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’. Continue Reading »

Samson’s rage against the Philistines comes across as righteous, though there is hardly a white hat to be found in this entire story. Samson himself hardly wears one. Nor does anyone who figures in the rent-a-priest tale that follows hold up well under the lens of Deuteronomistic ideals.

The book of Judges is punctuated by a recurring assessment that ‘In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes’. On the one hand, this could be read as a technical description of decentralized self-rule. But it seems likely that there is more here than the evolution of Israelite political structures in the time before monarchy took hold. The phrase ‘what was right in their own eyes’ casts a dark light on the moral and spiritual chaos in which Israel found itself enveloped. Continue Reading »

An odd incongruity flavors the pages of the Book of Judges. Amid the stories of Israel’s vicious cycle of declension and the heroic feats of warrior ‘judges’, there is little exemplary behavior that aligns itself with the ethical counsel of the Hebrew Bible. Far more chaos appears than order, more idiosyncratic episodes than steady walking in right ways.

The book makes for great reading. Its heroic figures claimed their place in my memory in boyhood and remain there still. Continue Reading »