Raping, Killing And Cutting Up The Concubine

By James Donahue

The "Holy Christian Bible" is filled with a few horror stories that no parent would ever want to read to their children. In fact, they are not stories that Sunday school teachers or preachers ever speak of. Yet they exist, wedged in between the so-called stories of inspiration.

One of the most gruesome of the stories is found in the Old Testament Book of Judges, Chapter 19. It involves a Levite from Ephraim who traveled to Bethlehem to persuade his wayward concubine to return home after she was "unfaithful" and then went home to Bethlehem to live with her parents.

The family welcomed the Levite with open arms, and persuaded him to stay with them for four months. Then on their way back toward Jerusalem the Levite, concubine and his servants found themselves in the town of Gibeah as the sun was setting. One old man invited them to his home for the night. There he gave them food and drink.

In verse 22 we read: "While they were enjoying themselves, some of the wicked men of the city surrounded the house. Pounding on the door, they shouted to the old man who owned the house, ‘Bring out the man who came to your house so we can have sex with him."

The old man stepped out among the gang and asked them not to "be so vile. Since this man is my guest, don’t do this outrageous thing. Look, here is my virgin daughter, and his concubine. I will bring them out to you now, and you can use them and do to them whatever you wish. But as for this man, don’t do such an outrageous thing."

Thus the old man put the concubine out of the house where the men "raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go." She made it back to the house where she fell at the door and apparently bled to death. In the morning they found her lying at the doorway dead.

The story goes on to say that the Levite, who remains unnamed in this story, put her body on one of his donkeys and took her home. There he "took a knife and cut up his concubine, limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the tribal areas of Israel. Everyone who saw it was saying to one another, ‘Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt."

So what was the point of such a story? Why was the decision made to include such a story in the Bible when the old books were being assembled?

One Christian apologist wrote that the woman’s body parts were distributed throughout Israel "to incite revenge against the Benjaminites for the offence that was committed against him."

As for the decision to throw the woman to the wolves, so-to-speak, when they sought to rape the husband instead, the writer suggested that the practice of sacrificing concubines and daughters to men who wanted to homosexually rape the male guests was established by Lot, Abraham’s brother, as an alternative in Genesis 19:2-8.

Somehow the moral question here remains unanswered. Perhaps such stories help explain the generally nutty thinking among contemporary fundamental Christian believers.