Joshua and Judges

15. Judges 19: Text of Trauma

15 Judges 19: Text of Trauma Janelle Stanley Introduction Judges 19 tells the story of an unnamed woman who is gang raped, murdered, and dismembered. Though there has been significant scholarship on this passage from a variety of perspectives, there has been little or no scholarship that focuses on reading the text through a psychological lens. This essay aims to fill this gap. I argue that there are a number of aspects of Judges 19 that carry markers of trauma, and that by reading the text as a text of trauma, one gains new insights. In writing this essay I am informed by my backgrounds in both clinical social work and biblical scholarship. Studying trauma, and working with those who have survived trauma, has heightened my awareness of the multitude of ways trauma is expressed, both individually and culturally. Trauma is communicated and processed through movies, art, music, poetry, and stories; so it is no surprise to me that trauma can also be found in sacred texts. Reading a traumatic text with an awareness of how trauma influences and infiltrates narrative structures has informed how I read the text. Before this rereading of Judges 19 can be accomplished, I will first explore elements of traumatology that apply to the discussion at hand; namely, three classical symptoms of trauma: dissociation, repetition compulsion, and fragmentation. I will also examine the structure of trauma narrative as a distinct type of narrative that carries within it the markers of trauma. In the second and third sections, I will address the text of Judges 19 itself. I will look at scholarship, including feminist biblical scholarship, beginning with Trible’s (1984: 65–91) landmark work in Texts of Terror, Lasine’s (1984: 37–59) examination of Judges 19 within the anthropological framework of hospitality, and Lapsley’s (2005: 35–68 ) analysis of the narrative structure, which brings to life the authorial condemnation of the events. I will reference signatures of trauma that appear in the text to focus on what the presence of these symptoms 275 can tell us about both the text as well as trauma itself. Understanding this story through a traumalogical lens gives voice to many silenced issues that arise out of the experience of trauma. I will conclude by applying the modern lessons gleaned from traumatology and narrative psychology towards a reading of Judges 19 as a potentially healing text. There is therapeutic value in breaking the silence, in hearing and telling traumatic narratives. Looking across a wide range of clinical examples—from Holocaust victims to survivors of 9/11 to survivors of rape and incest—this essay will look at the ways in which a victim’s exposure to stories of trauma functions to reground trauma experiences within a broader picture of reality and to reduce the experience of unique aloneness characteristic of trauma. Trauma The nature of trauma is that it overwhelms our coping mechanisms. Trauma is experienced as life-threatening: it threatens our psychological and/or physical existence. The terror that arises from such threats elicits a physiological response. Judith Herman (1996: 6) describes this body response: Attention is narrowed and perceptions are altered. Peripheral detail, context, and time sense fall away, while attention is strongly focused on central details in the immediate present. When the focus of attention is extremely narrow, people may experience profound perceptual distortions, including insensitivity to pain, depersonalization, derealization, time slowing and amnesia. Modern neuroscience has noted structural changes in the brains of children exposed to extreme or chronic trauma. Cohen et al. (2006: 14) note that traumatized children “have higher resting pulse rates and blood pressure, greater physical tension . . . smaller intracranial volume, [and] smaller corpus collosi.” Trauma has been shown to influence neurotransmitter pathways in the brain as well, increasing the size and tenacity of neural connections formed during the trauma, and pruning away synapses that contradict the new trauma-formed paths (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child 2005). Long before this biophysical evidence was discovered, Freud (1966: 283) noticed traumatic memories presented as amnesia, which were actually “no true amnesia, no missing memory; just a connection that had been broken.” This “broken connection” changes the way the trauma is remembered, and it 276 | Joshua and Judges changes the way we store memories going forward. These changes become manifest in traumatic symptoms. The primary response to trauma—both individually and culturally—is denial and dissociation from the trauma (Herman 1997...