1. a Levite. Though nothing further is made in the story of his status as Levite, and no reference is made to any sacerdotal function performed by him, there is an obvious link with the morally dubious Levite lad in the immediately preceding story. Hereditary connection with the cult is clearly no guarantee of character.

2. played the whore against him. Given that a man and his concubine are involved, this could refer to sexual infidelity, but the fact that she goes off to her father’s house and that he wants her back argues for the metaphorical sense of this idiom: she pulled away from him, no longer wanted to remain with him.

3. his lad was with him and a pair of donkeys. Both servant and donkey will have a role to play as the story darkens.

the young woman’s. The fact that she is young, a naʿarah, will make what ensues all the more painful.

rejoiced to greet him. The rejoicing may be from the father’s perception that his daughter and the Levite will now be reconciled, but there is an odd emphasis in the story that the father is somehow smitten with the Levite, to the exclusion of concern for his daughter.

5. a morsel of bread. This is a polite understatement for a full meal.

6. enjoy good cheer. This mood idiom usually implies feasting and drinking.

7. his father-in-law pressed him and he stayed. In this story that turns on the refusal and then violation of hospitality, the father-in-law’s importuning of his guest looks in its exaggeration like a grotesque parody of hospitality.

8. the two of them ate. The Levite and his father-in-law. The concubine is not part of the feast.

10. the pair of saddled donkeys. At the end of the story, one of them will carry a grisly load on its back.

12. We shall not turn aside to a town of strangers. In the event, this consideration proves to be a bitter delusion because Israelites will behave more barbarically to them than any strangers.

13. And he said to his lad. The repetition of the formula for introducing speech indicates that the servant is perplexed or disturbed by what his master says but has no way of answering him: why, he must be thinking, does he insist that we move on when the only reasonable thing to do would be to seek refuge in this nearby Jebusite town?

15. but there was no man to take them in. This is the first signal of the network of allusions to the story of the visit of the two divine messengers to Sodom in Genesis 19.

16. the man was from the high country of Ephraim. Pointedly, the sole person in Gibeah prepared to honor the civilized obligation of hospitality is not a Benjaminite.

18. to the house of the LORD. This is a little odd because there is no indication that he lives in a sanctuary back in the far reaches of the high country of Ephraim. Also, instead of the preposition ʾel, “to,” the text shows an accusative particle, ʾet. Many, following the Septuagint, emend the two Hebrew words here to read, “to my house.”

20. Only all your lack is upon me. The old man refuses the Levite’s offer to bring his own provisions into the house.

Only do not spend the night in the square. The old man knows how dangerous it would be to spend the night outside exposed to the lubricious townsmen. The parallel with the story of Lot and his two daughters begins to become explicit.

22. They were making good cheer. As before, this is a mood idiom associated with eating and drinking.

worthless men. This judgmental phrase is added to the near verbatim quotation from Genesis 19:4.

Bring out the man . . . that we may know him. This is a direct quotation of Genesis 19:5, except that there the plural “men” appears because there are two of them. The gang-rapists’ initial preference is homosexual, but they clearly would also have been aware that the stranger was traveling with a young woman.

23. No, my brothers, no, pray, do no harm. These words are quoted from Genesis 19.8.

scurrilous thing. The Hebrew nevalah is a term generally used for shameful sexual acts.

24. Here are my virgin daughter and his concubine. This replicates Lot’s offer of his two virgin daughters to the rapists (Genesis 19:8). One does not know which is the more outrageous proposal, offering his daughter to be gang-raped or his guest’s concubine, over whom he surely does not have jurisdiction.

rape them and do to them whatever you want. The parallel text in Genesis 19:8 lacks the brutally direct “rape” (or “abuse”). Its insertion makes us wonder all the more what kind of father the old man is and what kind of host he is to the young woman, whom he appears to regard as a piece of disposable property.

25. the man seized his concubine and brought her out to them. In the event, it is the Levite, prepared to do anything to save his own skin, who thrusts his concubine into the clutches of the rapists. No action follows on the old man’s offer of his daughter to the rapists. Perhaps, seeing the Levite thrust his concubine outside, he concludes that one victim will suffice.

And they knew her and abused her all night long till morning. The source story in Genesis takes place in legendary times when there was supernatural intervention in human affairs. The two strangers, because they are divine beings, blind the would-be rapists and secure the safety of those within the house. In the latter-day era of the present story, there is no miraculous intervention—the female victim is gang-raped all night long and dies at daybreak from the prolonged violent abuse.

26. fell at the entrance to the house. She expires in this liminal space, her arms stretching out across the threshold of the house where she might have been safe, her body sprawled on the ground before the house, which is the outside zone of anarchic and destructive lust.

27. her master. Only at the end of the story is he called, repeatedly and almost ironically, “her master.”

arose . . . and opened the doors of the house and went out to go on his way. He is all brisk business and seems unconcerned about the fate of his concubine.

And, look, the woman, his concubine. Only now does he look down and see her brutalized body, identifying her first as a woman and then as his concubine.

28. Get up, and let us go. He at first does not realize that she is dead. This brusque command reveals his utter moral callousness: he expects the woman, after having been gang-raped hour after hour, to pick herself up quickly and join him on the journey back.

he took her on his donkey. At first, we may think he means to give her a decent burial near his home.

29. took a cleaver and held his concubine and cut her up limb by limb into twelve pieces. Although the intention is to trigger outrage in all the tribes—the number twelve is automatic, but it would actually be eleven, because Benjamin is excluded—over the atrocity that has been perpetrated, the act itself is barbaric, and in biblical terms, it is a desecration of the human body. It should be said, moreover, that the Levite until this point has himself been singularly lacking in outrage over the gang-rape of his concubine. In any case, the butchering of her body completes the set of images of mutilation and other violence done to the body that begins in the opening chapter of Judges with the chopping off of the thumbs and big toes of the captured king Adoni-Bezek.