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He chopped her body into 12 pieces
By Jeremy | March 30, 2005
But the men would not listen to him. So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go. At daybreak the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, fell down at the door and lay there until daylight. When her master got up in the morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way, there lay his concubine, fallen in the doorway of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, "Get up; let's go." But there was no answer. Then the man put her on his donkey and set out for home. When he reached home, he took a knife and cut up his concubine, limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel. (Judges 19:25-29)I for one have never preached a message from this text or analyzed and processed it in a Bible study. Typically I (and lots of others, considering the fact that I've never heard anyone else preach on this passage either) have ignored it (and passages like it) or avoided it or tried to contort it to fit our (Western) sensibilities. But CoCo challenged me a month or so ago with this story, and tonight Kevin (see post below) told me YW8? wrestled with it recently as well. Meanwhile, I read the following thought in ANKOC last night:
The parts of the Bible that bother you most are the ones that have the most to teach you. ... Instead of minimizing your discomfort trying to explain those parts away, you should bear down on those passages and maximize how different they are, really wrestle with [them]. (ANKOC, p.79)I'm starting to get the hint that I need to pay attention to Judges 19-20. What is God saying here?
Topics: Christ, evangelical, faith, theology | 1 Comment »
March 31st, 2005 at 1:07 pm
Yeah, this is a tough one to explain and sit with…then look at the massacre that ensued afterwards…a whole tribe almost wiped out…then they (Tribe of Benjamin) go and pillage a village (that’s like a rhyme yo) steal wives for themselves so they can continue their lineage. Mayra and I had discussed this with Marcus Smalls one time, and we talked about how it was interesting how the Levite, at one point acknowledged the concubines humanity by going back to get her after a “falling -out”. For a while she seemed to be to him more than property. But once the heat turned on he defaulted to seeing her as property so had no problem throwing her to the towns folks…
Crazy stuff,
Jose