The Son and the City: The Levite and his Wife

Anthropology and Antithesis in the last chapters of Judges

Building on the work of others, I have been seeking to lay a foundation for gender that aligns with God’s description of our creation in Genesis 1-2. Genesis 1 tells us that we were made like God, bearing his image like the impression made from a seal, an equally ultimate unity as one mankind and a diversity as male and female, told to fill the earth. Genesis 2 tells us that there is also an essential order to our creation as male and female. Man comes first, and he is from the earth and is created before God plants the garden of Eden. After he is created, God places him there to serve and guard it. Eve comes last. She is created in the garden, built by God himself from a consecrated side of Adam.  As second and last, I suggest that she points to our enduring end in the city of God. She reflects something of the Glory-tent which proceeds from the throne of the eternal Son, a Spirit-city which is feminized as mother and bride in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. 

Can we as a church consider the options for a theocentric, trinitarian, Christocentric foundation on which to build an anthropology that raises our thoughts to God? Some are still suggesting that we should look to the lower creation to understand ourselves— Doug Wilson, for example, suggests birds. But not any birds, he wants us to model our lives on robins because the male birds do not do the domestic work of helping the female birds build the nest.¹  Though it may sound far-fetched to him, I offer the option that we were not made like the birds, but like God. We reveal him. Juxtaposed with the woman, man reveals something of the Son as begotten of the Father and enthroned in heaven at the Father’s right hand. He reveals the eternal Son who was made incarnate, the Shepherd of the Gospels and Revelation, the Lamb in the center of the throne who leads us to springs of living water and wipes away every tear from our eyes (Rev 7:17). Contrasted with the man, woman’s creation reveals the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and Son as the Shekinah, the holy dwelling of God. From God’s throne proceeds the forming and filling of heaven, a glorious manifestation of the Spirit described as the train of the Lord’s robe in Isaiah 6. I believe the skirt or hem of the One on the throne refers to the tent pitched in the heavens. This is our end as those who have been brought near to serve him day and night and over whom he (the Son) spreads his tabernacle (the Spirit).  We are destined to be with the Son in the Spirit forever. That tent is filled with holy smoke, the glory of the triune God. When woman is called the glory of the man, I suggest it refers to her representation of the Spirit in the heavens, who proceeds from the one in the midst of the throne as the dwelling of God (1 Cor 11:7). When Revelation says, “I saw no temple because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple,” it simply speaks of the beatific vision, which, simply stated, is the One seated on the throne and his Glory-Spirit. This is our end. We are a people destined to be with the Lamb in the Spirit-Tent, illumined by his glory presence forever. This is our inheritance in the triune God who formed us for himself.

I have been accused of using a “feminist hermeneutic” because I find my identity as a woman in the unfolding revelation of the Spirit of God manifest in Jerusalem, our Mother, the bridal city of the Lamb. Perhaps I have aimed too high. But my question continues to be, “Where else is there to aim?” God told us that we are like him, the impression of his own ineffable being.  Of course, we all understand “feminism” differently, but I hope it is clear that my proposition is not an exhibition of femaleness as greater than maleness, but rather an eschatological and enduring meaning given to our differences as male and female rooted in God as triune.  The modern alternative to our identity as male and female founded in the Son and Spirit, the Lamb and his Glory Citadel, is the temporal, fleeting mark put upon us by modern interpreters. They offer that we are what we do here and now. For them, male and female find their primary significance not in our triune God above but in “roles” attached to our “natural use” relative to the times and places in which we live, the customs of our cultures.  They say that our natural uses are biblical priorities.  Really? Three patriarchs' wives were naturally barren, together averaging less than two children. Sarah gave birth once, and so did Rebekah (to twins). Rachel gave birth twice, with the second birth leading to her premature death. Her “give me children or I die” turned out to be, “give me children and I die.” Is my enduring identity what I do below in my brief sojourn on this earth, whether it is magnifying male strength (John Piper) or submission in earthly marriage (Douglas Wilson) or bearing natural sons?² 

We have enlarged the temporal and lost sight of the eternal. Through our differences as male and female, God is lifting our eyes from mortal life below to immortal life above. After the pronouncement of death in Genesis 3, the name Adam gives to his wife is  “life.”  Because of her promised Seed, “Eve” as a woman continues to represent enduring life in the New Garden, the mother realm. She sets our eyes above. When we “pass away,” we pass to the life for which we were made, the life of that City. The realm of Sabbath rest is the mother who will nurture us forever. Eve understood this. Eve had eyes of faith. She was looking for the son who would bring her to the City. She gave her first son the name Cain, with the words, "I have gotten a man from the Lord,” not because she was looking to multiply sons under sin, but for her man-child and Savior, the son from heaven, who would slay the serpent and reverse the curse and consequences brought about by her and Adam’s disobedience. After Abel was killed by Cain, Eve gave birth to another son, naming him Seth and saying, “for God has appointed (שִׁית) for me another seed (זֶרַע) instead of Abel,” two Hebrew words used in the promise of Genesis 3:15 (Gen 4:25). Child-bearing below is not the chief end of the woman. In fact, explicit laws prohibit the accumulation of wives and, by implication, multiplying one’s strength in sons (Deut 16:16-17) . Rather than accumulating sons, the patriarchal narratives show the havoc wreaked when we trust our natural strength to accomplish God’s supernatural deliverance. When we become preoccupied with power below, we lose sight of the Son and the City above.  The Bible’s primary concern is not the multiplying of our tribe by natural strength, but the ingathering from all tribes to the presently veiled mountain of the Lord by the supernatural power of God— “I will give them, in My house and within My walls, a memorial and a name better than that of sons and daughters. I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off” (Is 56:5, cf. Is 2:2; Mic 4:2). God is gathering sons in the Son to the City above so that we might receive an everlasting name better than sons and daughters. 

Last time I set forth the representation of the man and the woman in God’s son Moses and God’s city in microcosmic form, the tabernacle. Next time I want to write about David and the founding of Zion, the City of Peace. This week is a darker post. I set forth the antithesis of the Son and the City in Judges, more particularly the Levite and his second wife or concubine. It has all the elements that we have seen already beginning with the first antithesis of the Son and his glory in Genesis 4. The first son under sin, Cain, murdered his brother Abel and founded a city. He named his glory citadel after his own son, Enoch. In the seventh generation of God’s first son, Adam, Cain’s descendant Lamech composed a ballad in which he boasted of murdering a man who wounded him, a young boy who struck him. No commentator on my shelf gives sustained attention to the fact that Lamech directs a song glorifying his violence to his two wives. If we can think about that for a moment. There are four songs of women in the Bible — the Song of Miriam, the Song of Deborah, the Song of Hannah, and the Song of Mary, but there are no songs directed to women in the Bible, that is apart from the superlative Song, the Song of Songs. I might add Psalm 45: 16-17 addressed to the royal daughter: “Your sons will succeed your ancestors; you will make them princes throughout the land. I will cause your name to be remembered for all generations; therefore the peoples will praise you forever and ever.”  But Lamech’s song is a far cry from the royal wedding song and the words of the shepherd-king in the Song: “How delightful is your love, my sister, my bride! Your love is much better than wine, and the fragrance of your perfume than all spices” (Song 4:9). The Song of the Shepherd praises the love of the Shulamite, the bride of peace. Her love fills him and surrounds him. It intoxicates him. It is the spiced air that he breathes. She is to him as the atmosphere of heaven, mirroring the person of the Spirit whose filling is better than wine. He is the one in whom we live and move and have our being. He is the Lord and giver of life, and forever we will take deep, intoxicating breaths of the spiced air within the Glory Cloud of his presence (John 3:8; 20:22, cf. Song 8:14). Lamech’s song to his wives is the antithesis of the Shepherd’s song.  Lamech is not looking for the city above but glorifies the natural strength of mere man below. In other words, Lamech is taunting and threatening his two wives with retribution from himself and vengeance from God should they wound or kill him. I suggest that in Judges, the canonical moment has come to be shown the seventy-sevenfold vengeance on the bride from her wounded husband. The Levite is the Lamech-like son who will desecrate the bride who bears the image and likeness of the Spirit-city (Gen 4:24). 

Before we go to the Levite, I suggest that God gives us the second antithesis to the Son and the City in Genesis 6 when mankind (adam) began to multiply on the face of the earth (adamah). The “sons of God,” taken by Yahweh from the adamah in Genesis 2, took for themselves any daughters that they chose. Though the Spirit strove with them, they continued on their path, leading to a judgment like Genesis 3. God said that the adam’s life would be shortened; he would go back to the dust at 120 years (Gen 6:3). When the “sons of God” continued in disobedience, God grieved and regretted that he had made the adam, and he determined, “I will blot out adam whom I have created from the face of the adamah” (Gen 6:7a).  The only specific wickedness that is mentioned in the passage is the power and fame of the Nephlihim and the exploitation of the “daughters of men.” The strength given to the sons to “serve and guard,” thus spearheading the ascent of God’s people to their heavenly end, was turned to sacrilege (Gen 2:15; 6:2). The exploitation was a desecration of what God intended to reveal about himself by making us male and female, a corruption leading to God’s judgment in the flood. 

There is a direct connection between the corruption and judgment of Genesis 6 and of Judges 19. When the shadows and types representing the Son and Sabbath city are profaned, judgment follows. The archetypal City is not the utility of the Son with resources to be exploited and consumed, but rather it is a manifestation of the one essential power and glory of the triune God in personal procession and embrace. The interface of the Son and Spirit, the Throne and the City, are an unspeakably glorious mystery with glorious signs that are spoken, “Male and female he created them.” To distort and corrupt the symbol is to deprecate (dare I say blaspheme) the substance it symbolizes. True “sons” are set apart to mirror the Son from heaven. Self-sacrificial love is part of declaring him who calls us out of darkness into his glorious light.  True “sons” serve and guard the tabernacle and its symbol, the woman. “Worthless sons” do not (1 Sam 2:12). In the likeness of the Levite of Judges 19-21, the imposter “sons,” Hophni and Phinehas, far from guarding and keeping the Tent of God’s presence, exploited and desecrated both the sacrifice, representing the Son, and the women who stood by the tent, representing the City. Predictably, this led to war, death, and the removal of the ark from their midst (1 Sam 2:22; 4:1-11). Judges 19-21 portrays the same — war, death, and the absence of God’s protection. The silence of God at the end of Judges is deafening; he speaks a mere 9 words to his people amidst a war that claims the lives of 40,000 Israelite warriors and 41,000 Benjamite warriors.

The first two words Yahweh speaks in Judges 20 are translated as “Judah will be first.” God sent his son Israel, with the lion of Judah at the helm, into a battle in which 22,000 of them were massacred. The next two words God speaks to Israel are “Fight against them,” them meaning the Benjamites, leading to a second massacre of the Israelites with 18,000 casualties. The final five words translated, “Fight, because I will hand them over to you tomorrow,” lead to the massacre of 41,000 sons of Benjamin, genocide, and the total destruction of Gibeah. The fact that Israel had rejected the triune God as King — yes, the Rock of Israel who had delivered them with a strong arm and put his Glory Presence among them—brackets chapters 19-21 and gives us a context for all that falls between. What is esteemed as right in the eyes of men is detestable in God’s sight (Lk 16:15).

Noteworthy in the story is that the “son” of Judges 19 is not merely any adam or “son of God,” but rather, like Adam, one officially set apart to serve and guard the tabernacle (cf. Gen 2:15). The Levite revealed his lack of allegiance to the true sanctuary when he handed his wife over to the maniacal mob. In desecrating his wife, he revealed his true allegiance — guarding and keeping himself, doing what was right in his own eyes. His defection began with rejecting Zion, the unseen city whose builder and maker is God. His rejection of the triune God and the city above led to desecrating his wife. The judgment for such a thing in Genesis 6 was the wiping out of mankind. The judgment of such a thing in Judges is also severe. When covenantal union no longer mirrors the intertrinitarian embrace, God’s response is said to be grief and regret.

The descent from theocracy to unbridled anarchy took ten generations in Genesis and apparently the same in Judges. We also must take note that the book of Judges is not chronologically ordered but theologically ordered, with the incident of the Levite’s concubine last. It is the culmination of the building antithesis of the Son and City throughout the book. Like Genesis 6, the final judgment of Judges 20-21 is also death. The details of events that happened earlier in the book of Judges —for example in the rule of the judges Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson —point us forward to this climactic tragedy. For example, like Gideon and his 300 warriors with trumpets and pots, the pieces of the Levite’s second wife. The weapon of the Lamech-like Levite seeking revenge on the men of Gibeah who had wounded him accomplished the same effect among God’s people who had rejected him for their Baals and Asherahs. They turned on themselves and destroyed themselves.  

Though I have already delved into the story, I take it now in order. Judges 19 opens with days in which there was no king in Israel, and with a Levite, takes a second wife. Because polygamy was permitted in Ancient Israel does not mean that polygamy was sanctioned by God. Jesus makes it quite clear in Matthew 19:7-9 that it was because of the hardness of hearts that Moses permitted divorce, citing as proof  “what was from the beginning” — one man plus one woman equals one flesh.  The mysterious math of Genesis 2 mirrors the mysterious math of the triune God who made them male and female.  Neither serial monogamy through divorce nor polygamy mirror the Son and the Sabbath City in the unity of the divine embrace: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:4-6).

As already mentioned, the Levite of Judges 19 is in the line of sons set apart to “serve and guard” the sanctuary of God (Num 18:5-6, cf. Gen 2:17). He is a doorkeeper, otherwise translated threshold keeper. This is important to keep in mind as the story progresses. The threshold of the tabernacle is repeatedly associated with the Spirit, the garden, and with women (Ex 33:9-10; 36:37; 38:8). The Glory-cloud would descend at the threshold when Moses met with God. That entrance was covered with a screen, veil, or covering of blue, purple, and scarlet linen woven together. These were the colors that also veiled the innermost chamber, the Holy of Holies. They were the colors that adorned the High Priest’s robe in the likeness of the Spirit train that appears to form and fill the tent of God in Isaiah 6. At the veil and threshold of the tent, the serving women stood beside the bronze laver. Not only the bronze laver, but also the bronze altar was near the threshold where the priests offered sacrifice, sprinkling blood on its sides. The story of Judges 19 brings all these images together.  

Judges 19 begins with the Israelites’ rejection of God — “In those days, when there was no king in Israel, a Levite staying in a remote part of the hill country of Ephraim acquired a woman from Bethlehem in Judah as his second wife.”  The greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and the second is like it, to love our neighbor as ourselves. To love my neighbor is like loving God because they are like him (Gen 1:26-27). The practice of polygamy manifests a lack of love for God and the most explicit way he has chosen to reveal himself, through our neighbor who bears his image and was made in his likeness. Though many commentators choose to trace the horror of this passage to the Levite’s wife’s unfaithfulness — whether sexual or anger (ὠργίσθη αὐτῷ, BGT) or being “overfed/fed up” with mistreatment [based on the root of the Hebrew word often translated “unfaithfulness,” zanah, (זָנָה)] — we must begin where God begins in this chapter, with Israel, God’s firstborn son, rejecting God, and with the Levite, whose inheritance is God, exploiting his neighbor who bears God’s impression. In Zion, the promised land, our inheritance, God’s reign assures no such corruption of his image. 

Next is the mention of Bethlehem. In acquiring a wife from Bethlehem (v. 1), we are pointed forward to Ruth and to Mary, who proclaim the City of God, the House of Bread, not by antithesis, but by thesis.  They stand with Mother Zion, better than seven sons, because from Zion will come the Bread of Life from heaven. But unlike the named mothers of Israel, who mirror the Spirit as Glory and Giver of Life, the Levite’s unnamed wife in her demise portrays the utter desecration of that image and likeness. The antithesis unfolds slowly. For a time, we are led to imagine or hope that the Levite followed his wife to her father’s house and spoke kindly to her because he was indeed kind (v. 4). That hope soon vaporizes.  As for the Levite’s father-in-law, he also appears to me underhanded. Though some want to make him the quintessential host, it seems more likely to me that he is exploiting his daughter a second time, holding out for another dowry, more money from the Levite, before he releases his guest, a scheme which plays a part in her final demise (cf. Gen 24:54-61). 

Among the final things that I would like to point out are that the city of Jebus, specifically referenced as the future Jerusalem in 19:10, is bypassed for the Sodom-like Gibeah. At the critical hour, the Levite disregards the wisdom of his servant and rejects shelter in Zion, the City of Peace, for the Violence of Gibeah. There is no king and no wisdom. Nothing is as it seems. We are left imagining that the pagan Jebusites were more righteous than the descendants of Jacob. The depth of depravity in Judges gives us an outwardly respectable Levite, an outwardly hospitable Bethlehemite, an outwardly safe city of brothers, and yet it is all smoke and mirrors. By dawn, the Levite's wife has reaped Lamech’s seventy-sevenfold revenge through her husband, her father, her host, and through the “sons” of Gibeah. From the old to the young, the sons of Israel have devoured her life. 

At dawn, she returns to her “master,” adonai. This is a word used for the first time in verse 26: “Early that morning, the woman made her way back, and as it was getting light, she collapsed at the doorway of the man’s house where her master was.” She appears as a suppliant, with her hands on the threshold. He has mastered her. Her husband, ever the “threshold keeper,” tells her to get up because it is time to go. But she cannot stand. Her life is ebbing away.  The Levite's work is not finished. Though the Hebrew verb for “take,” laqach, לָקַח, is a common word used almost 1,000 times in the Hebrew Scriptures, it is notably used three times in chapter 19. The man who had “taken” her in verse 1, is the man who again “takes” her in verse 28 and loads her body on a donkey. The final “take” is in verse 29 when for a third and final time he “takes” a knife and forcefully grabs her body, cutting her limb by limb and sending her throughout the territory of Israel.  Employing the tools of his trade, he carves her like an animal, her final “use.” It is noteworthy that we never hear her voice in the entire passage. There is no direct speech. In this I see her united in life and death with the Son who is coming, a lamb who goes silently to the slaughter. In life, as the bride of Bethlehem, she points forward to Ruth and Mary, to the city of Bethlehem and to the Seed who gives resurrection. In death, she reveals Jesus as a sacrifice and faithful high priest, who has the last word in this woeful tale.

I conclude with this. The serving women at the tabernacle stand by the veil that covers the doorway of the Glory-tent. They stand at the threshold beside the blue and purple and scarlet covering, woven of fine linen. Though the text does not go there, I cannot help but imagine if these are not the colors of her broken body, for among the men who desecrated her were sons of Gibeah, “fit young men . . . all could sling a stone at a hair and not miss” (19:16).  What would have been the reflection of Levite’s wife in the bronze laver that morning? Can we not see that at the hands of the sons of Israel, made in the image and likeness of the Son, she has become the antithesis of Zion, the bride and Spirit-city of the Lamb? And yet in that laver, I also can see her with the faithful Priest-son, her husband, and with her brothers, true sons united to the Son in resurrection, in the Spirit, forever reflecting Zion’s glory.

1. In this recent post, Doug Wilson again reveals himself. His modus operandi is to take a word or text in the King James Version, a word he particularly likes, and turn it to his end goal, earthly dominion. If men are to take over the world, then women must be used in ways that make that happen. In this post, it is a word that appears only twice in the New Testament and in a specific context to make a specific point, Romans 1:26 and 27. He takes the Greek word chrasis, χρῆσις,  translated ”use” in the KJV, and  he builds a whole system of anthropology and ethics. Almost no modern commentator or Bible version translates chrasis as “use” because of the context. When chrasis is used in the context of sexuality, it pertains to the sex act. Modern commentators choose instead the word natural “relations,” simply meaning sexual intercourse. But Wilson likes the word “use,” just like he likes the KJV “lord” husband in 1 Peter 3:6. He takes chrasis and tells women (and men!) that women should go with the flow of their “nature,” which, simply stated, is to be used by the man.

2. Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, ed. John Piper and Wayne Grudem, 46; Douglas Wilson, For Glory and a Covering, 43-46.