Deuteronomy 22:13-29

[Kamaduck]

Some months ago in my religion class, we discussed Muslim honor killings, in which women are killed by their fathers or brothers for bringing shame upon a household, usually by being sexually impure. In particular, the instructor hammered home that women are often killed for things they have no control over, such as being raped.

I was thinking about this last night, and I remembered hearing something similar in the Bible. The passage I was thinking of turned out to be Deuteronomy 22, and after re-reading it, I’m really confused. There are a lot of things about this chapter that are hard to understand. At first glance, it sounds like:

-Women who do not bleed on their wedding nights cannot be proven virgins (at least, I think that’s what it’s referring to), and therefore their husbands are allowed to stone them for their supposed promiscuity (they are guilty unless proven innocent by their blood-stained sheets). Considering I’ve heard not everybody bleeds their first time, this is… troubling.

-If a woman ends up having sex with someone and does not cry out, she is considered to have consented. If she is raped in the city and nobody comes to her aid, it is assumed that she must not have screamed and therefore was not raped. If betrothed to someone else, she is to be stoned to death along with the man who had sex with her- even if it was what we would nowadays refer to as rape.

-If a woman is not betrothed yet and has sex with a man (or, it would seem, if he rapes her), they are required to get married. Going by other passages, it’s possible the woman’s father has veto power, but it’s still a really uncomfortable passage that can easily be read as forcing women to marry their rapists.

Can anybody help me out with this? I’m sure I’m misreading it. I have to be. As it stands, it sounds exactly like what we were taught to abhor in Muslim nations. I understand that the old laws don’t apply to us anymore, but I don’t understand why God would order people to kill women who may very well have been innocent. I’ve read some online commentaries about the section, but all of them basically confirmed my readings, and I don’t understand how that’s possible. I was hoping somebody here could help me understand some of this.

 

[sousley]

These laws were mostly concerned with the economic rights of the parties that were involved (father and husband) and need to be viewed within the culture (Assyrian law and the Code of Hammurabi shared similar facets). The other part of your question is covered by Jimmy Akin at this link:

ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/does-god-approve-of-rape-dark-passages/

Hope it helps

 

[Kamaduck]

These laws were mostly concerned with the economic rights of the parties that were involved (father and husband) and need to be viewed within the culture (Assyrian law and the Code of Hammurabi shared similar facets). The other part of your question is covered by Jimmy Akin at this link:

ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/does-god-approve-of-rape-dark-passages/

Hope it helps

That’s better than the commentaries I was reading, anyway. Jimmy Akin is usually pretty awesome.

The idea that the scream is meant as an objective way of telling rape apart from consensual adultery is helpful, but it’s still kind of hard to believe that there aren’t cases where the woman would have been prevented from screaming or from being heard. On the other hand, if he’s right that there would be a trial at the city gates, I suppose they could say from the parallel example of being raped in the country that “well, people wouldn’t have heard a scream in this situation, so we have to assume she’s innocent”.

That does make me feel a little better about the second point- even if the idea that “silence implies consent” isn’t the same as our modern legal code, it’s also not totally monstrous, and I can see how it’d be fairly objective. Thanks for pointing me to that.

I can maybe understand the third point as providing for the woman (since maybe people wouldn’t want to marry the woman if she had been raped). It’s definitely not ideal, but I guess it’s better than letting the man violate her and then not making him provide for her.

The first point still doesn’t make sense to me, though. Why would you stone a woman just because her virginity couldn’t be proven in a specific way?

 

[RPRPsych]

I was thinking about this last night, and I remembered hearing something similar in the Bible. The passage I was thinking of turned out to be Deuteronomy 22, and after re-reading it, I’m really confused. There are a lot of things about this chapter that are hard to understand. At first glance, it sounds like:

Disregard that first glance, and travel back in time to the Ancient Near East…

-Women who do not bleed on their wedding nights cannot be proven virgins (at least, I think that’s what it’s referring to), and therefore their husbands are allowed to stone them for their supposed promiscuity (they are guilty unless proven innocent by their blood-stained sheets). Considering I’ve heard not everybody bleeds their first time, this is… troubling.

Remember what the average age at marriage was in those days. 12 or 13, often as soon as menarche was attained. As Haydock’s commentary points out, this does not apply to other cultures, especially when marriage was later.

-If a woman ends up having sex with someone and does not cry out, she is considered to have consented. If she is raped in the city and nobody comes to her aid, it is assumed that she must not have screamed and therefore was not raped. If betrothed to someone else, she is to be stoned to death along with the man who had sex with her- even if it was what we would nowadays refer to as rape.

“In the city” is not New York City. We’re talking about small, crowded, low-privacy towns. To not find help in such a context would be almost impossible.

-If a woman is not betrothed yet and has sex with a man (or, it would seem, if he rapes her), they are required to get married. Going by other passages, it’s possible the woman’s father has veto power, but it’s still a really uncomfortable passage that can easily be read as forcing women to marry their rapists.

The rapist also has to pay a financial penalty - and the passage probably deals with seducers rather than only rapists.

Can anybody help me out with this? I’m sure I’m misreading it. I have to be. As it stands, it sounds exactly like what we were taught to abhor in Muslim nations. I understand that the old laws don’t apply to us anymore, but I don’t understand why God would order people to kill women who may very well have been innocent. I’ve read some online commentaries about the section, but all of them basically confirmed my readings, and I don’t understand how that’s possible. I was hoping somebody here could help me understand some of this.

Like the wars of the historical books, this is all to do with Ancient Near Eastern cultural realities, and the need to avoid blood feuds.

Let’s assume A seduces (or violates) B and refuses to marry her.

The result would be a blood feud between A and B’s clans, causing many more deaths, rapes, and the like.

God’s laws in this case are not “moral absolutes”; like the commandment permitting divorce, God provided them because of the “hardness of our hearts”.

 

[sousley]

I can maybe understand the third point as providing for the woman (since maybe people wouldn’t want to marry the woman if she had been raped). It’s definitely not ideal, but I guess it’s better than letting the man violate her and then not making him provide for her.

And in some cases, it may be more than just the girl. Considering that she had now been defiled, there is a far lesser chance of her becoming betrothed in the future. If she is the daughter of a widow, the likelihood of her family being provided for by a perspective husband (that might never come now) may be bleak. Apart from considering something like “the oldest profession” in a neighboring pagan community, security for the girl/family aren’t looking so hot. So if we look at the law from the perspective of mercy, the perpetrator is now responsible for provision not only to the girl, but possibly her mother and sisters, for the rest of her life. Pretty good detourant for a potential perpetrator.

The first point still doesn’t make sense to me, though. Why would you stone a woman just because her virginity couldn’t be proven in a specific way?

A woman’s disregard for her virginity was to ‘become a harlot in her father’s house’; so it was seen as a dishonor to her father (10 commandants), a sin against God, and an offense to marriage. Flavius Josephus’s account from Antiquities of the Jews bk 4, ch8, (246-248) may be helpful. It gives some insight into due process for the accused:

Josephus:

If any one has been espoused to a woman as to a virgin, and does not afterward find her so to be, let him bring his action, and accuse her, and let him make use of such indications 1 to prove his accusation as he is furnished withal; and let the father or the brother of the damsel, or some one that is after them nearest of kin to her, defend her If the damsel obtain a sentence in her favor, that she had not been guilty, let her live with her husband that accused her; and let him not have any further power at all to put her away, unless she give him very great occasions of suspicion, and such as can be no way contradicted. But for him that brings an accusation and calumny against his wife in an impudent and rash manner, let him be punished by receiving forty stripes save one, and let him pay fifty shekels to her father: but if the damsel be convicted, as having been corrupted, and is one of the common people, let her be stoned, because she did not preserve her virginity till she were lawfully married; but if she were the daughter of a priest, let her be burnt alive.

EDIT: that last quote should read “Quote by” not “originally posted by Josephus” (I don’t know how to do that)

 

[Gorgias]

The first point still doesn’t make sense to me, though. Why would you stone a woman just because her virginity couldn’t be proven in a specific way?

Kama,

In addition to the very good responses which you’ve received here, there’s another important point to be made. Look, again, at the text of Deuteronomy 22: “If a man, after marrying a woman and having relations with her, comes to dislike her, and accuses her of misconduct and slanders her by saying, ‘I married this woman, but when I approached her I did not find evidence of her virginity,’…”. Look what’s going on here: it’s not that he found her to be not a virgin on their wedding night, but that he later is unhappy with the marriage and is just looking for a pretext to justify getting rid of her. The text explicitly says that, in doing this, he is slandering her!

So, while we might look at the context of the culture of the day, and the relative roles of men and women, and the rights (or lack thereof!) that were given them based on gender, and disapprove of that situation in that period of time… we see that the standards laid down in Deuteronomy gave opportunities to women to defend their honor, where previously, there were no opportunities to be had – before then, if a man wanted to turn his wife out of his household, he could just accuse her and then do so, without repercussion. In this sense, the Law was both progressive in terms of women’s rights and was an improvement on the situation of the day!

 

[bogeydogg]

What you are looking at in Deuteronomy is case law not moral law. So think of it like this, since the Ten Commandments do not cover entirety of human experience Moses gives them examples, “If this happens then you should…” is how it reads.

Understand that in Canaanite culture they used blood magic, and it was common to use the blood that came from breaking a girl’s virginity in their fertility rites to make crops grow because it was supposed to represent Baal coupling with Ashteroth. So these laws are not only about protecting girls (because even in the Middle East today rapists are much more likely to not be prosecuted than the girls who are raped) but also about not participating in Canaanite culture.

Also look at how they read, “if a girl is not a virgin a husband may stone her”, not MUST stone her. In fact the only command given to absolutely without fail execute the criminal is murder, for all other examples given the punishments read “up to and including dearth.” This hits our modern ears very, very hard because our sensibilities do not run this way, and that’s good, but remember these laws are not for us, they are for the body politic of Israel then and there. Our laws do not allow this sort of thing and since government is ordained by God then you should consider these case laws in time and place and not try to equate them our time here and now.

I will give you one final example, Joseph discovers Mary was pregnant, and decides to put her away. Under the covenant he could have taken her out and stoned her right then, but he decided to do something else, that should be all the proof you need that these are not recommendations to kill women but rather examples of the most extreme cases and what to do in them, and these laws most certainly gave leeway for mercy and not prescription for death.

God Bless

 

[Gloria_de_G]

The death penalty for sexual immorality was instituted because God abhors sexual immoral people, and all liars.

Now we do not kill them anymore but God still abhors them, just that trough Christ we are forgiven of anything** if we repent**, but if we do not want to repent from the bottom of our heart, look what will happen:

"But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the sexually immoral, murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and sulphur, which is the second death.” Rev 21:8 :bigyikes:

In the love of the truth,
Gloria

.

 

[Kamaduck]

Thanks for the responses, everybody. It’s making a little more sense now, especially since it was pointed out that you don’t have to stone the girl, and that there would be a trial for this kind of thing. I’m going to guess that if there were, somehow, a situation where it would have been impossible for a girl to receive aid, they’d be able to assume the best and not kill her, in accordance with the example of the girl in the country. Is that making sense? And then I suppose there would be different social forces in play, and there wouldn’t be as many reasons for the girl to avoid going for help.

I did realize that it wasn’t moral law here, but I can’t accept that God would tell people to do something specifically immoral, and stoning rape victims seemed pretty immoral. But I don’t think that’s what the law is saying here, especially after thinking about Jimmy Akin’s article.

In any case, I can accept that the laws exist to protect women and discourage sexual immorality, not to attack women for things they can’t control.

I’m still not 100% clear on why you are allowed to stone any woman who doesn’t bleed on her wedding night, but I guess I’ll go with RPRPsych’s assertion that it was close to universal back then. Still kind of weird, but OK.

I’m not sure I completely understand what God was doing with these laws, but on the other hand, I know that rape is always a really difficult thing to determine legally. I guess “silence implies consent” isn’t any worse of a method than what we have today, given that what we have today is impossible to enforce. This is, if nothing else, more objective.

Thanks for the replies, everybody. They were really helpful, I’m just going to need to think about them some more.