The Concubine at Gibeah
A night in a town of their own people, a body divided into twelve parts, and a war in which the tribe of Benjamin was all but wiped out. The book ends it: "in those days there was no king in Israel."
A Levite from the hill country of Ephraim goes after his concubine, who had returned to her father's house in Bethlehem, and persuades her to come back. On the way home they will not lodge in a foreign town and turn aside to Gibeah, to their own—the inheritance of Benjamin. Nobody takes them in except one old man, himself a sojourner from the same hill country of Ephraim.
In the night the town surrounds the house. In the morning the woman lies at the threshold. The Levite cuts the body into twelve pieces and sends them through all the borders of Israel—and it is said: "there was no such deed done nor seen from the day the children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt to this day."
All the people gather and demand the guilty men; Benjamin refuses—and a war of brothers begins. It lasts three days; on the third day six hundred men of the tribe are left at the rock of Rimmon. Then it emerges that the people had sworn not to give them their daughters, and the whole end of the book is a search for a way out of their own oath, so that the tribe should not vanish.
The verse naming who stood before the ark then—"and Phinehas son of Eleazar son of Aaron stood before it in those days"—is the one point that ties this event to the beginning of the age rather than its end.
How we know
Sources
Tanakh
- Shoftim 19–21 — the night at Gibeah, the twelve parts and the war with Benjamin
- Shoftim 20:28 — "and Phinehas son of Eleazar stood before it in those days"
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Gittin 6b — Rabbi Evyatar and Rabbi Jonathan: a fly or a hair
- Seder Olam Rabbah 12 — "and in his days was the concubine at Gibeah"
Basis: stated in the Tanakh.