The last three chapters of Judges tell the worst story in the book, and Benjamin is at the centre of it. A Levite travelling with his concubine stops overnight at Gibeah, a Benjaminite town, and men of the town abuse her until she dies. The Levite cuts the body into twelve pieces and sends them through Israel. The other tribes muster and demand the guilty men; Benjamin refuses to hand them over and fights.
The war nearly ends the tribe. Israel loses two engagements, wins the third by ambush, and burns the towns, and the text says six hundred men escaped to the rock of Rimmon and no more. The tribes had sworn not to give their daughters to Benjamin, and then had to face having cut a tribe out of Israel by their own oath. The remedy is as ugly as the offence: the town of Jabesh Gilead is destroyed for not joining the muster and its unmarried women given to the survivors, and the shortfall is made up by telling the remaining Benjaminites to seize girls dancing at the yearly festival at Shiloh. Judges ends four verses later, saying there was no king in Israel and every man did what was right in his own eyes.
The tribe recovered and produced men out of all proportion to its size: Ehud, the left handed judge who killed Eglon of Moab; Saul, the first king, from Gibeah itself; Mordecai in the book of Esther; and Paul of Tarsus, who names the tribe when establishing his credentials. A small territory on the border between north and south, holding the ridge that Jerusalem sits at the edge of, mattered more than its numbers.