For most of my life, I was defined by my faith — “the evidence of things not seen,” as the Bible calls it. This meant that doubt — even small doubts — was a threat to everyone and everything that mattered most to me in the world, evidence that I was not one of God’s people. Doubts were not something I could indulge.
But eventually, I found myself engulfed in a storm of questions that became too chaotic to suppress. Even after I left my church, many of those questions remained unresolved. And when I’d talk about them with people who were still faithful — people who I knew meant well — they tended to say the same sorts of things my family had said. They reminded me to “trust and obey,” to “lean not on your own understanding,” that “God’s thoughts are above our thoughts, and His ways are above our ways.”
Even though I knew the good intentions behind these ideas, they became frustrating. I knew that until very recently, I myself would have been making the exact same sort of remarks to someone who I knew was struggling with their belief. And the implication that I hadn’t thought of these very obvious ideas — these “solutions” to the problem of my doubt — was grating. Faith was more than a pillar of my life; it was my foundation. The prospect of losing it permanently was such a painful thing. Even as it slipped away, I made this desperate clinging for it, as if I were reaching for a lifeline with both hands, and watching it move just beyond my grasp every time it seemed like I was close to getting it back.
So when someone would say something like “Well, have you prayed about it?”, it would elicit this somewhat bitter feeling inside me: “Oh, why didn’t I think of that?”
*****
Of all the sayings I heard again and again when I became a doubter, there was one that I found more trying than all the rest:
“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
It was a special frustration precisely because it named a tendency I had already recognized in others, and in myself, and I was determined to resist it: the impulse to cast away everything connected to a thing or a person once you’ve decided they’re wrong. This is what my family and I did to the people closest to us when someone decided to leave our faith. We would completely rewrite our experience of them, to see them as having always been “reprobate,” a danger to our very souls.
Eventually, this is what my family would do to me. And I never wanted to do that again, to give in to the impulse to see someone or something as all good or all bad, in any context — not with people, not with experiences, not with ideas. (In many ways, that is the animating theory behind this whole show: to examine with nuance the dark and the light, the beautiful and the broken, and let each scenario, idea, assertion, story stand or fall on its own.)
So when people would say to me, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” I always wondered what they considered “the baby” and what they considered “the bathwater.”
The story I want to share now gets to that very question. From the moment I first questioned whether the Bible was God’s literal, infallible word, this story struck me as, unquestionably, not the baby.
So for today: the bathwater — a story of betrayal, mob violence, and a brutal civil war that nearly destroys an entire tribe of Israel.
*****
Last time, we discussed the period in Israel’s history when they were governed by a series of judges. Like the stories of the dagger in the fat king’s belly and the tent stake hammered into the warrior’s temple, this story comes from the book called, aptly, Judges. And it’s a grim and very graphic, brutal tale.
It always surprises me that this is one of the lesser-known stories in the Bible. To me, the details are so stark as to be unforgettable. And in my family, we knew it well. We made it a habit to embrace the darkest lessons and passages in Scripture. It was proof that we would obey God’s word no matter how “extreme” it seemed to others. And that was no less true with this story, one of the darkest in the entire text — which, maybe needless to say, is a pretty high bar.
The context here matters a lot, and you’ll understand why soon enough. What you need to know is that at this point in the Bible, the people of Israel — after escaping centuries of slavery, and 40 years of wandering in the wilderness — have finally reached the Promised Land. But the tribes are still in disarray. There is no central authority, and society is repeatedly described as falling into cycles of instability and violence.
You also need to know that key to this story is the figure of the Levites. They are a religious class with no territory of their own. They are dispersed among the tribes and dependent on their hospitality. They are the ones who are supposed to hold Israel together spiritually.
And finally, you need to know what a concubine is. You can think of a concubine as a lesser or secondary wife. A concubine is not a prostitute, as some mistakenly assume. This is a woman who was bound to a man in a recognized relationship, just with fewer rights and protections than a wife. These arrangements were not fringe at the time. They’re mentioned throughout the Hebrew Bible, and were a known, accepted part of the social fabric throughout many cultures in the world — particularly for men with the means to maintain them. Women in this position often lacked the social standing, family alliance, or dowry that would accompany a formal marriage. So the relationship was real; it just wasn’t equal to a wife.
This story begins with one man — a Levite — and his concubine, who are having some serious drama. We are not told the names of this couple, only that she “played the whore against him” and then she leaves him. The woman retreats to her father’s house in the city of Bethlehem. There she remains for four months, until her husband decides to go after her — not in anger or jealousy, but “to speak friendly unto her,” and to persuade her to come home with him again. So he takes his servant and a couple of animals, and makes the journey to go get her back.
When the Levite arrives at his father-in-law’s and is reunited with his concubine, a party ensues. For several days they eat and drink and make merry, and the concubine’s father keeps insisting that they stay. By the fifth day, when they finally manage to leave, it’s late in the day, and they can’t make it back to their home by dark.
So that evening, rather than spend the night in one of the foreign cities they’re passing through, the Levite decides that their group will press on to the city of Gibeah, part of the tribe of Benjamin. They arrive just after sunset. I always imagine them starting to set up their tents, feeding their animals — and that’s when an old man sees them and draws near to warn them: “lodge not in the street,” he says. “Let all thy wants lie upon me.”
He’s basically saying, “Let me help you out here. It’s not safe to stay outside.” So the old man brings them into his house to care for them and their animals, and all seems well.
But, as the story goes, a mob begins to surround this old man’s house. The men of the city start beating at the door and yelling.
Now remember, this was a lawless time. There was no central authority, or as the Bible puts it: “In those days, there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”
I think of it as an ancient, Middle Eastern Wild West — but also as a dystopian warning of what can happen when law and order breaks down in a society.
And so when this mob descends on the old man’s house, what they yell at him is: “Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him.” That sounds like a pretty ordinary phrase to modern listeners, but readers of the Bible understand that in this context, “to know” someone is a euphemism. Basically, the mob wants to gang-rape the Levite.
The old man begs them not to do such a thing and offers the mob an alternative: “Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them will I bring out now, and humble ye them, and do what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing.”
So essentially, Leave the man alone, but here is his concubine, and my daughter. If you’re going to rape someone, rape them. But the men of Gibeah refuse to listen to the old man, and this is when the Levite takes matters into his own hands: He delivers his concubine to the men beating at the door.
And like a scene from a horror movie, the mob seizes her. They descend on her like a horde of zombies, and she’s swallowed up by their bodies.
At least that’s how I always imagine it.
What the text actually says is: “they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go.” So this mob rapes this woman all night long — and at daybreak, they finally release her.
As the day dawns, the woman falls down at the door of the old man’s house. And when her husband arises and opens the door to leave, he finds her there, collapsed. “Her hands on the threshold of the door,” it says. That detail evokes one of the most disturbing images in my mind’s eye: this desperate woman — bruised, bloody, slumped on the ground, her hands grasping for safety that she’ll never reach. Horrifying.
But apparently not to her husband. Because when he sees her lying there in that pitiful, crumpled state, “he [says] unto her, Up, and let us be going.”
“But none [answers].”
Because the woman is dead.
And seeing her lying there, lifeless, the Levite picks up the body of his concubine, carries her body all the way back to his home, and — as if this story hasn’t been ghastly enough — he hacks her body into 12 pieces. Then, he sends a piece of her body to each of the twelve tribes of Israel. The Bible says that everyone who sees these pieces of bloody flesh declares that nothing so horrific has been done in Israel.
*****
Not long after, the tribes gather to discuss this gruesome scenario.
They listen as the Levite tells his story, and the response is unanimous. All the men gathered there are of one mind. They decide to send messengers throughout all of Benjamin with a question — “What wickedness is this that is done among you?” — along with a simple demand: Turn over those men of Gibeah so that we can put them to death and “put away evil from Israel.”
But the men of Benjamin refuse. The tribe, for some reason, chooses to protect that mob in Gibeah — to protect these murderous rapists. So the other 11 tribes decide that, first of all, none of their women will ever marry a man from the tribe of Benjamin. And also that there must be civil war over this, that the tribe of Benjamin must pay in blood for their evil.
But despite the fact that the tribe of Benjamin is much smaller in numbers, they dominate the first two battles in this war, slaughtering 40,000 men in just two days of fighting. The losing tribes weep and fast and make offerings to God. They ask Him if they should go to battle a third time. And God answers their prayers, saying, “Go up; for tomorrow I will deliver them into thine hand.”
The next day, the children of Israel battle again — and this time the 11 tribes slaughter 25,000 men of Benjamin. But they take it further: They kill their animals, and their women, and they set their cities on fire. Amidst the carnage, 600 men manage to flee into the wilderness. They are all that remain of the tribe of Benjamin.
Only now, having prevailed, the Israelites face a new problem: In their passion on the battlefield, they have almost annihilated one of the twelve tribes of Israel, and they believe they cannot allow the entire tribe to perish. So what are they to do? There are no women left to repopulate Benjamin. All their women have been killed — because, of course, they killed them — and all the men of Israel have sworn an oath to God not to marry their daughters to the sons of Benjamin.
Well, it turns out that there was one city in Israel that had sent no men to battle, and thus had made no oath. So, thousands of men are dispatched to that city to kill every man, every woman, even every child — a punishment for not showing up to battle — but they make an exception for the young women, whom they keep alive. They capture 400 young virgins in the city, bring them to the camp, and give them as wives to the surviving men of Benjamin.
But there’s still a problem. There were 600 men of Benjamin who survived, and only 400 virgins — which means that there are still 200 men of Benjamin who remain without wives. So to fix this problem, the Israelites give these instructions to the last 200 men: Listen. Every year, there’s this feast. It’s in this place, at this time. And if you want a wife? “Go and lie in wait in the vineyards; And see, and behold, if the daughters…come out to dance in dances, then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife.”
And they continue, “When their fathers or their brethren come unto us to complain” about their daughters or sisters having been caught and forced into marriage, “we will say unto them, ‘Be favorable unto them for our sakes.’” It’s our fault for killing all of their women during the war, and not reserving a wife for these men.
And the men of Benjamin do exactly as they’re instructed. On the outskirts of this celebration, they lie in wait — shrouded in darkness, maybe, or hidden in foliage, or maybe both. And when the time comes for the young women to come out into the vineyards and dance, 200 of them are caught, kidnapped, and taken as “wives.”
Now, see if you can picture the scene of how I, as a young child, would have come to know this story: sitting around my living room, surrounded by my brothers and sisters, reading these chapters and verses out loud with reverence. Eventually I developed this new habit: whenever we’d get to the end of this story — to the part about the men who catch themselves a wife dancing out in a field — I would offer a chipper “The end!” into the silence in our living room.
I don’t remember exactly when I developed the habit, but the disgust I felt at this story became harder and harder to suppress as I grew older. It was solidly in place even while I was an ardent and zealous defender of my family’s doctrines, years before I began to truly doubt the goodness of our beliefs. If I had to guess, I would say it started in my late teens or early twenties, the point at which I began to identify with the women in the story. It seemed to me that every single woman mentioned had been treated unconscionably, and I could not imagine myself in place of any one of them.
The women who were out celebrating in dances, snatched by desperate men and forced into marriage. The women who were given to men as gifts, after having just seen their loved ones slaughtered. The virgin daughter offered up by the old man to the mob. The concubine sacrificed by her husband to a feral mob and raped to death. Her husband, then, finding her collapsed outside the house with her hands on the threshold of the door — commanding her “Up, and let us be going.”
I never knew what to do with the disgust and contempt that would rise in my chest whenever my family would arrive back at this story in our nightly readings — so the best I could do was try to shake it off or bring a bit of levity. My little “The end!” would always get laughs from my siblings, and even from my mom, who seemed just as at a loss about some of this as I was, particularly the part about the men lying in wait to catch themselves a wife. The absurdity of it. My mom had always exuded such incredible strength, and the idea of being subjected to such a fate seemed to rankle her as much as it did me.
From the moment it occurred to me to doubt my certainty about the divine origins of the Bible, this was the first story that sprang to my mind. Suddenly, I was free to entertain my own skepticism, and it was a shift that changed the whole way I saw this story. Because when I stopped trying to suppress my disgust and finally allowed myself to feel it, I experienced a flood. I felt an absolute rejection of the actions of the men in this story — rejection of what lay at the heart of my family’s beliefs: the idea that if something happened, it was because God caused it, and it was therefore good. I simply could not believe that any part of this story offered any kind of moral example.
And to be fair, most believers I speak with aren’t even familiar with this story. Unlike, say, the Christmas story, this isn’t one that gets taught or preached about very often. And when it is, it isn’t an example of what good Christian morals look like. It’s not a moral example at all. And for the ones who are familiar with it, a lot of them see it as describing, rather than endorsing, the events it recounts.
Perhaps the most generous reading of it is that it’s setting the stage for what’s about to come: that Israel will be united as a kingdom, and this is just the horrific lows they encountered in an age of anarchy — and that’s it.
That makes sense to me, but I had a hard time adopting that position myself because of what’s missing from the narrative: The Bible isn’t usually shy with its moral condemnation. And yes, the mob of Gibeah and the tribe of Benjamin are judged and punished.
But none of the men seem to hesitate in the slightest to offer these women up as “solutions.” The old man offers his daughter. The Levite thrusts out his concubine. The surviving Benjaminites are supplied with wives through slaughter and abduction. And nowhere does the narrative stop to say: there’s horror here, too.
Instead, the story moves forward as though the fates of these women are mere logistics — a means to an end.
And especially in the absence of explicit condemnation, the implicit message my family and I took from the text was: “The omnipotent, omniscient God of Eternity orchestrated this series of events, and His judgment is unquestionable. If you have a problem with what happened here, the problem is with your judgment — not God’s.”
And if you accept that premise, the moral calculus flips. The suffering of the women isn’t the problem. The slaughter of the tribe isn’t the problem. The problem is you — your discomfort, your outrage, your instinct that something here is terribly wrong.
For most of my life, that’s what I believed. I had been taught that the highest virtue was submission: that if something in Scripture disturbed you, the faithful response was humility — to assume that the error lay in your understanding, not in the story itself.
And it was that idea — even more than the horrifying details of the story itself — that became “the bathwater” for me, that had to be thrown out: the idea that it was improper for me to doubt — or even to question — the goodness of the God who was said to stand behind it all.
When I think back to those nights, sitting with my family reading at the end of the Book of Judges, offering that half-joking, half-exasperated “The end!” — I see one of the first small cracks in the foundation of my faith.
Not because the story was violent. The Bible is full of violence. But because this was one of the first times that I felt, unmistakably, that the voice telling me not to question was the one that needed to be silenced.
*****
Where I find myself landing today, at the end of this story, is still full of questions that I can’t quite shake. I’ve said before that I’m not interested in planting my flag on the moral high ground of the present and declaring simply: Well, people were worse back then. That's too easy, and I don’t think it's quite true. The instincts in this story — the mob, the scapegoating, the way the powerless become currency in the transactions of the powerful, the way an entire community can look at something monstrous and find reasons not to call it that — those are not Bronze Age problems we just can’t fathom today.
So I keep asking myself: Is this story still worth passing down? Is there some lesson or moral or value that it served to the tribes and civilizations and religions that saw a holiness somewhere in it that we would be sad to abandon? I don’t know. I’m not sure there’s a clean answer. Is it trying to teach us that sometimes, life is unfair, the world can be an ugly place, and justice doesn’t always come in a timely way?
I’d love to hear what you think.