Judges 19 Study Notes

19:16-21 Finally, an old man came in from his work. Like the Levite, he was from the hill country of Ephraim and was merely residing in Gibeah, which perhaps explains his greater hospitality. Custom demanded hospitality should be shown to every stranger, but the Levite would not have been a burdensome guest. He could provide food for his own party and his animals. The Levite’s statement that he was going to the house of the Lord seems odd in this context since the temple had not yet been built. Most likely, a scribe misunderstood the final letter in the Hebrew word “my house” as an abbreviation for the name of the Lord. The old man’s insistence that they should come to his home and not spend the night in the square suggests that he knew things were not as they ought to be in Gibeah. The square, inside the town walls, should have been a safe location.

19:22-24 The echoes of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Gn 19 were already present in the preceding verses, in which strangers arrived in the town square in the evening and found lodging with one of the town’s inhabitants. These echoes now become a virtual reenactment. The scene of peaceful hospitality was shattered by the arrival of wicked men (lit “men of Belial,” or “worthless men”; cp. 9:4). The old man appealed to them as his brothers, but he characterized their request for sex with his male guest as an offense against hospitality and morality. It would be an outrage, a word that characterizes an act that cries out for retributive justice (20:6; Gn 34:7; Dt 22:21). Yet the alternative that the old man proposed is equally abhorrent.

19:25-28 The similarities with the narrative of Sodom and Gomorrah heighten the differences. The perpetrators were not pagans but Israelites. There were no angels to step in and rescue the innocent parties. There was no judgment from heaven at daybreak as with Sodom and Gomorrah. In the morning, the Levite got up from his rest and opened the doors of the house to leave on his journey, as if nothing had happened the previous night.

19:29-30 There is no mention of the concubine’s death in the story, which raises the question of whether she was dead when the Levite found her, or even at the point when he cut her into twelve pieces. Her unresponsiveness to his commands suggests she was dead. At the very least, the Levite’s action goes against the normal respect shown to a dead body in Israel, carving it up as if it were the carcass of an animal and sending the pieces to the twelve tribes of Israel as a call to arms. The similar passage in 1Sm 11:7, where Saul cut up a pair of oxen into twelve parts and distributed them among the tribes, shows that this act included an implied curse. Those who failed to respond to the muster could expect to meet a similar fate. Everyone who saw the grisly message agreed that such an outrage demanded a response.