‘She had it coming’: text, tradition and trauma in Judges 19
The horrific story of the rape and murder of a young woman in Judges 19 ends with a dismembered corpse and a call to ‘Get on top of it! Take counsel! And speak out!’ (19:30). In Shelly Rambo’s terms, her death haunts the life that follows, and the narrator seems to be calling us to ‘witness’ to the reality of life after the storm of this traumatic event. Yet instead of taking up this responsibility to witness within the middle space of death-in-life, commentators from Pseudo-Philo to Matthew Henry have sought to blame her and excuse the men for what happened to her: her death is God’s justice for her alleged adultery; the men did what was necessary to avoid the ‘worse rape’ (of a man); she was (no doubt) dressed immodestly to inflame such a mob to lust. In short, the tradition finds a cautionary tale about a whore who got what was coming to her. Read within this tradition, it is hard to see how the passage can supply the lectionaries of modern faith communities without retraumatising survivors and perpetuating rape-culture myths. But must we surrender the text to this tradition? This paper offers a Gadamerian reception history that tracks the emergence of this tradition, and the counter-tradition that takes the young woman’s side. Understanding the Vorurteile that weaponise the text against the young woman is a necessary preliminary step towards a potentially reparative re-reading of her story.
