Number 12 of 17 in the *Twilight Zone* series:
by Farrell Till
Once upon a time in the Twilight Zone, a certain Levite and his concubine, overtaken by darkness on a journey home from visiting the concubine's father, stopped in the town of Gibeah and found no one willing to give them lodging (Judges 19:10-15). Luck was on their side, however, because an "old man" returning from work in his field saw them sitting in the street and offered them shelter in his house (vs:16-21). So the kind old man took them home, fed their donkeys, washed their feet, and gave them food.
As quite often happens, good luck is short-lived, and so it was in the case of the Levite and his concubine. Word of their presence got around to certain "perverted men" in the community (v:22), who came to the old man's house and said, "Bring out the man who came to your house, that we may know him" (v:22). [I will assume that everyone understands what "know" means in the biblical sense.] The old man was shocked at the demand. "No, my brethren!" he said to the mob. "I beg you, do not act so wickedly! Seeing this man has come into my house, do not commit this outrage."
A situation like this, of course, would require delicate negotiating, which the old man proved himself qualified to do. "Look," he said to the mob, "here is my virgin daughter and the man's concubine: let me bring them out now. Humble them, and do with them as you please; but to this man do not do such a vile thing!" [As Dave Barry would say, I'm not making this up. It's all right there in the book.] Needless to say, this kind old man wasn't nominated for Father of the Year, but, then again, maybe he was. After all, this is a story from the Twilight Zone where reality is so distorted that anything can happen. Besides, in a place where women were considered chattel, as they were in biblical times, a man who was willing to sacrifice his daughter in order to save a male guest from gang-buggery would probably have been highly esteemed. If this seems unlikely, just remember that this is a story from the Twilight Zone of God's inspired word.
At any rate, when the mob would not heed the old man's advice, the Levite decided to take matters into his own hands. "So the man took his concubine and brought her out to them [the mob], and they knew her and abused her all night until morning" (v:25). Now whatever happened to good old-fashioned chivalry? There was certainly none to be found in the conduct of this Levite, or perhaps it was simply a matter of the spark having gone out of his relationship with his concubine. Anyway, he threw her to the mob, who abused her all night long. Then "when the day began to break, they let her go" (v:25).
The concubine then went and "fell down at the door of the man's house where her master was" to wait until it was light (v:27). When the Levite arose and came outside, he saw his concubine lying at the door with her hands on the threshold. Did the man lift his lover from the ground to soothe and comfort her, perhaps to explain that the unrelenting demands of the mob had left him no choice? Indeed, he didn't, because--and I must remind you again that I'm not making this up--God's inspired word tells us that he said to the woman, "Get up and let us be going." But there was no answer; the concubine was dead.
The Levite then did the only thing any self-respecting master of a dead concubine could do. He lifted her onto his donkey and went home, where he "took a knife, laid hold of his concubine, and divided her into twelve pieces, limb by limb" (v:29). Then he sent "her," presumably a piece here and a piece there, "throughout the territory of Israel" so that all could see what the men of Gibeah had done. God's word tells us that "all who saw it" said that "(n)o such deed has been done or seen from the day that the children of Israel came up from the land of Egypt" (v:30). We can only wonder what "it" was that the people of Israel saw. Surely, it couldn't have been all the pieces of the concubine's body, because the implication is that the butchered body had been parceled out to the twelve tribes of Israel. So presumably all that most Israelites saw was the "it" [one piece] that was sent to their particular tribe or region.
At any rate, when the grisly deliveries were completed, the Israelites were properly indignant and decided to take action against the perverted men who had had the audacity to ravish the Levite's concubine to death. That, however, is another story. For now, let's just glean an important moral from this story from the pages of Twilight-Zone literature. Immorality is obviously on the rise in this country, so we are told by Bible believers, and the only hope we have of reversing the trend is to restore God's word to a place of honor in our society. We should work to purge our libraries and bookstores of filthy literature and encourage the reading of the Bible. If our young people would just read more wholesome stories like the Levite's concubine rather than the paperback trash that's so commonplace in our society, within a few years we would surely see a remarkable resurgence of old-fashioned biblical morality. Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a society in which most people believed in the noble moral principles taught in the story of the Levite's concubine?
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