The brutal rape of an Indian woman last week generated the full spectrum of human responses. The world has witnessed an eerie, mournful silence as thousands have stood in candlelit vigils. There’s been anger – lots of it; raw and desiring justice to come quickly to her attackers and to all rape perpetrators. And there have also been pleas for wide-scale cultural and political transformation in how rape is viewed and the initiatives used to prevent it. However, you may be surprised that these, among others, are some of the reactions to rape and other situations of gross injustice in the Bible. In fact, the raped Indian woman can be seen as emblematic of the wider community’s grief, displaying the universality of humankind’s cries for justice in response to situations of extreme wrong.

The young physio student raped in India was, until the beginning of this week, nameless. She was an individual affected by a most brutal crime, leaving a family suffering in loneliness and grief. Yet in her anonymity she belonged to the entire nation. Without a religion and caste to identify her, she was adopted by her country and came to symbolise their collective grief at violence against women. She drew together people of all creeds to mourn her death and call for action.

Similarly, the concubine of a Levite man brutally raped by some Benjamite men in Judges 19 is nameless. Her anonymity rendered her a symbol of Israel’s failings in their entirety. After her rape, the Levite ‘cut up his concubine, limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel’ (Judges 19:29). This gruesome act signalled that all Israel were mutually implicated in the woman’s brutal rape and death, confirmed in the following chapter: ‘I… sent one piece to each region of Israel’s inheritance, because they committed this lewd and outrageous act in Israel’ (Judges 20:6).

A woman’s body becomes disunited to reflect the disunity of the nation, raped by her fellow Israelites. This is compounded when ten tribes of Israel unite against Benjamin to almost completely annihilate the latter tribe – ‘twenty-five thousand Benjamite swordsmen fell that day’ (Judges 20:46).

Yet in their disunity Israel was still incriminated in the crime itself – each tribe received a piece of the woman’s body. In India, the victim became representative of many Indian women’s experiences of rape, yet her death has also brought disunity– between victims of crime and law enforcement authorities.

The Levite woman’s rape produced a worthy response: astonishment and calls for action. ‘Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt. Just imagine! We must do something! So speak up!’ (Judges 19:30). Likewise, the crime in India has generated feelings of shock at its brutality and swift calls for action. There have been cries for the perpetrators to be hung, for the government to promise better security for women, for the adult trial and punishment of a juvenile offender.

There have been demands for abusers to be publicly named and shamed and for a woman’s dress to not be taken into consideration when prosecuting rape cases. These responses are laudable because they reveal a God-given need for justice against perpetrators of sin. But the Bible also shows the danger of reckless justice in the story of Tamar, a daughter of David, who is raped by her half-brother Amnon (see 2 Samuel 13). After David’s failure to respond to the atrocity, Tamar’s brother Absalom kills Amnon in his anger, which compels a brutal split in the family. Absalom flees and soon establishes an alternate power-base which he later uses to challenge David’s leadership (2 Samuel 15). In this story, we see that taking justice into one’s own hands and punishing offenders without due process can have widespread consequences.

Unfortunately, the brutality of rape is not new to readers of the Bible. But thankfully, we are able to see some commonalities of human experience then and now and even glimpse some moments of hope. In Judges, the repeated refrain ‘in those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit’ speaks to the need for a king who will carry out God’s rule on earth. This was ultimately fulfilled in Jesus, who is called the ‘Prince of Peace’ (Isaiah 9:6) and will return to judge with justice (Revelation 19:11-12).