In a recent post we looked at several places in the Old Testament that have been claimed to show that "God approves of rape" and thus he is a moral monster.
Now let's look at a potentially more inflammatory charge: that God actually expects women to marry their rapists.
Is this true?
An Unmarried Virgin
(NOTE: This post is part of a series on the "dark passages" of the Bible. Click here to see all of the posts in the series.)
In the previous post we looked at what Deuteronomy had to say about the cases of women who were legally married and were then raped. Deuteronomy then turned to the situation of legally unmarried women:
Deuteronomy 22
[28] "If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, [29] then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her; he may not put her away all his days."
Here there is no question of whether the situation is adultery, because the young woman is not betrothed and thus not legally married.
As a result, the question of the death penalty does not come up. The death penalty which was applied in the case of adultery does not apply here.
But there is a problem: Now that she has been violated and is no longer a virgin . . .
Who is this girl going to marry?
Virginity was very highly prized in ancient Israel and, whether she consented or not, a young woman in this situation would find her matrimonial prospects vastly diminished.
Was that fair?
Absolutely not!
But it was a fact of life 3,000 years ago in the Middle East (and, in all likelihood, today as well, though not in modern Israel).
That presented the girl and her family with a very real problem: How can her future be best protected, given what has happened?
An Unrealistic Scenario
Of course, the ideal option would be if the girl met some boy who fell in love with her and was willing to marry her despite the fact that she was not a virgin.
While romantic marriages did occur in ancient Israel (Jacob and Rachel, Samson and Delilah, and David and Michal come to mind), they were not the norm.
It could happen that a boy would so love a girl that he would marry her though she was not a virgin, and if it did then the girl and her family would almost certainly leap at the chance (provided the young man were at least minimally acceptable), but they knew that--given the realities of their culture--counting on such a scenario would be unrealistic.
The ancients were far more practical about marriage than we are today, and while love was something that was expected to grow between the partners in a marriage, it was by no means a prerequisite.
They also understood--better than we--what the purposes of marriage were (and are). It was about raising a family and providing mutual support in a difficult and dangerous life.
So what would happen to a woman who did not get married?
Unless her family was rich, she would not have good options.
Basically, she would be doomed to a life of either poverty or immorality.
No Husband
Without a husband, she would be forced to earn her own living, and that would not be easy given the very restricted access women had to the job market in 1000 B.C. There were not many jobs open to women, and they didn't pay well.
She would also have to deal with the shame and social stigma of being unmarried, which was far more intensely felt in the ancient world than it is today.
You get a sense of that from passages like Isaiah 4:1, where the prophet speaks of a time in which Jerusalem would be conquered and devastated, and many men killed:
And seven women shall take hold of one man in that day, saying, "We will eat our own bread and wear our own clothes, only let us be called by your name; take away our reproach."
Besides shame and a lack of financial resources, there was also another consequence of not having a husband . . .
No Children
Without a husband, the woman could not (morally) have children to care for her in her old age--or even help the family earn a living before that.
Children were viewed as an enormous blessing (as well as being an economic asset rather than an economic burden), and the shame of being childless in ancient Israel is repeatedly noted throughout the Bible.
One only has to think of the moving stories of women who struggled with infertility, like Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth.
And, once again, without a husband, children, or rich relatives, an unmarried woman in the ancient world could be doomed to be among the poorest of the poor.
Malnutrition and starvation were real possibilities.
And then there was an even worse option . . .
The Oldest Profession
Of course, there was a way for a woman in the ancient world to make enough money to live on.
She could always sell her body.
At least for as long as her looks lasted.
If she was fortunate enough to have looks.
Exercising this option would also doom her to a life of shame as a social pariah.
And it would involve a life of enormous and constant sin.
It is not a life any family would wish for their daughter to have.
So what should be done?
The Source of the Problem
Of course, the source of the problem was the young man who had his way with the girl.
He's the one who is responsible for her plight.
And it's a basic intuition that the one who is responsible for causing a problem ought to fix it.
It is easy to see how, to the ancient mind, the young man himself should be held accountable to solve the problem: If he has gone and made this girl unmarrigeable then he had darn well better marry her himself!
And thus assure her future.
This is the ancient equivalent of a "shotgun marriage."
Making Sure He Doesn't Weasel Out
Furthermore, he should not be allowed to weasel out of his responsibilities.
Thus the law provides that he is still forced to pay the girl's father the marriage present (as was customary at the time).
He even has less privileges than a normal husband, because he is not permitted to divorce her ("put her away") as long as he lives. And observe the reason: "because he has violated her."
Note this well: The law recognizes the wrongness of his action.
Stopping This From Happening
There is also a deterrent intention here: Don't violate a woman if you're not willing to marry her and provide for her for the rest of your life.
When you think about it, that's a key reason for this law. Maybe even the main reason.
Because you have to wonder how often it was actually invoked.
This becomes clear if you look at a parallel law . . .
"If her father utterly refuses to give her to him"
Exodus contains a law that deals with a similar situation, in which a girl has been seduced rather than raped:
Exodus 22
[16] "If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed, and lies with her, he shall give the marriage present for her, and make her his wife.
[17] If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equivalent to the marriage present for virgins."
We have a similar situation in that the man is still expected to pay the marriage present, but the fact that the father can refuse to give him the girl is explicitly pointed out.
If the father can judge a man unsuitable who merely seduced his daughter, he can also judge a man unsuitable if he raped his daughter.
Thus, though the text in Deuteronomy doesn't explicitly point it out, that is an option as well.
Why doesn't the text point it out in the latter case?
Here's one possibility: Because if the Deuteronomy text added the qualifier "unless the girl's father refuses to give her to him" then it would hold out the prospect of another way of escape for the man.
That would weaken the deterrent effect of the passage.
The Deuteronomy text thus seems to be written in a way that gives the young man more reason for pause: Don't let your passion get the best of you. Don't force yourself on a girl. Or you'll be saddled with supporting her for the rest of your life (no mention made of the idea her father won't give her to you).
What Actually Happened?
It can't be ruled out that, in at least some cases in ancient Israel, the family (including the girl herself) would take a hard, practical look at the situation and conclude that marrying the man really was the best way to secure the girl's future--in which case the man would be held to the responsibilities he had incurred.
Presumably, this would be judged to be the case in situations where the young man was overcome with passion and, in an individual case, failed to respect the fact that "No!" means "No!"
What he did was bad enough, but the practical ancients might judge marrying him to be less bad than what would otherwise happen to the girl, as noted above.
On the other hand, they might decide otherwise--for any of many reasons--and the girl's father (who was presumably totally enraged) would refuse to give him the girl.
Given the way that the law in Deuteronomy seems written for deterrence by not mentioning this possibility, it's hard to know how often such marriages actually took place.
But there's still the larger issue . . .
What Does This Tell Us About God's Will?
We've seen that the law in Deuteronomy should not be read in isolation from other texts, like the one from Exodus, that can shed light on it.
In particular, we've seen that girls were not automatically forced to marry their rapists and that the purpose of the law is to secure the girl's future and hold the man who violated her accountable.
It's also meant to deter men from doing this, and it recognizes the wrong of their actions: the fact that they have violated the virgin and robbed her of something precious.
Would we put the principles behind the law together in this way in our culture?
No. Absolutely not.
Were the attitudes in ancient Israel that forced a girl who had been violated into the options mentioned above fair?
No. Absolutely not.
But they were there nonetheless.
And we can see within the law the underlying principles that are being applied.
Because Your Hearts Were Hard
That makes it possible to see this as one of the kind of laws we started out discussing in this series. They reflect a situation where God took the Israelites at one stage of their moral development and worked, over time, to educate them in his will--a process that would be completed when Jesus revealed the fullness of God's will.
It is like Moses originally allowing the possibility of divorce and remarriage because men's hearts were hard, but eventually Jesus abolished this.
In the same way, God worked with the Israelites at this early stage of their national development to begin to inject better elements in their culture to help address such situations.
It's already better than some of the other options, like murdering the young man in vengeance or honor killing the young woman. (GAH!)
But the perfect revelation of God's will had not yet come.
What Now?
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In the meantime, what do you think?
Comments
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“It’s already better than some of the other options, like murdering the young man in vengeance or honor killing the young woman. (GAH!)”
Really? Forcing a woman to marry her rapist (if her father allows it) and be stuck with him forever is better than killing the rapist? I grant that neither are good, but I don’t know that execution of the criminal is the worst of the two.
And I doubt that this rule would always be a disincentive…if a man wanted to marry a woman who didn’t want to marry him, well, with this law he now has an option to force her into it.
rea ,
It’s a matter of what was justice in ancient Israel, not what’s politically palatable or understandable in 2012 America.
Vengeance against someone who dishonored a family could escalate & take many lives.The marriage, or paying off the family options were answers to preventing that type of behavior.
If you look at more recent history, feuding clans in Scotland & families in the Southern American states continued cycles of vengeance & reprisals.One act could set off years of bloodshed that impacted whole communities.
As Jimmy explains, given the (wrongheaded) view of non-virginal women at the time, requiring the rapist to provide for his victim for the rest of her life might well be better, for her, than simply executing him and leaving her to make her own way.
We tend to look at it as “A woman gets raped, and is then expected to spend the rest of her life with her rapist,” which is indeed distasteful. Indeed, given the relative power of husbands and wives in that time and place, it is easy to imagine the woman being consigned to a life of terror and abuse at the hands of the same man who had already hurt her. There’s a reason we don’t have a similar law nowadays.
But it is also important to look at the actual goal of the law. It wasn’t aimed at the rape victim as a way of forcing her to continue to service her attacker (though I do hope they had a way of avoiding that possibility; Jimmy’s citation of the father’s right to take the money and refuse the marriage is a sign that there were at least procedures in place, though that still depends on a loving father rather than on the woman’s own choice). Rather, the law is aimed at the rapist, forcing him to marry and provide for the woman he had harmed for the rest of her life, with no option for divorce. The punishment is aimed at the rapist, not the victim, though the specifics are still rather patriarchal for our tastes. If the law had instead compelled the rapist to provide for the woman without gaining any of the privileges of a husband, that would seem better (though it would still leave the woman with no easy way to produce sons to care for her even after the rapist dies).
“Were the attitudes in ancient Israel that forced a girl who had been violated into the options mentioned above fair?
No. Absolutely not.”
Really? I think the logic of the law is brilliant, and as a woman, I think it would be very fair. Due to the harshness of the law, odds are I would not be raped if I took good care of myself. If I were, however, then I would be simply beside myself with grief if I knew I would probably never marry because of the rape. If the laws existed in today’s culture and I were raped, I would strongly consider joining the convent instead, but clearly that wasn’t an option for the Jews. Therefore, I’d be thankful that I was forced to marry the man, no matter how horrible he may be, so that I wasn’t completely socially disowned. In that culture it was possible to be married without spending quality time with your spouse.
I’m currently reading the trilogy Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. It’s a Norwegian novel about marriage in Medieval Norway. It focuses on the issue of seduction, showing how the girl’s parents were forced to make the decision of marrying their daughter to her betrothed or her lover. It addresses these points in a strong way, although the culture and laws were somewhat different (and it was a strongly Catholic culture, not Jewish.)
Reading that book is helping me to understand these Jewish Purity System laws much better.
The Old Testament G-d, is the G-d of the Jews. And whereas many Christians read the Old Testament and many adhere to it, it is not our law.
Modern Americans, usually follow the New Testament. And parts of the codes of Hammurabi, which was given to him by his G-d. I mean really how many seafood places and bbq joints would go out of business if we followed the Old Testament laws? The clothing companies of the world would also take a big hit. If expected to follow the Old Testament.
So as Todd Akin, found out you just can’t try to force a woman to marry her rapist. Its not done in this country. Women aren’t property to be disposed of by horrified fathers and socially backwards people. Honor killings are not sanctioned here as some immigrants have found to their surprise at being jailed for the torture and killing of their daughters. You can live where you want but the Old Testament is not the guide book to live by. Unless you might be Jewish.
Pete McNesbitt ,
What are you talking about? Todd Akin?
This topic does not make much sense to me. Was no one willing to marry a widow? Yes; see the story of Ruth. How about a woman who was divorced? That carried a bigger stigma, no doubt, but other laws make it clear that this could and did happen. How about the case of Michal—the very one you cite? Palti, son of Laish, seemed to be very willing to marry her, even though she had been given to David as a wife first (and they do not appear to have gotten along afterwards). How about Tamar? She was beautiful and a king’s daughter—I would expect the court to be full of young men who would see marrying her as a good way to win the gratitude of King David.
What bearing does the fact of ‘becoming one flesh’ have on the matter? For example, could either the unwilling party (the woman virgin) or the imposing party (the rapist) to this factual ‘union’ marry anyone else while the other lived without committing adultery? Or is there some sort of ‘rape exception’?
It is a perfect system.
That way, any man could have any woman he wanted for a fixed and cheap price. And what is wrong with that?
Nothing.
Suppoert your brothers Jimmy.
Not the women who were made to be helpmates anyway.
@Davidd—It has no bearing. First of all, you are reading this as “factual ‘union’” as a “factual marriage”, which it is not; if it were, there would be no need to say that the rapist had to marry his victim. Secondly, you are throwing in the “while the other lived” as though this were a permanent, sacramental marriage. My understanding is that the Church recognizes that remarriage is permitted after a non-sacramental marriage ends in divorce, although even in that case divorce is to be lamented.
@Gabriel—50 shekels of silver was not a “cheap price” in those days. The money would be hard to come by for the vast majority of men—the equivalent of 50 days’ pay for men who were usually living close to the edge to begin with. If it were a cheap and easy way for any man to have any woman he desired, one would expect rapes to be commonplace and for them to be casually mentioned in the Bible—that so-and-so saw a woman he liked, raped her, paid the price, and moved on to whatever followed. There really are no passages like that; there are rapes, but they are clearly parts of tragedies, like the rape of Tamar in the the tragedy of David’s messed-up family. In the case of the rape of Tamar, Amnon paid a price much higher than 50 shekels; Absalom had him killed. In the case of the rape of Dinah, Simeon and Levi exacted a much more serious revenge. Much of the Mosaic Law has to be understood as setting limits on cycles of vengeance that could and did spiral out of control.
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