Kyle Butt from Apologetics Press was cited to justify denying "rape" was the subject of Deuteronomy 22:28-29. Here's that passage in context:
23 "If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man, and another man finds her in the city and lies with her,When I noticed that this Christian apologist viewpoint wasn't balanced by citation to contrary opinions by equally "inerrantist" Christian scholars, I thought the public was done a disservice, and decided the article needed some balancing. So I made a public edit to the article as follows:
24 then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city and you shall stone them to death; the girl, because she did not cry out in the city, and the man, because he has violated his neighbor's wife. Thus you shall purge the evil from among you.
25 "But if in the field the man finds the girl who is engaged, and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lies with her shall die.
26 "But you shall do nothing to the girl; there is no sin in the girl worthy of death, for just as a man rises against his neighbor and murders him, so is this case.
27 "When he found her in the field, the engaged girl cried out, but there was no one to save her.
28 "If a man finds a girl who is a virgin, who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her and they are discovered, 29 then the man who lay with her shall give to the girl's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall become his wife because he has violated her; he cannot divorce her all his days. (Deut. 22:23-29 NAU)
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But not all inerrantist Christian scholars agree that Deut. 22:28-29 is mere consensual fornication:
"At first glance the next example, the rape of an unbetrothed girl, might appear to have been a lesser offense than those already described, but this was not the case at all. First, he seized (Heb. tāpaś, “lay hold of”) her and then lay down (šākab) with her, a clear case of violent, coercive behavior."[25]
Furthermore, Exodus 22:16-17 does not specify that the man "violated" her, but Deuteronomy 22:29 does. The Hebrew word for violated is עָנָה/anah, which means to be bowed down, afflicted. Every other time this word is used to describe two people interacting, it is always describing a man forcing a woman to have sex against her will (i.e., rape):
- Later, if you no longer want her, you are to let her go free. Since you forced her to have intercourse with you (Hebrew: anah), you cannot treat her as a slave and sell her. (Deut. 21:14, Good News Translation. The GNT was "...published by the American Bible Society...it is a clear and simple modern translation that is faithful to the original Hebrew, Koine Greek, and Aramaic texts. The GNT is a highly trusted version."
- "If you mistreat (Hebrew: anah) my daughters, or if you take wives besides my daughters, although no man is with us, see, God is witness between you and me." (Gen. 31:50 NAU)
- But the men of Gibeah rose up against me and surrounded the house at night because of me. They intended to kill me; instead, they ravished (Hebrew: anah) my concubine so that she died. (Jdg 20:5 NAS)
- However, he would not listen to her; since he was stronger than she, he violated (Hebrew: anah) her and lay with her. (2Sa 13:14 NAS)
- Jonadab, the son of Shimeah, David's brother, responded, "Do not let my lord suppose they have put to death all the young men, the king's sons, for Amnon alone is dead; because by the intent of Absalom this has been determined since the day that he violated (Hebrew: anah) his sister Tamar. (2 Sam. 13:32 NAU)
- They ravished (Hebrew: anah )the women in Zion, The virgins in the cities of Judah. (Lam 5:11 NAS)
12th century Rabbi Moses Maimonides said the man’s use of force would require that he marry his victim and never divorce her:
"every maiden expects to be married, her seducer therefore is only ordered to marry her; for he is undoubtedly the fittest husband for her. He will better heal her wound and redeem her character than any other husband. If, however, he is rejected by her or her father, he must give the dowry (Exod. xxii. 15). If he uses violence he has to submit to the additional punishment, " he may not put her away all his days " (Deut. xxii. 29).[26]
While the above grammatical and historical interpretation makes it appear one of the authors or editors of Deuteronomy were misogynist, that is only the concern of today's Christian apologists who wish to make the god of the bible appear harmonious with modern American concepts fairness, equality and woman's rights. But in Leviticus 19:20-22, the master who rapes a slave girl who had been previously betrothed to another man, is forgiven of the sin by simply giving up one of his animals to the priests. Some inerrantist Christian scholars agree it is reasonable to view this as "rape" and not merely consensual fornication:
"It is worth noting that only the man was considered blameworthy, not the female slave. Being a slave, the woman may have felt she had little recourse in resisting a male who was a free man and thus more powerful both in the social and economic spheres."[27]
Furthermore, had this not been rape but mere consensual fornication, then it would have qualified as adultery, in which case the author's explicit refusal to impose the death penalty (Leviticus 20:10) is stated by him as the female's having lower social status: "...because she was not free", so the misogyny persists in the text regardless of the efforts made to side-step it.
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See the article here. Let me know if, as is likely, Christians come along and remove my contribution.
UPDATE: January 27, 2020
Christian apologists will obviously pretend that the Good News Translation for Deuteronomy 21:14 is "false" or "inaccurate", because it then requires God's human mouth-piece Moses to admit that his law on marrying a female war captive (Deut. 21:10-13) would likely result in the law-observant Hebrew man "raping" the girl (v. 14).
But a google search indicates It was one Eugene Nida, a linguist who became a Christian in the typical fundamentalist way, who was responsible for that dynamic translation. Wikipedia says Nida "became a Christian at a young age, when he responded to the altar call at his church "to accept Christ as my Saviour."
See here. Nida gets accolades from trustworthy Christian sources, see here. The point being that Christian apologists do not have the expedient of complaining that the translator was some god hating skeptic or liberal, he was a "Christian", and when combined with my observation of cognate usage, supra, it's pretty clear that Nida got it right: the "anah" of Deut. 21:14 does NOT mean "lowered in social status by divorce", but "rape".
The fact that such translation scandalizes fundamentalists who are forever being god's lawyers and trying to fix all of his defects to make him more palatable to modern Western sensibilities, changes nothing: not only does God's law facilitate circumstances that increase the probability of "rape", not only does the biblical author presume the divorce from the female war captive was after a "rape", but the law does not express or imply any punishment for such "rape", likely because "marriage" had been slapped onto the circumstance by this barbarian law, and so her rape, while true, was not deemed offensive to God's own morals.
Like the case I discussed about Leviticus 19:20-22, how deserving of punishment the rape is, depends on the circumstances, which assures the modern Christian that the bible god is a very far cry from the basic notions of woman's rights held by most of today's Christian women.
What needs to be remembered is that my viewpoint here is "reasonable", and it isn't going to become "unreasonable" because of a few squeeks, squawks and trifles raised by desperate apologists.
And I defy all of them to challenge me via dialogue with me. Any fucking fool can "write a rebuttal", how hard is that?
But, maintain the scholarly justification for your position while you are being pummeled in real time with difficult questions? That's a whole 'nother story. One not likely to be correctly told by using a moose-character and Looney-Tunes sound effects unless of course you ADMIT your intended audience are ages 3-6?
