Around 3000 years ago, a man wandered around the land of Ephraim. That morning he had awoken as soon as the sun had risen and had started his way back home.
As he walked through the ancient highway, his pace was faster than usual and he strove to force his donkey to speed up. Some of the early wanderers in the land noticed that he was a priest and that he carried a woman (maybe his wife?) over the donkey, but the Levite didn’t stop to talk to anyone, it was a dangerous business to do so in those days and he was in a hurry anyway.
Not long after he finally arrived to his house. He saddled the donkey at the entrance door and took the woman off the donkey, although she barely noticed it. As the priest carried her inside the house, the woman let a soft whisper escape her mouth but, it was so soft, that neither the venerable priest nor anyone else for that matter was able to hear what she had said.
As he entered the house, the priest placed the woman on the floor and let her rest there as he walked a few feet away from her. The woman had one of her eyes opened now, the other was too swollen and hurt too much for her to even try.
Immediately she felt some memories of last night coming back at her. She remembered herself knocking really hard at a door, she also felt her body being pulled by many arms, and being beaten by fists and feet as soon as she lost balance… a tear ran through her eye.
At that moment she was able to recognize the place she was lying on, it was the floor of the man she had been living with. He was a good man but she had been unfaithful to him and had ran away thereafter. But now she was safe, wasn’t she?…
The priest returned with a knife in his hand, got close to the body on the floor and started to cut pieces of the woman. She felt the pain only once and then immediately after she died.
When the priest had finished his gruesome work, he made sure to deposit the different parts of the woman’s body on twelve different bags very carefully and sent a message with them.
Something awful had happened in Gibeah of Benjamin, it had something to do with the body parts the elders of the people of Israel were receiving and the calls of the priest for justice to be done against the men of Gibeah. Something like this had never happened in the whole history of the young nation of Israel.
Soon meetings were being called for all over the place, the leaders of the different tribes were moving to and fro, ladies in the streets whispered about what little information they were able to gather from their husbands, and it seemed that a great calamity had put everyone on alert.
How would a nation of priests, a people holy to the LORD respond? For a nation so different from the others, these actions had proven to look the same or worse than the pagan nations living around them.
After a while the tribes gathered together as one, their purpose was clear: they needed to punish the people of Gibeah. The resulting conflict left an indelible mark in the land. A whole tribe almost disappeared as a result of conflict and only 300 men of the Benjaminites had survived…
Around 400 years later, a young man from the land of Benjamin was roaming on the field. He was not oblivious to the fact that he was among the descendants of those 300 men, he was too aware that the reputation of his tribe lingered on him and other of his brothers just like the smell a putrid dead beast stays with you after one encounters it by accident in the forest.
There was a difference though, with the smell of the animal the LORD God had left rituals to be restored, but a bad reputation does not simply abandons the mind of the peoples. That is why it had to be a surprise to Saul when the famous seer of Israel was anointing him as king over Israel! It was unreal too, that the whole of Israel was now chanting his name!
Not everyone was convinced, though, some dared to doubt about the capacity of the newly ordained king. “How can this man save us?” Was the comment among some, maybe thinking back to the dubious Benjaminite past of Saul.
Soon, however, the young king was able to demonstrate everyone that they were mistaken. The Ammonites had fallen at his hands as easy as one sips goats milk in the morning!
Restless, their neighbors of the West decided that allowing Israel to survive was not a good idea for anyone, so the five cities of the Philistines joined forces in an attack against Saul.
What followed was a miracle that no one was expecting, not even brave Saul who had been hiding in a cave with his 600 men. As result of this miracle the Philistines where now on the run and the Israelites pursuing.
So exhausted were the Israelites from persecuting the enemy that many of them had started to eat raw meat, blood and all, something that was strictly forbidden to the Jews!
It seemed that no matter what Israel does, somehow Gibeah always gets involved in shedding blood, this time it was the blood of animals that ran freely through the jaws of the Israelites making them ceremonially unclean.
Horror stricken the messengers came from all over the place, letting the king know about the defilement. The solution was not difficult, a rock with no cravings made by human hands was pulled down near a mount close to the camp at Gibeah. This was the first altar built by Saul.
It all seemed to end happily.
One day, Saul grew tired of the problems that Israel was facing. He needed a scapegoat and looking around the land of Israel he found one ready at hand among his servants: the Gibeonites.
The people of the Gibeonites had been allowed to reside in the land of Israel, a solemn vow protected them from harm, but in the eyes of Saul that was not a problem. Besides, who is going to miss foreigners in the Israelite promise land? Wasn’t the land conquered by them and for them? What did a group of immigrants enjoying a land that was not theirs?
And although the Gibeonites had spent many centuries with Israel, it was pretty evident to Saul that they were still very Gineonite-looking… Soon the campaign started, it was not proper that Gibeonites enjoyed the milk and honey of the land. Israelite soil shouldn’t feed the mouths of robbers. Yes, not even the threshing laws applied to them because to be a Gibeonite was to be in between two worlds: neither sojourner nor citizen.
Passive aggression soon was transformed in active. Many of the Gibeonites were persecuted, murdered and executed without trials or due process. They were invaders, criminals, they are plotting against Israel and therefore must be seen as the enemy that is not allowing Israel to progress.
In reality, though, it was Saul through his disobedience who had stopped the rivers flowing with milk in Israel. Honey was no longer abundant as before because just like a king before him, Adam, Saul had decided to rebel against the LORD God by making himself the center of the Kingdom.
The persecution continued amidst wars and scarcity, and the excuse was always the same: it was the Gibeonites’ fault, except that this scape goat was starting to die and David, Saul’s favorite servant began to occupy that place of hatred.
Intrigue and betrayal was common place in the court of Saul until one day, in the midst of a war Saul and his son were killed in battle. There was a big cry and lament in the fortress of Gibeah, the chosen place of Saul, and the altar that previously was so busy, suddenly was less and less crowded.
Anyone would have thought that this was the end of Saul and his problems, but the Gibeonites had not forgotten about what Saul had done to them and their cry had reached heaven. A famine broke out and the oracle of the LORD revealed that it was because of Saul’s crimes that the land too was defiled.
A solution was needed, David the new king, didn’t find this solution with the oracle, though, but with the Gibeonites themselves… This would prove to be a tremendous error. The Gibeonites knew full well what they wanted. Seven men from Saul’s house and a cultic ritual celebrated at the altar built by Saul will do. They hanged (and maybe even hacked) the men at the top of the mountain and let their remains exposed to the elements, not even the David dared interfere with such quid pro quo justice!
Could it be that the irony was lost in the mind of David?… It certainly may seem like it. Gibeah was once again on the map and its name recorded in the pages of Scriptures. The same place that saw so much violence done to a woman, the place responsible for her hacking in pieces, was also the same place that was witnessing the hacking in pieces of the sons of Saul. Curse upon curse, defilement upon defilement. And the land didn’t find rest of violence.
Sin, said one of the distant observers, it makes waves in the annals of history and it is very difficult to know when it stops. He is not wrong, after 400 years Gibeah was still experiencing the shockwaves produced by sin. Polluted, the land lay in silence.
It only had to wait for another 1000 years, though, before the solution was finally found. A man of the house of David had been born. This man was not naive, nor afraid like his ancestor had been. He saw the shockwaves of sin everywhere, decried them and abhorred them. He fought against its very cause: Satan, and managed to get Himself in jail and judged.
It was around 1000 years after the crude events of Gibeah, 1400 years after a woman breathed her last, that a man walked holding a cross, but the location had been changed to Jerusalem, the spiritual Gibeah. The man exited the city walls, people looked at him in disgust: there was nothing beautiful about him, just like the woman, his face was unrecognizable… too many blows had been directed at His face.
When he arrived at the mount He was welcomed by a mob that jeered at Him, it was Gibeah all over again. His body was lifted up, held between heaven and earth, and after several hours He expired. A soldier pierced His side and to his surprise water and blood came rushing out. The land had finally been cleansed, the death of the King had brought pollution to an end. The death of an innocent had finally restored all of those years of curses! In the midst of the silence, another soldier looked to the floor: “Indeed this was the Son of God” had muttered just a few minutes ago.
Little the soldiers know that the Man will raise again from among the dead on the third day. Like a new Adam, He will open the defeated grave and enter in a new Garden. This time it was not the shockwaves of sin that will be felt in all the land but those of salvation in the New Adam.