Dowry - Exodus 22:16-17

22:16- 17- This next one is a little interesting, it says “if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife. If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay money according to the dowry of virgins.” I’m not going to read anything into this as far as whether or not the encounter was consensual and I’m just going to assume that it was because that’s how I read it.

I’ve thought about this a lot throughout my lifetime because, as a woman, I watch people and society and situations and I have a teenage son and I don’t want him to grow up to be a douchebag and I want to protect my daughter. I would assume that this mostly involves younger people because as far as I know marriage usually happened in the mid to late teens so if a “man” or “teenage boy” convinced an unmarried woman to have sex with him, I assume that they would be in the mid to late teen stage of life.

The only reason that I bring this up is because biology is important here, it’s late puberty and hormones are all crazy and sex is going to be at the fore front of most teenage minds. Anyway, all this is to say that our society puts such a hypocritical significance on the genders of a sexual encounter. A male and female have sex and she’s a slut but he’s a stud. Maybe I’m old and it’s not like that anymore, but that’s definitely the way it was when I was growing up and I think it’s a disservice to both men and women in our society.

Interestingly, it says that if he convinces her to have sex with him, he has to marry her, which is far cry from the protocol of what happened in any other society anciently, or pretty much ever, to include our own. I think about the concept of “shotgun weddings” where if the woman got pregnant, her father would force the man to marry her under the threat of death if he didn’t. But that’s not what the Lord is saying here, he’s not saying “if she gets pregnant,” he’s saying if she is convinced to do it at all, then he has to marry her.

Then there’s the part about if her father refuses to let her marry him, then he still has to pay money to her father, I assume the money would go to him and not her. This second part took me back a little bit because I don’t really understand all the ways that this would play out, like is the girl the victim, is this one way in which she can marry the man she chooses? So I imagine that the parents, the father particularly, would play the main deciding factor in who his daughter will marry, but if she doesn’t want to marry her father’s choice and then has sex with the guy that she actually does want to marry, is this one way that would force her father’s hand in letting her marry the guy that she chooses? But then if the father refuses, the man her father wants her to marry is still going to have to accept the marriage to a woman who has had sex with someone else, which I think was probably a big deal at the time.

That’s just one interesting way to think about this whole thing playing out. And again, this is all assuming that everything is consensual, which I can only assume that it would be from the reading. Again, this simple statement shows just how progressive God is in his protection of women and the vulnerable. In most societies, women were property and could be raped at will by whoever was in a position of power over the man she belonged to, this law opposed that which was very unusual, even for our society today. God required accountability and caution for those who would otherwise take advantage of women. I’ve been working on a personal relationship with God healing the way that I view all people, men and women, but it’s so reaffirming to me to see that even anciently, God’s always been devoted to the protection of women.

I had one other thought today that doesn’t directly correspond with these verses, but more of a general concept. Today I was listening to Jacob’s account of Sherem in Jacob chapter 7, and one of the accusations that Sherem makes against Jacob as the prophet is that he didn’t teach the law of Moses, which was the correct way to live. Interestingly, I don’t think that this objection was because Sherem studied the scriptures in great detail and wanted to make sure he was serving God the right way and was just convinced that following the law of Moses more strictly was the way to do that. I think that Jacob (and Nephi) not teaching or upholding the strictness of the law of Moses was just the tool that Sherem used to drive wedges between his followers and the gospel as it was being taught by the prophets (Jacob and Nephi).

Sherem also said that the law of Moses was the right way to follow God, not believing in some being who should come later (Christ). And it occurred to me when I heard that, that that’s what the Jews at Jerusalem were saying when Lehi left Jerusalem and when Christ was born. At that point, they knew they were waiting for a Messiah, but they didn’t recognize him when he got there because they had misunderstood the scriptures and killed the prophets. So when Sherem said, “you aren’t teaching the law of Moses,” he was right, Jacob wasn’t teaching the law the way that the Jews at Jerusalem were living it when Lehi had left with a strict adherence to the 600+ rules that they had. But instead Jacob was teaching how the law of Moses points to and prepares the people for when Christ, the Messiah, comes.

It’s just interesting to me how both groups of people could have the same scriptures, the same information, and one group got so bogged down with the letter of the law, that when their Savior came, they didn’t recognize him. But the other group was able to use personal revelation and righteousness to see the plan more clearly to the point that they knew the minute Christ was born, whereas most of the Jews in Israel had no idea. It makes me consider in my own life if I get so bogged down by details that obscure my view that I don’t see the proper picture. The contrast between the Bible and the Book of Mormon is such a commentary on the importance of learning what God wants you to know using the tools that He gives you, instead of just becoming familiar with the tools themselves.