This post is a response to a friends comments on facebook. In particular the subject was about some passages that seem to show the God of the Old Testament as a mean, nasty S.O.B. In most cases, the bigger issue when looking at these kind of verses is that we judge the people in them by our standards and ethics based on our western culture. In short we paint someone, including God, as a mean because to our culture they are mean but to their culture what they are doing is perfectly normal.
This is particularly true in the cases involving rape and marriage.
Our Western culture and the Ancient Oriental Culture are very different and because of that it is often difficult to understand what is going on in some passages or at best we will misunderstand their meaning:
1. Marriage -- in our culture people choose who they marry, it is a mutually accepted event. In the Ancient Orient culture of the Bible -- marriages are arranged by parents and there is often very little choice in the matter. In that culture marriage meant obligation not romantic love.
2. Sex -- this also creates a difference in the understanding of the purpose of sexual intercourse. In our culture sex is about expression of love and romantic feelings, it can lead to children but when we have sex that is not the main reason we go at it so to speak. In the Oriental Culture, the opposite is very true -- it is about creating children and secondarily it was about enjoyment. Sex was about the fulfilment of a contract of marriage to them so that a man would have descendants and a woman was to provide the womb in which those descendants would be made.
3. Rape -- In both societies rape is something evil, but the consequences are very different. In our culture, the stigma of rape, while still bad for the woman (unfortunately), does not mean that another guy might not marry her and love her. Not so in the orient culture as such a woman is considered 'spoiled goods' and would have only two options for the rest of her life -- begging or prostitution.
4. The Role of Women -- in our society women are equals, heck they are sometimes superior to men as far as roles ands power. In the ancient culture this was not the case -- women we somewhere above cattle and they have very few options. There main things in the culture of the Old Testament that gave a woman value was 1) her ability to produce children and 2) who she was married to. Marriage was something a woman wanted to give her both so she would be respectable. Otherwise her options became very limited.
These things taken into consideration some of the things in the Bible are a little more clear.
Deuteronomy 22:28-29 -- seems kind of harsh to westerners that if a woman who is not engaged is raped she has to marry her attacker. But in that culture this is actually an action to protect the woman. In all other cases of rape the man is put to death because the woman is either engaged or married and thus she has someone who is obligated to take care of her. Not so with the unmarried woman who is not engaged. If the Law had the man killed, the woman would either become a beggar or a prostitute. The man is forced to marry her and thus that makes him obligated to provide for her. He also looses his right to divorce her which means he has to take care of her for the rest of his life. This also meant he would loose face and in this culture that means no other family would deal well with him. He would live with the shame of his actions forever and at the same time the woman is provided for. This is not a mean law but an act of compassion in this culture.
Judges 21 -- Now one thing we need to remember is that the Bible sometimes simply records events but makes no moral judgement and parts of the Bible have no actions by God recorded. Such is the case of Judges 21. The people have slaughtered the Benjamites to the point that the tribe if for all practical purposes - gone. The reason for this slaughter was actually a rape of a Levite's concubine in the previous chapter. When the whole tribe of Benjamin decides to protect the rapists (thus becoming gilty as well after the fact), the rest of Israel decides to go to war with them and destroy them. They succeed. Now at this point THEY are troubled that the tribe is gone but it never says God was troubled. What follows is, in my opinon, the actions of misguided people who feel they are doing God's work but are really just being idiots because they have made rash vows. This causes them to destroy a group of people, so the women could be used be the few remaining Benjamites as well as kidnapping some women from another town.
In this culture, though, the odd thing would have been this -- the women would have accepted it. To them, as long as a man was providing for her and giving her an opportunity to have children, most of them would have been content with this arrangement because neither marriage nor sex was about romantic love but obligation and procreation. Hard to believe to our Western ears but true.
Awesome Pastor Ed! More great explantion! Thanks
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