In the last article, we examined the first of two episodes that are contained in an appendix to the Book of Judges: Micah’s Idolatry and the Migration of the Danites (Judges 17-18). In this article, we will examine the other episode: The Levite of Ephraim and His Concubine (Judges 19-21). This episode involves the gang rape of a Levite’s concubine, leading to war between the Benjaminites and the other Tribes of Israel. At the conclusion of hostilities, the devastated Benjamites are permitted to repopulate their tribe by abducting hundreds of virgins from Jabesh in Gilead and from Shiloh in Ephraim. The episode comprises three sections: The Outrage at Gibeah : The Benjaminite War : The Rape of the Israelite Women.
The Outrage at Gibeah
A Levite from Mount Ephraim has a concubine, who quarrels with him and—according to the Hebrew Masoretic text but not the Greek Septuagint—is unfaithful to him. She leaves him and returns to her father’s house in Bethlehem, in the territory of the Judahites. The Levite travels to Bethlehem to retrieve her, and for five days her father succeeds in delaying their departure. Late on the fifth day, the Levite and his concubine finally set out for Ephraim. As they approach Jebus (Jerusalem), their servant suggests they stop for the night, but the Levite refuses to stay in a Jebusite city, so they continue on to Gibeah in Benjamin.
They arrive in Gibeah as night falls. They wait in the public square, but no one offers the customary hospitality. Eventually, an old man coming in from the fields asks them what they are doing there. He, too is from the mountains of Ephraim but has been living among the Benjaminites for some time. He invites them to spend the night in his house. He brings them home and attends to their needs.
Then certain men of the city—“sons of Belial”— surround the house and beat on the door. They tell the old man to bring out the Levite so that they may “know” him (ie sodomize him). The old man refuses, but offers instead his own virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine. When the sons of Belial refuse this offer, the Levite himself gives her his concubine. Throughout the night, they abuse her. In the morning, the Levite finds her lying unresponsive—presumably dead, though only the Septuagint states this explicitly—on the doorstep. He places her body on a donkey and returns home to Ephraim.
When he arrives home, he carves up his concubine’s corpse into twelve pieces and sends them to the Twelve Tribes of Israel to show them how the Tribe of Benjamin treated an Israelite woman.
The Benjaminite War
Outraged, the other tribes rally a force of 400,000 troops at Mizpah in Benjamin and demand justice for the Levite and his concubine. They swear an oath to the effect that none of their daughters shall be permitted to become Benjaminite wives. Then they order the Benjaminites to hand over the men who committed the crime so that they may be executed, but the Benjaminites refuse and instead go to war. They raise an army of 26,000 men to defend Gibeah. Among these are 700 left-handed troops who can sling stones at a hairsbreadth without missing.
On the first day of battle the confederates are heavily defeated outside Gibeah, losing 22,000 men. On the second day the Benjaminites are again successful, cutting down 18,000 enemy swordsmen.
The discomfited Israelites go up to the House of God (ie Bethel in Ephraim, where the Ark of the Covenant is located). They fast until evening and offer burnt offerings to the Lord. And the Lord promises them victory over the Benjaminites.
On the third day the confederates set men in ambush all around Gibeah. These lure the Benjaminites away from Gibeah, while the main force of Israelites attack the city. When the Benjaminites see the city in flames and realize that the flight of their enemies was a ruse, they flee toward the wilderness. Benjamin is devastated. Their cities are burnt and their cattle slaughtered. Only 600 men survive the onslaught. The survivors entrench themselves at the rock of Rimmon in the wilderness, where they hold out for four months.
The Rape of the Israelite Women
After the cessation of hostilities, the Israelites face a quandary. On the one hand, they have all taken an oath not to permit any of their women to become Benjaminite wives. On the other hand, they do not want the Tribe of Benjamin to become extinct. A solution presents itself when they discover that the city of Jabesh Gilead in Transjordan did not send any representatives to Mizpah, where the oath was taken. The elders, therefore, decree that Jabesh Gilead should be attacked and its virgin women abducted and given to the Benjaminites as wives. This is done, but only 400 virgins are found.
Another solution is found to satisfy the remaining 200 Benjaminites. At Shiloh, in Ephraim, there is to be held shortly a feast of the Lord. As the men of Shiloh did not take part in the Benjaminite War, their women are not covered by the oath. The Benjamites are instructed to go to Shiloh and lie in ambush in the vineyards. When the women of Shiloh assemble to dance at the feast, the Benjamites can abduct them and take them to wife.
Interpretation
What are we to make of this extraordinary tale?
Is it significant that Mount Ephraim and Bethlehem are featured in both this episode and the preceding one (Micah’s Idolatry and the Migration of the Danites)? It has been pointed out that Samuel, who instituted the monarchy by anointing the first King of Israel, was from Mount Ephraim, while Israel’s king par excellence David was from Bethlehem. The first king, Saul, was a Benjaminite, and probably from Gibeah. Mizpah and Jabesh Gilead also figured in his reign (Singer 11:75):
Scholarship traditionally sees the story of the Levite’s Concubine in Judges 19-21 and the preceding story of Micah’s Shrine (chapters 17-18) as belonging to a supplement appended to the book of Judges. The primary function of this supplement was to vividly relate the depravity to which Israel had sunk by the end of the period of the Judges, a depravity whose very existence served as the justification for the establishment of kingship in Israel. The absence of this institution is repeatedly brought to our awareness in the refrain: “In those days there was no king in Israel” (17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25) (Szpek 1)
This raises the possibility that the tale is to be taken metaphorically and not historically:
Rather chapters 19-21 represent the story of a post-exilic author whose intent was to make a political statement that Israel, though clearly dealing with events not ordinary, works together as a unity. Such a vision of a unified political organization could only be conceived of by a post-exilic author ... Not only the ‘problematizing’ nature of language in Judges 19 (and 20-21), but the near silence of biblical referents to this tale (one reference to the ‘crime of Gibeah’ in Hosea 10:9), the scarcity of classical Rabbinic comments, as well as the brevity of the Church Fathers until the Medieval Period, specifically relating to the abuse and murder of the Levite’s concubine, together create an aura of suspicion and uneasiness that begs for a re-interpretation of this text as a metaphor of dire, not gentle, admonition. (Szpek 1 ... 2)
The presence of several parallels with earlier Biblical texts supports the hypothesis that this story was concocted by a later scholar out of Scriptural tropes:
These allusions of Israel’s past and near future history, pieced together like the tesserae tiles of a mosaic, present an image of what Israel’s destiny might become, what women’s position might become, how brethren might become enemies and how this might all be (wrongly) accomplished in the name of the Lord. (Szpek 2)
Szpek examines several of these parallels in a section of her paper entitled A Mosaic of Biblical Allusions, which the reader is invited to consult for further details. The story of the concubine’s rape is undoubtedly the most obvious piece of borrowing:
The scene that follows not only disrupts their enjoyment, but also blatantly forces the reader to recall the story of Lot and the Sodomites in Genesis 19. This allusion to the story of Lot and the Sodomites perhaps is the most noted and obvious of all allusions in the story of the Levite’s concubine ... In Genesis 19:8 Lot offers his two virgin daughters; in Judges 19:24 the host likewise offers two women, his virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine. (Szpek 5)
If the story is not true, it can tell us little about the true chronology of the Period of the Judges—which is, after all, why we are examining this story in the first place. But in her analysis, Heidi Szpek includes a chronological element:
Where this analysis parts with Amit’s analysis is in locating the chronological referent to our story. Amit, as earlier noted, sees Judges 19-21 as a post-exilic composition made to reflect the period of the Judges itself, based on the political unity demonstrated in tribal response to the demise of the Levite—a type of unified political organization that could only be described as such after the fact. The present analysis of language and narrative style in Judges 19 alone suggests the opposite, favoring the traditional understanding of Judges 19-21 as representative of the utter deprivation at the end of the period of the Judges. (Szpek 7)
Some scholars, however, believe that there is at least a kernel of truth in the tale:
The second appendix, xix.-xxi., in its main text, which can now hardly be determined with certainty, might similarly be traced back to an ancient story, as is indicated by expressions similar to those found in the first appendix; e.g., the Levite sojourning as a stranger in the country (xix. 1). The formula common to both appendixes, “in those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (xvii. 6, xxi. 25; comp. xviii. 1, xix. 1), perhaps also indicates that the original text was composed before the Exile; although it is possible that in the second appendix it is a later addition, or was introduced by the author in imitation of the first appendix. For the story as a whole dates from a very late period, since there is evidence that it is based on the Priestly Code. This is especially evident in the fact that the community of Israel is represented as a compact body pronouncing punishment upon Benjamin as with one voice, while elsewhere in Judges every tribe attends to its own affairs. The fact that all the personages named, with the exception of Aaron’s grandson Phinehas in xx. 28, are anonymous indicates that this is a piece of fiction and not a historical narrative. The story may have some historical foundation; for Hosea (x. 9), speaking of course quite independently of this story, also mentions the sin of Israel since the days of Gibeah. Nor is it impossible that the story, as Nöldeke was the first to assume, describes the ruin of Benjamin by the war between David and Saul’s son and the insurrections under David. (Singer 7:380)
The Rape of the Women of Shiloh
Two solutions are presented to the Israelites’ quandary. It is possible that originally there was only one and the second was added at a later date. The Rape of the Women of Shiloh is remarkably similar to the well-known tale from Roman history, the Rape of the Sabine Women, which is recounted in Book 1, Chapter 9 of Livy’s History of Rome and in Chapters 9, 14 and 15 of Plutarch’s Life of Romulus. It has even been suggested that the Roman myth was the source for Judges 21:15-23, which may have been added to the Deuteronomistic History in the late Persian or Hellenistic period (Gnuse 228).
Dan and Benjamin
Judges 19-21 concern the Tribe of Benjamin, while Judges 17-18 concern the Tribe of Dan. But the Benjaminites may also have a role to play in the story of Micah’s Idolatry and the Migration of the Danites. In their bestselling book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln turned up some interesting links while researching the history of the Merovingian Dynasty of Medieval France:
The third Biblical passage cited by the Dossiers secrets involves a fairly complex sequence of events. A Levite, travelling through Benjamite territory, is assaulted, and his concubine ravished, by worshippers of Belial—a variant of the Sumerian Mother Goddess, known as Ishtar by the Babylonians and Astarte by the Phoenicians. Calling representatives of the twelve tribes to witness, the Levite demands vengeance for the atrocity; and at a council, the Benjamites are instructed to deliver the malefactors to justice. One might expect the Benjamites to comply readily. For some reason, however, they do not, and undertake, by force of arms, to protect the ‛sons of Belial’. The result is a bitter and bloody war between the Benjamites and the remaining eleven tribes. In the course of hostilities a curse is pronounced by the latter on any man who gives his daughter to a Benjamite. When the war is over, however, and the Benjamites virtually exterminated, the victorious Israelites repent of their malediction—which, however, cannot be retracted ...
Following their war against the other eleven tribes of Israel, Benjamites fleeing into exile would, of necessity, have had to flee westwards, towards the Phoenician coast. The Phoenicians possessed ships capable of transporting large numbers of refugees. And they would have been obvious allies for fugitive Benjamites—for they, too, worshipped the Mother Goddess in the form of Astarte, Queen of Heaven.
If there was actually an exodus of Benjamites from Palestine, one might hope to find some vestigial record of it. In Greek myth one does. There is the legend of King Belus’s son, one Danaus, who arrives in Greece, with his daughters, by ship. His daughters are said to have introduced the cult of the Mother Goddess, which became the established cult of the Arcadians. According to Robert Graves, the Danaus myth records the arrival in the Peloponnesus of ‛colonists from Palestine’. Graves states that King Belus is in fact Baal, or Bel—or perhaps Belial from the Old Testament. It is also worthy of note that one of the clans of the Tribe of Benjamin was the clan of Bela. (Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln 244 ... 248)
Danaus and his fifty daughters, the Danaides, are the ancestors of Homer’s Danaans. But these names suggest that it was from the Tribe of Dan that these colonists came. On the other hand, the name of Danaus’s father, Belus, suggests a link with the “sons of Belial” in Benjamin.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail can hardly be regarded as a reliable source of information, but there is nothing unorthodox about the idea that colonists from Canaan settled in ancient Greece, bringing with them important cultural gifts. The Greek alphabet is clearly of Canaanite origin, and there are many other intriguing links that connect the two regions. The poet and mythologist Robert Graves documents some of these in The Greek Myths, but also notes that the Canaanite influence was not restricted to Hellas:
AGENOR, Libya’s son by Poseidon and twin to Belus, left Egypt to settle in the Land of Canaan, where he married Telephassa, otherwise called Argiope, who bore him Cadmus, Phoenix, Cilix, Thasus, Phineus, and one daughter, Europe ... Phoenix travelled westward, beyond Libya, to what is now Carthage, and there gave his name to the Punics; but, after Agenor’s death, returned to Canaan, since renamed Phoenicia in his honour, and became the father of Adonis by Alphesiboea. Cilix went to the Land of the Hypachaeans, which took his name, Cilicia; and Phineus to Thynia, a peninsula separating the Sea of Marmara from the Black Sea, where he was later much distressed by harpies. (Graves 58a ... 58d)
The character of Phineus, familiar to us from the story of Jason and the Argonauts, is surely the same as the Biblical character Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, who is mentioned in Judges 20:28. In fact, we already came across this parallelism in an earlier article, where we quoted Emmet Sweeney on the subject:
The occurrence of the name Phineus in particular provides probably the most direct and unequivocal link with the Exodus. There seems little doubt that the Greek Phineus is one and the same as Phinehas, the grandson of Moses’ brother Aaron, who slays the Israelite Zimri along with his Midianite bride in their tent (Numbers 25:6-15). In the Greek legend Phineus (or Phineas) attacks Perseus along with his bride Andromeda, daughter of the king of Joppa (Jaffa), at their wedding feast, but is slain by the Gorgon’s head, which Perseus exposes (Ovid 5:1-230). Again, in another tradition the Greeks told how Phineus, who had been plagued by harpies, was rescued by two of the Argonauts, Calais and Zetes, who pursued the harpies through the air (Apollonius Rhodius 2:178 ff). This accords with a Jewish tradition about Phinehas which has the flying swordsman Zaliah pursue Balaam through the air, on the orders of Phinehas (Ginzberg 3:410-411).
The story of the Danaids, as well as that of Agenor and Phineus, must have arrived in Greece through the same channels as the Phoenician alphabet. After their entry into Canaan the Twelve Tribes were allocated separate territories. Dan’s portion was in the very north of the country—regions now comprising eastern Lebanon (Judges 18:7-28). It is known that they became closely associated with the Phoenician kingdoms of the region. Some of the Phoenician traders and settlers who brought the alphabet to Greece must have been from the tribe of Dan. (Sweeney 120-121)
The persistence of the story of Phinehas or Phineus in the traditions of both the Jews and the Greeks suggests to me that it has an ancient and factual basis. If the story of the Wandering in the Desert was made up in Persian times by Jewish scholars, the story of Phineus could hardly have found its way into the Catalogue of Women, a fragmentary epic poem, which was once attributed to Hesiod but is currently dated to about 540 BCE (Hesiod 171, 177, 179).
The Legends of the Jews
In Louis Ginzberg’s The Legends of the Jews, we are told that the episode of the Benjaminite War occurred shortly after the episode of Micah’s Idolatry and the Migration of the Danites:
The mischief done by Micah spread further and further. Especially the Benjamites distinguished themselves for their zeal in paying homage to his idols. God therefore resolved to visit the sins of Israel and Benjamin upon them ... In the battle fought soon after, seventy-five thousand Benjamites fell slain. Only six hundred of the tribe survived ...
At the same time the punishment promised them by God overtook the two chief sinners. Micah lost his life by fire, and his mother rotted alive; worms crawled from her body (Ginzberg 4:51 ... 53)
Phinehas was the grandson of Moses’ brother Aaron. In Numbers 20, we are told that Aaron died shortly before the Israelites entered Transjordan. A different account in Deuteronomy 10 places his death even earlier, during the Wandering in the Desert. Numbers 33:39 explicitly tells us that Aaron was 123 years old when he died. Even if we take this with a grain of salt, his grandson must have been a grown man at the time. In the immediate aftermath of the Benjaminite War, Ginzberg’s Legends records:
In those days God spake to Phinehas: “Thou art one hundred and twenty years old, thou hast reached the natural term of man’s life ...” (Ginzberg 4:53)
As we saw in the preceding article, Ginzberg’s Legends also preserves the rabbinic traditions that Micah was the founder of the Golden Calf and that his son was Jeroboam, the first King of Israel in the Period of the Divided Monarchy (Ginzberg 4:49-51).
Chronologically, therefore, the episode of the Benjaminite War, in which Phinehas figures (Judges 20:28), must have taken place shortly after the Conquest of Canaan and shortly before the creation of the Kingdom of Israel. Although it is appended to the Book of Judges as an epilogue, it cannot possibly be placed 400 or so years after the Conquest. Even among the rabbinic scholars, there was considerable uncertainty as to whether the episodes of Micah and the Benjaminites took place at the beginning or the end of the Period of the Judges:
This author is obviously of the opinion that Micah’s activity and the “crime of the Benjamites” took place towards the end of the period of the judges, whereas the Rabbis and Josephus, Antiqui., V, 2.8, maintain that they occurred at the beginning of that period. (Ginzberg 6:213)
Phinehas is also the name of one of the sons of Eli, the penultimate Judge of Israel, who lived shortly before the anointing of Saul by Samuel. In I Samuel 2:12, he and his brother Hophni are called sons of Belial, the same expression used in Judges 19:22 and 20:13. Were Phinehas son of Eleazar and Phinehas son of Eli originally the same person? Ginzberg notes that in some traditions, Eli succeeded the former as High Priest. Another tradition makes “Dedila” Eli’s mother. Ginzberg reads this as a corruption of Delilah, who was also said to be the mother of Micah (Ginzberg 6:220).
This is further confirmation that the traditional Biblical chronology—according to which the Conquest of Canaan was followed by a Period of the Judges lasting about four centuries, before the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel under Saul—is untenable. Either the Period of the Judges relates to the history of Canaan before the Conquest, or it was considerably shorter than is generally claimed, or it is entirely fictional.
Incidentally, the account of the last days of Phinehas also support the identity of the Biblical Phinehas and the Greek Phineus:
In those days God spake to Phinehas: “Thou art one hundred and twenty years old, thou hast reached the natural term of man’s life. Go now, betake thyself to the mountain Danaben, and remain there many years. I will command the eagles to sustain thee with food, so that thou returnest not to men until the time when thou lockest fast the clouds and openest them again. Then I will carry thee to the place where those are who were before thee, and there thou wilt tarry until I visit the world, and bring thee thither to taste of death. (Ginzberg 4:53-54)
The mountain Danaben is thought to be a corruption of Mount Lebanon (Ginzberg 6:214). In Greek mythology, Phineus’ food is befouled by harpies. This is possibly a corruption of the Jewish legend, in which Phinehas is fed by eagles.
The tradition that the 600 Benjaminites migrated from Palestine to the west following their defeat is also preserved in The Legends of the Jews:
In the battle fought soon after, seventy-five thousand Benjamites fell slain. Only six hundred of the tribe survived. Fearing to remain in Palestine, the small band emigrated to Italy and Germany. (Ginzberg 4:53)
In connection with this legend, which is preserved in the Midrashim, Ginzberg notes that the reading “Germany” is not certain. Some texts have “Italy and Romania,” possibly referring anachronistically to the West and East Roman Empires (Ginzberg 6:212).
If Homer’s Danaans preserve in their name an echo of the Tribe of Dan, then what of the Danes, the Danube, the Don, the Dnieper, the Dniester, or, in Ireland, the Túatha Dé Danann? Are any of these related to the Danites, or are these phonetic similarities merely coincidental? These are subjects worthy of further study, but as they would take us too far off our current course, we must leave them for another day.
And that’s a good place to stop.
References
- Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Arrow Books Ltd, Random House, New York (2006)
- Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Volume 3, Translated from the German by Paul Radin, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia (1911)
- Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Volume 4, Translated from the German by Henrietta Szold, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia (1913)
- Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Volume 6, Translated from the German by Henrietta Szold, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia (1928)
- Robert Gnuse, Abducted Wives: A Hellenistic Narrative in Judges 21?, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, Volume 21, Issue 2, Taylor & Francis Online (2011)
- Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Volume 1, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex (1971)
- Hesiod, Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica: With an English Translation by Hugh G Evelyn-White, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1943)
- Isidore Singer (managing editor), The Jewish Encyclopedia, Volume 7, Funk & Wagnalls Co, New York (1904)
- Isidore Singer (managing editor), The Jewish Encyclopedia, Volume 11, Funk & Wagnalls Co, New York (1905)
- Emmet John Sweeney, The Pyramid Age, Ages in Alignment, Volume 2, Algora Publishing, New York (2007)
- Heidi M. Szpek, The Levite’s Concubine: The Story That Never Was, Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary E-Journal, Volume 5, Number 1, Online, Ontario (2007)
Image Credits
- The Levite of Ephraim: Alexandre-François Caminade (artist), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Lyon, Public Domain
- The Levite of Ephraim at Gibeah: Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (artist), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Public Domain
- The Benjaminite War: Morgan Bible, Folium 16v, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, Public Domain
- The Children of Benjamin Carrying off the Virgins of Jabesh-Gilead: Gustave Doré (engraver), Public Domain
- The Death of the Levite’s Concubine: Willem Bartsius (artist), Hermitage Museum, ГЭ-3384, St Petersburg, Public Domain
- The Blinding of the Sodomites: Charles-André van Loo (artist), Public Domain
- The Rape of the Sabine Women: Peter Paul Rubens (artist), National Gallery, London, NG38, Public Domain
- John Milton: Samuel Freeman (engraver) after William Faithorne, Fullerton & Co, Glasgow (1833), Public Domain
- Robert Graves: Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography, Frontispiece, Jonathan Cape, London (1929), Public Domain
- Perseus Turning Phineus and His Followers to Stone: Wikimedia Commons, Luca Giordano (artist), Public Domain
- Phineus and the Harpies: J Paul Getty Museum, Malibu 85.AE.316 (Vase), Malibu, California, Fair Use
- The Death of Hophni and Phinehas: Gerrit Claesz Bleker (artist), The Holy Ark Falling into the Hands of the Philistines, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Public Domain
- The Tribe of Benjamin Seizing the Daughters of Shiloh in the Vineyards: John Everett Millais (artist), Public Domain
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