My sister’s keeper: The Levite as brother-guardian
How the priests and Levites served as brother-guardians of Israel until her wedding day
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The book of Judges ends with the gruesome story of the Levite and his concubine, her brutal rape in Gibeah, and the national conflict that ensues as a result (Jud. 19-22). It is, as E T A Davidson says, “an allegory of the history of the pre-monarchic period”. She continues:
In the parable, the Concubine is “Israel,” ravished by the terrible tribe of Benjamin, and now being cut apart into 12 pieces (i.e., 12 separate dysfunctional tribes) […] Israel is not even at this time a legal wife. [E T A Davidson, Intricacy, Design & Cunning in the Book of Judges, 60.]
This insight by Davidson is basically sound, relying as it does on the very common motif of Israel-as-bride. But given that Scripture focuses so much of its marital symbolism on the figure of the king, why is Israel portrayed here as married to a Levite?
I will argue that by placing the Levite in the husband role for this narrative, the author of Judges is bringing to our attention that the Levitical priesthood is not an adequate “husband” for the people of Israel, and that at this point in their history some better husband is needed, namely, a king. The Levites fail to exercise faithfully their office as the brother-guardian of the bride Israel, charged to guard her virginity until she is given to her husband, the king.
The king as the husband of Israel
The marital motif of Scripture is closely connected to the pairing of the figures of the king as husband with the people or the city as his bride.
Psalm 45 exhibits this theme with clarity yet economy, evoking key themes of the literature concerning David and his son Solomon. Like David himself, the king is a handsome figure, moreso than all “the children of men” (Ps. 45:2; cf. 1 Sam. 16:12). The king is “blessed forever”: this should remind us of the Davidic covenant, in which God promises that David’s son would rule “forever” as God’s own son (2 Sam. 7:13, 16). The king images God’s own person: he is addressed as God on an eternal throne, alongside God himself (Ps. 45:6-7).
Alongside this Davidic king is a fittingly glorious bride. In marrying this king, she is decisively leaving behind her former people and her father’s house in promise of being the mother of many children, who will be “princes in all the earth” (Ps. 45:6, 16). She is illustrated in terms that evoke the Solomonic temple: she is draped in the gold of Ophir, just as David prepared gold of Ophir for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem (1 Chr. 29:3-4). The daughter of Tyre is present at the wedding to offer the bride a gift, just as Hiram of Tyre offered his services for the construction of the temple under Solomon (1 Kings 7:13-14).
The king, as God’s son, represents his Father’s person in a more direct way than do the king’s other servants. The writer to the Hebrews invokes this distinction, contrasting “Moses [who] was faithful in all God’s house as a servant” with Christ, God’s son, who is “the express image of his person” (Heb. 3:5; 1:3, ESV). Therefore, it is fitting for Israel’s marriage covenant to the Lord to be imaged in terms of marrying the king rather than marrying a priest.
Israel’s marriage to the Davidic monarch is a high point in its national history, and that marriage brings resolution to Israel’s “unmarried” state under the guardianship of the priests and Levites. In that time prior to the arrival of the king, it was imperative that the bride Israel be prepared and kept pure for her wedding day.
Guarding the daughter’s virginity
The Scriptures present a moral standard of virginity prior to marriage. While this is the case for both men and women, this moral command should not be understood in a gender-neutral way. A father’s concern for his daughter’s virginity has a different accent than his concern for his son’s virginity. In the book of Proverbs, the father’s exhortations to his son against fornication or adultery focus upon the son’s wasting his honour and strength, and being disqualified for godly rule (Prov. 5:7-23). On the other hand, the father’s concern for his daughter’s virginity focuses upon her desirability as a marriage prospect: for example, Caleb offered his daughter Achsah as a prize to a sufficiently worthy warrior (Jud. 1:12-13). [See also Johanna Stiebert, Fathers & Daughters in the Hebrew Bible, 48-49.]
God is often presented not only as the father of the bridegroom, as discussed above, but also as the father of the bride. The Lord both takes a pure wife for his excellent son, and gives his valuable daughter to a worthy husband (cf. Jer. 29:6). As James Jordan notes concerning the first marriage in the garden:
Eve was Adam’s sister, and we [the human race] are Jesus' sister, God's daughter to marry His Son. Thus, the Song of Solomon always says “my sister, my bride.” [James B Jordan, Trees and Thorns, 127.]
Therefore, God as father is concerned for the virginity of his daughter so long as she is not-yet-married.
The brother-guardian as father’s agent
Importantly, there is a role for the virgin’s brother to serve as the father’s agent to guard the young woman’s virginity until her marriage. This brother-guardian role appears in a few places in Scripture. For example, we meet Laban twice in the book of Genesis, first as the older brother of the virgin Rebekah, responsible for giving her to Isaac (Gen. 24:29), then again as the father of the virgins Leah and Rachel (Gen. 29:13). Laban’s role with respect to each bride is very similar in both cases, indicating the extent to which the brother of the bride can represent the authority of the father of the bride.
The brother-guardian also appears in the Song of Songs. While the Shulamite’s father does not appear the Song, her older brothers do. They describe their role as protective of her sexual purity until her betrothal: If she guards her virginity as a “wall”, they will deck her with silver to honour her; however, if she opens herself up like a “door”, who fails to protect her own purity, they will board her up to protect her (Song 8:8-9).
The most relevant example for our purposes is the episode in Genesis 34 in which Simeon and Levi exact bloody vengeance on the men of Shechem’s city, who have dealt with their sister as a “harlot” (Gen. 34:31). As Howard Eilberg-Schwartz notes:
one of the primary concerns of this story is whether Israel, as represented by Jacob and his sons, should have social relations with non-Israelites alongside whom it dwells. [Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism, 126.]
It is fitting that the sons’ vengeful killing of the Shechemites involves inviting them to join the covenant people via circumcision, as this illustrates something about the rite itself: circumcision is a cutting-off of unclean flesh. In Simeon’s and Levi’s judgment, the whole people of Shechem are “unclean things” which must be cut off to protect the pure covenant people.
This violent zeal for the virgin’s honour foreshadows that zeal which later would qualify Levi’s descendants for their ministry after Israel’s worship of the golden calf at Sinai (Ex. 32:25-29), and the zeal which would win Phinehas favour from the Lord after he excises fornication from the camp of Israel at Baal-peor (Num. 25).
Why is the father Jacob not pre-eminent in the avenging of his daughter in this story? Mary Anna Bader has argued that the Mosaic law presents fathers as having an intimate involvement in protecting his virgin and avenging her defilement. In contrast to this expectation, Bader considers that Jacob recedes into the background of the narrative “in silence and passivity”. [Mary Anna Bader, Sexual Violation in the Hebrew Bible: A Multi-Methodological Study of Genesis 34 and 2 Samuel 13, 76. Bader says the same of David’s passivity following the rape of Tamar (2 Sam 13).]
Without a doubt, Jacob is distanced from Dinah in this narrative: for example, Dinah is introduced as “the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob”, rather than as Jacob’s daughter per se (Gen. 34:1). However, if as I have argued, there is a proper role for the brother-guardian, then the acts of Levi and Simeon should be seen as the exercise of a legitimate authority (albeit with excessive force), rather than as their “usurping the role that readers might have expected the fathers of the women to play” [Bader, 76].
The later appointment of the Levites as deemed “firstborns” for the Lord under the Mosaic covenant (Num. 3:12, 41) institutionalises this brother-guardian role: just as Levi sought to guard Dinah’s chastity, the Levites will bear the responsibility before their father God to ensure that Israel is guarded from idolatry and false worship.
The failure of the Levites in the era of the Judges
With this in mind, the significance of the story of the Levite and the concubine becomes quite a bit clearer, and various of its details fall into place.
The narrative is bookended with the refrain that “there was no king in Israel” (Jud. 19:1; 21:25). The story presents two major problems with the fact that Israel was without a king: firstly, Israel is not able to leave behind false worship and advance to right worship of the true God; secondly, Israel risks being assaulted and divided, that is, becoming a disparate set of tribes rather than a united kingdom.
Israel’s failure to leave behind false worship
Once the characters and setting are introduced, the narrative begins its movement in verse 2, mentioning the concubine’s adultery and apostasy from her husband the Levite. Evidently, the Levite is unable to win her affections. James Jordan is correct to understand this return to the father’s house as symbolic of Israel’s “return” to Egypt or to Ur of Chaldees, in the sense of returning to the worship of those idols from the earlier part of their history. [James B Jordan, Judges: A Practical and Theological Commentary, 294.]
The Levite in our story is (eventually) successful in effecting an exodus of the concubine from her father’s house, just as the Levites Moses and Aaron were successful in bringing Israel out of slavery and idolatry in Egypt. However, the Levite fails to bring his concubine all the way from her father’s house in Bethlehem-judah to “the house of the Lord” (Jud. 19:18).
In Deuteronomy, the Lord had taught Israel that their entry into the land would necessitate the utter destruction of the high places of false worship, and that their liturgical chaos (“every man [doing] whatsoever is right in his own eyes”: Deut. 12:8) would be resolved by the establishing of a central place of worship where the Lord would choose to place his Name (Deut. 12:5). Thus, the exodus from Egypt is not completed by mere relocation into the land of Canaan, but by coming to true worship of the Lord:
Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thine inheritance, in the place, O Lord, which thou hast made for thee to dwell in, in the Sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established. (Ex. 15:17)
Our story—and the book of Judges as whole—closes with an allusion to Deuteronomy 12:5 (Jud. 21:25), signalling that the Exodus not yet come to completion. There was no king in Israel, the priests and Levites had failed to bring Israel to the full experience of worship that the Lord had intended for them.
The rape and division of Israel
The failure of the Levite to care for his concubine should not be taken as a total absolution of the responsibility of the concubine herself. While clearly the concubine does not exhibit the same degree of agency as do most of the other characters in the narrative, her own sins of adultery and apostasy from the Levite appear to initiate the drama. Her gruesome fate is a bitterly ironic answer to her forsaking of her husband: she ends up being cast out by him into the hands of other “lovers”.
Throughout the course of the book of Judges, the reader witnesses Israel’s returning again and again to doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord. Each time, it invites its own conquest by foreign nations and their gods. This is not merely a repeated cycle, but a downward spiral that seems to get worse and worse over the course of the book.
The nation is also at risk of being “cut up” throughout Judges, as it lacks a strong sense of itself as one nation. For example, in her song, Deborah reprimands the tribes of Reuben, Dan and Asher for not joining in the battle against Sisera (Jud. 5:15-17). In our present story, the assault upon the Levite’s concubine in Gibeah results in a civil war, in which the tribe of Benjamin is very nearly cut off from Israel by the other tribes.
Israel is not only vulnerable to attack from enemies without, but the tribes are also vulnerable to internal conflict and disharmony which threatens to tear them apart.
In those days, there were priests and Levites in Israel
The subtext of the refrain, that in those days there was no king in Israel, is that there were priests and Levites in Israel in those days—but they were not competent to bring Israel into true worship or to protect them from assault and internal conflict. Under the half-hearted care of the Levites, the people were not flourishing at all.
We are invited to wonder if things might have been different for the concubine if she’d had a better husband to protect her.
How the monarchy (mostly) solves these problems
The establishment of the monarchy is not an afterthought to God’s purposes in the redemption of Israel, but is in fact an integral part of Israel’s destiny. There is a real sense in which the Exodus is not fully realised until the priestly brother-guardian has brought Israel to her husband-king.
Thus, the king is presented as the husband that Israel has been waiting for. As Robert Alter notes, “David is repeatedly the object […] of the verb ‘to love’” throughout the narrative of Samuel, whether by Saul, Jonathan or various women. [Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, Vol. 2 (The Writings), 251.] The husband-king is introduced to address the particular problems of the pre-monarchic era set out above.
The king (mostly) puts away the idols and establishes right worship
David, Solomon and their righteous sons make significant strides towards the Deuteronomic vision of right worship established in the land and high places torn down.
David establishes a tabernacle for the ark in Jerusalem and makes the preliminary moves towards the construction of the temple, for example, providing materials and purchasing the threshing floor as the site for its construction (1 Chron. 15:1ff; 29:1ff; 21:18ff).
As Solomon gives effect to these Davidic plans, the author of Kings draws to our attention that in the early part of Solomon’s reign, “the people sacrificed in high places, because there was no house built unto the name of the Lord, until those days” (1 Kings 3:2). Thus, the author presents King Solomon’s construction of the temple as the answer to the problem of every man doing what is right in his own eyes.
The reign of Josiah is particularly notable for his tearing down the sites of false worship within Judah. His first mention in prophecy comes in the immediate context of the division of the two kingdoms and the establishment of idolatry in the north under Jeroboam (1 Kings 13:1-3). When Josiah at last makes his appearance, the author of Kings focuses upon his efforts in tearing down the high places, even in Bethel, and restoring worship according to God’s law (2 Kings 23).
The king (mostly) unites the nation
While Judges haunts the reader with the real possibility of a divided and internally fractious assortment of Israelite tribes, the establishment of the monarchy holds out the promise of uniting the people.
One example of this is in Saul’s successful rallying together of the nation, as the city of Jabesh-gilead is threatened by Nahash the Ammonite and his army (1 Kings 11). Will this city be raped and pillaged, like the Levite’s concubine? Quite the contrary: in a very clear allusion to the Levite’s cutting up of his concubine in Judges 19, Saul now cuts up oxen and sends the parts throughout the land, calling the tribes to unite in defence of besieged Jabesh-gilead.
David and Solomon have more success in their uniting of the tribes than Saul did; however, this unity is always somewhat fragile. David’s reign is marked by a lingering question as to whether, or to what extent, various parts of the nation have a part or inheritance in David.
Women appear in the narrative as symbols of Israel throughout David’s reign as this question of the nation’s unity is teased out. For example, as Absalom is staging his coup, David leaves his ten concubines behind at his house, which Absalom later has sex with to symbolise his conquest of his father’s kingdom (2 Sam. 15:16). The symbolic import is troubling: David seems willing to leave the ten tribes of northern Israel to be ravished by another.
The rebellion of Sheba the Benjaminite again raises the question of the nation’s unity, immediately following a brief dispute between northerners and southerners about their respective shares in David (2 Sam. 19:43-20:1). At this point, it is mentioned that David
took the ten women his concubines, whom he had left to keep the house, and put them in ward, and fed them, but went not in unto them. So they were shut up unto the day of their death, living in widowhood. (2 Sam. 20:3)
The reader wonders, “Does the husband of Israel love the ten northern tribes of Israel at all?”
The kingdom in summary
While there are real and substantial advances towards for the bride Israel under her husband-king, those advances are easily lost because, in many ways, the kings reenact the sins of the people under the judges, re-establishing the high places and worshipping idols. After the death of Solomon, the kingdom of Israel is divided up once again as the ten northern tribes at last come to the painful conclusion that they have no share in the house of David (1 Kings 12:16).
At last, the northern and southern kingdoms are each struck with the sword for their “whoredoms” and cast out from the land (Ezek. 23:25). In the exile, Israel has effectively returned to square one, and the divided nation awaits cleansing from idolatry and reunion under a single king:
Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. (Ezek. 36:25)
And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all. (Ezek. 37:22)
Christ as Israel's long-awaited husband
This movement from brother-guardian to husband that I have sketched out above gives us a basic framework by which to understand not only the movement from priest to king within the Old Covenant, but also the movement from the (priestly) Old Covenant as a whole to the (kingly) New Covenant. Christ comes as the long-awaited husband-king to take back the nation that had been put away for her adultery (cf. Is. 50:1).
The book of Hebrews presents Moses as a sort of emblematic figure for the entire Old Covenant era. By means of the law and the institutions which bear his name, Moses continued to serve faithfully over God’s house until her true husband should arrive. Therefore, Paul compares the law of Moses to the former husband of God’s people, yet one who was unable to make the people fruitful. Having died to the law of Moses, God’s people have been freed to “be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God” (Rom. 7:2-4).
Christ, faithful over God’s house not merely as a servant but as a son, is thus the fitting husband for Israel in a way that “Moses” never could have been. Joined to him, the church will bear many more children than the Old Israel who, at least at that moment, had a husband (Is. 54:2; Gal. 4:26-27).
The Apostle Paul as faithful brother-guardian
The brother-guardian role is not obsoleted with the coming of Christ the bridegroom. Rather, the New Testament presents the apostles as assuming a new kind of brother-guardian role, preparing the fledging first-century church for her marriage to her husband-king.
Paul is the preeminent example of this. Prior to his conversion, he exhibited the zeal of a Levi or a Phinehas, seeking to preserve Israel from apparent apostasy. His zeal continues after his conversion, and his epistles to the churches demonstrate concerns very similar to those discussed above in the pre-monarchic period. Where the Levites had failed to address the problem of each one doing what was right in his own eyes, Paul labours to preserve the purity of the church’s worship, directing the Corinthians that it is to be “done decently and in order” (1 Cor. 14:40) and warning them from being partakers in “the table of demons” (1 Cor. 10:21, ESV).
Paul also teaches that the apostles were given to the church for the sake of her unity (Eph. 4:1-16). The apostle’s many exhortations concerning forgiveness and forbearance are not mere moral platitudes, but are intended to help the church avoid the kinds of divisions and internal strife that were a black mark on Israel’s history and robbed them of fully enjoying their inheritance. He labours to bring together Jew and Gentile into one body, as in Christ, “neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation” (Gal. 6:15). In a striking inversion, Paul’s zeal to cut off the Judaizers and to “intermarry” Gentiles into the body of Christ recalls Levi’s zeal to protect the daughter of the covenant and “cut off” the uncircumcised men of Shechem.
At the end of the apostolic age, the reward for Paul’s labours was a church built up, united and found without spot or blemish. Even to this day, it is the beauty of this church that Christ greatly desires, and her children are princes in the earth.
This essay is an ever-so-slightly reworked version of a term paper for my Theology of the Sexes course taken as part of my M.Litt program.
I am indebted to Dr Alastair Roberts for bringing to my attention that the Bible's teaching about the sexes involves not only the relationship between husband and wife, but also the many relationships we have as fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters.