Thread by @DrPJWilliams

THREAD: The Bible’s most gory story

It’s the disturbing account of the rape & dissection of the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19-21)

With lessons about male violence against women #vawg

The story is set during the time of the judges, when there’s little government.

The 1st & last verses remind us that there was no king (Judges 19:1; 21:25), which has already become a motif (17:6; 18:1)

It’s at the climactic point of the Bible’s goriest book.

Other Bible books relate more deaths, but Judges, with Adoni-bezek’s thumbs/big toes cut off, Eglon’s belly stabbed, Sisera’s temple pierced, Abimelech’s skull crushed, Samson’s eyes gouged out, & the concubine dissected depicts more body damage than the whole rest of the Bible.

This story is thus the final climax in the goriest book.

It’s arguably no coincidence that the Bible, which rigorously depicts human wrong, records both small government (judges) & big government (kings) as unravelling in tragedies of male sexual violence followed by civil war.

Neither decentralised nor centralised government, nor even a great (God-given!) constitution, can restrain human evil.

God is going to have to come into the world to sort things out personally...

So our account begins in 19:1 with a Levite taking a concubine.

A concubine is a second tier wife, but this guy doesn’t have a first tier wife. So he’s using her from the start.

Note: she’s from Bethlehem.

Like David.

Like Jesus.

In this story it’s no coincidence that the main victim comes from Bethlehem, the town of king David

and the main bad guys come from Gibeah, the town of king Saul.

Both final stories in Judges (ch 17-18 & 19-21) contain a Levite, Ephraim & Bethlehem.

If, as in some orderings of the Bible, you put Ruth after Judges you have 3 stories about Bethlehem in a row.

The concubine is unfaithful to her man (19:2), but this doesn’t seem to consist in going off with someone else so much as going home to Bethlehem.

She’s there for 4 months during which the guy seems to do nothing about her.

4 months recurs later in 20:47.

Eventually the Levite goes to Bethlehem to find her.

What’s so striking is how warmly his father-in-law receives him (19:3). They lodge & drink together & her father repeatedly delays his departure.

The men have a camaraderie which the Levite doesn’t share with his concubine.

Later on we’ll see a bond between the Levite & another male host which overrides their concern for the women.

After days of delay & more merriment with his father-in-law the Levite sets off with his concubine & male servant, but too late in the day for safe travel.

As it gets dark, the servant advises they go to a Canaanite city (19:11), which resonates with when later Saul’s servant advises him to go to Ramah.

The Levite wants to press on to an Israelite city like Gibeah or Ramah.

They get to Gibeah (tribe of Benjamin) after dark.

No one welcomes them in.

Then an old man from out of town, from the tribe of Ephraim welcomes them in.

We like him. He seems an ideal host, offering everything.

They’re having a great time together (19:22).

Just then the men of the city start banging on the door.

Careful readers will have already noticed many echoes of the Sodom narrative of Genesis 19 in Judges 19.

In both, the locals don’t offer hospitality; there’s mention of the city square (Genesis 19:2; Judges 19:15); someone from out of town hosts.

Even the the phrase ‘he pressed (פצר) upon him’ (Judges 19:8) is rare enough to remind us of how the men of Sodom pressed (פצר) Lot (Gen 19:9).

But now the echoes become unmistakable as the men of this city demand that the Levite be brought out that they might know him.

One might be tempted to read ‘know’ (19:22) innocently: they want to get to know the stranger in their midst. But the context & subsequent horror don’t allow us to dwell on this possibility for long.

The men of this Israelite city are wanting the man to be brought out for sex with them just as the men of the most proverbially wicked non-Israelite city (Sodom) had wanted sex with Lot’s guests.

But parallels run deeper. The host in both goes out to say ‘my brothers, please do not do bad’ (Gen 19:7; Judg 19:23).

Lot offers his virgin daughters to protect his male guests.

Here the old man (whom we were just beginning to like) offers his virgin daughter & the concubine.

Worse than Lot, he invites them to humble/rape them & ‘do what is good in your eyes’ (19:24), thus echoing the motif of this part of the book.

Extraordinarily we hear him say ‘but to this man do not do this foolish thing’.

So things have come to a point where a father thinks his solidarity to his male guest trumps his parental care for his daughter.

The Levite grabs hold of his concubine and thrusts her out.

Sparing us details, the narrator tells us ‘they knew her and abused her all night until morning; and when the day began to break, they let her go’ (19:25).

What horrors she must have undergone!

‘Then the woman came as the day was dawning and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her master was, till it was light.’

She collapses while her ‘master’ (doesn’t that title say a lot about the asymmetry of the relationship?) is safe inside.

The narrator shocks us with the callousness & pathos of the next verse:

‘When her master arose in the morning [presumably after a good night’s sleep], and opened the doors of the house [which she’d been shut out from] and went out to go his way [business as usual]...’

‘there was his concubine, fallen at the door of the house with her hands on the threshold’. (19:27)

The position of her hands—so close & yet so far—shows exactly where the narrator’s sympathies lie, in the personsl tragedy of this poor woman.

But the juxtaposed callousness of the Levite shocks further: ‘and he said to her “get up, and let’s go”, but there was no answer’. And he took her on the donkey and the man arose and went to his place’ (19:28)

‘And he came to his house and took a knife and took hold of his concubine and cut her up into twelve parts and send them into all the territory of Israel’ (19:29).

People are shocked and respond to a call to arms.

But we have to observe the heartlessness of this Levite who thrust out his concubine to predators, expected her simply to resume travel in the morning and then dismembered her body.

We also notice that death through misnamed #roughsex is not new.

It is unusual (relative to biblical narrative generally) that the story never relates the concubine’s death.

We don’t know when she died because the heartless Levite never checked.

I hope it was before he cut her up.

Was she put on the donkey half-dead like the man in Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan—unlike the bad Samaria guy in this story (there’s a Levite in that one too, who doesn’t score well)?

The Levite tells her to ‘arise’ qumi (קומי) like but also unlike Jesus in Mark 5:41.

Moving through the rest of the story rather more quickly: in ch 20 civil war breaks out: 11 tribes vs 1 tribe (Benjamin), the tribe of the aggressors from Gibeah.

Even here the ‘good’ side is not good because it’s following the Levite’s false report of what happened (20:5).

So 1/10 of Israel is lost and almost all the tribe of Benjamin.

The whole narrative is deeply reminiscent of Israel’s attack on Ai.

In other words, an Israelite city has become as bad as a Canaanite one.

So all of Benjamin are killed except for 600 men.

NB the Benjaminite men were the problem, but more women were wiped out!

Problem: the Israelites had made a stupid vow not to allow their daughters to marry men from Benjamin.

Solution: destroy all of Jabesh Gilead, except 400 virgins cos Jabesh Gilead hadn’t helped in the war.

This creates a strong bond between the small tribe of Benjamin & Jabesh Gilead so that Saul is quick to come to their aid in 1 Sam 11 (after Saul cuts up oxen, 1 Sam 11:7).

Still 200 wives short, Israelites decide that if Benjaminites ambush & abduct 200 dancing girls in Shiloh that’s OK.

That’s how the book ends. Solution to problem of male violence = abducting more women.

They’ve learned nothing.

Last line of book:

‘In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.’ (21:25)

REFLECTIONS: it’s a story without heroes, but with a clear victim.

No character is named. These characters evoke us.

The Bible is not tone deaf to the problem of male violence against women. It’s actually a theme to which it repeatedly returns.

The picture of the woman’s hands on the threshold should haunt us.

The woman from Bethlehem was the involuntary victim, substitute for others.

Later the Bible tells of someone from Bethlehem who willingly gave up his life as a substitute to protect others from death.

Human evil runs deep. That’s why we need someone willing to die for us.

END