Dr. Manny Arango (0:00)

Hey, Bible nerds. This is Dr. Manny Arango and I'm your host for the Bible department podcast powered by Arma. This podcast follows a Bible reading plan we created to help you read the entire Bible in a year. You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan and join the Journey family. We used church candy for our new church plant the Garden, and the response blew me and my team away. At our new church Plant the Garden, we ran simple invite ads through none other than church candy, and hundreds of people responded. Seriously. People who had never even heard of us, who had never met me or heard me preach. They saw an ad on Facebook or Instagram. They showed up to a launch party or launch team training. Some of them have joined our team. Here's the best part. A good amount of them have started giving and tithing, which means the ads have paid for themselves. Our church plant is growing, and it's because we chose the right partner. We didn't have to figure out marketing strategies or spend hours tinkering with ad settings. Church candy handled it all and it worked. You might not be planting a church, but if you're a pastor who wants to see more new faces on Sunday. And by the way, I've never met a pastor who doesn't want to see more new faces on Sunday. It's time to check them out. How about you go to churchcandy.com Manny and book a discovery call? Let their team show you what's possible when the right people hear about your church family. Welcome to day147. We are in some of the saddest content in the whole Bible. This is Judges, chapters 19, 20 and 21. This last section of Judges follows this theme of everyone did what was right in their own eyes because Israel had no king. Now, for context, when the Bible says Israel had no king, it is actually not. It's saying a couple of different things. Here's the first thing that it's saying. The first thing that it's saying is that Yahweh is not their king. That they could do things based on how God sees it, God's eyes, God's perspective, or on how they see it. And because Yahweh is not their king, their nation has fallen completely into chaos. Okay, so that's the first level of just what that means. Israel had no king. The first thing we should hear is, ooh, they've rejected God, Deuteronomy, established God, Yahweh as their suzerain, and them as A vassal, the suzerain is king. So the theme of Yahweh as king has already been established in the biblical narrative that happened in the book of Deuteronomy. The book of Deuteronomy is formatted after a suzerain vassal treaty because Israel is entering into a covenant relationship with their suzerain named Yahweh. Okay, first thing, second thing, there is no centralized leader who is calling the people of Israel to the truth of that covenant. Okay? So the Bible has no issue with a king. The Bible does have an issue with kings that are modeled after pagan kings. So the Bible is going to say, yeah, when you do have a king, they should have a copy of the law and they should know the law and they should be holding Israel accountable to the law. Because man, the king should love God's laws. Okay? The king should have a passion for the laws of Yahweh, for the truth of Yahweh, for the doctrine and the decrees of Yahweh. So not only is Israel void of Yahweh as king, but Israel is also void of leadership that sees Yahweh as king and is willing to step in and call people to righteousness and holiness. So Israel's missing multiple things. And this story highlights all of the things that Israel is missing. Okay, judges, chapter 19. A Levite who lived in a remote area of the hill country of Ephraim took a concubine from Bethlehem and Judah. Okay, already a problem. Levites are not supposed to have concubines. Back in Leviticus, there are all these rules for who Levites can marry and cannot marry. Levites are supposed to be monogamous. Levites, okay, are the tribe that Yahweh says belong to him. These are the people who are not supposed to have land because God's their inheritance. These are the people who work in the Tabernacle. This Levite has a concubine is already terrible. It's already really, really bad. But the concubine is unfaithful to the Levite. So she left him and went back to her parents home in Bethlehem. After she had been there for four months, her Levite husband went to her and persuaded her to return. Now her father, the father in law, prevailed on him to stay. So incredible hospitality like this is just normal hospitality. So he ended up staying three days, eating and drinking and sleeping there. Fourth day they got up early to leave, but the dad keeps bringing them back. Stay tonight. And the man got up to his father in law persuaded him, so he stayed there that night. On the morning of the fifth day, okay? So the dad's just like, no, don't leave. This is great. It's good for us to be together. Don't leave. Okay? So finally they leave, okay? And when they leave, they can't find a place to really stay. So verse 14. So they went on and the sun set as they neared Gibeah in Benjamin. There they stop to spend the night. So they stop in Gibeah. If you remember, the Gibeonites are the people who deceived Joshua now and he made a covenant with them when he wasn't supposed to. Now I don't know if it took me a while to realize this when I started watching like TV shows. The flashback, not the flashbacks, but you know, like when the credits roll, like there's like a couple of scenes that happen before. Like the actual, like not the credits, the credits that happen at the beginning. I don't know what it's called. Like the, the. Every TV show has like a jingle, like a theme song, theme music. Okay. So it's typically like a couple of scenes, like three minutes, maybe sometimes less than that. And then you have like the theme music, like the theme song with like the video opener. And then you get into like the, the real first scene of the show. You know how based on what the show is going to be about, those like previews change at the beginning and typically they're helping you to remember something from a previous season that is going to be relevant again in this episode. If there were two scenes that the Bible could show us that would be relevant in what we're going to read today. The first scene would be Joshua and the Gibeonites, cuz Gibeah is going to be such an important thing here. But the other thing that would be really, really important is Genesis chapter 19, which is Sodom and Gomorrah. So I need you to have Sodom and Gomorrah kind of like in your mind as we continue to read Family. The wait is over. My brand new book, Crushing Chaos is out now and available everywhere. Books are sold. Literally. Today I walked into a Barnes and Noble and I signed a bunch of copies at a physical location. So you can grab this book at a physical Barnes and Noble or you can go to a Books a million or Amazon or anywhere books are sold and grab a copy. If you enjoy reading the Bible from an ancient perspective, if you understand that the beauty of scripture is actually knowing it in context, then you'll love this book. And if there's any chaos in Your personal life. I think that reading the Bible from an ancient perspective can actually help to crush the chaos in your life. I think this book is going to be a New York Times bestseller. I really do. I think we wrote a good one. I think you should get a copy today. All right, back to the episode. So they near Gibeah. There they stopped to spend the night. They went and sat in the city square, but no one took them in for the night, culturally speaking. Remember how the dad was super, super hospitable? He's not just that way because this is his family. He's that way because this is Middle Eastern Semitic culture, okay? And hospitality is very, very, very, very normal. It's a cultural value, okay? Also, the way that these houses are set up is that most houses had space for their animals that people could stay in. And. And I don't want to get too complicated because I don't want to make this episode too, too long. That evening, an old man from the hill country who was living in Gibeah came in from his work in the fields. When he looked and saw the traveler, so the Levite, he said, where are you going? Where'd you come from? They have a conversation and the old man takes in the Levite and his concubine. Okay, you're welcome. At my house. Verse 20. Okay? Verse 21. While they were enjoying themselves, some of the wicked men of the city surrounded the house, pounding on the door, they shouted to the old man who owned the house, bring out the man who came to your house so we can have sex with him. Now, I know what you're thinking. This is homosexuality, right? This is sino homosexuality, ok? It is, but layered, ok? This is also an expression of brute force and power to essentially communicate to a visitor whose boss. Okay, this, and I know this is going to be so controversial, okay? In the ancient world, a man wasn't gay just because they had sexual intercourse with another man. That's not what made them gay. They were gay if they received sex versus giving the sex. Okay? So a man was a man. If he used his penetrator to penetrate, it didn't matter what he was penetrating as long as he was using his penetrator to penetrate. That was masculine. And since men are bigger and stronger than women, it meant that you were even more masculine for penetrating and dominating someone who was bigger than a woman and stronger than a woman. Ok, so sodomy was not just about homoerotic attraction. Sodomy was about domination, which there are any pockets of culture that still kind of hold this, it would be prison, okay? Men in prison aren't necessarily sodomizing new inmates out of an attraction to males. They're doing that to show new inmates what the pecking order is and who's in charge. And so this is more about dominion and power than it is about same sex attraction. Okay? The men of Sodom were trying to do that to the angels, and these men in Gibeah are trying to do the same thing. Is there homosexuality? Yes. I'm not saying this is not homosexual. What I'm saying is it's homosexual. Plus there are other factors, okay? And those other factors are dominance, our violence, conquering. So bring out the man who came to your house so that we can have sex with him. The owner of the house went outside and said to them, no, my friends, don't be so vile. Since this man is my guest, don't do this outrageous thing. Look, here is my virgin daughter, okay? And the Levite's concubine. It's very reminiscent of Sodom and Gomorrah. I will bring them out to you now and you can use them and do to them whatever you wish. But as for this man, don't do such an outrageous thing. How is the virgin and the concubine any less outrageous? Oh, I don't know. And if you compare this to Caleb and Othniel and the transfer of Caleb's daughter to becoming Othniel's wife, and you see these as bookends, you can see how the country, the nation of Israel has devolved into not protecting women at any. At any rate, like there's. There's no protections for women, okay? But the men were not listening to him. The men are not listening to the old guy who owns the house. So the Levite took his concubine and set her outside to them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night. And at dawn they let her go. At daybreak, the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, fell down at the door and lay there until daylight. When her master got up in the morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way. There lay his concubine, fallen in the doorway of the house with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, get up, let's go. This is the Levite. But there was no answer. Then the man put her on his donkey and set out for home. Okay, so this man's concubine has been raped all night, raped and abused all night. She's crawled back to the house. She has her hand on the threshold. He comes out. There's no response from her. Is she dead? Is she not? We really don't know. When they reach home, he took a knife and cut up the concubine limb by limb into 12 parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel. Everyone who saw it was saying to one another, such a thing has never been seen or done. Not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt. Just imagine, we must do something. So speak up. Who? I wish this was the end of the story. I wish we were at the end of the story. Now, why is this Levite so good at cutting people up? Well, he's a Levite. He's a Levite. He's a butcher. He's been butchering animals his whole life. He knows exactly how to dismember a person. So the question is, did the men who raped her kill her? Did he kill her? Who killed her? The answer is both. Everybody killed this woman. Now he sends dismembered body parts to every tribe in Israel. Here we go. Here's the first time we get unity in the whole book. Then all Israel went from Dan to Beersheba and from the land of Gilead came together as one and. And assembled before the Lord in Mizpah. To do what? To go to war with the Benjaminites. And now the nation devolves into civil war. So they're gonna fight the Benjaminites. They're gonna finally defeat the Benjaminites. And once they defeat the Benjaminites, the Benjaminites are gonna say, hey, like, we're almost extinct. Like, you guys, like, freaking killed us. Like, there. There's. There's just. There's. What are we going to do? So now they have to build back the tribe of Benjamin. Okay, so chapter 21, verse 6 says this. The Israelites grieve for the tribe of Benjamin, their fellow Israelites. Today, one tribe is cut off from Israel. They said, how can we provide wives for those who are left, since we have taken an oath by the Lord not to give any of our daughters in marriage. Then they asked which of the tribes of Israel failed to assemble. Okay, now here's the solution that they come up with. Verse 20. So they instructed the Benjaminites, the Benjamites, go and hide in the vineyards and watch. When the young women of Shiloh come out to join in dancing, rush from the vineyards, and each of you sees one of them to be your wife. Then return to the land of Benjamin. When their fathers or brothers complain to us, we will say to them, do us the favor of helping them because we did not get wives for them during the war. You will not be guilty of breaking your oath because you did not give your daughters to them, but they were taken from you. This is the loophole. So this is what the Benjamites did. While the young women were dancing, each man caught one and carried her off to be his wife. Then they returned to their inheritance and rebuilt the towns and settled in them. At that time, the Israelites left that place and went home to their tribes and clans, each to his own inheritance. In those days, Israel had no king. Everyone did as they saw fit. Why do they go to civil war? They devolve into civil war because a concubine got raped and then dismembered. So they go to civil war because they're mad that a woman got raped. Then they kill too many of the Benjamites. They're in danger of their whole tribe going extinct. So then the bright idea that they come up with is this, let's go rape some women. Go and hide in the vineyards and watch. When the young women of Shiloh come out to join the dancing, rush from the vineyards, and each of you seize one of them to be your wife, then return to the land of Benjamin. While the young women were dancing, each man caught one and carried her off to be his wife. Then they returned to their inheritance and rebuilt their towns. The way a society treats women tells you a lot about that society. And this society has devolved into raping women, dismembering women, seizing women, carrying them off to be wives without their consent or their permission or their love, and then coming back to their dads and explaining to their fathers, you shouldn't be mad because you made a vow to not marry your daughters to us. And you didn't. You didn't marry your daughters to us. We took them from you. That's wild. And this is where Israel has gotten to. Both stories include Levites, and both stories include absolute moral failure that should only be found in the land of Canaan amongst the Canaanites, not at all found amongst the people of God. God's people should not be acting this way. However. Is the story over? No. God is going to reach his people, change the hearts of his people, transform this people, heal this people, and continue to try to turn them into the nation that God's always desired for them to be. So God doesn't get to this point of a concubine who shouldn't even be the concubine of the Levite, being raped, being dismembered a civil war breaking out. The only time that they practice unity through the whole book is to be at civil war. The only time they practice unity is to be at disunity with each other. The only time that they practice unity is to actually be at division. This these last five chapters are you're supposed to be left hopeless. And so if that's how you feel, that's a good way to feel. You should feel utterly hopeless at the depravity of people that have multiplied chaos throughout their society. But thanks be to God, he's not hopeless. He has a plan to redeem and save and rescue. And throughout the next couple of books, we're gonna see that plan unfold. Family, it's been fun to go through the Book of Judges with you. I'm so proud of you. I'll see you right here tomorrow as we keep trekking to the Bible. I love you guys. Peace. Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department Podcast. You can find us online and learn more about the show@thebibledepartment.com and on Instagram hebibledepartment. If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into the Bible, you can get free access to our library of courses@thebibledepartment.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.