Farewell, My Concubine David H.

Richter
Introduction
An essay interpreting a biblical text in a book entitled Agendas for the Study of Midrash needs to start off by explaining what it is doing there. One could fall back upon the notion that any biblical interpretation is, in at least the crudest sense of the word, itself a midrash, particularly since an entire cottage industry is currently under way encouraging anyone with opinions to write, draw, even dance their own midrashim as a way of interpreting, expanding, or perhaps resisting the Biblical text. 1 More broadly, however, my reading of Judges 19-21 operates implicitly and often explicitly against the background of the history of its interpretation: it is not a freestanding midrash, but one that already rests on the existing body of interpretive midrash upon this text. 2 Nevertheless I would claim that the aspect of my study with real payoff for serious students of midrash lies in its approach to narrative, the form of discourse which biblical tales, rewritten bible, and aggadic midrash have in common. Those who study midrash are beginning to discover the need to understand how complex narratives work. Marc Bregman's paper, for example, in this volume, analyzes how certain types of aggadic midrash generate transactions with the reader that change, sometimes with radical shifts in impact, the focalization of the original biblical text. On the other side, there are many recent studies of aggadic midrash that might have been enriched by a more rigorous grasp of the implied audience's multilayered response to the meshalim, usually tagged as fictional, that so often carry the message in aggadic midrash. 3 Once one begins to analyze the transactions of a text with its reader, the midrash scholar becomes, inevitably, a narratologist, and the only question whether one will rely on a systematic theory of narrative or fly by the seat of one's pants. The two modes of narratology currently in vogue are: a structuralist/semiotic model associated with Umberto Eco and Gerard Genette that has been influential on biblical students like Mieke Bal; and a rhetorical model originating with the studies of Wayne Booth. 4 My own training, as a former student of Booth's, naturally prejudices me toward the latter, but I would also claim that its ways of reading the narrative text, not from the abstract perspective of the pure sign, but as engaged from the outset in transactions with the reader, always already attempting to convince, beckon, persuade, is more readily adapted to the dialogical rabbinic discourse we find in the texts of the midrash. The meshalim of midrash often give off mixed signals, invite multivalent interpretations by their uncertain relation to history and law and to a system of genres we are only beginning to reconstruct. Few are, of course, quite as disconcerting as the biblical text discussed below. This essay, then, interprets Judges 19-21, the narrative of the Outrage of Gibeah, from a perspective based in the rhetorical theory of narrative of Wayne Booth as it has been carried forward by students of his including James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and myself. Booth's well-known theories in The Rhetoric of Fiction form a background that will be assisting me with questions about distance and point of view, and the way in which the reader's sympathetic or antipathetic response to characters depends upon

technical matters of focalization and voice. His ideas in A Rhetoric of Irony, too, have informed my own earlier work engaging the question of what happens to audience response in texts that are ambiguously ironic. Rabinowitz's theories in Before Reading are about what he calls "conventions" of reading, the way in which the sort of phenomenological structure we build up in processing a narrative text is dependent on certain tacit habits of thought, learned codes that we bring to texts to make them mean. 5 Phelan's work on audience-centered narrative theory is wide ranging, but I will be using his ideas in an essay on Toni Morrison's novel Beloved to try to understand the differences between "difficult"narrative texts and texts that go beyond the merely difficult to an intransigent resistance to interpretation that he calls "stubborn." 6 Difficulty in literature is a concept we all understand intuitively well enough, though it is tempting to try to systematize it. In a famous essay published more than two decades ago, George Steiner defined difficulty in terms of the implicit contract between author and reader that is challenged by various sorts of resistance encountered in a text. 7 Steiner found four categories of "difficulty": (1) "contingent" difficulties like difficult or foreign words, or unusual names, which "aim to be looked up" and are solved with homework (40); (2) "modal" difficulties that involve "a stance towards human conditions that we find essentially inaccessible or alien" (28); (3) "tactical" difficulties, reefs on which authors intentionally run readers in order "to deepen our apprehension by dislocating or goading to new life the supine energies of word or grammar" (40). All these modes of difficulty are meant to be solved. And when they are solved, as James Phelan puts it, there comes a certain point at which the reader experiences the "click" of intelligibility when the semiotic codes come together in a coherent interpretation (713). In a different class is Steiner's fourth category, those "ontological" difficulties that actually break the writer-reader contract by confronting us with "blank questions" about the nature of language, meaning and literary communication and other unsolved problems (41). This "ontological difficulty" is a bit like Phelan's notion of the "stubborn," although Steiner's author-centered notions of difficulty do not map exactly onto Phelan's readerly ones. For Phelan the difficult text is one whose ambiguous and recalcitrant elements are designed to coalesce in an interpretation that ultimately unifies the text and reflexively certifies via the hermeneutic circle the validity of the interpretation. "Stubborn" narratives, on the other hand, are those whose ambiguities lead ultimately away into a centrifugal void that resists and denies a central meaning. As you may guess by now, it will be my thesis that the narrative in Judges 19-21 exemplifies the "stubborn" text. For those fascinated by editing problems, I should serve notice from the beginning that I shall be reading the narrative that ends Judges in the version given by the Masoretic Text, despite its difficulties. 8 I come to this interpretive activity with the prejudice (nothing more) that MT should be followed except where it is manifestly in error, and the conviction (nothing less) that flipping back and forth between different textual traditions in search of a macaronic text that can be made to support a coherent interpretation leads onward and upward to emendations and reconstructions and, finally, perhaps, to making up out of whole cloth the Bible one reads. It evades all too easily, at least, the recalcitrant material that underlies "difficult" as well as "stubborn" texts. And for those who wonder about the identity of that unaccountable creature named "the reader," I should serve notice that it is your humble servant, though I have striven, I hope
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successfully, to eliminate what is merely idiosyncratic in my response.

Configuration and Coherence, Difficulty and Stubbornness

The primary peculiarity of the narrative in Judges 19-21 lies in the strain between what Peter Rabinowitz calls conventions of configuration and conventions of coherence. Configurational rules are ones that suggest to us what kind of story we are reading, allowing us to develop expectations about what will happen, expectations that help us read the text from moment to moment. (Rabinowitz uses the example of the opening of Philip Barry's play Holiday, where the mere combination of "a charming man, a rigid fiance and an attractively zany fiance's sister," even in the absence of any direct foreshadowing, leads the audience to expect, drawing on the generic experience of other comedies, that the ending will involve the man becoming engaged to the zany sister. 9 ) Rabinowitz has argued more recently that in fact we always read generically, so that whenever a text violates the rules and conventions of the genre to which the audience has tentatively assigned it, the audience will not leave the narrative in generic limbo: instead, our response will be to switch the backgrounded generic field to an adjacent category that begins (or if possible retrospectively continues) to make sense. 10 Rabinowitz's conventions of coherence operate differently: in effect they force the audience to read each text as though it were as well-formed as possible, dealing with textual disjunctures in ways that will permit us "to repair apparent inconsistencies by transforming them into metaphors, subtleties, and ironies." Just as the conventions of configuration shape the text prospectively during our reading of it, 11 this transformation works retrospectively. Whatever material in the text is apparently recalcitrant to the hypothesis, whatever fits poorly into the interpretation, is reinterpreted (for example, by arguing that what seems literal is actually only figural) in such a way as to reinforce the original interpretation, or at worst to qualify it. Given the potential scope of this operation, and its twenty-twenty hindsight, all texts should theoretically fall into the class Phelan calls "difficult." But it is in the interaction between the conventions of configuration and coherence that explains the possibility of texts that are not merely "difficult," that allow for Phelan's category of the "stubborn" text. The reconfiguration of the generic background that will make sense of the moment-to-moment experience of the text may be in conflict with the overall interpretation that will make coherent sense of that sequential experience as a whole. Coherent interpretation, such as academics can always come up with, may be at war with actual reader response. If we were to watch a movie that began with a few seconds of amateurish footage of a cat playing with a ball of knitting, then a woman playing with a little boy on a beach, then a man washing a car in a driveway, we might configure this experience within the genre "naive home movies." If the next frames were stock footage of aircraft strafing infantrymen following a line of tanks, however, we might reconfigure the cat-beach-carwash scenes differently, as part of a movie about the effect of war on family life, and our expectations would shift accordingly. But if the fifth sequence showed a man in a trenchcoat stealthily overhearing a conversation between an elegantly dressed couple, the sixth a beautiful formation of synchronized swimmers, and the seventh an old man slowly pruning a bush in a garden, we would be driven, after the fact, to find the coherence of the film in a considerably more abstract theme. We might read this film as being about the aesthetics
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of film itself, perhaps the very issue of the thematic coherence presumed in cinematic montage. Such an overall interpretation of the coherence of the cinematic text as a whole would be emotionally consistent with our patterning and configuration of its parts, I posit, only so long as the individual clips were brief enough to avoid engaging us in the disparate configurations of the home movie or the war story or the swimmers. At the reductio point of this phenomenon, we intuitively know the difference between a complex whole and several different wholes: we don't need to be told the difference between watching a movie and watching a double feature. But what if the two halves of a double feature were shown, not successively, but in alternating segments? William Faulkner's The Wild Palms is an experiment of this sort (alternating chapters tell two distinct stories) in which the reader's experience involves an intense but ultimately successful effort to find a level on which the two stories can be read as one. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is another. In this case it is easy to imagine an experiment precisely designed to achieve not coherence and satisfaction but chaos and frustration. To move away, now, from the hypothetical, James Phelan argues that in the long monologue that ends the second section of Beloved, Toni Morrison creates precisely this sort of "stubborn" text. He suggests that although we can bridge, intellectually, between different "levels" of readerly experience in the long monologue at the close of the book (which reverberates between the character "Beloved" as Sethe's ghostly daughter and "Beloved" as a representative of African womanhood undergoing the torments of the Middle Passage), we cannot bring the two representations together emotionally. We can understand the monologue either way but not both ways at once. Phelan feels it is part of the intentionality of the story that we are required to struggle, unsuccessfully, with our desire to reduce it to coherence, and that losing struggle in fact defines the aesthetic effect of the book---an effect that is therefore belied by academic interpretations which inevitably seek to reduce what is overwhelming to what can be explained. 12 The stubborn text forces us to reach for the numinous and confront our failure to lay hold of it; as A.R. Ammons put it in "Corson's Inlet," I will try to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening scope, but enjoying the freedom that Scope eludes my grasp.... Given the persistence of our species in its encounter with the numinous, or its darker side, the unnamable, I do not think this a peculiarly modern effect or one peculiar to poets. As Morrison says about Beloved, "it is not a story to pass on." Neither is that of the concubine.

The Frame
The story of the Concubine of Gibeah begins with the phrase: "it was in those days when there was no king in Israel..." (Judges 19:1). Prospectively this may give us no more than a rough date (after Joshua, before Saul), but this formula recurs at the end at 21:25: "and in those days there was no king in Israel, every man did what was right in his own eyes." 13 Both versions have already appeared in Judges, the full version at Judges 17:6, and the abbreviated one at 18:1. Clearly this is meant to be the moral of the story, the nimshal for which the parabolic mashal was constructed. What is it getting at?
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Both the full versions seem to be echoes of Deuteronomy 12:8, which specifies that once YHWH has chosen his special place for worship, "you shall not do as we are doing here today, every man [doing] what is right in his own eyes." Every man should do what is right, but every man is not fit to define what right is. Once there is a central temple there will be a right and a wrong way to worship YHWH. But the versions in Judges refer to the lack of a central civil authority: no king in Israel. Crime rather than heresy is to be the central issue. So readers who know Deuteronomy 12 and the preceding chapters of Judges already know the moral of the story before they have heard it. But is this really an adequate moral? Is there indeed any moral at all to this story? We must read it to know.

Playing the Harlot

"And it came to pass," then, "when there was no king in Israel, that there was a certain Levite sojourning on the farther side of the hill country of Ephraim who took him [a wife] a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah." In brackets I have added to the JPS translation the word that is not translated in the phrase "vayikach lo ishah pilegesh." "Ishah" (wife) and "pilegesh" are not categories easily combined. 14 Aside from the eleven instances of pilegesh in this narrative, the word appears 27 times in Tanach, generally with the clear denotation of a "secondary wife" relative to some other primary wife or wives, and often with the implication of a woman more stimulating erotically than those primary wives are. 15 There is no primary wife in evidence here, however, which makes this a unique usage. 16 Nevertheless, the two key words in the first verse are surely "Levite" and "concubine" and the combination is a dissonant one. The Levites were singled out in Exodus and Numbers as YHWH's special tribe, His servants par excellence, from which tribe the priests who officiate at the altar would be selected; 17 the particular holiness expected of the Levite jibes ill with the implication that this Levite must have searched far and wide before finding a beautiful Bethlehem concubine far from his home in the hills of Ephraim. What harum-scarum sort of Levite, we might ask, are we dealing with? 18 This marriage, whatever its origin, is in deep difficulties: "And his concubine played the harlot against him and went away from him unto her father's house and was there the space of four months." 19 Serves him right, one might think: infidelity seems an appropriate punishment for the Levite's venery. It isn't clear, however, what outcome we should expect. In the case of another woman held to be a harlot (zonah) --Tamar in Genesis 38--her father-in-law ordered her taken out and burnt at the stake, and the Mosaic code in Leviticus 20:10 presents the punishment for adultery in no uncertain terms. In the event, the Levite's behavior is neither punitive nor dismissive but, apparently, forgiving. After a hiatus of some four months 20 "her husband arose and went after her to speak kindly unto her, to bring her back." 21

In Bethlehem
"...And she brought him to her father's house, and when the father of the young woman saw him, he rejoiced to meet him." The Levite has brought a servant and a pair of asses, so he clearly is providing for a return journey more comfortable than her exodus was. The scene is set for a family reunion and yet the narrative is tacit about the initial
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meeting between husband and concubine, and about everyone's feelings save the father's. Even his feelings could do with a bit of explanation: is he rejoicing in the reconciliation or in the prospect of getting his daughter again off his hands? One clue is that Bethlehem is easier to enter than to leave. The father keeps his son-in-law for three days feasting together, and the feast appears not to be anything the Levite can get out of. The verb used at 19:4 and translated "retained" in AV is "yekhezak b-", perhaps an ominous word since, in so many of its other usages in the Tanach, including twice later in this narrative, it specifies laying hold of something by force before it is torn or otherwise destroyed. 22 The feast runs its prescribed three days in a round of enjoyments described by the triplet of verbs "vayochlu vayishtu vayalinu sham." 23 On the fourth day, as we expect, the Levite gets up and prepares to leave, but his father-in-law asks him to strengthen his heart with a morsel of food before going, and the morsel turns into another day's feasting, so that the Levite stays yet a fourth night. On the fifth day the same script is played out once more: again the Levite gets up ready to go and again he is persuaded to stay and eat something before he leaves. This time, however, at some time after noon, he insists upon getting onto the road back home with his concubine, his servant, and the two asses. The father-in-law attempts to dissuade him, warning that the day is waning and promising that the Levite can make an early start the next morning, but he insists upon leaving at once. It seems reasonable: the Levite realizing that morning and hunger recur daily, so that the script can be repeated indefinitely, is trying to make a break for it. The father-in-law may be trying to keep the young couple with him as long as possible, but Levite resists, perhaps proudly sensitive about being entertained too much and too lavishly (a feeling young married men with check-grabbing fathers-in-law may recognize). Whether one is more sympathetic to the Levite's need to assert his independence or to the family feeling of the father-in-law, the reader may feel that the serious issues with which the story began---adultery and forgiveness--have been displaced by an comedic and comparatively trivial conflict: whether and how to resist middle-eastern hospitality. This is the first fissure in the reader's experience of the story.

Journey Into Night

As the couple sets off, another rapid triplet of verbs in masculine singular-"vayakum vayelech vayavo"-- signals their arrival near Jerusalem, then still in the hands of the Jebusites. 24 The serving-lad, making his only speaking appearance in the story, 25 suggests that they turn off the road and spend the night there, but the Levite refuses, since it will not do to spend the night among foreigners, so that they must journey on to Gibeah or Ramah. 26 They make it only as far as Gibeah by sunset and begin to encamp in the town square since "no man took them into his house for the night." Hospitality seems still to be the primary thematic focus, with an implicit contrast between the all too lavish hospitality of Bethlehem (etymologically the "House of Bread") and the barrenness of Gibeah (etymologically "mountain-peak"). As the geographical details fall into place, another possible motive of the fatherin-law's insistent requests comes into sharper focus. On a map of ancient Canaan the distance between Bethlehem and the hill-country of Ephraim is close to 50 km (if one takes Shiloh as the Levite's home). 27 That seems a long distance to cover in a single day by two men on donkeys but we are not told that the Levite broke his journey. It would be even more difficult, perhaps, for a man and a woman with a servant walking behind. The
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father-in-law's insistence calls attention to the fact that, leaving after noon, the Levite and his wife are going to have to break their journey somewhere in a world filled with foreigners and strangers. At this point, at nightfall, there enters a new agent, an old farmer from the hillcountry of Ephraim who is a "ger," a permitted sojourner, a foreigner with a green card, so to speak, in the Benjamite town of Gibeah. 28 The friendly conversation that begins suggests that the Ephraimite will surely provide their refuge for the night, while in the dialogue the Levite recapitulates his defensiveness about accepting hospitality from his elders, insisting that he requires lodging but otherwise has all that his party requires, down to provender for his pair of asses. The Ephraimite, like the father-in-law, turns down the Levite's self-sufficiency and offers to provide food and drink as well, but then adds "only lodge not in the broad place" (rak b'rachov al talin). The party enters the Ephraimite's house where they proceed to eat, drink, and make their hearts merry once more. Just as Gibeah, inhabited by Israelites, was explicitly presented as a safer refuge than Jerusalem, inhabited by Jebusites, so the Ephraimite's house has been explicitly presented as more secure than the public square.

The Sons of Belial

These expectations are overturned almost at once, as "behold, the men of the city, certain base fellows, beset the house round about, beating at the door; and they spoke to the master of the house, the old man, saying: "Bring forth the man that came into thy house, that we may know him." The assault echoes verbally with only minor variations the assault on Lot's house by the men of Sodom in Genesis 19:5, but if the reader jumps from this intertextual parallel to the conclusion that the assault will end in the same way, with the Sons of Belial struck blind, with the escape of both host and guests, he or she is in for a series of shocks. Just like Lot, who offered the rioters of Sodom his two virgin daughters in place of his male guests, explicitly affirming the ideal that the person of a guest is sacred, 29 the Ephraimite host offers the rioters two women in place of his male guest. But while one of them is his own virgin daughter, the other is the Levite's concubine, whom he would have no right whatsoever to offer, and who is obviously as much a guest as the Levite himself. If the Ephraimite presents a parodic version of the ideal host he had seemed, though, the Levite's behavior is even more astonishing and, given what we know from his previous behavior, out of character. When the Sons of Belial reject the old man's offer of two women for one man, he "lays hold" of his concubine and brings her out to be raped and abused all night by the townspeople. 30 In the morning--having for all we are told to the contrary passed a restful night--he gets up "and opened the doors of the house and went out to go his way" as though nothing has occurred. Then, seeing the concubine "fallen at the door of the house with her hands upon the threshold," the Levite says to her, "Up and let us be going." 31 As Stuart Lasine puts it, the Levite "acts as though he were in a hurry to get on the road to beat the morning traffic. The absurdity of his statements is so great that the reader is forced to view the scene with detachment, which in turn prevents the reader from indulging in 'tragic' pity for the plight of the concubine" (45). Lasine has grasped one horn of the reader's dilemma--he is surely right that one would have to be entirely humorless not to take in the absurdity of the Levite's behavior. But I think he has relinquished the other horn too quickly. In a story with so little concrete
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detail, the posture of the concubine, fallen, with one hand still on the threshold of the refuge from which she was expelled, is precisely designed to evoke "'tragic' pity." I do not think any reader can evade that. The story at this point becomes emotionally incoherent; the authorial reader is split in two. On one level one goes on responding to a grimly horrifying tale, while on another level one warily suspects that the story may instead be some nasty sort of joke. 32 Let me stop retelling the story of the Levite and his concubine and tell a another story that may be nearly as old. A golfer who always got up at 7:00 on Sunday morning to have his round of golf got home late at night instead of at his usual time, and his wife was very angry with him. "Please, let me explain," he said. "It wasn't my fault. You know Fred? Well, we're on the second green, when we get a sudden thunderstorm. Fred is just setting up his putt when suddenly a bolt of lightning hits him. The storm passes all right, but then all day long it was hit the ball and drag Fred, hit the ball and drag Fred...." In jokes, one meets characters who do very strange things, who (for example) finish a round of golf while dragging along the course the dead body of a friend who died on the second green. It seems absurd to analyze soberly narratives of this sort, but clearly we understand the story in terms of the concerns of the narrative audience (including the narratee, the wife of the golfer, to whom an explanation is due about why the golfer is late getting back from his game) but also in terms of the very different concerns of the authorial audience (which knows the story is a fiction ridiculing the fanatical desires of golfers to play out their game, no matter how uncomfortable or outrageous the circumstances). The story of the Levite and the concubine is not merely a joke: it is rather a story that, at one point, begins to look as though it might be a joke. A Levite who one week forgives an adulterous wife and undertakes a long journey to reclaim her and the following week thrusts her out of doors to the mercy of a mob, addressing her recumbent corpse the next morning with a cheery "Get up, and let us be going!" is not much more credible than a golfer who hits the ball and drags Fred. Not credible, that is, without an explanation of the contradictions within his psychology that the blunt and deadpan narrator never offers. This makes the authorial audience's choices very difficult. If the story is a joke, then there was never any dead concubine and we were fools to have been concerned for her. But if it is not a joke and we treat it as one, then we are worse than fools. The conclusion of the chapter continues this split in the authorial audience, perhaps even raising the stakes. "Then he took her up upon the ass, and the man rose up, and got him unto his place. And when he was come into his house, he took a knife 33 , and laid hold upon his concubine, and divided her, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, and sent her throughout the borders of Israel...." While some readers (as I have indicated in note 00) feel the text holds open the possibility that the concubine is alive when she is dismembered, this moment is surely horrific even for those tamer souls who understood that the Levite had found his concubine dead. While the passage suggests in a general way that this is a message to the twelve tribes, as it proves, the description of the physical action, ("vayinatachah l'atzmeha" literally signifies "and he divided her according to her bones") forces us to attend to just how she is being dismembered, possibly even to think about the fact that human beings don't divide easily into twelve neat-looking pieces. Minimally, the concubine has no honorable burial: she is hacked in pieces to become a
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set of semiotic objects carrying the meaning of the horror that was performed on her, and the medium is as horrifying as the message, which summons all the tribes save Benjamin to Mizpah to deal with an outrage they view as unparalleled since the exodus from Egypt. If the pathos and horror with which we follow this end to the story of the Levite and his concubine reaches its height with one authorial audience, the other audience in which we participate may be escaping further into its "detached" reaction, as what had started to seem as though it might be some sort of joke begins to find an object other than the nameless Levite. For what the Levite does echoes down to its language another memorable biblical event when the tribes of Israel are rallied as a national army (1 Samuel 11:7): "And he [Saul] took a yoke of oxen, and cut them in pieces, and sent them throughout all the borders of Israel by the hand of messengers, saying 'Whoever cometh not forth with Saul and Samuel, so shall be done unto his oxen.'" And at this point, the reader familiar with the events of 1 Samuel will also recall that Gibeah of Benjamin was King Saul's home town, just as Bethlehem of Judah was King David's. 34

Mizpah and After

From the beginning of chapter 20, the tempo and agency of the narrative changes. Where most of Chapter 19 takes place over a week of feasting and a night of terror and violence, Chapters 20 and 21 take place over an indeterminate span of time during which a conference is held, troops are levied, battles fought, brides for the surviving Benjamites acquired. Where Chapter 19 is populated by individual characters, however unnamed or unparticularized, a Levite, a concubine, her father, an old Ephraimite farmer, the people of the last two chapters of Judges exist only as masses within tribal politics, speaking and acting collectively. For the narrative audience that has read Chapter 19 with mounting pathos and horror the last chapters continue but with the lessening intensity that such faceless collective agents tend to generate. The Levite, having summoned the tribes to Mizpah, recounts a filtered and clarified version of the complex and troubling events we have already experienced. The Levite's choices at night have vanished, as have his words the next morning. In addition, the local hellraisers have become "baalei ha-Giv'ah"--the nobles of Gibeah--and their demand to "know" the Levite has been reshaped into two parallel clauses: "me they intended to slay and my concubine they raped so that she died" ("oti damu laharog v'et pilagshi anu vatamut"). At this, the Israelites rise "as one man" promising to muster an army to avenge its "wantonness" (navalah) on Gibeah. The payback turns out to be more difficult than one would think. The Benjamites refuse to surrender the criminals of Gibeah to the justice of the other tribes, and muster an army to defend themselves against the rest of Israel. In the first pitched battle, the Israelites lose twenty-two thousand men, and in the second, eighteen thousand. Consultation of the favor of the divine oracle, performed before both these battles, is no longer enough, and the Israelites fall back on Bethel, where, after sacrifice, fasting and prayer, they receive YHWH's promise of success. In the third battle, the Israelites employ the same ruse they had used against the city of Ai after Joshua's failure to take the city by frontal assault: like the citizens of Ai, the Benjamites, pursuing what appear to be a fleeing Israelite column, leave their city open to ambush and destruction. Twenty-five thousand Benjamites, their entire army except for six hundred fugitives who hide at Rimmon, are slain.
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If the campaign seems a retelling of Joshua's conquest of Ai staged as civil war, the casualties in the three battles are almost grotesquely numerous by comparison: Joshua lost only thirty-six men in his unsuccessful frontal assault on Ai. 35 To the 65,000 dead soldiers of Israel and Benjamin are added the countless thousands who must have been slain in the aftermath, when, in the final verse in Chapter 20, we are told how the Israelites "turned back upon the children of Benjamin and smote them with the edge of the sword, both the entire city, and the cattle, and all that they found": this formula of herem, found elsewhere (e.g. Joshua 10:28-39, 11: 11-14) suggests the slaughter of helpless old men, women and children throughout the tribal area. The dead concubine now has a lot of company. For the authorial audience who has read the concubine's story as history, the sequel serves to demonstrate how a single crime can turn into a casus belli, and then into a massive slaughter that destroys the innocent with the guilty. But for the other authorial audience the continuation of the narrative suggests only a continuation of the parody, as the language alludes not only to the first chapter of Judges 36 , to the hapless direct assault of Joshua on Ai, but to the scene of the coronation of Saul at Mizpah (1 Samuel 10:17), where that hero has to be discovered among the baggage. There is also what seems to be a pointed satirical allusion, in the remnant of six hundred Benjamite soldiers left hiding at the Rock of Rimmon ("shelah rimmon"), 37 to the remnant of six hundred left of King Saul's army at Gibeah before the battle of Michmash: "And Saul tarried in the uttermost part of Gibeah under the pomegranate tree ("rimmon") which is in Migron" (1 Samuel 14:2). For the authorial audience reading this chapter as parodic satire--as a covert attack, perhaps, on Saul as a military commander--the story is, of course, a mere "story" in scare-quotes, and the casualties are as factitious as the strategies. But the narrator never allows us to dismiss either reading.

Brides for the Benjamites

The remnant of Rimmon, historical or otherwise, generates the action of the final chapter. The Israelites, having just put the entire tribe of Benjamin to the sword, with the exception of these six hundred soldiers, is filled with remorse: "Why is this come to pass in Israel, that there should be today one tribe lacking in Israel?... How shall we do for wives for them that remain?" (21:3-6). How indeed? The six hundred survive, but their wives and children have apparently been killed in the herem, so there can be no progeny. Nor can they be given wives from the other tribes, since we are now told proleptically that at Mizpah the Israelites had all sworn not to give their daughters to be married to a Benjamite. Nor, apparently, can the Israelites be released from these oaths, even though Leviticus 5:4 prescribes a relatively simple way of being released from "any sort of rash oath that men swear." Nor, apparently, can they marry women from outside the Children of Israel, even though the previous judge, Samson, had done exactly that. But fortunately, contrary to the universal attendance at Mizpah stated in 20:1, not every group of Israelites had sent delegates; in 21:8 this impression is corrected: the town of Jabeshgilead had failed to turn up. These had thus not sworn the same oath. So twelve thousand men are dispatched with a new mission of herem to Jabeshgilead, to kill every man, every child, and every sexually experienced woman, everyone but the nubile virgins (naharah betulah) of the city. After the slaughter of the rest of the town, four hundred are found to give as brides to the Benjamites. It is never explained precisely why it is
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necessary to kill everyone else in Jabeshgilead to procure these women, but, from the perspective of the authorial audience that has read the story as history, it is entirely consistent with the epidemic of bloodlust that caused the Israelites, after the defeat of Benjamin, to put its cities to the torch and its people to the sword. This does not, however, end the matter; four hundred brides cannot marry six hundred Benjamites. The "elders of the congregation" require that, for there to be a true "inheritance for Benjamin," the other two hundred Benjamites must be provided for. The Mizpah oath, however, cannot be abrogated. The final solution is found in the "daughters of Shiloh" who "dance in the dances" at the annual feast of YHWH: the Benjamites shall wait among the vineyards and steal these women for themselves when they are out of doors and unprotected. Each of the women is surely the daughter of some man who was included in the oath but, since the fathers have not "given" their daughters but merely had them stolen away, no one has been foresworn. 38 Once more, the logic of the solution seems, in the "historical" narrative, the grossest perversion of reason. The story that had begun with one gang-rape urged by an elder, ends with another urged by a group of elders, of a somewhat different sort, but on an enormously greater scale. The "rape" of the virgins of Shiloh is not precisely the violent and murderous rape of the Concubine by the Sons of Belial in Gibeah; it is more like that of the Sabine women by the Romans, that they are taken by force ("raptus" in the Latin) as warbrides, rather than exchanged between patriarchal families, as they might have been in time of peace. But it is surely ironic that the story of the outrage of Gibeah, which began with one woman of Shiloh 39 who leaves her patriarchal lord and master to be suddenly and unexpectedly used sexually by Benjamites, concludes with two hundred women of Shiloh meeting a similar fate with the approval of all the elders of Israel. To the authorial audience for whom the strains of the narrative in Chapter 19 had moved into a more suspicious framework of telling, the story in Chapter 21 nails home these suspicions, and the irony of the rape of the virgins of Shiloh plays into that suspicious narrative, as a finale too bad to be true. But the earlier episode within the chapter is even more telling. The Jabeshgilead that is destroyed and depopulated in Judges 21 is the same one that turns up, apparently none the worse for wear, in 1 Samuel 11, as the city threatened by Nahash the Ammonite, the city for whose defense Saul decisively musters the army by cutting up a yoke of oxen and sending them among all the tribes of Israel. 40 This is indeed the heroic event that inaugurates Saul's reign. But no explanation is ever offered how the city managed to rebuild itself from utter destruction, and no mention is made of the irony that Jabeshgilead, which entreats Saul to raise a tribal army to save it from the Ammonites, had dodged the draft only a few years before. The implication, for the reader of Judges 21 who is familiar with the events of the reign of Saul, is of the suggestion of a strange proleptic link between Gibeah and Jabeshgilead, as though the historical courage of Saul of Gibeah on behalf of Jabeshgilead, and the historical loyalty of the men of Jabeshgilead to the kingship of Saul, had been born out of the refusal of the men of Jabeshgilead to help punish the rapists and murderers of Gibeah and the subsequent marriage of the virgins of Jabeshgilead to the Benjamite remnant. It's not a link the suspicious authorial audience is in any danger of taking as serious history absent any explanation of how Jabeshgilead came back from annihilation. But its aroma taints Saul and Saul's most loyal supporters
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with the nasty stink that the last three chapters of Judges give off however they are read. For this authorial audience, the story functions a bit like a Swiftian Modest Proposal told by an utterly deadpan narrator who never doffs his mask. 41

The Frame Again

The episode, together with the book of Judges as a whole, concludes with the framing device already mentioned: "In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes." To the reader who has belonged to both the authorial audiences reading this text, this is a "hard saying" with a paradoxical interpretation. If story of the concubine of Gibeah is "history," then it documents not merely a crime against a nameless woman, perpetrated by nameless hellraisers in Gibeah and connived at by her host and her husband, accessories in patriarchy. It illustrates the grotesque waste of life that was a part of an anarchic Israel before the monarchy gave it law and stability, where one was safe only in one's tribal area and where tribal levies, guided only by the oracle of the Urim and Thummim, put their own people under the ban. If "in those days there was no king in Israel," then the king's anointment cannot come too soon. But if the story of the concubine of Gibeah is "parody" or "satire" then its historical target can only be found within the very monarchy that is absent from the story, and the violent, unreasonable, even outrageous behavior in the story reflects only that of the monarchs themselves, whose idiosyncratic whim, now become law, might as easily annihilate Jabeshgilead as save it from the Ammonites, as fecklessly sacrifice the virgins of Shiloh as the priests of Nob. Politically, then, the last line of Judges reverberates between these readings: savage truth or savage irony, with no space between. 42

The Space Between: Theorizing the Stubborn

Let me be clear about my reading of the Outrage at Gibeah. I am arguing that the text is ambiguous, but not ambiguous in any way that ultimately can be resolved---except at the more abstract level of metainterpretation at which I am operating right now. There is no truth that lies in between. As a narrative, it simultaneously generates two almost entirely inconsistent authorial readings, readings that are emotionally incoherent with each other. Flesh and blood readers are at liberty to refuse either reading but both audiences are "invited" within the text, and even a reader who refuses to join one of the audiences may on some level be aware of the temptation. For one authorial audience, the concubine is a "real" person; and this audience experiences the horror of her death and dismemberment. For the other, she is meant to be seen as a fictional character in a parodic or satirical narrative, no more real (and no less vivid) than the Yahoos about whom Lemuel Gulliver told us in the fourth book of his Travels, who, last we heard, undoubtedly with utter indifference, were to be either exterminated or castrated by the rational horses of Houyhnhnmland. Within this sort of audience, viewing the concubine as a symbol rather than a person, we cannot be horrified at her end, because unlike people and books, symbols have no fate. One literary analogue that might help us understand the Outrage of Gibeah is James's novella, The Turn of the Screw. This text appears well-formed on two completely disparate interpretations: that the ghosts haunting Miles and Flora are "real," and that they are fantasies constructed by the narrating governess. Unsuspecting students---if there are any left these days---are apt to read the story one way only to
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discover that others have read it the other way. While some people might refuse to admit the legitimacy of the alternative method of interpreting the information in the story, many can see that the story reads equally well--but entirely differently--the other way. Another analogue that can be helpful is the familiar rabbit-duck illusion in psychology, the picture that can be viewed as both a rabbit profile facing right and as a duck profile facing left.

Most people can see the figure above as either a rabbit or as a duck, but not as both simultaneously. Nevertheless they are aware, despite their inability to "see" both the rabbit and the duck at once, that both are "there" at the same time. And they might well describe the figure as a radically ambiguous figure (as a "rabbit-duck," as I have just done, or even as a "textbook example in perceptual psychology," which it is) rather than as either a rabbit or a duck. The neo-Aristotelian critic Sheldon Sacks used to argue that in literature such ambiguous forms were impossible because, given the hundreds, perhaps thousands of choices of language, characterization, and action, in any literary text as short as a short story, it was inconceivable that every choice should be simultaneously equally plausible as contributing to two radically different forms. 43 This seemed self-evidently true to me twenty years ago, but Peter Rabinowitz's notion of "conventions of configuration" makes such an implausible set of coincidences unnecessary. A form or genre, once intuited by a reader, prospectively and retrospectively "lights up" the significant elements in language, character and action relevant to that genre, while suppressing the elements that fit indifferently, or even poorly. If we have intuited a different genre, different elements are valorized and suppressed. (On the figure above, one can see that a slight indentation in the back of the skull of the "duck," a detail we are unlikely to notice whilst seeing the figure as a "duck," is necessary to indicate the position of the mouth of the "rabbit.") Even so, there are not many figures that qualify as "rabbit-ducks," and not many narratives that are "stubborn," in James Phelan's sense. His demand is not merely for radical ambiguity but for a form of radical ambiguity whose tensions in effect define a new form of narrative meaning that could not have been introduced in any simpler way. 44 The Outrage of Gibeah, however, is not exactly like The Turn of the Screw. In reading The Turn of the Screw, generally speaking, regardless of whether one believes that the ghosts are real or are made up by the governess, the interpretation is validated by the story; one does not come across much information, if any, that is seriously recalcitrant
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to the interpretation one has formed, and one may be unaware of alternative interpretations until one's own interpretation is contested by a reader who has taken the other route. After one's own reading, one may join a "critical" audience exploring, at a meta-level of interpretation, the ways in which details in the text fit alternative hypotheses about its meaning. In the Outrage of Gibeah, however, there are few major clues at the outset of the story that would tempt the reader to posit a parodic/satirical reading; one joins an authorial audience reading the text as sacred history until one or more of the details toward the end of Chapter 19, taking the narrative "over the top," begin to suggest the presence of irony, and license an alternative interpretation of the text. In this case everyone begins seeing a rabbit rather than a duck, in other words, and indeed, some readers never see anything else. Even for those who begin to see covert irony beneath the deadpan tone of the narration, and hence the possibility of parody or satire, it takes a long time for the object of that satire to come into focus. From around 19:24 on, though, the reader who has begun to see both formal possibilities has become engaged, in addition, in a meta-authorial audience exploring two alternative interpretations of the narrative. That is, since the text does not give unambiguous support to either the "sacred history" or the "parody/satire" interpretations, one reads aware that neither audience one has tentatively joined can be entirely comfortable with all the details of the text. 45 One reads as one does when one is "puzzling out" something difficult. Such a reader's stance---simultaneously inhabiting two audiences and one metaaudience---may sound impossibly complicated, yet it is something we do in real life whenever we are told a story that may or may not be true. For example, when a student narrates an implausible family tragedy as a way of explaining why his work is not in on time: if the story is true we are bound to be sympathetic; if it is an elaborate falsehood, however, we are entitled to be outraged at this attempt to play on our feelings. The primary difference in the case of the Outrage of Gibeah (and other texts exhibiting ambiguous covert irony) is that the audiences are authorial rather than narrative: we are engaged in deciding, not whether a story is likelier to be true or false, but whether a narrative is meant to be taken literally or whether the author behind that narrative is winking at us. Such undecidably "stubborn" texts, as I have indicated already, are relatively uncommon within the Tanach: a few others might include the rape of Dina in Genesis 34, the deposition of Saul in 1 Samuel 15, and the ascension of Jehu in 2 Kings 9-10. None of these has the precise structure of the Outrage of Gibeah, though all involve recalcitrant material that generates productive radical ambiguity. This is the area in which my continuing work is planned.

Coherence Rules: Evading the Stubborn

One could write, at this point, a lengthy interpretive history of the Outrage of Gibeah, discussing the creative misreadings of Philo and Josephus, some medieval Jewish commentators on Former Prophets, Enlightenment readers including Rousseau and Sterne, and some of the painters and printmakers, mainly from the nineteenth century, who have chosen the story as a theme. Such a history might provide an interesting side glance at the Jewish and Christian emphases in retelling, or, more usually, avoiding retelling this rebarbative story, but it would bulk too large for this book. The
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most recent chapter would have to conclude with a section contrasting two contemporary ways of reconstructing the Outrage of Gibeah: one group, primarily women, who, operating as resisting readers, construct the narrative as a "text of terror" representing the sexual violence at the heart of patriarchal culture (e.g., Bal, Delany, Exum, JonesWarsaw, Trible, Yee); and a second group, primarily men, who read the narrative as a political and social text in which the issues of sexual politics are incidental or totally ignored (e.g., Amit, O'Connell, Unterman, Webb). 46 To historicize my own interpretation of The Outrage of Gibeah against this elaborate background would involve the admission that the terms of understanding I have worked with the hardest, Phelan's contrast of the difficult and the stubborn, Rabinowitz's contrast of conventions of configuration and conventions of coherence, are ones that have developed against a background of postmodernity, and at least partly in an effort to analyze reader-response in postmodern literary texts. This does not mean, of course, that I would necessarily attribute typical attitudes of postmodernity to the author of The Outrage of Gibeah. But I am less embarrassed than one might think by the temporal disjuncture of the methodology and the text--whatever period we might ascribe to it; in fact, I am not all that surprised to find what might be thought a "postmodern" undecidability in a premodern text. In a fast and dirty way one might view the principal narratives of modernity beginning in the age of the Enlightenment, from Richardson's Pamela, let us say, until Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's To the Lighthouse, as engaging an elaborate set of conventions of configuration and coherence most of us have internalized as literary readers. The pioneers of that mode of narrativity were consciously aware of creating a new form of writing against models found in earlier modes of narrative--as Fielding's prefaces make clear--just as much as the postmodernists, such as Barth and Coover, were intensely aware of and often elaborately parodying the conventions of modernist narrative. While no link between premodern and postmodern narrative is necessary, both are defined for us over against the "standard" of the modern, and in fact the formalist analysis of Ralph Rader has argued that there are important links, hidden similarities within obvious differences, between the premodern narratives of Defoe and the high modern and postmodern experiments of the twentieth century. 47 The sorts of ambiguous, reverberatory irony analyzed in "The Reader as Ironic Victim" are most strikingly visible in premodern satires by Defoe and Swift, and satires with strong links to the premodern by Sterne, as well as in postmodern ironists such as Vladimir Nabokov. It is not at all strange to find similar features in other premodern narratives, even those at the beginning of the Western tradition. Nevertheless one of the obligations of an analyst of reader response within the narratological tradition of Booth, Phelan, and Rabinowitz is to account in some sense for the text, and the readerly transactions with it that its narrativity demands, as a plausible production of its author. 48 One has the advantage, in the case of biblical narrative, of not having to specify a specific historical author with identifiable allegiances and opinions (such as the prophet Samuel, to whom Jerome ascribed the book of Judges). The intertextuality of the passage in question, particularly the parodic relations of Judges 1921 to passages in Genesis and Samuel, and on the other side the allusions to Judges 19-21 in Hosea 10:9, may place limits on when the text could have been composed and what it could have been intended to mean. From my survey of the literature, however, almost
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nothing about the dating and Sitz im Leben of Judges is uncontroversial, and there is hardly a date in ancient Israelite history that has not been proposed as the time of composition of the Outrage of Gibeah narrative. 49 If the suggestions I am about to make should turn out to have been way off base, I will have been in very good company. Let me start with two observations that seem tolerably obvious: 1. Any text that contains pointed satire against a ruler is likely to have been composed either during or soon after the reign of that ruler. While literary parody can be inspired by any canonical text--the Cambridge comedy group Beyond the Fringe was writing delicious Shakespearean parody over three centuries after Shakespeare's death-satire fades rapidly with its object. The idea that sarcastic, belittling attacks on Saul as a ruler and military leader might be written after the days of Jeroboam I doesn't seem very plausible. 2. Nevertheless, the personality and deeds--including the foibles--of a founding leader might well continue to signify, especially to a learned or literate group of political activists, long after that leader has passed into history. The debate about the ideas, and even the sexual proclivities and peccadilloes, of Thomas Jefferson continues among liberals and conservatives today, at least partly because such leaders are continuing models for political thought and action as long as the group led--the United States, here, continues to keep its political cohesion. Therefore the notion that a satire on Saul might be kept alive within a redacted text reshaped for circulation long after Saul's death does not seem hard to believe at all--if there were some reason for doing so. Judges is one segment of the so-called Deuteronomistic Narrative that runs from Deuteronomy itself through 2 Kings. The narrative, which has a great deal of literary coherence and a consistent verbal texture, is generally thought to have been composed in stages late in the Israelite monarchy and partially revised during or after the Babylonian exile, but incorporates much earlier documents (such as the "Court History of David" that makes up much of 2 Samuel). Judges in particular seems a collection of much earlier stories (and poetry) that float like pebbles within an amalgamating cement of Deuteronomistic moralizing. I would guess that the Outrage of Gibeah is one of these pebbles from the past, but that the original story involved a much simpler readerly transaction than it does in its present state. One might suppose that the plot of the original pebble might have been much briefer and much closer to what the Levite reports at Mizpah -- that the lords of Gibeah wished to kill the man and raped his wife so that she died -- than the more complicated and concatenated series of actions that lead to the violence in Judges 19. In this version, the concubine would uncharacterized except as a random victim of Benjamite violence, and thus more like Fred in the golfing joke. I am supposing that that the emphasis of the ur-text was designed to fall more squarely on parody of the major events of Saul's reign: his cutting up the oxen, his insistence on risking the entire tribal army to save the frontier town of Jabeshgilead while more important areas of Canaan were not under Israelite control, his superstitious reliance on oracles, his listless waiting under the pomegranate tree before the battle against the Philistines, his fatal combination of rashness and inanition. I would hazard, from the fact that Saul's name is carefully avoided, that this satire may have originated in Saul's lifetime, during his reign, but it might well have been (as O'Connell insists) the period portrayed in 2 Samuel 1-4, after Saul's death, during the reign of David over the southern tribes. This might be the version
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of the story that is alluded to in Hosea. The ideology that I would associate with my "stubborn" reading of the Outrage of Gibeah, however, belongs to a much later era of Israelite history. I see the conclusion of Judges, as W. J. Dumbrell does, as exilic, as a text written in Judea after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE 50 , indeed, after the subsequent assassination at Mizpah of Gedaliah ben Ahikam, by a pack of revanchist rebels led by Ishmael ben Nethaniah ben Elishama of the Davidic royal family. To me the political vision projected by the rebarbative undecidability of this text appears the product of an age of social chaos, one that saw a violent end to the rule of the House of David, which had been promised to endure for eternity, and an equally violent end to the generous-hearted and kindly judge whom the Babylonians had appointed to govern the Israelites. The creator of The Outrage of Gibeah could well have been a person who had seen with his own eyes the sort of wholesale terror the episode describes, one who understood from experience how easily good intentions turn into violent acts, outside of their perpetrators' control. Whoever it was that expanded the satiric pebble into the story without heroes that ends the book of Judges would have to have been someone with no very sanguine vision of the Israelites as individuals, who had formed the habit of seeing husbands as cowardly poltroons, wives as adulterous, fathers as officious fools, elders as mere parodies of respectability and tradition. He might even have been something like the man whose recurring image of Israel is an adulterous wife committing harlotries in the hills, a Levite living in Benjamin who knew at first hand what sons of Belial his neighbors could be, one who had suffered equally under kings and under tribal chaos, a religious and political thinker who understood all too well what he loathed but could never envision what might replace it: Jeremiah of Anathoth. 51 To inscribe the story in this way is, of course, to recuperate the Outrage of Gibeah on the metacritical level as a difficult rather than a stubborn text. We can experience the "click of intelligibility, when the signifiers fall into place" once we reconfigure it as a text whose radical ambiguity and undecidability can ultimately viewed as a strategic expression of political rhetoric in a chaotic age by a bitter and divided soul. Narrative, even here at the limit of readerly transaction, becomes rhetoric. 52 Unless it falls into an abme beyond the limits of all understanding, this is the fate of every stubborn text. This is not a story to pass on. Farewell, my concubine.

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Notes
See for example Alicia Ostriker, The Nakedness of the Fathers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1994); Jo Milgrom, Handmade Midrash (New York: JPS, 1991); Joann Packer and Susan Freeman, Torah in Motion: Creating Dance Midrash (New York: A.R.E., 1990). 2 The number of references in the aggadic midrash to Judges 19-21 is vanishingly small and the few references are tangential to the main issues of the story, but there are several versions of rewritten bible in the classical period, and the text is commented by most of the important medieval commentators; see below, note 00. 3 David Stern, Parables in Midrash (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 4 For an brief overview see the introductory material to my essay collection Narrative / Theory (White Plains, NY: Longman, 1994). For Eco see The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); for Genette, see Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980); for Bal, see Narratology (Paris: Klincksiek, 1977). 5 See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961) and A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1987; reissued Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1997). For Phelan's work see in particular Reading People, Reading Plots (Chicago: university of Chicago Press, 1991) and Narrative as Rhetoric (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996). 6 For this distinction see James Phelan, "Toward a Rhetorical Reader Response Criticism: The Difficult, The Stubborn, and the Ending of Beloved," Modern Fiction Studies 39, iii-iv (1993): 709-732. For an application to a "difficult" Biblical narrative, see my "Midrash and Mashal: Difficulty in the Blessing of Esau." Narrative 5 (October 1996): 253-264, especially 253-254. In that article, by the way, I substitute the term "recalcitrant" for what Phelan calls "stubborn" texts. I'm not entirely happy with the connotations of Phelan's term, which suggests an affect of the agent as much as the problematic transaction of the reader, but I'm not going to be stubborn about it here. 7 See George Steiner, On Difficulty and Other Essays (New York: Oxford UP, 1980). 8 Translations will be those of the JPS text unless otherwise indicated. 9 See Rabinowitz, Before Reading, p. 45. 10 This argument is in the chapter, "The Grip of Form: Rule-Governed Writing," in the Authorizing Readers: Resistance and Respect in the Teaching of Literature by Peter J. Rabinowitz and Michael W. Smith (Chicago: Teachers College Press/NCTE, 1998). 11 See note 00, below, however, for a complicating view. 12 In addition, some academic interpretations may, these days, be "strong misreadings" that may falsify the text to some extent, as well as the reader's experience of it, for the sake of an ideological exploration on the critic's agenda. I should add that Phelan would not claim that Beloved was "stubborn" as a whole; he thinks of it as a "difficult" text that incorporates the "stubborn" as an essential local effect.
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1

A truncated version of the phrase occurs at the climax of the outrage at Gibeah, when the Ephraimite farmer tells the "sons of Belial" to do what they please with his virgin daughter and the Levite's concubine: "asu lahem ha-tov b'eineichem." 14 The categories are distinguished in the Talmud at b.Gittin daf 6b, which specifies that a pilegesh is a wife without a dowry or ketubah (marriage-document), something like a common-law wife, but of course this legal ruling is at least a millennium later than the text in question. The word is not Hebrew in origin at all, deriving from the Greek pallax/pallakis. 15 On the other hand, the first instance of the word at Genesis 22:24 specifies that Nahor had a concubine, Reumah, by whom he had named children, in addition to those by his wife, Milcah. Indeed Genesis concubines are twice mentioned in terms of their offspring, suggesting that they were kept for breeding rather than pleasure, though the third instance, Reuben's ill-advised seduction of Rachel's maid Bilhah, who is called Jacob's concubine only at Genesis 35:22, runs in the more usual direction. 16 C. F. Burney suggests that (unless the two words betoken the combination of two traditions) "ishah pilegesh" may be a compound similar to "isha n'viah" in the narrative of Deborah in Judges 4, in which case the translation would be "married a wifeconcubine"; but he does not speculate on what the compounding is designed to signify. But if the addition of "ishah" is to specify and emphasize that the prophetess was a woman in Judges 4, it's not clear, given that all the pilagshim in the bible are women, what its function is here. See C. F. Burney, The Book of Judges, with Introduction and Notes (London, 1903; New York: KTAV, 1970) 442. The nudging and winking of Laurence Sterne's sermon on Judges 19: 1-4 implies that "concubine" was a woman kept for sexual purposes, rather than for producing children, which would be consistent with other uses of pilegesh within the Deuteronomic History (as in 2 Samuel 16:21 and 1 Kings 11:3). See Laurence Sterne, Sermon III ("The Levite and His Concubine") in Sermons, ed. Melvin New (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991), 167-176. Gersonides seems to forge this implication at the start of his massive list of the various morals of this story: the fifth moral he finds is "she'ein ra'ui l'adam laqachat pilegesh l'hameshach l'inyan ha-mishgal"---that it is not proper for a man to take a concubine for the purpose of sexual intercourse. The implication is that concubines are apparently good primarily for mishgal--sexual intercourse. See Mikra with Rashi, Metzudat David, Metzudat Tzion, Ralbag, Targum Jonathan, Radak, Midreshei Hazal (Jerusalem 1994). Volume I: Yehoshua Shoftim, 146-71. One must also mention Mieke Bal's ingenious interpretation of the word "pilegesh" in this story as "patrilocal wife," based in part on the historical speculations of Julius Morgenstern about what he calls "beena marriage." Bal is able to explain the elaborate hospitality of the Levite's father-in-law and the Levite's resistance to its continuation as part of the father-in-law's unsuccessful attempt to recapture both his daughter and the labor of his daughter's husband from the "virilocal" marriage she has formed. But the hypothesis that pilegesh means "patrilocal wife"--which Bal treats as apodictically proven in some of her more recent work [such as "A Body of Writing"]-does not seem to have convinced most of the Biblical scholars who have written after the publication of Death and Dissymmetry--see for example Cheryl Exum in Fragmented Women (177). The most one can say is that, if the institution of patrilocal marriage was common in the ancient near east, and if pilegesh was a term for "patrilocal wife," the
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Deuteronomist who redacted the narratives in Judges seems not to have understood the institution of wife-concubine any better than the J and E narrators understood the Hurrian institution of wife-sister which, it has been suggested, underlies the Abraham and Isaac stories in Genesis 12, 20 and 24. See Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and "A Body of Writing: Judges 19" in Athalya Brenner, A Feminist Companion to Judges (Sheffield: JSOT, 1993): 217. See also Cheryl Exum, "Raped by the Pen," in Fragmented Women: Feminist Subversion of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1993), 170-201. Morgenstern's speculations about matrilocal marriage appear in "Beena Marriage (Matriarchat) in Ancient Israel and Its Historical Implications" in Zeitschrift fr die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 47 (1929): 91-110 and "Additional Notes on 'Beena Marriage (Matriarchat) in Ancient Israel,'"Zeitschrift fr die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 49 (1931): 46-58. 17 See especially Numbers 3:12. While Levites were not given any special instructions for sexual purity, it was the Levite Phinehas who slew the Israelite who had married a Midianite woman (Numbers 25:7-15), lust after a woman leading to whoring after false gods; and, after the holy war against the Midianites, it is the Levites who are singled out for a special share in the permitted spoils (Numbers 31:30). 18 The Levite here bears obvious comparison with the Levite in the previous narrative in Judges. The latter, from Bethlehem-Judah, wanders to the hill country of Ephraim, where he finds employment as priest to Micah's graven and cast idols until he is carried off, along with the idols, to officiate in the same manner, for the Danites who are moving to their new home in the north near the source of the Jordan. 19 Here of course is one of the key places where the Targum and LXX differ from MT, giving at this point "And his concubine was angry with him" or "quarreled with him." The principle of lectio difficilior would award the prize to MT in this case. Nevertheless, the Talmud at b.Gittin 6b seem to be reading the Targum's "quarreled" and ignore as far as possible the issue of adultery, since it raises uncomfortable legal questions (the Levite would surely be a poor exemplar of Mosaic law in forgiving and reconciling with an adulterous wife). I say "as far as possible," but adultery seems to be a subtext of the by-play in Gittin over the Concubine of Gibeah, in which the rabbis argue the cause of the quarrel between the Levite and his bride. One suggests that the cause was a hair left in the husband's food, another rival rabbi that it was a hair left in "that place" (i.e., her genital region). Even Mieke Bal, whose interpretation otherwise holds strictly to MT, here decides to translate tizneh with a difference, arguing that the radical of the verb means "to stray" and that the concubine-wife, this virilocal wife from a patrilocal family, "strays" not before but precisely by her return to her father's house (Death and Dissymmetry, 80-85). Bal thus converges with Rashi's gloss on "vatizneh alav pilagsho." Rashi seems to be suggesting that the z.n.h radical means "to go out" on the basis that Targum Onkelos glosses Genesis 34:31 "hach'zonah ya'aseh et achotenu" as "nafkat bara, yotzet meba'alah l'ahov et acherim." The Aramaic radical n.f.q means "to go out" and it may be cognate with the Yiddish "nafka"--a whore. Genesis Rabbah insists at great length that Dina's "going out" resulted in, and thus was equivalent to, her being treated as a whore, so, conversely, the concubine's whoredom was equivalent to her going out from her husband's house.
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Literally "the days of four months," an unusual phrase interpreted by some medieval commentators as meaning one year plus four months. 21 Translating the qere "lahashivah." 22 For example, in the passage when Saul grabs onto the skirt of Samuel's robe (1 Samuel 15:27), when David takes hold of his garments to tear them (2 Samuel 1:11), later in 2 Samuel when Amnon takes hold of Tamar before raping her, and in 1 Kings 1:50 and 2:41 when first Adonijah and then Joab take hold of the horns of the altar before they are slain by order of Solomon. 23 The Levite is included within the plural subject of these verbs, but the other party or parties cannot be consistently located. Surely the father-in-law is included in the eating and drinking, but why is he "lodging for the night" (the meaning of the radical l.y.n) in his own house? It seems improbable that it is the Levite and his concubine who are doing the eating and drinking together, since it is seldom that women participate in biblical feasting. (The text says "v'achlu shneihem"--and the two of them ate together-implicitly leaving out both concubine and the servant-lad.) On the other hand Nachmanides felt that "vayalinu sham" indicated the loving marital reconciliation of Levite and concubine. The only person who is definitely included in all three verbs is the Levite, which confirms the focalization of the passage on him after its momentary shift to the father-in-law. 24 This is consistent with Judges 1:21; 2 Samuel 5:6-10 presents the final capture of Jerusalem by David. On the other hand Judges 1:7 implies that Jerusalem had fallen during the conquest of Canaan into the hands of Judah. 25 The servant is mentioned once more in verse 19 as one of the group of people and animals arrived in Gibeah for whom the Levite has food and provender, then disappears from the story, his fate at the hands of the Sons of Belial unknown. 26 The geographic particulars given at this point may make one curious about the distances involved here. Jerusalem is about 10 km north from Bethlehem, Gibeah perhaps another 6 km further north, and Ramah of Benjamin (the more famous Ramah of Ephraim is a very long distance away) about 5 km north of Gibeah. 27 The Levite says to the Ephraimite farmer "v'et beth YHWH ani holech" (Judges 19:16), which the versions translate merely as "And I am going home"; if Kimchi is right, MT may be indicating that the Levite's home is at or near Shiloh, where the tabernacle resided during much of the premonarchic period. Given the prominence of Shiloh in the narrative that follows, it is an attractive possibility. 28 He is almost but not quite a landsmann of the Levite, as the Levite is merely a sojourner, a ger in the old man's native place. 29 Lot says at 19:7 "Do ye to [his virgin daughters] as is good in your eyes, only unto these men do nothing, for as much as they have come under the shadow of my roof." 30 There have been many speculations about the motivations of the townspeople, of which the most interesting is Ken Stone's "anthropological" reading of the story as an attack on the honor of the foreigner. The townspeople are hungry not for sexual satisfaction but for acknowledgment of power. They wish to express their dominance/power over the Levite by sexually penetrating him and settle for doing so vicariously by penetrating his concubine. That might explain why they reject the Ephraimite's offer: having permitted him to sojourn, they cannot enact this rite of dominance upon his virgin daughter. She is taboo while the concubine is not. Stone's
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argument explains not only their rejection of the Ephraimite's offer of two women in place of the Levite, but their acceptance of the Levite's personal presentation of concubine alone, which is otherwise hard to make sense of. The problem with Stone's theory, though, is that by turning the actions of the Sons of Belial into a ritual humiliation with strict conventions if not rules, it implicitly suggests that such events were commonplace, that people staying the night outside their tribal areas were generally liable to be sodomized by the natives--which seems inconsistent with the outrage of the tribal leaders who discuss the incident at Mizpah. See Ken Stone, "Gender and Homosexuality in Judges 19: Subject-Honor, Object-Shame?" JSOT (1995): 87-107. 31 The question has been raised--and probably it cannot be finally settled --whether the concubine is alive or dead at this moment. If she is alive, then it is never made clear at what point she died between her arrival at the threshold of the Ephraimite's house and the moment when the Levite cuts her body into twelve pieces. Both Mieke Bal and Meir Sternberg argue that this ambiguity forces us to blame both the Levite and the men of Gibeah for the death of the concubine; see Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, 125; Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 239. I really don't think our sense that the Levite is at least partly responsible needs to depend on this, since he laid hold of her (yekhezak b-) and delivered her over to men whose original intention was to rape and torture him. While we must leave open the horrific possibility that the Levite dismembered his concubine while she was still alive, that seems a wild surmise resting on a bare possibility. Though the participials nafal / nofelet can mean merely "fallen" from a standing to a prone or supine position, more often than not they mean "dead." Of 72 biblical uses of nafal, over half unambiguously mean "dead", less than a quarter unambiguously refer merely to a change in position from vertical to horizontal. 32 The issue of narratives that demand or license contradictory responses from the audience as a fulfillment condition is discussed in my "The Reader as Ironic Victim." Novel, 14:2 (Winter, 1981), 135-51 and "Narrative Entrapment in Pnin and 'Signs and Symbols.'" Papers on Language and Literature, 20:4 (Fall, 1984): 418-30. 33 The Hebrew is "ma'achelet." Two things are strange here. One is the noun itself, which is quite rare, found elsewhere twice in Genesis 22, as the slaughtering-knife which Abraham takes to Moriah to sacrifice Isaac. (It is also found once in the plural at Proverbs 30:14.) One assumes knives were common implements in biblical times but since there isn't any real distinction made between a "sword" (cherev) and other sharp instruments like razors (Ezekiel asks men to cut their beards with a cherev), one assumes that cherev was also the common word for "knife." The other is the use of the definite article with a noun previously unmentioned and otherwise unspecified, which generally implies that it is a particular object one ought to know about (e.g., "the" White House, as opposed to "a" white house.) If the Levite lives at or near "the house of the Lord" at Shiloh, as MT suggests, then "the" slaughtering-knife might be the one used in ritual sacrifices at the altar. Apropos the slaughtering-knife, Jeremiah Unterman demonstrates that there are many verbal parallels between Judges 19 and Genesis 22 besides this one, which to his mind argues a pointed contrast between God's providential activity with Abraham and his failure to act in a similar manner here: ultimately Unterman's argument is designed to support a view of the episode as written during the reign of David as an attack against
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Saul. See "The Literary Influence of 'The Binding of Isaac' (Genesis 22) on 'The Outrage of Gibeah' (Judges 19)." Hebrew Annual Review 4 (1980), 165. 34 As note 33 citing Unterman has already made clear, I am very far from being the first reader to have picked up parallels between the narrative of the Concubine of Gibeah (and its aftermath) and the reign of King Saul. Perhaps the most complete analysis of the last three chapters of Judges as a "hidden polemic" against Saul can be found in Yairah Amit, "Literature in the Service of Politics: Studies in Judges 19-21," in Henning Greg Reventlow, ed. Politics and Theopolitics in the Bible and Postbiblical Literature (Sheffield: JSOT Supplementary Series 1994). Many of the elements of this "satire/parody" approach, however, appear as early as C.F. Burney's The Book of Judges with Introduction and Notes (1903), cf. especially pp. 446-447 with the notes. I would be curious to know just how early this strain of interpretation surfaces. Rashi explicitly links the Outrage of Gibeah story with that of Saul's monarchy in his commentary on Genesis 49:27 ("Benjamin is a wolf that preys..."), but does not, of course, view the former as political commentary on the latter. 35 See Joshua 7:5. One can however find comparable casualties--some forty-two thousand--suffered by the Ephraimites, at the fords of the Jordan, where they are massacred by the Gileadites for failing to help in Jephthah's war against the Ammonites; see Judges 12:6. David Marcus, who is deeply skeptical of numbers of this size, takes this latter passage as evidence of satire; see From Balaam to Jonah: Anti-Prophetic Satire in the Hebrew Bible (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1995), 7. I am not confident that inflated figures are a good index. It seems to me that many of the statistics given as engaged and slain in military and quasi-military campaigns all through the book of Judges must be grotesquely exaggerated, at least on the basis of what we know from other sources about the size of bronze age armies. For example, see John Keegan, History of Warfare (New York: Random House, 1993), who estimates the forces at world-historical bronze age battles like Qadesh (between the Egyptian empire and the Hittites) at around 5000 men, and the casualties at Megiddo (between Egypt and the Hyksos) at a mere 83 (175-6). Compare this with Judges 8:10, where Zebah and Zalmunna, the kings of Midian, for example, lose 120,000 men in the battle of GibeathMoreh, all slain by Gideon's three hundred picked men. An attractive alternative explanation is that the Hebrew word "elef," usually translated "thousand," denotes in military contexts a much smaller numerical unit, conceivably a platoon rather than a battalion. Thus the subsequent engagement at Nobah, where Gideon's three hundred fights against the last vestige of the Midianite host, numbering fifteen "alafim," may be something close to an even match. The miraculous intervention of YHWH is not reported, at least, in Gideon's victory. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Rabbi Marcus, who was personally helpful to me at the outset of my researches. 36 In for example the "Who shall go up?" questioning of the oracle: Judges 1: 1-2 and 20:18. 37 Their period in hiding--four months--is precisely the same length of time the adulterous concubine stayed in her father's house after leaving the Levite. This is not a standard phrase denoting a longish stretch of time; "four months" appears in Tanach only these two passages in Judges 19:2 and 20:47 (the phrase also appears at 1 Samuel 27:7 as part of "one year and four months").
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Had this method of circumventing the oath been thought of earlier, of course, it might have saved the thousands of victims in Jabeshgilead. 39 Assuming, as explained in note 00, that this is indeed the place in Ephraim where the Levite dwells. 40 It is men from Jabeshgilead who bury Saul (1 Samuel 31:11) and whom David subsequently courts as the last holdouts contesting his monarchy (2 Samuel 2:4-5). 41 In "A Modest Proposal," Swift's narrator is a projector proposing, as a method of keeping wealth within the colony of Ireland, that the fecund native Irish sell their overproduction of babies as meat to be eaten hot-dressed from the knife by the Englishborn middle classes in the Dublin area. His deadpan slips when he claims that the product can only be valuable domestically, that it cannot be an export, as it will not keep well preserved in salt, "although, perhaps, I could name a Country, which would be glad to eat up our entire Nation without it." See Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal" in Major Writers of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold Pagliaro (New York: Free Press, 1969), 470, italics in original). 42 The tension between satire and sacred history here is very similar to that in the Micah story that precedes it in Judges--the two stories together are often linked as the Deuteronomistic "coda" to the book. Like the Concubine story, the tale of Micah is outrageously "over the top," recounting how that Ephraimite steals his mother's silver, then, repenting, uses the money with her approval to create a graven and a cast idol, together with an ephod and teraphim, and hires a wandering Levite to officiate at his idolatrous altar as his priest. (His sentiment is "God will do good things for me now that I have a Levite as my priest.") Meanwhile the Danites, migrating from their ancestral portion in the south of Judea to a new home in the far north, visit Micah on their way, stealing his idols and other paraphernalia and impressing his Levite to be their own priest. The Levite is identified, at the end of the tale, as Jonathan ben Gershom ben Moshe: a startling suggestion that the idolater is the grandson of Moses. [MT shows a suspended nun between the mem and shin in Moshe, suggesting that an outraged scribe changed the name to "Menashe" in order to spare Moses this indignity.] This last detail, if taken as straight sacred history, suggests just how outrageously the Israelites would behave in the absence of kings "when every man did what was right in his own eyes": Moses's own grandson an idolater! But of course the detail operates brilliantly as fictional satire as well. It seems to mark the text as fiction, since no Jonathan ben Gershom appears among the descendents of Moses listed in the many catalogues of the Levites (one Shebuel is listed in 1 Chronicles 23:16 as Gershom ben Moshe's only son; another famous priestly Jonathan appears in 1Kings 1 as the man who brings the news to the vainglorious Adonijah that Solomon has been anointed king ). This Jonathan, however, has no apparent place in history, though the idolatrous altar at Dan--here ascribed to Micah in the tribal period--was clearly established by Jeroboam ben Nebat in 1Kings 27:30. Just as with the concubine, the evils ascribed to the tribal period in the Micah narrative are in fact those of the monarchy. My thanks to David Halperin for pointing out some of the complex issues involved here. 43 Sacks, personal communication. See also the discussion of the rabbit-duck as a visual metaphor for genre at pp. 84-5 in Ralph Rader, "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-Century Studies," in New Approaches To Eighteenth-Century Literature:
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Selected Papers from the English Institute. ed. Phillip Harth, New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1974), 79-115. 44 Phelan also includes a trivial category of the stubborn that he calls "the erroneous" (715). This is where a mistake on the part of the author creates problems of interpretation that cannot be resolved (at least by any interpretive schemes that make sense), but whose contradictions do not lead to any significant interpretive movement. Phelan's example here Toni Morrison's inconsistency about the time frame of Beloved, where different signals within the first chapter set the action in both 1873 and 1881. Trivial contradictions abound in biblical narratives as well (e.g., was it the Ishmaelites or the Midianites who sold Joseph in Egypt?) and there are also many mini-narratives that are not inconsistent but which instead seem to have been truncated to the point where their significance is hard to read. The casual mention of Reuben's lying with his father's concubine Bilhah in Genesis 35:22 seems a part of an important story that has been lost. Even more puzzling is the "bridegroom of blood" episode at Exodus 4:24-26 where YHWH tries to kill Moses on the way back to Egypt but is appeased by Zipporah's circumcising their son and touching the bloody foreskin to Moses's "feet"---probably his genitals, for which "feet" are often a metonymy. 45 Phelan himself analyzes the narrative situation this way (personal communication): "It sounds to me as if the reading experience you're trying to describe is one in which the details of the text begin to suggest one kind of configuration, and then other details become more prominent so that a second possible configuration emerges. Because the details don't entirely cohere, the reader becomes aware of the multiple possible configurations. But what's also striking is that once the reader completes the narrative, two coherent configurations are discerned. As I recall, Peter Rabinowitz talks [in Before Reading] about configuration as involving our activity as we read and coherence as involving our activity [in reshaping the text into a structure] once we've read the whole. Your work with Judges 19 would show that this temporal distinction is heuristic for Rabinowitz's purposes than a strict description of readerly activity, which involves a dynamic recursiveness between hypothesizing configurations and the coherence of such configurations. 46 This interpretive history will concern itself with the following texts: (1) Classical texts including Philo and Josephus; (2) Patristic texts including Origen, Procopius, Theodoret, Rabanus Maurus, and Walifridi of Strabo; (3) Rabbinical commentaries including those of Kara, Ibn Ezra, Rashi, Kimchi, Nachmanides and Gersonides, Abravanel and Laniado; (4) Enlightenment commentaries and midrashim including Rousseau's apologue "Le Levite d'Ephraim" and Sterne's sermon alluded to above; (5) the contemporary biblical scholarship on the Outrage of Gibeah. Feminist approaches not already cited above include Sheila Delany, "`This Borrowed Language': Body Politic in Judges 19," Shofar 11:2 (Winter 1993): 97-109; Koala Jones-Warsaw, "Toward a Womanist Hermeneutic: A Reading of Judges 19-21" in Brenner 172-185; Peggy Kamuf, "Author of a Crime" in Brenner, 187-207, originally published in Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985); and Phyllis Trible, "An Unnamed Woman: The Extravagance of Violence," Texts of Terror: LiteraryFeminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984): 65-91. Other political readings of the Outrage of Gibeah, in addition to Unterman and Amit mentioned above are W. J. Dumbrell, "`In Those Days There Was No King in Israel: Every Man Did
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What Was Right in His Own Eyes': The Purpose of the Book of Judges Reconsidered," JSOT 25 (1983): 23-33; Barry G. Webb, The Book of Judges: An Integrated Reading (Sheffield: JSOT 46 supplement, 1987); and most recently Robert H. O'Connell, The Rhetoric of the Book of Judges (Supplement to Vetus Testamentum No. 63; Leiden: Brill, 1996). 47 See Ralph Rader, "Defoe, Richardson, Joyce, and the Concept of Form in the Novel" (1973) reprinted in David Richter, ed. The Critical Tradition (Boston: Bedford, 1989): 828-46. 48 Wayne Booth argues, for example, against Eric Solomon's interpretation of James's The Turn of the Screw (as a detective story in which the villain and least likely suspect is the housekeeper, Mrs. Bread) that "a James who would do that would have to be a highly skillful writer.... But... it is absolutely the wrong kind of skill and thus the wrong kind of author--wrong when tested against everything we know or could possibly postulate about the writer Henry James." Wayne C. Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 293. 49 I have not duplicated all of Robert O'Connell's painstaking secondary research, but he presents the following hypotheses that have been proposed about the date of the compilation and redaction of Judges: (1) early in the reign of Saul, as argued by C. J. Goslinga and other sources; (2) early in the reign of David, as argued by C. F. Keil and Franz Delitzsch; (3) late in the reign of David, as argued by Cundall and Morris; (4) after the reign of Jeroboam I, as argued by M. Brettler; (5) pre-exilic Judah subsequent to the Josian reformation, as argued by Frank Moore Cross and by Robert F. Boling; (6) exilic Judah, as argued by Martin Noth and by W. J. Dumbrell; and (7) post-exilic Judea in the 5th or even 4th century BCE, as argued by C. F. Burney. For specific references to sources, see O'Connell, 305-7. 50 Dumbrell puts more weight than I would want to on the reference in the Micah story that precedes the Outrage of Gibeah, that the idolatrous altar at Dan persisted "until the day of the captivity of the land" (Judges 18: 30). Assuming that the same author constructed both narratives (as I would be happy to: they share a rebarbative sense of irony), that only establishes a terminus de quo of 722, the date of the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom. See Dumbrell, 29. 51 I am not claiming that Jeremiah personally wrote the Outrage of Gibeah, merely that the conditions of his age are those most likely to have produced its rebarbative social and political vision. I am aware, however, that scholars such as Richard Elliott Friedman have seen Jeremiah as a possible candidate for the Deuteronomist. See Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 146-9. 52 My point here is parallel to Phelan's discussion of Beloved, which makes clear that, though it is impossible to resolve the radical ambiguity of the character "Beloved," Phelan understands at least some of the reasons why Morrison would want to block any solution. Beloved is thus a "difficult" book with a "stubborn" element. And in the same sense, Judges is a "difficult" book with "stubborn" elements.

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