“On arrival at his house, he got a knife, took hold of his concubine’s body, cut her up into twelve pieces, and sent them to all the regions of Israel. Everyone who saw it said, ‘From the day the people of Israel came up from Egypt until now, never has such a thing happened or been seen. What are we going to do about it? Talk it over and decide.'”-Judges 19:29-30
What we have next in our ongoing saga of the Levite and his now dead concubine is something akin to what would appear in some horror slasher flick instead of our Holy Bibles.
Brace yourself because this gets graphic.
The Levite took a blade to his concubine’s corpse and chopped her up into 12 pieces.
Then a messenger delivered each piece of the body to each Israelite tribe.
Where to even begin here?
Let’s just start with the obvious.
It’s obvious the Levite had zero respect for his concubine while she was alive and even less now that she was dead.
The way he cut up her body was something forbidden by Torah.
She should have been given a proper burial.
But instead, the Levite used and abused the body to vent his anger.
What’s interesting is the Hebrew verb used here to describe her body being “chopped up”.
That word is NATHACH or נָתַח.
This is actually the very same word used to describe the Tabernacle ritual of dividing up an animal into pieces to prepare it for sacrifice at the Altar of Burnt Offering.
The fact it’s used here in some strange way indicates the Levite felt he was justified in what he did…
He was operating under some delusional sense of self-righteousness…
Because in his own mind, he made what he did into some form of pious religious ritual.
Compare this story with the previous one about the other Levite who Micah hired to be his false priest.
That young Levite didn’t come from the proper lineage and had no reservations about worshipping TERAPHIM (god idols).
Then later he left Micah for more money to serve as a priest for the tribe of Dan by overseeing their cultic worship system in Laish.
Boy, when you combine that story with this one, Israel’s religious leaders certainly aren’t being cast in a good light now, are they?
Another point we shouldn’t overlook is the Levites were the butchers of their era.
Not only were they experts in knowing how to dissect an animal’s body to prepare it for sacrifice but they knew how to prepare the animal’s body parts for food.
That’s exactly how today’s Kosher traditions came to be.
In fact, more often than not, it is Levites who run Kosher butcher shops in our day and age.
So getting back to our horrific story here, it would have been an easy task for this Levite to butcher up his concubine’s body.
All he had to do was apply the sacrificial training he had received at the Tabernacle to the woman’s dead body.
A terrible event like this simply can’t be overlooked.
Verse 30 says “From the day the people of Israel came up from Egypt until now, never has such a thing happened or been seen“.
The people were in a state of outrage…
For never before had they witnessed such a horrible thing…
They had to come to terms with the fact there was a gang of homosexual rapists on the prowl in Benjamin territory.
But worse than that, why didn’t the tribe of Benjamin bring those men to justice?
Where were the authorities?
Israel had reached a level of depraved lawlessness that could no longer be tolerated.
Something had to be done.
But what?
That’s the topic we’ll deal with in the closing chapters of the Book of Judges.
See you all next time.
NEXT TIME WE BEGIN JUDGES CHAPTER 20
Leave a Reply