We have spent several chapters on items related to murder, manslaughter and warfare. Now appear a variety of decrees moving towards the Seventh Commandment (Deuteronomy 5: 18), prohibitions on adultery.
Deuteronomy 22: 1-4, Your neighbor's flock
If you see your brother's ox or sheep straying, do not ignore it but be sure to take it back to him. If the brother does not live near you or if you do not know who he is, take it home with you and keep it until he comes looking for it. Then give it back to him.
Do the same if you find your brother's donkey or his cloak or anything he loses. Do not ignore it.
If you see your brother's donkey or his ox fallen on the road, do not ignore it. Help him get it to its feet.
We are to care for our neighbor's property. This seems to be a collection of ad-hoc decrees pointing out one's communal responsibilities. It does not seem to be related to adultery or, more generally, human sexuality.
Deuteronomy 22: 5-7, Dress for your gender
A woman must not wear men's clothing, nor a man wear women's clothing, for the LORD your God detests anyone who does this.
In a society that emphasized fertility and large families, it was important that one wore clothes that clarified their gender.
Deuteronomy 22: 5-7, Release the mother
If you come across a bird's nest beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young. You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go, so that it may go well with you and you may have a long life.
Even as one hunted for eggs or nestlings, one was to recognize that the mother bird should be free to build a nest again and to propagate the species.
Deuteronomy 22: 8, Railing on your roof
When you build a new house, make a parapet around your roof so that you may not bring the guilt of bloodshed on your house if someone falls from the roof.
Protect your neighbors with a railing on the roof. This example is one of several examples that argue that one should be a thoughtful, compassionate citizen in Israel. It seems to clearly be representative -- one who meditates on these decrees could surely think of other places where they would need to protect the neighbors and family.
We now begin to explore principles related to the Seventh Commandment (Deuteronomy 5: 18), prohibition against adultery. In its most general setting, to adulterate something is to water it down, to thin and reduce its concentration. What follows are some strange decrees that appear to be related to depleting, weakening the power of a process.
Deuteronomy 22: 9-11, Mixed messages
Do not plant two kinds of seed in your vineyard; if you do, not only the crops you plant but also the fruit of the vineyard will be defiled.
Do not plow with an ox and a donkey yoked together.
Do not wear clothes of wool and linen woven together.
Make tassels on the four corners of the cloak you wear.
These items seem to mix unequal things together, things that will tear or come apart because of this inequality. Elsewhere Israelites are prohibited from marrying someone outside of Israel for this reason; the pagan partner gives an "unequal yoke."
Deuteronomy 22: 12, Tassels
Make tassels on the four corners of the cloak you wear.
While we are discussing clothes, we have a strange statement about tassels. This command is clearer when we look at an expansion of this statement in Numbers 15: 37-41. There the tassels represent the various decrees of YHWH, fitting in with the instructions of Deuteronomy 6: 8, to keep these commands ever tied before one. The tassels become a physical statement of one's identity with the decrees of YHWH. (A modern version of using beads or tassels as a reminder of spiritual words would be the Rosary.)
Deuteronomy 22: 13-19, Slandering your bride
If a man takes a wife and, after lying with her, dislikes her and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, "I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity," then the girl's father and mother shall bring proof that she was a virgin to the town elders at the gate.
The girl's father will say to the elders, "I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her. Now he has slandered her and said, `I did not find your daughter to be a virgin.' But here is the proof of my daughter's virginity."
Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, and the elders shall take the man and punish him. They shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give them to the girl's father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives.
What a strange and culturally weighted example. In a society relying on fertility, large families and large flocks, the woman's virginity was viewed as a valuable contribution to the family and there were significant penalties for slandering her sexual character.
The elders typically met at the gates of the town; this would be the location for some type of judicial hearing. Currid argues that the elders would have add an additional penalty, beyond the one hundred shekels of silver, for the dishonest husband, and that the one hundred shekels was probably twice the standard bride price (see verse 29, below.)
Currid argues that evidence of the woman's virginity, blood preserved from the perforation of the woman's hymen, was part of the ritual of the wedding night.
Deuteronomy 22: 20-21,
If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the girl's virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father's house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done a disgraceful thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father's house. You must purge the evil from among you.
Although adultery was technically defined as sex with a partner who is married to someone else, this passage makes it clear that any sex outside of marriage in condemned in these decrees. In this case, the woman presumably has had a sex partner who is unknown. (What proof is demanded here? What if a woman is a virgin but does not bleed from her first sexual intercourse?)
Deuteronomy 22: 22,
If a man is found sleeping with another man's wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge the evil from Israel.
Here the woman is married and both partners are condemned for their adultery. So far these examples (three of them) have described moral issues involving a woman who is married.
We now move to three examples that involve an unmarried woman.
Deuteronomy 22: 23-27, Premarital sex
If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death--the girl because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man's wife. You must purge the evil from among you.
But if out in the country a man happens to meet a girl pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die. Do nothing to the girl; she has committed no sin deserving death. This case is like that of someone who attacks and murders his neighbor, for the man found the girl out in the country, and though the betrothed girl screamed, there was no one to rescue her.
This passage distinguishes between "in town" where the woman could presumably call for help but did not and "out of town" where the woman could not call out and so was unprotected.
Hopefully our culture has proceeded beyond this -- but we will notice a number of passages further along in the Old Testament in which these issues of seduction, rape and a woman's vulnerability lead to conflict and even murder.
Deuteronomy 22: 28-29, Rape
If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl's father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.
Is this accepting of rape? Or seduction? In the patriarchal society this provides some small protection to the woman but we do not see the harsh penalties of other examples. (Our modern culture certainly cringes with a paragraph like this. An example from Old Testament history occurs in II Samuel 13, where Amnon, son of David, rapes his half-sister Tamar. There Tamar pleads with Amnon to first marry her, but he refuses to stop and suffers no immediate legal penalty.)
According to Exodus 22: 16-17, the father (hopefully after listening to his daughter?) can reject the marriage but still collect the bride price of fifty shekels.
Deuteronomy 22: 30,
A man is not to marry his father's wife; he must not dishonor his father's bed.
This verse appears to be a somewhat tangential decree that forbids incest, echoing back to Reuben's crime in Genesis 35: 22. This decree repeats the earlier decree of Leviticus 18:7. In the Hebrew Bible, says Currid, this verse was part of the next chapter, where it may fit in a little better.
Random Reactions: Among all the stuff about adultery, sex, rape, one strange verse jumps out at me. In verse 8 the people are instructed to extend their walls to form a barrier on their roof! Clearly this decree is not useful today, unless it merely represents a principle of this book:
Think about the implications of the Law; think about how to love God and love your neighbor!
In the ancient Near East, houses were single story, with a flat roof. People often congregated on the roof; on hot nights people slept on the roof. If you care about your neighbor, make sure to protect them when you congregate there. Verse 8, which seems bizarre at first, is merely an example of an underlying principle that appears in modern law as issues related to negligence.
Once I see these many decrees as mere examples of deeper underlying principles, suddenly a lot of this makes sense. Look not to the details of the decrees but to the underlying principles!
No comments:
Post a Comment