ONE OF THE STRANGEST laws in the Bible, as far as I’m concerned, is this one about what should happen to a man who rapes a Jewish virgin.
“The man who raped her has to give her father fifty pieces of silver. He has to marry her because he took advantage of her. And he can never divorce her” (Deuteronomy 22:29).
Go ahead. Explain that one.
In the book of 250 Bible oddities that I wrote, Strange and Mysterious Stuff From the Bible, I led with that one.
I’ll not reprint the answer here. You can read it on the flip book I posted on my website: Flipbook.
The law is so troubling that I decided to create a short video on the topic. I just released it on Friday. It’s called Marriage by Rape.
I’ll embed it into this article for you. It runs less than five minutes.
Marrying your rapist? It is dangerous to try to analyze too much anything out of the context of its time and, unless you lived in that time, is impossible to do so. I think the issue, from our standpoint of understanding, was the woman. Would she have a lousy life, or an even lousier life? Also, the social castigation the man would face forever after is not mentioned.
Thanks, Tom. I’ll bet we’ve got plenty of laws that wouldn’t make sense to them. Come to think of it, we’ve got plenty of laws that don’t make sense to us.