Strikingly, the narrator leaves out any reference to the actual attack on Jabesh-gilead. He leaves out any details of a fight or of the slaughter of the city’s inhabitants. The reason is likely that the attack’s significance is to be found exclusively in fixing the present problem. And so the author gives only the result.1
12 And they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead 400 young virgins who had not known a man by lying with him, and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan.