This is my reply to an article by Dr. Jonathan McLatchie entitled
More than two years ago, I participated in a debate in Oxford, England, with atheist YouTuber Alex O’Connor (who goes by the online alias Cosmic Skeptic). The subject was “Why I Am / Am Not a Christian,” which was quite broad. Given the short time constraints of the debate and the breadth of the topic, we were regrettably unable to pursue an explication of our differences with the depth that I would prefer.
And when I challenged you with a list of possible topics worded in a polite respectful manner, being the very first communication I ever sent to you, you absolutely refused to debate me for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with my ability or inability to significantly challenge you on the merits of your beliefs. See here.
Nonetheless, I very much appreciated my interaction that evening with O’Connor, including the dinner we enjoyed together before the event.
You enjoyed having dinner with an atheist? What fellowship hath light with darkness? And you call yourself a bible-believing Christian? Then so is John Dominic Crossan.
I have long viewed O’Connor as one of the more philosophically nuanced atheist thinkers, and I have valued our ongoing private discussions subsequent to our initial public dialogue.
And what about the opinion of those other people in your Calvinist group, like Sye Bruggencate and Jeff Durbin, or their teachers Van Til, Greg Bahnsen and John Frame, who think anything an atheist has to say in defense of any non-Christian tenet is pure blasphemy? Wow, I didn't know you valued blasphemy. Or did I forget that Calvinism and presuppositionalism are houses divided no less than Protestantism is?
My positive argument in the debate concerned the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, while O’Connor focused on moral critiques of the Bible.
Then such a lopsided debate likely had the convenient effect of allowing one side to avoid having to answer the more difficult questions, while had you both been debating a single solitary proposition, the cross-examination would have been more comprehensive.
In his portion of the cross-examination, O’Connor chose to focus on the issue of slavery in the Old Testament. The last of the texts we discussed was Numbers 31:15-18, which was interpreted by O’Connor to endorse sexual slavery. At the time, this was not an issue that I had researched with great depth, though I recognized it as a difficult text. My preparation for the debate had largely been on the evidences for New Testament reliability, and its epistemic relevance to developing a robust case for the resurrection. I therefore acknowledged it as a difficult text without offering any detailed response.
If you weren't such a cessationist, you would not have needed time to prepare for the subject matter anymore than would the people Jesus described as puppets in Matthew 10:20. You worry too much. Just let go and let God.
If you are not a cessationist, then why didn't the Holy Spirit do for the unprepared you, what He allegedly did for the apostles when they needed to give answers? Maybe you didn't pray enough? Maybe you had secret or unconfessed sin in your life? Or must I assume, contrary to the NT, that the spiritual world had nothing to do with you being less prepared than you wished to be?
Earlier this week, Alex O’Connor uploaded the clip from our debate, in which this text was discussed, to his Cosmic Clips spin-off channel. I therefore thought it an appropriate time to publish an article offering my current perspective on this difficult text. Here is the passage under discussion (Num 31:15-18):15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he [Moses] asked them. 16 “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.The first thing to note about this text is that it is not technically God who gives the instructions. Thus, on the worst case scenario, one may interpret this text as being descriptive of Moses’ command, rather than it being an act endorsed by God. Nonetheless, even supposing (as I think is more likely) that Moses’ instruction carries with it God’s approval, I do not believe it to be as problematic as it might appear on first impression.
Good save: God told Moses to take "full" vengeance on the Midianites (Numbers 31:2), so it was intended to be a genocide.
O’Connor believes that this text gives permission to the Hebrew soldiers to rape Midianite war captives.
He's not going far enough, Numbers 31:18 constitutes Moses' advocating marital pedophilia. O'Connor didn't hit you as hard as he possibly could have. You should thank him for having mercy on you.
However, such an interpretation would fly in the face of every piece of clear moral legislation on sexual relations that we have in the Hebrew Bible.
How do you expect your "scripture interprets scripture" rule to be the least bit impressive or obligatory on an unbeliever who clearly denies biblical inerrancy and biblical consistency?
Do you the juror demand that the prosecutor reconcile all of his theories of the case with everything the suspect said on the witness stand? No.
There is no universally recognized rule of historiography, hermeneutics or common sense that obligates anybody to presume moral consistency in a text of theocratic rules that allegedly began in somewhere between 1400 b.c. and 650 b.c., the original text of which most scholars think has been altered numerous times over the centuries, with definite anachronisms?
There is nothing the least bit unreasonable in the unbeliever-hermeneutic that says that on account of the Hebrew texts admitting they fell into idolatry nearly every day, charging them with inconsistent legislation is about as worrisome as charging the Canaanites with inconsistent legislation.
For example, in Deuteronomy 22:23-27:23 “If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, 24 then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. 25 “But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. 26 But you shall do nothing to the young woman; she has committed no offense punishable by death. For this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbor, 27 because he met her in the open country, and though the betrothed young woman cried for help there was no one to rescue her. [emphasis added]According to this text, the crime of rape is so serious that it is punishable by death.
Your excluding vv. 28-29 was apparently intentional, because it restores the moral depravity you so desperately try to remove:
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. 22:28-29 NAU)
The moral depravity here is in forcing the rapist to marry the victim, when in fact this particular legislation does not express or imply that the victim is allowed to deny the marriage. Trinitarian inerrantist scholars explain that v. 28 is also describing the man taking the woman by force, so that the victim in v. 28 was forced to marry the rapist even though she was forced into the sex act:
22:28–29 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.
What fool would trifle that the victim of a "clear case of violent, coercive" rape was also somehow "willing"? I do not argue that Merrill's view is necessarily correct, only that its existence prevents YOU from justifiably accusing my more negative appraisal as unreasonable.
If the woman failed to scream for help when she was in the city and could be heard, the Jewish law viewed the situation as consensual sex rather than rape, since the woman could have cried out for someone to rescue her but didn’t.
A bit of unforgivable stupidity since common sense dictates that the man could either prevent her screaming by muffling her, or threatening her life.
Thus, both parties were guilty. However, if the sexual assault took place in a rural area where the woman had no chance of being heard, the Jewish law gave the woman the benefit of the doubt and she was not to be considered culpable.Which is also stupid since nothing about the place the sex act occurred would say anything authoritative about whether she was willing.
One might object here that women captured in war were not afforded the same rights as women belonging to the people of Israel, and thus this consideration offers little help with regards to the text of our study. However, the previous chapter in Deuteronomy concerns the rights of women who are captured in war (Deut 21:10-14):A text that neither expresses nor implies that the woman had any right to refuse the marriage. You quote as follows:
10 “When you go out to war against your enemies, and the LORD your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, 11 and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, 12 and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. 13 And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. 14 But if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her. [emphasis added]
McLatchie continues:
Therefore, while the Hebrew soldiers were permitted to marry female war captives, they were not permitted to rape them or treat them as slaves.
The "Good News" Translation of v. 14 makes plain that this rite involved rape:
14 Later, if you no longer want her, you are to let her go free. Since you forced her to have intercourse with you, you cannot treat her as a slave and sell her.See here. McLatchie continues:
The woman was also to have a month to mourn the loss of her kin prior to getting married.
Oh, ok, so if I kidnap your 18 year old daughter and deal with her exactly as Deuteronomy 21:10-14 allowed a Hebrew man to deal with a female war-captive, then you'd conclude I was treating her "right"?
Daniel Block notes, “This monthlong quarantine expresses respect for the woman’s ties to her family of origin and her own psychological and emotional health, providing a cushion from the shock of being torn from her own family.”
Then that is respect for pagan theology and idolatry, since the woman's family ties would have been formed in idolatrous contexts. Gee, is tolerance for her family ties what was meant by a Mosaic author whose purpose in killing her family was his intolerance of idolatry?
[1] Indeed, as John Wenham comments, “In a world where there are wars, and therefore prisoners of war, such regulations in fact set a high standard of conduct.”
Some would say that making her shave her head and remove her clothes merely adds unnecessarily to the humiliation. Your idea that this is supposed to be a "nice" thing is absurd, and you'd never conclude any such foolishness if somebody kidnapped your 18 year old daughter today and followed out all the permissions and requirements in that passage. You only make excuses and hem and haw because nobody has subjected YOU to such degredation.
[2] Furthermore, by becoming part of the people of Israel (and possessing full status as a wife), the women would be delivered from pagan idolatry and exposed instead to Israelite religion concerning the true God, thereby having opportunity to attain salvation.
Meaning: we should be amazed at how the Hebrews who killed her family, acted nice to her after kidnapping her and forcing her into a marriage with one of the people who killed her family. Sorry, I'm not feeling that. Try again.
The historical context of the war against the Midianites is also important to bear in mind as we evaluate our text. Numbers 31:16 indicates that the Midianite women “were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people.”
Then we wonder why Moses didn't also kill off the children of the Hebrew soldiers who sinned there, no less than he ordered the killing of the children of the Midianites in Numbers 31:17. But sometimes, demanding consistency from a dictator is out of step with the barbarisms of the ANE. My bad.
This is an allusion to Numbers 25:1-9, in which we read of an occasion where the Midianites devised a plot to entice Israel into pagan worship involving making sacrifices to Baal and ritual sex. According to Moses, the Midianite women were among those who “enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord” (Num 31:16). Thus, the women who were permitted to live and marry into Israel (that is, those who had not known man by lying with him) were presumably those who had not been involved in enticing the men of Israel into sexual impurity.
Moses is a hypocrite: he kills the Midianite babies apparently because he ascribed to some type of corporate-responsibility ethic, but he does NOT kill the babies of the Hebrew men who participated in that sin. How convenient.
Another consideration, often overlooked in discussions of our text, is that we are not informed what happened to young woman who were brought into the Israelite camp but who did not wish to marry the men who had just slaughtered their kin.
No, the text that allows the Hebrew soldier to marry the daughter of parents he recently killed, neither expresses nor implies the girl had the least bit of choice in the matter. If the Hebrews were stupid enough to kill her family, we can hypothesize they were also stupid enough to give her as much say in whether to marry, as they gave to her parents on whether to die.
We can hypothesize that they were forced into it anyway, but we can equally hypothesize that they were allowed to make themselves useful as virgins until such a time as someone more suitable presented himself.
What fool would seriously tell himself that where women of a cult tempt other men to sin sexually, surely the virgins in that cult couldn't possibly be culpable? Did the Hebrews think only vaginal intercourse counted as sexual sin? When Moses spared the women who were still virgins, wasn't he taking a chance that in the spared group were a few virgins who had engaged in forms of sex that leave virginity intact, such as fellatio, cunnilingus, anal sex, i.e., participating in the Midianite sin but preserving their virginal status?
If he really was taking a such a chance, how can we be unreasonable to say he was just a stupid gullible dictator without any god to make actual truth known to him?
You also have the option of saying they were not dolts, and the reason they deny culpability to the still virgin girls is because the Hebrews honestly didn't see anal sex, fellatio or cunnilingus as adultery or fornication...but you aren't in the business of making concessions that open the door for today's Christians to fornicate without fornicating, right?
This is simply not stated or even intimated in the text. Thus, if there were women who were averse to being married to an interested Israelite soldier, we just do not know what happened.
If you don't know what happened, you cannot render improbable the possibility that they were forced into the marriage.
Moreover, even if on occasion something bad happened — and there is no reason to deny that sometimes it may have — it is not something we are told was done by command of God.
But if there was any forcing, it would have been justified by appeal to Deuteronomy 21:10-14. So, Jonathan....do you believe that passage is the inspired inerrant word of God, yes or no?
When Moses gave the requirements as recited in that passage, was God speaking through him, yes or no?
In conclusion, though Numbers 31:13-18 is undoubtedly a difficult text, especially from the vantage point of our twenty-first century western culture, the text becomes, upon closer inspection, significantly less problematic than it appears at first impression.
You can save your campaign speech until after you have shown the Good News "rape" Translation of Deut. 21:14 to be unreasonable or incorrect. You highly doubt you'll ever do that, right?
The Pentateuch outlined the rights of female war captives, and they were not allowed to be treated as a slave or sex object.
Those who killed a girl's parents forced her to marry one of the guilty Hebrew soldiers, in a way that wasn't quite as barbaric as would have been allowed in pagan cultures. Congratulations. I'm experiencing a heart attack right now because of how guilty I feel about my sin. Nice job. Do you have any dust and ashes I could borrow?
The Pentateuch also takes a very negative view of rape.
According to the Good News Translation of Deuteronomy 21:14, God must have intended this rite to result in rape.
Most likely, the women who were spared were not involved in enticing Israel into sexual impurity during the incident at Peor. Finally, we are not informed by the text what the arrangements were for women who did not wish to marry an interested Israelite soldier, and so any suggestion of what may have happened is mere conjecture.
But my conjectures cannot be shown to be unreasonable. Your assumption that the multiple authors of the Pentateuch were honestly trying to give future readers exactly what Moses wrote, is also mere conjecture. If the Hebrews were as prone to corruption as every page of the Pentateuch says, we have no reason to pretend their scribes were any exception.
Footnotes
8 thoughts on “Does the Bible Support Sexual Slavery? An Analysis of Numbers 31:15-18”
JOHN RICHARDS
DECEMBER 24, 2021 AT 12:49 PM
Labelling the Numbers text as ‘difficult’ reveals your point of view – that of a presuppositionist.
I don’t find it at all difficult!
It also reveals your assumption that the Bible is a reliable source of information…
Reply
KEVIN ROSS
DECEMBER 24, 2021 AT 9:57 PM
Of course you don’t find it problematic. Your presuppositions ensure that any misunderstanding of the text remains a live option.
Reply
JMCLATCHIE
DECEMBER 25, 2021 AT 4:18 PM
John Richards: Anyone with a cursory familiarity with my work knows of my staunch opposition to presuppositionalism. Contrary to the insinuation of your comment, it is not an entailment of evidentialism that, for one to be rational in holding a belief, that belief can admit no difficulties.
Reply
-----------------turchisrong replies, April 19, 2023
Then you, McLatchie, must confess that it is possible for an atheist to be rational in holding to atheism, even if atheism presents "difficulties".
============================continuing:
PETER
DECEMBER 24, 2021 AT 2:53 PM
Definitely appreciate addressing this. It really is an uncharitable reading that doesn’t even make sense (e.g. Kill the Canaanite non virgin women and Isrealite men for inappropriate sexual acts, and keep the Virgin women so you can… Do more inappropriate sexual acts!??!?), so it’s nice to see a complete response to it.
Reply
JESSE
JULY 22, 2022 AT 2:00 AM
Remember the sexual idolatry of Balaam’s sin led Israel to experience a plague, for which Moses killed many Israelites, both to punish the sin and to stop the spread of disease. Notice the emphasis on the cleansing rituals to ensure they did not carry back to the camp any plagues; ie STD’s. Sexual idolotry. Orgies. Even with children. Remember these tribes which surrounded Israel were accused of cannibalism and human sacrifice of children as well as incest and bestiality, and archaeological findings do support those claims.
Reply
DAVID MADISON
DECEMBER 26, 2021 AT 10:02 PM
The world in which God revealed Himself was very different from today’s world. It was a world in which warfare was common and the consequences for defeated peoples were often terrible. Marrying the men who had conquered you is not a particularly attractive option but it is better than the alternative. What we often find in the Old Testament is a way of doing things that limits harm.
Atheists are dismissive of this. Their usual response is to ask why God didn’t just come along and impose modern values on the people who lived 3000 years ago. This is remarkably shallow. Life was brutal 3000 years ago. The reason why it was brutal is that this is what human nature is capable of. And it still is. Christianity offers us the hope of deliverance from our corrupt nature but this hope is not something we have any right to expect.
Reply
----------------------------------------turchisrong replies, April 19, 2023
Their usual response is to ask why God didn’t just come along and impose modern values on the people who lived 3000 years ago. This is remarkably shallow. Life was brutal 3000 years ago. The reason why it was brutal is that this is what human nature is capable of. And it still is.
Then how do you explain God preventing the pagan prophet Balaam from cursing Israel in Numbers 22:38, 23:8, 12? Wasn't life during Numbers 22 equally as brutal as it was in Numbers 31?
What we find here is that your God has no excuse: Not only can God prevent pagans from sinning, the fact that he did so at least once proves that he is far more willing to violate human freewill than today's freewiller Christians wish to admit.
And God can cause pagans to both know his will and obey it even if they are idolaters. See Ezra 1:1.
So the skeptic is reasonable to say that your god is sadistic: he clearly does have a viable way of preventing humans from sinning, but no, he prefers to take the route that causes unnecessary misery and bloodshed. Sort of like the fool who has a choice between drawing money out of his account to pay the rent, or robbing the bank to pay the rent, and he chooses the latter despite the former being entirely sufficient to the purpose.
