Crotch Examined 07
As a pro- and epilogue to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the story of Lot and his daughters is among the favourite stories good, bible believing Christians read to their children. In order to not get too repetitive however, it is good to remind those parents that there’s a remake of it that expresses the same moral example for their kids; though you may want to reflect on whether there is any useful moral lesson to be drawn from the account of Lot and his father raping daughters…
A. Story take two
The script authors of OMG Bible Inc. rightly wanted to milk out the success of their above mentioned story and they sure upped the ante with the expanded remake titled ‘The Levite and his concubine’. The story is spread over three chapters, from Judges 19 to Judges 21. Spoiler alert: below is a schematic synopsis of the plot.
A Levite from Ephraim feels his wife isn’t enough to satisfy his sexual appetites, so he decides to cheat on her and buy himself a sex toy, aka concubine.
However, the concubine in turn cheats on the cheater, leaves him and returns to her father’s house in Bethlehem.
Four months after, the Levite decides to get her back with help from a servant. After spending four nights in Bethlehem, the Levite had enough of his concubine’s father’s hospitality and decides to leave with his servant and concubine. They set out to Jerusalem in the evening of the fifth day.
Unwilling to spend the night in that heathen city, they continue on to Gibeah, a town of the Benjamites.
An old Benjamite invites them in to spend the night there.
That evening, some of the Benjamites surround the house, demanding the old man turns over his Levite guest so they can gang rape the Levite.
In order to save the Levite’s ass hole, the old Benjamite offers his virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine to be gang raped instead, but the Benjamites initially decline the offer.
In a final bid to save his own ass, the Levite throws out his concubine and the Benjamites gang rape her the entire night, finally leaving her to go back to the house in the morning. The concubine collapses at the door and dies.
That morning, the Levite decides to continue homewards and finds her dead at the door. He loads her body on one of his donkeys and returns to Ephraim.
Back home, the Levite cuts the body of his concubine in twelve pieces and sends a piece to each of the tribes of Israel.
Corralled by this graphic message, all tribes of Israel but the Benjamites convene at Mizpah. They decide to demand the Benjamites to turn over the rapists from Gibeah.
The Benjamites refuse and instead mobilize their entire tribe. They muster 26,700 swordsmen and prepare for war. The other tribes respond in kind and mobilize 400,000 swordsmen. The next day, war breaks out.
On the first day of war, the Benjamites kill 22,000 swordsmen of the tribal alliance. The second day, the Benjamites kill another 18,000 swordsmen of the alliance. The eleven tribes retreat and ask god for advice and blessings. God gives them the go-ahead and promises to deliver the Benjamites into their hands.
The third day, a 10,000 strong decoy force of the Israelite alliance draws the Benjamites away from Gibeah and suffers 30 casualties. Meanwhile, another force of the alliance enters Gibeah and kills every living being in the town. They set fire to the town to signal the other divisions of the alliance to come down on the Benjamites.
The alliance kills 18,000 Benjamites on the battlefield. The Benjamites flee, but another 5,000 of them are killed along the roads. Two thousand more of them are chased down and killed, while the remaining 600 go into hiding for the next four months.
The Israelites then systematically set all the towns of the Benjamites on fire. They slaughter all the livestock and exterminate the entire female Benjamite population. No Benjamite survives the genocide, save 600 young swordsmen.
To save the Benjamite tribe from annihilation, the Israelites decide to exterminate the allied clan of Jabesh Gilead. A 12,000 strong force sets out and kills all the men, women and children of Jabesh Gilead, while sparing the four hundred virgins they found, to be given as peace offering to the Benjamites.
Because the 400 sex slaves weren’t enough to cater to the 600 Benjamite men, additional women needed to be mined. So the Israelite alliance gives the Benjamites their approval to abduct the balance amount of women from Shiloh, another town up till then uninvolved in the story.
And god saw that it was good. The end.
B. Holes in the A-hole story
B.1. Numerical errors
The bible is the inerrant word of god, or at worst, the product of divinely inspired authors. For some reason, the author of this story attributed great importance to the numbers of fighting men. In spite of that, chapter 20 of Judges contains no less than three numerical contradictions. Because these can undoubtedly be biblesplained away by the context, I will merely give the breakdown of the body count and leave it up to you to verify if indeed there were any errors made.
B. 2. A slowly ripening conscience
For four months after the Battle of Gibeah, the Israelites went on a killing spree and slaughtered or destroyed everything Benjamite. No quarter was given to any non-combatant member of the tribe. Yet while the towns of the Benjamites were still smoldering and the blood of thousands of women and children was still happily fertilizing the soil, the eleven tribe alliance suddenly wondered how a tribe that they just tried to exterminate could be saved from extermination with all their women gone.
So what better way to undo the all but complete genocide…than to commit yet another genocide, right? And who better to target this time around, then a clan of your own alliance, merely for failure to not partake in the first genocide.
Granted, the survival of a minor tribe is a much greater good than the survival of an even smaller allied clan. But why feel remorse for killing Benjamites, while not feeling any remorse for killing the allies of Jabesh Gilead?
Rectifying one evil with another evil makes…good? And as usual, throughout the entire debacle the women - in order of value – are placed behind the livestock and only marginally worth more as a bartering good as long as their hymen is intact. It is remarkable also how, like veritable Lords Balfour in November 1917, the assembly deciding where to find the remaining herd of virgins, doesn’t give away any of their own brood hens, but surprise, surprise, decides to simply take them from yet another town. How charitable it is to give away someone else’s cattle.
C. Any moral of the story?
Maybe someone can help me find any moral lesson in this story. I’m honestly at a loss here and can’t find anything constructive in it; not even if I spin it through the many hoops theists so often creatively come up with.
I am aware of the importance attributed to guest rights in the ancient Mediterranean world. It is reflected in this story as much as it is in Lot’s story preceding the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and in the histories of the Greek world dealing with the Xenia. In that light, both biblical accounts can be explained as allegories to stress how important hospitality customs really were to the people in those days. But even in that sense, the behavior of the old Benjamite and Levite is questionable. While the reaction of the Benjamite host to put the safety of his Levite guest above all else can be commended in line with the morality of his days, it still omits that his Levite guest’s concubine was just as much a guest. Perhaps being a woman she wasn’t and merely a piece of property of the male guest; certainly not a human being with equal rights as her male master.
But in comes the reading of many theists, who maintain that the bible is giving an accurate historical account, while interweaving it with an approving deity, actively involved in the genocide of a tribe he just helped escape the abominable slavery they suffered in Egypt. In that context, the story is just an account of complete depravity, both of men and their god.
As science and technology advance rapidly, we are often faced with some tough moral dilemmas. But I don’t see how some authors writing from their Iron Age perspective can help us solve them, especially if those authors can’t even get grade school subtractions and additions right.
DPA, 25 April 2023