Farewell, My Concubine:

Difficulty and Indeterminacy in Judges 19-21

My talk reads Judges 19-21, the story of the Outrage of Gibeah, from a perspective based in a rhetorical theory of narrative as begun by Wayne Booth and carried forward by James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and myself. Booth's Rhetoric of Irony has informed my own studies of what happens to audience response in texts that are ambiguously ironic. Phelan has distinguished between "difficult" narrative texts and texts that display an intransigent resistance to interpretation that he calls "stubbornness." For Phelan the difficult text is one whose ambiguous and recalcitrant elements are designed to coalesce into an interpretation that ultimately unifies the text and reflexively certifies its own validity. "Stubborn" narratives, on the other hand, involve us in ambiguities that lead ultimately away into a centrifugal void that resists and denies a central meaning. As you may have guessed by now, it will be my thesis that Judges 19-21 is a "stubborn" text.

My analysis here will invoke Peter Rabinowitz's analysis of rules of reading, learned habits of thought that underlie the phenomenological structure we build up in processing a narrative text. Rabinowitz distinguishes between rules of configuration and rules of coherence. Configurational rules are rules of genre; they suggest prospectively what kind of story we are reading, allowing us to develop expectations about what will happen. Rabinowitz has argued that we always read generically, that reading is always "reading as." Even when a text violates the rules of the genre to which we have provisionally assigned it, we 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 continues) to make sense.

Rabinowitz's rules of coherence operate differently from his rules of configuration. In effect they force the audience to read each text as though it were as well-formed as possible, dealing with textual disjunctures so as "to repair apparent inconsistencies by transforming them into metaphors, subtleties, and ironies." If rules of configuration shape the text prospectively, rules of coherence work retrospectively. Whatever material seems recalcitrant, whatever fits poorly into the interpretation, is reinterpreted (for example, by reading what had seemed literal as figural). Given the potential scope of this operation, and its twenty-twenty hindsight, all texts should theoretically fall into the class Phelan calls "difficult."

But out of the interaction between configuration and coherence emerges the possibility of "stubborn" texts. The reconfiguration of generic background that will make best sense of the moment-to-moment experience of the text may conflict with the interpretation that will make the best sense of that sequential experience as a whole. The coherent interpretation we academics can always come up after the fact with may be at war with actual reader response. This is in effect what James Phelan argues about the long monologue that ends the second section of Toni Morrison's Beloved. Phelan suggests that we can respond to Beloved as Sethe's ghostly daughter or as African Womanhood undergoing the torments of the middle passage, but we cannot respond in both ways at once. Although we can bridge, intellectually, between different "levels" of readerly experience, we cannot bring the two representations together emotionally. Instead we are required to struggle, unsuccessfully, with our desire to reduce the narrative to unity, and this losing struggle in fact defines the aesthetic effect of the book.

The stubborn text forces us to reach for the numinous and to confront our failure to lay hold of it. Given the persistence of our species in its encounter with the numinous, or its darker side, the unnamable, I don't think this is a peculiarly postmodern effect. Morrison says in Beloved, "it is not a story to pass on" and neither is that of the concubine.

The story of the Outrage of Gibeah begins with the phrase: "in those days when there was no king in Israel" and the same formula recurs at the end: "and in those days there was no king in Israel, every man did that which was right in his own eyes." This gives us more than the rough date of the story (after Joshua, before Saul). Both echo Deuteronomy 12:8, which says that once the LORD has chosen his special place for worship, "you shall not do as we are doing here today, every man [doing] what is right in his own eyes." Once there is a central temple there will be a right and a wrong way to worship the LORD. Yet the formula in Judges refers instead to the lack of a central civil authority: no king in Israel. Crime rather than heresy is to be the central issue. So we already know the moral of the story before we have heard it. Or so we think.

"And it came to pass in those days, when [there was] no king in Israel, that there was a certain Levite... who took to him a concubine out of Bethlehemjudah. And his concubine played the whore against him, and went away from him unto her father's house to Bethlehemjudah, and was there four whole months." What next? In the case of another woman held to be a whore--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. But in the event, the Levite's behavior is neither punitive nor dismissive but forgiving. "Her husband arose and went after her to speak kindly unto her, to bring her back.... And she brought him to her father's house, and when the father of the damsel saw him, he rejoiced to meet him."

Reconciled and on their way back north, the couple arrives near Gibeah at sunset and begins to camp in the town square, when an old farmer offers them lodging for the night. They enter his house and are well entertained. Suddenly, however, "the men of the city, certain sons of Belial, beset the house round about, [and] beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man, saying, Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him."

This assault echoes the assault on Lot's house by the men of Sodom in Genesis 19:5, but the reader who jumps to the conclusion that the assault will end in the same way, with the Sons of Belial struck blind by angels, is in for a series of shocks. Just like Lot, who offered the rioters of Sodom his two virgin daughters in place of his guests, the host offers the rioters two women in place of the Levite. But while one of them is his own virgin daughter, the other is the Levite's concubine, whom he has no right to offer, who is surely as much a guest as the Levite himself.

If the elder presents a parodic version of the ideal host, the Levite's behavior is even more astonishing and out of character. When the Sons of Belial reject the old man's offer, he "lays hold" of his concubine and brings her out to be raped and abused all night by the townspeople. Then, having apparently passed a restful night--he "rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way" as though nothing unusual had occurred. Then, seeing the concubine "fallen down at the door of the house with her hands upon the threshold," the Levite says to her, "Up and let us be going."

This is for me the uncanny moment in the narrative. Stuart Lasine has put it this way: the Levite "acts as though he were in a hurry to get on the road to beat the morning traffic. The absurdity of his statements is so great that the reader is forced to view the scene with detachment, which in turn prevents the reader from indulging in 'tragic' pity for the plight of the concubine". I don't quite agree with Lasine. He has grasped one horn of the reader's dilemma--he is surely right that one would have to be entirely humorless not to take in the absurdity of the Levite's behavior. But I think he has relinquished the other horn too quickly. In a story with very little concrete detail, the posture of the concubine, fallen, with one hand still on the threshold of the refuge from which she was expelled, is precisely designed to evoke tragic pity. I do not think any reader can evade that. For me what happens is that the story from this point on becomes emotionally incoherent; the authorial reader is split in two. One authorial reader continues responding to a grimly horrifying tale, while the other warily suspects that the story may be some nasty sort of joke.

Let me stop retelling the story of the Levite and his concubine and tell another story that may be nearly as old. A golfer who always got up at 7:00 Sunday morning to have his round of golf got home late at night instead of at lunchtime, and his wife was very angry with him. "Please, let me explain," he said. "It wasn't my fault. You know my buddy Fred? Well, we're on the second green, when we get a sudden thunderstorm. Fred is just setting up his putt when suddenly a bolt of lightning hits him. The storm passes all right, but then all day long it was hit the ball and drag Fred, hit the ball and drag Fred...." In jokes, one meets characters who do very strange things, who can finish a round of golf while dragging the dead body of a friend who died on the second green. Understanding the joke requires us to join a narrative audience for whom the story is a true explanation of his lateness, while at the same time joining an authorial audience that knows the story is a fiction ridiculing the fanatical need of golfers to play out their game, no matter how uncomfortable or outrageous the circumstances.

The story of the Levite and the concubine is not a joke, but at this point it begins to look as though it might be a joke. A Levite who forgives his adulterous wife and undertakes a long journey to reclaim her and then thrusts her out of doors to the mercy of a mob, addressing her recumbent corpse the next morning with a cheery "Up, and let us be going" is not much more credible than a golfer who hits the ball and drags Fred. This makes the real 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.

The conclusion of the chapter continues this split in the authorial audience, and raises the stakes. "Then he took her up upon the ass.... And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold upon his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her throughout the borders of Israel..." The description of the physical action forces us to attend to just how she is dismembered, possibly even to think about the fact that human beings don't divide easily into twelve neat-looking pieces. If the pathos and horror with which we follow 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 into further detachment, as the joke begins to find an object other than the nameless Levite. For what the Levite does here echoes down to its language the moment when the tribes of Israel are first rallied as a national army (1 Samuel 11:7): "And [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 will also surely recall that Gibeah was King Saul's home town, just as Bethlehem was King David's.

As the story continues, the tempo and agency of the narrative changes as the last two chapters of Judges are propelled by masses within tribal politics, speaking and acting collectively. The Levite tells a filtered version of the story we already know. The local hellraisers have become "baalei ha-Giv'ah"--the lords of Gibeah--and their demand to "know" the Levite has been tidied into two parallel clauses: "me they intended to slay and my concubine they raped so she died" ("oti damu laharog v'et pilagshi anu vatamut"). At this, the Israelites rise "as one man" to avenge this outrage upon Gibeah.

But payback turns out to be difficult. The Benjamites refuse to surrender the criminals of Gibeah to the other tribes, and muster their own army. It takes three battles until the Israelite army is victorious. By then, 65,000 soldiers of Israel and Benjamin have fallen. And since, after the last battle, the Israelites slaughter every helpless old man, woman and child throughout the tribal area, the dead concubine now has a lot of company.

For the authorial audience that has read the concubine's story as sacred history, the sequel serves to demonstrate how a single crime can cause a war that destroys the innocent with the guilty. But for the other authorial audience, the continuation sharpens the satire on Saul, as the locale alludes to the coronation of Saul at Mizpah (1 Samuel 10:17), where our hero is discovered hiding among the baggage. There is also a pointed satirical allusion, in the remnant of six hundred Benjamite soldiers left hiding at the Rock of Rimmon, to the remnant of six hundred left of King Saul's army at Gibeah before the battle of Mikhmash: "And Saul tarried in the uttermost part of Gibeah under a pomegranate tree ("rimmon")." (1 Samuel 14:2). For the authorial audience reading this chapter as parodic satire--as a lampoon on Saul as a military commander--the story is, of course, a mere "story" in scare-quotes, and the massive casualties are fictitious. But the narrative never allows us to dismiss either reading.

In the final chapter the Israelites are filled with remorse: "O LORD..., why is this come to pass..., that there should be today one tribe lacking in Israel?... How shall we do for wives for them that remain?" (21:3-6). How indeed? The Benjamite wives and children have been slaughtered, and the men cannot marry women from the other tribes, since, we are now told proleptically, the Israelites had all sworn at Mizpah never to let their daughters be married to a Benjamite. The Israelites cannot be released from this oath (even though Leviticus 5:4 prescribes a simple way of being released from "any sort of rash oath that men swear"). nor can they marry women from outside Israel (even though the previous judge, Samson, had done exactly that).

There is, however, a convenient solution. It appears that one Israelite town, Jabeshgilead, had failed to muster at Mizpah, so its men had sworn no oath. Now 12,000 soldiers can be dispatched to Jabeshgilead to kill every man, every child, and every sexually experienced woman. The 400 virgins who remain can be given as brides to the Benjamites. This does not end the matter, though, since 400 brides cannot marry 600 Benjamites. The "elders of the congregation" discover a final solution in the "daughters of Shiloh" who "dance in the dances" at the annual feast of the LORD: the 200 brideless Benjamites shall wait among the vineyards and steal these women when they are out of doors and unprotected. Each woman is presumably the daughter of some man who swore the oath but, since the fathers have not "given" their daughters but have had them stolen away, no one has been forsworn. So the story that had begun with a gang-rape urged by one elder, ends with another gang-rape urged by a whole group of elders on an enormously greater scale.

This may be as ironic as sacred history gets, but to the other authorial audience there is an additional irony.The Jabeshgilead that is destroyed and depopulated in Judges 21 is the same one that turns up, apparently none the worse for wear, in 1 Samuel 11, as the city threatened by a foreign enemy for whose defense Saul decisively musters the army by cutting up that yoke of oxen and sending the pieces among all the tribes of Israel. Judges 21 forges a strange connection between Gibeah and Jabeshgilead. 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, now look as though they originated in 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. It's not a link one may want to take as serious history, but its foul aroma taints Saul and Saul's most loyal supporters with the nasty stink the last three chapters of Judges give off no matter how they are read.

The story, and the book of Judges as a whole, concludes with the framing phrase already quoted: "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 authorial audiences, this is a "hard saying" with a paradoxical interpretation. If the story of the Outrage of Gibeah is "sacred history," then it documents not merely the rape and murder of a nameless concubine. 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 by the divine oracle, subjected their own people to genocide. 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 be found only within the very monarchy that is absent from the story on the literal level. The violent, even outrageous behavior reflects only that of the monarchs themselves, whose idiosyncratic whim, given the force of law, might as easily annihilate Jabeshgilead as save it, 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.

Let me be clear about my reading of the Outrage at Gibeah. I am arguing that the text is ambiguous, but not in any way that ultimately can be resolved, except at the abstract level of metainterpretation at which I am operating right now. There is no truth that lies in between. As a narrative, it simultaneously generates two authorial readings that are not only inconsistent but emotionally incoherent with each other. Flesh and blood readers are at liberty to refuse either reading but both audiences are welcomed within the text, and even a reader who refuses to join one of the audiences may on some level be aware of the temptation. For one authorial audience, the concubine is a "real" person; and this audience experiences the horror of her death and dismemberment. For the other, she is a symbolic character in a parodic or satirical narrative, no more real (and no less vivid) than the Yahoos about whom Lemuel Gulliver told us in the fourth book of his Travels, who, last we heard, surely with utter indifference, were to be either exterminated or castrated by the rational horses of Houyhnhnmland.

The narrative of the Outrage of Gibeah can be read in two entirely incompatible ways, like the rabbit-duck, the picture that can be viewed as both a rabbit profile facing right and as a duck profile facing left.

Most people can see the figure as either a rabbit or as a duck, but not as both simultaneously. Nevertheless one is aware both are "there" at the same time. I once felt that such ambiguous forms were impossible in literature because, given the thousands of choices of action, characterization, and language in any literary text, it was inconceivable that every choice could contribute equally to two radically different forms. Rabinowitz's notion of rules of configuration, though, makes such implausible coincidences unnecessary. A form or genre, once intuited by a reader, "lights up" the significant elements in language, character and action, while suppressing the impact of those elements that fit poorly. Intuit a different genre, and different details 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.") The world of visual representation does not contain many "rabbit-ducks," and the world of narratives does not contain many texts that are "stubborn," that exhibit a radical ambiguity whose tensions define a meaning that could have been introduced in no simpler way.
But with the rabbit-duck you can start out seeing either a rabbit or a duck. In the Outrage of Gibeah, however, there are no clues to tempt a reader into a parodic/satirical reading at the outset of the story. Everyone reads the text as sacred history until 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 other words, everyone begins seeing a rabbit rather than a duck, and some readers never see anything else. Even for those who configure the text as satiric fiction, it takes some time for the object of satire to come into focus. From the end of Chapter 19, though, the reader is in a position to see both formal possibilities.

One is then 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. Such a reader's stance---simultaneously inhabiting two audiences and one meta-audience---sounds impossibly complicated, yet it is something we do in real life whenever we are told a story that may or may not be true. For example, when a student recounts an implausible family tragedy as a way of explaining why his work is not on time: if the story is true we are bound to be sympathetic; if it is an elaborate falsehood, however, we are entitled to be infuriated at this attempt to play on our feelings. The primary difference in the case of the Outrage of Gibeah (and other texts exhibiting ambiguous covert irony) is that the audiences are authorial rather than narrative. We are engaged in deciding, not whether a story is true or a lie, but whether a narrative is meant to be taken literally or figuratively; whether or not the author behind that narrative is winking at us.

Such undecidably "stubborn" texts are uncommon within the Bible: a few others might include the rape of Dina in Genesis 34, the deposition of Saul in 1 Samuel 15, and the ascension of Jehu in 2 Kings 9-10. None of these has the precise structure of the Outrage of Gibeah, though all involve recalcitrant material that generates productive radical ambiguity. This is the area in which my continuing work is planned.

I could end here, and maybe I should, but any analyst of reader response is tempted to account for the genesis of the text and the transactions demanded by its narrativity as a plausible production of some author with identifiable allegiances and opinions. Let me start with two observations: Any text that contains pointed satire against a ruler will have been composed either during or soon after his reign. Literary parody can be inspired by any canonical text, but satire fades rapidly with its object. The idea that sarcastic, belittling, personal attacks on Saul as a military leader might have been initiated long after his death doesn't seem likely. Nevertheless, the personality and deeds--including the foibles--of a founding leader can continue to signify, especially to a literate group of political activists, long after that leader has passed into history. The debate about the ideas, and even the sexual proclivities, of Thomas Jefferson continues among liberals and conservatives today, at least partly because founding leaders are models for political thought and action. The notion that an early satire on Saul might have been preserved within a redacted text reshaped for circulation long afterwards does not seem hard to believe at all.

Judges is one segment of the so-called Deuteronomistic Narrative, which runs from the book of Deuteronomy through 2 Kings. The narrative is generally thought to have been composed late in the Israelite monarchy and revised during the Babylonian exile, but it also incorporates much older documents. Judges in particular seems composed of ancient stories (and poetry) that float like pebbles within an amalgamating cement of Deuteronomistic moralizing.

If the Outrage of Gibeah is one of these pebbles from the past, the original story may have involved a much simpler readerly transaction. The action of the original pebble might have been closer to what the Levite reports at Mizpah -- that the lords of Gibeah tried to kill a man and raped his wife so that she died. Here the concubine may have been just a random victim of Benjamite violence, and thus more like poor Fred in the golfing joke. This ur-text would have lampooned or parodied major events of Saul's reign: his cutting up of the oxen, his insistence on risking the entire tribal army to save the frontier town of Jabeshgilead while more important areas of Canaan were not under Israelite control, his superstitious reliance on oracles, his listless waiting under a pomegranate tree before the battle against the Philistines, his fatal combination of rashness and inanition. One might hazard, from the fact that Saul's name is carefully avoided, that the satire originated during Saul's reign, but it might equally have been soon after his death, during the contested rule of David over the southern tribes.

The ideology that I would associate with my "stubborn" reading of the Outrage of Gibeah, however, would belong to a much later era of Israelite history. The conclusion of Judges might have been written after the sack of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, after the assassination of Gedaliah at Mizpah by a pack of revanchist rebels led by Ishmael ben Elishama of the Davidic royal family. 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 kings of the dynasty of David, which was supposed to endure for eternity, and an equally violent end to that generous-hearted and kindly judge whom the Babylonians had appointed to govern the Israelites.

The creator of The Outrage of Gibeah might have been someone who had seen with his own eyes the sack of a great city and other wholesale terror. He understood from experience how easily good intentions can turn into violent acts, outside their perpetrators' control. Whoever created the story without heroes that ends the book of Judges had a mordant vision of the Israelites as individuals, saw husbands as cowardly poltroons, wives as whores, fathers as officious fools, elders as sanctimonious parodies of respectability and tradition. He might have been something like the prophet whose recurring image of Israel is as an adulterous wife committing harlotries in the hills, a Levite dwelling in the tribal area of Benjamin who knew at first hand what sons of Belial his neighbors could be, a man 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. We could even put a name to him: Jeremiah of Anatoth.

To inscribe the story in this way is to recuperate the Outrage of Gibeah on the metacritical level as a difficult rather than a stubborn text. We can again experience the "click of intelligibility, when the signifiers fall into place" once we reconfigure it as a text whose radical ambiguity and undecidability can be 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. 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.