More About the Levite and the Concubine

Few stories in the OT provide a more shocking example of man's man's inhumanity to man than the story of the Levite and his concubine. I mentioned it briefly in a post last week about sacrifice ...and then again when I posted a link to a modern day (eery) retelling of the story. I also came upon an interesting blog post on a blog called Dr. Claude Mariottini - Professor of Old Testament. The name of the post is Rereading Judges 19:2 .....and keeping with what seems to be a tradition, it is from February 2006....yep, still caught in yesteryear. His blog is fairly conservative, but interesting, and some of the more up to date entries talk about "The Savage God" of the OT. He takes a pretty traditional stance on this, attributing God's acts in the OT to his divine justice which is something one would expect for a professor at Northern Baptist University.

About the concubine, he questions the KJV's translation that declares she had "played the whore" and had been unfaithful to her husband. But Josephus wrote: “They quarreled one with another perpetually; and at last the woman was so disgusted at these quarrels, that she left her husband and went [back] to her parents.”

The word zanah, which is translated played the whore, can also mean “to be angry, hateful” or to “feel repugnant against.” A few versions get it right...but for the most part the poor concubine is not only raped, murdered and cut into pieces, but the text is mistranslated and we are led to believe she was unfaithful to her husband. With the stellar display of valor and integrity he showed by pushing her out the door for the angry men to have their way with, one gets a glimmer of why she might have been disgusted enough with him to leave him.

It seems that the author of the blog post wants to see her vindicated since she truly got such a bum deal.