(Trigger warning.  I’m going to be talking about a story from the Bible that involves rape and abuse.)

There are some stories in the Bible that just make me mad–mostly when people make bad decisions.  Of course, I have the perspective of time and distance and knowing the story.  What really makes me mad is the way that people, especially women, are treated.  I know that humans are messed up because of sin, which infects all areas of life.  I just wish people could do better, especially in how they treat each other.

The story in Judges 19 is one such story.  The children of Israel are out of Egypt, out of the desert, and back in the Promised Land.  There’s this guy that lives in the land that belongs to the descendants of Ephraim, but he’s a descendant of Levi.  And he decides to go to Bethlehem (where the descendants of Judah live) to get himself a concubine.  A concubine is kinda like a wife, but not.  The man has all of the rights of a husband, but the woman doesn’t have the legal protections she would as a wife, few that they were.  She was more a servant that he could sleep with legally.

The story isn’t clear if he couldn’t afford a dowry for a wife or what exactly were the circumstances which led him to just get a concubine.  It was likely, with the culture at that time, that money or property changed hands.  Women were more commodity than human anyway.  However it happened, he takes the woman from Bethlehem north to where he lived in the hills in Ephraim.

Something happens between the two of them.  The story doesn’t say.  Depending on which version/translation of the Bible you read will depend on the story you get in verse 2.  The NLT says, “But she became angry with him and returned to her father’s home in Bethlehem.”

But, the KJV says, “And his concubine played the whore against him, and went away from him unto her father’s house to Bethlehem Judah, and was there four whole months.”

Obviously the translators don’t agree on which definition should be used.  Did she get angry?  Or did she commit adultery?  Or maybe one of the man’s acquaintances raped her?  Maybe he was okay with letting his friends do that.  Whatever happened, she went back to her dad’s house.  There’s all kinds of speculation I could do here, which other people have done in different commentaries.  If she did cheat on him, how come she wasn’t killed?  That was the Old Testament penalty for adultery.

But what if it was something that he did that made her go back to her dad?  What if he was a jerk?  Some of the people who favor the adultery translation make him out to be a softy for not killing her and for going to her dad’s house to win her back.  Some of them say he should have stoned her if she did cheat on him, that his not doing so was just another example of how far the people had strayed from God.

But what if he was an abusive narcissist and she had to get away from him?   Then him coming after her is just him asserting control over her.  The way he treats her in the story leads me to believe that he didn’t really value her as a person.  So who’s to say he didn’t treat her horribly at home.

Either way, he waits four months and goes to Bethlehem to get her.  He takes a servant and some donkeys with him and goes to bring her home.  He is invited into her dad’s home and he ends up staying five days.  He wanted to leave after three days, so probably a long weekend.  But her dad gets them to delay their departure a couple of days.  I picture the dad not wanting his daughter to leave him again.  Maybe she told him everything that had happened; and, like a good dad, he wanted to protect her and was hoping to find a way out for her.

Legally, though, he couldn’t.

Come afternoon of the fifth day, the man’s like, “forget this, we’re riding all night.”

They didn’t really go all night.  They just rode their donkeys as far as they could before it got too dark to see where they were going.  They went all the way to Gibeah, 12 miles.  They could have stopped at Jebus (later Jerusalem), which was only 6 miles.  But there weren’t any Israelites that lived there, so the man wanted to go to a town where there were Israelites–Gibeah.

Big mistake.

They arrive and hang out in the town square hoping someone will take them in for the night.  An old man finally does.  He says,” whatever you do, don’t spend the night in the square” (verse 20).  That sounds foreboding.

This was getting to be a really long post.  Tune in next week for part 2.  It’ll be worth it.

Part two can be found here.