Hospitality Collapses Into Sexual Violence and National Outrage

A second Levite, a second link between mount Ephraim and Bethlehem: chapters 17 and 19 open on the same two places, travelled in opposite directions. A concubine, pilegesh, was a wife of secondary rank, often without a dowry, yet the chapter will call him her husband and her father his father in law.

The Hebrew verb is zanah, to act as a harlot, but the Greek and some Latin witnesses read that she was angry with him. Going home to her father is an odd move for an adulteress, who would face death, which is why many think anger is the older reading. Four months is long enough for the breach to look final.

“Speak friendly” is literally “speak to her heart”, the phrase Shechem uses of Dinah (Genesis 34:3) and Boaz of Ruth (Ruth 2:13): tender, persuasive speech. The father “rejoiced” to see him, perhaps because a daughter returned from her husband brought shame on the house.

Three days is the customary span of hospitality, and a guest who stayed it had been honoured in full. From here on the father is named five times by his relationships, father in law and the damsel’s father, as if his family tie to the Levite is the thing being tested.

“Comfort thine heart” is literally “sustain your heart”, the phrase Abraham uses in Genesis 18:5 when he offers the three visitors “a morsel of bread”. The morsel is a figure of speech; it turns into a meal and a day.

“Be content” is ho’el, the same verb as the Levite being “content” with Micah in 17:11. “Let thine heart be merry” is the drinking phrase; the same words will return in verse 22 at the old man’s table, when the mob arrives.

“Urged” is the verb used of Lot pressing the angels to stay in Sodom (Genesis 19:3). The echo is quiet here and loud by verse 22.

“Until afternoon” is literally “until the day declined”. Each morning the Levite rises early and each morning he is kept, and the fifth day is lost like the fourth.

The father uses two phrases for the waning light, the day “draweth toward evening” and “groweth to an end”, the second literally “the camping time of the day”, the hour to pitch a tent. His reasoning is sound. It is the Levite who will not listen this time.

Jebus is the old name of Jerusalem, still held by the Jebusites (Judges 1:21), about six miles north of Bethlehem. Setting out that late, the party can reach no Israelite town before dark except Gibeah or Ramah, a few miles further on.

“Far spent” is literally “had gone down greatly”. The servant proposes the obvious and sensible thing. He is the only person in the chapter whose advice would have kept everyone safe.

The Levite rejects Jebus because it is a “city of a stranger”, nokri, a foreigner. His confidence in Israelite towns over pagan ones is the assumption the next thirteen verses destroy.

Gibeah and Ramah stand close together on the ridge road north of Jerusalem, about three and five miles north of Jebus. Ramah will be Samuel’s home (1 Samuel 1:19), and Gibeah Saul’s (1 Samuel 10:26).

“Which belongeth to Benjamin” sets up the civil war of chapters 20 and 21. The sun sets on them here as it set on Jacob at Bethel (Genesis 28:11), but there will be no ladder at Gibeah.

“A street” is the rechov, the open square just inside the gate, where travellers waited to be offered lodging. Lot’s visitors offered to spend the night in the same kind of square (Genesis 19:2). Hospitality to strangers was an obligation, and no one in Gibeah honours it.

The old man is himself a sojourner from mount Ephraim, like the Levite. The added clause, “but the men of the place were Benjamites”, marks the distinction pointedly: the one outsider is kind and the natives are not.

“Lifted up his eyes” is the Hebrew idiom for noticing, used of Abraham seeing the three men at Mamre (Genesis 18:2). His two questions, whither and whence, are the questions of a host sizing up a guest.

“The house of the LORD” in the Hebrew may be a scribal expansion; the Greek reads “to my house”. If the Hebrew stands, the Levite is travelling to Shiloh, which makes the refusal of shelter to a man going to the sanctuary all the sharper.

He lists what he carries so as to cost no host a thing: straw and fodder for the donkeys, bread and wine for the people. He asks only for a roof. “Thy handmaid” and “thy servants” are courteous speech, the traveller placing his party at the old man’s service.

“Peace be with thee” is shalom lekha, a guarantee of safety as much as a greeting. “Lodge not in the street” shows the old man knows what happens in Gibeah’s square after dark.

Fodder, footwashing, food and drink: every act of hospitality is recorded, in the order Abraham followed in Genesis 18:4–5. The full list makes the violation that follows all the worse.

“Sons of Belial” means worthless or lawless men; the word combines “without” and “profit”. The demand repeats the men of Sodom in Genesis 19:5 almost word for word, “bring them out… that we may know them”. An Israelite town now speaks as Sodom spoke.

“Folly” is nevalah, the word for outrageous sexual wrong, used of the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34:7) and of Amnon’s crime (2 Samuel 13:12). The host calls them “my brethren” and appeals to the sanctity of a guest under his roof.

The offer copies Lot’s in Genesis 19:8, and again two women are offered. “Humble” is anah, to violate. The host treats the protection of a male guest as the law of hospitality and the women under his roof as exchangeable. The Book of Judges records it without approval.

At Sodom the angels struck the mob blind and pulled Lot inside. Here no one intervenes. “The man” who takes her out is ambiguous in the Hebrew, but the context points to the Levite. The verse measures the night in hours: all the night, until the morning, until dawn.

She comes back to the house where “her lord” is, adon, master, the only word the verse gives for him. She falls at the door and lies there until full daylight. The Book of Judges counts the time the Levite spent asleep behind that door.

He opens the door “to go his way”, intending to leave, not to look for her. The detail of her hands on the threshold is the image the chapter chooses to hold: reaching for the house that had given her up.

“Up, and let us be going” is two words in Hebrew, curt as a command to an animal. “None answered” leaves open whether she was already dead; the Greek adds “for she was dead”, the Hebrew does not say.

“Knife” has the article, ha-ma’akheleth, the knife, the same word used of Abraham’s knife over Isaac (Genesis 22:10). Twelve pieces for twelve tribes, a grim summons. Saul will later cut up oxen and send them out the same way (1 Samuel 11:7).

The comparison runs back to the Exodus, the founding of the nation: nothing like it since Israel came out of Egypt. The three commands, consider, take advice, speak, are what the Book of Judges has been showing Israel failing to do for chapters.