“Consider it, take counsel, and speak out.” – Judges 19.30

These are fine words of advocacy from a man of means who purchased a human being for sex (19.1), tracked her for two days on foot after she escaped his lack of self-control for four months (19.2), discriminated against an entire city out of xenophobia (19.13), and all before finally handing over the woman he purchased to be “wantonly raped” and “abused” (19.25) to the point of death.  In the next chapter, the man responsible for the above actions would go on to tell an adjusted story about his actions, starting a civil war between Benjamin and the rest of the tribes of Israel, but I would prefer to leave that interpretation for another day.  Today, I think it is important to consider the violent image of the bruised, bleeding, terrorized, utterly broken, and (perhaps…) dead, woman laying sprawled against the contaminated Earth where she was brutalized.  The woman’s hands are reaching out to open the door into a room full of men who either proposed her demise, physically forced her into the brutal herd of rapists, or the man who did nothing at all in the face of her terror.  The presence of the men who enabled her abuse were preferable to remaining in the desecrated place where her body and life was massacred.  The man departed the next day, having given no apparent thought to the woman’s well being the night before, nor even to the point of throwing her across a donkey like a goat to be slaughtered for the market.  The woman’s hands lay upon the threshold, a passageway from one place to another.  Between the men who brutalized her and the men who handed her over to be brutalized.  Between living and dead.  I cannot tell that she was dead at the door, only that she did not reply to her captor’s further cruel insistence to “Get up” (19.28).  The woman simply lays there, clinging to the boarder between appalling situations, destroyed.

A terrible image, too horrifying perhaps for me to suggest that there is any lesson here other than the blunt and blatant reminder that we cannot let this happen again.  As a realist, I rarely find myself looking to any situation in search of some silver lining.  I cannot help but think about how much more area the cloud has than the sliver of refracted light drawing the perimeter of darker, three-dimensional, mass.  The phrase, ‘But the good news is…’ irks me as the least creative and dullest of all pulpit clichés.  The further details of the man continuing the mutilation and use of her body, as though she were a museum, by cutting her into demonstrative pieces for viewing points to her death.  A death that wrought more death, abduction, and rape.  We cannot know what the woman’s thoughts were, only that she was (according to the likely male author) angry[1] with the man for whom she was purchased (19.2).  What we can know is that she had no defense in this narrative, even from her father.  Though we may plead with the text for redemption, that the woman may be saved or find some dignity and humanity and love from anywhere, we too are simply complicit viewers.  We are powerless to offer aid or help in this situation, but we are responsible now to intervene, if we see this archetype at any point.  By preventing any part of her story from becoming reality for anybody in our time, we can now honor the memory of the woman in Judges 19.

US national abuse hotline: 1-800-799-7233

US Department of State human trafficking hotline: 1-888-373-7888

[1] Some translations will read “prostituted herself against the man,” which gives even less information about her perspective in this narrative.