Take My Wife... Please!

It’s no benefit to us if we kill our brother. Let’s sell him. So Judah’s already not looking good from a modern sensibilities point of view. But he’s a dick is what he—to put it bluntly, yes, that is what Judah is. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Good. Things are good. We… we’re…

We’re…

We’re… we’re delving deep into some… I don’t know, some stuff that some people might find disturbing this week.

Yeah, it’s…

It’s… it’s not easy stuff. And all of it is… well, let’s just say that if you have feminine or feminist sensibilities like I do, which you should, you’re…

You’re…

You’re not going to like a lot of things you hear today.

Yeah. Yeah. As… as you’re… you’re probably used to hearing on the… the podcast, we’re going to get weird today. It’s… it’s… it’s a little problematic.

The first… the first half will be a little less problematic than the last. The last one, we’re just going to give you a trigger warning right now. If you’re… if you… if you’re triggered by mentions of sexual assault or whatever, please feel free to skip the last half, but do listen to the first half, even though it will still piss you off.

Precisely.

Yeah. So should we dive into this?

I don’t think we have any other choice.

We must do it. It is our job. After all, we’re… we’re starting off in Genesis, chapter 38. And what’s weird about chapter 38 in Genesis is that chapter 37 starts off the Joseph being sold into slavery story. It’s the whole Joseph story, then chapter 38—nothing about that at all. It’s about his brother. And then chapter 39, back to Joseph. So it’s like this weird, like, sort of interruption of the narrative, kind of.

Kind of an A-B kind of sitcom thing. Right, right. Like this…

This is the Kramer plot.

Yeah, you gotta… you gotta think about He-Man, where they went and shot over to the other… the other scene. And we’re dealing with Judah and Tamar now.

This is… this is Judah, for whom the kingdom of Judah is eventually named. Is that right?

That would be accurate.

So. Pretty fancy dude.

Yeah, he’s… he’s big time. And we’ve got Israel is… is Jacob, who is, right, Judah’s father. And that’s the northern kingdom of Israel. And then Judah is the southern kingdom of Judah, Judah being one of the twelve sons of Israel. And Judah was kind of doing some silly stuff in the previous chapter, 37, comes up with this idea, “Hey, you know, it’s no benefit to us if we kill our brother. Let’s sell him into slavery.” And so Judah’s already not looking good from a modern sensibilities point of view. But he’s a dick, to put it bluntly. Yes, that is what Judah is. But in chapter 38, we’re going to see a little bit about his family and we’re going to bring into view a principle called levirate marriage, which we’re going to talk a little bit more about once we get into it. But to… to start, Judah went down with his brothers and settled near a certain Adullamite whose name was Hirah.

And so we’re in Canaan. Judah marries Shua and they have a son named Er, and… and then they have another son named Onan, and then they have another son named Shelah.

Now, a lot of people who talk about chapter 38 focus in on the Onan part of the story.

Yes, you… you may have heard of Onan before. You probably haven’t heard of Er, much less Shelah. But… so Judah picks out a wife. And in this time period, the… your marriages were closely related to what we think of as… as arranged marriages, where a father was like, “I like the cut of her jib. I’m going to go talk to her father and I’m going to secure a contract so that either right now or when they come of age, my son will marry this guy’s daughter.” And so he pays a bride price. The father of the young woman profits from letting his daughter go. And that’s… that’s usually the betrothal. So that’s when they’re engaged. And that engagement period could be pretty long. But they were contractually married, basically. They just had to consummate the marriage and then actually go off and… and become part of their own household.

But we got a problem. Rather tersely, verse 7 just says, but Er was wicked in the sight of the Lord. And so Adonai, you know, killed him.

Yeah, he got offed. Which is, which is rough, like. Yeah, this happens more than once in this chapter where God just like zaps somebody. It’s it. Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, this, this is something that, you know when, when you’re talking about body count in the Hebrew Bible, people will be like, oh, Satan had, you know, only killed eight people. God killed millions. And, you know, this is one.

And there’s going to be another before the chapter ends. Spoiler alert. But we’ve this, at this point, we have to talk about something called levirate marriage because Judah has brought this, this woman into his household. Now, Er and Tamar would have had to have gone off and formed their own household. But above that, hierarchically speaking, in terms of the family, was Judah’s household. And so Tamar kind of reverts to Judah’s household. She does not have a child yet. And each male in the line, particularly the oldest, who stood to inherit the lion’s share of the father’s inheritance, wanted a child to carry on their line, carry on their share in the inheritance, carry on their name, all of that stuff. And if they didn’t get that, then you have an arrangement called levirate marriage. And this is discussed in Deuteronomy 25 , verses 5 through 10.

And basically the commandment is this. If a man marries a wife and then he dies before he’s able to impregnate his wife, then the close, the next of kin, usually the brother, but it could be somebody else in the, in the family. The next of kin who is a male has a responsibility to either marry her or get someone else to, to marry her. And then whatever children come from that relationship are raised in the name of the deceased person. And then.

Which is a little weird. Like, that’s. I, I. Yeah, it’s like. But it’s just a, you know, it’s just words, right? It’s just in the name of this person. I don’t know, it, it seems like a weird thing to get too, like, hung up on. Hung up on.

Well, the thing is they also inherit everything that the older sibling who is dead stood to inherit. And so it is legally, financially, in every way, it is considered the offspring of the deceased. And so there. And it. This is something that we see in, in a variety of different places in the ancient world and even in some societies still today. And levirate doesn’t have anything to do with the tribe of Levi. It comes from a Latin word, levir, which means brother-in-law. So.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. So this, this is not unique to the Bible. And the idea… well, one of the ideas is that it provides for the widow, she’s now under the, you know, auspices, the protection, the roof of a pater familias, a male who runs a household. And then her, she is going to have offspring and they’re going to be raised in. In the name of. Of the deceased. And you know, depending on exactly how it’s expected to work, it’s kind of a raw deal for the. The person who might marry this woman because the. Some of their money is going to go to this child who’s not going to be raised in. In their name. And you know, this might. The. The inheritance from the living brother’s parents’ father might skip over them to go to the son.

Let’s use the names of this story as our example because I think it’s getting a little bit hard to follow. My bad. We’re. We’re talking. It might just be that I’m having trouble, right? Everyone else is fine, but. So Er has died.

Er has died. Onan is the next in line. And Judah’s. And Judah’s like, look, you got to go marry your. Er’s widow. He’s like, but dad, he goes, shut up and do it. And so Onan goes in and marries Tamar. And then we get this peculiar story which has been interpreted a variety of different ways, where it says, this is NRSVUE. But since Onan knew that the offspring would not be his because it. In. In name, legally, financially, in every way, it is Er’s child, right? He spilled his semen on the ground whenever he went into his brother’s wife so that he would not give offspring to his brother. So he’s gonna. He’s gonna take advantage of this opportunity to, you know, the extent he can without actually causing problems for himself financially. And he commits coitus interruptus. And it seems to be.

Let me see if. If it’s an iterative verb. It is. I think it’s just a Piel.

I don’t know what that means.

Nothing. Don’t worry about it. Just says he—he spilled his seed onto the ground when he went in. And in English that could mean whenever he went in, all the times he went in. But in Hebrew it’s not exactly. It seems to be just—just one time. And then the next verse says what he did was displeasing in the sight of the Lord who’s watching, obviously. And he put him to death also. So Er was just wicked. Onan was like, “I’m not impregnating my—my new wife.”

So his—his objection is, if—if Tamar has my child, then that’s Er’s child legally. And that child then inherits Er’s inheritance and my—and if I don’t impregnate her, then I could have another wife, and that would be my child, and my child would get everything.

That’s the situation that would seem to be the most, like, detrimental to Onan. That is a possibility in this circumstance. The text is not precisely clear. The text just says, since Onan knew that the offspring would not be his. So he could be like—and there have been a lot of speculations about what exactly is going on here. Onan might be like, “Ooh, brother, ooh, I don’t want to raise a child with my deceased brother’s wife, widow. Ew.” Or it could be, you know, “This child is not going to be my child. It is some—you know, it’s my deceased brother’s child. It’s not in my name. I—I’m not going to care for this child. I don’t want this child.” It is most likely, in my opinion, there’s some kind of financial thing going on here that it has something to do with inheritance and stuff like that. But these are all just probabilities, speculations. Yeah. We don’t know for sure. And because levirate marriage operated differently from society to society, and from time to time, you know, within this culture, it could have operated differently from

from town to town. We can’t really say for sure, but

so no matter—no matter what, Onan made a bad decision.

Onan made a bad decision in the moment. You know, he was—he was not thinking, and he did—well.

He was thinking. He had—he definitely had thoughts. He was—he had purpose and thought.

But he didn’t realize that the big—the big guy was watching.

Yeah. He did not consider the implications. And he’s

he’s gone.

Yeah. So he got—he got the final zap from the All-Father. And then we have another problem. The problem then reverts back to Judah,

right,

who’s like, “Damn it.”

So it’s okay because he’s got another one.

He’s got another son. However, as the story says, Judah says to Tamar, “Hey, stay in your father’s house until my son Shelah grows up.” And according to the text, Judah was just stalling. Judah was like, “Every—every child of mine this woman touches, we find him dead with a hole in his chest, kind of Predator style.”

She’s saying God done it.

It’s not me. And so Tamar went to live in her father’s house. So basically, Tamar is like, “Okay, I’m not a part of Judah’s household anymore. I’m going back to live with my family,” which is—is not going to be a great prospect. She’s got no prospects because now that she has been with two other men, she’s been married to two other men, she’s tainted goods in the eyes of decent Israelite society according to the—the standards and practices of that time period.

So it seems like her best bet is the youngest son. Yeah, Shelah.

Right. And Judah—Judah’s like, “Let’s—let’s let the—let’s let the corpse quit sizzling before we give you my youngest son.”

Right.

And then in—and then Judah’s wife dies. And when Judah’s time of mourning is over, he goes—he basically heads off to work. He went up to Timnah to his sheep shearers, he and his friend Hirah the Adullamite. And—and Tamar gets wind of this. I, you know, there’s—there’s got to be a pretty robust gossip network going on here. But so she throws off her widow’s garments, and it says she put on a veil, wrapped herself up, and sat down at the entrance to Enaim, which is on the road to Timnah. And so the veil—and—and we’re going to see something a little peculiar here. And Timnah, if I’m pretty sure, is—it is a—there’s a little valley that goes down to the Shephelah toward the sea. And so Beth-shemesh is a little up the valley, uphill a little bit. Timnah’s—there’s stories from the Judges, Samson associated with

with Timnah. But she basically dresses up as some manner of sex worker.

Right.

The. The. It says she put on a veil, wrapped herself up. And then in 38:15 says when Judah saw her, he thought her to be a prostitute, for she had covered her face. Now, face coverings were not unusual. It was not like that’s the uniform of a sex worker, as far as we can tell. But maybe something having to do with maybe the thickness of the veil, the fabric of the veil, the color of the veil, the.

Maybe it just said prostitute across the front of it.

Yeah, it could have. Who knows what was on it. Something keyed Judah to this. And, and this is something that I bring up in the chapter of the book that I have coming out soon on a chapter about whether women were told to cover up in the Bible, because a lot of people will point to passages that talk about, oh, someone was dressed as a prostitute. And when today, when, you know, you hear a father saying, don’t go out like that, you’re dressed like a prostitute, the idea is you’re dressed in revealing clothing.

Right.

As far as we can tell from this and from a couple of passages in Proverbs, it sounds like, don’t go out like that. You’re dressed like a prostitute. Means you’re wearing a specific kind of veil or you’re wearing specific jewelry.

You’re… something covered up.

Yeah, you’ve got more. Take some of those layers off, young lady.

You look like a. Yes, indeed.

So great editing on the fly there.

Thank you.

Yeah, my brain was going to places that we don’t. We. This is a. This is a family show.

Not really, because the subject matter sure ain’t.

But so she sits down, and she’s gonna. She’s gonna intercept Judah. And she sees that Shelah. She sees Shelah with Judah going off to the sheep shearers. And he’s grown up.

He’s plenty old.

And she’s like, huh, he hasn’t given him to me yet. So it sounds like this is just not in the cards. And says when Judah saw her, he thought her to be a prostitute. She’d covered her face. He went over to her at the roadside and said, come, let me come into you. And this means precisely what it sounds like. This is a euphemism, but a pretty descriptive euphemism. Right. And she’s like, so we got to talk price first.

And he’s like, ooh, I left my wallet back at the sheep shearers. How about. And he’s. He’s basically giving her collateral. This is not payment. This is collateral. Says, I will send you a kid from the flock. So that’s the payment. And she says, only if you give me a pledge until you send it. And he says, what collateral do you want? She says, your signet. So a. Like a seal, a ring that marks something with his identity. And your cord and the staff that is in your hand. So pretty steep collateral, if you ask me.

Is a cord basically a belt? Is that what we’re talking about here?

Let me look at the Hebrew here. What we’ve got. Patil. This is not a very common word. Something that’s tied on. Fine fiber. Yeah. This could be any one of a number of different things. So, yeah, give me some kind of ring.

I’ll take. I’ll take your stick and that. That piece of string, whatever that’s doing.

Give me your Jordans. I like the. The look of that belt.

So, yeah, this. This is basically. Judah is like, you know, it’s been a long day. Oh, look, a sex worker. I could use some relief. And he provides this collateral. So he’s like, sure, sure, sure, take it, take it. And she conceives, right, because of his patronization. And she got up and went away. And when she got home, took off the. The sex worker garments and put back on the widow garments. And then when Judah was like, okay, hey, I visited this sex worker, I told her I would give her one of our goats. So I’m gonna take that goat right there. And he goes back and he can’t find her. And he asks the town, well, he.

Sends his buddy back.

Oh yeah, by his friend the Adullamite. He. He asked the townspeople, where’s the prostitute who was at Enaim by the wayside? But they said, ain’t no prostitute here.

Yeah, we’ve never had a prostitute. Are you kidding me?

Have you ever seen Amazon Women on the Moon?

Oh, maybe there’s.

There’s a great skit with Arsenio Hall where he gets home from work in his apartment and the phone rings and he’s like, hello? He’s like, oh no, there’s nobody by Sheila here. And then. And. And he’s having just like a progressively worse day that ends up with him falling out of his window and dying. But the phone rings in the middle of all of this calamity. And every time he’s like, ain’t no Sheila here, man. So, yeah, no, no kedeshah has been here. So he was like, huh? And goes back to Judah, says, I can’t find her. I guess you get to keep the kid.

Ring and stuff. So.

Yeah. And verse 23 says, Let her keep the things as her own, otherwise we will be laughed at. You see, I sent this kid and you could not find her. He’s like, I don’t want to make a big deal out of this.

Okay, let her have it.

He’s like, don’t want to post on Facebook, “Hey, I patronized this sex worker the other day.”

He’s on Nextdoor.com. “Does anyone know where the woman with the veil is? I owe her a goat.”

Yeah. And then three months later, Judah is told, “Hey, man, your daughter-in-law, Tamar, has prostituted herself. Moreover, she is pregnant as a result of prostitution.” And Judah immediately is like, “Bring her out, let her be burned.”

Yeah, which. Which is rough.

Like, considering the fact that even if he, you know, doesn’t know who she is, which he doesn’t, like, you participated in one half of just such an arrangement. Why. Why are you getting all burny about everything?

So it’s. Yeah, there’s some, some pretty rank hypocrisy here when. When he is basically treating this like a stop off at the bar to have a beer before going home, but. And then he’s like, “What? You’ve been selling beer? We’re gonna. We’re gonna have to execute you.”

It does feel like. Let me ask you this. In. In the world of the Levirate marriage, since that’s sort of part of what we’ve been talking about, would that the. Had she, you know, if it weren’t his child, if it was just. She had just prostituted herself and. And conceived, would that child then be considered Er’s child?

No. Okay.

Yeah. So Levirate marriage is not just first come, first served. It is. It is supposed to be within the. The kinship line. So this is actually what we have with the story of Ruth and Boaz. I don’t. Have we ever talked about Ruth?

No. We need to do a Ruth.

Yeah, we need to do a Ruth. Yeah. So anyway, Boaz is not the closest of kin to Ruth’s deceased husband. And we have the scene where he goes to the closest of kin, and he’s like. And the closest of kin goes. And so then they’ve got to have this ritual where he takes off his sandal and gives it to him. But. But because Boaz is in the kinship line, that’s what makes him eligible.

To actually fulfill the Levirate marriage, because otherwise it’s just another marriage.

And I guess that. I mean, you know, that comports with the sort of the theme that we have oft talked about on this, which is that the woman. The. The woman is kind of meaningless in this, other than just sort of as a vessel and a piece of property like her. Her contribution is not anything.

So it’s about. It’s about the. The line. The masculine line. The men in this fam. Familial sort of line.

Yeah. Her personhood is basically established upon her ability to facilitate the procreation of her husband.

Right.

And. And so, yeah, the. Her agency and her will is virtually null. But as this story shows, her agency and her will is active. It may not be very respected, but she’s going to. She’s actually going to exploit this rather patriarchal system of expectations and rules and everything to protect herself. And. And she’s going to be recognized as the more righteous one for that. So. So basically, they. They bring her in, say, “Hey, we got to burn you.” And they bring her before Judah, and she says, “Hey, check these things out. It was the owner of these things who impregnated me.” And. And here’s what the. The NRSVUE at the end of verse 25 says. And she said, “Take note, please, whose these are, the signet and the cord and the staff.”

Do note, if you would.

Yeah. Point of order. Point of order.

Yeah. Point of order. Point of order. It’s. It. Yeah, it does take a lot of self containment to be facing burning death and go. Could you please take note of the following.

And. And what is the. Okay, so recognize. So it’s. It’s the imperative of. With the na on the end, which is kind of a please. Thank you thing. Haker na. Which is please recognize to whom these things belong.

Your honor, I present art. I present exhibit A.

May I approach? And Judah acknowledged them or recognized them, the same verb that. That Tamar says. And says she is more right than I since I did not give her to my son Shelah and he did not lie with her. Again, odd note at the end of the verse saying Judah decided not to.

To give her.

Know her again. But yeah, but yeah, Judah immediately recognizes. And you know, this. This is a literary creation. You know, they’re telling this. This story the way that the story needs to go to advance the narrative. But if we imagined it was real. I can just see Judah, like, getting his matches out and being like, what are you doing with my signet ring and my. Oh, crap. Oh. Oh.

He looks over at his buddy and I get away. No, I can’t get away with this.

Well, I guess we found her. Yeah. And.

But I owe you a goat.

That’s how the scene. If this were a. A sitcom and we were about to do the Fresh Prince of Egypt theme, that’s how the scene would have ended. So you still need that goat, huh? And so he. He immediately realizes why she has done what she has done. She is trying to secure offspring that are part of this kinship line. And she’s like, I will go. I don’t need the apples fall into the ground. I’m going to go straight to the tree.

Right?

And she. And you know, that’s valid, I guess.

And it does seem to be because everything works out fine. Like, yeah, in. In the story, as you say, she is hailed as the righteous one. He acknowledges his own problematic behavior in this.

However, none of. None of his sin, it seems to me, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, is about going to a prostitute. That is. That is never decried in this.

There is nothing in the story that suggests there’s anything wrong with that. There’s something wrong with a woman being a prostitute according to, you know, part of their family. No, no, no, no. Twice married and. And widowed daughter-in-law of mine is going to be engaged in sex work on, you know, under my roof, but even though she’s not under his roof anymore.

Right.

But yeah, the. And. And this raises a point that a lot of people don’t realize when they talk about adultery. Adultery. Like a man was not committing adultery if he was married and went and had sex with an unmarried woman. That’s not adultery in the Hebrew Bible, because he could be married to as many women as he wanted. And in that time period, there was. There were a variety of different ways to kind of stake a marriage claim, and one of them was to have sex with a woman. And.

Yeah, we’re gonna get to that in a little minute. Yeah, let’s. Let’s. Let’s wrap this business up and then we’ll. We’ll get into some. Some real nitty gritty on that front.

Right? So. So Judah’s like, ah, you got me. You got me. I didn’t. I didn’t give you my youngest so thought somehow, you know, it was So I Married an Axe Murderer scenario. I thought maybe you were Mrs. X. And we’re gonna take Shelah from me as well. And I. One can only imagine what her response must have been at that time. Relief, probably. That she was not going to be burned. Probably a little pride in sticking it to Judah.

Yeah, I mean, he. Okay, no more jokes that I just can’t do. All right. But here’s the question that I have just as a. I don’t even know if we know the ins and outs of. I mean, first of all, this is Genesis, which means that maybe the. The Deuteronomistic. Is that the word?

That is a word. The Deuteronomist would be whoever was responsible.

Whatever the laws are that govern all of this. Because, you know, the. The laws that you pointed out are in Deuteronomy. Whatever the laws are that govern this. I don’t know how this works, but my curiosity is, did Tamar, by the end of this, give birth to. Oh, and it’s twins. But did. Are the twins that she gave birth to Judah’s youngest sons or are they Er’s oldest sons?

So there’s not. There’s not a marriage there. Yeah, this. This, I think, is a. Is an interesting question because, I mean, the. The act. The. The act of copulation could be considered a.

In fact, I’m just gonna look it up right now. How do they.

I mean, the question makes sense, right? I like.

Oh, yeah, yeah, it makes sense.

So I mean, it. Because she could then be his wife, Judah’s wife, but if Onan’s kid was going to be then considered legally Er’s kid. Yeah. Who knows? I. Yeah, that’s, that’s.

So if we look in the genealogy in Matthew 1 , it actually lists Perez and Zarah as Judah’s children.

Okay, interesting.

Yeah. So again, it’s a situation where levirate marriage works different, differently in, in different circumstances, different societies. And so who knows exactly how it was understood? It could have changed because obviously the, the genealogy in Matthew is not like a perfect representation of the genealogies as they were understood 500 years earlier. They’re. They’re negotiating with it just like everyone else is.

Right.

But yeah, that is, that is an interesting question because according to the law of levirate marriage, you know, and that’s why. That’s why Onan didn’t want to do it, because it wouldn’t have been considered his child. It would have been considered his deceased brother’s child.

Yeah. So if, if it had. If they had been Shelah’s kids, then they would have been Er’s kids. But since they were dad’s kids, then their dad’s kids. And they don’t get the firstborn’s share, they get the lastborn’s share, probably.

Yeah, I get that is an interesting. That is an interesting consideration. Anyway, now again, this is all literary fiction, so.

Okay, fine. I’m just trying to explore the, The, The. The rules here.

Yeah, yeah. And this, you know, the. They’re more like guidelines than.

This is something that I, that I always point out when I’m teaching biblical Hebrew, by the way, going to be teaching biblical Hebrew starting August 5th. So anybody out there who wants to. To learn some of this? You know, the language isn’t built on a foundation of rules. Language just does what language is going to do, and then we turn around and look back at it and try to identify patterns. And then we say, these are the rules. When really it’s like these are the tendencies. Yeah. And all tendencies have rules, exceptions. So. But yeah, that’s. That’s the story of Judah and Er and Onan and Tamar and not Shelah.

Right.

So. And the story of levirate marriage, which, yeah, this is the, the, this and Ruth are the two stories where levirate marriage bubbles to the surface within the Hebrew Bible.

Would levirate marriage have covered kind of everybody? Would that be a standard like thing, or did it apply only in certain circumstances or only if invoked by the. By the widow or like was it. Or by. Or the widow, as if she had a choice in the matter by, by the family or whatever.

It’s. That’s another unknown. We see what’s in the text, and according to the text, it sounds like this is the law, this is what is expected. But we already know that Deuteronomy is a, is a pretty ambitious set of laws that probably wasn’t ever enforced. And so we, we probably had. Each tribe probably had its own way of, of making it work. And it, it’s also probably something that often flew under the radar. You know, you, you probably had situations where somebody died and the dad and the, the daughter in law were just like, let’s just.

Right.

Let’s not worry about this and, and that. And you know, nobody would have gotten upset. The, the curtain twitchers across the street might have tried to, to raise some complaints, but yeah, who knows?

Well, it almost seems like just reading the text, it almost seems like Judah is just making this decision like it could, he could have made a different decision, but instead he decided, you know what, Onan, go, get in there. We’re, we’re gonna, we’re gonna keep pursuing this.

Yeah. And this, and this is, this raises another observation that this period seems to be more about just the patriarchy running the show.

Right.

As the pater familias, as the supreme authority within that household, which included the, the sons, the daughters, the servants. The servants, sons and daughters, any, anybody who resided within there he reigned supreme. And so he probably could have done what he wanted. And there, you know, depending on how early we understand levirate marriage to have been operative among these tribes, maybe it wasn’t even a thing. Maybe if it was a thing, the elders were kind of like, hey, you got that option if you want. We don’t know for sure, but Deuteronomy 25 is probably later than this story.

But yeah.

All right, well, there you go. There’s, there’s the story of that. We may return to Genesis 38 at some point if we ever want to discuss masturbation, because onanism becomes a very important part of that discussion. But we’ll see. We’ll see. Who knows? In the meantime, let us move on to a little chapter and verse only. This is, this is laws of the land, you know what I mean? We’re going to get into some, some legalistic stuff. We’re going back to Deuteronomy, this is 22, and we’re going to discuss some laws. And yeah, this is, this is where things start to get a little sketchy. So why don’t you guide us through what we’re, what we’re looking at here.

Okay. If, if you want an interesting law, you can check out earlier in the chapter verses 13 through 21. We’re going to skip that for now. We’re going to start in verse 22. And this is, this is basically some laws about adultery and sexual assault. And there’s a little bit of overlap between these two things. And something that we’ve talked about before is that, you know, you don’t really have a clear concept of the agency and the will of women in this time period, that in fact, they were not considered to be the owners of their own sexuality and their sexual organs and stuff that was property of their husband or their father, anticipating getting paid to sell them to a husband. So they don’t really have much agency or control over their own sexuality. And so we’re going to see some, some lines blurring together here. But starting in verse 22, we have a set of laws.

And this is NRSVUE. I’m going to dip into the Hebrew a little bit to talk about what’s going on in some of these passages. If a man is discovered lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman as well as the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel. Now this is talking about adultery, and we just talked about how if, if a married man is lying with a woman who’s not married, that’s not adultery at all. We’re going to get to what’s going on there. But this is just saying, yeah, they, they both must die. So shall you purge the evil from Israel. And the idea here seems to be similar to what we have going on in the holiness legislation, which is this idea that this act generates a kind of metaphysical contaminant that gets out onto the actual land and pollutes the land. And the land can only stand so much of it before it will vomit you out. And that’s, that’s the warning we get in Leviticus 18 and, and Leviticus 20 .

And so the punishment, it says, this punishment is how you purge the evil from Israel, from the land yeah, it keeps saying that.

It says that sort of after each of these things like. Yeah. This is the. I, it feels like it knows that this is harsh, that killing these people is harsh and so it’s sort of justifying it.

In that way it is interesting that the women are not considered to be the. You know, obviously in this case with it, where a man is lying with the wife of another man, it’s clear what the man’s sin is like. It’s a, it’s a violation of the other man’s property.

Right.

Essentially it’s unclear what the woman’s sin is. Or like in this case she could, you know, he could be doing it entirely against her will, but she’s still going to be killed for this act.

Yeah. And it does, it just does not address whether or not this was consensual. It is.

Yeah. Heard. Yeah. It doesn’t seem to be relevant to the question.

And she. Yeah. I, huh. This has bred some very, very bad. I just this week saw a TikTok of a woman talking about when she was young and having been told in church, you know, sort of among the, the young women of her church, she had been told that they had all been told that if they were sexually assaulted, better that they should.

Right.

Then come home sullied.

Right.

And I think that is just about as toxic a theology as you could possibly, possibly concoct.

It’s.

And it seems like it’s rooted in verses like this.

Yeah. And. And it’s rooted in this, this long-standing patriarchal idea that the value of a woman is found in her, her purity.

And her. And which, which is really like the, the objectification of. Of when this is so rooted in the objectification of, of women. Because nothing changes about a woman physically.

Once she’s had sex. Virginity is an abstraction. It is a conceptual category that we have created. It is a social construct. It means nothing. Right. Biologically, except that there has been a penis in this vagina. That is all that it means. And so to say that this somehow sullies a woman is to say that she is property. And the property is no longer in pristine new condition. It is now used and therefore it is less valuable. It is literally treating a woman as property. There is, there’s not really a legitimate way to conceptualize it other, other than to say we want these organs to be fresh and new and have that new car smell. And any use of this is, you know, it means it’s damaged goods, means it’s used property.

Yeah. And. And that’s. That’s just awful. But the notion. And, and I understand what that rhetoric is trying to do. It’s trying to emphasize how important this is. But when you try to escalate the importance by saying, oh, oh, you should be willing to fight to the death before that, what it’s saying is that. That purity is more important than your life.

Right.

And so if someone has been sexually assaulted or even engages consensually in premarital sex, the message is you don’t deserve to live.

And there are people who have taken their own lives because that’s the message they hear. Irrespective of what the person who communicated that message thought they were communicating. That’s what people hear. And that has resulted in people taking their own lives, and that is abominable. Yeah.

Elizabeth Smart, the. The. The kidnap victim from here in Salt Lake City speaks very eloquently about all of this.

Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, there’s more bad, bad laws coming up. Let’s get to those.

So there’s a. There’s a threefold division between verses 22 and 29. First, we’re going to talk about a married woman. Then we’re going to talk about a betrothed woman, and then we’re going to talk about an unmarried, unbetrothed woman who is. Obviously, she is. I don’t know, she’s gone through puberty.

Yeah. Buckle up for that.

Yeah. So verses 23 and 24. If there is a young woman, a virgin, already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in town and lies with her, you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death. The young woman, because she did not cry for help in the town, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. And here the fact that this is a property crime against a man is made explicit.

The other man is put to death not because he victimized a woman, but because he violated the property rights of another man.

Right.

But then. And this is the part that. That people have been arguing about this for generations. But you shall stone the young woman to death because she did not cry for help in the town.

And. And this is. There’s. There are a lot of assumptions that have to be made here. And, and the people who wrote this are making a bunch of assumptions. For instance, it seems to be saying if he. If it happened, that means she did not cry out. It doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that she did cry out and nobody heard, right? She did cry out. And the neighbors were like, not my business.

Right?

She did cry out, but because she was paralyzed with fear, maybe she could not cry loudly enough. Maybe he was choking her, maybe he threatened her and she was scared. There are any one of a number of reasons why this could have been nonconsensual and she could not have put a stop to it.

I think it’s just saying she didn’t stop it. That’s where, that’s the, the fulcrum on which all of this pivots is whether or not she stopped it. Because in the next verse it says, if the man meets the engaged woman in the open country and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. You shall do nothing to the young woman. The young woman has not committed an offense punishable by death. Because this case is like that of someone who attacks and murders a neighbor since he found her in the open country, the engaged woman. Okay, now the NRSV says may have cried for help. And that is not what is in the Hebrew.

Interesting.

Yeah, because the Hebrew just said, and tsaaqah hannaarah, the, the young woman. So the engaged woman cried out, but there was no one to rescue her. So the NRSVUE is, is doing some, some rehabilitating here of this text because this, this is the opposite side of the coin. If it happened in the city, she didn’t cry out. Why? Because it happened. Because we’re assuming that if she was unwilling, then she would have cried out and it would not have happened.

He would not have someone, all of the. Everyone would come running, right?

And they would arrive before he was able to actually do anything.

Right.

And so this is the other side of the coin. Oh, if it happened in the open field, she did cry out. And so, and, and so this is. This is a performance of the ability to be compassionate and to consider the. The agency of the woman in an awful way. In a way that would not stand in any courtroom, ancient or modern. But it’s saying, hey, let’s show them that we can consider the agency of the woman. And then we get to the case of the woman who is not married or engaged. In verse 28 and 29, it says, if a man meets a virgin who is not engaged and seizes her and lies with her, and they are discovered, the man who lay with her shall give 50 shekels of silver to the young woman’s father and shall become his wife because he violated her, and he shall not be permitted to divorce her as long as he lives. So lots of stuff going on here too.

Yeah, that was really rough. Can we start with just. And this was a question I had actually earlier in the. In the chapter, the word virgin here. Yes, we understand that one way I know that the word virgin has in history been used to just mean a young woman and hasn’t been a reflection of her sexual past at all. What, what are we thinking on this?

So betulah is the, the word here, which generally is a little more tightly focused on virginity. Naarah is the word for young woman. And, and this just means a young woman. You do have almah, which is a woman who is of marriageable age. And so almah is not really marked for virginity or not virginity. It could be either or almah usually is. You’re an almah between puberty and having your first child. Okay, So a married woman who is not yet pregnant could be referred to as an almah. So it’s at least as far as we know. Again, language does what language is going to do. So we can’t really put rules on these things. We can just observe tendencies. But betulah is much more closely associated with a modern concept of a woman who has not had sexual intercourse. Okay, now it says he seizes her.

And this is, this is the. Where a lot of apologists get upset because one of the things that. To note here is that again, this is about a property crime, not about rape. Right? And not because it’s not the sexual assault of a woman. It’s because they didn’t have the category of rape because they didn’t care about the woman’s agency. And one of the ways that we know this is because the punishment for raping a woman is different depending on whether or not she’s married. Because here he rapes this woman who is not engaged or married. And the punishment is, oh, now you got to marry her. Whereas if she’s betrothed or married, he dies. So it’s only a death penalty if she’s married because that contractual relationship is considered to be sacrosanct in this society.

When she’s still in her father’s household, she is potential money, right?

She is a potential bride. But she still, the father still stands to profit from her marriage. So there is a, there is monetary loss that takes place because of this. But the word there for “seizes her” is different from the word in the previous account. Oh, it says the man seizes her and lies with her. In verse 25 there. Let me pull up verse 25 there. The, the verb is chazak, which means to grab, to grasp, to seize. And in verse 28, the verb is tafas, which also means to grab, to grasp or to seize. Now, the, the reason that, that apologists think that they have an out here is because tafas can be used to mean to handle or to hold. And so they’re like, it’s talking about, you know, just caressing this woman, not seizing her. The, the problem with that, that none of them ever seem to note is that it only ever means to handle or to hold when the direct object is an inanimate object.

Right?

Every single time this verb is used with a person as a direct object, it means to grasp. It means to hold them against their will. It means to physically restrain them. Okay, so, so this unquestionably is referring to sexual assault. And a lot of people will say, well, does that mean that it is consigning a, a, the a victim of rape to marrying her rapist? That, that’s kind of taking this law and turning it around. And there are a couple of things to say here, kind of because the, as a victim of rape, she’s, she is now tainted goods in, in the eyes of this society. And so she is not eligible for proper Israelite marriage anymore. And that’s why the punishment is that the man must marry her and cannot divorce her as long as she lives because he has, when it says violated her, that’s the, the verb. And, and this I, in my opinion, it’s used to mean humiliated, humbled, all this kind of stuff. In my opinion, this verb has to do with the violation of her virginity, her, her sexual purity or something like that.

And so saying that that has been violated is saying she’s no longer eligible for, for proper Israelite marriage. And so he has to marry her so that she is provided for. It is providing a way for her to be taken care of. She’s going to be a part of a household. She’s not going to be a drain on her father’s house anymore. She’s going to be a part of another household and be taken care of.

Which, seen purely through the lens of economy, is a boon.

Yeah, it’s.

But that’s not the lens, I think that most modern people would see this through.

Absolutely. And again, coming back to the fact that the authors of these passages are writing this for propagandistic purposes, these are not laws that are ever going to see the inside of a courtroom. These are laws, this is, this Ten Commandments being posted on the outside of the courtroom. They have nothing to do with what goes on inside the courtroom. They’re for show. These are the show laws. And so these are being written by people who don’t know anything about this, which is why they’re like, oh, yeah, if it happens in a city, it means, it means she didn’t stop it. She didn’t cry out. Because if she cried out, obviously somebody would have stopped it. So these are not people who are taking this incredibly seriously. These are not laws that will function within the jurisprudence on the ground. However, we do have something in, in Exodus 20 , I think it’s 22:16, a very similar law where it says that if a man seduces a virgin, and the word for seduce is pata, which means to entice, to deceive, if he seduces her and.

And lies with her, he shall give the bride price for her and make her his wife. But if the father refuses to give her to him, he shall pay an amount equal to the bride price for virgins. Now, if we go back to Deuteronomy 22 , I think it actually says it’s much higher than the bride price.

I don’t know what. You’d have to give us some context for how much 50 shekels is worth and what a bride price is and stuff.

So an enslaved person was 30 shekels. That’s the standard. The bride price was probably 20 to 30 shekels. 50 shekels might be double the bride price.

Right.

And so it’s, it’s not just the father is getting his bride price, he’s getting the bride price and then some.

Right.

At least in Deuteronomy 22 . In Exodus, it’s a little different. But because Exodus uses this verb that means to entice, seduce, deceive, it’s not clear that this is sexual assault, it might just be seduction.

Exodus, same thing. These were not laws meant for the inside of a courtroom, but they provide an out so that it is not required that a rape victim marry her rapist. And when this kind of stuff happened, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that 999 times out of a thousand times, the woman stayed in her father’s household.

Yeah, I mean, okay, that’s an interesting speculation. It’s still abominable that this is even here. Yeah, it’s like, like the problem is that this is here and that people now take it seriously. You know what I mean? Like, even if they would never dream of marrying their child against her will to her rapist, the fact that it’s there and that people think about it as though it is a serious thing is, is the deeply problematic thing.

And it leads to some of that thinking that we talked about earlier. It leads to people saying awful things to their daughters about being, you know, who wants a chewed piece of gum or whatever. Like, it all, it’s all sort of part and parcel with that.

Yeah, it is, unfortunately, because it’s still there, because it’s considered authoritative. It influences the rhetoric, it influences how people think about these issues. But, you know, you have an awful lot of apologists who just try to deny it and just try to argue, no, this is, this is about consensual sex. This isn’t about sexual assault. And that’s their attempt to negotiate with the text, to make it a little more amenable to their particular moral outlook. And in, in 2020, whatever year it is, 2024, the 21st century, we really need to be able to recognize when the text of the Bible is not just wrong, but is just abominable, is morally despicable. And this is, this is an instance of that. And, and I don’t think it’s because they were doing these things. I think it was just because this was the rhetoric they were using in their day for their propagandistic purposes and because they were a deeply patriarchal, not incredibly thoughtful or compassionate set of writers, the Deuteronomists, particularly of this part of Deuteronomy, they were just like, yeah, whatever, we’ll just say it like this.

But I, yeah, and I think I, I guess that that’s the important takeaway here, is that you, a believer, is, is. I think, I think we can say it is the editorial position of this podcast that it is safe and, and moral to jettison this from our belief systems, at least in terms of like having any control over how we think about things now.

Yeah, I think it is a moral, moral imperative to do so. I think it would be immoral not to do so. And yeah, the people who want to argue with that are, are going to try to turn the text into something that it is not in order to try to get around that. So lots of problems with the way these texts are deployed.

Well, there you have it, friends. Thank you so much for joining us. If you would like to continue our conversation with us and, and you know, have access to asking us questions that we will probably get around to, you can feel free to become one of our patrons over at patreon.com/dataoverdogma, where you can receive the After Party, which is the, the extra content, the bonus content that we do every week, as well as get access to an early and ad-free version of every episode of the show. If you’d like to write into us about anything you’ve heard here, please feel free to do so. contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the way to do that and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

Take My Wife... Please!

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology