CONTENT WARNING: rape, suicide, homophobia, misogyny
(1) In those days, when there was no king in Israel, a certain Levite residing at the other end of the hill country of Ephraim took to himself a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah. (2) Once his concubine deserted (Lit. “played the prostitute.”) him, leaving him for her father’s house in Bethlehem in Judah; and she stayed there a full four months. (3) Then her husband set out, with an attendant and a pair of donkeys, and went after her to woo her and to win her back. She admitted him into her father’s house; and when the young woman’s father saw him, he received him warmly.
So, to set the stage. There is a Levite (from the tribe of Levi, the tribe which at this point has status over all the others and is solely responsible for running the Temple) living in Ephraim. The Levite takes a concubine/wife, but she deserts him for some reason (the first word in line 2, "tizneh," means to commit adultery or work as a prostitute) she goes back to Judah (south of Ephraim) to live with her father.
The Levite goes to his father-in-law's house to convince her to come back. The father-in-law repeatedly convinces the Levite to spend the night, and, curiously, their five days of hanging out and feasting does not appear to involve the Levite's wife. Just a guy and his father-in-law who are besties? But what is the point of going to win back your wife if you just end up hanging out with her dad and not her?
Finally, on the fifth day, the Levite decides to leave (with his wife) and the father-in-law tries to convince him to stay the night again, as it is getting dark. But the Levite is not convinced.
They leave for Ephraim in the north, but must first pass through the territory of Benjamin.
(14) So they traveled on, and the sun set when they were near Gibeah of Benjamin. (15) They turned off there and went in to spend the night in Gibeah. He went and sat down in the town square, but nobody took them indoors to spend the night. (16) In the evening, an old man came along from his property outside the town. (Lit. “in the field.”)
When it gets really late and they need to stop to sleep, they decide not to stop in Yevus (AKA Jerusalem, which was then located in Benjamin) and try their luck in another Benjamite town called Gibeah. An old man from the outskirts of town warmly invites them to crash at his place and gives them food, drink, and baths.
(22) While they were enjoying themselves, the townsmen, a depraved lot, had gathered about the house and were pounding on the door. They called to the aged owner of the house, “Bring out that man who’s come into your house, so that we can know* him.” (23) The owner of the house went out and said to them, “Please, my friends, do not commit such a wrong. Since this fellow has entered my house, do not perpetrate this outrage. (24) Look, here is my virgin daughter, and his concubine. Let me bring them out to you. Use them, do what you like with them; but don’t do that outrageous thing to this fellow.” (25) But the others would not listen to him. So the man seized his concubine and pushed her out to them. They raped (Lit. “knew”) her and abused her all night long until morning; and they let her go when dawn broke.
*The word ונדעה is a euphemism for the intention to kill these people, just as it is in Judges 19:22 as reported by a party involved there in 20:5. Other commentators believe that the euphemism concerns the intention of sodomising these men.
The "depraved" townspeople demand that this old man give up this foreigner to "know" him - Radak's commentary notes that this may be a euphemism either for sex/rape or for murder. The old Gibeonite counter-offers that they should, rather than raping/killing the Levite, instead rape the Levite's wife and his own unwed daughter. One must wonder why the old Gibeonite thinks this is a better solution...
Then, to stop the townspeople, who are still pretty set on raping/killing the Levite, the old Gibeonite pushes the Levite's wife into the street and allows the townspeople to abuse her all night.
I would just like to note that the threat of sexual violence, and the specific disgust towards male-on-male penetrative rape, is problematic (homophobic and sexist, to be precise) but indeed not unique to this story in the Jewish rabbinic canon. See the source below:
In this mishnaic story (or perhaps baraita- a piece of Oral Torah that was not originally included in the Mishnah but was still maintained by the rabbis), captive girls commit suicide to avoid rape. Upon seeing this, the boys decide that they should also commit suicide, with the reasoning that male-female sex, even if it is rape, is still better than male-male sex or rape. I don't think I need to say how insulting this is to female rape victims, or to men who have consensual sex with other men.
Anyway, back to the story:
At dawn, the woman is finally left alone and goes to the entrance of the house of the old Gibeonite, where she collapses. The Levite, who apparently slept through this with no issues, gets ready to leave and callously tells her to get up. But at this point, she has died from the excessive physical trauma she experienced. Then the Levite carries her corpse back to Ephraim, cuts her body up into twelve pieces (one for each tribe) and sends them to each territory in Israel, along with the story of what happened.
The eleven other tribes, outraged, send agents into Benjamin and demand that Benjamin's leadership take the Gibeonites to court and put them to death. The Benjaminites refuse, and this triggers a civil war in which the other eleven tribes almost completely decimate the tribe of Benjamin. The tribes then realize that slaughtering the entire tribe of Benjamin is not a good solution, either, and take (perhaps questionable) actions to ensure that the tribe of Benjamin does not completely die out.
(15) Now the people had relented toward Benjamin, for GOD had made a breach in the tribes of Israel. (16) So the elders of the community asked, “What can we do about wives for those who are left, since the women of Benjamin have been killed off?” (17) For they said, “There must be a saving remnant for Benjamin, that a tribe may not be blotted out of Israel; (18) yet we cannot give them any of our daughters as wives,” since the Israelites had taken an oath: “Cursed be anyone who gives a wife to Benjamin!” (19) They said, “The annual feast of GOD is now being held at Shiloh.” (It lies north of Bethel, east of the highway that runs from Bethel to Shechem, and south of Lebonah.) (20) So they instructed the Benjaminites as follows: “Go and lie in wait in the vineyards. (21) As soon as you see the daughters of Shiloh coming out to join in the dances, come out from the vineyards; let each of you seize a wife from among the daughters of Shiloh, and be off for the land of Benjamin. (22) And if their fathers or brothers come to us to complain, we shall say to them, ‘Be generous to them for our sake! We could not provide any of them with a wife on account of the war, and you would have incurred guilt if you yourselves had given them [wives].’”
(1) Judges 19:1-30 (2) This notorious narrative, surely the most horrific nonmilitary story in the Hebrew Bible, launches the final three-chapter section of Judges. As we indicated above, it appears to be motivated by two factors: a desire to (1) demonstrate the sorry state of Israel’s polity in that era and (2) establish a link with the later House of Sha’ul (Saul), implying its own moral bankruptcy. Several editorial devices are used to connect this section to the previous one: first, the appearance of another Levite, whose character proves to be even worse than that of his predecessor. Yee sees these chapters as a polemic against “country Levites,” continuing the trend begun in Chap. 17. We will shortly encounter more corrupt priests, Eli’s sons, in I Sam. 2. A second possible link lies in the image of the nobles at the door, reminiscent of the six hundred Danites in the previous chapter, whose ominous presence at the town gate led to the appropriation of Mikha’s idols. (3) In order to portray moral decay, the chapter patterns itself after the Lot story of Gen. 19, but goes well beyond that narrative, which itself had a chilling outcome: the destruction of the cities of Sedom and Amora (Sodom and Gomorrah). Whereas in the earlier story the host also offered to surrender his women, here (v.24) he goes so far as to suggest rape (“force them or do to them whatever is good in your eyes”; the first two words are an addition to what appeared in Genesis), and the Levite actually pushes his concubine out the door. That, and the absence of protecting angels, would be enough to differentiate these two texts, but the telling detail is neither the comportment of the natives nor of the host, but rather the callous and self-centered behavior of the Levite himself. Despite his quest to get his concubine back at the beginning of the chapter, once he arrives at his father-in-law’s house he rarely acknowledges her existence; he is contemptuous of foreigners, and so declines to stay in Yevus for the night; he is complicit in the rape by pushing his concubine outside; and he never bothers to check if the violated body on the threshold is dead or alive. In contrast to the text’s mention of “refresh/humor the heart” multiple times in describing his father-in-law’s and his later host’s hospitality, the Levite is a man virtually without a heart. In the end we are left with a descendant of Aharon (Aaron) who, in a parody of priestly sacrificial behavior, “sections” (see Lev. 1:6) the abused woman whose bed he shared. (4) Klein notes that the Levite is anonymous and comes from the outlying area of his region. In addition, neither he nor the concubine’s father calls her to task for her sexual straying, unusual behavior for biblical males. And the purported host, who has seemed generous until now, and who is the Levite’s countryman, commits the unforgivable act of offering not only his daughters but also the Levite’s concubine to the mob. (5) In the end, the deeds done to the concubine are so vile that the writer feels compelled to break into a poetic rhetoric: “Never has there been, / never has been seen [anything]” like this act in all of Israelite history (v.30). It signals the collapse of societal standards, violating at one swoop the rules of hospitality and the proper sexual treatment of both men and women. Such a low point may be subtly hinted at by the description of the hours in vv.9-11: the day is “weakening,” “declining,” and “low,” a fitting characterization of Israel as well. But it is the dismembering of the concubine that ultimately suggests what has happened to Israel. The book of Samuel too will be replete with examples of bodily harm, and its accumulated tally of stricken body parts will also point to an unhealthy society (see the Introduction to Samuel later in this volume). (6) Perry tellingly notes that the narrative here embodies something further, which continues into the subsequent two chapters: the rejection of male warrior-based ideology. In his words, “God tries to teach the callous male union the hard way, at the expense of forty thousand dead, to hesitate, to be remorseful, to weep and have brotherly feelings toward the ‘enemy,’ to ‘play the woman’ (20:19-28).” The rare unification of the tribes takes place through gang rape and subsequent dismemberment. (7) Finally, as hinted at previously, attributing such behavior to the tribe of Binyamin, at the town of Giv’a, clearly implicates Sha’ul by association in the future. In addition, Israel’s first king begins his career by cutting up a brace of oxen and sending them all around the tribes, in order to rally them to battle. It is almost as if the subliminal message of the text is “In those days there was no king in Israel (17:6, 18:1, 19:1, 21:25), and Saul wouldn’t be much better either!” (Brettler 2001a).
The above source, published in 2014, asserts that this story is at least partially allegorical, rather than literal.
This story shows, according to Everett Fox, how divided the tribes are at this point in history, despite technically being part of one united kingdom. It also hurls political criticism at both the priestly Levites, the ruling class, as the Levite is weirdly aloof and uncaring towards the fate of his wife, and at King Saul, a Benjaminite and the first king of Israel, by implying that he is from a morally bankrupt tribe.
There is also something interesting about the way that gendered bodies and sexual violence are used here to discuss political and religious issues. The woman's body is cut up into twelve pieces, like the land of Israel, and her body is also treated similarly by the Levite to a sacrificial offering for the Temple. If Fox is correct in that the story is allegorical, what is being said about the Levites and their relationship with the Temple or their values more broadly? Are the Levites being criticized for using their power and influence to incite wars with neighboring kingdoms? And why is the land upon which the Israelites live associated with the woman's body?
I take issue with Perry's (cited in Fox's writing) interpretation that "G-d tries to teach the callous male union the hard way...to weep and have brotherly feelings toward the 'enemy,' to 'play the woman.'" While it may be true that this story, if allegorical, could be used to teach moderation in war tactics (i.e. don't wipe out an entire population, only their military), I really dislike the implication that 1) seeing your military opponent as a human being is a womanly trait and 2) that G-d would use the brutalization and murder of a woman to teach men not to kill other men. Certainly I would not agree with the collective punishment that the Israelites inflict upon Benjamin, but I do think it's important to take misogynistic violence and sexual assault seriously.
In the civil war, the civilian women of Benjamin are apparently killed alongside the male militants, and after the war, any Benjaminite men, children, and non-virgin women from Jabesh-Gilead are slaughtered. The virgins of Jabesh-Gilead are married off to the surviving Benjaminite men, and the virgins of Shiloh (a town in Ephraim) are forced to be wed to the remaining Benjaminite men.
I don't have a satisfying or uplifting note to end on. This is a difficult passage in the Tanakh, and is very painful to wrestle with. The ancient Israelites and the Rabbis did not care much about women's trauma or safety, outside of the ways it affected her husband or father. In order for us to create a Judaism now that is equitable for women, we must contend with the sins of our past.
If you are a man reading this, you should sit with this and think about how you may be perpetuating sexism today- this is not intended to be an accusation, but the trumpet call of the shofar on Yom Kippur, demanding us all to wake up and take accountability. Do you accept feedback and criticism from women? Do you ensure there are women in the room when making important decisions for the community?
And, if you are a woman reading this, think about the ways you are struggling with sexism in the Jewish past (and present): are you settling, instead of demanding the treatment you deserve? Are there other women or men who will support you and help make your community better? How can you contribute to the Judaism you would want for your daughters and granddaughters?