"Everyone Did As He Saw Fit"

My read-the-Bible-in-a-year reading today was from Judges 19-21. It has to be one of the most gruesome and oddest stories in the Old Testament. Basically, a Levite was having marital problems. His concubine (a non-married living arrangement) left him to return to her father's home. He goes and gets her and on the way stops in Gibeah for the night. Late in the evening, morally depraved men pound on the door of the home where the Levite is staying and want the owner to send the Levite out so they can abuse him sexually. They eventually send out the Levite's wife (concubine) after offering her and the host's virgin daughter. The moral depravity of this situation is not only the men on the outside, but the moral confusion of preserving the men inside but throwing a woman outside to be abused. In fact, she is so abused that she apparently dies on the doorstep of the host home.

When the Levite gets home, in a fit of moral outrage, (how can this be, he was the one who didn't protect her), he cuts his wife into 12 pieces and sends her around Israel to rally the nation to moral indignation. They eventually nearly completely wipe out Gibeah. Then, after massacring men, women and children, they have a moment of compassion and decide they need to help re-populate the tribe of Benjamin. These men were trying to protect the people of Gibeah. They discover that the people of Jabesh Gilead didn't help them in their war against Gibeah, so they decide to wipe out the people of Jabesh Gilead and give the men of Benjamin the virgins from Jabesh Gilead. Do we see a movie script unfolding here? From a starting cast of thousands to just a few hundred.

Then they discover that there are not enough virgins to go around, so they hatch a plot to help the men of the tribe of Benjamin kidnap virgins from a festival. When the kidnappings occur, they basically tell the families of the kidnap victims "live with it, deal with it". The last verse of Judges sums it all up. "In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit."

For a moment I caught myself saying "boy, I'm glad I didn't live in that time period", and then I remembered that yesterday a member of the president's inner circle of advisers called pro-life advocates, "racists". We are still... so morally confused. God help us.