This post is part of my ongoing series of writing down my thoughts on the Bible passages I read each day. Some days I hope to have great insight that the Lord gives me, and many days, I will likely struggle through the text and not know what to write down based on what I read. My hope and prayer is that as I make this a habit, just as I did daily writing for so long, that I will improve on my ability to read and understand the passages I’m reading. Please keep in mind that many of these posts may be published late at night or with little time studying and simply be my first thoughts after reading. This is in no way a commentary that one should use to discern the Bible, but my own personal thoughts.
Judges ended with some crazy stories that are hard to read. A callback to the story we read in Genesis 19. Where there are people sojourning in the land and the people of the city come and knock on the door demanding to have relations with the men who are staying with them. The owner then gives the sojourner’s concubine to the men to do what they want with.
This passage, in a way, is even harder to read than the Genesis passage because it ends with a group of men raping a woman and leaving her for dead. She barely makes it back to the house that she was offered from and there dies on the doorstep. The story makes me sick to my stomach, but the rest seems equally as bad.
The man who was staying at the house straps his dead concubine to his donkey and takes her back home, proceeds to cut her limb for limb, and send each part to the tribes of Israel. I won’t go into the rest of the story, but this is to help you get a perspective of how evil people were even then.
Not worse, but equally as bad to me seems the man who offered his concubine instead of either fighting off the men or offering himself in place of the woman. It’s disgusting to me to see the seeming carelessness he has for the life of this woman.
The words I wrote down to describe this man in my Bible were evil, foolish, coward. It’s a reminder as I read through the Bible that this is a history book, it’s not a textbook. There are examples to follow in it, and there are a lot of just true stories for us to learn from. There were and are a lot of mistakes made constantly and we can learn from that.
One of the most uplifting things after reading the end of Judges was to then read the book of Ruth. You see the exact opposite of this character all through the book. You see the sacrifice of Ruth staying with Naomi, you see Boaz going after this woman who has no person to provide for her or her mother-in-law.
What a beautiful love story the book of Ruth is. The traditions of how relationships work have certainly changed since then, but the love and beauty of two people falling in love still seem very much the same.