Jeff Adams

Last night in our city a jury delivered a death sentence against a man who had been found guilty of first-degree murder, rape and sexual torture of a woman. The jury knew that this same man had been convicted years ago in another brutal rape and that he had confessed to kidnapping and assaulting a five-year-old girl. The jury wasted little time in rendering their sentence recommendation. Little room was left for reasonable doubt because the jury was shown 90 minutes of video taken by the murderer that included the forced sex, torture and even the scene in which the victim died.

This morning my Bible reading happened to be in Judges 20, the heart of one of the vilest periods of Hebrew history. I couldn’t help but notice some parallels. In the previous chapter, a Levite who should have been a servant of God lives a life of self-gratification. To skirt the legal requirement he marry only a virgin, the Levite takes a concubine. As with most relationships built on mutual selfishness, she sleeps around, moves out and runs home to daddy. The Levite chases her to her father’s house and set out to bring her he back. Looking for a place to spend the night on the way home, they decide to stop in a Benjamite town thinking they would find a better reception than in a Canaanite settlement.

The spiritual and social deterioration of Hebrew society can be seen by what happens next. A man in the Benjamite city meets the levite and his concunbine and advises them it is far too dangerous to spend the night in the town square. Instead, he opens his home to them. Even there they are not safe. In the middle of the night a mob rushes the house demanding to sodomize the Levite. The gutless excuses for men inside the house offer to them instead the homeowner’s daughter and the Levite’s concubine. Apparently these sexual maniacs have no preference for the gender of those they gang rape. The poor women are shoved out the door, and for the next hours are prisoners to the souless men who rape, torture and abuse them.

In the morning the Levite finds the lifeless body of his concubine on the doorstep. Incensed, he hauls her body back home, hacks it into twelve pieces and sends one to each of the twelve tribes as a call to action. He makes no mention, of course, of his own series of horrible decisions and lack of personal responsibility that led to this senseless tragedy. It’s not his fault, but that of those who did this to her after he had thrown her out of the house and into their sex-craved grasp.

From here things escalate quickly. We can just imagine that having a raw body part delivered by UPS would spark some sort of response. Neither justice or diplomacy can be found as representatives of the tribes gather for loud protesting, beating their chests and frothing at the mouths with threats. The men of the city where the crime occurred dig their heels deep into their muddy pride and refuse to deliver up the perpetrators. In face of impending attack by the other tribes, the entire tribe of Benjamin decides that protecting other tribal members is more important than protecting justice, decency and personal responsibility. In a bloody series of exchanges fueled by tribalism, carnality and sin, thousands die and the male population of the entire tribe of Benjamin is all but annihilated.

So ends the one of the most horrible chapters of Israeli history. Thousands of Israelites lay dead and many homes lost fathers and sons. One of the amazing features of the Bible is its brutal honesty in recording such events. Yesterday’s local news was a reminder that the basic operating system software of the human being has never been upgraded. Mankind is still born with sin v.1.0. I used to marvel at how degenerate Israel had become by Judges 20. Then I realized that nothing has changed. This story is in the Bible not to show that Israel is worse than any other people, but rather to show that Israel is a typical representative of every other people. Whatever people and whatever culture in whatever moment of time is capable of whatever sin and the worst perversion imaginable. The common denominator of the human race is sin.

Another lesson of this passage is to show what happens when personal responsibility gets lost and everyone wants to blame everyone else. This remarkable chain of events began when a single levite focused on his personal desire instead of his personal responsibility and no one held him accountable.