The Massacre of Innocence Part One

I am going to use a strange approach to the start of the New Testament.

There is a particularly horrible story near the end of the Old Testament Book of Judges (19:1-21:25).  It concerns the fatal hours-long gang rape of a Levite’s concubine in a town of the tribe of Benjamin.  It is particularly horrible to read the particular horrors of this episode because of the landscape of ghastly brutalities that constitutes the bulk of the book—it is hard to know where one horror ends and the next begins.

The Levite apparently finds the situation unusually distressing (though not so much as to have prevented him from to tossing the girl to those who would rape her to death.)  The Levite hauls his dead concubine to his home in the territory of the tribe of Ephraim, dismembers her, and dispatches her portions across Israel—so that all of the tribes might consider the misdeed of the guilty men of Benjamin.  Upon receipt of the grisly missives:

“And it was so, that all that saw it said, There was no such deed done nor seen from the day that the children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt unto this day” (19:30, KJV).  Of course, to modern readers—even the most conveniently gullible—the greater bulk of the Conquest appears to consist of “such” deeds.

And so, to address the particularly horrible evil that has arisen in their midst, the assembled Israelites—being refused the surrender of the culprits—slaughter everyone in the town in question.  Then, for good measure, they slaughter everyone in the towns encountered in the running battle—apparently the entire civilian population of the culprits’ tribe of Benjamin.  Then, for extra good measure, they slaughter everyone in a certain town of Israel that had not responded to the muster.

This extra-good-measure slaughter provides the extra good of the chance to procure wives from the town for the six hundred hiding Benjaminite soldiers still alive.  The Book of Judges has the entirety of Israel telling the dispatched contingent of their own men:

“Go and smite the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead with the edge of the sword, with the women and the children” (21:10).  (This statement is consistently rendered by the translators as referring flatly to “the children.”)

But the directions to the soldiers are not yet complete: “And this is the thing that ye shall do, Ye shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman that hath lain by man.” (21:11)  Apparently widows would not do.

So: “And they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead four hundred young virgins, that had known no man by lying with any male, and they brought them unto the camp.” (21:12)  Apparently middle-aged virgins would not do.

What is more, the blanket description of those to be killed along with the adult males was “the women and the children,” not “the women and the male children”—leading to the grimly unsurprising conclusion that the only type of person to be spared was the sort of sufficiently ripe sweet young stuff as might be expected to entice a cringing vanquished soldier out of the desert.  Apparently, no female children were to be allowed to mature unmolested until they were turned over to the rapist-husbands for whom the girls’ kinfolk had been murdered.

(Don’t worry; the six-hundred-vanquished-soldier-to-four-hundred-grief-stricken-terrified-tween-ager mismatch was duly rectified by an additional mass rape-abduction.)

At this point the objective observer—or at least one successfully fighting nausea—might ask a salient question: “How?”  Or that is: “How did the Israelites know they were getting virgins?”  Did the married girls proudly voice their status after they perceived the criterion for being spared?  Were the girls diagnostically raped by their captors (the old blood-on-the-sheets thing?) before they were handed over to the Benjaminites as virgins?  Did the Israelites consult marriage records in a massacre-racked semi-literate village of the rape-ridden second millennium B.C.?  “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” (21:25)  The whole thing is ludicrous; the entire episode survives scrutiny such as it does only because neither Judaism nor Christianity need scrupulously own the time before the kingdom.

I intend to use the foregoing to frame the proper approach to the infancy narrative of Matthew, and there is already plenty to make use of, but there is still to be mentioned a further connection between the concubine murder story and the infancy narrative—a connection that almost defies belief: the stories share the use of the same short stretch of road.

But first, inescapably: the author—or compiler—of Matthew tacks on to the front of the Gospel an account of Jesus’ origins that has been roundly assessed as contrived and convenient.  The genealogy with which it begins is scarcely worth bothering about, though the flailings of apologists in its defense (and that of its cousin in Luke) can be amusing.  Matthew’s version at least includes mention of four of Jesus’ foremothers—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba—giving rise to many a commentator’s musings.

Matthew’s version of the infancy of Jesus builds on the logic of Jesus being, in his incarnation, a product of the story of Israel—and so Matthew presents Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies.  For our purposes, the important thing is the tendency of a Jesus represented in prophecy as being a Jesus thought of as inevitable in the particulars of his ministry; Jesus is “conceived” in the narrative.  “Of course,” goes the prevailing logic, “Jesus was what he was and did what he did because it was so prophesied.”

The essential problem with Jesus being “conceived” through prophecy is that the core story of Jesus is one of his being “roused” in his experiences.  Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane really is asking to be released from his prophesied end—otherwise the unspeakable agony in the garden is reduced to a hideous shadow play.  For our part, the least we can do is to avoid fretting over who Joseph’s grandfather was.

And so we will return to considering the infancy narrative of Matthew, a consideration that would seem to be an example of such fretting—if not for one thing: no representation of Jesus ought to be countenance if it is a falsehood.  If the infancy narrative of Matthew cannot be dismissed on its (lack of) merits, then surely the only test of any Scripture’s authority is its inclusion in the received canon.