I updated this post. Scripture: Deuteronomy 21:10-14. I knew a kid named Carl at elementary school, my contemporary. He was half European-American and half Japanese. His dad had married a Japanese girl after WWII and brought her over here.
I knew a Vietnamese hairdresser who married a European-American during the Vietnam War, and now she lives over here.
War-time marriages like those happen in our own times. Now what about the ancient Near East?
War was a fact of life in the ancient Near East. When an Israelite soldier whose army was victorious saw a woman he was attracted to, what could he do? In the larger ancient Near East, war led to rape. See the second link in the Preliminaries section for a more gruesome description of this cultural fact.
The Torah says no to rape but yes to marriage.
As usual, I write to learn.
If you would like to see other translations, please go to biblegateway.com.
Preliminaries
I deposit the same preliminaries in each post in the series on slavery in the Torah, because each post functions as a standalone. Readers don’t typically click on all the links in the series.
One of the most important points to have in mind is that the Torah is an incomplete revelation. It could be amended.
For example, the four daughters of Zelophehad, who had died earlier, took their case before Moses and Eleazar the high priest. Since he died, why should his name die among his clan? The four girls requested an inheritance among their father’s relatives. Moses took the case before the Lord, and God replied that the four girls were right and ordered Moses to give them property among his father’s relatives.
Another example: Jesus said in Matthew 19:1-9 that Moses allowed for easy divorce for the men (Deut. 24:1-4). However, in the beginning, in Genesis 1:27, 2:24, God himself ordained marriage and intended it to last. Moses eased up on this ideal and allowed for divorce because of the people’s hardness of heart. Thus, the Torah sometimes left the ideal behind.
In Genesis 1:28, God said that “we” should make humankind in their own image, in the image of God. The theme of humankind being in the image of God is repeated in Genesis 5:1. The abolitionists used this theology to defeat slavery in the past four centuries. And so all slave laws in the Torah do not endorse slavery but regulates the already-existing institution. That’s why many laws begin with phrases such as “Suppose a man has a slave.” Or “What if a man owns a slave?”
And so the later legal parts of the Torah (the halakha) responds to the flawed conditions in the ancient Near East because slavery was universal. But the Torah never says, “Thou shalt buy slaves! Thou must have a slave! That’s an order!”
Finally ….
Skeptical, unfriendly reader of the Torah: “I demand that you denounce this law about marrying captive of war in the Torah! It is immoral!””
Friendly, non-specialist reader of the Torah (me): “The best that I can do is announce that this law was culturally conditioned by its surrounding ancient culture and is therefore irrelevant to the world and the church today. The Torah was not exhaustive but is incomplete.
Let’s leave behind, just for a moment, the law of marrying a captive of war and discuss slave laws more generally.
The laws represent a moral hazard, by which wrongdoing could be committed against the slave or indentured bondservant, if the master broke the law. These laws are morally risky. But if the laws were followed, then the risk would diminish. (Think of the death penalty in the Old Testament. If the wrong man were to be executed, then a great injustice would be committed. Thus the death penalty is also a moral hazard or risk. But if the right man were executed, then the risk embedded in the law of capital punishment would diminish, though the moral hazard always lurks in the background.) Further, as just noted, the Torah is not exhaustive but is incomplete. The slave laws represent a decline from the ideal in Genesis 1:28, due to the hardness of hearts of these ancient people. Next, these laws are of interest to specialists who observe that some of the laws improved on slave laws in the larger ancient Near East, in some cases.
God’s accommodation to the ancient context and people and Incremental progress is a fact of Scripture.
Interpreting the Bible and Accommodation
Also, this video from Truth Unites is excellent because it has more information about slavery in the ancient Near East and Roman empire.
Now let’s return to the law of marrying a captive of war.
In the next video, Truth Unites deals with the cultural context of the ancient Near East during and after warfare:
The Torah 9improves on its brutal culture in which it was written.
Let’s begin.
Scripture
10 When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives, 11 if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife. 12 Bring her into your home and have her shave her head, trim her nails 13 and put aside the clothes she was wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house and mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. 14 If you are not pleased with her, let her go wherever she wishes. You must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her. (Deut. 21:10-14, NIV)
Commentary
The text is straightforward, except a few customs, noted under point no. three. Let’s look at the elements one by one.
(1) A war was fought between two sides in a distant land (20:15). This is not a war within Canaan or with the neighboring Canaanites. This is not a raid with the purpose of kidnapping, which inflicted the death penalty on the kidnapper (Exod. 21:16; Deut. 24:7). Israel is victorious in a war.
(2) A soldier notices a beautiful woman and is attracted to her, but he must take her as his wife. This is not the same as rape. The Torah says no. It is marriage or nothing.
(3) The Torah recommends these ancient customs: shaving her head, trimming her nails and replacing her clothing. Earl S. Kalland says that these actions symbolize moving past her former life because her family may have been killed. If they were still alive, then she still needed to move on. “These cleansing rites (cf. Lev. 14:8; Num. 8:7; 2 Sam. 19:24) initiated the woman into the Israelite family [….] (Deuteronomy: The Expositor’s Bible Commentary with the New International Version, Zondervan, 1990, comment on vv. 10-14, p. 132).
(4) Then she may mourn for a full month, since she lost her family.
(5) After that, the soldier may take her as his wife and consummate the marriage.
(6) However, if for some reason the soldier is not pleased with her, he may let her go. Deut. 24:1-4 allows for divorce when two Israelites get married, by the man writing a certificate of divorce. Here, no such certificate is brought up, so the divorce may be easier.
(7) But he must not see her as a business product and sell or enslave her. He would profit unjustly from her, as a human being. He dishonored her because he rejected her after he had sex with her (Kalland).
John Walton in the NIV Cultural Background Study Bible (Zondervan, 2016) says the following about parallel texts in the ancient Near East:
The Mari texts also instruct that clothing and jobs be provided to captive women. The rights given to the former captive are similar to those given to Israelite women and demonstrate that there was no reduction of her status if divorce were to occur. Similar concerns are reflected in Assyrians laws, in which married former captives are required to dress like ordinary Assyrian women of that social class. (comment on vv. 10-14, p. 331)
How does our knowledge of the Bible in its own context of the ancient Near East grow?
The law is clear. I see no need to go past what the NIV Biblical Study Bible says, so I let the commentator summarize it:
The law relates to the previous commands dealing with human life and war and the following command regarding polygamous marriage. Both laws show the importance of respecting human life in compromising situations. The first law is striking in its limitation. A perennial problem in war is rape, but this was forbidden in Israel. If a soldier was attracted to a woman, he had to marry her, and he could do so only when she had lived with him in a state of humiliation and mourning for a month. If he changes his mind after they were married, she had to be granted her freedom. Her dignity had to be guarded, and she could not be treated as a slave. The fact that female prisoners of war could be taken as wives by the Israelites does not sanction the practice so much as regulate and transform it. (comment on vv. 1-14)
I really like how the commentator says that the Bible does not necessarily approve of the custom of marrying captives of war, but regulates it. So the Torah, once again, was accommodating and guiding and regulating ancient Israel, which was situated in its larger culture. Rape after war happened often, but the Torah says no to this awful act. Instead, the Torah says marriage only–before sex.
The Torah upholds the rights of captive woman by requiring the soldier to marry her before sex and not allowing him to rape her before marriage (or any other time).
This law appear primitive by our twenty-first-century standard. (The closest we come are the stories I recounted in the introduction, and the two parties are willing). In any case, the ancient Israelites don’t live in our times; they lived in theirs. And the Torah provided the captive woman with some dignity and status and legal protections.
ARTICLES IN THE SERIES
1. Torah and Slavery: Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar
2. Torah and Slavery: Israelite Indentured Servants
3. Torah and Slavery: Impoverished Father Sells His Daughter to Be a ‘Secondary Wife’
4. Torah and Slavery: What Happened When Masters Punished Their Slaves?
5. Torah and Slavery: Protecting Slave Women from Injustice
6. Torah and Slavery: Foreign Slaves
7. Torah and Slavery: Marrying Captives of War
RELATED
Slavery and Freedom in the Bible (an overview, for the big picture)
The Biblical Norm for Marriage
What Does the New Covenant Retain from the Old?
How Jesus Christ Fulfills the Law: Matthew 5:17-19
How Christians Should Interpret the Old Testament
5 Slavery in the Quran, Traditions, and Classical Sharia Law
The link to Islam has a section on having sex with female captives of war without marrying her. And so even though the Quran was written 600 years after Jesus, it still follows a misreading of the Old Testament. Let’s not go backwards.
SOURCES
Dr. Jim's Essential Bible Teaching 