Can you explain this bible verse? Judges 19:25-28?

a man took a women, and everybody raped and beat her all night until she passed out. then in the morning the man put her on a donkey.

how is this book suitable for kids?

Judges 19

The bible is not condoning this behaviour, which seems to be what you are worried about. What happened is a sad case of someone putting hospitality before what is right. He pushed the concubine out the door because the people outside the door were demanding to have sex with the man who took them in. He felt he had to appease the "hellraisers" outside the door because they wouldn't let up in their demanding to have sex with the other man.

It doesn't anywhere say that this man made the right decision, it just says it happened. But later on, the man cuts up the dead body of this woman and mails it to everyone in Israel saying "has anything this horrible ever happened before?" He was obviously very disgusted by it all, even though he shouldn't have offered her to appease the gang outside.

This is most definitely still a troubling verse, but the Bible isn't here to sugar coat, it's here to tell us truth, and that means exposing just how evil man can be, and man can be unfathomably evil.

You missed the parts (before and after this incident) where the writer says,"This was a time when there was no king, and every man did whatever he felt like doing." The Old Testament is a pretty good history of what the world used to be like. It's also interesting that the people in this chapter were Palestinians living in Gaza. It's hard to imagine, but the world was a really shocking place in those days, so it's distressing to read what it used to be like.

Life sucked.

And people were d!cks.

This is one of the vignetes of lawlessness which explains why the Jews demanded of Samuel to appoint a king for them.

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@jweston - it was an excuse. I agree it wasn't a good one.

But perhaps Samuel could have / should have offered other alternatives instead of simply getting incensed.

Shute -- if Samuel had been a bit more creative, we coulda had a federated democratic republic of Israel.

When people are scared, they turn to strong leaders.

There are old Russian people today who are yearning for a new Stalin to put things right.

In the 1930ies in the USA, it was very much to FDR's credit that he did not take full advantage of the opportunity to become another dictator.

In that instance, Samuel was the one with the brains and the influence to make things happen.

The failure was therefore also largely his.

In those ancient days, women were just sex-objects and baby machines.

Look what Lot offered - his 2 virgin daughters! [Gen 19:8]

And what did righteous Abraham did to protect his own life? He offered his wife to the Pharoah!

Gen 12:13-15 Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee. .... The princes also of Pharaoh saw her, and commended her before Pharaoh: and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house.

Oh! BTW, the next verse after the concubine story above....

Jdg 19:29 And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel.

It is a Bible verse explaining the gang rape of a worthless woman who was offered to a lustful group of men in order to prevent them raping the male house guest. Lot did the same thing. Anybody who's got the gall to tell you that the Bible doesn't condone this kind of behavior is full of it. Lot did the same thing and he was the most upstanding citizen in the city and God clearly saw it fit to rescue him from the destruction of the city for his wholesome goodness. Abraham, founder of the religion and also very favored by God, likewise tricked a king into sleeping with his wife Sarah so he could then blackmail him for reparations for sleeping with his wife and that is how he got much of his great fortune. Women were treated like worthless property in the Bible, good for nothing but sex and as the property of their fathers and husbands or any man who screwed them even unto the fact that they were forced to marry the man who raped them if they were raped (read Leviticus if you doubt this). And the Bible, especially the Old Testament, being the love-filled and hopeful foundation of the revelation of the "one true way of God" for the Big 3 monotheistic religions of this world, not only has zero problem with women being treated this way, but fully condones it, and paints men like Lot and Abraham and Paul (Mr. "women ought to keep silent in church" and "it is shameful for a woman to speak in church" or ask questions) are painted as among its greatest heroes. Welcome to the Abrahamic religions.

More candor of the early doings of the people and has to be studied in context and the whole

Bible. Some things are hard to read but in the Last Days time is going fast.

Reply to kaganate:

Life may have been bad but that wasn't excuse enough for them to seek a man as their king instead of God, whereby they were said to have rejected God in so doing[1Sa 10:17-19].

This can easily be misconstrued as being a bad verse but if you read throughout entire chapter of Judges 19 it is more easily understood. If your still confused read my source