Context No. 3988 of 4322 · Judges

Judges 19:23-30: in context

23The man, the master of the house, went out to them, and said to them, “No, my brothers, please don’t act so wickedly; since this man has come into my house, don’t do this folly. 24Behold, here is my virgin daughter and his concubine. I will bring them out now. Humble them, and do with them what seems good to you; but to this man don’t do any such folly.” 25But the men wouldn’t listen to him; so the man grabbed his concubine, and brought her out to them; and they had sex with her, and abused her all night until the morning. When the day began to dawn, they let her go. 26Then the woman came in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her lord was, until it was light. 27Her lord rose up in the morning and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way; and behold, the woman his concubine had fallen down at the door of the house, with her hands on the threshold. 28He said to her, “Get up, and let’s get going!” but no one answered. Then he took her up on the donkey; and the man rose up, and went to his place. 29When he had come into his house, he took a knife and cut up his concubine, and divided her, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, and sent her throughout all the borders of Israel. 30It was so, that all who saw it said, “Such a deed has not been done or seen from the day that the children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt to this day! Consider it, take counsel, and speak.”

This is one of the dark and horrifying passages in all of Scripture, an account of a woman brutalized and killed by a mob in a night of unspeakable evil. We do not retell its horrors; we grieve them. Scripture does not hide this atrocity or soften it, and neither should we; it stands as an unflinching record of the depths of cruelty human beings are capable of, and of the particular brutality visited on the vulnerable.

The chapter belongs to a book that repeats a refrain: in those days there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes. This is what such a society descends to: when the fear of God is gone and each person is a law to himself, human life becomes cheap and the weak are devoured. The passage ends not with a lesson tied up neatly but with a raw command: consider it, take counsel, and speak. The horror is meant to be faced, not looked away from. There are things so evil that the only faithful response is to refuse to grow numb, to grieve, to name evil as evil, and to resist with all our strength the descent into a world where God is forgotten and the vulnerable are brutalized.

Do I refuse to grow numb to evil and the brutalizing of the vulnerable, grieving it, naming it, and resisting with all my strength the descent into a world where God is forgotten and human life is treated as cheap?

Sources

Judges 19:30: "Such a deed has not been done or seen from the day that the children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt to this day! Consider it, take counsel, and speak."
Judges 21:25: "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did that which was right in his own eyes."
Psalm 11:5: "The LORD examines the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and him who loves violence."