(Trigger warning. I’m going to be talking about a story from the Bible that involves rape and abuse.)
(Since I really like this post, I decided to combine both parts so I can see it all in one place.)
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.
Later, there’s pounding on the front door and shouting. A gang of men from the town were there and they wanted to have some “fun” with the man. The old man tried to talk them out of it. It’s bad hospitality, not to mention wrong (verse 23).
He even offered them his daughter and the concubine. “I will bring them out to you, and you can abuse them and do whatever you like. But don’t do such a shameful thing to this man” (verse 24). The gang didn’t like that offer, but the man shoved his concubine out the door anyway.
The old man didn’t place much value on women, either. He was okay with throwing the women to a gang of men. He didn’t see any reason to protect them. He thought he was keeping the men from doing something “shameful.”
What they were planning to do to that poor woman was just as shameful, worse so. The old man and her “husband” were supposed to protect her. The old man had extended his hospitality. They were practically honorary members of the household. Don’t get me started on her “husband.”
Makes you wonder how often this particular gang of men did this. Enough that the old man told the travelers not to spend the night in the town square. They must have done this to every traveler that came through Gibeah. Maybe they were rather nasty to the people who refused to turn over their guests. If they were that violent toward the woman, how did they treat others?
She was gang raped. All night.
They let her go when the sun came up. She managed to make it back to the old man’s house.
Just in time to die on the porch.
When her husband opened the door, he told her to get up so they could go. She didn’t get up, so he puts her body on one of the donkeys and he and his servant go home.
She doesn’t get a proper burial. He doesn’t tell her dad what happened. Instead, the man chopped up her body and sent it out with a message to all the parts of Israel.
A battle ensues because the people of Gibeah and the rest of the descendants of Benjamin won’t make things right. And after the fight ends, several hundred young, unmarried women (virgins) are kidnapped and forcibly married to the unmarried survivors from Benjamin’s descendants.
Awful story, right?
One of the worst, I think.
And we don’t even know her name.
We don’t know any names.
There’s just a whole lot of pain.
And she gets the worst of it. She should have been protected, cherished, loved. She should have been a wife, not a concubine.
It’s so easy to pass judgment on the people in this story. So easy, we do it without even really thinking about it. Usually following those thoughts, we think that we’re so much better, our society is so much more civilized, we wouldn’t do that if we were in that situation.
But is our society all that better? We don’t have to look any further than the headlines to know that women are still being taken advantage of. Headlines announce another influential man is being accused of rape, and we’re quick to blame the ones doing the accusing.
Other headlines speak of redistributing sex, because some men are getting violent because they aren’t getting any. If they had sex, they wouldn’t be violent, goes the reasoning.
Still other headlines decry human trafficking. According to the 2016 Global Slavery Index, there were an estimated 57,700 people in slavery here in the United States.
We’re not any better than they were back then. We’re all fallen, sinful people. So what do we do? “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). “When you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!” (Matthew 25:40).
Your neighbor, the least of these, the women, the children, the homeless, the imprisoned, the refugee.
Love them. Protect them. Feed and clothe them. Changing these horrible headlines starts with us.
To start, I’m going to give this concubine a name. I’m going to call her Abigail. It means “my father’s delight.” She deserves that much.
This post initially appeared in two parts on my blog here and here.