FROM TODAY’S RECAP: - 2 Corinthians 11:24 - Genesis 38 - The Bible Recap - Day 053 - The Bible Recap - Day 074 - The Bible Recap Large Print 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.
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Hey Bible Readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap. Today, as we continue Moses' final speech, we encountered a wide variety of laws, and the first thing we encountered was a law about divorce. In fact, it's the only law about divorce in the Old Testament, and it's very specific.
We have to look at the cultural practices of the day to see what this law is about, and even still, it's not entirely clear. Some believe that this practice protects the first husband from an adulterous wife, while others believe it protects the wife from a greedy husband. The first husband is the one who gets the bride's dowry.
Then she would have inherited her second husband's property when he died. So this law prevents the first husband from exploiting her for his own financial gain. Either way, this law serves as a means of protection. In 24-7, we see again that God is protective of all human life and that he disapproves of slavery as we know it. Kidnapping is forbidden and is punished by the death penalty.
It's considered theft, but it's punished by a greater consequence than theft of anything else, for obvious reasons. We also saw lots of measures to protect the poor. These were laws instructing people to give back the coat of a poor person if they'd offered it as collateral, because that's how they stayed warm at night.
It also instructs them to not take a poor person's millstone as collateral because millstones are used to grind food, so that would mean they wouldn't have any way to eat. God also commanded that they pay their poor servants when they needed it, which usually means the same day they do their work, because they don't have any savings stored up to live on.
And he commands the Israelites to remember those who are landless, and to remember that they were once landless people in Egypt. Those who don't own land are the most vulnerable and usually the poorest. We talked recently about how the rabbis would aim to protect against breaking a law by building a fence around it.
There's a law in 25.3 that provides a great example of what fence building looks like and how it evolved over time. This verse limits punishment of a guilty man to 40 lashes, but later the Jews reduced it to 39 lashes just in case someone miscounted. This helped make sure they didn't accidentally give a man 41 lashes and break the law.
So the law given by God is 40 lashes, but the law as amended by the rabbis was 39 lashes. By the way, in 2 Corinthians 11 24, Paul says he endured this beating of 39 lashes five times. The law mentioned in 25 5-10 may have reminded you of a woman named Tamar. We read about her in Genesis 38. When Tamar's husband died, she married his brother.
Then when he died, she was supposed to marry his other brother, but Judah, her father-in-law, held out on her. The law we read about today pertains to something called leveret marriage. The word leveret looks like the word Levite, but it's actually from the Hebrew word levir, which means brother-in-law, since it refers to marrying into the same family.
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