Learning how to live
the Hebrew Scriptures and our own lives
Warning: Today we are continuing a four-part series on two stories in the Hebrew Scripture that are horrific to read, particularly the second one. They are stories of violence and sexual abuse. If you need to skip this series, please do so.
The past two posts in this series have walked us through the stories of Genesis 19 and Judges 19. We’ve looked at comparisons and contrasts in the stories and talked about the added horror of the second story happening among the people of God. They were called to be different, to represent God in the world. Instead, they acted like people who did not know God.
In this post, we are going to look at two of four themes that resonate through these stories. We are not going to answer all of the questions that we have about these stories. We are going to ask more questions, think broadly across Scripture, and finally wonder what these stories reveal about God and about ourselves.
Theme 1: Purpose of the law
The law in the Hebrew Scriptures is not a blueprint for God’s perfect world. God’s law was put in place to prevent sin, to put up guardrails around evil. Galatians says that the law was “added for the sake of transgressions” (Galatians 3:19). In The Pentateuch as Narrative, John Sailhamer wrote, “After the failure of the people in the incident of the golden calf, however, more stringent measures were taken to keep the people from falling away into idolatry.”1 It also aimed to restrain the evil that people intended to do to one another. While that is no small thing, it is also not the same as outlining God’s intended world. We need to name the difference.
Many of the laws should cause the readers to reflect on situations that may have triggered them. For instance, should the prohibition of marrying a woman’s sister in Leviticus 18:18 provoke us to remember the story of Leah and Rachel? The Israelites were forbidden to oppress the “alien” or “foreigner” because they were aliens/foreigners in the land of Egypt. The commandment should have called up the whole story of their people. Most of the commands called up stories. Sometimes it is explicit; sometimes it is not. You can see this practice in the book of Numbers. Numbers oscillates from story to law to story to law in a way that appears dizzying to modern readers. But once you know what you are looking for, you start to see the pattern. God is teaching the people how to live.
The law would have prevented the story in Judges if the people had been following it. God had given them guidelines. Sex was pretty regulated (see Leviticus 18 and 19) and probably because it needed to be. The people needed a standard for what was acceptable behavior. What happened in Judges was far outside the regulated sexual behavior. If they had been rehearsing the stories of their own people, they would have remembered the judgment of God after the Genesis story. They didn’t even need the law to choose a different path as a people.
The law was not enough. The people did not remember. The story in Judges still happened. Other horrors kept happening. Prophets came, calling for repentance, and the people refused. They eventually went into exile. When Jesus comes and people are given new hearts though the work of the Holy Spirit, the sexual ethic of the Bible narrows. Now you can’t take a second wife as long as she isn’t your wife’s sister (or mom or sister or aunt or…you get the idea). Faithfulness in marriage has an equitable standard for both men and women because followers of Jesus are empowered by the Spirit of God to live in this manner.2
We do not live under the law, but sometimes it seems easier to construct one than to make room for the Spirit to work. Here is exactly what you do not do, even if you want to. Here’s what you do, even when you don’t want to. Here is the movie you can watch and the movie you can’t. You probably shouldn’t listen to that radio station because you might be exposed to evil. However, all the legalistic work we could do, even if it’s with the intent of responding to God’s love as the law was supposed to be, only serves to block off a teeny bit of sin. And that only works when we are actually trying to follow whatever law we design. What we need is for our hearts to be changed by God’s love and God’s Spirit. We need power beyond ourselves. We need wisdom and discernment to apply God’s principles to the particular situations in our lives. We need to parent and mentor and disciple from this place, not a place where we are preoccupied with behavior.
The law cannot save us, not from ourselves and not from our sins. The law can prevent some evil, but it cannot change our hearts. Only God can do that. We need God to rescue us.
Theme 2: The agency of women
Unlike other stories in the Bible, the women in these two chapters have no agency. They do not speak. They are not spoken to. They do not act, though in Judges the woman is acted upon.3 The daughters of Lot are almost an afterthought to the entire story. The Judges story is clear from the beginning that the woman has a very low status. She was a concubine; she had a status lower than a wife.4 The reference to her being unfaithful is obscure; it could also mean that she made her own decision to leave and return to her father’s house.5 Though the story says that the Levite goes to “speak kindly to her and bring her back,” he never speaks to her. That visit turns into an elongated party between him and the woman’s father. The story lists the woman after the two donkeys that belonged to the Levite, as if she were a possession even lower than them. The tale is a tale of men.6
The story needs to be contrasted with how we see God honor women in Ruth and the beginning of 1 Samuel. Though the Tanakh, the Jewish arrangement of the Hebrew Sctipures, places Ruth in the section of the writing, 1 Samuel still follows Judges.7 In the Protestant Bible, Ruth is wedged between the two books because Ruth happens ”during the time of the judges” (Ruth 1:1). The stories should be read together. In the stories of Ruth and Hannah, we see God behave toward women in marked contrast to how the men do in the end of Judges. God speaks to the women, honors women, shows up in the lives of women.
The way God interacts with women is distinctly different from the way men often felt free to. In Genesis, God intervenes to save the women. In Judges, left to the care of men, they are desecrated, deserted, dishonored.8 Even before the story in Genesis, we see Abraham save himself by refusing to honor Sarai’s position as his wife. God saved her by striking Pharaoh’s household with plagues (Genesis 12:10-20).9
In both the Genesis and Judges stories, the men are protected and women are offered up in their place. The women are treated as disposable.10 God never treats women as disposable; instead God bestows on them the honor of bearing God’s image. God speaks to women.11 Women speak to God. Women act in obedience to God. Robert Alter referring to the story of Hannah points out that “when she herself finally speaks, it will be first to God, a formal mark of her dignity and her destiny.”12 Women are offered their full humanity before God; men often refuse to acknowledge that humanity.
These stories help us see the depth of our brokenness and the way that God offers women full humanity. We still live in a world where these truths are disputed and debated. As people who follow Jesus we need to make space to acknowledge the evil that people are capable of, the evil that even God’s people sometimes participate in. That should lead us to lament and repentance and change. We need a deeper gratitude for the redemptive work of Jesus and the transforming work of the Spirit. Our own rules can never change us.
We can also partner with God in honoring the full humanity of women. Women are active partners in the work of God. And if you think the church knows that and this is an unnecessary point, a broader look at the modern church will disillusion you.
How do these two themes help you read these stories in Genesis and Judges?
John H. Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 273.
There’s real space in these stories and all of our stories to talk about the absolute evil we are capable of doing as humans. We are dark. We needed a Savior that was outside ourselves, in no way implicated in our own wrongdoing. That could have been a theme that was discussed with this story. The conversation points around these stories keep growing.
The daughters of Lot do speak and act at the end of Genesis 19 but that is outside the scope of the story we are looking at.
Susan Niditch, Judges (2008): A Commentary (La Vergne: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 192.
Niditich, 192-193.
Niditch, 192.
The ending of the story of Judges is the capture of 600 women, some of whom were worshipping Yahweh. Even their “solution” was a violation of women.
This actually happens AGAIN in Genesis 20. As an aside to this footnote (I know I have problems), imagine if we read 1 Peter 3 as grounded in the Hebrew Scriptures as the Jews would have been. We would have known that the Sarah reference was subversive.
Niditch, 193.
There is not space to compile a list of references here, but observe the story of Judges 13. You can see a contrast between how God treats women and how men do throughout the entire book of Judges.
Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 105.