40 Acres

An acre was traditionally meant to be the amount of land that a farmer could plow in a day with a farm animal's assistance.

40 acres was traditionally the amount of land necessary for a single family of unmechanized subsistence farms to support themselves. It is the most typical economic unit in which farmland and vacant land is sold, even today.

40 acres and a mule was what post-U.S. Civil War advocates for reparations to former slaves had advocated for (and obviously, did not achieve).

A square 40 acre plot is a quarter mile on each side (a.k.a. 1320 feet a.k.a. 440 yards), with a one mile circumference and a 16th of a square mile area.

The population density of subsistence farmers at this traditional pre-modern scale is about 100 people per square mile.

A survey township has 36 square miles (6 miles a side) and was traditionally the presumptive size of the smallest unit of local government, which at subsistence farming population density would have had about 3,600 people, and perhaps a bit more for a hamlet of perhaps 400 people who would make up the 10% or so of non-farmers who would have been present in a predominantly subsistence farming pre-modern society at the technology level that would have prevailed around the time of the American Revolution (250 years ago), so it might have had a total population of about 4,000 people. Non-farmers in hamlets like this would often include clergy, craftsmen in the skilled trades, doctors, veterinarians, and merchants.

In the brief period where there was democratic government and a predominantly pre-modern subsistence farming economy, people under age twenty-one couldn't vote, and neither could women, so perhaps 400-500 of those people would have been eligible to vote and/or participate in town meetings (in areas without slavery, as slaves couldn't vote either and were usually used to farm cash crops in any case).

In townships that were not governed in the town meeting style of New England towns, a typical town council would have had three elected trustees and sometimes an elected town clerk as well, so about one voter per 100 to 167 people would have been elected officials. This rate is similar to the rate at which people serve as precinct organizers in modern political parties.

A community of this size might have a single church that doubled as a community center and while pre-mechanized subsistence farming largely predated universal public education, a township would typically have something on the order of 2,000 school age children.

In that era about a quarter of children would have died in their first year and about half would have died before reaching adulthood. In any given childbirth, about 1% of pregnant mothers would have died in childbirth, and a typical woman would give birth six to eight times in a lifetime, leading to an excess of widowers over widows. There would be post-menopause age grandmothers in the community, but far fewer, proportionately, than there are today. Most elderly people would have lived with extended family. Then, as now, about a third of pregnancies would have ended in a miscarriage or stillbirth.

It would be unusual for a subsistence farming community to have more than a handful of people with post-secondary education (perhaps a priest and a government official or lawyer), and the percentage of people with the equivalent of a full high school education today would have been comparable to the percentage of people with graduate degrees today, although in some regions, a significant number of people without formal second education would nonetheless have been quite well-read autodidacts. Journalists and school teachers and merchants would typically not have a post-secondary education and would often not have the equivalent of a high school diploma today.

The Levite And His Concubine

The Biblical story of the Levite and his concubine, which is Chapter 19 of the of book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible, is an odd and shocking story. (It isn't, however, part of the Torah, and is instead part of the collection of stories that make up the remainder of what Christians call  the Old Testament, after its initial five books).

Why the Hebrews, hundreds of years later, chose to preserve this piece of legendary history, when they assembled the Hebrew Bible isn't entirely clear. It may be because it has strong parallels in the story of Lot in the book of Genesis, another case where a bunch of random men come to a house and demand the the householder surrender someone for them to rape and the household complies. Or, it may be intended to demonstrate how lawless the Levant was for the Jews in the age of judges, before they established their own proper kingdom there, as Judges 19:30 suggests.

The story of the Levite and his concubine is also cryptic. It belabors seemingly unimportant details at length, while omitting context that help the story make more sense and explain why these people acted the way that they did. Three thousand or so years removed from the setting of the story, we are left to fill in the blanks by inferring what we can from what it does say.

The story

A Levite and his concubine (whom he acquired in Bethlehemjudah, apparently from her father) visit his concubine's father, where they stay for four months and five days and were urged by her father to stay longer. But the Levite insisted on leaving for his home, together with his two donkeys, his servant and his concubine. Judges 19:1-10. His next stop was to "the house of the Lord" (presumably, his home as the Levites are the priestly class of the Hebrews). Judges 19:18.

The Levite and his party consider staying overnight in Jerusalem, but decide to go to the Jewish town of Gibeah that was part of the tribe of Benjamin, instead, because at this time (before there was a Jewish King in Israel) there were no Jews in Jerusalem. But the Levite can't find a place to stay in Gibeah. Judges 19:11-15. However, a local farmer they meet agrees to take the Levite and his party in for the night, provides them with a meal, and stables the Levite's donkeys for the night, so that the Levite and his party don't have to sleep on the streets that night. Judges 19:16-21.

Some men from the area come to the farmer's house saying that they want to rape the visiting Levite. But the farmer refuses because the Levite was under the farmer's hospitality and protection, and instead offers the hostile crowd of men his own virgin daughter, or the Levite's concubine, instead. Judges 19: 22-24. 

It isn't clear if they want to rape the Levite because they are craving gay sex, because the Levite is a stranger in the town, or because they have animosity towards the Hebrew people's priestly class.

The implication is that if the crowd of men wasn't placated with a girl or woman to rape, that they would have taken the Levite and raped him by force.

The men ultimately accept the Levite's concubine instead of the Levite himself and gang rape her all night until dawn, after which the Levite's concubine collapses on the farmer's doorstep. Judges 19:25-27. But the concubine was unable to speak when the Levite asked her to get ready to go (perhaps because she is unconscious and dying as a result of the brutal gang rape), so he put her on a donkey, finishes his trip, and when he arrives there, cuts her body into twelve pieces, and sends one piece to each of the twelve tribes of Israel (presumably to express his outrage at the situation and to protest the mistreatment of the Levite priesthood). Judges 19:28-30.