Judges 17-21 - The dregs

The readings - days 83 and 84 - Judges 17-21

I had a professor once named Ephraim. He remains the only man I've ever met (or really even heard of) by that name.

Not that many of the names Jacob gave to his sons has really caught on through the centuries, other than Joshua, Benjamin (I'm pretty sure that most Dans are actual Daniels, so that doesn't count) and the occasional Levi. You don't meet a lot of Manessehs or Naphtalis these days, and as much as I'd love to, I'm pretty sure I'll never meet anyone named Zebulun.



That said, I can't help but think that maybe there's a certain something that has made Ephraim an especially rare choice for naming babies, at least in the days when people had a slightly higher level of familiarity with those portions of scripture that I don't feel too out of line calling the dregs.

We're there now, by the way.

Seems that every horrible thing that happens in Israel in the time of Judges happens in or around the land of the tribe of Ephraim.

Here in these five chapters we have two stories, and both of them involve men from the hill country in Ephraim. It's like the South Central of ancient Israel. It is to Israel's moral character what Hamilton is to Canada's average municipal harbour water quality.

Anyway, the first of these two stories involves a guy named Micah who is the central figure of a weird little anecdote about silver and idols, etc. It's a sort of bizarre snapshot of how far from the original plan the people of Israel had come, and it features what will go on to become an ominous and sombre refrain: "In those days there was no king in Israel ; every man did what was right in his own eyes."

Micah finds some silver that his mom had lost, and she's so happy she tells him that he can just go and make an idol out of it. He does so, and then he convinces a wandering Levite to be a part of his little house-cult and all things are happy. Then a bunch of dudes from Dan come along, find out that Micah's got idols, etc, in his house (remember how the entire country nearly went to war with Reuben for building a single altar?) and all they do is coerce Micah's Levite to join them instead. The Levite does, and then he takes the idols and they move off. Things are different than they once were, obviously.

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How much different is the focus of the last few chapters of this chunk. I once heard a preacher call Judges 19 "the sewer of scripture." I thought, at the time, that that was a bit irreverent, and I still think that he was more appalled by the actual fact that he had to read details of the grisly crime involved than the broader stuff going on, but that's neither here nor there.

This chapter, in a word, sucks. Everything about it is stomach-turning and gut-wrenching. It's a hard one to read, and it's a hard one to find anything redeeming about it at all.

It's also, I think, a stellar example of the fact that no part of the Bible's books was set apart from any of the other by chapter/verse designations. Looked at as a single, cohesive chapter, it seems like it ought to just be blotted out and removed entirely. It's offensive in every conceivable way, and in a very weird and uncomfortable way, it represents a lot of what I really like about The Bible.

If you take the version of the Bible that some would present, you would get the impression that it's a sterile, puritan, idealistic representation of a world that doesn't exist, populated by flawless saints and uninterrupted piety.

If you read it, however, you've got to admit that whatever other accusations you want to throw at it, whitewashing the brutal reality of life cannot be one of them.

Basically, the gist of the story is that a Levite had himself a concubine (which, if you're sensitive to the cultural/historical realities in which this was written, is harmless - sort of) who ran away, back to her father's house. So he goes after her. He brings a servant, and another donkey for her to ride back on. He's not, apparently a vengeance-driven man who has particularly horrible plans for this young lady - he just wants her back at his place. So he gets there, the father wines and dines him for days on end, and finally he decides that he'd better be going, and packs up his things, and his concubine, and hits the road.

They need to stop for the night soon, but they're near Jerusalem and they don't like it, so they decide to keep going until they get to some place in one of the tribes' territories - Benjamin, to be precise. Nobody takes them in, so they're in the city square (this is starting to sound vaguely familiar) until someone insists that they stay with him so that they don't have to spend the night there (getting more familiar as it goes along). The donkeys are fed, and everybody's sheltered and happy when "the men of the city" (rings bells) pound on the door demanding that this strange foreign man be brought out so that they can gang-rape him (wait...). The host offers his own daughter and the Levite's concubine to the crowd in exchange for them leaving his guest alone, and they refuse. Then the Levite throws his concubine out to the crowd, who rape her until she can only crawl back to the front door and die there in the morning. The morning rolls around, and the Levite comes out the door and says "get up - let's go." That's all. "Get up - let's go."

He finds out she's dead, cuts her into 12 pieces, ships the parts to all tribes of Israel and goes home.

So Israel has become Sodom and Gomorrah, or that's about the size of it, if that's as far as you read. If, however, you treat the book like a cohesive unit as a whole, rather than a bunch of standalone chapters, you have to look at the response from everyone else in the country, which (and I don't mean to spoil it for you) is satisfyingly brutal. Essentially, the other 11 tribes band together, once they find out what exactly happened, and go after the men of the city. First they try to suss out exactly who were the "worthless fellows" who did this thing, but the rest of the city refuses to give them up. Then the tribe of Benjamin comes along and tries to defend the city. Ultimately, the whole tribe is brought to the brink of utter destruction as a result. The remaining Benjaminites number merely in the hundreds, and they're cut off utterly from the rest of Israel by a prohibition of intermarrying - which basically seals the deal, if you consider that a ban on intermarriage was one of the key ways that Israel as a whole set up hard boundaries between them and their neighbours.

Sodom and Benjamin.

I've tried three times to write something about the fact that this little nothing town in Benjamin has been set up to be an exact replica of the city that has been, throughout history, synonymous with degradation and evil, but come up blank each time.

On the one hand, we've got God's relationship with Israel progressing, in a way. In Abrahamic times, Sodom was simply blotted out. God took matters into His own hands, and that was that. Here, we have Him guiding Israel and consoling them as they go through this clearly painful time in their history. A parent gets a baby dressed, but simply reminds a toddler of the next thing he/she has to put on. Progression.

On the other, we have the chosen people of God sinking to depths that defy all explanation, and appear to defy all redemption. We may still have the famous and prolonged exiles and occupations to come, but Israel seems to have already hit its lowest point.