The book of Judges is a loose collection of tales set in the tribal period, but written in later centuries and compiled and edited during the Babylonian Exile of the 6th century BCE and the early Second Temple period after Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon and repatriated the Jews to Judah. Scholars generally agree that this is among the book’s later additions.

It’s a justification tale, a story recasting an event as righteous. And while there’s not universal agreement about what exactly had to be justified, the most likely explanation in my opinion is the simplest:

• It explains why Ephraim and Judah fought in a war against Benjamin (perhaps as a replacement of previous writings or traditions about the war).
• It explains why the tribe was not exterminated despite the story’s invocation of herem (or utter destruction) because of the sin supposedly justifying the war.
• It explains why Gibeah in particular is the home city of the faction of Benjaminites not destroyed in the war.

OK, fine, so some ancient Israelite and Judahite tribes may have ganged up against one of their own in a war. It wouldn’t be the last time ancient Hebrews fought each other. And one group of Benjaminites comes through it. So what?

Well, this particular story closes the narrative of the tribal epoch, right before the story of Samuel, a prophet from the hill country of Ephraim, who will anoint the first king of a United Monarchy of Israel and Judah, a Benjaminite from Gibeah named Saul.

Coincidence? Not likely.

The Bible is like a cyclorama — and why that matters

The Cyclorama in Atlanta depicts the Civil War Battle of Atlanta “in the round” with visitors on a platform at the center of an enormous circular room. Below them stands a life-sized diorama of the action. Behind that, covering the curved wall, is a realistic painting. From the vantage point on the platform, it’s often impossible to tell where exactly the 3-D model ends and the 2-D painting begins.

The Biblical literature is a lot like a cyclorama when it comes to history and legend. The earliest materials are obviously mythic — the garden of Eden, Noah and the ark, the tower of Babel, that sort of thing. Yet we can verify that the reigns of the latter kings of Israel and Judah, and their wars and alliances, are generally accurate, notwithstanding a great number of miracle tales, anachronisms, and nationalistic exaggerations slathered on top of it all. But from our point of view, many centuries in the future, it’s often unclear where mythology gives way to legend, and where legend cedes ground to historical fact.

According to Hebrew tradition, for about a century around the year 1000 BCE the Israelite and Judahite tribes were joined under a common king — first Saul, briefly one of his sons, then David, then Solomon. When Solomon’s son Rehoboam ascended to the throne, Israel and Judah split again into separate kingdoms.

The Biblical accounts of this “United Monarchy” are riddled with problems. But most of these are typical of ancient accounts of earlier times — anachronisms, inaccurate dates, and exaggerations born of national pride and/or of assuming that the past was more like the writers’ own time than it actually was. But one issue especially draws the United Monarchy into doubt.

The territory of Judah in the eleventh and tenth centuries BCE was a tiny region in an arid and mountainous area with a sparse population. The Israelite territory to the north spanned fertile farming and grazing lands flanking the Jordan river, and so boasted a much larger and more prosperous polity. But David and Solomon were both Judahites. Why would Israelites allow themselves to be ruled by Judahite kings?

Some historians believe they didn’t, that the United Monarchy is a fictional history composed during and after the Exile to aggrandize the Judahite legacy and justify the aspirations of the rebuilt kingdom of Judah. After all, if David had ruled over Israel as well as Judah, efforts to expand Jerusalem’s power northward could be justified as a return to the Judahites’ own territories rather than encroachments into other peoples’ lands.

We have archaeological evidence for the Davidic dynasty, but only from the period after the supposed United Monarchy. Is there good reason to believe that the Judahites David and Solomon really reigned over a Hebrew kingdom that included Israelite tribes? Or was that part made up?

Clues that the United Monarchy did exist

Before returning to our unfortunate concubine, let’s first take a look at another clue about the United Monarchy. Then we can see where the tale of the Levite fits in.

The Hebrew Bible is rife with “doublets” (and triplets), a scholarly term for stories that appear more than once. For instance, there are two very different (and irreconcilable) stories of how David comes to fight in Saul’s army, and three distinct versions of Saul’s rise as the first Hebrew monarch with the help of Samuel.

The reason for these doublets is quite simple — more than one faction of priests and their scribes were writing about these events, and recording their own versions of the Hebrew oral tradition. The Ancient Hebrews had varying accounts of the anointing of Saul for much the same reason that the contemporary United States has varying accounts of the Trump inauguration, or the Reagan administration. At the time they were written, these conflicting accounts were separate, produced by different theocratic factions for their own audiences. Centuries later, they were compiled into a single text.

Contained within the books of Genesis and Exodus are two complete parallel stories (among others) beginning with Abraham and Sarah and ending with the death of Moses, one told from an Israelite point of view and another from a Judahite view, each with its own geographic locations, neighboring cultures, local heroes, and theocratic politics. (See the postscript to this article for an example of an extended doublet story within this narrative.)

We know from archaeological evidence that the Hebrew enslavement in Egypt and the ensuing exodus is a fiction. And in fact, if the Hebrews had fled from north Africa to the eastern Mediterranean at the time of the supposed exodus, they would have been “escaping” from Egypt into Egypt, because the Levant was part of the Egyptian Empire up through the Late Bronze Age Collapse in the 13 century BCE. So why is it that both kingdoms, Israel and Judah, had parallel accounts of the exodus?

The obvious answer is that the core story was written prior to the establishment of the two kingdoms, in an earlier version now lost to history but preserved in the dual accounts which were later incorporated into the Hebrew Bible. If so, then the purpose of the exodus tale was not, at least initially, to justify the territorial ambitions of Second Temple era kings, but rather to justify the United Monarchy by crafting a pan-Hebrew past in which the Israelite and Judahite tribal groups were all one family from the get-go, and in which the authority of the Levitical priesthood and the Mosaic law are sanctioned by God.

The tale of the Levite’s concubine meshes well with this view of the Hebrew literary tradition. According to this hypothesis, the tribe of Benjamin became a seat of political power in the Israelite confederation after the collapse of Reuben (which may have been the tribe of the historical Moses, given the legendary Moses’ repeated association with the southern Transjordan). At some point in the late 11th century BCE, the historical Saul — it is important to differentiate between actual historical persons and the legendary literary figures crafted after their deaths — formed a military alliance with the neighboring Judahites and Ephraimites to depose the current ruling faction within Benjamin and establish a multi-tribal monarchy with a capital in Gibeah. The tale of the concubine was composed at a later time as an alternate history justifying the purely political war by casting Benjamin as a latter-day Sodom, with the tale of the Gibeahite survivors explaining why Benjamin was not in fact destroyed despite supposedly committing such a grievous sin.

But what about David and Solomon?

If the tale of the Levite’s concubine glosses over a war that led to a monarchy spanning Israelite and Judahite territories, and if the original exodus story (now lost, but forming a basis of later versions which were eventually incorporated into the larger book of Exodus) was crafted to justify this monarchy, we are still left with the question: Why did the Benjaminites and Ephraimites tolerate the rule of the Judahite kings David and Solomon?

Part of the answer is hinted at in the story of the concubine, in which Judah leads the attack. The Judahites may have lived in rugged lands, but they also had rugged warriors. The advantages of an alliance comprising Ephraim’s agricultural wealth, Benjamin’s political savvy, and Judah’s military prowess didn’t vanish at Saul’s death.

Successions of power among Ancient Hebrews tended to be bloody affairs, and assassinations were common. The reign of Saul’s son Ish-bosheth is largely forgotten, and was likely as short as reported in the Biblical tradition, the throne being quickly seized by the warrior David.

But David seems to have made smart political moves to retain his power. Rather than relocating the capital from Benjamin to Judah, he takes a city in the region between them, Jerusalem, and places it there. He then allows high priests from Benjamin and Judah to share power, and brings the holy relics of both tribes to the new capital. And he takes wives from all the tribes in the alliance.

As always, it’s difficult to be certain about any of this, to sift out the facts from among the legends crafted by later political factions to present a history aligned with their theology and in which they avoid blame and appear righteous. But David’s son Solomon seems to have been more keen than his father to centralize power. While Biblical stories of his building projects and worker conscription are clearly overblown (with obvious echoes of the tales of Pharaoh’s abuse of Hebrew slaves in Egypt), it’s likely that he did establish a temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem through which an official religion could be, and undeniably came to be, controlled by the throne.

It’s no surprise, then, that when a third Judahite assumed power after Solomon, the Israelite factions within the alliance no longer saw any advantage in it and withdrew, spawning the era of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah, for which we do have archaeological evidence.

Clearly, the United Monarchy as presented in the Hebrew Bible, with its palaces and expansive territories and international intrigue, is an anachronistic work of Exilic and post-Exilic fiction. But is it a fiction based on a kernel of truth?