When he reached home, he took a knife and cut up his concubine, limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel. (Judges 19:29)
The story is becoming truly and unremittingly awful. The 30 verses of Judges 19 are marked by rape, murder, callous indifference and post-mortem mutilation. God is absent and leadership non-existent (v.1). Israel has descended into depraved anarchy where the rule of law, respect for the sanctity of life and the honoring of God in any way is a distant memory. Strikingly, the name of God is not called on or invoked in any way in this chapter.
In the first ten verses of the chapter the narrator painstakingly details the elaborate hospitality offered to the travelling Levite priest by his foreign Father-in-law. It all seems over the top to our modern eyes, but reflect the middle-eastern custom to honor guests with almost overwhelming hospitality. This hospitality stands in stark contrast with the hostility rather than hospitality that the Levite receives at Gibeah from his fellow Israelites. There, he and his party are left out in the town square to fend for themselves, even though they would be no financial burden to any prospective host. The extent of the offence of this lack of hospitality is difficult for us to comprehend, but with it, what happens next does demonstrate the depths of Israel's depravity.
The men of Gibeah demand the Levite me made available to them for sex. He is an object to be dominated and humiliated. Instead, his concubine is offered up. Again it is a woman who suffers the most. She is gang-raped and left for dead. But even in her death she is used - now by her husband as he mutilates her body and sends pieces of her to the twelve tribes of Israel as a macabre call to arms against the people of Gibeah. Awful - truly awful.
What could pssibly be a word from God for us in this passage? Perhaps the only thing that this passage offers us is a terrible reminder that the wages of sin is death. Continuous and habitual sin will lead a person and community into an ever accelerating descent into God-forgetting anarchy. Israel without God is hope-less. And so are we.
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