BY JEAN SHELDON

HE ACCOUNT, FOUND IN JUDGES 19-21, reads like a detective story,¹ each of the characters playing an ambiguous role in a plot in which innocence and guilt are unclear. Yet the stark details betray real events in which real people experience or cause terrible atrocities without a satisfying conclusion, let alone a peaceful resolution. The story ends with a haunting moral: “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.”²

The events themselves begin to unfold like a journalist’s outline of her notes from which she will create a front-page story: A Levite living in the hill country of Ephraim has a concubine/wife who apparently gets angry with her master/husband and returns home to her family in the tribal land of Judah. Four months later the Levite goes after her to speak kindly to her. Instead he talks only to her father, never speaking once to her during the time. Despite the obvious reluctance of her father to let her go, the Levite eventually sets out with her toward his home.

Tragedy
Late in the afternoon they approach the Canaanite city of Jebus, a natural stopping place, but over his servant’s protests, the Levite insists on going on to the Benjaminite town of Gibeah. Arriving at dusk, the travelers sit in the plaza, hoping that someone coming in from the fields will invite them home.

An elderly Ephraimite living among the Benjaminites finally sees the Levite and invites him home. His concern about his plans to stay in the plaza overnight is the first suggestion in the story that Gibeah is not a safe town.

Their host is partying with the Levite in his home when the town rabble begins pounding on the door. They demand that the host bring out his guest—the Levite—so that they can sexually abuse him for the night. The host refuses, offering his daughter and the Levite’s concubine to the rabble, explicitly for their pleasure. When they refuse the “gift,” the Levite intervenes. First he seizes (a term used for assault) his concubine, then thrusts her out (a verb also used for the act of divorce) to the mob, who gang-rape her all night long.

The portrayal of the gang rape and torture takes only a short sentence. Is this brevity an indicator of a shrug (oh well, she was only a concubine) or an intentional attempt to dull the horrors of what must have seemed to be the longest, most horrible night in the concubine’s life? Or is it a stark encapsulation of the tragedy’s intensity?

The narrator here shifts into slow motion and emphasizes the results of that long night against the light of dawn:

They knew her, and abused her all night long until morning.

And they let her go as dawn broke.

Then the woman came in the presence of the morning

And she fell at the entrance of the man’s house where her master was until the light.

Was She Alive? Or Dead?
In the ancient Near East the sun was the revealer of evil deeds done during the night. Here the light focuses on the rapists slinking away into the darkness, on the body of the woman lying in a tortuous position, ravaged and exposed in the dawn, and then on her excruciating movements as slowly she gets on her hands and knees, then on her feet, and shuffles painfully toward the house. Inside that house, still sleeping and deliberately oblivious to her pain, are her host and her husband. Barely walking, she reaches the front of the house. Just short of her goal she falls, and with her last bit of strength she stretches out both hands, feeling for the door. Failing even of that, her fingers barely touch the threshold. There she lies inert—in cold cruciform—until the sun fully rises.

Her actions are the only “statement” she makes in the entire story.

It is at this juncture that her husband speaks to her for the first and last time. Getting up, the Levite prepares to resume his journey. He opens the door, comes out of the house, finds his path blocked by his concubine’s body, and barks four short words: “Get up! Let’s go!”

His utter callous heartlessness heightens the question of guilt in the story. His subsequent actions highlight it even more. And once again there is ambiguity. Was the concubine dead or not? The Greek translation (the Septuagint) answers yes; the Hebrew Bible leaves it open-ended. What we do know from both accounts is that the Levite picked up her body, put it on his donkey, and headed for home. When he arrived, he picked up a knife, cut her body up into 12 pieces, and mailed them to each of the 12 tribes of Israel.

Out of Control
Shocked at the reception of such a parcel post, 11 of the tribes gather and demand an explanation of the Levite.

Here the story changes. In the mouth of the Levite, the details are colored and even prevaricated. The crime is not the rape and murder of the concubine but rather the intended murder of a holy man, the Levite. Instead of a local rabble, the town fathers committed the deed.

It was this—a single speech by the central figure in the story (as he tells it), who was not a witness but rather a self-indicated victim—that led to the subsequent war against the tribe of Benjamin. And the war came to be justified as an act of the ban (the practice of devoting to destruction a person or town because of a specific sin). In the process they violated several specific Old Testament injunctions for due process:
1. It was assumed that Gibeah was guilty on the basis of the Levite’s testimony alone. Normally two witnesses were required in addition.³
2. Gibeah was ordered to hand over the guilty without thorough investigation, in violation of the laws of the ban.⁴
3. The issue was not idolatry or witchcraft, the only two items mentioned as justifying a ban.⁵

The war thus suggests reactionary retaliation that, like a fire out of control, burns the tribe of Benjamin, ravishing entire towns, killing all women, elderly men, and children, and reducing the tribe of Benjamin to a mere 600 men. If the story were a sequel to the Joseph narrative, the worst fears of Jacob would be finally realized.⁶

Thus the prevaricated claims of one man becomes the impetus behind a war that actually repeats and perpetuates the original crime—more than 25,000 times.

And the war was not instantly won. Two times the armies of the allied tribes were beaten back by just one small tribe. Each time they crept back to the Lord and pondered and wept, but in neither instance did they honestly question whether they were doing what was right. The war ended with the Lord giving them victory at their insistence and then getting their blame for the near decimation of the tribe of Benjamin.⁷

In the silence that follows, a horrified Israel sets out to repair the tribe. With the tribe under the ban, they would not give their daughters to the survivors in order to replenish the slain. The redemption of Benjamin involves the ravishment of one more town and the seizure of its virgin girls. Still 200 women short, the remaining men of Benjamin are told to kidnap the girls they want from the town of Shiloh, at their yearly prenuptial dances, until the lack is replenished.

Thus the original crime is repeated again and again in the war, the ravishing of Jabesh-Gilead and the kidnapping of the Shiloh women. The perpetration of the crime is seen as its cure.

Entailing a terrible crime against a woman—brutalized, murdered, and finally buried in one man’s dishonest testimony—it results in thousands more suffering a fate similar to hers.

Who Were the Guilty?
The woman should not have left home, but can we blame her for doing so, given the abusive nature of her husband?

The father perhaps acted the coward in letting his daughter go back with him. Was he perhaps also afraid of her husband and thus ultimately gave in?

The host was guilty in not taking better care of his guests, but did he not have reason to fear the mob?

The town of Gibeah was guilty for not handing over the rabble to the Israelite tribes for punishment. But who were the rabble? Did anyone really know?

The villains themselves are most certainly guilty. And like many criminals, they may have gotten away with their crime. They may have even been among the 600 survivors!

The 11 tribes of Israel are guilty, are they not? Why did they not investigate the story of the Levite? How could they be so wanton in their destruction that they no longer valued everyone as a child of God? Did they, like sheep, merely follow a man of holy office assuming that he was right?

What about the Levite? Was he guilty?

The concubine probably would have died anyway (and may have) without being put under the knife. And was not the life of a man in holy office more important than hers?

So perhaps he was not guilty!

It is the Levite who personifies the greatest sin of all human beings in every time and place. His guilt exceeds that of all others in the story, and it is exacerbated by his holy office.

First, he used the concubine for his own selfish needs. To him she was an object to be enjoyed to his benefit and to her loss. Regarding her as without personhood, he allowed her no respect, no dignity, no freedom of choice, no voice of protest, no rights—to say nothing of what all human beings created by God should have: love and trust.

Headstrong and unwilling to listen to advice, the Levite, because of his office, considered himself as above everyone else, and thus could reject the offers of the concubine’s father and override the pleas of his servant. Callously he throws his concubine out to men without their humanity and then, without an apparent qualm of conscience, sleeps soundly all night, oblivious to her screams of pain.⁸ When he finds her blocking his path, he treats her as an obstruction, showing no appreciation for her enormous and forced sacrifice for him, nor horror or sympathy over her condition.

He further exemplifies this attitude by cutting up his concubine as though she were a piece of meat.

In his own testimony he betrays the truth about his total self-centeredness: His only horror was not over what they did to her, but only over what they intended to do to him. In brief, his character remains totally devoid of the fruit of the Spirit—and even of humanity.

Perhaps the Levite had murdered his concubine long before this event—by destroying who she was. Perhaps the one time she actually exercised her God-given freedom of choice was the day she left him for her father’s house in an attempt to keep on living in the fullest sense.

We usually distance ourselves emotionally from this story, and rarely, if ever, discuss it. In fact, many of us are relatively ignorant of its existence.

Another Tragedy
There is another story more familiar to us, and from which we also distance ourselves. It starts out with a woman on a donkey⁹ and ends up with a cold victim hanging, brutalized and ravished, from a cross. And once again, the question still remains unanswered, “Who are the guilty?”

Those purgers of evil gang up on their Creator in human flesh after dark and ravish His body all night long. No voice raises a question as to whether the accusations against Him are true. And He, like the concubine, is silent before their abuse. In the early light of dawn He carries His cross over the threshold of the city gate toward a bleak Golgotha. His hands slip from the crossbeams, and He falls to the ground. There—like her—He lies dying on the ground. Her hands, imploringly touching the threshold, cry out a question; His hands, nailed to a cross, embrace that eternal question of human suffering. And like the Levite’s brusque command, the mob shouts, “Get down from the cross!”

And both respond with silence.

The silence is a statement that words cannot convey: We are all guilty of murder. We all abuse others for our own selfish purposes. In our failures to love as Jesus loves, we could come to the point where we could actually condone a holy war—to purge evil from our midst—in God’s name.

The first story tells us what will be our end if we continue to devalue others. The second story offers us redemption from the tragic ending of the first story. For in the second story the gentle God of the Old Testament speaks. He is not totally voiceless. And unlike the concubine, He offers us new life.

“Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

And truly the Levite did not. The rabble did not. The 12 tribes did not. Those who nailed Jesus to the cross did not.

Are we also ignorant of the fact that as we do it to one of the least of His brothers or sisters, we have done it to Him?

Starting Over
It is here that our story can begin anew. At the cross we meet the bad in our story—our ravishments of others’ reputations, our condemnations of others we deem more sinful than we are, our shading of our stories to justify un-Christlike behaviors, our curt orders and dismembering of reasonable ideas, our unsympathetic attitudes, our selfish, arbitrary wills, our refusals to pursue truth and honestly to question our prejudices, our unwarranted holy wars—that recrucify Him once again.

When we discover redemption, we find that He offers us forgiveness and a true sense of sin and righteousness, a true view of His character. Only those who recognize the bad in their story can welcome His graciousness, become new people, and perceive truth in new dimensions from the foot of the cross.

There our stories can begin anew. Beyond race, tribalism, and holy wars the nature of the Lamb can be ours, and with that nature in our hearts, the tribes can become one. For in Christ there is no north or south, no Ephraim or Benjamin. In Christ there is no east or west, no Jabesh-Gilead or Mizpah, no Centrist or West Coast theology. In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no Bethel or Shiloh, no Hutu or Tutsi. In Christ there is no bond or free, no master-Levites or slave-concubines, no ecclesiastical kings or oppressed members. In Christ there is no male or female, no exclusion on the basis of race or gender.

May Galatians 3:28 (the results of the cross)—and not Judges 19-21—soon become the concluding chapter of our own Adventist story.

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¹For the scholarly evidences supporting this article, please see the original paper, “Reading the Bad in Our Story: A Prerequisite to Redemption,” read at the 1997 Adventist Society for Religious Studies meeting in San Francisco.
²Judges 21:25, NRSV.
³Deut. 17:6.
⁴Deut. 13:14.
⁵Deut. 7:1-5; 13:1-18.
⁶Gen. 42:4, 36.
⁷Judges 21:15.
⁸One of my former classmates in my doctoral program told me how he once lived next to People’s Park in Berkeley and would hear the screams of homeless women being raped at night.
⁹I am indebted to Richard Choi of the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary for this image.

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Jean Sheldon is assistant professor of religion at Pacific Union College in Angwin, California.