The Levite of Ephraim

偶然的機會讀了盧梭的《以法蓮山地的利未人》，忽然覺得，這便是那「黑天鵝」（black swan）。在拿起《對話錄》之前，我根本聽也未聽過這部作品的存在。（真奇怪，《懺悔錄》不曉得是怎樣讀的。）它的重要性事前完全不可逆料。

盧梭年輕時便失眠，失眠的夜他愛讀《聖經》，同一個故事往往讀上六七遍。我也讀過《士師記》，但只記得耶弗他（他的獻女故事總令人想起格林童話《沒有手的姑娘》和法國童話《美女與野獸》）和參孫。利未人這個故事荒唐得很，也許實在太荒唐了，盧梭在逃亡的過程裡，「找點事做」，第一時間便想起出走前剛再讀過的這段經文。

這裡引用特拉維夫大學政治學教授Michael S. Kochin的英文重述：

The Levite journeys south from the far hill country of Ephraim to Bethlehem to retrieve his concubine from her father's house. The couple are reconciled, but the girl's father so delights in feasting the Levite that he compells them to tarry in their return for several days. When the Levite finally insists on setting out with his concubine and servant, it is already late in the day. Unwilling to stop at the heathen city of Jebus (Jerusalem), the Levite's party find themselves at nightfall in the hilltop village of Gibeah in the land of the tribe of Benjamin. They seek hospitality but no one takes them in until an old man comes and brings them home, a man who is himself not a Benjaminite but a member of the tribe of Ephraim sojourning in Gibeah.

The old man feasts the Levite, but while they are still at upper a gang of thugs surround the old man's house and demand that the Levite be brought out to them "that they might know him," that is, as we would say, rape him. The old man, appalled by the violation of hospitality, offers to appease the thugs by sending out his virgin daughter and the Levite's concubine. The gang is not appeased, but the Levite grabs his concubine and thrusts her out of the house into their hands. The gang proceeds to rape and torture her through the night. At dawn they "send her on her way," and she somehow finds her way back to the door of the Ephraimite host.

The Levite gets up to go on his way, but he is astonished to see his concubine collapsed at the door, "with her hands on the threshold." He calls to her to get up and go, but she does not answer. He puts her on his donkey and continues north to his home in the land of Ephraim. When the Levite get home, he takes a big knife of the type used for animal sacrifice and cuts her into twelve parts and sends the parts "throughout the entire bounded-off-land of Israel." "And everyone who saw [this] said 'there has not been and there as not be seen such as this, from the day in which the Children of Israel came up from the Land of Egypt until this day: Attend to this all of you, let us take counsel and speak'" (Judges 19:30, my trans.)

The sign of the limbs brings together "all of the Children of Israel," north and south, east and west. They gather four hundred thousand strong at Mitzpeh (a few miles from the village of Gibeah) to understand what has happened. The Levite narrates the awful events, not without a certain amount of convenient emendation, whereupon the Children of Israel resolve to demand that the tribe of Benjamin yield up the gang of thugs, and make war on Benjamin when the Benjaminites mobilize to defend Gibeah rather than yield up the evildoers.

The war is prosecuted with difficulty; but after two days of failure amid tremendous losses, the united tribes finally succeed in crushing the Benjaminites, not just in Gibeah but in the entire land of Benjamin. Only six hundred Benjaminite males escape, and their wives and children have been slaughtered. The other Israelites are unwilling to see the tribe of Benjamin extinguished, but are unable to repopulate the tribe by granting the remnant their own daughters because, the narrator says, they had before the battle commenced taken an oath at Mitzpeh not to give their daughters to the men of Benjamin (Judges 21:1). Fortunately the Israelites find a creative way to evade the terms of the oath: They first send an expedition to slaughter the men of Jabesh Gilead, an Israelite town in Transjordan whose lives and possessions were forfeit for having failed to answer the call of the limbs and come up to Mitzpeh. But as the expedition slaughters all of the men and adult women, and spares only the virgins, they return with only four hundred "brides"; The Israelites do not consider this to be a sufficient restoration, and so counsel the Benjaminites to seize brides from the girls of Shiloh, when they go out during the vintage festival to dance in the vineyards, and carefully direct them along the byways so as to ambush the girls without alerting their fathers and brothers. The Israelites catechize themselves to justify the virgin-unequipped Benjaminites' behavior by reference to the oath and the shortage of virgins from the punitive raid on Jabesh Gilead: "You didn't give them to the Benjaminites, they took them."; the Israelites propose to say, so that the father and brothers of Shiloh at least have the consolation that they have not broken their oath. This 'Rape of the Shilonite Women" comes off without difficulties from any party, and "The Children of Israel then went each man to his tribe and family, and each man returned to his own allotment of land." And, in case the reader wondered, "In those days there was no king in Israel; a man did what was right in his own eyes" (Judges 21:24-25, cf. 19:1).

盧梭的改寫，主要是把這故事浪漫化。《The Levite of Ephraim》這篇散文詩，既是他的「治療」，也是他的復仇（revenge）。