ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author begins to attempt a reparative reading of Judges 19. In the first half, she considers the purpose and effect of the woman’s anonymity within the text and challenges the claims that this is obliterative. She considers the literary purpose of anonymity (with particular relation to work by Don Hudson and Adele Reinhartz) and concludes that this device is used by the narrator to make a general, ethically compelling critique of ancient Israel. This therefore elevates the story in significance. The second half of the chapter engages with the surprising degree of autonomy and agency with which the Levite’s wife or concubine acts in the first third of Judges 19. There are strong textual markers that emphasise this subjectivity; in particular, the unusual reference to the man as ‘her husband.’ The chapter then considers Isobel Hamley’s argument that the ambiguity around to the circumstances of the woman’s abandonment of her husband serves to attribute her with moral agency. This then makes her an ambiguous, complex figure rather than a two-dimensional character who exists simply as a textual device.
