| Recently, I saw a Ray Comfort video that dealt with an objection he had heard to the Bible, saying it forced a woman who is raped to marry her rapist.He argued that the passage did not refer to rape. I look at the package and the girl seizes the girl and lays with her. Why does it say 'seize' if it was concentual? It seems like a rape passage to me. The point he didn't address was that the man was forced to rape the girl, not the other way around, and he could not divorce her. Since women could not initiate divorce, he was losing his legal options. There is a seduction passage where the father of the bride can choose not to give his daughter in marriage to a man who took her virginity, but the man has to pay the bride price. The whole thing does not fit well with most American's values. Fathers giving their daughters in marriage is a vague cultural memory from the distant past. Could it be that our culture puts too much value on individual freedom and not enough on such things as two becoming one flesh, virginity, etc. The laws in Deuteronomy would keep people, women at least, from having multiple sexual partners floating around there. Even some fairly modern research (Teachman, 1990) indicates that women who have sexual partners besides their husband before marriage are much more likely to experience 'marital disruption.' I heard a pastor recently repenting of his ancestors being slave owners. He mentioned Christians using the Bible to justify slavery in the past. But the Old Testament did allow slavery. It wasn't the US version, and they probably didn't have the system where they locked slaves up tightly on ships for weeks at a time where many of them died and sold the ones that survived. Slaves could be set free if the master injured them in the Old Testament and laws against turning in escaped slaves made the system almost quasi-voluntary. But it was slavery nonetheless, and there were slave-owners among the people of God like Isaac and Philemon. Our holy and righteous God did have Israel wipe out cities and villages of cities of certain peoples who were given to idolatry and wickedness. I know some of these things in the Bible are rough for people with contemporary western values and mores, but I do not think we should try to argue that the Bible says something that it does not in apologetics |