But the Bible okays rape, they say

“If an ish find a na’arah that is a betulah, which is not orasah (betrothed), and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;

Then the ish that lay with her shall give unto the avi hana’arah fifty [shekels] of kesef, and she shall be his isha; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his yamim.” Devarim (Deuteronomy) 22:28-29, OJB.

“If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, 29 he shall pay her father fifty shekels[a] of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.” Deuteronomy 22:28-29, NIV.

It’s true, dear one. Before we can talk about being the mother of God, I need to address the question the most serious and possibly the most important gendered accusation made against the Torah: the claim that Deuteronomy 22 sells women to their rapists for life.

Like many people I’ve been hurt by religious environments where people treated me like I’m not good enough for male company, or all my company is always sexual, or like I’m the weaker second fiddle who can’t even help stack the chairs or kill a wasp, or like I should be grateful that I’m “allowed” to have a job that should belong to a man, or like it’s a sin to want to open my own door (yes, all of this people actually said to me).

But I haven’t been hurt like the friend who was raped by a Christian who then told her afterwards, as he pinned her to the sweat-stained couch,

“Now you have to marry me, because the Bible says so.”

She isn’t the only one to suffer the attitude some of the Christian church has taken towards sexual assault. I know a young man who was molested as a child by a church members and then ordered by his parents to stop telling them about it—because propriety and saving face matters more than right and wrong. I’m sure he’ll be offended if I say, “is it any wonder he now identifies as a woman?” While as a trained sexual assault medical forensic examiner for the military, I can attest that the issues facing male survivors differ somewhat from those facing women, there’s a common denominator here in which society generally tells us a weaker, victimized person is naturally female—so a male victim must also be in a “female” role. I acknowledge that most LGBTQ+ people deny trauma as a causative factor in our orientations and identities, but as a physician used to treating patients with unresolved trauma there’s absolutely no denying to me that any boy’s understanding of gender and body is affected at least some way by early sexual trauma just as that similar act permanently marred my female friend’s understanding of gender and God.

I wait for the day that their rapists suffer.

Excuse you?

Yeah, I get it. People not affected by sexual assault will often parrot simpering nonsense about forgiveness and not ruining young men’s lives over “mistakes” and protecting leaders who are otherwise “basically good otherwise.” Meanwhile David in his Tehillim (Psalms) pledges in the strongest words to despise evil, and the memories of the tortured dead in the Brit Chadashah’s Hisgalus (Revelation) cry out for vengeance from under the divine throne, and Yeshua, in true militant Jewish fashion declares what he thinks about those who’ve robbed that faith from the young people I’ve mentioned: “For anyone who causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for him to have a millstone put around his neck and be drowned.”¹

Did you know that drowning is actually one of the single most painful ways to die because of the sensitivity of your lungs and your underwater reflexes?

Survivors and victims need that God of judgment that so many Westerners discard along with the rest of the “Old Testament” (properly called the Tanakh, by the way, and never intended by Yeshua to be thrown away).² But if the very God we need to cry to for justice then sells us to our assailants for fifty pieces of silver, where can we turn?

It hurts my chest and stomach to talk about this, dear one, and I’m sure it sickens you, too. But if we don’t address this first, we can’t address anything else, can we? I cannot claim that God put something special in womanhood, or manhood for that matter, if he allows it to be so horrifically used.

Let’s start with the historical context.

The Jewish version of ancient history goes something like this:

1. Fertile Crescent Mesopotamia: Abraham and his family wander around like nomads for a few generations

2. Because of famine this family, now a large clan, ends up moving to Egypt for about 400 years

3. When they become forced labor in Egypt, these people, now an ethnic nationality identified as Israelites, leave, and wander around the desert again for a generation, where they’re given the laws that define their theocratic system; once they’ve received these laws, they invade the land where Abraham used to wander, under the orders of God and these laws

4. After a period of loose tribal rule, the people establish a kingship; there’s a brief “trial run” of a guy named Saul before David establishes the Davidic line

5. There’s a civil war that splits the country into Northern and Southern kingdoms a couple generations after David; this situation remains for several hundred years until the Assyrians destroy the Northern Kingdom, and then the Babylonians destroy the Southern Kingdom. Importantly, God tells the Jewish people not to rebel against the Babylonians

6. The Persians invade Babylon, which God is cool with according to the prophet Daniel, and then the Greeks invade them

7. Greek rule sucks for Jewish people, who have a rebellion and a short-lived Hasmonean independent dynasty before the Romans show up

8. The Romans occupy Israel for a while before becoming fed up with Jewish independence movements. 70 AD/CE sees a violent genocide of Jews that scatters them throughout the Western world

This is the “sanitized” version that even anti-Semitic scholars will generally agree with. With a quick glance at the other cultures mentioned here, you can see the people groups that would naturally most strongly influence Jewish thought from the outside would be Middle Eastern Fertile Crescent culture originally, then Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, and Greek culture through periods of subjugation—by the time we get to the Romans Jewish people are far too separatist and independence-minded, and unlike the rule of the Babylonians and the Persians, they don’t see themselves as commanded by God to submit to these more sexually-liberal rulers. In fact, ancient Jewish and Persian thought are so similar that anti-Semitic scholars will often claim that the Jewish faith evolved from Zoroastrianism (with absolutely no evidence that it wasn’t the other way around—we have very few written records left from the Persians because they wrote on clay that dissolved, which means we often rely heavily on the propaganda of their enemies, the Greeks).

Our contentious rape passage is believed by practicing traditionalist Jews and Christians to have been written by God and given to Moshe around 1400 BCE. While it is common conjecture from anti-Semites to claim the Torah was written during the Babylonian exile as Jews “invented” a reason for claiming a right to the land of Israel and establishing a religious order (because oh those Jews, always lying!), the reality is that archaeological evidence indicates a much earlier Torah date. At minimum the Torah must have existed before the 7th century BCE, long before Babylonian invasion, because we have Israeli jewelry from that time with an inscription of the Aaronic blessing. We know Moshe certainly existed in 1400 BCE, because we have an inscription in an Egyptian mine referring to Moses’ plagues (Moses was NOT a common name at the time) with pottery dated to that time.³

So at the moment in Devarim we’re talking about a time period in which Jewish thought would have been strongly influenced by Egyptian culture, and the Middle Eastern Fertile Crescent culture of their ancestry. Women’s “employment” in the Middle East at that time was very much reproduction, to the point that you see an evolutionary drive to preserve a male’s particular genetic line actually codified in law. In the Code of Hammurabai (dated to about 1755 BC/BCE when the Jewish people would have still been in Egypt),⁴ childbirth was so important that complex provisions are made about servants essentially serving as “stand-ins” for women who couldn’t have children, to protect the employing woman’s reputation and financial standing. These systems also included financial remuneration for marriage, like dowries.

You have to shift into an entirely different mindset to understand that bride price reality. Like most Westerners, I’d always seen the bride price as a way to “buy and sell” women, but I chatted with a young Liberian woman years ago who saw a bride price as a way for a man to demonstrate his respect for her. She was displeased with a young American man who wanted to date her because he wasn’t willing to demonstrate her overwhelming value to him by working to provide her parents with a large bridal payment. To her, his request to sleep with her without making this payment was an insult, implying she wasn’t worth anything to him, and that he as a man wasn’t capable of work.

That’s a kind of thinking still prevalent in much of the world, and I’m not going to claim my culture is superior to hers.

Positive female views of bride prices aside, what didn’t exist in the Code of Hammurabai or any known legal systems between 1755 and 1400 BCE was a concept of female autonomy over her own body. Code of Hammurabai 132 sees any sexual action you take with a woman who isn’t married to you as an insult to the man “in charge” of her—her husband or her father. In fact, a woman accused of adultery—even if innocent—was supposed to drown herself for her husband’s sake, to protect him from shame.⁵

There’s another passage in the Code of Hammurabai that’s been taken by moderns to mean that a woman who is raped is also supposed to drown herself to protect her male guardian. The reality, however, is that the concept of rape literally didn’t exist: the word that’s used throughout the code isn’t “rape,” but “taken in,” which when compared to other verses in the code means “caught.” The actual passage says, in other words, that “if she’s caught having sex with another man, she and the man shall be drowned, but her husband has the option of rescuing her from the river if he likes.” They literally don’t have a word to differentiate between consensual and nonconsensual sex, because female consent is always implied. There is no provision for rape or not in the case of a married woman in Hamurabai’s code. Just sex.

So with that cultural background in mind, now let’s go back to the full text of Deuteronomy 22.

This is the full context of the sexual laws, quoted here from the OJB—the NIV, as I demonstrated at the beginning of this chapter, absolutely says a rapist gets to marry his victim, so we’ll go into detail about the actual Hebrew words in a minute. But let’s start with the full passage:

“|13| If any ish take an isha, and go in unto her, and hate her,|14| And give occasions of speech against her, and bring up a shem rah (bad name) upon her, and say, I took this isha, and when I came to her, I found her with no betulim (proofs of virginity); |15| Then shall the av of the na’arah, and her em, take and bring forth the betulim (proofs of virginity) unto the zekenim of the town in the sha’arah (gate);|16| And the avi hana’arah shall say unto the zekenim, I gave my bat unto this ish as isha (wife) and he hateth her; |17| And, hinei, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy bat with betulim; and yet these are my bat’s betulim. And they shall spread the simlah (clothing) before the zekenim of the town. |18| And the zekenim of that town shall take that ish and punish him;|19| And they shall fine him a hundred shekels of kesef, and give them unto the avi hana’arah, because he hath brought a shem rah (bad name) upon a betulat Yisroel; and she shall be his isha; he may not put her away all his yamim. |20|

But if this thing be emes, and the betulim be not found for the na’arah;|21| Then they shall bring out the na’arah to the door of her bais avi, and the anashim of her town shall stone her with avanim that she die; because she hath committed an outrage in Yisroel, to play the whore in her bais avi; so shalt thou put away the rah from among you.

|22| If an ish be found lying with an isha married to a husband then they shall both of them die, both the ish that lay with the isha, and the isha; so shalt thou put away the rah from Yisroel.|23|

If a na’arah that is a betulah be betrothed unto a husband, and an ish find her in the town, and lie with her; |24| Then ye shall bring them both out unto the sha’ar of that town, and ye shall stone them with avanim that they die; the na’arah, because she cried not, being in the town; and the ish, because he hath humbled his neighbor’s isha; so thou shalt put away the rah from among you.

|25| But if the ish find a na’arah hame’orasah (betrothed woman) in the sadeh, and the ish overpower her, and lie with her; then the ish only that lay with her shall die. |26| But unto the na’arah thou shalt do nothing; there is in the na’arah no chet mavet (sin worthy of death); for as when an ish riseth against his neighbor, and slayeth him, even so is this matter;|27| For he found her in the sadeh, and the na’arah hame’orasah cried, and there was no moshia (savior) for her [see 2C 11:2-3 regarding Moshiach and his Kehillah Kallah and Hasatan’s evil interference with the betrothal and the above three Scriptures T.N.].

|28| If an ish find a na’arah that is a betulah, which is not orasah (betrothed), and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;|29| Then the ish that lay with her shall give unto the avi hana’arah fifty [shekels] of kesef, and she shall be his isha; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his yamim.

|30 (23:1)| An ish shall not take eshet aviv (his father’s wife), nor uncover his father’s robe.”

Versus 13-21, the slander passages, are scary, and I include them because they contrast interestingly with our focus, verse 29. These sexual laws start by talking about what to do if a married man, newly wed, accuses his wife of sleeping with someone else during their period of betrothal. In most Fertile Crescent societies—and still, I understand, under Shariah law—if a man accused his wife of cheating on him during her betrothal period, he could have her killed or sent away for any reason. Victorian-era Christianity used the hymen as the ultimate proof of virginity; under this law in Deuteronomy a woman’s proof of her virginity requires “spreading the garment,” which could be taken to mean looking up her skirt in that Western fashion, or, more likely, demonstrating previous discharge on her clothing or bedding like was done in other Eastern societies.⁶

However, Rashi, the preeminent Jewish Rabbi who lived between 1040 and 1105 (around the time we have for the Masoretic Codex, actually), explains that in his Jewish culture spreading the garment “is a figurative expression, meaning: they shall clarify the matter as [“clear”] as a [new] garment.”⁷ He is greatly revered by Orthodox Jews, and much of Scripture from a Jewish perspective is interpreted through his lens, so it’s not unreasonable to take his interpretation. Rashi is absolutely not a feminist—he also uses this passage to claim that a woman should be silent when her husband is around—so it’s not like he’s trying to twist this passage to support women’s rights here.

At any rate, it’s highly unlikely that “spreading the garment” means looking up her skirt before the elders in conservative Middle Eastern culture that used “uncovering nakedness” as an expression for sexual sin. And if the betulim “proofs of virginity” are discharge on cloth, it’s actually not clear what kind of discharge, although I’m aware of the natural interpretation that we’re talking about blood. The hymen—and blood from a broken hymen—are both terrible demonstrations of virginity from a scientific perspective because a woman’s hymen can break from something as simple as horseback riding or a nasty fall, but I’m actually going to step out of line here and say we can’t really know what “betulim” means. We simply don’t have enough information about what method they used to analyze this with the knowledge of their time, and I’m willing to admit that sometimes ancients knew things we didn’t, and sometimes we know things they didn’t.

Regardless of biological questions, if you read Hebrew it’s Rashi’s interpretation that makes the most sense, because literally the passage actually says:

“And shall take the father of the girl and her mother and bring out the virginity of the girl to the elders of the city at the gate.” And then the father says, “This man says…‘I did not find your daughter a virgin.’ But this virginity of my daughter’s.” And then the passage says, “and they shall spread the garment before the elders of the city.”⁸

That sounds a lot more like Rashi’s “figurative garment” interpretation, doesn’t it? Rashi’s interpretation also makes sense because we know from the book of Ruth that clothing was used to demonstrate figurative pacts in general: a man would give another man his shoe to demonstrate that he was unwilling to marry a woman he was supposed to marry to carry on his relative’s bloodline, for example.⁹

But unknown “betulim” aside, there are two striking social elements to the slander passages. First, yes, from a modern Western perspective, this very much sounds like a “guilty until proven innocent” situation. Verse 20 says “but if no evidence of the girl’s virginity be found…they shall stone her.” That is, of course, unless you’re Rashi, again, who interprets “no evidence of the girl’s virginity” to mean that it was corroborated “by witnesses, and there was warning, that she had committed adultery after her betrothal.”¹⁰ Again, his interpretation makes sense when you look at the passage from a Jewish legal perspective: because Jewish lawyers were required to interpret the entire law using the entire law, you would not be allowed to put someone to death “except on the word for two or three witnesses.”¹¹ And the word “witnesses” in Jewish culture isn’t like the witnesses in American culture who got an innocent Black man put on death row because they saw him walk out of the room where a girl had died—the word “ed,” also used for inanimate objects, means absolute proofs that something happened. It’s a word also used to describe the heap of stones put up as a signature on a contract—irrevocable data, observed by both parties, that confirms the contract occurred.

In other words, a Jewish witness would have to have actually seen the accused kill the girl, not just see him come out of the room. And something like modern DNA testing would qualify as a witness according to this definition, too.

So again, Rashi’s interpretation makes sense, because Jewish lawyers wouldn’t be allowed to have this girl killed otherwise. In fact, according to Mishnah Makkot, capital punishment is so dangerous that “a Sanhedrin that executes a person once in seven years is considered a destructive tribunal…Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya says this characterization applies to a Sanhedrin that executes a person once in seventy years.”¹² Just for your general knowledge, the Mishnah is even more likely than Rashi to be a reasonable interpretation of Jewish Torah, as it is written during the period of Roman rule by the Rabbi Judah HaNasi, a descendant of the revered Rabbi Hillel whose teaching still influences Passover celebrations today.¹³

Even without the rabbinic commentary, just in the context of the other laws governing capital punishment, while the verse itself does literally read that the woman is stoned unless her father can prove her virginity, it would have been very difficult to put her to death. I’m not going to claim that this law is politically correct for modern people whose mantra is “innocent until proven guilty.” My goal is to be honest, and in all honesty if a law did actually come from a Progenitor Being outside of time and space, we would expect it to neither fit our culture, nor ancient Middle Eastern culture.

Which leads well into the second striking social element of this law: in a Middle Eastern context where a man’s word was law over his wife, it is absolutely wild that suddenly a man’s word was no longer enough to have his wife killed. The men of that time must have been shocked. I mean, contrast this with later medieval European and 19^th century Igbo practice, where leaders would hold “trial” by putting a woman in a deadly situation like drowning or drinking poison and determine her innocence via her unlikely survival. Here in Devarim literally thousands of years before these cultures existed you have a society where debate and proof are required for punishment. What a huge blow to the teleological assumption that “later always equals more advanced,” right?

A man cannot accuse his wife of unfaithfulness without a trial of evidence.

So right away at the beginning of this controversial passage you have protective laws against slander of women—radical new rights ideology not recorded in Middle Eastern history at this point—and that’s the context in which we’re moving into the rape and adultery laws. Contrast this with the Hammurabic woman who, when slandered, is supposed to drown herself!

So on to adultery. I remember being told as a child that the Torah only kills the adulterous woman, not the cheating man. I think I was mistakenly taught this because of the John 8 Brit Chadashah passage where the Pharisees bring a woman alone to Yeshua, accuse her of adultery, and ask if Yeshua’s down for a good old-fashioned stoning. He says, “let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” and then writes in the dirt until the Pharisees leave the woman alone. People somehow used this passage to make me believe it was normal for Jewish Pharisees to only punish the woman. While that John 8 passage doesn’t exist in the earliest Greek manuscripts—and the translator of the Peshitta and Khabouris Aramaic texts for the AENT excludes John 8 as an anti-Semitic pro-adultery fabrication—you could also see John 8 as an affirmation of the Torah if you ask the question my mother used to ask: what did Yeshua write in the dirt? Perhaps, “Where is the man?” Because whatever you think about death penalties for infidelity, verse 22 of Deuteronomy demands the male adulterer receive equal penalty with the female, just like in Habburabai’s code.

So it must have been shocking to the Middle Eastern mind to see that in verses 23-26, for the first time in the region’s recorded history¹⁴ suddenly only one party is seen as responsible for a sexual act: a man who forces a woman into sex.

“But unto the na’arah thou shalt do nothing; there is in the na’arah no chet mavet (sin worthy of death); for as when an ish riseth against his neighbor, and slayeth him, even so is this matter.”

This is the first time in Middle Eastern history that rape is defined in the context of a woman’s autonomy over her own body.

I’ll say that again: up until now, there is no such thing as rape. There’s only sex. Two people have sex against someone’s marriage, drown ‘em. Doesn’t matter if she wanted it or not. It happened. Then suddenly, here in the Torah, the God of Israel says, “actually, it does matter if she wanted it or not. And if she didn’t want it, then it’s just like when a man rises against his neighbor and kills him.”

I mean, wow! Wow!

Outside of its historical context, you can’t see how huge this is. But even today, can you imagine if proven rapists were put to death? And proof here does matter: that’s the whole point of the “field/city” distinction. She’s not liable in the field, because we have no way of knowing if she said “no” or not. She’s liable in the city, because she could have been heard to say no.

So. As a sexual assault forensic medical examiner (have I name-dropped myself enough yet?), I am obliged to tell you that just because a woman doesn’t say “no” audibly doesn’t mean she wants sex. The majority of assailants in our weak modern West are cowards who employ some form of substance, whether that’s a sedative or simply assailants preying on women who are incapacitated because of alcohol. If you’re unconscious, or near-unconscious, you can’t say no. There’s also a biological phenomenon called the “freeze” phenomenon in which, like fight or flight, some people experience such a powerful catecholamine spill from terror that they physically can’t move, not entirely unlike when certain animals “go dead” in the wild before a predator. It can actually become impossible for a person to move or speak, and those victims are usually the most distraught afterwards, because they have no idea why their body didn’t obey them.¹⁵

So ladies and gentlemen, the correct way to have sex, according to scientific sexual assault care protocol, isn’t to make sure the person didn’t say “no,” but to ask them to say “yes,” and to repeatedly check if they still feel “yes” during the act (which we can all agree is sexy anyway—everyone wants an enthusiastic “yes I want you!”).

So then how does a modern sexual assault care provider look at the “no” paradigm here in the “city vs. field”?

First, in these passages there is a responsibility on a woman to have autonomy over her own body. She isn’t automatically a weak victim: she is supposed to say “no” if she’s asked to do something that’s immoral, and she is encouraged—as a member of a warlike society—to fight back. (Have I mentioned that unlike the Greeks, early Semitic societies like Persians and Jews did encourage killer women? We’ll mention it more in a future chapter)

Secondly, however, I am pretty sure there isn’t a single Rabbinic scholar—Rashi included—who wouldn’t agree with me that if you’re incapacitated biologically, you’re “in the field.” I say that because of this verse:

“For…the na’arah hame’orasah cried, and there was no moshia (savior) for her.”

Emphasis on there was no savior for her. She wouldn’t be able to cry out if she was mute, or unconscious, anyway. The passage is assuming an ability to cry out, and the presence of someone else to try to help her. Without those two things, you can’t execute her. In verse 25, if there’s question of the woman’s ability to get help, the man is assumed guilty, and the woman assumed innocent.

When I first wrote this chapter, I was rather angry with some of my memories of my military patients and their cowardly assailants, and I wrote a bit of a diatribe assuming that ancient Israeli masculinity cult warrior behavior would preclude the kind of substance use our cowardly modern assailants favor—sort of a reverse teleological fallacy on my part. Certainly during the Davidic era there’s criticism of the kind of man who uses treachery to gain control of someone else, like the general who pretends to embrace his opponent and then stabs him in the stomach.¹⁶ The reality is, however, that God also specifically discusses my biological “in the field” theory elsewhere in Scripture, this time in the context of a man trying to take advantage of the nakedness of his neighbor:

“Woe to him who makes his neighbors drink—

you pour out your wrath and make them drunk,

in order to gaze at their nakedness!” Habakkuk 2:15, ESV

That middle part translated “you pour out your wrath” in the ESV is translated in the OJB as “pressing the bottle to them,” and in the Koren Tanakh as “mixing in their venom.” In context this unwanted sexual behavior is being used as a metaphor for a civilization conquering another civilization, which is why “pour out your wrath” is used in the ESV; the Hebrew phrase there is “mesapah hamatkah,” literally “joining wineskin,” which for obvious reasons could be joining the wineskin to the person—pressuring them to drink—or joining something to the wineskin. I favor the latter interpretation because of the “piel” conjugation, which seems to read “adding to the wineskin.” An ancient roofie, basically.

But whether this creep just pressures his victims to drink, or also adds an incapacitating toxin, the term “gaze at their nakedness” isn’t just about peeping Tom behavior: in Vayikra (Leviticus) and elsewhere, this is the phrase used as a euphemism for sex, specifically there in the context of incest.¹⁷ Habakkuk 2:16 then goes on to be a bit graphic regarding the assailant’s body parts as a sign of guilt, as God reveals and pours shame upon the assailant’s plot.

Habakkuk isn’t a legal document: it’s a call and response poem about Israel as a disobedient nation being conquered by an even more evil nation, and God meting out justice on both nations. However, one thing is very clear: the writer expects Israeli people to condemn and bring to light the kind of person who would take advantage of someone else’s weakness for sexual purposes, and while there are multiple other poems in the Tanakh that criticize passive drunkenness, the sexual portion of the guilt is only applied to the “drink-mixer.”

When the whole of Scripture is considered together, we conclude that a person who cannot consent or get help is not responsible for sex that happens to them—and the consenting party, here in Deuteronomy the man, gets the death penalty whether sneaky “in the field” or violent “in the city.” We are looking at laws originally given to assumed warriors with limited forensics, but I think I’ve made it clear that even if those laws were applied to men today in our substance-obsessed context, the penalty for having sex with a woman who can’t say “no” would be the same as the penalty for proven premeditated murder: death.

That adds some gravitas to those drunk one-night stands, doesn’t it?¹⁸

I can actually hear certain self-proclaimed “sex-positive” men arguing that verse 25 is unfair because of its assumed male guilt—remember, however, that this is describing a case for which the adultery is already established, and we’re trying to ascertain the question of consent. Consent issues aren’t exclusive to women, of course, and we do have at least one nonconsenting female-on-male sexual attempt mentioned in the Tanakh: the case of Joseph, where Potiphar’s wife takes physical action despite his clear “no” and actually grabs hold of and removes his clothing (in my field, that’s at least an attempted unwanted sexual contact charge). In general, however, the God of Israel seems to be acutely aware of the power imbalance between men and women in the culture he’s working with. You can argue that it’s unfair that the consent of the man in the Deuteronomy passage seems to be assumed, but I would actually go so far as to argue that the man’s consent is only assumed when he is the more powerful party. I can make this argument because of the sentence, “for this is like when a man rises up against another man and kills him.” In other words, it’s not actually about gender, but about power.

Which—as any sexual assault expert will tell you—is what most rape is really about anyway.

And this is all incredible background for us as we get to our much-maligned verse 28.

“|28| If an ish find a na’arah that is a betulah, which is not orasah (betrothed), and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;|29| Then the ish that lay with her shall give unto the avi hana’arah fifty [shekels] of kesef, and she shall be his isha; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his yamim.”

Just a throw-away observation here, taking into account my Liberian friend’s cultural perspective on demonstrating respect for a woman through bride price: 50 pieces of silver is more than the price paid for the Messiah both in Zechariah’s prophecies and in the actual life of Yeshua when he was betrayed by his friend (30 pieces of silver).¹⁹ Just pointing out that this woman’s sexuality gets a higher going price than the whole divine Anointed One.

But we’re here to talk about rape, so let’s talk about rape. Because of the highlighted distinction between the betrothed and not-betrothed woman and the context of adultery, people usually assume that verse 28 is talking about rape of a non-engaged woman, while the verse 25 is talking about the rape of an engaged woman.

The problem is that the words used to describe the sex aren’t the same, and when you assume you make a misogynist out of you and me and your Bible translator.

The word translated in the NIV version of the bride-price section as “rape,” and in the OJB as “lay hold on her,” is actually the word taphas, or to take. I don’t know if the NIV translators just never had experience with a woman saying “take me,”²⁰ but even in a modern sexual context when a woman begs her husband to take her she’s definitely not saying “rape me,” because consent is literally stated. I’ll grant that taphas is absolutely translated in many places as “seize,” and I think it probably shouldn’t be—it’s a pretty generic term, and even in a warlike context you’d still say “soldiers, let’s take that hill.” Potiphar’s wife does “take” Joseph’s coat when trying to force him to have sex with her, but it’s the coat that’s ultimately taken, not him. The first time the word is used in Scripture is actually Bereshit (Genesis) 4:21:

His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who taphas the lyre and pipe.

Look, he’s not “raping” the lyre. I don’t know much about Jubal, but I do know a little bit about music, and that part of the body just doesn’t really work with guitar-shaped instruments. It would even be weird to say he’s “seizing” the lyre.

I have another reason for arguing that taphas sex is general sex, not rape. There are two important “single lady” sexual assault cases in the Bible we can look at to see how rape is defined in action. The most obvious case is 2 Samuel 13, and there the root word for that rape is chazaq—literally, he “overpowered” her. Not taphas.

The other passage is the rape of Dinah. There it says the rapist carried her away (laqah) to lie down with her (shakab) by bending her over in oppression (ana). Interestingly, he’s then described as “speaking tenderly” to her. You see, Dinah’s oppressor is more of a twisted figure who wants her long-term, not a purely violent brute like the rapist in Samuel—but the guy’s state of “niceness” doesn’t determine whether or not it’s rape, but rather her state of “affliction.” And here again, even in Dinah’s case, the writer uses other specific terms to explain that this was “rape.” Taphas isn’t rape.

We also learn a lot from the reactions in these passages. In the rape of Dinah, the guy actually intended to marry her, but not only does her father not require her to marry the man, but her brothers get so mad they kill the guy’s entire people group when he makes the offer—pretty unfair to all the non-rapists in that people group, but a clear demonstration of how negatively they viewed the idea of marriage after this oppressive sexual intercourse. Someone will argue the brothers were just angry an uncircumcised foreigner slept with their pure sister, but actually they clearly state that they’re only pretending to care about the circumcision, and that they’re just extremely angry he treated her this way.

Then we have the woman’s reaction in that 2 Samuel scenario: because she is acutely aware of her economic and social position, she argues with her assailant that by kicking her out afterwards in front of the servants (instead of providing for her), he’s done a worse thing to her than the assault itself. She’s not afraid of being forced to have sex again. She’s afraid of being shamed and disadvantaged for the future. I will freely admit she would absolutely have used this passage to argue that her assailant owed her a living payment for the rest of her life, but not on the basis of rape: on the basis of sex itself. ²¹

Remember, we’re literally looking at the passage in Deuteronomy where the concept of rape is being invented.²² There is literally not a word for rape still! Even the most obvious and horrific gang rape in Scripture, the assault of a concubine in Judges, doesn’t have its own term: the root words used there are alal (mistreat) coupled with yadah (to know, slang for sex)—in other words, sex that is mistreating, and condemned because it is mistreating. Not sex that is bad because it was offensive to the man who “owned” the woman—he okayed it when he locked her out with the rapists. Consent and unkindness are the mitigating factors here, and neither of the terms used for this nonconsensual sex show up in this Deuteronomy marriage, either.

More important than any of these examples—since some of these scrolls are separated from each other by hundreds of years, and therefore it’s best to interpret a word in the context of its own scroll if we can—

Verse 25, where rape was defined and equated with murder, uses the root chazaq (overpower). That word is not used in the context of a man paying 50 shekels to marry the woman he slept with. If the point were that survivors must marry their rapists, wouldn’t the writer have used the same descriptors he used just a few verses earlier? Wouldn’t this same writer use the same words he used when he described Dinah’s case in Bereshit? If the point is “marry your rapist,” why not just say it? It’s easy enough just to say ana or chazaq one more time, isn’t it?

These words make all the difference, and this mistranslation, by the way, is exactly why it’s important to have gender equality on Bible translation teams and in higher-level seminary training. This one word in the NIV would absolutely have been caught by a survivor: next to God, the other person who best knows what it means to “love your neighbor” is your neighbor herself. To a non-victimized man, this is just a tiny word for some ancient Jews to worry about; to a rape victim, this is the question of God’s justice and character.²³

But the word here in Devarim 22 is take, not rape.

Now. Is it possible for a person to “take” another person without overpowering them, and it to be rape? Absolutely. But it’s disingenuous to claim that the passage says something it doesn’t say. It simply does not say a woman must marry her rapist. It says a man who takes a nonbetrothed woman for sex must marry her.

Does this general “taking” sex include rape, however?

You could maybe make that argument. This passage doesn’t say either way. I’d actually say no, because Shemot (Exodus) 22:16 restates this exact same situation, but in the context of restitution law instead of sexual law. In that passage, the word is pathah—to seduce, entice. A man who entices a nonbetrothed woman for sex must marry her. And like in the case of the Gospels, when these Torah laws are restated across scrolls it’s usually to clarify a point or drive it home. Take is a pretty general term. Entice, however, isn’t. Entice is clearly consensual.²⁴ This is a legal document, and the entire legal code must be interpreted in the context of the rest of the legal code.

Shemot 22 also has extra sentences that Devarim doesn’t. It’s pretty clear that Exodus 22 isn’t, “oh I want this girl, so I’m going to rape her, and then I get to marry her,” because in the next sentence, after prescribing the “pay a bride price and marry her” remedy, the passage then provides the penalty for the man in case she doesn’t marry him: he still has to pay the bride price. There are options here! She’s not required to marry him, but he’s required to pay up.

The bottom line is that a man can’t have sex with a woman—potentially making her pregnant—and then leave her to deal with the medical and economic fall-out. I have personally taken care of a post-abortive woman who was initially excited to find out she was pregnant, but then the loser boyfriend was unhappy about it, and her simpering command team said, “oh, but we were going to promote you, and now you’re pregnant…” So she sought out an abortion. She was lied to by the male “physician” who provided the abortion, who failed to offer her financial support resources, failed to perform a mental health evaluation (the anniversary of her brother’s suicide was not the time for this huge decision), and failed to perform an ultrasound to rule out the danger of an ectopic pregnancy—and then also claimed that because it was “just the abortion pill” it would be “just like a period.” Yeah, like a period from hell. She was in the most intense pain she’d ever been in her life, took all her pain medications, also got drunk, fell down and hit her head, and ended up in my ICU after dropping two points of hemoglobin because she’d bled so much. The worst part of it was that she remembered trying to find the baby in the products of conception that came out of her. She’s going to remember pawing through that blood for the rest of her life.

She was never able to find that baby.

She wanted that baby, and the only people who ultimately benefited from her abortion were the men around her. I still feel a sick rage over this case, and for years I couldn’t talk about it without having either flashbacks or breaking down crying. This is exactly the kind of thing this Shemot rule prevents. A man doesn’t get to have sex if he’s not big boy enough to take responsibility for what might happen afterwards. Full stop. That’s the God I serve.

Could this “get married” law be abused in everyday use? Yes. Sure. Theoretically I suppose two non-betrothed people could intentionally have sex, get “caught,” and then use this to push for a quicker marriage.²⁵ Could a father use Deut. 22 to marry a girl off to someone that wasn’t good for her? Probably.

But a woman’s father would already marry her off like that in much of the Middle East, and literally every rule in the Torah can be abused—Yeshua even points out in the 1^st century how the passages about donating to the Temple were later abused by the religious leaders to mean they didn’t have to take care of their aging parents²⁶ and how the passages about divorce could be used to get rid of a woman for no reason. This is coming from a man who loved those laws, who universally kept them, who said that not a single dot of them would pass away until the entire Universe collapses! The allowance for divorce, Yeshua says, is “because of the hardness of your hearts,” and that’s a striking way to interpret some of these older passages: he’s essentially saying that God’s actual law of love is stricter than what is written in these specific Torah passages, and that sometimes God in his mercy makes allowances for things that he doesn’t like while we’re still evolving and learning as a society. As Paul states in Galatians, these laws are like stop-gaps and teachers: they exist because sin exists, and they exist to curb that sin. Does that mean Paul thinks they’re imperfect? Absolutely not. It’s not like when you graduate from your teachers you’re supposed to forget everything they taught you. These laws are just specific use cases of a much broader law: the law of love laid out in Vayikra, “you shall love your reacha (your fellow, your buddy, your ‘neighbor’) as yourself.”

And God seems to think it wouldn’t be very loving to rape your buddy.

And I get it. We’d like to see God go further. We’d like to see God straight out come down and change all of Middle Eastern culture in one fell swoop. Because unlike God, we’re impatient imperialists. But for the women of that day—women who saw marriage and children as an end financial status goal beyond romance, women so desperate to survive that Tamar would pretend to be a prostitute in order to get pregnant when her husband wouldn’t hold up his end of the sexual deal, women so desperate that the 2 Samuel 13 rape victim would demand that her assailant marry her (he didn’t, by the way)—

Well, can’t you see, dear one, how Deuteronomy would be game changing for those women? And how if we applied the logic of these laws today, for completely different reasons they’d be game-changing for us, too?

You see, this is a God for all cultures, the same God for the veiled Middle Eastern woman and the short-haired European butch. That’s the central prayer of Judaism, isn’t it? Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad—he is One, the one God for and over all people, not just the god of the hills, not just the god of the valleys, but the god of all things. And this same God who’ll kill a man for assault also loves these ancient Middle Eastern men I find it hard not to hate, and instead of laying out all of morality and science for us on a golden platter, this God leaves us a lot of room for growth precisely because he loves his Oneness in our diversity, precisely because he wants relationship with us as we discover him through history. Morality is the side effect of a relationship with him, not the goal.

And God is pretty aggressive with those Middle Eastern men, to tell you the truth. There are a lot more men struck down randomly in their sin in Scripture than women—it’s striking to me how many people God doesn’t execute, but it’s not like he’s just hanging out letting people walk all over him. I see in Deuteronomy 22 the beginnings of the dawn. I see the same God who praised the murderess Jael and the prophetess Deborah and the prostitute Rahab for taking matters into their own hands, a God who did create laws that protect women, but also treated women as their own protagonists. The women in the Tanakh are rarely damsels in distress. Esther saves her own people with clever intrigue, and even though she spends three days in prayer, God’s name isn’t even mentioned in her scroll of the Bible. The sexual slave Hagar becomes the first person in Scripture to name God, and while he’s the one who shows her water to save her life in the desert, she’s still the one who seizes it. The daughters of Zelophad orchestrate their own land-grab and are praised for it, like Ocsah in Judges, and the egalitarian fact that Job’s daughters inherit land with their brothers is shown as a sign of his virtue. Huldah the prophetess tells the male king of Israel what to do. I mean, I’m going to sound tongue-in-cheek here, but how feminist would it actually be if the God who identifies as male does all the changing of male-dominated society for us, without us?

The rape passage in Deuteronomy makes it clear we need a Moschiach to save us. God is that. That’s why he put his foot down and defined rape for men who were too stupid to just naturally figure it out. But also, God is a Ruach HaKodesh for a reason: a spiritual force that moves through us while we act. That’s why he doesn’t write you a textbook on Chlamydia and spell out every detail of sexual morality that could possibly be necessary through all of time. Because he is Echad, one: the God of your weakness depending on him, and the God of your individualist strength.

I don’t know your life. I don’t know what you’ve been through. But I know that the same God who will absolutely one day take vengeance for his children didn’t sanction the translation of the Bible that literally undoes what his law historically did for his people.

So if modern rape culture doesn’t come from ancient Judaism, where does it come from?