Canter Bridge

it would be difficult to find in the Hebrew Bible a story of more brazen awfulness than that of the Levite traveler and his concubine on their ill-fated layover in Gibeah of Benjamin. The conduct of the ‘men of the city’ is miscreant. Their overnight host, so generous in his rescuing invitation that they pass the night in his home, responds with inexplicable calculation to the pressure that his townsmen bring to bear. Finally, the Levite himself responds to the outrage with one of his own. He cuts up the body of his concubine and sends the pieces to the tribes of the Israelite confederacy, demanding a reaction to the horror that has gone down in Benjamin:

‘Get up,’ he said to her, ‘we are going.’ But there was no answer. Then he put her on the donkey; and the man set out for his home. When he had entered his house, he took a knife, and grasping his concubine he cut her into twelve pieces, limb by limb, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel. Then he commanded the men whom he sent, saying, ‘Thus shall you say to all the Israelites, “Has such a thing ever happened since the day that the Israelites came up from the land of Egypt until this day? Consider it, take counsel, and speak out.”‘

The wording of his complaint seems intended to provoke reflection on the Israelite project as well as to demand immediate retribution. His time frame, within which he claims for his experience a shattering uniqueness, is bookended on the early side by reference to ‘the day that the Israelites came up from the land of Egypt’.

This is more than simple chronology. The project has gone badly wrong.

What began with liberation and was sealed in covenant as the creation of a new nation that would reside, according to the prescient observation of Brevard Childs, as much within ethical boundaries as within geographical lines, has lurched into a calamitous ditch. If things like this can go down in Israel—and especially if they can remain unpunished there—then the whole liberation project is worthless and perhaps now to be compared rather than contrasted with slavery in Egypt. Is this chaos, the text may inquire, preferable to slavery’s dark stability?

Israel is rightly enraged and wreaks vengeance upon Benjamin. Yet this is not celebrated—how could it be—as the putting right of all things. It is a regrettable, remorseful duty.

Israel with no king is trapped in a series of overlapping crises of its own making. Everyone does—one can hardly overstate the ominous tone of the assessment—what is right in his own eyes.