FROM TODAY’S RECAP: - 2 Corinthians 6:14 - Galatians 3:13 - Numbers 22-24 - Podcast: When Scripture Doesn't Make Sense* *Resource not mentioned in TBR podcast Note: We provide links to specific resources; this is not an endorsement of the entire website, author, organization, etc. Their views may not represent our own. SHOW NOTES: - Follow The Bible Recap: Instagram | Facebook | TikTok | YouTube - Follow Tara-Leigh Cobble: Instagram - Read/listen on the Bible App or Dwell App - Learn more at our Start Page - Become a RECAPtain - Shop the TBR Store - Credits PARTNER MINISTRIES: D-Group International Israelux The God Shot TLC Writing & Speaking DISCLAIMER: The Bible Recap, Tara-Leigh Cobble, and affiliates are not a church, pastor, spiritual authority, or counseling service. Listeners and viewers consume this content on a voluntary basis and assume all responsibility for the resulting consequences and impact.
Full Episode
Hey Bible Readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap. Moses continues his farewell speech today, and he covers a wide variety of laws in these three chapters. We don't have time to touch on them all, so I'll just pull a few from the ones that might have been the most perplexing from our reading, most of which pertain to relationships between men and women.
But before we get there, I want to remind us about a few things just so we have the proper framework for what we're encountering here. God is not setting up a utopian society where everything is ideal. God is meeting the people where they are and giving them a framework for a functional society where people are treated with at least the bare minimum level of respect.
When God addresses something like multiple wives, it doesn't mean he's putting a seal of approval on it. It means he's acknowledging that it happens. and he's giving them honorable ways to respond to an imperfect, sinful situation. We'll hit some challenging passages today, and it's important for us to remember not to overlay our cultural experience onto theirs.
Speaking of which, let's go over the first tough segment, marrying female captives. For anyone in Western society today, this idea is really cringe-inducing. We even balk at the idea of arranged marriage, and this feels like it fringes on our idea of love and marriage even more. One of the things we have to remember about this society is that marriage rarely fit our modern ideas of love.
Very rarely did a woman especially marry for love. They often married as a means of being provided for. So the situation we've got here is that the Israelites would have conquered a city and killed all the men, but taken the women and children alive. Some of these women would have been absorbed into the society.
But if a man found a woman he wanted to marry, it's quite likely she wouldn't have objected. And this law God set out here honored the woman by giving her a 30-day period of time to mourn and grieve all she has lost before marrying the Israelite man.
If for any reason things in the marriage went south, God protects the woman by requiring the man to treat her with honor, not like she's his property. Please don't miss God's heart in this. Even though so much of this seems archaic, we can still see God's plan to provide for the woman through the man and to protect her if the man fails to honor her well.
We have a few more laws dealing with relationships between men and women, some of which pertain to a woman's virginity. There are a lot of ancient traditions, some of which are also cringeworthy, about how a couple should approach their first night of marriage. Most study Bibles and commentaries will have more info on this if you're curious.
One of the many detrimental aspects of sexual infidelity was that it could potentially threaten the tribe's economy and land inheritance as God had distributed it. So it was important for them to have laws to protect against this. Moses also sets out a few standards for determining whether a woman has been raped or not.
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