The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (39 page)

The servant laid out her battered and bloody corpse, the face unrecognizable and the private parts unspeakably insulted, on the table in the Levite’s house. As the servant watched in amazement, the Levite himself took a sharp knife that he used for butchering and cut the young woman’s body into twelve pieces, limb by limb. He wrapped each piece of the corpse tightly in linen and cord, and then he dispatched the twelve grisly packages by messenger to all of Israel—all the tribes except Benjamin, of course, against whom he now hoped to incite a war of revenge, a war that would cleanse all of Israel, a holy war.

“Such a thing hath not been seen from the day the children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt unto this very day,” went the Levite’s message. “Consider it, and speak.”

Heroines and Martyrs in the Book of Judges

T
he Book of Judges is a grab bag of tall tales about the time of troubles that followed the conquest of Canaan, a place where the Israelites were beset by bitter enemies, riven by tribal hatred, and lured into apostasy by strange gods and goddesses. The tale of Samson and his catastrophic seduction by Delilah (Judg. 13-16) is perhaps the single most familiar story in Judges, one that has escaped the confines of the Sunday school classroom and spread into the popular culture. And Samson is emblematic of the plight of the nation of Israel, whose people were equally susceptible to seduction and brought down calamity on their own heads.

But the tale of Samson and Delilah is hardly the most lurid of the atrocity stories that we find in the Book of Judges, an escalating cycle of sin and scandal that reaches a bloody climax of mass rape and mass murder in the account of the Levite traveler and his concubine. Indeed, the biblical author is eager to show us by gruesome example how badly ordinary people behave when they enjoy too much liberty, and the essential message of Judges is repeated throughout the book like a mantra. “In those days there was no king in Israel,” the author writes. “Every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judg. 21:25).

The moral chaos that prevailed in ancient Israel before the crowning of a king, as depicted in Judges, begins with sexual violence, escalates into civil war, and ends with genocide. Throughout the Book of Judges, the victims of these excesses are often wholly innocent women. We have now encountered two of them: Jephthah’s daughter, a doomed young woman who achieves a certain tragic grandeur in death (see chapter ten), and the Levite’s concubine, a woman of whom we know nothing at all except that she is gang-raped to death, then dismembered and scattered among the tribes of Israel. Significantly, the biblical author takes care to specify the tribe of the men who abuse her, and even the town where she dies—Gibeah—but
her
name is never mentioned. So her story has come to be called the Gibeah Outrage in a kind of reverential shorthand.

“Oh miserable men, who destroy your own species through those pleasures intended to reproduce it,” cried Rousseau in his own horror-soaked retelling of the tale, “how is it that this dying beauty doesn’t freeze your fierce lusts?”
¹

The tale of the Levite traveler and his concubine bears a striking resemblance to a Bible story that we have already encountered: the tale of Lot and his daughters, who are saved from a gang of Sodomites by a pair of helpful angels. The old man who hosts the Levite and his concubine in Gibeah, just like Lot back in Sodom, offers a couple of young women to the lusty mob for their pleasure in order to spare his guest (and himself) from their unwanted attentions. From what we recall about the intervention of the angels in Sodom, we do not really expect the young women in Gibeah to be cast into the arms of the mob—
something
, angelic or human, will spare them at the very last moment.

But no angelic rescuers appear at the doorway in a burst of celestial light to drive off the attackers, and the concubine finds herself at the mercy of mere mortals. As the author of Judges reminds us, mere mortals are not very well-behaved in the absence of some higher authority, human or divine, to check their worst impulses. And no such authority is to be found during those tumultuous years before the Almighty anoints a king to rule over the Israelites. God, who is not much seen
or
heard in Judges, “plays out with ironic detachment his role as a god of convenience.”
²
Even the judges who rule over the unruly Israelites are flawed and ineffectual. As both Jephthah’s daughter and the Levite’s
concubine discover,
everyone
is at risk when “every man [does] that which [is] right in his own eyes.”

The Book of Judges offers a few glimpses of glory, but even these moments are odd and off-putting. Here in Judges, for example, we find an exceedingly strange account of the exploits of a man named Ehud, an Israelite assassin who tricks his way into the palace of a Moabite king. “I have a message from God unto thee,” says Ehud—and then disembowels the monarch with a dagger while he sits in his royal privy! The blade is driven so deep into the king’s fat belly that Ehud cannot draw it out, but the odor of the king’s spilled bowels fools the courtiers outside the door into thinking that he is still using the privy, thus allowing Ehud an opportunity to make a safe getaway (Judg. 3:12–30).

Here, too, we find the saga of quite a different sort of assassin, a valiant woman who can be seen as the mirror image of the abused and murdered concubine, a Bible-era guerrilla fighter whose heroism somehow redeems the sorry spectacle of the Gibeah Outrage. But by the end of the Book of Judges, we are so sullied and unsettled that we are ready for a king,
any
king, who will bring these wild and dangerous people under control. And that of course is the motive of the biblical author who told these shocking and sorrowful stories in the first place.

The Gibeah Outrage does not end with the gang rape of the concubine. Her death and dismemberment, it turns out, are only the first of a series of atrocities that build to a gruesome climax in the final chapters of Judges. The grisly packages of human flesh that the Levite sends to the tribes of Israel prompt a civil war among the tribes and a war of genocide against the tribe of Benjamin. Abruptly, the death of the concubine ceases to be a matter of personal grief and turns into a political cause célèbre. At the end of the harrowing saga, the very survival of the tribe of Benjamin is at risk, and only another outrage allows the Benjaminites to survive at all.

The author of Judges is much concerned with tribal rivalries, but the Levite himself belongs to a tribe that possesses no territory of its own in Canaan. A Levite is
always
a sojourner on the land of another tribe, and so he is a neutral in the rivalry among the tribes of Israel. The
Levites are descendants of Jacob’s son, Levi, and—as we have already seen—Jacob denied Levi a deathbed blessing because of Levi’s role in the slaughter of innocents at Shechem. (See chapter five.) That is why the tribe of Levi does not enjoy any “portion or inheritance” in the Promised Land (Deut. 18:1), and the role of the Levites is to “minister in the name of the Lord” (Deut. 18:5) to their fellow Israelites.

So the Levites are scattered throughout Israel as a tribe of landless priests who depend on the offerings of the other Israelites for a livelihood. “The first-fruits of thy corn, of thy wine, and of thine oil, and the first of the fleece of thy sheep, shalt thou give him,” decrees Moses, himself a Levite and a priest (Deut. 18:4). In fact, the ritual sacrifice of animals, which is described in such exacting detail by the priestly authors of Leviticus and other biblical texts, can be understood as a way to feed and clothe the Levite priests who have no other way to earn a living. And the duties of the priesthood at the altar of sacrifice, which amount to sanctified butchery of animals, allow us to understand why a Levite might be good at cutting a body into pieces!

Summoned by the Levite’s bizarre call to arms in the form of the butchered concubine, the tribes assemble at Mizpah to decide what to do about the “filthy outrage” of the Benjaminites in Gibeah (Judg. 20:6 NEB). If we take the biblical author at his word, some four hundred thousand foot soldiers show up at Mizpah and listen to the Levite’s distinctly self-serving version of what happened back in Gibeah. “[T]he men of Gibeah rose against me,” the Levite says, conveniently leaving out some of the more awkward details of what actually happened. “[M]e they thought to have slain, and my concubine they forced, and she is dead” (Judg. 20:5).

The assembly resolves to punish the men of Gibeah—and the tribe of Benjamin as a whole—for their “wickedness” and “wantonness.” First, they make a sacred vow to the Almighty that no Israelite will allow his daughter to marry a Benjaminite. Then an ultimatum is delivered to the Benjaminites: “[D]eliver up the men, the base fellows that
are in Gibeah, that we may put them to death, and put away evil from Israel” (Judg. 20:13). The Benjaminites defy the ultimatum and muster an army of their own, some twenty-six thousand men-at-arms who join the seven hundred men of Gibeah on the field of battle. All of the men in the contingent from Gibeah are left-handed—an ironic play on the name of the tribe, Benjamin, which means “son of my right hand”—and all are able to strike a blow with deadly accuracy using only a stone and a slingshot, the weapon that will soon be made famous in the hands of the future king, David (Judg. 20:16).

On the eve of battle, the Israelites are stricken with sudden doubt over the wisdom of making war on a fellow tribe. So they gather at Bethel and ask God to designate the tribe that will strike the first blow, as if to confirm whether they should fight at all. “Who shall go up for us first to battle against the children of Benjamin?” the Israelites ask. “Judah first,” says God. In fact, the Israelites suffer dire losses in two successive battles with the Benjaminites; after each defeat, they lament over their losses to the Almighty—and the Almighty urges them back into the fight. Only when the armies meet for a third time does God finally promise the high priest of the Israelites to “deliver [Benjamin] into thy hand” (Judg. 20:28).

Even then, the victory is based on guile and deceit rather than superior courage in battle: the Israelites feign a retreat to draw the Benjaminites into a deadly ambush. Victorious at last, the Israelites chase down and kill the fleeing soldiers, burn the Benjaminite towns and murder the townsfolk, and even pause to slaughter their cattle. Of the tribe of Benjamin, only six hundred survivors manage to find a place of refuge in a natural redoubt called the Rock of Rimmon.

Now the triumphant Israelites suddenly wake up to the fact that they have condemned the tribe of Benjamin to extinction. Only a few hundred Benjaminite men have survived the battles and the general slaughter that followed; all of the Benjaminite women have been put to the sword; and the other tribes of Israel have already vowed not to permit their daughters to marry a Benjaminite. So the tribe is doomed to extermination, and the Israelites are stricken with remorse. “O Lord, the God of Israel, why is this come to pass,” they weep, “that there should be today one tribe lacking in Israel?” (Judg. 21:3).

A solution is devised, but it is so bloodthirsty, so bizarre, that the
mind simply boggles at the very notion that it is described in the pages of Holy Writ. The Israelites conveniently recall that
two
vows had been made at the assembly of tribes at Mizpah. The first vow, as we have seen, is that none of the participants in the assembly will give his daughter in marriage to a Benjaminite. The second vow is that any Israelite who fails to participate in the assembly will be put to death. Now it occurs to the Israelites that the townsfolk of a place called Jabesh-gilead did not bother to show up at Mizpah. These circumstances provide a way to secure wives for the surviving Benjaminites and to preserve the tribe from extinction.

First, the Bible tells us, an expeditionary force consisting of the twelve thousand “valiantest” soldiers of Israel is dispatched to the unfortunate village of Jabesh-gilead, where every single male—adult, child, and infant—and every single woman “that hath lain by man” is put to the sword. Only four hundred young virgins are spared—and they are promptly turned over to the soldiers who are holed up at the Rock of Rimmon to serve as brood mares for a new generation of Benjaminites. Suddenly, the victorious Israelites find it within themselves to forgive the tribe that they had tried to exterminate, and they take it upon themselves to round up enough virgins, willing or not, to repopulate the tribe of Benjamin.