Judges 19 Is Rather Divisive

There was a very dark joke in the title. For those of you who didn’t get it, you will shortly. I was reading Judges 19 the other day. It is one of the wildest chapters in the whole Bible. I’ll tell you the story and then I’ll comment on it a bit.

So, to set the stage, we’re out of Egyptian slavery and in the promised land but things aren’t going hot. Israel doesn’t have a king yet. They’re still under the judges system and everyone just kind of does what they want.

One day, a Levite from the hill country of Ephraim decided to take a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah. The Bible never gives him a name so I’m going to call him Levi. It doesn’t give the name of the concubine either so I’m going to call her Rolyat which is just Taylor spelled backwards. So, anyway, Rolyat is unfaithful to Levi. She left him and went back to her parents’ home. I assume this means she had sex with someone who wasn’t Levi, but I suppose it would be unfaithful to just leave your husband as well…

Alright, after looking at some Hebrew, it took me about five minutes to figure out they read right to left instead of left to right. The text uses zanah {zaw-naw’} which means to commit fornication, be a harlot, play the harlot. So Rolyat appears to have had sex with someone who wasn’t Levi.

At any rate, she goes home and after four months, Levi decided to go see her to persuade her to return. He set out with his servant and two donkeys. Upon arrival, Rolyat welcomed Levi into her parents’ home. Her father persuaded Levi to spend the night. For some reason, he’s very persistent about it and he gets Levi to spend five days there. On the fifth day, he tries to get Levi to stay yet again but Levi refuses and he leaves. Levi, Rolyat, his servant, and the donkeys head toward Jerusalem which is called Jebus in the story.

Near the city, the servant wanted to stop in Jerusalem for the night, but Levi insisted on continuing on to Gibeah or Ramah. Levi didn’t want to spend the night in a city that didn’t belong to the Israelites. They pressed on and made it to Gibeah. However, when they got there, no one offered them lodging. Gibeah was a Benjamite city. In the evening, an old man from the hill country of Ephraim who was living in Gibeah came in from working in the fields. When he sees Levi, he asks where Levi is from and where he is going.

Levi explains to the old man that no one offered them a place to stay. He even says that he has food, water, and everything they need so it would be no burden to host them for the night. After hearing this, the old man welcomes them to his house. He doesn’t want Levi and the gang to spend the night in the city square.

After supper at the old man’s house, wicked men of the city surround the place. They pound on the door and demand that Levi be brought out so they can have sex with him. The old man goes outside and tells the wicked men not to be so vile. Instead, he offers up his virgin daughter and Rolyat in Levi’s place. He tells the wicked men they can do whatever they want to the two women.

The wicked men are not receptive to this. So, Levi takes Rolyat and sends her outside. The wicked men raped her and abused her throughout the night. At dawn they let her go. At daybreak, Rolyat makes it back to the house where Levi was staying. There she fell at the door, and she remained there until daylight.

When Levi got up, he stepped out of the house to continue on his way. When he saw Rolyat at the foot of the door, he told her to get up so they could go. She didn’t answer. Presumably, because she was dead. So, Levi put Rolyat on one of the donkeys. He then headed for home. Once he got home, he decided to take a knife and use it to cut Rolyat into twelve pieces, limb by limb. He sent each piece to one of the twelve parts of Israel.

Upon receiving the body parts, the people said, “Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came out of Egypt. Just imagine! We must do something! So speak up!” After that, 400,000 men head to Mizpah. There Levi tells them the whole story. In response, the men tell the Benjamites to turn over the wicked men who committed the crime. The Benjamites refuse and instead mobilize 26,000 men to fight the rest of Israel.

Surprisingly, when battle lines are drawn outside of Gibeah, the Benjamites actually kick the crap out of the Israelites. Israel suffered 22,000 casualties on the first day and 18,000 casualties on the second day. On the third day, the Israelites finally got it together and they set an ambush. This works well and they manage to kill 25,100 Benjamites. Then the Israelites went ahead and killed everyone in Gibeah, and they also killed the Benjamites living in the surrounding cities. They seemed to burn a lot of the cities down.

So that’s the story. It has a lot to unpack. My first thought is that it cost Israel 40,000 men to kill 25,100 Benjamites. I’m not sure I would call that much of a win. The Benjamites basically ran a 2 to 1 K/D on the rest of Israel. Moving past that, talk about escalation. This whole story started with Levi the Levite taking a harlot like Rolyat as his wife. If he hadn’t done that or if she could have kept it in her pants, this whole episode could have been avoided.

Overall, that’s a bit of a recurring theme in the story. Levi shouldn’t have married a prostitute. Rolyat shouldn’t have cheated on her husband. Levi shouldn’t have left late in the day just to get out of his father-in-law’s house. The wicked men of Gibeah shouldn’t have tried to pull a move on Levi. Moreover, they shouldn’t have raped and abused poor Rolyat. Levi probably shouldn’t have decided to chop up Rolyat. The Benjamites shouldn’t have protected the wicked men among them. Everyone screwed something up at some point. That together resulted in the deaths of at least 65,000 men for sure plus the number killed in the resulting Benjamite purge. It sounds like several cities were burned down and a lot of livestock were killed too. The whole thing was one giant mess.

Now on to a few specific points. The first of which is Rolyat. I can’t help but wonder what her personality was like. How I feel about her is highly dependent on her age and whether or not she was a moron. If this is a 15-year-old girl we’re talking about here and she cheated on Levi with someone more passionate and charming, then I have some sympathy for her. That doesn’t excuse her from screwing up, but I have a hard time believing that Levi was a complete and utter tyrant. After all, after four months, he seemed to forgive Rolyat and decide to go collect her back despite her betrayal.

If Rolyat was older, and maybe more of an active agent in her treachery, then my sympathy rapidly falls off. It’s one thing to be a woman and to be seduced by another man into cheating on your husband. It’s a completely different thing to be a woman and to be the one doing the seducing. If Rolyat was the one instigating the infidelity that took place, then I would have a hard time feeling sorry for her. As a matter of fact, in a very messed up and demented way, how the story ends is almost poetic.

If we assume that Rolyat kicks all of this off by seeking out sex, then it’s poetically cruel that she dies on account of excessive sex. I presume that’s what happens. The Bible doesn’t give a cause of death, but some Google searches provide a number of different ways in which rape can result in death. Internal organ damage, hemorrhaging, and blunt force trauma are a few examples. No matter how you slice it, this isn’t pretty. The number of men required to surround a house is definitely greater than 10. If everyone got a turn, Rolyat was in for a pretty bad night. So yeah. She wanted sex and she got it.

Moving past that disaster, reading the account reminded me of Genesis 19 which is ironic as heck. In Genesis 19, angels show up at Sodom in the evening. They plan to spend the night in the city square, but Lot gets them to spend the night in his house instead. The wicked men of Sodom show up and want to have sex with the angels. Lot tries to talk them out of this, but they’re not interested. Lot offers up his virgin daughters, but they’re not interested in those either. At that point, the angels intercede. They evacuate Lot and his family. Shortly after that, they wipe Sodom and Gomorrah off the face of the earth.

A couple of things on this. First, it must be standard operating procedure to offer up your virgin daughter when a group of men comes to rape your male house guests. Evidently in the culture of this time, a culture where Deut 22:25-29 exists, they did frown on homosexual relations that much. Enough to subject a virgin girl to rape, which carried with it the death penalty for the perpetrators. Beyond that, surrounding a house to have sex with someone’s male guest is unthinkable. As in, I can’t even comprehend why someone would want to do that. The fact that this situation played out twice in the Bible is ridiculous.

Making matters worse, the Benjamites should have known what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. The last time the stunt they attempted was pulled, God literally rained burning Sulfur from the sky. Yet the Benjamites of Gibeah do it anyway. This is what burning sulfur in oxygen looks like if you’re curious.

It’s pretty serious. I used to feel sorry for the Benjamites that they got genocided by the rest of Israel, but they truly and profoundly disobeyed God. God explicitly said don’t have sex with men, don’t rape, don’t murder, and purge evil from among you. The Benjamites screwed up all of these. If anything, they’re just lucky they only got the sword. It would be hard to argue that Sodom was behaving worse than them. The Sodomites weren’t God’s chosen people. The Benjamites were.

Stepping past that mess too, I’m kind of conflicted about what Levi did. I don’t much like the fact that he put Rolyat out to be raped. The text says, “…So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go.” I’d like to know exactly how that went down.

There are a few different ways you could paint it. For instance, notice how the old man’s virgin daughter wasn’t sent out with Rolyat. So maybe Rolyat sacrificed herself to save the young girl from the same fate. Maybe she sacrificed herself for Levi as well. For all we know, this could have been a major, almost Christlike redemptive arc for Rolyat. I don’t think it’s very likely but it’s certainly possible. If she had a functioning brain at all, she likely knew what was in store for her outside. So, if she went out willingly, that says something about her character. She accepted certain humiliation and possibly death to save everyone else.

However, that seems unlikely. Having loved two different girls who proved to be unfaithful harlots, I have a difficult time giving Rolyat the benefit of the doubt. On the one hand, I would have a very difficult time offering either of those girls up to be raped on my behalf by a band of wicked men. These are two women who have both stabbed me in the back, yet I still can’t imagine subjecting them to what Levi subjected Rolyat to. On the other hand, I can’t imagine either one of these girls suffering through even the slightest inconvenience on my behalf. If I texted either of them right now, it would be a coin toss if they even responded. There is no version of reality in which either of them would get raped to save me, much less die to save my life.

So, on account of that, I feel like Levi had to tell Rolyat to go outside. I feel like Rolyat wouldn’t have wanted to go outside. I’m not sure how Levi got Rolyat to go outside. Looking at the Hebrew text again, the phrase is “waYacházëq häiysh B'fiylag'sh” which I probably botched up, but chazaq means to fasten upon or hence to seize. So, I’m kind of thinking that force was involved which kind of makes sense. It makes the story rather more tragic though. It means that Rolyat probably pleaded for her life and begged to stay inside but Levi didn’t cave. I can imagine her hopes swelling as she maybe thought she was going to be forgiven for her previous adultery, only for them to be dashed upon the rocks as the realities of their situation at the hands of the wicked men became apparent.

Making matters worse, once the episode is over and Rolyat has managed to drag herself back to the house where she died on the doorstep, Levi shows some profound callousness. He tells her to get up so they can go. It’s almost like he doesn’t care that she just finished having the worst night of her life. When she doesn’t get up, he picks her up, takes her home, and dismembers her. That’s another example of a thing I couldn’t imagine myself ever doing. Even if I were a deranged psychopath, I can’t say I can see myself dismembering either of the girls who betrayed me. I’m using them as examples because there are no people alive on earth who I dislike more than them yet even then I wouldn’t do something this terrible to either of them.

That’s not to say that I’m a saint or anything like that. Another point of interest is that this assault on Rolyat happened in the city. It’s unlikely that it was a quiet event. I would imagine that Rolyat made some noise. I would imagine the men made some noise. Yet despite this, no one in the city of Gibeah came to help her. No one interceded to stop the atrocity. And thinking about this, I’m not sure I would be much different. I don’t think I would confront a gang of 20 or even just 10 men wielding nothing more than a sword or a spear for the sake of a woman I don’t know. I might if I had a fully automatic M2 Browning or an AA12. With anything less, I don’t think I’d want to get involved. In a sword, spear, and axe type of situation, I’d likely only be courageous if the odds were no more than 2 to 1. That’s the best I would be willing to do for a random woman. I would be willing to face two unarmed men while wielding a sword myself.

For a girl I knew or one that I loved, the odds would scale a bit. For a female friend, maybe 3 to 1. For a girl that I loved, well, I guess it would depend on how serious things were with her. There’s one girl who I would have died for, so for her, the odds wouldn’t matter much. That said, the very statement should be enough proof that love makes you stupid. At any rate, the point I’m getting at here is that Levi was the only man in the city of Gibeah who had any incentive to sacrifice anything for Rolyat. He did not, so you can’t much blame the good men of Gibeah for not stopping the wicked men of Gibeah. Who knows, perhaps it was a bystander effect situation.

At any rate, I think that’s enough about this story. The key take away I think is that one should be wary of little evils. Small decisions that seem inconsequential can add up quickly to create devastating results. Aside from that, maybe don’t be a wicked person. Also, probably don’t cheat on your significant other. Oh, and probably don’t rape people either. This was another example of a story in the Bible that isn’t meant to condone the actions that occurred within. It clearly seems to be a cautionary tale. A very interesting one at that in a multitude of sick and twisted ways.