As evidence for the nastiness of the Old Testament and its God, Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 240f) can find no better example than the account of an unnamed Levite and his concubine while travelling in Gibeah (Judges 19:11-28).

Quoting the Authorised Version (why?), Dawkins outlines the ghastly unfolding of events.  The two of them spend the night in the house of an old man.  While eating their supper, the men of the city come to the door and demand that the old man hands over his male guest so that they can have their way with him.  The old man demurs, offering instead his daughter and the concubine.  The concubine is gang-raped all night, and finally crawls back to the doorstep of the house.  In the morning, the Levite find her lying there, but she is dead.  Then he cut up her body, and sent the 12 pieces to the far corners of Israel.

So there you have it: how can those who think that the Bible is the inspired word of God be so blind to the fact that it records such monstrous behaviour?

But blindness is not the sole preserve of ‘fundamentalists’.  Dawkins, in his zeal to find fault with the Bible, has shut his eyes to a simple and very obvious point:-

To record something does not necessarily mean that you approve it.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John record the crucifixion of Jesus.  But not even Dawkins would think that in recording it they thereby intend to signal their approval of it.

I have already posted on the story from Judges 19, but I think its worth repeating the helpful explanation from the New Bible Commentary:-

In vv11-28 we have another story of hospitality, but this time ‘perverted and grotesque, with unmistakable similarities to the description of life in Sodom in Gn. 19:1-13. This is particularly ironical because the travellers had deliberately avoided pagan towns in order to seek hospitality with their fellow-Israelites (v12-14). The rowdies in the streets of Gibeah were clearly morally bankrupt, but so too was the old man who opened his house to the travellers. It was this apparently model host whose perverted sense of duty led him to conceive the idea of casting two innocent women to the dogs (v23-24). Here is moral bankruptcy indeed. When God’s people do whatever is right in their own eyes they are no better than Sodomites.

The account in Judges 19 is, as Dale Ralph Davis remarks, precisely an illustration of everything that God calls sinful and depraved.

Dawkins surmises that because of the similarities between this story and that of Lot, ‘one can’t help wondering whether a fragment of manuscript became accidentally misplaced in some long-forgotten scriptorium.’

But Davis hits the nail on the head.  Noting that the similarity between Genesis 19:1-11 and Judges 19:22-26 is ‘unmistakable’, he says that it is also ‘deliberate’:-

The writer wants you to view Judges 19 this way.  “Yes, that’s right,” he says, “it sounds exactly like Genesis 19.  It’s the Sodom Connection.  Only here you have Sodom-in=the-land-of-Benjamin.  Gibeah is “New Sodom”.  This is the writer’s way of accusing the people of God.  He shows that even in Israel some have plunged into the moral abyss of Sodom and eagerly wallow in its twisted depravity.

Other commentators view the passage similarly.  Cundall (TOTC), for instance, points out the perverted morality of the old man, who seemed to regard the accepted conventions of hospitality as much more important than the care and protection of the weak and vulnerable.  He adds,

It is not only the action of the men of Gibeah which reveals the abysmally low moral standards of the age; the indifference of the Levite, who prepared to depart in the morning without any apparent concern to ascertain the fate of his concubine, and his curt, unfeeling command when he saw her lying on the threshold (27,28), these show that, in spite of his religion, he was devoid of the finer emotions.  The sense of outrage does not appear to have influenced him until he realised that she was dead, when he lifted her body on to one of his asses and continued his journey.  The whole shocking incident made an indelible impression upon Israel, and was referred to by the prophet Hosea as one of the greatest example of corruption (Hos 9:9; 10:9).

The Apologetics Study Bible concurs, stating:-

This passage, with its gory outcome, reveals the degraded condition into which Israelite life had fallen during this period. The Levite’s speaking tenderly to his concubine might suggest that he truly cared for her, but his actions belied his words. First, he waited four months after her abrupt departure before he sought to bring her home (vv. 2–3). Second, he delivered her to the sexual ravages of a mob to protect himself and others (v. 25). Third, the morning after the rape when he found her lying at the doorstep of the house, he treated her without compassion, demanding she rise and leave with him. The narrator does not gloss over the horror of these events, but records them as they happened and does not try to reconcile the attitudes and actions of the people about whom he wrote. The inspiration of Scripture does not require that only comforting and edifying material be presented in historical narrative; inspiration requires that the true picture be laid out, even when events are disgusting.

Dawkins thinks that the passage represents a misogynist view, with the old man offering for his daughter and the concubine to the mob while showing a proper respect for the Levite, ‘who is, after all, male’.  Again, Dawkins is right to characterise this as unacceptable behaviour, but wrong to assume that this represents the attitude of ‘the Bible’.  Even in the context of such a far-off culture and age, the actions of the old man were clearly to be viewed with disgust.  According to the IVP Bible Background Commentary,

It should be noted that women are legal extensions of their husbands in ancient Israel and thus would come under the same legal protections guaranteed to their husbands—as long as their husbands identified them as such. In this instance the Ephraimite apparently shifts his role from hospitable to inhospitable host by “callously” offering the Levite’s concubine to the crowd in order to save his honor and perhaps his own life. Technically the concubine could not be legally separated from the Levite and should have been protected by the customs of hospitality to the same degree.