The Bible’s book of Judges contains two utterly remarkable sections. One is the story of Samson, which is well-known, but the other consists of the last five chapters and is likely the most disheartening chronicle in the Bible. I reread Robert Alter’s remarkable translation and notes this month, and found them greatly illuminating.
Chapters 17 and 18 concern a man named Micah who steals his mother’s silver. She curses the thief, not knowing that it’s her own son. He confesses and gives back the silver. She tries to take back the curse and tells Micah to make a household god out of some of the silver. To minister to this god, Micah hires a young Levite from Bethlehem as his priest, and the man is like a son to him. Micah says, “Now I know that the Lord will deal well with me, for the Levite has become my priest.” Meanwhile, the Danites, a tribe of Jews, are looking for a new place to live, and five of their warriors spend the night at Micah’s. They recognize the Levite from somewhere and he tells them that their mission will be successful. The Danites find a city, Laish, which they feel they can conquer. So they go back to their tribe and bring 600 warriors. On their way to Laish, they stop at Micah’s house again and steal his silver god and convince the Levite priest to come with them. Micah runs after them with some of his friends, but the warriors tell him to be quiet and go home or else they’ll be killed. So Micah goes home, the warriors conquer Laish (“a quiet and secure people”), kill them all, and burn down the town. Finally they set up Micah’s statue in their new town.
Nobody comes off well in this tale. Micah is a thief and idolator, his mother is two-faced, his priest is a vagabond and a traitor, the Danites are thieves and killers. But this tale is only a prelude to the next.
Chapters 19 through 21 concern another Levite, also unnamed. His wife “plays the whore” with him and goes to her father’s house for four months. He comes to his father-in-law’s house and is entreated to stay for a while before he goes back home. After a few nights he decides to journey home with his wife, servant, and donkeys. On their way the sun sets and the servant suggests that they spend the night in Gibeah, a town of Benjaminites. So they go to the town square, but nobody wants to take them in. Finally an old man, not a Benjaminite, offers them his house and food and bed. They go in and have a good time, but soon the townsmen are pounding on the door, demanding the Levite, whom they intend to sodomize. The host tells the men not to do such a “scurrilous thing” and offers them his own virgin daughter and the man’s wife instead. “Rape them and do to them whatever you want. But to this man do not do this scurrilous act.” The townsmen refuse the host’s offer. So the Levite takes his own wife and hands her to the men so that they’ll leave him alone. They gang-rape her all night and leave her at the door. In the morning the man opens the door, intending to go, not even thinking about his wife. But he sees her on the doorstep and says, “Get up, and let us go.” She doesn’t answer. So he takes her on his donkey and goes back home. We do not learn until much later that she is dead. When he gets home, he cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them through all the territory of Judah.
The Israelites hold a great assembly to discuss what to do about this, and the Levite appears and tells his story, leaving out the details of his own culpability: he says that the Gibeah townsmen wanted to kill him and raped his wife, not that they wanted to rape him and he gave them his wife instead. So the Israelites muster a huge army and attack the Benjaminites, who fight back successfully, killing 40,000 men in two days. On the third day of battle, the tides turn and the Israelites are successful, killing 25,000 Benjaminites. Only 600 Benjaminites remain.
The Israelites again hold an assembly and are terribly concerned that one of the twelve tribes has been all but wiped out and that they had made a vow before the battles that none of them would give their daughters to a Benjaminite. So they go to Gibeah and kill everyone there except the virgin girls, whom they give to the remaining Benjaminites. But there aren’t enough of those. So they tell the Benjaminites to go to Shiloh, where there’s a festival to the Lord, and tell them to snatch up the girls when they come out to dance. This is what the Benjaminites do, and there the book ends.
This tale of mass rape and slaughter is the most repulsive in the entire bible. As in the preceding tale, nobody comes off well. The women are voiceless victims; the men are rapists and murderers.
These tales set us up for the next book, Samuel, in which the Israelites say they need a king. “In those days,” the book of Judges concludes, “there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes.” Without a strong authority, these tales suggest, idolatry, thievery, rape, revenge, and slaughter will become endemic.
But there are other implications too. As Nick Tosches once said, “humanity’s most distinguishing trait [is] inhumanity.” Men are not noble beings, kind at heart and forgiving. The view here is Hobbesian avant la lettre. Hobbes wrote that the natural state of mankind was bellum omnium contra omnes, war of all against all: “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
In October, a band of Hamas warriors/terrorists/ideologues/youth raped and slaughtered hundreds of Israeli civilians. In retaliation, Netanyahu ordered the IDF to eliminate Hamas, and in doing so they slaughtered thousands of women and children in Gaza. All this brought to my mind the end of the book of Judges. Too many people in the US want to take sides: either Israel or the Palestinians are in the right. But the Bible does not offer us this option. God absents himself from the scene here and the judges are in short supply.