Rape in the Old Testament

[Rosebud]

Most intelligent people acknowledge that scripture is not the word of God from God's own mouth. It's the word of God as explained by Godly men. It's silly to try and apply today's standards to those from different eras. If you were back in Old testament days and were offered the spoils of war, don't kid yourself and think you would turn them down. Morality is not universal. If you commit rape in an era when rape is generally condoned, that doesn't make you an immoral person. Morality is nothing if not relative.

Sigh... yeah, there's some truth to what you say. People generally stick with the morals of the culture they were born into. They feel guilty about the things they were taught to feel guilty about as kids whether those things include spilling milk, defying authority, or rape.

However, every single one of us knows what it's like to be physically and emotionally hurt by someone else. Therefore any normal person can ascertain how others feel when s/he hurts them.

It would be pretty hard to find anyone who would would want to be beaten no matter what culture they were raised in. That says to me that anybody can therefore deduce that beating someone else is hurtful. If people know they're doing damage to another person, they know their actions are morally wrong no matter what era they live in. That's not to say they won't try to justify their actions based on the actions of others around them, though....

Yeah.... morals are relative, but not that relative. Morality exists outside of religion and culture. There is a difference between right and wrong.

[Eddie]

Sigh... yeah, there's some truth to what you say. People generally stick with the morals of the culture they were born into. They feel guilty about the things they were taught to feel guilty about as kids whether those things include spilling milk, defying authority, or rape.

However, every single one of us knows what it's like to be physically and emotionally hurt by someone else. Therefore any normal person can ascertain how others feel when s/he hurts them.

It would be pretty hard to find anyone who would would want to be beaten no matter what culture they were raised in. That says to me that anybody can therefore deduce that beating someone else is hurtful. If people know they're doing damage to another person, they know their actions are morally wrong no matter what era they live in. That's not to say they won't try to justify their actions based on the actions of others around them, though....

Yeah.... morals are relative, but not that relative. Morality exists outside of religion and culture. There is a difference between right and wrong.

Is there ever justification for some things?

With one of those groups Robin initially listed from the Old Testament - they as a people had attempted to defeat the Israelites by tempting them to commit immoral acts and lose the protection/blessing of God. Following along, the biblical result was a plague and everything that came with it. With that particular group, at least, I suppose I could see why the result/consequence would be to simply kill them all.

I suppose in a sense I am justifying it. Which fits with what you are saying. I suppose the question would be are their situations in which it can be justified without being immoral?

I would think that forgiveness would always be preferred or rewarded. But can death/destruction ever be justified?

[Indy Coug]

Moral choices aren't made in a vacuum where there is no possible interaction with other moral considerations. The tricky part is knowing what the correct Moral Hierarchy is, understanding their interactions and weighing different moral choices both in the short and long term.

Is killing someone OK if it prevents a nation from dwindling in unbelief?

Is lying OK if it prevents the needless damage to another's feelings?

Is getting an ox out of the mire OK even if it's on the sabbath?

[Rosebud]

Moral choices aren't made in a vacuum where there is no possible interaction with other moral considerations. The tricky part is knowing what the correct Moral Hierarchy is, understanding their interactions and weighing different moral choices both in the short and long term.

Is killing someone OK if it prevents a nation from dwindling in unbelief?

Is lying OK if it prevents the needless damage to another's feelings?

Is getting an ox out of the mire OK even if it's on the sabbath?

So when is rape okay?

[Indy Coug]

So when is rape okay?

If you read my comments, I don't believe anything has been established about whether the Israelites raped women or not, but it does explicitly mention that certain women were killed along with the men.

As for my most recent post, that is talking in generalities and doesn't pertain to rape specifically.

[Rosebud]

If you read my comments, I don't believe anything has been established about whether the Israelites raped women or not, but it does explicitly mention that certain women were killed along with the men.

Yeah, but Indy... you're choosing not to accept that they're about rape because you don't want them to be. I don't want them to be either. I think rape is horrible. I choose to at least try to look at things objectively even when it sucks, though.

As for my most recent post, that is talking in generalities and doesn't pertain to rape specifically.

I agree that moral choices aren't made in a vacuum. I can see that there may be a time for murder, but I can't think of any time when rape is justified. I was wondering if you could.

[Indy Coug]

Yeah, but Indy... you're choosing not to accept that they're about rape because you don't want them to be. I don't want them to be either. I think rape is horrible. I choose to at least try to look at things objectively even when it sucks, though.

I don't exclude the possibility that rape might have been involved, but what is recorded is very, very far from definitive.

I don't pretend to know what the Moral Hierarchy is nor how it should work in all instances. Fortunately, my life has been removed from any radical situations like the extreme examples found in the scriptures. I am left with more sedate quandries such as what to do about Sunday worship while on vacation.

[hopfrog]

It has always disturbed me that so many people use the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to condemn me as queer, and yet they seem to neglect that Lot got drunk and impregnated his daughters. Not a case of rape, since it was the daughters who instigated this, according to scripture. Still, we see Lot as a "godly" man, yes?

[Rosebud]

I don't exclude the possibility that rape might have been involved, but what is recorded is very, very far from definitive.

Wait. I'm not trying to claim that anyone has any definitive knowledge of anything that is purported to have happened in the OT. I am saying that what we have recorded is most likely referring to rape. Two different things.....

I don't pretend to know what the Moral Hierarchy is nor how it should work in all instances. Fortunately, my life has been removed from any radical situations like the extreme examples found in the scriptures. I am left with more sedate quandries such as what to do about Sunday worship while on vacation.

Speaking of moral hierarchy, religion and culture, I saw this article in the NY Times today. It's kind of long, but pretty interesting. Evidently a bunch of psychologists are demonstrating that babies as young as five months old make moral judgments. That's a bit of an over-simplification, but they're basically trying to claim that humans are born with a sense of morality rather than it being something taught them by adults.

One long and very out-of-context quote:

In the journal Science a couple of months ago, the psychologist Joseph Henrich and several of his colleagues reported a cross-cultural study of 15 diverse populations and found that people’s propensities to behave kindly to strangers and to punish unfairness are strongest in large-scale communities with market economies, where such norms are essential to the smooth functioning of trade. Henrich and his colleagues concluded that much of the morality that humans possess is a consequence of the culture in which they are raised, not their innate capacities.

At the same time, though, people everywhere have some sense of right and wrong. You won’t find a society where people don’t have some notion of fairness, don’t put some value on loyalty and kindness, don’t distinguish between acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes, don’t categorize people as nasty or nice. These universals make evolutionary sense. Since natural selection works, at least in part, at a genetic level, there is a logic to being instinctively kind to our kin, whose survival and well-being promote the spread of our genes. More than that, it is often beneficial for humans to work together with other humans, which means that it would have been adaptive to evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals. All this is reason to consider the innateness of at least basic moral concepts.

In addition, scientists know that certain compassionate feelings and impulses emerge early and apparently universally in human development. These are not moral concepts, exactly, but they seem closely related. One example is feeling pain at the pain of others. In his book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” Charles Darwin, a keen observer of human nature, tells the story of how his first son, William, was fooled by his nurse into expressing sympathy at a very young age: “When a few days over 6 months old, his nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of his mouth strongly depressed.”

There seems to be something evolutionarily ancient to this empathetic response. If you want to cause a rat distress, you can expose it to the screams of other rats. Human babies, notably, cry more to the cries of other babies than to tape recordings of their own crying, suggesting that they are responding to their awareness of someone else’s pain, not merely to a certain pitch of sound. Babies also seem to want to assuage the pain of others: once they have enough physical competence (starting at about 1 year old), they soothe others in distress by stroking and touching or by handing over a bottle or toy. There are individual differences, to be sure, in the intensity of response: some babies are great soothers; others don’t care as much. But the basic impulse seems common to all. (Some other primates behave similarly: the primatologist Frans de Waal reports that chimpanzees “will approach a victim of attack, put an arm around her and gently pat her back or groom her.” Monkeys, on the other hand, tend to shun victims of aggression.)

[LogMafia]

Sigh... yeah, there's some truth to what you say. People generally stick with the morals of the culture they were born into. They feel guilty about the things they were taught to feel guilty about as kids whether those things include spilling milk, defying authority, or rape.

However, every single one of us knows what it's like to be physically and emotionally hurt by someone else. Therefore any normal person can ascertain how others feel when s/he hurts them.

It would be pretty hard to find anyone who would would want to be beaten no matter what culture they were raised in. That says to me that anybody can therefore deduce that beating someone else is hurtful. If people know they're doing damage to another person, they know their actions are morally wrong no matter what era they live in. That's not to say they won't try to justify their actions based on the actions of others around them, though....

Yeah.... morals are relative, but not that relative. Morality exists outside of religion and culture. There is a difference between right and wrong.

Have you ever heard of sadomasochism?

[Rosebud]

Have you ever heard of sadomasochism?

snap.... i was worried someone would think of that....

[Solon]

snap.... i was worried someone would think of that....

The way I understand it, "rape" as we know it today did not exist in OT times. Women weren't deemed worthy of the kind of agency it takes to say "no" to sexual advances. Generally, women were understood to have voracious sexual appetites and men needed to keep them sequestered because the women were generally incapable of restraining themselves. Also, this was done in order to make sure the men's children were indeed their own (there was no Maury Povich in 600 BC). Women were punished for infidelity because it endangered the legitimacy of children, and therefore the heirs of a man's property. Seducing another man's wife was a property crime against that man.

What these scriptures and incidents are referring to is a property crime. The Greek word usually translated as "rape" really means to seize or snatch or grab. The sex part is a foregone conclusion, as well as the cooking and sewing and householding chores.

The Sodom story about the men wanting to rape Lot's guests isn't about the sex-part of rape. It's about the rules of hospitality and the desire to humiliate a stranger. It has nothing to do with being "gay" and everything to do with power, force, and assertion of will.

It's really, really hard to feel a sense of connection to people from the ancient world. They really were nothing like us. If we can find lessons and words of wisdom in the pages of the Bible, then great for us. But we do so with modern understandings of morality, equality, sexuality, etc.

The OT is great as a historical text, as a piece of literature, as a miracle of transmission and preservation, as the collected sacred writings of millenia, as the most influential book ever compiled - but not as a blueprint for how we should live our lives today.

[wuapinmon]

It has always disturbed me that so many people use the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to condemn me as queer, and yet they seem to neglect that Lot got drunk and impregnated his daughters. Not a case of rape, since it was the daughters who instigated this, according to scripture. Still, we see Lot as a "godly" man, yes?

That's why utilitarian morality is what most people use even though they claim they don't.

[Indy Coug]

It has always disturbed me that so many people use the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to condemn me as queer, and yet they seem to neglect that Lot got drunk and impregnated his daughters. Not a case of rape, since it was the daughters who instigated this, according to scripture. Still, we see Lot as a "godly" man, yes?

I guess I never saw Lot as a godly man, I saw him being the recipient of a major favor God did at the request of Abraham.

[Fiyero]

It has always disturbed me that so many people use the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to condemn me as queer, and yet they seem to neglect that Lot got drunk and impregnated his daughters. Not a case of rape, since it was the daughters who instigated this, according to scripture. Still, we see Lot as a "godly" man, yes?

I understand the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah to be rape, not homosexuality. For example when they said "bring us those men, so we may know them, e.g. forced sodomy. Was it the existence of homosexuality that angered God, or the widespread rape?

Meanwhile, whichever it was, goodly Abraham pleaded with the Lord to spare the town. Add Abraham to the list of prophets who probably wouldn't have donated to Prop 8.