40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Judges 18:11-19:12 (Episode 217)

Episode Date: May 23, 2020

The men of Dan take Micah's idols and Levite priest. Micah pursues them but quickly realizes he will not be returning home with what was stolen from him. The Danites attack the city of Laish, overcome it, rename it Dan, and set up the idols. And we are introduced to a different Levite who has an "unfaithful" concubine that runs away. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network 1517 YouTube Donate

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Chad, what's going on, man? I'm just gradually coming out of our caves here in Texas. Yeah. We have seen the light. Yeah. I mean, I won't say we're getting back to normal, but uh my wife's come back to work part-time which is good we went to a restaurant over the weekend there you go and had some wings and rings cold beer it was nice yeah i felt like i was a a social

animal i was actually getting out in society a little bit yeah i put what i what you were telling me earlier you're coming out of your cave into the blazing light of day yeah the forecast has 100 degrees today that's ridiculous yeah that is ridiculous that is like so wrong but i guess it's south texas hey man maybe maybe the rona can't stand the heat you know he had how to kill everything i mean everything not in air conditioning should be dead pretty soon not that many things can survive 100 degrees for very long so no they can't let's hope that coronavirus also is uh like every like most things and can't stay out there too long in that yeah yeah yeah but other than just uh life is somewhat normal i'm working on my uh my book every day just about every day

unveiling mercy i don't know if we've talked about that much but that's my uh hebrew devotional so i'm at i think yesterday i was looking at i'm at 250 out of 365 yeah so coming down dude coming down make it headway make it headway yeah we've got an awesome just super cool cover so we'll be putting that out there uh sometime in the near future so folks can kind of feast their eyes on that and uh yeah so that's been my life cooped up riding sneaking out sometimes that's about it yeah i spent i've spent a lot of time in the yard man a lot of time in the yard the last couple months my yard looks better than it has ever looked like in the 12 years that i have i have lived in this house my yard has never looked this good yeah yeah we we worked in our backyard over

the weekend got a little sitting area all spruced up out there so kind of like you hey do something kill the time yeah man yeah you gotta get out there and be be uh feel like you're being productive i mean even if you're being productive inside and you're writing a lot and all that kind of stuff at some point you're like i need to do something where i have to lift something or saw something or you gotta do something physical right exactly exactly well right on man well uh where are we at in the uh in the book of judges we got a nice uh bedtime story and story today yeah i have uh one of these uh g-rated stories coming up this is uh we're entering into i think not the one we're in now not the story right now but we're uh we're entering probably today if if not today next time

into i think it's the darkest darkest story in scripture i mean it's just it's just about as uh as bad as they get. I guarantee you that you did not study this in Sunday school, and you've probably never heard it read in church or a sermon preached on it. I mean, if you've heard this story in church, it was probably because you were studying the book of Judges. Yeah, it's really the only time it comes up. I mean, it doesn't come up apart from somebody deciding to go through the book of Judges either in a sermon series or more likely probably in a bible studying yeah yeah i mean i don't i have never heard it referenced or uh or studied or a debate or a debate with an atheist yes right it probably comes up there it will come up there

yeah so we'll uh we'll be getting to that pretty soon but we're we're in the middle of chapter 18 right now we we started well the story actually begins in chapter 17 chapter 17 has 13 verses that kind of sets the stage and then there's kind of two or three things that are going on in this story so we'll recap real quick and then we'll pick up with chapter 18 verse 11 so chapter 17 begins this final uh section of judges and there's two main stories that comprise these these last few chapters so we're in the first of these we meet this guy named micah and micah we learn right away is a thief. He stole some silver from his mom. He gives it back. She dedicates part of it to the Lord. And Micah ends up making this silver image. And he has a shrine and he ordains

one of his sons to serve as a priest. And then things get even better for him, at least better from his perspective, because all of a sudden a Levite who's just like wandering around the country looking for a job, this Levite shows up and Micah's like, hey, why don't you move in with me. I'll give you a little salary. I'll give you some vestments. And look, I've already got these idols, these gods, and you can be a father and a priest to me. And this Levite, seeing a good opportunity, seizes it, moves in, and he sets himself up there. He has a little religious shop going on there, a little sort of cult kind of growing here at this compound at Micah's house. so that was chapter 17 chapter 18 kind of shifts to a different setting and these two stories are

going to merge when we pick up with verse 11 today but there uh is this uh this tribe the tribe of dan and they haven't really been able to get as much territory as they wanted their their enemies have kind of been pushing them back into the hill country so they got a couple cities they need a lot more land. And so they decide they're going to send some spies out. They're going to find them some, you know, fresh territory. So they send five spies out and I guess they wander around looking, looking here and there. And along the way, they, uh, they meet this, this Levite that Mike has hired. And he inquires for God, inquires for them to God to find out if their way is going to be successful. And the Levite's like, yeah, God's on your side. Everything's

cool. He's watching. So they go on and they discover this city named Laish. Everybody's there. It's just, you know, I got these little nice, peaceful, secure lives. And then the spies go back and the report that they give is, look, we found the perfect place. So everybody get up, pack, get your sword, get your spears, get your families together, because we found the perfect place for us to settle. And that's kind of where we left it off. That's the first 10 verses of chapter 18. So picking up here with verse 11 in Judges 18, we have 600 warriors, 600 men who are armed with weapons of war set out. Now they're not alone, as we discover later in the story, there's children with them, and so presumably also the wives of these warriors. So the whole

families are going out so this isn't just like a war party this is a migration party that's ready for battle they're ready to conquer but they're they've basically just packed up and trusted these spies and so they're on the move so they they leave their cities of Zorah and Eshtoel and they go a little ways and they camp at a place named Kiriath Yadrim which is in Judah now I can't remember if we've encountered this before but we're going to we're going to run into this city again, because Kiriathia Arim, it's about, what is it, eight miles, six, eight miles west and north of Jerusalem. Kiriathia Arim is famous in the Old Testament, because you remember, this is, we're kind of looking to the future now, but when David

wants to bring back the Ark of the Covenant, the Ark of the Covenant is in Kiriathia Arim. The Philistines steal it, and they bring it back, and it sits in Kiriathia Arem for a long time until David decides to try and move it away from there. So the Ark of God was in this particular city for quite a while. And then I was doing some research recently on Emmaus, and it turns out last year, 2019, that archaeologists are pretty sure that they've discovered some fortifications at Kiriathia Arem that match what we know about fortifications at the city of Emmaus, which we know of course from the ending of Luke so chances are not 100% certainty but chances are Kiriath Arim and Emmaus are actually the same city same location anyway that was kind of a side note they camp there and the place is named Machanadan which just means the camp of Dan a little bit west

of Kiriath Arim so they spend the night there and then they go on from there to the hill country of Ephraim. And lo and behold, they come to the house of Micah. So now these two stories are coming back together. And as soon as they get there, the five guys who have been the spies, they say, it's kind of humorous the way they phrase this. They're like, hey, did you know, this is verse 14, did you know that in these houses there, there's an ephod and there's some household idols, teraphim in the Hebrew, and a graven image, molten image. So they ask this question, this kind of, you know, filling in, giving us some information. And then they say, now, therefore, consider what you should do. It's like, I got to set it up like, wink, wink,

you know, we all know what you should do. But yeah, just think about it for a minute. Consider what you should do. Well, evidently, they didn't have to think about it very long, because it says they turned aside and they come to the house where the Levites living and they ask him hey how you doing they ask him about his shalom how about his welfare and the the 600 armed men are with their weapons of war are like stationed there at the entrance of the gate so I mean they're making quite an impression upon the the Levite who's serving under Micah and then the five guys they just like go into the house like assumingly assuming they go into this little shrine uh kind of a mini temple i suppose and they start taking the stuff out they take out

the graven image and the ephod and the teraphim and the molten image and the priest is just like standing there watching this happen in the verse 18 he when he sees all this happening he's like what are you doing? And they respond, verse 19, more or less, shut up, be silent, put your hand over your mouth. And then they add, you know, why don't you come with us? Why don't you be a priest and a father to us? Because think about it, man. Isn't it better for you to be the priest to like a whole tribe and a family rather than to be a priest of just one man? And it says, verse 20, the priest heart was glad and he took the ephod of the household idols and the graven image and went among the people man this guy's an opportunity yeah this this is uh well this this dude is the

definition of a hireling right i mean just better opportunity i'm i'm down for it including by the way stealing this stuff that doesn't technically belong to him right yeah this whole story is uh it's almost a it's it's depressing in many ways but it's also comical in many ways you know because you think about it how did how did micah if you go back to the beginning of the story how did micah make all of these images well he made them from silver that he had first stolen from his mother and then she kind of she gets it back he admits he stole it and so she dedicates part of it to yahweh and he makes these these pagan images out of it so the very silver that he stole to begin with to make these images now get stolen from from him yeah yeah and what's interesting about the

these guys come in and and seeing this stuff and be like well that stuff looks like something we should steal we should probably take that stuff looks like it's probably worth something that's valuable these aren't like god-fearing dudes who are you know uh like you know what we should probably we should probably have a little revival um we should probably start start serving god the taking of the priest is just as opportunistic as anything else because what what they're doing is saying you know what else might be useful is a god yeah i mean we could use a god in our midst that would be good these are just totally pragmatic choices right yeah yeah i mean like all the pagan cultures do this too they're all interested in having a god with them right and so

and that that part's fascinating is that there's not a lot of just like you know at this time there's not like a lot of just secular hedonism where where you have no use for for a god so these these guys are doing what they're doing but they don't have a priest and they think well that would be be good to have a man of god in our midst that would that couldn't hurt you know i i know we're we both uh you're farther ahead than i am but we're both watching the last kingdom yeah and i was i was reading back through this story this morning i was like man this looks like it sounds like a scene out of the last kingdom yeah you know get these uh get these danes rolling in they see all these gods like hey let's take those gods and grab that priest while you're at it yeah

it's like it's lifted out of uh some sort of medieval legend but they ask i mean it really is it's a it's a pragmatic choice on their part i mean they're you got when you're when you're thinking about idolatry especially kind of this kind of idolatry you always have to keep in mind that the gods these kind of gods are primarily used in in a more i guess manipulative way would be the way to express it so there's not really they're not really worshiping not wanting to worship these gods not in the way that we think about worship you're like praise and adore them they are they're using them to find out what's best for them yeah well it's very transactional it's it's it's a uh you'll be our god so that's good for you because now you're god over something

and then uh and then you give us counsel or victory or whatever it is right and so there's a there's a deal that's cut essentially like we'll we'll you know we'll serve you as as god so we'll say you're god which is what you want right you want to be you want to be someone's god and uh and then you'll help us get what we want which is whatever it is right yeah yeah yeah a lot of these uh a lot of the pagan gods were worshiped just by feeding them right so the gods were hungry and so they had to be fed and the transaction was okay we'll feed you we'll offer these sacrifices to feed you because we know that you're hungry and then you feed us in other words you send rain you uh you give us everything we need to grow good crops you make sure that our

cattle or our sheep are are going to be uh producing offspring all that kind of stuff so yeah it's completely transactional we're going to give you sacrifices or in some cases it was more of a sexual cult you know we'll have typical prostitutes and we'll kind of enact in our sexuality what then you want what we want you to do for us so we'll have these cultic prostitutes and by performing that act we're as it were giving to you and then we want you to give back to us we want you to make our wives fruitful so we'll have you know large healthy families but it's all based upon the idea that the gods need something that's kind of the foundational understanding of the gods need something and we give that to the gods and then the gods in turn provide us with what

with what we want. That's why I think it's Psalm 50 is where God says, you know what? I don't need your sacrifices. You know, shall I eat the flesh of bulls? Shall I drink the blood of male goats? The cattle on a thousand hills are mine. If I were hungry, I'd tell you the world is mine, the earth and all it contains, however that Psalm goes. But that's the idea. That's kind of a, it's an anti-pagan anti-canonite view of of god listen god doesn't he needs nothing he stands in need he doesn't need our praise he doesn't need our sacrifices he certainly doesn't need the flesh of bulls and rams and goats and all of that because he's sufficient in and of himself the one who stands in need is us so there's never kind of a quid pro quo

tit for tat transactional kind of thing going on instead it's always god gives and and we receive Which is totally opposite of what these guys, these Danites are wanting out of these gods that they're stealing from Micah. So anyway, pick up the story. After the priest decides he's going to jump at this opportunity, he's going to move his way up the ladder, the religious ladder, as it were. Verse 21, it says they decide they got everything they need. So they turn and leave. And it says they put the little ones and the livestock and the valuables in front of them. So this is where the kids come up.

So these weren't just 600 soldiers. They also had little ones, children, no doubt, wives, mothers with them. So they put all of the valuable stuff and the vulnerable ones in front because, you know, they know there's going to be a party that chases them after a while. So the warriors are in the back. And sure enough, that's what happens. They'd gone some distance from Micah's house. and then i guess i don't know if the guys weren't there when this was happening or maybe it took a while for them to gather their forces whatever it was micah shows up with a whole bunch of other

people from his neighborhood his compound if you will and they you know cry out against these sons of dan and you gotta love these guys are just uh they're pretty cold-hearted they turn around to Micah and his party, this is verse 23, and they say, what's the matter with you that you've come out against us so that you've assembled together? As if it's not patently obvious, you just took all of these religious valuables, you stole them, and you took our priest. And now they turn around like, yeah, what's up with you? Why are you coming after us? And I don't know which is worse. that or Micah's response, Micah's response is just like thick with irony here, because he starts out by saying, you have taken away, now listen to this, you have taken away my gods, which I made.

You gotta love the irony of that. I mean, first of all, gods, which I made, so like not the God who made me, but the gods that I made. And these gods have been taken away. In other words, these gods that micah made were so impotent they couldn't be prevented themselves from from being stolen it's kind of like what we'll be back in the story of remember uh when jacob finally leaves uh from laban laban's house and laban pursues him because his terrafim have been stolen and rachel sits on them so these gods can't they get sat on they can't even prevent themselves from being stolen they can't prevent themselves from being sat on same same case here this is kind of this mockery that you often see in the old testament yeah i mean this is you took my priest

and my non-gods yeah and he says you know and what now what do i have and then you're gonna ask me what's the matter with me uh you take all my stuff yeah yeah you took all my stuff and so more or less i don't have anything left in other words you you took everything that was valuable to me more or less all the stuff that uh that meant so much to me i mean this whole uh like i said earlier it's kind of a humorous exchange here because we're talking about stolen gods and supposedly these gods are able to help you well they can't even help themselves so they get a big fat f in godhood then these guys don't mess with these sons of dan uh they say more or less shut up to him as well so don't let your voice be heard among us

let and i love the they like speaking third person here they don't say or otherwise we're going to fall upon you they say lest fierce men fall upon you and you lose your life for the lives of your household yeah you lost you lost your god that you made you you you've maintained your life but we could arrange for that to be taken as well yeah yeah you think things are bad now you just wait till these fierce men fall upon you oh it's sort of a sort of a reply to the to the question that micah says like what do i have left and they're like well you're alive you're breathing aren't you and that could change yeah i could change really quick so uh verse 26 evidently they got their point across they uh the sons of dan they go on their

away and when micah saw that they were too strong for him uh he turned back and he he went back to his to his house and uh micah then disappears disappears from the scene so his story is over ends in a he's kind of a just kind of a sad tragic figure at the end i mean he starts out as a thief and he ends up getting stolen from he starts out thinking oh now i've got these gods and i got a Levitical priest, and God's going to smile down upon me. In the end, it's all gone. And he ends up losing everything that he considered to be valuable to him. I mean, it's one of these stories where there's no theologizing going on here explicitly. It's like the story tells the theology, as often happens in the Old Testament. There's not like any kind of narrative parentheses

where the writer breaks in and says, you know, here's the moral of the story, or here's the theological point that's being made. The story makes the point well enough. And the point of the story is basically, well, when you worship false gods, then this is what happens. I mean, they are impotent with regard to doing you good, but they are potent with regard to evil befalling you and that's precisely what happens to micah it's precisely what happens to the israelites throughout the old testament of course it's still what happens what happens today i mean the false gods always promise much and deliver nothing unless you want to count consider the evil that they that they bring into your life anyway so picking up with just the rest of the chapter

verse 27 and following what happens well the story picks up with basically whatever what's going to befall the the danites so they go on their journey and they go to this city that their spies had found laish to this people quiet and secure and they just slaughter them verse 27 they struck them with the edge of the sword they torched the city no doubt part of the city whatever they needed to maybe they burned the city gates whatever needed to be taken care of they didn't want to destroy the whole city they're gonna they're gonna you know they're gonna live there verse 28 says they didn't have anybody to come to their rescue because they were just kind of this isolated little enclave where they thought they had everything they needed but as it turns out they lost it all

well anyway they they rebuilt the city and they lived in it and they changed the name of the city from laish to dan so you'll you'll often hear a reference to the city of city of dan throughout the rest of the old testament well this is the origin of it they named it after their after their father uh and uh they set themselves up well that you know they're not gonna they're not gonna let this this uh ephod and and the household gods all that go to waste so they set them up they set up the graven image and finally and strangely all of a sudden after this whole story two chapter story in which the levite is anonymous we hear his name verse 30 says and jonathan this is the first occurrence of that name the old testament there's a whole lot of jonathans in the rest of the old

us but this is the first occurrence of that name Jonathan the son of Gershom the son of Moses I'm going to come back to that in a minute he and his sons were priests to the tribe of the Danites until the day of the captivity of the land so they set it for themselves Micah's graven image which he had made and all the time and all that and all the time that the house of God was at Shiloh there's a lot squeezed into those last couple of verses now depending on which translation you're using i know esv has moses here well it's kind of interesting thing here a little little uh a bit of hebrew textual uh information here that that it's it kind of it kind of gets to the gets to the uh the troublesome aspect of this so i'm looking at new american standard and my new

American Standard has that this guy's name was Jonathan, the Levite, the son of Gershom, the son of Manasseh. So is it Manasseh or is it Moses? Well, there's a weird little thing that happens in the Hebrew text. I was looking at it this morning, and this only happens, I think, four times in the Old Testament. So the rabbis who put the Hebrew text together, when they came to this, evidently were so troubled by this bad Levite being a direct descendant of Moses that they inserted a Hebrew in, like halfway, it's like a hanging in, I guess is the way you would picture it. Like if you're writing, say, Manasseh, and you put one of the ends like halfway above the rest of the word, that's the way it looks in Hebrew. So you can tell that

it wasn't there in the original but it was added as it were to protect i guess moses's reputation i mean it's kind of a strange it's a strange change uh but it's a little bit up the air because there are some ancient greek translations that uh like the septuagint traditions some of them have manassas some of them have moses but it's pretty obvious to me this is moses because you know Gershom was his son so uh I suspect it's one of these cases where and we have a few of these elsewhere where the rabbis were so troubled by what the text said that they they they slightly altered it or they would put sometimes an alternate reading in the margin so that when you came to that you would actually read the alternative word instead of the word that was printed in the text

yeah it's a it's a and you know i mean if you know i mean i mean if you followed along this far it's not like it's going to come to some surprise that you know the grandson of moses or whatever is uh going to going to be a sinner or an idolater yeah it really should be i mean you look at you didn't have to get very far from moses i mean just look at his brother right aaron was the and was the uh the one who created the golden calf so this shouldn't be any surprise and it's anyway uh so moving on from that it says that evidently in this particular city they just perpetuated this idolatry that he and his sons were preached to the tribe of the danites until the day of the captivity of the land that uh probably is referring to the destruction of the

northern kingdom so that would have been 8th century 722 bc is when the assyrians marched through and decimated the northern kingdom and hauled off those 10 northern tribes to to captivity so i'm assuming that is the reference here and it says they set up micah's graven image which he had made and all that time the house of god was at shiloh so that's where the tabernacle's at that that's thrown in there probably just to make the point that the day and nights were they were rebelling against the Torah in more than one way. They were worshiping these idols, but they were also sitting at another shrine besides

the one that was in Shiloh. And it also tells you that this sort of goes on for quite a while. Oh, yeah. We're looking at centuries here. Not decades, but centuries where this happened. And that's the end of chapter 18. That finishes up that particular story.

As we said when we kind of started out this whole narrative of 17 and 18, I think that the reason these two main stories, the one we just covered, the one we're about to begin, these are included as exemplary of what was going on in more than one place. So it wasn't like there happened to be this one guy in this one city who did this. No, this was probably going on all over the place. He had Levites hiring themselves out to various individuals who maybe had some wealth,

enough wealth to build a little shrine and have gods and hire a priest to serve them. so this is probably just indicative of how widespread this problem was and no doubt the story we're about to begin is the same way in fact uh some some would argue that the reason a lot of times like in the when the one we're starting in chapter 19 a lot of times these individuals are anonymous is because they're intended to kind of represent every man so there's no man named so that he can represent every man or the woman's not named so she can represent every every woman and what's fascinating about this is that if you're creating these different gods and you're you're breaking all kinds of of rules of worship uh and then but

then you still have this uh desire to to have a levite priest and so that this is where this is why it feels so so weird and culty all the time is that if you're just going to worship different gods altogether why do you need why what's the what's the value in a levite yeah why not just keep your son as the priest right yeah and uh and it's going to be like the same kind of thing happen again you know where the a levite is is like well that's that's the guy that would be good to have as a priest you know and it's it's just it's just weird and of course if you were wondering if uh there was a king in israel in those days uh they're gonna let you know once again there's not this is almost like story reset language right uh just in case we're going to tell

you another story uh in just case you were wondering also uh no king in israel yeah yeah by the way little reminder thrown in there no king yeah that's the way this chapter starts out right chapter 19 uh now it came about in those days when there was no king in israel but here's what happened we're this is where we're introduced to our second levite and this guy i mean as far as like on the scumbag level he's just about as far down as you can go uh this will become obvious as we as we work our way through this okay so this guy this levite he is staying in the hill country of ephraim and it says he took a concubine for himself from bethlehem in judah now there's so many things i wish we knew that we're not told i mean

ordinarily if a guy takes a concubine he's married right right she's like a co-wife right so if why would he take a concubine if uh he's not if he's not married that just doesn't make any sense so i would we're never told so this is somewhat speculation but chances are he's married and maybe he has one wife maybe he has multiple wives but anyway he takes a concubine and she's from Bethlehem. Then verse two starts out. Well, my translation says that his concubine played the harlot against him. Now, it's sort of a strange phrase. I can't explain it because it's too kind of detailed in the Hebrew, but the grammatical structure here only occurs in this place. So usually you don't play the harlot against someone. That's what's different about the

grammatical construction here. So it's a little bit unclear. I mean, did she, I don't know, did she sleep with the other man is this some sort of figure of speech meaning something else because the guy sure seems you know to want her back he's going to go in search of her well some translations will say that like had a spat they had a fight she was angry or something like that and it's just kind of idiomatic way of saying that well it seems like well there's that we'll see there's lots of evidence that this guy was probably not the greatest person to be in relationship with probably not doesn't seem like a real like solid guy so who knows there could be loads of reasons why if you were a woman in a relationship with this guy whatever that

relationship is that you would maybe not want to be in that relationship and and you sort i think you sort of see that when it says that she went away from him to her father's house and was there for four months right so it's almost like you get the sense that i mean i'm inserting this a little bit in there but to me this sounds like more of a fleeing now maybe she maybe she like hooked up with some other guy and that that's why she fled but at the very least you have the idea that she thinks fleeing is necessary yeah yeah yeah and you can't blame her and i presumably she was she was good with that distance right she she was she had no plans on going back so yeah she's there for four months and verse three this is the only verse that there's any indication whatsoever that this

guy has a little bit of humanity about him says her husband arose and went after her the the Hebrew there is to speak to her heart my translation to speak tenderly to her sometimes it's translated to woo her but it is a language of like courting someone so he spoke tenderly to her spoke to her heart but you know there's plenty of uh there's plenty of abusive men who also know how to turn on the charm right yeah so whatever whatever his speaking tenderly to her consisted of he's trying to get her back and he takes with him he doesn't go alone he takes a servant and a couple donkeys anyway she uh she brings him to her father's house and when the girl's father saw him he was glad to meet him the girl's father's kind of a strange character he's like mr party he just wants to

keep uh keep partying on as you will see as we'll see as the story uh unfolds anyway it says uh the father-in-law so the the girls the girl's dad kept him there and he stayed for three days it says they ate they drank they lodged there and you know basically showing them hospitality they were you know they're living there in bethlehem and he's bringing out all his best wine and making meals and entertaining his his son-in-law now the fourth day comes along and it says they got up early in the morning and he was ready to go but the girl's father's he's wanting to keep him there this is one of these one of these i'm still trying to figure it out myself as to why there's why this built into the story almost i guess it's creating suspense there's a lot in these in this particular

chapter that's about timing like sunrise and sunset and day and night anyway he says let's listen uh eat some bread and then you can go so they sit down they eat and drink together and the girl's father convinces him to to stay for a fourth night so he does he keeps him there the eight on the in verse eight it says the the fifth day rolls around so he's been there for four days five days rolls around it gets up early in the morning and we have the same thing the the girl's dad is like oh no no no stay wait till afternoon so they eat and verse nine it says the man arose to go along with his concubine and his servant and once more the father-in-law tries to get him to stay he's like hey the day is late so spend the night and then you can you can go early

in the morning. Now this becomes important because this is, this is, this is the reason that what's going to happen happens. Guys, verse 10, he's like, nope, I'm not going to stay the night. So he gets up and they, and they leave. So this was his, the reason this is significant is because if he left in the morning, then he would have had plenty of time to get past the city where they're going to end up spending the night. So they're delayed, and they leave. They come close to Jerusalem. Verse 10 says that they came to a place opposite Jebus, or Yebus. That is Jerusalem. So you'll remember that at this point, the city of Jerusalem is still under the control of the Jebusites, who were the native inhabitants. It's not going to be until the time

of David when Jerusalem is captured. So this particular city is known by several different names. It's called Salem in Genesis 14 and in one of the Psalms. Here it's called Jebus because it was the home of the Jebusites, but it's probably all the same place. It's all Jerusalem. Well, they come opposite Jerusalem, and when they were near, the servant's like, why don't we just turn aside and spend the night in the city of the the jebusites i mean it's close right why don't we why don't we just you know sun's gonna be down pretty quick we can just get a place to stay there but the levite is is not going to do it verse 12 he says nope we will not turn aside into the city of foreigners who are not of the sons of israel but we will go on as far as gibeah

so this is this is going to become a fateful decision and this is part of the irony of the story too so the levi doesn't want to spend the night in this non-israelite city people who were not of the of the sons of israel because he's presumably because he's afraid something bad might happen right oh we don't want to we don't want to endanger ourselves by going into a city that's controlled by, by a Canaanite population, because who knows what might happen if we spent the night in Jerusalem. Instead, we're going to go on and we're going to find an Israelite city to spend the night in because, and I'm kind of, let's just, you know, making, filling in the gaps here because, you know, we'll be fine in the Israelite city. Well, as we'll find out in the

next episode, he could not have been, could not have been more wrong. And that's, that's kind of part of the the implicit story that's going on here that things were so bad in israel that it would have been a lot safer and better if they'd have spent the night in a non-israelite town than they did in a in an israelite city yeah it seems to me that it's possible anyway that the father is trying is is not i mean it seems like he's playing a game where he he's acting nice he's acting hospitable he doesn't seem like he really wants his daughter to go but he's also got a certain degree of fear uh he can't push too hard and so he's first trying to persuade him to stay there it doesn't really know it doesn't really have an end game in mind other than he

just doesn't really want them to leave yeah i think you're right yeah i mean he no doubt when she came back home she told him why she left and so the thought of losing her once more is something he's going to try and avoid but yeah ultimately he knows there's only so much he can do so he's he's going to keep pulling out the bottles of wine as long as he can to keep uh to keep him there but in the end he has to he has to let her go and and uh sadly that will be the last time that he that Caesar. There's not a lot of gospel-y things to pull out of this particular story, not

yet. Things will not get any better in this tale, but if you're interested in how this turns out, you'll have to come back next week. Chad, I'll see you then. Alright, we'll see you then. We'll see you next time.