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.
FOUR HUNDRED VIRGINS
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!
And this shall be the priests’ due from the people, from them that offer a sacrifice, whether it be ox or sheep, that they should give unto the priest the shoulders, and the two cheeks, and the maw (Deut. 18:3).
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 expe
ditionary 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.
You mean that’s in the Bible?
Yes, dear reader, that’s in the Bible.
But wait—it gets worse.
Four hundred virgins, no matter how fecund, are simply not sufficient to provide bedmates to the six hundred surviving Benjaminites at the Rock of Rimmon, and so the remorseful Israelites are compelled to look farther afield for suitable women. Someone points out that a harvest festival is held every year in the vineyards of Shiloh, and the festival is the occasion for singing and dancing by the maidens of the district. And so the surviving Benjaminite soldiers are promptly dispatched to Shiloh. “Go and lie in wait in the vineyards, and see … if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance,” the soldiers are told by their former enemies, “then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife” (Judg. 21:20–21).
By such brutal means, we are told, the endangered species of Benjaminites is saved from extinction, the unity of Israel is restored, and all is made well again. “The children of Israel departed,” says the author of Judges, “every man to his tribe and to his family” (Judg. 21:24). Again we are reminded of the story of Lot, where the earnest desire of Lot’s daughters to repopulate a God-blasted landscape leads to seduction and incest; here, abduction and rape are the means to repopulate the ravaged tribe of Benjamin. Both Genesis 19 and Judges 19 are disturbing examples of how moral order, always precarious in the Bible, “is turned upside down [when] one lives in an age governed by human selfishness.”3
After the orgy of violence that follows the gang rape and murder of the concubine—mass murder, mass abduction, mass rape—the traditional reference to the incident of the traveler and his concubine as the Gibeah Outrage seems almost ironic. Only one woman is cast to a mob of rapists at Gibeah, but six hundred women share the same fate at the Rock of Rimmon. The real outrage is that tens of thousands of men, women, and children are slain—and hundreds of young women are sexually enslaved—as the cycle of sin and despair in Israel achieves a kind of moral fission.
“ALL UNTRUTHFUL, AND ONE A KLEPTOMANIAC”
The outrages against women that take up so much of the Book of Judges explain why even the earliest feminist Bible critics tended to regard the Holy Scriptures as hopelessly tainted by the sexism of the stern patriarchy that created the Bible in the first place. More than a century ago, pioneering feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton published a collection of biblical commentary titled The Woman’s Bible, in which she complained that the Bible had long been used to enslave and oppress woman. Nothing before or since has exceeded her flat condemnation of the Bible as a rhetorical weapon directed at women.
“Whatever the Bible may be made to do in Hebrew or Greek,” wrote Stanton, “in plain English it does not exalt and dignify woman.” She declared herself unimpressed by most, if not all, of the women in the Bible. “In fact the wives of the patriarchs, all untruthful, and one a kleptomaniac,” she cracked, “but illustrate the law, that the cardinal virtues are seldom found in the oppressed classes,”4 and she summed up what she saw as the sorry role assigned to women by Holy Writ:
The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man’s bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire on the vital questions of the hour, she was commanded to ask her husband at home.5
Some contemporary feminist Bible scholars still feel the same way. For example, they are troubled by the fact that the women depicted in the Bible resort so often to guile and deception to achieve otherwise praiseworthy ends. The deceit practiced on various men by Rebekah, Tamar, Ruth, Rahab, and others strikes Bible scholar Carole Fontaine as “morally ambivalent,” especially when the trickery is based on sexual allure or actual seduction. Rebekah connives with her son, Jacob, to trick her husband into bestowing the blessing of the firstborn on the younger son by cooking up a savory stew. Tamar seduces her father-in-law by dressing up as a harlot. Ruth, at the urging of her mother-in-law, carries out an elaborate seduction of a rich landowner on his threshing floor. And Rahab, a good-hearted hooker, conspires with a pair of Israelite spies to turn away the soldiers of the Canaanite king.
“‘[W]oman the Provider,’ associated with food, drink, and shelter,” writes Fontaine, “turns deceiver, thereby rendering the familiar nurturing figure suddenly dangerous to unsuspecting males who fall into her ‘snares.’”6
Of course, the use of deceit and seduction by these biblical women can be understood and explained even by critics who are put off by such depictions. To be fair—and perfectly frank—the fact is that women in the biblical era did not have any weapons other than trickery to work their will in the real world. A woman in ancient Israel was far more likely to be a wife, a concubine, a handmaid, or a harlot than, say, a queen or a prophetess; and, in any case, the Bible was interpreted to forbid the use of weaponry by women (Deut. 22:5). No matter what their standing, women were always under the domination of a male figure, first a father, then a husband, and sometimes a son. Except when summoned to bed by a man, they were confined to the women’s tent and the company of other women. So it should not surprise us that the biblical women who assert themselves at all are compelled to use the offer of food, shelter, or sexual gratification—the only tools available “to those who lack power to achieve their ends in other ways.”7
Sexism in the Bible, then, is sometimes strictly in the eye of the beholder. Bible critic Esther Fuchs, for example, reads the account of God’s visit to Abraham at the terebinths of Mamre, where Sarah laughs out loud when she overhears the divine promise that she will yet bear a son in old age, and concludes that Sarah is depicted by the biblical author as “confined, passive, cowardly, deceptive, and unfaithful.”8 Yet the very same passage strikes novelist Joseph Heller as worthy of celebration: Sarah’s laughter is an act of audacity and courage by a woman of “generous, high-spirited good nature.” “Old Sarah’s fun—she laughed and lied to God,” King David is made to say in Heller’s God Knows, “and I still get a big treat out of that.”9
What is often overlooked in these debates is the fact that the Bible—and the culture that the Bible defines and describes—treated women with greater care and respect than they generally enjoyed elsewhere in the ancient Near East. Daughters of Israel, for example, are entitled to inherit property under certain limited circumstances (Num. 27:3–8); a man is not permitted to sell his wife into slavery (Deut. 21:14); a daughter who is sold into servititude is entitled to her freedom if her master violates her rights under biblical law (Exod. 21:7–11); and, as we have seen, a childless widow is entitled to the extraordinary benefits of a levirate “marriage” (Deut. 25:5–10). (See chapter seven.) Such grudging allowances may not much impress some contemporary readers, but the fact that women have any legal status under biblical law is “almost unique in the ancient world,” as Bible scholar Gila Ramras-Rauch points out.10
What’s more, an open-eyed reading of the Bible reveals that women play a crucial and dynamic role in the destiny of humankind, in both Jewish and Christian tradition. Inevitably, a woman figures decisively in the recurring theme of “the birth of the chosen one,
” starting with the matriarchs of the Hebrew Bible and culminating with the Virgin Mary in the Christian Bible. As we have already seen, Lot’s daughters and Judah’s daughter-in-law are examples of how the bearer of the “chosen one” is not passively impregnated with the seed of a patriarch; rather, these women take it upon themselves to defy the will of powerful men and sometimes God himself in order to bring about the crucial birth. Indeed, the Bible frequently singles out “the woman as initiator of events,” as Ramras-Rauch puts it. “From Eve through Sarah and Esther, women have shaped sacred history through word and deed.”11
GOD AND GYNO-SADISM
Still, a certain sexist sting can be felt in unexpected places in the Bible. Remarkably, even a woman so thoroughly victimized as the Levite’s concubine still comes in for a bit of victim-blaming by the biblical author, at least in one version of the Bible. According to the Masoretic Text, an early and authoritative Hebrew version of the Bible, the Levite and the concubine are estranged because she “played the harlot against him” (Judg. 19:2 JPS), thus setting into motion the sequence of mishaps that reaches a sudden and unexpected crescendo of violence on that night in Gibeah.
But the phrase “play the harlot” does not appear in the Septuagint, an early Greek translation of the Bible that serves as the basis for many Christian Bibles, which says that the concubine “became angry with him” (RSV) and thus suggests only an ordinary squabble between husband and wife.12 Indeed, we might conclude that she is the one sinned against, especially since the Levite displays such ardor in making his way to her father’s house “to speak kindly unto her, to bring her back” (RSV).13 In any event, the Levite’s father-in-law seems very glad indeed to see him when he arrives in hot pursuit of his mate.*
The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible Page 29
