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Reload this Page Does the bible condone rape?
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Old 03-05-2007, 09:33 AM   #11
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Originally Posted by spin View Post
Rape, as we know the idea, didn't exist at the time the text was written in the culture. Just think that women not so long ago were the possessions of their family (ie their father) until they got married when they functionally became the property of the husband. (Goods and) chattel. The plot mechanism of Wuthering Heights, circa 1850, was based on iniquitous inheritance and marriage laws. Women died at the end on the 19th c. in efforts to gain women the right to vote.

In Deut 22:21 a young woman whose "virginity" was not "intact" could be stoned.

The verse cited in the OP 22:28 is a parallel with a prior verse 22:25, in which a promised virgin was forced. The major difference between these two verses is that the woman in 22:28 is not promised. The act of the male should be seen to be the same, just the circumstance of the virgin being promised is different.

Rape was an attack on the family and the value of the daughter. You destroyed the value of the daughter through rape.

Obviously these verses are dealing with rape, but with an extremely different view of society behind it.

One should not retroject modern ideas onto such a statement in an ancient text. If someone is foolish enough to think that the morality of that book is appropriate to today's society, they are probably not interested in any criticism you might have to say about it.


spin
Gee, and I thought I was the poststructuralist here.

I think women in the Iron Age middle east knew what rape was. Now, the men who wrote about it may have used the discourse of property to describe it, because it suited their purposes, but to claim that that discourse represented the consciousness of the victims is pure nonsense.

As Foucault warned "Discourse is not life; its time is not your time." You should heed that epistomological warning, spin.

But getting back to the topic, just because something happens in the pastiche of narratives in the Hebrew scriptures, even when described as something God orders, doesn't mean its "condoned" in the meaning of the story. God as protagonist commands a lot of actions which we are to take as something that is exactly not being condoned. The meaning of these narratives doesn't lie in the elements, but how the elements are used.
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Old 03-05-2007, 09:55 AM   #12
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Gee, and I thought I was the poststructuralist here.
Tee-hee-hee.

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Originally Posted by Gamera
I think women in the Iron Age middle east knew what rape was.
I'm sure you're right.

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Originally Posted by Gamera
Now, the men who wrote about it may have used the discourse of property to describe it, because it suited their purposes, but to claim that that discourse represented the consciousness of the victims is pure nonsense.
I don't see the relevance of this stuff. I talked about the relations between people as described in texts.

If you think that the "discourse of property" in this context doesn't provide us with strong sociological implications about the position of women in the society and more especially within the family, you might like to say what it does imply.

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Originally Posted by Gamera
just because something happens in the pastiche of narratives in the Hebrew scriptures, even when described as something God orders, doesn't mean its "condoned" in the meaning of the story.
You could be right.

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Originally Posted by Gamera
God as protagonist commands a lot of actions which we are to take as something is exactly is not being condoned.
I couldn't parse this, so perhaps you could help me.

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Originally Posted by Gamera
The meaning of these narratives doesn't lie in the elements, but how the elements are used.
I talked not about the meanings of the narratives, but about what one could understand of the "sociology" active in the society as seen in the texts and other such texts. If you have a complaint about deriving sociological indications from these texts, what is it exactly?


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Old 03-05-2007, 10:48 AM   #13
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But getting back to the topic, just because something happens in the pastiche of narratives in the Hebrew scriptures, even when described as something God orders, doesn't mean its "condoned" in the meaning of the story.
This is a good point, and I semi-regret using the word "condone" in the thread title. I guess I was looking for an attention getter.

I think this section of Deut. makes it pretty clear that "God" doesn't condone rape. The punishment for rape or pre/extramarital sex was fairly severe (stoning to death in most cases). My objection to the apologists interpretation of verse 28 is when they read "taphas" as implying in any way a consensual relationship.

They trot out other instances of the word from other books (there was one from the book of Kings that uses taphas when referring to holding a harp) that support their position. Even if a pair of six-inch thick rose colored apologist glasses allow for this interpretation, the virgin would still have to die according to verse 23.
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Old 03-05-2007, 03:44 PM   #14
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I have one other question, if anybody is still out there...

In Deut 22:17, it says that if a married man questions the virginity of his new bride, the brides father must protect her honor and respond by saying...

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17and behold, he has accused her of misconduct, saying, "I did not find in your daughter evidence of virginity." And yet this is the evidence of my daughter's virginity.' And they shall spread the cloak before the elders of the city.
What "cloak" are they referring to? Some translations call it a cloth, others a garment. Could this be some kind of menstrual cloth?
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Old 03-05-2007, 03:49 PM   #15
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It's one of those old traditions. On the wedding night, the bride proved her virginity by the fact that there was blood where her hymen broke. She saved the bloody sheets as evidence. (Of course, it was easy to fake, if necessary . . .)
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Old 03-05-2007, 03:55 PM   #16
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I have one other question, if anybody is still out there...

In Deut 22:17, it says that if a married man questions the virginity of his new bride, the brides father must protect her honor and respond by saying...



What "cloak" are they referring to? Some translations call it a cloth, others a garment. Could this be some kind of menstrual cloth?
Here is the annotation from The Jewish Study Bible, page 417:

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The cloth upon which husband and wife slept upon consummation of the relationship. The is scant medical support for the underlying assumptions: that intercourse would cause the first perforation of the hymen and that such perforation would cause bleeding upon the bedding, which is held up in public display as legal evidence.
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Old 03-05-2007, 04:22 PM   #17
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Thank you! I'd make damn sure my daughters had a bit of goats blood handy to throw down on the sheets just in case. "First, fake the orgasm. Then fake the blood. Got it? Good!"
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Old 03-05-2007, 04:39 PM   #18
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Emily Davison threw herself under the King's horse at the Derby
...at least thats the story they gave the authorities.

She may have been given a little push.


< overly graphic language removed>
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Old 03-05-2007, 06:09 PM   #19
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This is a good point, and I semi-regret using the word "condone" in the thread title. I guess I was looking for an attention getter.

I think this section of Deut. makes it pretty clear that "God" doesn't condone rape. The punishment for rape or pre/extramarital sex was fairly severe (stoning to death in most cases). My objection to the apologists interpretation of verse 28 is when they read "taphas" as implying in any way a consensual relationship.

They trot out other instances of the word from other books (there was one from the book of Kings that uses taphas when referring to holding a harp) that support their position. Even if a pair of six-inch thick rose colored apologist glasses allow for this interpretation, the virgin would still have to die according to verse 23.
This is because literalists make the same mistake I suggested you might be making (though you've corrected me on your purpose). They look at the text as proclamation from God and retroject their moral systems back onto the text. Where there is a contradiction, they reinterprete the text to align it with their moral system. Ironically, their moral system arose in great part out of the very text they are reinterpretating, but only because the Judeo-Christian tradition was in fact not literalists and had some understanding that the Hebrew scriptures are a narrative, who meaning is derived from the narrative, not from any particular element in the narrative.

In short, instead of trying to interprete away verse 28, the real issue is what role it plays in the larger narrative of God as lawgiver to these wayfaring Hebrews. I don't know the answer to that, but I think it's the right question.
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Old 03-05-2007, 06:20 PM   #20
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I don't see the relevance of this stuff. I talked about the relations between people as described in texts.

If you think that the "discourse of property" in this context doesn't provide us with strong sociological implications about the position of women in the society and more especially within the family, you might like to say what it does imply.
I think it implies that certain power relationships existed between men and women at the time, giving men (or men of a certain class in certain institutions) power over the discourse to "explain" the experiences of women. But we need not take those explanations seriously. Indeed, we should discount them as totally self-serving.

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I couldn't parse this, so perhaps you could help me.
Sure, narratives have elements. The meaning doesn't lie in the elements, but their relationship to each other. God's proclaming the law (even particularly odious laws) is an element. It doesn't have meaning by itself. It only has meaning in the narrative. So just because God orders, for instance, all the Philistines butchered, including men, women and children, it doesn't mean that the story's purpose is to valorize the butchering of the Philistines. You have to place that element of the story in the narrative and ask what the story means.

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I talked not about the meanings of the narratives, but about what one could understand of the "sociology" active in the society as seen in the texts and other such texts. If you have a complaint about deriving sociological indications from these texts, what is it exactly?
My complaint is simple: sociological discourse is just another narrative about the past. In this case you've used one narrative to "explain" another narrative. Essentially, you've told a little story about the narrative to fit it into our worldview, where things like sociology makes sense.

This is old stuff: the human sciences were deconstructed by Foucault and Ricouer 30 years ago.
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