Portion for Reading 19-21All the tribes of Israel assembled in Mizpah to hear the Levite's* explanation for the bizarre package of human flesh and bones they received. Fourteen thousand footmen listened as the Levite told them what occurred. He told them the men of Gibeah sought to kill him, but instead they raped his concubine.
"And now she is dead," he said, "I took her and cut her in pieces and sent her to each of the tribes. The Benjamites have committed lewdness and folly in Israel." (20:1-6)
Power
“Played the harlot”—if this means she had intercourse with another man then there are power implications. To sleep with another’s concubine is to assert power over him (2Sam 16:21-22; 1Ki 2:22).
The concubine might also have been displaying power by voluntarily cuckolding the Levite.
If she simply ran away, she was displaying power to take her destiny into her hands.
The concubine’s father’s hospitality is over-zealous. One way of reading this is that he used the obligations of hospitality to assert his power over the Levite.
The Levite has power over his servant, overruling what may well have been a sensible suggestion. The Levite is powerless in Gibeah because no-one will take them in. The old Ephraimite has the power to do so and does.
All sexual penetration has power implications. Anal penetration is often an expression of power over another. Anal rape is often used in male prisons to humiliate new inmates and to perpetuate the power of the ruling elite. In this context it has little or nothing to do with sexual pleasure.
The desire to anally rape the Levite is therefore a desire to subjugate him (perhaps this is why he says that they wanted to kill him in 20:5).
The offer of the old man’s daughter and Levite’s concubine is an acknowledgement of their powerlessness.
Rape is about power, not sex. The gang rape of the concubine expresses the total dominance of the Benjamites over the Levite, the Ephraimite and the Judahite (the concubine). The wider political connotations of this act become chillingly obvious when the whole story is considered.
Benjamin is a ‘ravenous wolf’ (Gen 49:27)—so what else could we expect?
Benjamin failed to be powerful—or to trust in the power of Yahweh—in the matter of the taking of Jebus.
There is a clear irony here—Benjamin failed to use legitimate power over the nations at Jebus (where the Levite would/could not stop) but used illegitimate power over fellow sons of Israel at
Gibeah (where the Levite had to stop because of their earlier failure).
The cutting up of the concubine is a dramatic act. It could be seen as a further abuse of the concubine’s body by her now humiliated husband/owner. Does he blame her and so punish her further?
Probably not. Rather the brutality of the act mirrors and expresses the brutality of the crime. The division into twelve pieces is surprising—perhaps it includes both half tribes of Ephraim & Manasseh as well as Levi.
More importantly, it symbolises the fracture of the unity of Israel: if this sort of thing is allowed to happen we will become twelve broken parts instead of one living body.
The Benjamites bit the lure. They followed the Israelites, unaware of what evil lay ahead of them. Twenty-five thousand, one hundred Benjamites were slain. The Israelites then returned to Gibeah and burned the Benjamites houses, killed their cattle, their women and whatever else got in their path. (20:32-37, 48)
To conclude the story of the Levite and his concubine, the tribes of Israel nearly destroyed the entire tribe of Benjamin for its initial offense. When they realized their mistake, they committed mass murder, wiping out an entire group of people. They mercilessly killed women and children, then kidnapped the virgins to be given as birth receptacles for the Benjamites. But this still did not suffice, so they kidnapped more women from their homes and forced them to live with men they did not know.
The irony of this story is what started as a single act of redemption for a brutal crime ended in genocide, mass murder and the dislocation of hundreds of women. But according to the author of Judges, this was how it was when there was no king in Israel.
Source: The Daily University of Washington & Richard Seel