What do we make of the Levite’s testimony?

Judges 20:4–7 gives the Levite’s testimony. And the general storyline is correct; it is not full of gross distortions. But it is a slanted version; it is full of half-truths. He wants to eliminate any trace of personal guilt in the incident. I came to Gibeah that belongs to Benjamin, I and my concubine, to spend the night. There is no mention of his slave or the old man. Further, he makes it sound like Gibeah was his destination, leaving out his suggestion to his servant and concubine that they all spend the night in Gibeah instead of Jebus. Also, the leaders of Gibeah is different from worthless fellows in Judges 19:22. The Levite is giving the impression that the whole town was actively responsible for the crime.

He then says that the leaders of Gibeah came to kill him (Judges 20:5). He changes the story from the men’s attempt at sodomy to an attempt of murder. Maybe he did so because he does not want to raise any suspicions about the connection between his (avoided) rape and his concubine’s actual rape. But for sure his word choice stresses the threat to himself. In the Hebrew, his self-centred perspective is emphasized: They rose up against me and surrounded the house against me at night. Me, they intended to kill, but my concubine they raped, and she died. He wants to avoid any whiff of personal responsibility. He doesn’t mention that he threw his concubine to the mob. Instead, he simply conjures up the picture that his life was threatened, he escaped, but his poor concubine just wasn’t fast enough, so she was caught and violated. And he gives the impression that she died from the rape, even though the previous account was ambiguous about whether she died as a result of that or at the hands of her husband when dismembering her. His speech simply arouses none of the suspicions that the narrator’s account did in Judges 19:1–30. He lays the blame for the abomination and outrage in Israel entirely at the feet of the men of Gibeah.¹ He continues to display the extraordinary callousness that we have come to see from him.