Interesting, thanks for the post.

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The third reason is that, to interpret the law in Deut 21:28-29 as a rape is to make God the commander of a morally heinous command.

So the reason it can't be translated as "rape" is because that would be horrible....

Yeah, that's some pretty lame apologetics right there.

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If it appears to be in very strong tension with moral values in other texts, it's a good reason to bring the interpretation into question.

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If it appears to be in very strong tension with moral values in other texts, it's a good reason to bring the interpretation into question.

It's in tension with the values which stone women for adultery and stone women for losing their virginity? Really?

The reference they provide in Exodus (where they get the verse wrong, grrr!) is slightly different. However, it's not in conflict. And this is not unusual in the Bible. There are two versions of the Noah's Ark story. One says he brought two of every animal and the other says he brought two of every unkosher animal and more (seven if I remember correctly) of every kosher animal. Two versions of the same thing, but with some changes. Strong tension? Not really.

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http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=865&letter=A

I think it depended.

http://www.womenintheancientworld.com/women%20and%20the%20law%20in%20ancient%20israel.htm

http://www.jewfaq.org/women.htm

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I'm not sure what you are trying to point my attention to. One thing I have discovered from those links that I didn't know already is that the "ordeal" (described in Numbers) was so horrible that Jews actually stopped doing it in ancient Palestine (though it's noted that it was technically no longer possible to do it after the fall of the Temple).

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I do wonder what his explanation is for punishing a woman who loses her virginity outside of marriage with stoning....
(Deut 23-24)

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Well, ask. The website itself deals with a lot of biblical stuff and in interesting ways. He or she (there are two) might make it a blog post.

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There are tons of apologetics websites out there. What's so special about this one?

I'm not really terribly interested in apologetics, wherever it comes from. The fact is that there is tons of sexist stuff in the Bible and plenty of religious people who want to offer excuses for it.

The NIV translators actually use the term "rape" and that would have been produced by a whole team of translators who would most likely have been Christians. That particular interpretation clearly isn't as silly as this writer makes it out to be. ("Oh if they'd only checked out a commentary they'd know they were wrong." - Um, yeah, whatever...)

In fact, now I come to look into the references at the bottom, the piece this was responding to was by Michael Martin and contained not only the example which I mentioned, but also another example in the book of Numbers (where Moses advises his men to capture women as spoils of war).
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/rape.html
Michael Martin was observing a clear trend throughout the Bible of viewing women as property, not being picky about a single verse as the article you quote suggests.

..............

Annoyingly they've missed off a 4 in their reference to Aquinas. (It should be question 154, not 15.) They seem to have chosen this source in order to demonstrate that people of the time would have trouble distinguishing between seduction and rape (though it's not a great argument, since Aquinas seems to do quite well in distinguishing them). In any case, the argument that people in the past were not great at recognising rape is part and parcel of Martin's argument that women were considered more as property than as people.

Aquinas' argument also doesn't serve to show that rape was taken seriously. His talk similarly revolves around the status of the marriage contract. He says that a rape should not undo an existing marriage contract, but still seems to consider the possibility that a man may be expected to marry a woman he has raped. Certainly he says it is up to the father, but Aquinas mentions that the virginity of the daughter has been stolen from the father, so it is still a matter of property disputes.

It's also worth noting that Aquinas finishes with the claim that it is impossible for a husband to rape his wife because he has a contractual claim over her.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.SS_Q154_A7.html

All in all, I think this source serves to show quite clearly that religious texts are a poor source of morality, just as Michael Martin's article intended to demonstrate. It is quite clear from all this that the reader often needs to specifically interpret the text to fit with a decent moral framework if they don't want to come out with horrible demands. After all, who wants to bring back stoning for adultery? Any takers?

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The NIV translators actually use the term "rape" and that would have been produced by a whole team of translators who would most likely have been Christians. That particular interpretation clearly isn't as silly as this writer makes it out to be. ("Oh if they'd only checked out a commentary they'd know they were wrong." - Um, yeah, whatever...)
==============================

See, the fact that this guy says the word is being used wrong and in what context it is meant, makes sense. Religioustolerance.org has a huge piece of the mistranslation of the bible and what the original words were supposed to have mean.

Here, is a sample search I did
http://www.google.com/custom?domains=ReligiousTolerance.org&q=bible+mistranslations&sitesearch=ReligiousTolerance.org&sa=Search&client=pub-2550010077357874&forid=1&ie=ISO-8859-1&oe=ISO-8859-1&cof=GALT%3A%23008000%3BGL%3A1%3BDIV%3A%23336699%3BVLC%3A663399%3BAH%3Acenter%3BBGC%3AFFFFFF%3BLBGC%3A336699%3BALC%3A0000FF%3BLC%3A0000FF%3BT%3A000000%3BGFNT%3A0000FF%3BGIMP%3A0000FF%3BFORID%3A1%3B&hl=en

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It isn't a mistranslation. There's a wider argument to be made, but your apologetics guy hasn't made it.

Please feel free to check out my longer response at apololgetics.

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There's a reason the NIV is often jokingly referred to as the "Nearly Inspired Version". Translations are aids to taking the text from one cultural context and facilitating understanding in another; they aren't replacements for examining the text in its native context. Word-nitpicking a translated word without basing the points firmly in the underlying text falls into the "religion being like telephone" problem of interpretting an interpretation.

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The guy the initial apologist was arguing with was not involved in word-nitpicking. He was making a much wider argument and the response of "you aren't reading it properly" is actually pretty dodgy:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/rape.html

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What part of the article is relevant? I have had to skip past the part where he completely butchers the notion of theistic morality and makes an incoherent argument that it's not "objectivist", I jump to the part where he anachorinstically confounds the lack of choice in marriage as "rape", and then apparently to an assertion of your interpretation of the verse without anything added that I see as relevant to this discussion. And it's nicely sandwiched with a cross-reference to Deut. 22: 23-25, which in fact condemns rape (v. 25) and only punishes the (betrothed) woman if she consents (doesn't cry out), in which case it's adultery since she's pledged to someone else. He further completely baffles me by going on to say that the text doesn't "condemn" the rapist if they don't get caught...after acknowledging that the passage ascribes the death peanlty to the rapist?! By this reasoning, apparently our laws don't condemn child molesters, since even when we do catch them they get a lesser punishment than that.

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What part of the article is relevant?

Lol, my point exactly. The article was in the apologist's references. If there's no relevance, why did they reference it?

only punishes the (betrothed) woman if she consents (doesn't cry out)

You don't see anything dodgy in the sentiment "if we don't hear you cry out, you must have wanted it"?

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Actually it also depends on which Jewish time period, whether they punish or not.

You might want to look at Jewish faq.

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You don't see anything dodgy in the sentiment "if we don't hear you cry out, you must have wanted it"?

Do you have a better suggested way to objectively discern between rape and adultery in this situation? If it's he-said-she-said, she would always claim it's rape to save herself and he'd claim it was adultery to make good on the threat to have her killed if she tells. It's far from perfect, but in that social context, it worked to make a simple, relatively fair, and most importantly objective system. It would certainly be dodgy by modern standards, but this wasn't a modern context so it's irrelevant at best and anachronistic if you're actually holding to the claim that it's relevant.

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Wonderful...
Q. When is a rape not a rape?
A. When it is mentioned in the Bible.

So there was no rape, and the woman is thus guilty of adultery. Stone the little b*tch!

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Q. When is a rape not a rape?
A. When it is mentioned in the Bible.

That's not the argument at all. Is there a relevant point here in criticism of the OP or just a strawman used as a springboard into a snarky dismissal?

So there was no rape, and the woman is thus guilty of adultery.

Premarital sex - while generally considered immoral - isn't adultery. The text says exactly what to do if you get caught into premarital sex: get married and stay faithful to your partner. What's absurd about this?

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That's not the argument at all.

Yes it is. It's one of several arguments, but it is an argument employed nonetheless.

Premarital sex - while generally considered immoral - isn't adultery.

Thank goodness for that. Otherwise she'd be stoned to death. :S

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No, the argument/statement/claim is never that "rape is not rape when it is mentioned in the Bible". The argument being made is that rape is never actually mentioned explicitly in this context at all and it's a misinterpretation of the passage. Did you even read the article?

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Did you even read the article?

More thoroughly than you it seems.

They give three reasons for disagreeing with the idea that the Bible asks women to marry their rapist. The first is that it's not the best translation. An argument they don't make fantastically well, but fortunately they have two other reasons still to go.

The second is that the teaching parallels another one from Exodus. As I've mentioned before, having two parallel teachings with slight differences is not unusual in the Torah and isn't enough to dismiss extra bits that might be tacked on or altered in Deuteronomy.

The third is that this teaching cannot possibly be about rape because that would mean God was horrible. That is the third of these arguments. I'm sorry if you missed it, but to say that it was never made shows that you weren't paying sufficiently close attention.

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The first is that it's not the best translation. An argument they don't make fantastically well, but fortunately they have two other reasons still to go.

What's wrong with the argument made? The author argues that:

1. The word doesn't necessarily mean that.
2. There's a better word that could have been used in the same context if that was what was meant.
3. In the context of the text in relation to other texts, this interpretation brings it into a closer harmony with other texts and thus the context favors this interpretation.

To counter this argument, one would have to claim that we should rightfully interpret a passage to mean something when:

1. It doesn't necessarily mean that.
2. The author could have made it clear they meant that, but didn't.
3. It isn't supported by other passages that could support it.

Are you arguing that these qualifiers make an acceptable basis for an interpretation, or that there's some other argument to be added that you haven't made that supports the interpretation such that these apparently undesirable characteristics of the interpretation should be put aside?

The third argument at that point is simply putting the cherry on top of the sundae; it's simply adding additional evidence as to why we be highly critical of the interpretation in question.

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>Q. When is a rape not a rape?
A. When it is mentioned in the Bible.

>That's not the argument at all.

>Yes it is. It's one of several arguments, but it is an argument employed nonetheless.

>No, the argument/statement/claim is never that "rape is not rape when it is mentioned in the Bible".

>The third argument at that point is simply putting the cherry on top of the sundae

Your original claim was that this was never argued. Not even as "cherry on top of the sundae". Your dismissal of their position was unjustified.

You also seem to be suggesting that the earlier arguments were somehow more convincing. The whole article is ridiculous apologetics.

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Your original claim was that this was never argued.

And it was not. The third argument was not "rape is not rape when it is mentioned in the Bible".

You also seem to be suggesting that the earlier arguments were somehow more convincing. The whole article is ridiculous apologetics.

Are you going to actually answer my question, or just throw more adjectives around? This is a worthless answer.

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