Monday, June 8, 2020

My invitation to James A. Jardin

Mr. Jardin in 2013 wrote a paper called The Slaughter of the Midianites in Numbers 31, a Group Exegetical Paper.  I found it through Academia.edu, here.

Therein, he defends the traditional conservative Christian view that Numbers 31:18 wasn't about authorizing rape.  I sent him the following message:
Hello,
With reference to your "Numbers 31:13-24 Exegetical Paper",
 What would be unreasonable in interpreting Numbers 31:18 as approval of sex within adult-child marriages?   It's therefore not about "adultery" or pre-marital "fornication", so I'm not seeing the problem.
 I see nothing in the bible indicating the minimum age the girl must reach before she can be married, not all sexual relations require penetrative intercourse, the atrocities of the ancient Israelites prove they were nothing close to the modern democratic American, God wanted women to experience vaginal pain on first intercourse anyway, and as I'm sure you know, the Babylonian Talmud, which is reasonably presumed to reveal ancient Jewish traditions, several times indicates approval of sexual intercourse between a man and a prepubescent girl.
 In your paper you claim Deut. 21:10-14 was intended to protect female war captives from rape, but on the contrary, this authorization for a man to marry such a woman gives not the slightest indication that the woman's consent was needed, the Hebrew "anah" in v. 14 always means rape in other bible verses describing men interacting with woman, and the decidedly pro-Christian Good News Translation renders v. 14 as "you forced her to have intercourse with you..." which would hardly be the case if those Christian translators felt there was any reasonable way to spin the literary evidence to get rid of the rape-implication.
 Maybe the question should be whether the non-Christian can be "reasonable" to reject the democratic conservative Christiain interpretation of Numbers 31:18 and continue viewing it as approval of sex within adult-child marriages?
 I've done a massive amount of research on those issues, and I'd like to see how a Christian who has studied them answers my concerns.
 Thank you for your time,
 Barry  (barryjoneswhat@gmail.com)
I hope to recieve Mr. Jarden's reply, as nearly no Christians appear willing to take up this challenge.  Of course, there's always the hyena "apologist" who is frightened of real-time debate, and keeps his tithing customers happy by doing the occasional cartoon video about some argument I present here, but I'm requesting seriously interactive scholarship on the level of Outback Steakhouse.  Not the hide-and-seek bullshit one gets at Chuck E Cheese.  The last time I raised the pedophilia-issue in a Christian-chat room, noody could refute me and several admitted they couldn't say for sure whether God condemns sex within adult-child marriages.  I think it had something to do with my combining Romans 13 with a 19th century Delaware law which set the age of sexual consent at 7.

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