‘ And his master said to him, we will not turn aside into the city of a stranger, who are not of the children of Israel, but we will pass over to Gibeah.'
The Levite was a patriotic and religious man and preferred not to depend on or trust foreigners if he could help it. The Jebusites were one of the seven nations of the land of Canaan, who were to be dispossessed and destroyed, and were idolaters and worshippers of Baal, with their sexually abandoned beliefs, and he knew that his wife had already been led astray by similar religious beliefs. Thus as a Levite responsible for the maintenance of the religion of Israel he preferred to trust to his own people. He was not aware how debased many of them too had become, permeated as they had been by Canaanite practises, the result of their not having been faithful to God's demands to totally destroy the Canaanites and their religion.
“The children of Israel.” Usually in the predicate the writer uses ‘Israel'. But here the stress is on covenant relationship so that he uses the longer phrase (see Introduction).
“But we will pass over to Gibeah.” Gibeah was in the portion of the tribe of Benjamin, and was inhabited by men of that tribe, and so was more agreeable to this Levite, who thought that it would not have been deeply affected by depraved religion. He thought that they would know how to treat a Levite. It was around Judges 6:5 kilometres (four miles) from Jebus or Jerusalem, and, although it was near sun setting, he chose rather to proceed on to this place than to lodge at Jebus. It was a relatively ‘new' town, having no natural water supply, and therefore dependent on lime plastered cisterns. It was probably built on a hill (Gibeah means ‘hill'). It was later famous as the birthplace of Saul. It is probably not connected with the Gibeon or Geba which were levitical cities (Joshua 21:17).