No King in Israel (45)

There’s no getting around it, I hate this part of the story. When I’m preparing a chapter-by-chapter book study like this one, my morning Bible reading consists of a chapter of the Old Testament twice through, a chapter of the New twice through, plus the chapter of the book I’m working on for the study twice through, usually in that order.

This story is so distasteful that I had to switch my reading order around for the past few weeks or go into my prayer time feeling slightly defiled. I needed a Psalm and a chapter of Matthew to wash the taste of Judges 19 out of my mouth.

Yes, it’s the word of God. Yes, it’s all profitable. Yes, we can learn from it and need to, but only by contrast. There’s no nobility in the story to enjoy, no fine example to emulate, no sense of God’s presence or protection. Just human beings doing what human beings do if left to their own devices long enough. No wonder God sent a flood in the days of Noah.

Let us soldier on and try to take something away from it.

III. Two Historical Vignettes from the Period (continued)

b. Benjamin becomes Sodom (continued)

Judges 19:22-26 — An Old Story Revisited

“As they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, worthless fellows, surrounded the house, beating on the door. And they said to the old man, the master of the house, ‘Bring out the man who came into your house, that we may know him.’ And the man, the master of the house, went out to them and said to them, ‘No, my brothers, do not act so wickedly; since this man has come into my house, do not do this vile thing. Behold, here are my virgin daughter and his concubine. Let me bring them out now. Violate them and do with them what seems good to you, but against this man do not do this outrageous thing.’ But the men would not listen to him. So the man seized his concubine and made her go out to them. And they knew her and abused her all night until the morning. And as the dawn began to break, they let her go. And as morning appeared, the woman came and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her master was, until it was light.”

The next chapter will reveal these “worthless fellows” were not simply a small, deviant group of drunks and bad actors. They included the leaders of Gibeah. That made the situation hopeless. Nobody would be coming to their aid.

Benjamin and Sodom

The similarities between the gang rape in Gibeah and the attempted gang rape of two angelic visitors to Sodom in Genesis 19 are worth noting because they are so numerous and deliberately laid out. In part because of this incident, the city of Sodom became a euphemism for the worst kinds of human behavior. That long-destroyed city is still referenced frequently today in popular culture, and not favorably. Even Sodomites don’t call themselves Sodomites. In the OT, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos and Zephaniah all compare the evils of others to those of Sodom. In the NT, the Lord Jesus, Peter, Jude and John all do the same. Surely the Holy Spirit is making a statement about the level of depravity into which Israel had fallen during the period of the judges.

The words “the men of the city” and “surrounded the house” appear in both accounts. In both accounts, the person granting hospitality to visitors was a sojourner rather than a native. The demand to bring out the visitor(s) “that we may know them” is identical, its euphemism familiar to readers of the OT. Both Lot and the Ephraimite sojourner appealed to the would-be-rapists as “brothers”, though there was nothing fraternal about their behavior. In both accounts, the owner of the house offers two women as an alternative, and in both he appeals to the evil of violating the sanctity of the tradition of hospitality. A person under the roof of another, they say, should be off limits. Lot calls the Sodomite behavior wicked. The Ephraimite host calls the act of the men of Gibeah wicked, vile and outrageous.

The difference, of course, is that the angels in Sodom escaped the fate that befell the Levite’s concubine by afflicting the Sodomite mob with blindness. In Judges, there was no such deliverance.

So, So Wrong

As much as modern readers complain about the way patriarchal cultures treated women, fathers and husbands normally tended to protect their wives and daughters even at the cost of their own lives. Men exclusively fought in all the wars of scripture and died in appalling numbers; women were exempt. Moreover, the Law of Moses judged the sin of rape much more severely than our society does, in many cases punishing it with death. With these things in mind, the Ephraimite’s offer of his virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine horrifies modern readers, and it should. It also gives us a vivid insight into the post-Sinai Israelite view of the homosexual sex act. From that perspective, however awful might be the rape of a woman, homosexual rape was worse, adding abomination to violence.

Pro-gay apologists argue that the sin of Sodom was not in the homosexual act itself, but in the use of force to engage in it. Alternatively, they suggest Sodom’s sin was a violation of hospitality. Neither explanation works in Judges. The Levite’s concubine was just as much a guest as the Levite, and just as much under the Ephraimite’s roof. The concubine was raped every bit as savagely, we can reasonably infer, as her master would have been had he stepped outside. It killed her, and it probably would have killed him too. Yes, the violation of hospitality was a grievous sin. Yes, the forcible aspect is a horror. Yet to the Ephraimite, sending out the man would have been an even greater evil.

I’m not saying he was right. In the end, the choice was not up to him.

No Good Options

Without a pair of angels to defend them, the people in the Ephraimite’s house were left with no good options, forced to choose between awful and more awful. The Christian reader cannot help but ask himself what they should have done instead, yet I can imagine no possible scenario that would not have ended as badly or worse. It’s no use asking what God would have preferred. Quite obviously, nobody involved was thinking much about that.

Faced with an impossible choice, can we excuse the Levite for seizing his concubine and pushing her out the door to save himself? Absolutely not. Shameful cowardice. Brutality. Lack of loyalty and love. All are fair accusations. Can we excuse the Ephraimite for offering up his own virgin daughter as a substitute? Are you kidding? How would you like that guy as a father? There’s nobody to cheer for in this story. Yet how do you fight off a mob? Action heroes do it all the time in the movies. Real life does not work that way. Sin has consequences, and its victims get hurt.

I notice the Levite’s servant disappears from the story at this point and is never mentioned again. Perhaps he slipped away.

Judges 19:27-30 — Limb by Limb

“And her master rose up in the morning, and when he opened the doors of the house and went out to go on his way, behold, there was his concubine lying at the door of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, ‘Get up, let us be going.’ But there was no answer. Then he put her on the donkey, and the man rose up and went away to his home. And when he entered his house, he took a knife, and taking hold of his concubine he divided her, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel. And all who saw it said, ‘Such a thing has never happened or been seen from the day that the people of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt until this day; consider it, take counsel, and speak.’ ”

From the narrative, the Levite’s behavior appears unspeakably callous. Would you be able to sleep with that going on outside? Can you picture stepping through that door, finding the woman who is effectively your wife face down on the threshold with her hands out, and having the first words out of your mouth be “Get up, let us be going”? With that for a husband, I’d be happier dead too.

Then, instead of receiving a dignified burial, the poor woman was sliced up and her body parts distributed throughout the various tribal territories of Israel. That need not include Benjamin. The concubine was dismembered into twelve pieces. Counting Levi, there are thirteen tribes. Chapter 20 suggests the Benjamites discovered the men of Gibeah had been found out after the fact. Either way, the writer of Judges does not stop to tell us how the Levite arranged this grisly distribution, but we can be sure he did not use parcel post. More likely, he sent servants with their packages to the elders and tribal heads, and charged them with reading or retelling the story by way of explanation.

The shock value was considerable, the reaction immediate. Something had to be done.