Women - Deuteronomy 22:13-30

Now we get into relationship issues and what I think is important to remember is that at this time in the ancient world, as far as I know, women were considered property of their husbands and fathers and had limited rights and considerations legally, so when we get into the laws given here, even though they are abhorrent to us now, they were pretty progressively pro-woman for the time. First, if a man marries a woman “and hate her” one of the options he had was to go to the council and accuse her of not being a virgin when they got married. It seems to me that this happened probably pretty soon after the wedding so not like 15 years into the marriage, but I’m not sure about that. So the man who decides he doesn’t like the wife that he chose accuses her of not being a virgin on their wedding night. The wife’s father will counter saying that he gave this man his daughter to marry and now he doesn’t like her and is making up lies about her. They way that this dispute gets solved is the same way that it was solved throughout human history in many different cultures. I’m sure most people know about this, but there was a white cloth that the couple had sex on top of for the first time, and the woman is supposed to bleed and then the blood will get on the cloth, thus verifying that she was a virgin, I think the assumption was that the hymen would break and that would cause the bleeding.

Now, having worked in women’s health for 25 years, I have significant problems with this. Think about the sex act itself, what kind of message does that send to girls, like “sex is so great that you bleed” like what. TB notes that this is how it ideally played out but said that it didn’t always work like that. I could not even imagine how distressing a wedding night would be for a girl knowing that something completely beyond her control could ruin her life and make her an outcast. I know what it’s like to not be believed about something so serious. And not even if the girl had consensual sex beforehand, what if she was raped or molested as a child, she’s punished further for that. Anyway, TB said that this special cloth was displayed for everyone to see so that they knew that the wife was a good girl, and then it was kept as a legal item so that at any point if the husband accused the wife of not being a virgin when they got married, the wife could bring that out as proof that she was.

If the husband’s accusations are found to be lies because there is a bloody cloth to show that the wife was in fact a virgin when they got married, then the man has to take the woman back and can never divorce her and pay the woman’s father 100 shekels of silver because he shamed the family. If the cloth can not be produced with the blood on it, then the woman is found to be a whore and is to be taken outside of the city and stoned to death. I just see how this would have played out for me and that I would be violently murdered because of something beyond my control and it is a little bit of a sensitive topic.

The commands are now expanded, if a man has sex with a married woman, they are to both be killed. For the next few it’s important to define betrothal. TB says that it is essentially a marriage contract but there has been no consummation. So when a couple becomes betrothed, they are basically married legally but after the short ceremony, they then consummate it and show off the cloth and they are married. In the legal sense, the responsibility for the betrothed woman transfers to her betrothed man when they become engaged. Another way to see it is that once they are betrothed, that woman belongs to that man, that’s why the distinction is so important. Another point that I think is important is that in the KJV of translation it says that if a man “find her” and have sex with her which doesn’t imply non-consent, whereas some other translations say that the man “grab her” or “take her” which implies that there is no consent. So if a man “find” a betrothed woman in the city and has sex with her, they are both to be killed. The way I read this verse from the KJV, the concept of consent isn’t an issue. TB says that the cities were densely populated so that if someone was screaming, it would be heard, so the woman would be killed along with the man in the city because the logic was that if it was not consensual, she would have “cried” out and someone would have heard her and even if they didn’t stop to help her, they could at least testify later that they did hear her cry out and so it was not consensual. I think the implication is that if a woman did cry out, only the man would be killed.

If a betrothed woman was in a field, the caveat here is that it says “the man force her, and lie with her,” and that word “force” isn’t in the other verse. But if a man has sex with the woman in a field, only the man would be killed because there would have been no one there to hear her cry out, even if she had tried to, so the implication here is that it’s rape no matter what because there’s no way to prove otherwise. Now if a man finds a “virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found,” then that man has to give the girl’s father 50 shekels of silver, and has to marry her and can never divorce her no matter what she does. This obviously isn’t ideal because if it wasn’t consensual then suddenly a woman has to marry her rapist, which sucks, but at that time, even if it wasn’t consensual, she would have very limited prospects on men willing to marry her after that, so that man who did that now has to take responsibility for her for the rest of her life.

TB indicates that this verse isn’t about a man raping a woman but instead about a man and a woman who are both not married or betrothed, having consensual sex with each other. He says, “the best way to compare this to modern times is that an unattached teenage girl, living at home, has a date with a guy and they decide to have sexual relations… The end result is that they MUST marry. Why? Because by god’s rules such a willing union by a man and a woman indicates marriage; a girl has decided she wants to have the authority over her transferred from her father to a husband The Lord says that a man who has sexual union with a woman who is NOT committed to another man HAS engaged in marriage and NOW he is responsible for her.” This is a prohibition against men just having sex with whosever they want, they are responsible for a woman for the rest of her life if he chooses to engage in sexual immorality with her. It’s like the saying I heard about polygamy, “when a man has a wife and a lot of girlfriends, he is celebrated by society, the minute he wants to make legal commitments to them, he’s a felon.”

Just the fact that Moses here is considering things like consent and making sure that the women are taken care of if is pretty progressive and I thought that commands like “don’t rape” would be better, they do have that commandment, “thou shalt not commit adultery” so these are just ways Moses was expanding on the loopholes that he knew the people were going to immediately start spinning. These are very progressive policies and demonstrates once again that Jesus Christ is the champion of women.

The last verse is very weird, saying, “A man shall not take his father’s wife, not discover his father’s skirt.” The IM explains this saying, “Discovering one’s skirt is a Hebrew euphemism similar to uncovering one’s nakedness and means to have sexual relations. Thus, this prohibition probably referred to a stepmother. In some cases an older man would marry a much younger woman after the death of his first wife. Then when he died an older son who was close to the age of this stepmother would be tempted to marry her. The law prohibited this eventuality, as it did other cases of incest.”