Delay the departure,
the return
there are shelters with no safety
fellowship that does not warm
paths that reach nowhere.
Cling to the threshold.
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This chapter shares a chronotope with the p
receding chapter: it too takes place in the timless time of "
in those days"; it too refers to the twin spaces of Beit Lehem of Judah and the Mountain of Ephraim. It is further linked by various intertextual elements: the centrality of the father, the unusual term for "be persuaded"--ויאל
vayoel-- and repeated references to a youth
naar and to a Levite.
This final section of the Book of Judges, set aside by the refrain "in those days there was no king in Israel", tells a story of ever-widening dissolution. It begins with the domestic, with Micah's betrayal of his mother; and extends to the tribal, with the Dannite abandonment of their territory and the House of God; and here it spreads to the national, as the Levite calls together the 12 tribes of Israel. The widening canvas is accompanied by the stripping of individuality: in the story of Micah, the protagonist is named immediately; in the story of the Dannites, the Levite's name is revealed only at the very end; in this story we are left with nameless archetypes: a Levite, a girl, her father, an old man.
Indeed, as the story opens with a nameless Levite from Mount Ephraim, for a moment he can be confused with the Levite priest of the Micah saga. Yet if Micah's Levite is identified as a youth (naar נער), with a hint of innocence to offset his opportunism, the nameless "Levite" of this story is defined as a "man". The appelation naar is split off to other characters--to his servant (repeatedly called a naar), and his youthful concubine (referred to as naara). Innocence is transferred elsewhere, leaving only ruthless faithlessness.
This version of Sodom is both more local and crude than the original. If in the original story we have a mythic morality tale of "
the entire city" rushing to attack the righteous Lot and his angelic guests, here a local "
group of louts" surruond the house of the old Ephramite, and his all-too-mortal guests. The attackers are fewer, and not as violent--only "
pounding on the door" rather than seeking to "
break" it; yet those being attached are far quicker to surrender the weakest amongst them. Lot offered his "
two virgin daughters" to the maurauding mob "
to do with them as was good in their eyes." Here, the old man offers his daughter and the Levite's young concubine to explicitly "
rape", only then returning to the euphemism of "
what is good in your eyes." And if in the original story, the horrific offer never comes to fruition, as the
angels guard the limen with blinding light, here the Levite brutally and heartlessly shoves his young concubine
outside, himself breaching the guarded threshold.
The threshold between inside and out,
the space of feminine power in the Deborah saga, here becomes the site of female vulnerability. The concubine, excluded from the syntactic fellowship of plural verbs (
they ate and drank ) which include only the men (
the two of them), is now shoved out of the literal shared space, the door slammed behind her. After surviving a night-long gang rape, she collapses with hand outstretched on the limen, futilely begging protection.
The gesture remains unanswered. When her indifferent "master" find her in the morning, he finishes the work of dissolution, carving her violated body into literal piaeces. Denied outer shelter, the interiority of the girl's body was repeatedly breched, and now he violently breaches her outer form, destroying her completely.]
