Gibeah - Judges 19

Chapter 19 has a story in it that has always horrified me and so I’m glad we’re getting into it because there’s been a lot of clarity for me. Again, I always thought that if it was in the scriptures then it was good and I could not for the life of me see how this was good, but now I see that it’s not good and it’s included in the scriptures to illustrate just how evil parts of Israel were at this time. It’s also important to note that this event occurred before Micah, so again, not in chronological order.

There was a Levite how took a concubine. The story refers to her as the concubine and him as the husband but those words don’t make sense to me because she’s not his wife, but in that time the woman wasn’t just a mistress, she had some rights as a companion but not the full rights of a wife. He was the husband regardless, but getting those two roles straight was harder for me. This Levite and his concubine had a fight and she left the city that they lived in and went back to live with her father. Verse 2 says that “his concubine played the whore against him,” which indicates that she cheated on him but TB says that this almost certainly is a mistranslation and that she probably did not cheat on him because if she had, she would have been executed and this story shows no indication that her life was in danger. He says that it probably just means that they had a fight and she left to go back to her father’s house.

After 4 months without her, he left the city and went to her father’s house to bring her back home to him. The father convinced the man to stay for several days and when it was time to leave, they left and made it to the town of Gibeah to stay the night before continuing on their journey. They thought that Gibeah would be the better options because it was a Hebrew city and they assumed that their countrymen would treat them better than strangers.

They are sitting in the middle of town because no one would offer them a place to stay for the night, which was a big no-no back then where hospitality was a very big deal. Finally an old man saw them and invited them to his house to stay the night. That night a group of men surrounded the house, tried to beat the door down and told the old man, “Bring forth the man that came into hine house, that we may know him.” They want to gang rape the male visitor. This again, goes against the hospitality rule, plus it’s gang rape, all bad. The man says not to rape the man but offers his virginal daughter instead and the concubine. The group really wants the man so the Levite man pushes his concubine out the door and they rape her all night long. She crawls back to the front door of the house where her husband is staying and dies there.

In the morning, the man sees his concubine laying in the doorway and tells her, “up, and let us be going.” She doesn’t answer because she’s dead so he takes her body back to the city where his house is and cuts her up into 12 pieces and sent each piece of her body to the tribes if Israel so that they would all know what happened.

I don’t know why he’s all indignant, like “look what they did to my concubine,” when he was the one who pushed her out of the house in the first place to save his own skin. Like I don’t think there’s much commentary on this story that I can make because it’s just so horrific. What a depraved state that Israel was in at this time. TB noted that the people who did this would have lived under Joshua for a lot of their lifetimes and their grandparents would have been the ones that were delivered out of Israel. So we aren’t that far removed from the very brief time that Israel was righteous. Plus, this is very similar to what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah, but at least they were pagan. This was supposed to be God's chosen people who were acting like this.