“In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.” These words comprise the introduction to every episode of the NBC television show Law & Order: SVU (Special Victims Unit). The show’s writer, Dick Wolf, adapts real life stories to reveal the ruthless realities of sexual crimes. He delves into the deranged minds and despicable motives of the perpetrators and depicts the dreadful effects on the victims and their families. Every episode of SVU is a documentary on the depths of human depravity.
Whether you watch shows like this on television or if you simply scan the day’s headlines, you know that we live in a nation that is plagued by an epidemic of sexual violence. Prostitution is plentiful! Rape is rampant, especially on our college campuses. Child molestation is perpetrated by people you would least expect. Human trafficking is as common today as it was during the pre-civil war slave days (with more than 15,000 people trafficked in the United States every year, and most of them are young women who get exploited in the underground sex industry).
And if you think these dastardly deeds only happen in the big city, you are sadly mistaken: sexual violence lurks in every suburb, small-town, and rural village in America, even in communities like ours!
Judges 19 is like an episode of Law & Order: SVU. I want to warn you from the outset, this is one of the most shocking and appalling chapters in the whole Bible. It is Rated-R for graphic violence and sexually explicit material. As we investigate this case together, you may find yourself asking, “Why is this in the Bible?” But I assure you, if you can bear through the repulsive scenes, you will see that God has put it here for a good reason. So, let’s take a look!
A Bad Romance (1-9)
This sick saga begins with a bad romance between a Levite and his concubine. Levites were descendants of Levi, the tribe which God designated to serve as priests and spiritual leaders of Israel. This Levite, however, was anything but a spiritual leader. As we will soon discover, he was a yellow-bellied self-serving morally degenerate back-stabbing weasel.
Concubines were live-in mistresses who performed all of the functions and duties of a wife but did not enjoy the social status or legal protection of being married. Although we don’t know how this girl became a concubine, many young women were forced into this lifestyle as a means of survival. As we will soon discover, this concubine, who was from the little farming town of Bethlehem, would not receive the security she desired; instead, she will become a special victim of sexual violence.
We don’t know how these two originally hooked up, but we do know that they were shacking up together in the remote hill country of Ephraim. But for some unknown reason, the concubine became angry with the Levite and moved back to her father’s house in Bethlehem. Again, we don’t know why she left him—she may have been frustrated because she was forced to live a lonely life of seclusion in the boonies. Maybe she just got fed up with the fact that he wouldn’t marry her (maybe she held out her hand and sang “If you like it, you better put a ring on it. Oh oh oh, oh oh oh!) Or perhaps he was even verbally or physically abusive to her. At any rate, she left him and returned to the comfort and security of her father’s house.
After four long months, the Levite’s loneliness got the best of him and he decided to go to Bethlehem and try to make amends with his concubine. He probably had a pocket full of half-hearted apologies and empty promises to persuade her to come back.
When the Levite got to Bethlehem, the girl’s father was surprisingly glad to meet him. We would think that the girl’s father would confront the Levite about the conflict with his daughter, but it never happens. Instead, her father displays grace and generosity; providing him food, drink, and shelter for three days. You know what they say—“Company is like fish, after three days they begin to stink.” But this father shows incredible hospitality when he insists that the Levite stay a forth night. Finally, after the midday meal on the fifth day, the Levite and his concubine saddled up the donkeys and headed northwest toward the town of Jebus.
Ghastliness in Gibeah (10-21)
By the time they approached Jebus (that is, Jerusalem), it was already late in the day, so the Levite’s servant proposed that they stop there for the night. But the Levite immediately squashed any idea of spending the night there because it was inhabited by the Jebusites, a powerful subset of the wicked Canaanites. He decided, instead, to press on a few more miles toward the Israelite town of Gibeah, where he expected to receive a more hospitable welcome.
As the afternoon wore on to evening, the weary travelers arrived at Gibeah, hoping to find lodging from their fellow Israelites from the tribe of Benjamin who inhabited the town. Following the custom of the day, they went to the town square and waited for someone to offer them a place for the night. But there was an eerie air about this town. Like something out of a Stephen King novel or Wes Craven horror film, the people of Gibeah wouldn’t even make eye contact with them, let alone offer them hospitality. Their prospects of securing accommodations were soon vanishing with the setting sun.
But just when they thought they might be forced to camp in the town square for the night, an old man, who was on his way home from work, approached and greeted the couple. They were delighted when they discovered that, even though the man was temporarily living in Gibeah, he was from the hill country of Ephraim. (When you are in a stranger in a strange place, it is always comforting to meet someone from your hometown.) The old man’s offer for them to stay with him was gracious, but his insistence that they not sleep in the town square cast an ominous shadow over the whole ordeal. There was some ghastliness about Gibeah.
Sodom and Gomorrah Revisited (22-30)
When they got to the old man’s house, he treated them with tremendous hospitality: he made sure that their donkeys were fed, their feet were washed, and their bellies were filled. As they reclined around the dinner table enjoying cordial conversation and a glass of wine, iniquity came knocking. A mob of mad men surrounded the house, pounded on the door, and demanded that the old man send out the Levite so that they could sexually abuse him. (For those of you who know your Bible, you will recall that this was precisely what took place at Sodom and Gomorrah. This act provoked God’s judgment in the form of sulfur and fire from heaven.)
The old man knew that both homosexuality and rape were expressly forbidden by God’s law, and he went outside and begged these monstrous men not to do this disgraceful deed. But just when we think that the old man is will make a heroic stand for moral justice, he offers the ultimate indecent proposal: “Look, here is my virgin daughter, and his concubine. I will bring them out to you now, and you can use them and do to them whatever you wish. But to this man, don’t do such a disgraceful thing.” (24)
Well, how would the Levite respond to the old man’s cowardess? Would he be a real man and stick up of his own wife and the old man’s daughter? He was close enough to the door to hear that the old man’s offer was not pacifying the savages, so he grabbed his concubine and threw her out like one tosses a scrap of meat to the dogs, and the men of Gibeah abused and gang raped her all night long.
Now we have to pause here for a moment and ask, “What in the world were these men thinking? What kind of father would sacrifice his own daughter to secure the safety of a stranger? What kind of person would offer another man’s wife to a horde like this? What kind of husband would actively allow his wife to be treated like this?
The answer is—men who have no value or respect for the female gender. These men were so consumed with saving their own skin and maintaining their honor in a male dominated culture that they was willing throw their women to the wolves. The old man showed incredible hospitality to the Levite, but none to his own daughter or the Levite’s wife. The Levite was happy to receive the old man’s hospitality, but he wasn’t willing to extend it to a woman. This is truly a case of inhospitable hospitality!
Just when we think this story can’t get any worse, we have to brace ourselves for another shockwave of wickedness. As dawn’s early light appeared, the perpetrators finally had their fill and they let the concubine go. As she stumbled back to the old man’s house, she collapsed before she could reach the door and laid there until morning.
As the poor girl lies there, can you behold the bewilderment of betrayal and abandonment in her unopened eyes? Can you feel the ache of her blood-stained and broken body? Can you taste the tears of terror and torment trickling down her face? And can you hear the faint sounds of fingernails scratching against the threshold of desperation?
When the Levite woke up in the morning and got ready to go on his way, he found his concubine’s brutalized body by the door and uttered the chilling words, “Get up, let us be going.” And when he picked up her limp frame and a placed in on his donkey, he discovered that she was already dead.
As the Levite returned to his home in the hill country of Ephraim, he had a lot of time to reflect on everything that had happened and what he should have done. When he arrived home, he performed an unspeakable act of gruesomeness. He took a knife, cut her body into twelve pieces, and sent one to each of the twelve tribes of Israel, along with a note that explained what the Benjamites’ inhospitality, brutality, and degeneracy of their own society. He and his concubine avoided a Canaanite city in favor of their own, but they wound up back in Sodom and Gomorrah. (Block 546)
I hope we are all shocked by this story. I hope that we are all outraged by such tale of unrestrained animal lust and human depravity. And I hope that you are all wondering why the Good Book contains such a bad story!
The answer to that last question is simple: This story shows us what happens when a society ignores God’s laws. This is what it looks like when a society falls into the pit moral relativism. This is what happens when the people of a society say, “I determine my own morality. What’s right for you may not be right for me and what’s right for me may not be right for you. Nobody has the right to tell me what to do or how to live my life.” A society becomes the new Sodom and Gomorrah.
When people do what is right in their own eyes, the strong take advantage of the weak and injustice prevails. Don’t we see this in our world today? Just like in the Book of Judges, as our society continues to turn its back on God, government corruption, economic inequity, social injustice, and violence (particularly sexual violence) will flourish. Are we not watching this before our very eyes right here in America?
So, what is our only hope? There is only one hope: Jesus Christ. Our society will only truly change when it repents from its sin, trusts in God’s only son Jesus Christ, and lives a life centered on God’s moral standards! Will it begin with you?