An essay interpreting a biblical text in a book entitled Agendas for the Study of Midrash needs to start off by explaining what it is doing there. One could fall back upon the notion that any biblical interpretation is, in at least the crudest sense of the word, itself a midrash, particularly since an entire cottage industry is currently encouraging anyone with opinions to write, draw, even dance their own midrashim as a way of interpreting, expanding, or perhaps resisting the Biblical text.1 More broadly, however, my reading of Judges 19-21 operates implicitly and often explicitly against the background of the history of its interpretation: it is not a freestanding midrash, but one that already rests on the existing body of interpretive midrash upon this text. 2

Nevertheless I would claim that the aspect of my study with real payoff for serious students of midrash lies in its approach to narrative, the form of discourse that aggadic midrash has in common with biblical saga, history, stories and tales. Those who study midrash are beginning to discover the need to understand how complex narratives work. Marc Bregman's paper, for example, in this volume, analyzes how certain types of aggadic midrash generate transactions with the reader that change, sometimes with radical shifts in impact, the focalization of the original biblical text. On the other side, there are many recent studies of aggadic midrash that might have been enriched by a more rigorous grasp of the implied audience's multilayered response to the meshalim, usually tagged as fictional, that so often carry the message. 3

Once one begins to analyze the transactions of a text with its reader, the midrash scholar becomes, inevitably, a narratologist, and the only question whether one will rely on a systematic theory of narrative or fly by the seat of one's pants. The two modes of narratology currently in vogue are: a structuralist/semiotic model associated with Umberto Eco and Gerard Genette that has been influential on biblical students like Mieke Bal;4 and a rhetorical model originating with the studies of Wayne Booth. My own training, as a former student of Booth's, naturally prejudices me toward the latter, but I would also claim that its ways of reading the narrative text, not from the abstract perspective of the pure sign, but as engaged from the outset in transactions with the reader, always already attempting to convince, beckon, persuade, is more readily adapted to the dialogical rabbinic discourse we find in the texts of the midrash. The meshalim of midrash often give off mixed signals, invite multivalent interpretations by their uncertain relation to history and law and to a system of genres we are only beginning to reconstruct. Few are, of course, quite as disconcerting as the biblical text discussed below.

This essay, then, interprets Judges 19-21, the narrative of the Outrage of Gibeah, from a perspective based in the rhetorical theory of narrative of Wayne Booth as it has been carried forward by students of his including James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and myself.5 Booth's well-known theories in The Rhetoric of Fiction form a background that will be assisting me with questions about distance and point of view, and the way in which the reader's sympathetic or antipathetic response to characters depends upon technical matters of focalization and voice. His ideas in A Rhetoric of Irony, too, have informed my own earlier work engaging the question of what happens to audience response in texts that are ambiguously ironic. Rabinowitz's theories in Before Reading invoke what he calls "rules" or more properly "conventions" of reading, explaining how certain learned but tacit habits of thought underlie the phenomenological structure we build up in processing a narrative text. Phelan's work on audience-centered narrative theory is wide ranging, but I will primarily be using his distinction in an essay on Toni Morrison's novel Beloved between "difficult"narrative texts and texts that go beyond the merely difficult to an intransigent resistance to interpretation that he calls "stubborn."6

Difficulty in literature is a concept we all understand intuitively well enough, though it is tempting to try to systematize it. In a well-known essay published more than two decades ago, George Steiner defined difficulty in terms of an implicit contract between author and reader that is challenged by various sorts of resistance encountered in a text.7 Steiner found four categories of "difficulty": (1) "contingent" difficulties like difficult or foreign words, or unusual names, which "aim to be looked up" and are solved with homework (40); (2) "modal" difficulties that involve "a stance towards human conditions that we find essentially inaccessible or alien" (28); (3) "tactical" difficulties, reefs on which authors intentionally run readers in order "to deepen our apprehension by dislocating or goading to new life the supine energies of word or grammar" (40). All these modes of difficulty are meant to be solved. And when they are solved, as James Phelan puts it, there comes a certain point at which the reader experiences the "click" of intelligibility when the semiotic codes come together in a coherent interpretation (713).

For those fascinated by editing problems, I should serve notice from the beginning that, despite its difficulties, I shall be reading the narrative that ends Judges in the version given by the Masoretic Text.8 I come to this interpretive activity with the prejudice (nothing more) that MT should be followed except where it is manifestly in error, and the conviction (nothing less) that flipping back and forth between different textual traditions in search of a macaronic text that can be made to support a coherent interpretation leads onward and upward to emendations and reconstructions and, finally, perhaps, to making up out of whole cloth the Bible one reads. It evades all too easily, at least, the recalcitrant material that underlies "difficult" as well as "stubborn" texts. And for those who wonder about the identity of that unaccountable creature named "the reader," I should serve notice that it is your humble servant, though I have striven, I hope successfully, to eliminate what is merely idiosyncratic in my response.

The primary peculiarity of the narrative in Judges 19-21 lies in the strain between what Peter Rabinowitz calls conventions of configuration and conventions of coherence. Configurational rules are ones that suggest to us prospectively what kind of story we are reading, allowing us to develop expectations about what will happen, expectations that help us read the text from moment to moment. Rabinowitz uses the example of the opening of Philip Barry's play Holiday, where the mere combination of "a charming man, a rigid fiancée and an attractively zany fiancée's sister," even in the absence of any direct foreshadowing, leads the audience to expect, drawing on the generic experience of other comedies, that the happy ending will involve the man becoming engaged to the zany sister.9 Such an expectation alters, of course, the way we will "read" the plot as it unfolds. Rabinowitz has argued more recently that in fact we always read generically, so that whenever a text exhibits "generic refusal" by violating the rules and conventions of the genre to which the audience has tentatively assigned it, the audience cannot leave the narrative in generic limbo. Instead, our response will be to switch the backgrounded generic field to an adjacent category that begins (or, if possible, retrospectively continues) to make sense. 10

Rabinowitz's conventions of coherence operate differently: in effect they force the audience to read each text as though it were as well-formed as possible, dealing with textual disjunctures in ways that will permit us "to repair apparent inconsistencies by transforming them into metaphors, subtleties, and ironies." Just as the conventions of configuration shape the text prospectively during our reading of it, this transformation works retrospectively. 11 Whatever material in the text is apparently recalcitrant to the hypothesis, whatever fits poorly into the interpretation, is reinterpreted (for example, by arguing that what seems literal is actually only figural) in such a way as to reinforce the original interpretation, or at worst to qualify it. Given the potential scope of this operation, and its twenty-twenty hindsight, all texts should theoretically fall into the class Phelan calls "difficult."

To move away, now, from the hypothetical, James Phelan argues that in the long monologue that ends the second section of Beloved, Toni Morrison creates precisely this sort of "stubborn" text. He suggests that although we can bridge, intellectually, between different "levels" of readerly experience in the long monologue at the close of the book (which reverberates between the character "Beloved" as Sethe's ghostly daughter and "Beloved" as a representative of African womanhood undergoing the torments of the Middle Passage), we cannot bring the two representations together emotionally. We can understand the monologue either way but not both ways at once. Phelan feels it is part of the intentionality of the story that we are required to struggle, unsuccessfully, with our desire to reduce it to coherence, and that our losing struggle in fact defines the aesthetic effect of the book---an effect that is therefore belied by academic interpretations which inevitably seek to reduce what is overwhelming to what can be explained.12 The stubborn text forces us to reach for the numinous and confront our failure to lay hold of it; as A.R. Ammons put it in "Corson's Inlet,"

The story of the Concubine of Gibeah begins with the phrase: "it was in those days when there was no king in Israel..." (Judges 19:1). Prospectively this may give us no more than a rough date (after Joshua, before Saul), but this formula recurs at the end at 21:25: "and in those days there was no king in Israel, every man did what was right in his own eyes."13 Both versions have already appeared in Judges, the full version at Judges 17:6, and the abbreviated one at 18:1. Clearly this is meant to be the moral of the story, the nimshal for which the parabolic mashal was constructed. What is it getting at?

"And it came to pass," then, "when there was no king in Israel, that there was a certain Levite sojourning on the farther side of the hill country of Ephraim who took him [a wife] a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah." In brackets I have added to the JPS translation the word that is not translated in the phrase "vayikach lo ishah pilegesh." "Ishah" (wife) and "pilegesh" (concubine) are not categories easily combined.14 Aside from the eleven instances of pilegesh in this narrative, the word appears 27 times in Tanach, generally with the clear denotation of a "secondary wife" relative to some other primary wife or wives, and often with the implication of a woman more stimulating erotically than those primary wives are.15 There is no primary wife in evidence here, however, which makes this a unique usage. 16

Nevertheless, the two key words in the first verse are surely "Levite" and "concubine" and the combination is a dissonant one. The Levites were singled out in Exodus and Numbers as YHWH's special tribe, His servants par excellence, from which tribe the priests who officiate at the altar would be selected.17 The particular holiness expected of the Levite jibes ill with the implication that this Levite must have searched far and wide before finding a beautiful Bethlehem concubine far from his home in the hills of Ephraim. What harum-scarum sort of Levite, we might ask, are we dealing with?18

This marriage, whatever its origin, is in deep difficulties: "And his concubine played the harlot against him and went away from him unto her father's house and was there the space of four months."19 Serves him right, one might think: infidelity seems an appropriate punishment for the Levite's venery. It isn't clear, however, what outcome we should expect. In the case of another woman held to be a harlot (zonah) --Tamar in Genesis 38--her father-in-law ordered her taken out and burnt at the stake; and the Mosaic code in Leviticus 20:10 presents the punishment for adultery in no uncertain terms. In the event, the Levite's behavior is neither punitive nor dismissive but, apparently, forgiving. After a hiatus of some four months20 "her husband arose and went after her to speak kindly unto her, to bring her back." 21

"...And she brought him to her father's house, and when the father of the young woman saw him, he rejoiced to meet him." The Levite has brought a servant and a pair of asses, so he clearly is providing for a return journey more comfortable than her exodus was. The scene is set for a family reunion and yet the narrative is tacit about the initial meeting between husband and concubine, and about everyone's feelings save the father's. Even the father's feelings could do with a bit of explanation: is he rejoicing in the reconciliation or in the prospect of getting his daughter again off his hands? One clue is that Bethlehem is easier to enter than to leave. The father keeps his son-in-law for three days feasting together, and the feast appears not to be anything the Levite can get out of. The verb used at 19:4 and translated "retained" in AV is "yekhezak b-", perhaps an ominous word since, in so many of its other usages in the Tanach, including twice later in this narrative, it specifies laying hold of something by force before it is torn or otherwise destroyed.22

The feast runs its prescribed three days in a round of enjoyments described by the triplet of verbs "vayochlu vayishtu vayalinu sham."23 On the fourth day, as we expect, the Levite gets up and prepares to leave, but his father-in-law asks him to strengthen his heart with a morsel of food before going, and the morsel turns into another day's feasting, so that the Levite stays yet a fourth night. On the fifth day the same script is played out once more: again the Levite gets up ready to go and again he is persuaded to stay and eat something before he leaves. This time, however, he insists upon getting onto the road back home with his concubine, his servant, and the two asses. The father-in-law attempts to dissuade him, warning that it is after noon, the day is already waning, and promising that the Levite can make an early start the next morning. But he insists upon leaving at once. It seems reasonable: the Levite realizing that morning and hunger recur daily, so that the script can be repeated indefinitely, is trying to make a break for it. The father-in-law may be trying to keep the young couple with him as long as possible, but Levite resists, perhaps proudly sensitive about being entertained too much and too lavishly (a feeling young married men with check-grabbing fathers-in-law may recognize). Whether one is more sympathetic to the Levite's need to assert his independence or to the generosity of the father-in-law, the reader may feel that the serious issues with which the story began---adultery and forgiveness--have been displaced by an comedic and comparatively trivial conflict: whether and how to resist middle-eastern hospitality. This is the first fissure in the reader's experience of the story.

As the couple sets off, another rapid triplet of verbs in masculine singular--"vayakum vayelech vayavo"-- signals their arrival near Jerusalem, then still in the hands of the Jebusites.24 The serving-lad, making his only speaking appearance in the story,25 suggests that they turn off the road and spend the night there, but the Levite refuses, since it will not do to spend the night among foreigners, so that they must journey on to Gibeah or Ramah.26 They make it only as far as Gibeah by sunset and begin to encamp in the town square since "no man took them into his house for the night." Hospitality seems still to be the primary thematic focus, with an implicit contrast between the all too lavish hospitality of Bethlehem (etymologically the "House of Bread") and the barrenness of Gibeah (etymologically "mountain-peak").

As the geographical details fall into place, another possible motive of the father-in-law's insistent requests comes into sharper focus. On a map of ancient Canaan the distance between Bethlehem and the hill-country of Ephraim is close to 50 km (if one takes Shiloh as the Levite's home).27 That seems a long distance to cover in a single day by two men on donkeys but we are not told that the Levite broke his journey. It would be even more difficult, perhaps, for a man and a woman with a servant walking behind. The father-in-law's insistence calls attention to the fact that, leaving after noon, the Levite and his wife are going to have to break their journey somewhere in a world filled with foreigners and strangers.

At this point, at nightfall, there enters a new agent, an old farmer from the hill-country of Ephraim who is a "ger," a permitted sojourner, a foreigner with a green card, so to speak, in the Benjamite town of Gibeah.28 The friendly conversation that begins suggests that the Ephraimite will surely provide their refuge for the night, while in the dialogue the Levite recapitulates his defensiveness about accepting hospitality from his elders, insisting that he requires lodging but otherwise has all that his party requires, down to provender for his pair of asses. The Ephraimite, like the father-in-law, turns down the Levite's self-sufficiency and offers to provide food and drink as well, but then adds "only lodge not in the broad place" (rak b'rachov al talin). The party enters the Ephraimite's house where they proceed to eat, drink, and make their hearts merry once more. Just as Gibeah, inhabited by Israelites, was explicitly presented as a safer refuge than Jerusalem, inhabited by Jebusites, so the Ephraimite's house has been explicitly presented as more secure than the public square.

These expectations are overturned almost at once, as "behold, the men of the city, certain base fellows, beset the house round about, beating at the door; and they spoke to the master of the house, the old man, saying: "Bring forth the man that came into thy house, that we may know him." The assault echoes verbally with only minor variations the assault on Lot's house by the men of Sodom in Genesis 19:5,29 but if the reader jumps from this intertextual parallel to the conclusion that the assault will end in the same way, with the Sons of Belial struck blind, with the escape of both host and guests, he or she is in for a series of shocks. Just like Lot, who offered the rioters of Sodom his two virgin daughters in place of his male guests, explicitly affirming the ideal that the person of a guest is sacred, the Ephraimite host offers the rioters two women in place of his male guest. But while one of them is his own virgin daughter, the other is the Levite's concubine, whom he would have no right whatsoever to offer, and who is obviously as much a guest as the Levite himself.

If the Ephraimite presents a parodic version of the ideal host he had seemed, though, the Levite's behavior is even more astonishing and, given what we know from his previous behavior, out of character. When the Sons of Belial reject the old man's offer of two women for one man, he "lays hold" of his concubine and brings her out to be raped and abused all night by the townspeople.30 In the morning--having for all we are told to the contrary passed a restful night--he gets up "and opened the doors of the house and went out to go his way" as though nothing has occurred. Then, seeing the concubine "fallen at the door of the house with her hands upon the threshold,"31 the Levite says to her, "Up and let us be going."

The story of the Levite and the concubine is not merely a joke: it is rather a story that, at one point, begins to look as though it might be a joke. A Levite who one week forgives an adulterous wife and undertakes a long journey to reclaim her and the following week thrusts her out of doors to the mercy of a mob, addressing her recumbent corpse the next morning with a cheery "Get up, and let us be going!" is not much more credible than a golfer who hits the ball and drags Fred. Not credible, that is, without an explanation of the contradictions within his psychology that the blunt and deadpan narrator never offers. This makes the authorial audience's choices very difficult. If the story is a joke, then there was never any dead concubine and we were fools to have been concerned for her. But if it is not a joke and we treat it as one, then we are worse than fools.32

The conclusion of the chapter continues this split in the authorial audience, perhaps even raising the stakes. "Then he took her up upon the ass, and the man rose up, and got him unto his place. And when he was come into his house, he took a knife,33 and laid hold upon his concubine, and divided her, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, and sent her throughout the borders of Israel...." While some readers (as I have indicated in note 31) feel the text holds open the possibility that the concubine is alive when she is dismembered, this moment is surely horrific even for those tamer souls who understood that the Levite had found his concubine dead. While the passage suggests in a general way that this is a message to the twelve tribes, as it proves, the description of the physical action, ("vayinatachah l'atzmeha" literally signifies "and he divided her according to her bones") forces us to attend to just how she is being dismembered, possibly even to think about the fact that human beings don't divide easily into twelve neat-looking pieces. Minimally, the concubine has no honorable burial: she is hacked in pieces to become a set of semiotic objects carrying the meaning of the horror that was performed on her. The medium is as horrifying as the message, which summons all the tribes save Benjamin to Mizpah to deal with an outrage they view as unparalleled since the exodus from Egypt.

If the pathos and horror with which we follow this end to the story of the Levite and his concubine reaches its height with one authorial audience, the other audience in which we participate may be escaping further into its "detached" reaction, as what had started to seem as though it might be some sort of joke begins to find an object other than the nameless Levite. For what the Levite does echoes down to its language another memorable biblical event when the tribes of Israel are rallied as a national army (1 Samuel 11:7): "And he [Saul] took a yoke of oxen, and cut them in pieces, and sent them throughout all the borders of Israel by the hand of messengers, saying 'Whoever cometh not forth with Saul and Samuel, so shall be done unto his oxen.'" And at this point, the reader familiar with the events of 1 Samuel will also recall that Gibeah of Benjamin was King Saul's home town, just as Bethlehem of Judah was King David's.34

If the campaign seems a retelling of Joshua's conquest of Ai staged as civil war, the casualties in the three battles are almost grotesquely numerous by comparison: Joshua lost only thirty-six men in his unsuccessful frontal assault on Ai.35 To the 65,000 dead soldiers of Israel and Benjamin are added the countless thousands who must have been slain in the aftermath, when, in the final verse in Chapter 20, we are told how the Israelites "turned back upon the children of Benjamin and smote them with the edge of the sword, both the entire city, and the cattle, and all that they found": this formula of herem, found elsewhere (e.g. Joshua 10:28-39, 11: 11-14) suggests the slaughter of helpless old men, women and children throughout the tribal area. The dead concubine now has a lot of company.

For the authorial audience who has read the concubine's story as sacred history, the sequel serves to demonstrate how a single crime can turn into a casus belli, and then into a massive slaughter that destroys the innocent with the guilty. But for the other authorial audience, the continuation of the narrative suggests only a continuation of the parody, as the language alludes not only to the first chapter of Judges,36 to the hapless direct assault of Joshua on Ai, but to the scene of the coronation of Saul at Mizpah (1 Samuel 10:17), where that hero has to be discovered among the baggage. There is also what seems to be a pointed satirical allusion, in the remnant of six hundred Benjamite soldiers left hiding at the Rock of Rimmon ("shelah rimmon"),37 to the remnant of six hundred left of King Saul's army at Gibeah before the battle of Michmash: "And Saul tarried in the uttermost part of Gibeah under the pomegranate tree ("rimmon") which is in Migron" (1 Samuel 14:2). For the authorial audience reading this chapter as parodic satire--as a covert attack, perhaps, on Saul as a military commander--the story is, of course, a mere "story" in scare-quotes, and the casualties are as factitious as the strategies. But the narrative never allows us to dismiss either reading.

This does not, however, end the matter; four hundred brides cannot marry six hundred Benjamites. The "elders of the congregation" require that, for there to be a true "inheritance for Benjamin," the other two hundred Benjamites must be provided for. The Mizpah oath, however, cannot be abrogated. The final solution is found in the "daughters of Shiloh" who "dance in the dances" at the annual feast of YHWH: the Benjamites shall wait among the vineyards and steal these women for themselves when they are out of doors and unprotected. Each of the women is surely the daughter of some man who was included in the oath but, since the fathers have not "given" their daughters but merely had them stolen away, no one has been forsworn.38

Once more, the logic of the solution seems, in the "historical" narrative, the grossest perversion of reason. The story that had begun with one gang-rape urged by an elder, ends with another urged by a group of elders, of a somewhat different sort, but on an enormously greater scale. The "rape" of the virgins of Shiloh is not precisely the violent and murderous rape of the Concubine by the Sons of Belial in Gibeah; it is more like that of the Sabine women by the Romans, that they are taken by force ("raptus" in the Latin) as warbrides, rather than exchanged between patriarchal families, as they might have been in time of peace. But it is surely ironic that the story of the outrage of Gibeah, which began with one woman of Shiloh who leaves her patriarchal lord and master to be suddenly and unexpectedly used sexually by Benjamites, concludes with two hundred women of Shiloh meeting a similar fate with the approval of all the elders of Israel.39

The implication, for the reader of Judges 21 who is familiar with the events of the reign of Saul, is of the suggestion of a strange proleptic link between Gibeah and Jabeshgilead, as though the historical courage of Saul of Gibeah on behalf of Jabeshgilead, and the historical loyalty of the men of Jabeshgilead to the kingship of Saul, had been born out of the refusal of the men of Jabeshgilead to help punish the rapists and murderers of Gibeah and the subsequent marriage of the virgins of Jabeshgilead to the Benjamite remnant.40 It's not a link the suspicious authorial audience is in any danger of taking as serious history absent any explanation of how Jabeshgilead came back from annihilation. But its aroma taints Saul and Saul's most loyal supporters with the nasty stink that the last three chapters of Judges give off however they are read. For this authorial audience, the story functions a bit like a Swiftian Modest Proposal told by an utterly deadpan narrator who never doffs his mask.41

The episode, together with the book of Judges as a whole, concludes with the framing device already mentioned: "In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes." To the reader who has belonged to both the authorial audiences reading this text, this is a "hard saying" with a paradoxical interpretation. If story of the concubine of Gibeah is "history," then it documents not merely a crime against a nameless woman, perpetrated by nameless hellraisers in Gibeah and connived at by her host and her husband, accessories in patriarchy. It illustrates the grotesque waste of life that was a part of an anarchic Israel before the monarchy gave it law and stability, where one was safe only in one's tribal area and where tribal levies, guided only by the oracle of the Urim and Thummim, put their own people under the ban. If "in those days there was no king in Israel," then the king's anointment cannot come too soon. But if the story of the concubine of Gibeah is "parody" or "satire" then its historical target can only be found within the very monarchy that is absent from the story, and the violent, unreasonable, even outrageous behavior in the story reflects only that of the monarchs themselves, whose idiosyncratic whim, given the force of law, might as easily annihilate Jabeshgilead as save it, as Saul does, from the Ammonites, as fecklessly sacrifice the virgins of Shiloh as Saul sacrifices the priests of Nob. Politically, then, the last line of Judges reverberates between these readings: savage truth or savage irony, with no space between. 42

The neo-Aristotelian critic Sheldon Sacks used to argue that in literature such ambiguous forms were impossible because, given the hundreds, perhaps thousands of choices of language, characterization, and action, in any literary text as short as a short story, it was inconceivable that every choice should be simultaneously equally plausible as contributing to two radically different forms.43 This seemed self-evidently true to me twenty years ago, but Peter Rabinowitz's notion of "conventions of configuration" makes such an implausible set of coincidences unnecessary.

A form or genre, once intuited by a reader, prospectively and retrospectively "lights up" the significant elements in language, character and action relevant to that genre, while suppressing the elements that fit indifferently, or even poorly. If we have intuited a different genre, different elements are valorized and suppressed. (On the figure above, one can see that a slight indentation in the back of the skull of the "duck," a detail we are unlikely to notice whilst seeing the figure as a "duck," is necessary to indicate the position of the mouth of the "rabbit.") Even so, there are not many figures that qualify as "rabbit-ducks," and not many narratives that are "stubborn," in James Phelan's sense. His demand is not merely for radical ambiguity but for a form of radical ambiguity whose tensions in effect define a new form of narrative meaning that could not have been introduced in any simpler way.44
The Outrage of Gibeah, however, is not exactly like The Turn of the Screw. In reading The Turn of the Screw, generally speaking, regardless of whether one believes that the ghosts are real or are made up by the governess, the interpretation is validated by the story. One does not come across much information, if any, that is seriously recalcitrant to the interpretation one has formed, and one may be unaware of alternative interpretations until one's own interpretation is contested by a reader who has taken the other route. After one's own reading, one may join a "critical" audience exploring, at a meta-level of interpretation, the ways in which details in the text fit alternative hypotheses about its meaning.

In the Outrage of Gibeah, however, there are few major clues at the outset of the story that would tempt the reader to posit a parodic/satirical reading; one joins an authorial audience reading the text as sacred history until one or more of the details toward the end of Chapter 19, taking the narrative "over the top," begin to suggest the presence of irony, and license an alternative interpretation of the text. In this case everyone begins seeing a rabbit rather than a duck, in other words, and indeed, some readers never see anything else. Even for those who begin to see covert irony beneath the deadpan tone of the narration, and hence the possibility of parody or satire, it takes a long time for the object of that satire to come into focus. From around 19:24 on, though, the reader who has begun to see both formal possibilities has become engaged, in addition, in a meta-authorial audience exploring two alternative interpretations of the narrative. That is, since the text does not give unambiguous support to either the "sacred history" or the "parody/satire" interpretations, one reads aware that neither audience one has tentatively joined can be entirely comfortable with all the details of the text. One reads as one does when one is "puzzling out" something difficult.45

One could write, at this point, a lengthy interpretive history of the Outrage of Gibeah, discussing the creative misreadings of Philo and Josephus, some medieval Jewish commentators on Former Prophets, Enlightenment readers including Rousseau and Sterne, and some of the painters and printmakers, mainly from the nineteenth century, who have chosen the story as a theme. Such a history might provide an interesting side glance at the Jewish and Christian emphases in retelling, or, more usually, avoiding retelling this rebarbative story, but it would bulk too large for this book.46 The most recent chapter of this interpretive history would have to conclude by contrasting two contemporary ways of reconstructing the Outrage of Gibeah: one group, primarily women, who, operating as resisting readers, construct the narrative as a "text of terror" representing the sexual violence at the heart of patriarchal culture (e.g., Bal, Delany, Exum, Jones-Warsaw, Trible, Yee); and a second group, primarily men, who read the narrative as a political and social text in which the issues of sexual politics are incidental or totally ignored (e.g., Amit, O'Connell, Unterman, Webb).

In a fast and dirty way one might view the principal narratives of modernity beginning in the age of the Enlightenment, from Richardson's Pamela, let us say, until Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's To the Lighthouse, as engaging an elaborate set of conventions of configuration and coherence most of us have internalized as literary readers. The pioneers of that mode of narrativity were consciously aware of creating a new form of writing against models found in earlier modes of narrative--as Fielding's prefaces make clear--just as much as the postmodernists, such as Barth and Coover, were intensely aware of and often elaborately parodying the conventions of modernist narrative. While no link between premodern and postmodern narrative is necessary, both are defined for us over against the "standard" of the modern, and in fact the formalist analysis of Ralph Rader has argued that there are important links, hidden similarities within obvious differences, between the premodern narratives of Defoe and the high modern and postmodern experiments of the twentieth century.47 The sorts of ambiguous, reverberatory irony analyzed in "The Reader as Ironic Victim" are most strikingly visible in premodern satires by Defoe and Swift, and satires with strong links to the premodern by Sterne, as well as in postmodern ironists such as Vladimir Nabokov. It is not at all strange to find similar features in other premodern narratives, even those at the beginning of the Western tradition.

Nevertheless one of the obligations of an analyst of reader response within the narratological tradition of Booth, Phelan, and Rabinowitz is to account in some sense for the genesis of the text, and of the transactions demanded by its narrativity, as a plausible production of some author.48 One has the advantage, in the case of biblical narrative, of not having to specify a specific historical author with identifiable allegiances and opinions. The intertextuality of the passage in question, particularly the parodic relations of Judges 19-21 to passages in Genesis and Samuel, and on the other side what may be allusions to Judges 19-21 in Hosea 10:9, may place limits on when the text could have been composed and what it could have been intended to mean. From my survey of the literature, however, almost nothing about the dating and Sitz im Leben of Judges is uncontroversial, and there is hardly a date in ancient Israelite history that has not been proposed as the time of composition of the Outrage of Gibeah narrative.49 If the suggestions I am about to make should turn out to have been way off base, I will have been in very good company. Let me start with two observations that seem tolerably obvious:

The ideology that I would associate with my "stubborn" reading of the Outrage of Gibeah, however, belongs to a much later era of Israelite history. I see the conclusion of Judges, as W. J. Dumbrell does, as exilic, as a text written in Judea after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, indeed, after the subsequent assassination at Mizpah of Gedaliah ben Ahikam, by a pack of revanchist rebels led by Ishmael ben Nethaniah ben Elishama of the Davidic royal family.50 To me the political vision projected by the rebarbative undecidability of this text appears the product of an age of social chaos, one that saw a violent end to the rule of the House of David, which had been promised to endure for eternity, and an equally violent end to the generous-hearted and kindly judge whom the Babylonians had appointed to govern the Israelites.

The creator of The Outrage of Gibeah could well have been a person who had seen with his own eyes the sack of a great city and the other sorts of wholesale terror the episode describes. And he would have been one who understood from experience how easily good intentions turn into violent acts, outside their perpetrators' control. Whoever it was that expanded the satiric pebble into the story without heroes that ends the book of Judges would have to have been someone with no very sanguine vision of the Israelites as individuals, who had formed the habit of seeing husbands as cowardly poltroons, wives as adulterous, fathers as officious fools, elders as mere parodies of respectability and tradition. He might even have been something like the man whose recurring image of Israel is an adulterous wife committing harlotries in the hills, a Levite living in Benjamin who knew at first hand what sons of Belial his neighbors could be, one who had suffered equally under kings and under tribal chaos, a religious and political thinker who understood all too well what he loathed but could never envision what might replace it: Jeremiah of Anathoth.51

To inscribe the story in this way is, of course, to recuperate the Outrage of Gibeah on the metacritical level as a difficult rather than a stubborn text. We can experience the "click of intelligibility, when the signifiers fall into place" once we reconfigure it as a text whose radical ambiguity and undecidability can ultimately viewed as a strategic expression of political rhetoric in a chaotic age by a bitter and divided soul. Narrative, even here at the limit of readerly transaction, becomes rhetoric.52 Unless it falls into an abîme beyond the limits of all understanding, this is the fate of every stubborn text. This is not a story to pass on. Farewell, my concubine.