I have come to look for my corpse. I was raped and dismembered three thousand years ago, and only now, after so long, am I coming back. I am coming back to look for my remains.
I am coming back to dig through my past. I want to find the twelve pieces, the severed parts of my body, scattered across the length and breadth of this land.
Try to understand me.
I gathered the courage to come back here because I was told that lately, only lately, you, the sons of one tribe or another, have come back too, after a long exile.
Doubt nests in me, for I am sure that everything has already changed.
I want to believe, to convince myself, that here I will find the thing I have missed most for three thousand years.
I want to find myself.
I was used, raped, and dismembered three thousand years ago. Just like that. Without too many laundered words.
Only a woman who understands knows that this terrible thing did not happen to me once. It happens to me anew every single day, every morning I open my eyes. An agony that never, ever ends.
Three thousand years is a long time. I am tired. This time will be my last attempt to find my limbs, the ones you scattered across all this land.
The thought that I have one last attempt left does not frighten me. I take comfort in the fact that you are in a far more wretched state than I am.
Why? Because your return to the land is an attempt unlike any other, singular, one-time, and in fact your last. Yours.
I believe the search for the pieces of my body will let me put it back together, gather all my parts, so I can be made whole and rest at last.
You have no idea how grateful I am that you are reading these lines. You might even be able to help me, because my scattered limbs, the length and breadth of this land, are in a certain sense yours too.
You ask how you can help?
Just read. To the end. Don't give up. Don't react. Don't answer me. Please, listen. Don't be lost in your own thoughts, trying to comfort me. Don't tell me what I should have done. Don't be nice to me.
Don't call me 'sister.' Don't try to be my 'friend,' and don't replace my 'mother.'
Don't say to yourself, as if you were speaking to me through these pages: 'It's all right, those wicked men, those sons of Belial, will never come back to you,' or the worn-out line: 'They can't hurt you again,' or any other threadbare mantra.
Don't 'support' me! Just listen. And don't let yourself off easy. Be brave, and listen to me to the end.
I am alone in this story.
This is my story. I am the concubine of Gibeah. And the pain is mine!
In fact, by the very act of speaking with you, even now, this very moment, my fear lives on and is felt again and again, here and now, exactly as it was three thousand years ago.
Every time I hear my name carried on the air, the pain and the violation fill me. This fear floods me.
You need to understand: if you have chosen to listen to my story, you have chosen to meet me. To meet a victim. I was the victim. And it was no choice of mine. I did not choose to be a victim. I truly was one.
I was beautiful, and I was accomplished, and I was a victim. Today, I am only a victim. It is the one thing left of me.
So if you want to listen to my story, it is best that I begin from the beginning, and to begin, I want to ask your permission. Permission to grant me one thing. My name.
Glossary
Concubine (pilegesh). In the biblical world a pilegesh was not a “mistress” but a recognized secondary wife with some legal standing. The narrator is “the concubine of Gibeah,” a woman the Bible never names.
Gibeah (HaPilegesh BaGivah). A town of the tribe of Benjamin and the setting of the atrocity in Judges 19. “HaPilegesh BaGivah” is the Hebrew name for the narrator: “the concubine at Gibeah.”
Judges, chapter 19. The biblical chapter (in the Book of Judges) that tells the narrator's story: a Levite, his concubine, a night in Gibeah, her rape and death, and the civil war that followed. The narrator urges readers to read it first.
Yehudit (“the holy tongue”). Literally “Judahite” — the narrator's word for Hebrew, the guarded sacred language kept for home. JPS renders it “the Jews' language” (II Kings 18:26). Not Yiddish.
Imenu (“our mother”). An honorific for the matriarchs, e.g. “Leah Imenu,” meaning the mother of us all rather than one's mother by blood.
Tribe of Judah. The narrator's tribe, settled around Bethlehem; in the story it sees itself as the responsible, leading tribe.
Tribe of Reuben. Descended from Jacob's firstborn, Reuben, who lost the birthright after defiling his father's bed (Genesis 49:4). Herders who lived east of the Jordan; the narrator's “third friend” belonged to this tribe.
Tribe of Simeon. Settled in the harsh, dry Beer-sheba region; in the story their survival depended on tamarisks marking the water sources.
Bethlehem (Beth-lehem in Judah). The narrator's hometown, in the territory of Judah — distinct from other places of the same name.
African wild ass (arod). A wild relative of the donkey — faster, fiercer, and more striking, with zebra-like legs. The narrator likens a tamed, saddled one to a top-of-the-line off-road vehicle.
Amodu (“Stand still!”). A children's game the narrator's generation played — the equivalent of “Red Light, Green Light.”