Lots of Death - Deuteronomy 21

Chapter 21 is separated into two parts, and TB has hour long lectures on each, which are interesting. Verses 1-9 have to do with what to do if someone is found in the land who is dead that has been murdered but no one knows who did it. One reason why I don’t think I could ever commit murder is because I’m confident that I would be caught immediately, which is a deterrent, because there’s no way that I could do something like that in a way where I was not immediately caught. All this is to say that this topic took me by surprise because it never occurred to me that people could just dump a body and body and not get caught. If someone is murdered and no one knows who did it, then wherever that person’s body was dumped, the closest place that is “neither eared nor sown” is where the priests should take a heifer, break it’s neck and then behead it, and pray over it “so shalt thou put away the guilt of innocent blood from among you, when thou shalt do that which is right tin the sight of the Lord.”

TB has a whole hour lecture on just these 9 verses and says that this ritual is to be performed because that murdered person had their blood spilled and therefore the land and the people living in that land had a blood guilt put on them. I’m not super sure about the concept but the lecture was really interesting because it said basically that any one of God’s commandments that involved blood or life, when violated put a blood guilt on the people. He even went as far as to talk about Adam and Eve wearing the coats of animal skins because the animals were killed as a sacrifice for their blood guilt that came upon them when they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It was very interesting, not interesting enough for me to get into too much here, but if you’re interested then you can listen to it. It did kind of go off the rails at the end because TB insisted that the only way to appease our blood guilt now is to execute all people who had taken life, and I vehemently disagree with that. What’s interesting too is that when he was talking about how we need to obey Mosaic law now especially when it comes to criminal code, I was thinking how grateful I am for the Book of Mormon because without the contrast of that second book it might be easy to become convinced that we really should execute all people who are responsible for the loss of life, or that we should blindly support the country of Israel as it stands today just because the Hebrews were given that land by God 3500 years ago. Stuff like that. Without the Book of Mormon, that argument could be made.

The rest of the chapter starts into what are called the “Miscellaneous commandments” that go through the next several chapters. The first commandment is that when Israel wins a battle, if one of the foreign captive women looks attractive to one of the soldiers and he wants to marry her, she is to be brought back to Israel, “she shall shave her head, and pare her nails” and change her clothes and then she has 1 month to “bewail her father and her mother” and then the soldier can marry her. This seems pretty abhorrent to us, and for good reason, but one of the things to mention is that at the time, any woman taken captive after her people lost the battle was probably raped, taken and sold as a slave where her life was horrible. In this instance, She wasn’t to be raped, or sold as a slave, she was to be taken, given full rights as a wife and given a month to settle in before she was married. TB said that this arrangement implied to the marriage because at the end of that month if she was miserable and mean then the soldier wouldn’t want to marry her. I don’t see any evidence of that in the reading, and I think that many men would take an unwilling wife as a personal game for him to play for the rest of his life, so none of that implies consent to me, but I could be wrong, I’m not the expert. Additionally, if he changes his mind and “have no delight in her” and doesn’t want to be married to her anymore, then he is to let her go wherever she wants, and he can’t sell her as a slave or “make merchandise of her” which the footnote indicates to me “treat her harshly”. TB again, says that this is only applicable within the month long window before marriage and if he changes his mind after they are married then too bad so sad, she has all the rights of a traditional wife. Again, I don’t see that in the reading but I could be wrong. So the thing to take away from here is that yes, this was abhorrent treatment of women by our standards, but at the time it was very progressive and protective of women. God is a girl dad.

If a man has two (or more) wives and has a favorite, then when it comes time to divide his inheritance, the man has to give the inheritance to his first born son, even if that son was born to the less favored wife. Jacob is an excellent example of this. The next commandment is that if a couple has a son that is “stubborn and rebellious… which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother,” then those parents were to take their son to the elders and all the men of the city would stone that son to death. This is an interesting commandment and there’s a lot of commentary about it to go through. My first thought about this was that while I’m not a son, my parents absolutely would have used this rule to get rid of me, so I’m not approaching is from the view point of “the son is a bad guy” but instead “the parents are manipulating the system to get rid of children they don’t like.”

That being said, there are several points to consider here. First, the IM notes that the son would almost certain have to be an adult, so this probably wouldn’t apply to children. Though TB did mention that this threat might have been very convincing to the children that if they didn’t behave then their parents could turn them in for this. Second, was that both the father and the mother had to agree to do this, if both parents weren’t in agreement, then the elders weren’t to move forward. This gave the mother’s voice just as much weight as the fathers, so again more power to women in this scenario. Additionally, in most cases, it would take a lot to get a mother to turn against her son, so if the mom was to the point that where she felt that he was a detriment to society and needed to be killed, then it was probably pretty bad. But this doesn’t say that the son was guilty of any other crimes other than disobedience, gluttony and a drunkard. Drunken violence would have carried their own consequences, general laziness would have just resulted in that man being hungry or a burden on his family, hardly a capital offense.

So it’s interesting to consider what this man must have been to be recommended for this treatment but not guilty of any other crimes. This was to be done after the parents had tried literally everything else and the son wouldn’t shape up. And TB notes that the judgment of death was the maximum punishment that could be allowed, but the elders would try anything else before getting to that point. There’s an anecdote that I heard once that said “there was a man in a village who was so lazy that he wouldn’t work and was a burden on all the society so the council banished him to leave the town and his family and never come back. He was to be driven in a wagon outside of town and left there. The man driving the wagon felt bad for him on the way to dump him and offered him some corn and the man being banished asked, ‘is it shucked?’” I wonder if it was one of those situations. As far as why this was a rule, the IM makes a few good points, “Since the family is the basic unit of society and the most important means of transmitting righteousness from generation to generation, the child who utterly rejected parental authority threatened the very order of society. Thus, like the idolator, he must be put to death. A parent who upheld his child in crime became a contributor to crime in society… Think for a moment of how strongly parents would strive to turn their children from sin, knowing that if they failed, they would have to go through the horror of taking them to the judges for execution. Surely they would chasten them in every possible way to see that such an event never happened. In a world of permissive child rearing and the ensuring destruction of righteousness, the lesson of this passage has great meaning.”

The last commandment of the chapter says that if a man is executed for a crime, to hang him on a tree, but it should be taken down and buried “that day” so before the sunset. The obvious connection to this commandment is when Christ was crucified and the women were so anxious to get his body down and “buried” before sunset, especially considering that the next day was Passover. TB noted that it was interesting because the women were the ones so concerned with keeping the commandments of getting the body down, whereas the priests who were supposed to be the ones mostly concerned didn’t care. He said that the priests were totally fine with Jesus’ body being left out overnight, even to the Passover, and even though it was against the commandments, in a demonstration of their contempt for the actual commandments of God. Instead it was the women who were upholding God’s commands and not the ones who were actually charged with ensuring compliance.