Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 35:3 (Summer 2021)
Article: He Made Her Play The Harlot: Judges 19 Through The Lens Of Domestic Abuse
Author: Evelyn Sweerts-Vermeulen

PP 35:3 (Summer 2021) p. 15

He Made Her Play The Harlot: Judges 19 Through The Lens Of Domestic Abuse

Evelyn Sweerts-Vermeulen

Evelyn Sweerts-Vermeulen holds MA degrees from the Universities of Bristol and Durham, UK, and is a priest in the Church of England. She has a particular interest in the Hebrew Bible and in biblical theology. Currently living and serving in Luxembourg, Evelyn is married and has four school-age children.

The story of the gang rape and murder of an unnamed woman in Judges 19 is one of the bleakest narratives of the OT. Although it is mostly avoided in churches, since it is in the Bible it is important to ask how it might be read as a vehicle for justice.1 Compounding the difficulties the text presents, certain key elements of the narrative are ambiguous—for example, what the woman’s status was and why precisely she left the Levite. A close exegetical analysis, brought into conversation with the domestic abuse cycle, makes the story internally coherent and resolves the textual difficulties. Furthermore, by drawing attention to this dynamic in the text, churches can be challenged to address these issues more openly. Doing so must be a priority, given the prevalence of abuse and the imperative of the gospel.

Seeing And Understanding Domestic Abuse

In her seminal work, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, Phyllis Trible says about Judges 19 that “to hear this story is to inhabit a world of unrelenting terror that refuses to let us pass by on the other side.”2 This indirect call from Trible not only to notice but to act when confronted with abuse cannot be made insistently enough. In our neighborhoods and churches people of every age, ethnicity, and socio-economic status are being hurt. Domestic abuse helplines in the USA receive more than 19,000 calls daily.3 More than twenty-three percent of women and almost fourteen percent of men have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner, which means a significant minority of people who have experienced or witnessed severe violence are present in most churches. Indeed, there will almost certainly be abusers lurking in the pews. Many more will have had exposure to (or committed) other types of abuse or “milder” violence (is there such a thing as mild physical violence, given its emotional effects?).4

Domestic abuse can take many forms. As well as physical violence, those victimized may be subjected to emotional, psychological, financial, and ...