Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 37:1 (Winter 2023)
Article: Judges 19 As A Paradigm For Understanding And Responding To Human Trafficking
Author: Chuck Pitts

PP 37:1 (Winter 2023) p. 5

Judges 19 As A Paradigm For Understanding And Responding To Human Trafficking

Chuck Pitts

From Priscilla Papers 29/4 (Autumn 2015) 3–6

Chuck Pitts holds MDiv and PhD degrees from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He taught at Houston Graduate School of Theology from 1999–2015. He now teaches high school history in inner-city Houston. He has served several congregations, both as a staff member and a volunteer. In all these settings, he has worked with a strong concern for civil rights, social justice, and ministry to the economically challenged. He also supports and volunteers for United against Human Trafficking, an organization fighting against human trafficking in Houston. Chuck is a member of the Priscilla Papers Peer Review Team.

Judges 19 contains a seldom read, let alone studied or discussed, story of misogyny, subjugation, rape, murder, and dismemberment. Determining how to handle such atrocities in the Bible makes texts such as these difficult to address. More than thirty years ago, Phyllis Trible labeled Judg 19 as one of the “texts of terror” in the Hebrew Bible (along with the stories of Hagar, Tamar, and the daughter of Jephthah).1 Texts of terror tend to be avoided unless the reader can clearly separate the perpetrators of evil in the text from themselves. David Garber and Daniel Stallings have argued that the church must stop ignoring sexually explicit texts “because the story of the Levite’s concubine and the brutality contained therein speak vividly to issues of sexual violence that persist to this day. The silencing of sexually explicit biblical texts in American churches mirrors the silencing of issues of sexual violence in contemporary society.”2 This article will begin with a look at various approaches to exegesis of this text and then seek to show that we cannot exempt ourselves from this text of terror in light of its application to the twenty-first century problem of human trafficking, especially sex trafficking.

The Biblical Story

First, here is the story. A Levite (hence, an apparently important man) from the hill country of Ephraim took a concubine from Bethlehem. A concubine was a woman used for a man’s pleasure without the legal protection of a primary wife;3 indeed, some would argue that the concubine in Judg 19 is not a “wife” at all, but is part of a “mistress-type relationship.”4 The primary wife is not me...