Welcome
once more to my Bible blog! We find ourselves today deep in the midst of
Deuteronomy, where Moses is spilling out an interminable speech on the laws the
Hebrews are supposed to hold when they come to the promised land. In the last
post there were some real doozies, and I don’t think today’s installment is
going to disappoint on that front either. So let’s jump in, shall we?
So, how
does one follow up a legal requirement to stone disobedient children to death?
Well, Moses does it with an instruction that, if you put a man to death for a
crime and hang him from a tree, you shouldn’t leave him hanging there into the
next day. He should be taken down and buried in the same day, because “a hanged
man is cursed by God,” and they shouldn’t defile their land by leaving hanged
corpses dangling around.
Then we
get a random collection of seemingly unrelated laws that include: requirement
to return your neighbors lost possessions and livestock if you happen to find
them, declaration that cross-dressing (by man or woman) is an abomination to
God, a requirement that if you come across a bird tending its young or eggs in
a nest you can take the eggs/young but must leave the mother, a requirement to
put parapets around the roof of your house so people can’t fall off,
prohibitions on sowing your fields with more than one type of seed, using an ox
and a donkey together to pull the same plow, or wearing cloth of linen and wool
mixed together, and a requirement to hang tassels on the corners of your
garments.
From
there, Moses moves on to some laws about sex, so you just know there’s some
controversy to be mined here. And it starts off immediately with laws about the
virginity of brides.
If a man
marries a woman, and on their wedding night decides that he doesn’t think she’s
really a virgin and accuses her of such, her parents are supposed to provide
proof that she was. Apparently (although the Bible dances around the subject
and doesn’t really explain clearly) this proof is supposed to consist of
showing that the bedsheets have blood on them from her losing her virginity to
her husband. If they can provide the proof, then the husband must be whipped
and pay a fine of 100 shekels of silver. You know who he pays the fine to? The
father of the girl he falsely accused. Oh, and he has to keep the girl as his
wife and never divorce her.
If the
parents can’t provide proof of their daughter’s virginity (and new flash: not
every woman bleeds the first time she has sex), you know what happens to the
girl? She gets stoned to death.
Yeah,
remember that law earlier about how the accusation of a single witness can’t be
enough to convict someone, and that other law that false witnesses are supposed
to receive the punishment that the falsely accused person would have received?
Apparently those laws don’t apply when it’s a man accusing a woman. But leaving
aside the bullshit hypocrisy just within the structure of their own laws, let’s
think a moment about what this really means.
If the
man is in the wrong, he just committed a crime (bearing false witness) that
could get a woman killed. He gets whipped, the victim’s father gets rewarded
with silver, and the victim herself is punished by being forced to remain
married to the man who tried to kill her. On the other hand, if the woman was
in the wrong, she has committed a “crime” that harms no one in any demonstrable
way, and she gets killed for it. There is no justice here.
But
that’s not the end of it. Let’s move on and see what other gems of compassion
and wisdom God’s prophet had to lay down regarding sex and immorality.
If a man
has sex with a married woman, both are to be put to death.
If a man
rapes a betrothed woman in the city, and she doesn’t scream loudly enough to
bring help, they will both be stoned to death. Because I just guess they assume
that if nobody heard her scream she must have been willing, and therefore
committing adultery, and of course no rapist has ever used force and/or threats
to keep his victim silent.
But if a
man rapes a betrothed woman in the countryside, then it’s assumed that she
cried for help and nobody was there to hear, so only the man will be put to
death. Although this raises the question: if no one was there to hear her cry
for help, who was able to witness the crime? After all, by law the woman’s word
alone (as only a single witness) can’t be good enough to convict the rapist.
And
finally, if a man rapes a woman who isn’t married or betrothed, then he has to
pay her father fifty shekels of silver, marry her, and never divorce her.
Because nothing makes up for victimizing a woman in the most intimate way
possible like legally victimizing her for the rest of her life.
But
then, it’s pretty clear that in the eyes of Moses and his God, if you rape an
unmarried girl, the real victim was her father because of the economic loss in
reducing her value to be sold as a bride.
And
aside from the highly questionable assertion that it’s even remotely just to
put people to death for having sex, think about the implications. Got fifty
shekels to spare and a hankerin’ for a girl who won’t give you the time of day?
Just rape her, and she’s yours for life! These laws are fucking sick.
Oh, and
to end this bit on sexual horrors, we get a low-key prohibition on sleeping
with your father’s wife without specifying a penalty.
The next
bit is about those “excluded from the assembly of Yahweh.” It’s not really
explained precisely what that means, and I haven’t turned up a lot online that
seems to really agree about it either (not that I searched all that hard – if
the Bible can’t be clear enough to stand on its own, I see little reason to
care what anyone else has to say about what it means either). But I’m sure it
meant some kind of second-class status for these people. And the excluded
people are: eunuchs, anyone born from a forbidden union and any of their
descendants (like… all the Israelites, who I remind you are all descended from
the son Abraham fathered on his own sister), Ammonites and Moabites (these last
two, the Israelites are actually forbidden to make peace with or give aid to
forever). Edomites and Egyptians are allowed to enter into the assembly after
three generations (three generations of what, I don’t know… intermarriage with
Israelites, and/or worshipping Yahweh perhaps?).
The bits
about descendants of forbidden unions, as well as Ammonites and Moabites, both
include “unto the tenth generation” as a qualifier, but then one tacks on a
“forever,” as well, so I’m not certain whether that means the condition follows
for literally ten generations, or whether the phrase “unto the tenth
generation” is supposed to be a euphemism for a status that follows all
descendant generations for all time. Regardless, it’s still just an example of
penalizing people for stuff that other people did, which is kinda bullshit.
Next on
the legal agenda are some rules of warfare, in which the Israelites are
instructed to “keep themselves from any evil thing” when encamped for war. Note
that “any evil thing” does not include genocidal wars of aggression, but rather
nocturnal emissions and failure to bury your feces outside the camp. Apparently
this is done because the war camp is supposed to be a holy place where God
walks among them, so they don’t want him to see anything indecent and turn away
from them in the face of their enemies. I imagine God’s “turning away” bears a
striking resemblance to dysentery, which is the usual result of leaving piles
of open sewage inside your camp.
Following
the Bible’s usual organizing principle of “whatever floated through the
author’s mind at the time,” we then move onto another random collection of
seemingly unrelated pronouncements. So there’s a prohibition against returning
escaped slaves to their masters (it’s kind of unclear whether they just mean
slaves who have escaped foreign masters and fled to Jewish lands, or if this is
just a general prohibition against returning any escaped slave to any master
even among Jews), followed by a prohibition against Jewish men or women
becoming cult prostitutes or using any prostitute’s wages to make payments to
God’s temple, then a restriction against charging interest on loans to other
Jews (while explicitly allowing interest to be charged to foreigners). Then we
get an instruction to fulfill any vows to God quickly because failing to
fulfill them is a sin, whereas simply never making any vows is not. And then
there’s permission to eat as much food as you like from your neighbor’s fields,
so long as you don’t try to carry any extra away (yeah, because there’s no way that law could bite anyone in the ass).
Anyway,
I could go on with more of the random brilliance that characterizes God's law, but this post is getting long and random pronouncements get to be
boring as all get-out. So we’ll call this a stopping point, and I’ll leave you
to get on about your day while I figure out how to approach the next post.
Hope all
is, and continues to be, well with you!