Judges 19:1–30

July 4th, 2023| Topic: aBeLOG, Judges | 0

An utterly immoral lack of care for the weak and defenseless marks a godless and leaderless community.

Every character in this passage is anonymous—the Levite, his concubine, his father-in-law, his servant, and his host in Gibeah. In a book that often names even its minor characters, this namelessness is unsettling. It literarily points to the disintegration and dehumanization of society in this sordid story. But there is also something worse: deity is also completely absent, never mentioned by protagonists or by narrator. The people of God have been utterly Canaanized!

The Levite maintains a concubine (19:1), but what exactly his concubine did—“play the harlot against him”—and why she left the Levite to go to her father’s house is unclear (19:2). If in fact “she played the harlot against him,” it seems unlikely she would have gone away to her father’s house. A solution is found if we read the preposition as “for/on behalf of”: “she prostituted for him [the Levite].” He was pimping her! This would also explain why the Levite chose to go to her only four months later (19:2): perhaps he had run out of money.

But quite strangely, in her house, the “girl’s father” seems to have been glad to see the Levite (19:3), when one would have expected him to have been outraged by the treatment meted out to his daughter. The term “father of the young woman” is found elsewhere in the OT only in Deuteronomy 22. This text deals with a protective father who zealously guards his daughter, that contrasts starkly with this nonchalant father in Judges 19 who does not. To emphasize this contrast “father of the young woman,” resounds six times in seven verses (19:3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9). In fact, often the term is redundant. He is her father, father, father, father, father, father, … but he does not act like one! An utter lack of concern for the weak and defenseless.

In any case, on their way back home, the Levite and his concubine stop in Gibeah, an Israelite town, and are hosted by an unnamed “old man.” The story is horrific. A group of thugs demand the Levite for homosexual relations. The host and Levite pacify the wicked rabble by giving them the concubine instead, who suffers gang rape (all night!) and dies! (The similarities with the Sodom and Gomorrah account in Genesis 19 are striking and worth looking at.) Israel was now truly Canaan!

When the Levite finds her corpse at the doorstep (after he had apparently slept well!), all he can tell her is, “Arise, and let us go” (19:28a). There is no answer from the victim, so he puts her on his donkey, “arises” again and “goes” home (19:28b). It is almost as if the woman lying in front of the door was an interruption to his routine of arising and going. There is no emotion on his part, no attempt to check on the woman (forget any effort to revive her), no responsibility and no care in the world, apparently—a microcosm of the calloused state of the Israelites towards evil, towards their fellowmen, and towards God: Canaanization!

Later he cuts up the hapless woman’s body into twelve, sending a part to each of the tribes of Israel. The cutting up of a body and sending out parts as a message is also seen in 1 Sam 11:7, signifying the kind of punishment that would come upon those who refused to follow King Saul. Perhaps that was the intention of the Levite as well: failing to execute justice for what had happened in Gibeah, this would be the kind of divine judgment that would befall the Israelites. (Not that he himself is not guilty of abject cruelty!)

And so the woman dies, as silent as she has been throughout the narrative: she does not say a single word in the whole story. Captured, betrayed, raped, tortured, murdered, dismembered, and scattered!

Sick!

[For more details, see my Judges commentary.]