Most people know the story of Lot
offering his daughters to the mob in exchange for leaving his guests alone, but there's a more disturbing version of the same story in
Judges 19-21. A man's concubine (which here seems to be indistinguishable from a wife) leaves him. Some textual traditions say she was "angry with him," but in others, including the Masoretic Text, we start seeing a theme of blaming the victim. In those, she "played the harlot." So she leaves and goes to her father's house. Her husband saddles up his donkey and follows her, where his father-in-law greets him and offers him a few days of hospitality. Presumably the man and his wife make up (at least that's how I choose to read it) and they head back. They were near Gibeah when it got dark and an old man agreed to take them in for the night. Using such similar wording to the Lot story that it's unlikely to be coincidence, the men of the city surround the house and the two men offer the old man's daughter and the traveller's wife to the mob. This time, though, there are no angels to smite anyone, so the guy tosses his wife out the door and goes to bed.
In the morning, he gets up and his wife isn't moving. He has no patience for her sleeping in even if was a rough night and she's still on the porch, so he says, "Get up! It's time to go!" She doesn't get up, so he puts her apparently dead body (the text doesn't say for sure) on the donkey and heads home. When he gets there, he cuts her body up and mails it to the other tribes. Everyone is mad at the Gibeonites (but not at the idea of cutting up a girl to make a point, apparently) and they get together and slaughtered a few tens of thousands of Benjamites, including men, women and children.
Then they felt sorry for the remaining men of Benjamin (boys will be boys, right?), so they slaughtered the adults of a
different town and gave the now orphaned girls to the Benjamites to "marry". It turns out that there weren't quite enough girls, though, so they told the Benjamites to go kidnap some more from a third nearby town and "marry" them, too.
And they all lived happily ever after.
What adds to the WTF nature of this story is how modern, conservative Christian commenators fall all over themselves to place blame on the dead, chopped-up wife:
The MacArthur Bible Commentary:
She should have been killed as the law required and could have been, if there was a devotion to holiness and obedience to Scripture (cf. Lev. 20:10). A priest was not allowed to marry a harlot (Lev. 21:14), so his ministry was greatly tainted. Yet, he made little of her sin and separation and sought her back sympathetically (v. 3).
Believer's Bible Commentary:
Without excusing the Benjamites, we might point out that if she hadn't given herself to harlotry beforehand (v. 2 ) she would not have suffered a harlot's death. Sin mercilessly rewards its followers.
The Preacher's Commentary (completely misunderstanding the term
concubine and infantilizing her in the bargain):
One of the themes of chapter 19 is the moral depravity which runs all the way through it. The Levite, who should have been faithful to one wife, decides to take a girlfriend whom he lives with (1). In turn, she is unfaithful to him (v. 2). The implication is that, as a result, the Levite sends her packing, and she decides to go back home to daddy. After four months the Levite decides he wants her back and so he goes off to find her.
