June 10, 2025
Please use the comment section on this page to share insights from today’s reading OR your own personal Bible reading.
Reading along with us in Judges, Proverbs, and Psalms? Here’s today’s reading:
Judges 19 (NIV)
A Levite and His Concubine
1 In those days Israel had no king.
Now a Levite who lived in a remote area in the hill country of Ephraim took a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah. 2 But she was unfaithful to him. She left him and went back to her parents’ home in Bethlehem, Judah. After she had been there four months,…..Continue Reading
This chapter is hard to read and gives us a Sodom and Gomorrah feel. Not only was no basic hospitality shown, these people had strayed so far away from God that they do the most horrible things to this concubine. But clearly she ran away originally because she knew the lack of care the Levite had for her, as he was willing to sacrifice her to save himself. His message to the tribes at the end certainly seems like a perverse way to speak out against what was done to her and especially because it was done due to his choice to send her out to those wicked people to start. Sad, sad, troubling chapter on what happens to lawless people that turn away from God and any sense of morality.
I have so many questions about this chapter.
I question the lawfulness of this Levite in taking a concubine in the first place, and then he challenges the morality of this inhospitable tribe in violating his concubine.
Both he and his host offer up daughter and concubine to be abused by these vicious men! All night long! These poor women! Then he chops up his concubine to enlist the outrage of the other tribes against Benjamin.
This chapter truly encapsulates the irrational lawlessness of Israel at this time.
Yes it does, Amy. And it would be lawful for the Levite to take a woman for a wife but it appears that having a concubine at this time was not frowned upon, although not part of God’s original direction. It almost seems at times in the account that she is also considered the Levite’s wife which the law would condone. And, yes everything from there is horrendous. How could the men of the town and the homeowner and the Levite act in this way. But it is what happens to us when we are not rooted in the truth of God and look to our own desires to determine our course. And yes, how tremendously sad for these women and even more the concubine, who based on decisions made by someone else, for the sake of the protection of this Levite, is brutalized and then thought of as nothing to the point that the greater value of her life is to be cut up to prove a point. Barbaric!
Right Kelly hard to read. Get upset at these two so called men who don’t defend their house and protect their family and guest.
Judges 19
Judges 19; 1 Kings 14-15
psalms 58-59; Judges 19
Judges 19