Last night was the longest night of the year. Once upon a time this was the original holy night celebrated by people to mark the transition from winter to spring. In today’s story from the Book of Judges we hear echoes of how some nights, filled with terror, are longer than others. And how we keep waiting and watching for the dawning of salvation - in so many ways.
Helene Cixous, a French thinker and author wrote that “Someday there will be a Somewhere in which the Other will not be condemned to death.”
Trigger alert: the next three chapters are a lot to take in. We are not anywhere near that utopian somewhere quite yet.
The Book of Judges comes to a close with three brutal and bloody chapters that narrate one of the ugliest attacks on humans and humanity, as one crime evolves into another and into a full blown civil war between the tribes of Israel. The initial victim in this sordid saga is a defenseless woman, condemned to death because she is an ‘other’. Following this difficult scene will be the massacre of many more women, children and men - kin who become suddenly assigned as ‘others’ and who are killed in cold blood like so many people whose existence is suspect, silenced and savagely attacked through this book.
Many have wondered over generations about the purpose of these final chapters . Recent Feminist scholars have raised the stakes that challenge what this text is trying to convey and what its meaning may hold for modern eyes.
Prof. Sarah Milstein's essay asks: “How could a crime against a single woman launch a massive intertribal war? The clearly literary nature of Judges 19, with its anonymous characters, direct speech, and folkloric repetition, indicates that this unit must be read and interpreted as literature, but what is it trying to say?”
The story begins with a nameless man from the tribe of Levi, who resides in the hill country of Ephraim and whose concubine - a second, a secondary wife, has left him and returned to her father’s home in Bethlehem. He goes after her and after several days with her family they begin the journey back home. They arrive at the city of Gibeah - the hilltop - belonging to the tribe of Benjamin, where only one old man, himself a foreigner, takes them in for the night. As soon as they enter, some of the town’s men surround the house and demand to ‘know’ the guests. If this reminds you of the Sodom scene in Genesis it is no coincidence. Whoever wrote this chapter is making literary allusion to that horrible story and to others as well. Just like Lot did in Genesis, the host refuses and offers his young daughters instead. The Levite hands them his concubine instead.
Tikva Frymer-Kensky, in her book "Reading the Women of the Bible" comments: “Modern readers cannot but be appalled. From our perspective, such “sacrifice” is a scandalous disregard for the personhood and lives of daughters and wives. We treat each individual as a separate person, not as an appendage of the father/husband. We can find no justification for sacrificing a daughter or a wife to save a man, and are horrified at such biblical stories.”
Wd don’t know what this nameless woman from Bethlhem goes through that terrible night of torture. It isn’t clear if she is dead or alive by the time the sun rises.
וַיָּ֨קׇם אֲדֹנֶ֜יהָ בַּבֹּ֗קֶר וַיִּפְתַּח֙ דַּלְת֣וֹת הַבַּ֔יִת וַיֵּצֵ֖א לָלֶ֣כֶת לְדַרְכּ֑וֹ וְהִנֵּ֧ה הָאִשָּׁ֣ה פִֽילַגְשׁ֗וֹ נֹפֶ֙לֶת֙ פֶּ֣תַח הַבַּ֔יִת וְיָדֶ֖יהָ עַל־הַסַּֽף׃
“When her husband arose in the morning, he opened the doors of the house and went out to continue his journey; and there was the woman, his concubine, lying at the entrance of the house, with her hands on the threshold.”
Her hands on the threshold are limp by the time he wakes up. Is she still alive? The Hebrew Bible leaves the option open. But the Greek translation already makes sure that we know that by this moment she had died. He calls her, but she does not answer. So he hoists her body on the donkey and goes home.
When he reaches the safety of his familiar surroundings he proceeds to produce one of the most chilling acts of protest in biblical history. He takes a sacrificial knife, dismembers the woman’s corpse into twelve parts, and sends these parcels of protest to the twelve tribes of Israel. Everybody is talking about it - no horror like this has been heard of in Israel since they crossed over the Jordan river. The chapter ends with the murmuring of war.
What is going on here?? Frymer-Kensky writes:
“Were the biblical authors and readers of this story blind to the personhood of these women? Did they consider such actions simply a part of patriarchy, regrettable but necessary? Or did they view the Levite’s sacrifice as an abuse, a rupture in the social order, a tragedy even when “necessary... Feeling himself abused, the man now abuses his concubine’s corpse and uses it to inscribe and dramatize his message. Her torn body is a symbol of the torn shreds of the social fabric: what has been done to her has already been done to the bonds of trust between Israelites...‘Judges 19-21 relates a process of implosion and dissolution in which everyone behaves badly. The story set ‘when the judges judges’ has no villains; the story set when ‘there was no king’ has no heroes.”
More will be revealed about this horror story and its aftermath, as the Book of Judges enters its final chapters and the people of Israel, united in horror, are increasingly ready for a central ruling body that will prevent such populist violence from rupturing innocent lives, and as we’ll see ahead - the very fabric of a fragile nation. The woman’s hands on the threshold remain the last image of her tragic death and the start of the end of one era of chaotic anarchy in the land and the future king, of the tribe of Benjamin, whose links to this story will be soon revealed in full.