Missing Mosaic Laws...

[Moral Orel]

You said that "this thread is more of an attack on Bible-worship than it is on God." The title of the thread is "Missing Mosaic Laws..." and I am discussing the way Moses handled a situation. In particular, it can be said that the Mosaic Laws are lacking discussion about whether or not it is ethical to execute or rape civilian POWs.

But it isn't a law. They didn't deal with every single nation they went to war with the same way. Genocide for the Amalekites, restraint for the Ammonites, for instance.

Also, there is a passage about what to do with the female captives. Orders on who was to be captured or not were given on a case by case basis. Sometimes death for all, sometimes forced labor. But when they did decide to take female captives there is this passage:

When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. 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. 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. Deuteronomy 21:10-14​

Which still sounds like marital rape to me. But you don't get to just kill her either.

False. GotQuestions.org does not address the passage.

You claimed it was human sacrifice, right? From the article you cited:

The heave offering was often given in conjunction with tithes (Leviticus 7:14, 34) as a provision for the Levites, the priestly tribe who did not have land of their own and therefore could not grow their own food. They depended on the Lord’s provision through tithes and heave offerings (Numbers 18:24, 29).​

And it is an important distinction between tithes and heave offerings, because tithes were tithed by the priests to God, but heave offerings were separate.

They weren't sacrificed to God any more than the food was burnt for God, because it wasn't. It was for use by the priests, which isn't nice either. I mean, the priests took slaves essentially as well, but it wasn't "human sacrifice" as you put it. They weren't killing them.

Look at you, making me defend the Bible.

 

[golgotha61]

So here is this link on the topic that looks at the Talmud and other Jewish sources. For starters, don't forget that they slept in their cloaks, so it would be reasonable to think that they, well you know, on them as well. A cloak as described by Vasholz would prove nothing at all. Anyone can put on a cloak, so I don't see how he came up with that.

My link talks about how Talmudic sources talk about people frisking the bride and groom before they enter the wedding chambers. The woman may sneak in a stained sheet, the man may sneak in a clean sheet. It goes further when it decides that no cloth should be examined at all, and the matter should be settled by witnesses instead.

See, the Bible says that judges should be appointed to interpret the law, and so the Talmud and other writings are what they interpreted the law to be. Men corrected the original law because they found all the reasons that it was faulty. Of course, according to some in Jewish tradition, they were guided by God to interpret it correctly, so it was more of a progressive revelation kind of deal. In light of this, you would have to evaluate whether you think the Talmud is God inspired the same way the OT is. If it isn't God inspired, then men corrected God's law, or my theory: men corrected men's law.

The reference to the robe as special is taken from 2 Sam 13:18 and Psalm 45:14-15. These are the verses that Vasholz (D. Th. From the University of Stellenbosch and Chairman of the Old Testament Department at Covenant Theological Seminary) uses for his support and he also mentions that the “cloth” produced by the parents to prove that their daughter was a virgin comes from the Targum of Psuedo-Jonathan. Vasholz also mentions that the blood could not only be that of the first time sex was practiced by the woman but could also refer to the menstrual cloth to prove that the girl was not pregnant.

The point is that to judge a law to be irrational and thereby a forgery by man and not a law laid down by God would require incontrovertible proof but what we have is several different readings and meanings of the Deuteronomic law. Vasholz determines that the traditional interpretation is wrong and offers his correction. Other scholars see things differently and tradition offers yet more additions to the details of how this law should be applied and interpreted. So, one probably should relax the insistence that this particular example of the law makes an unarguable case for man being the author of Mosaic and should look to other examples to support that claim. For me, based on my own studies and my education, to agree with the position that this law in Deuteronomy proves that man wrote it is in need of much more solid proof.

The development of the Talmud was done by collecting Mishnah which was the “collection of oral Jewish law and traditions” (Kitchen 228). It was compiled in ca. A.D. 200, which puts it beyond the appointed judges of Israel as prescribed in the OT by roughly 1400 years. It was Christ Himself who rejected these traditions of the elders, not the OT judges, and the perversion of the original God given law (Matt 15:1-20). The extra-biblical texts of the Jews and other ANE authors are valuable in comparative studies but do not rise to the magisterial position of Scripture. However, to claim that man adjusted the original law because God’s law was faulty is not based on sound observation of human history. Man changes God’s law in order to become autonomous and to create a world of his own making, thinking that hedonism and autonomy are the highest achievements of existence.


As an example of man changing the written law so as to circumvent God’s original intent was the “prosbul” and was applied to Deut. 15:1-3 that prescribes “the release of all debts in the seventh year” (Ferguson 542). The prosbul declared that “the loan might be collected whenever the lender desired it” and so the payment of debts in the seventh year was no longer honored ((542).


Ferguson, Everett. Backgrounds of early Christianity. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003. Print.

Kaiser, Walter C. The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable & Relevant?. InterVarsity Press, 2001. Print.

 

[Nihilist Virus]

But it isn't a law.

That is the point, isn't it? It's one of the "Missing Mosaic Laws..."

They didn't deal with every single nation they went to war with the same way. Genocide for the Amalekites, restraint for the Ammonites, for instance.

Right, and if they had divine laws in place, would they have committed genocide?

Also, there is a passage about what to do with the female captives. Orders on who was to be captured or not were given on a case by case basis. Sometimes death for all, sometimes forced labor. But when they did decide to take female captives there is this passage:

When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. 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. 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. Deuteronomy 21:10-14​

Which still sounds like marital rape to me. But you don't get to just kill her either.

So like I said, they either executed or raped their civilian POWs, placing them more or less on par with the Nazi regime who tortured and killed their own countrymen. The execution and rape depicted in the Old Testament presumably would not have happened, or would have occurred less frequently, if they had ethical laws on the books regarding treatment of civilian POWs. So to reiterate, I was bringing up a scenario involving Moses regarding a law that seemed to be missing here on this thread about missing Mosaic laws.

You claimed it was human sacrifice, right? From the article you cited:

The heave offering was often given in conjunction with tithes (Leviticus 7:14, 34) as a provision for the Levites, the priestly tribe who did not have land of their own and therefore could not grow their own food. They depended on the Lord’s provision through tithes and heave offerings (Numbers 18:24, 29).​

And it is an important distinction between tithes and heave offerings, because tithes were tithed by the priests to God, but heave offerings were separate.

GotQuestions.org does not address Numbers 31:40 to my knowledge.

Let me give a quick overview of the latter half of the chapter:

The Jews returned from war and many of the soldiers just took whatever they wanted, or whatever they could hold. Aside from gold, silver, metals, and other goods, this was the war loot:

675,000 sheep, 72,000 cows, 61,000 donkeys, and 32,000 virgin women.

God tells the Israelites to give half of the plunder to the men who went to war and half to everyone else. The men who went to war only have to give up 1/500th of their goods, and everyone else has to give up 1/50th of what they get. But the 1/500th and the 1/50th do not go to the same place. The 1/500th go to Eleazar the priest, and the 1/50th go to the Levites as a whole as their allotment.

It is apparent to me that Eleazar was meant to sacrifice everything that was given to him (hence the reason they were referred to as tributes to the Lord). If Eleazar gets to keep everything that's given to him for himself, that means he makes out with 675 sheep, 72 cows, 61 donkeys, and 32 virgin women. That seems excessive for one guy who didn't even do much of anything at all, but to be charitable to the apologist, it is conceivable. But there are some major problems with that interpretation.

First of all, it would mean that no sacrifice was made to the Lord at all to celebrate the victory. That seems unlikely if you take the time to read the Old Testament. Secondly, it specifically says that the animals going to Eleazar are heave offerings (below I will show yet again that heave offerings are indeed animal sacrifices). And third, as I mentioned above, I just find it odd that they'd give so much to a guy who did nothing. Lastly, it would be strange for them to set the precedent of giving large amounts of war booty to a priest and then never doing that again after future battles.

They weren't sacrificed to God any more than the food was burnt for God, because it wasn't. It was for use by the priests, which isn't nice either. I mean, the priests took slaves essentially as well, but it wasn't "human sacrifice" as you put it. They weren't killing them.

Now, regarding the personal use by the priests: it seems to me that the priests were simply eating the flesh of these animals after they sacrificed the blood and guts to Jehovah rather than letting the flesh go to waste. They were not allowed to eat fat or blood. I'm not sure why the blood was forbidden (probably conflated with raw and unsafe food), but I think the fat was forbidden because Jehovah enjoys the smell of burning fat and they could not deprive him of that.

Let me clarify that a wave offering is a side-to-side motion above the altar, and a heave offering is an upward motion above the altar. And they're not waving their hands. They're waving animal flesh. Let's look again at that list of animals dedicated to the Lord: sheep, cows, donkeys, and virgin women. Were they somehow waving a live donkey around? An entire cow? No, they were just waving the guts that they would later sprinkle on the altar. This is consistent with the ritualistic blood sacrifice as I recall reading it back when I was a Christian.

My sources for all of this can be found here:

http://www.biblestudytools.com/dict...ical-dictionary/offerings-and-sacrifices.html

If you're not inclined to read the whole thing, you can just ctrl+f "eat" and you should find where the priests were allowed to eat the things that they sacrificed. Notice that in the article that you quoted back at me, we see that the Levites "depended on the Lord’s provision through tithes and heave offerings." Meaning that aside from tithes, they got their chicken dinners from the heave offerings, that is, blood sacrifice.

So I think this should clear it up. The context clearly outlines that the virgins, along with the cattle, are to be tributes to the Lord, tributes to the Lord are to be heave offerings, and heave offerings are gutted animals which can be eaten later by the priests. I'm not persuaded either way about whether or not the priests were cannibals, but I find it extremely likely that human sacrifice is being depicted.

Look at you, making me defend the Bible.

You should already see that as a red flag. If you're defending the Bible, you're probably in error somewhere.

I apologize if this is again off topic, but from my position what I see is that we are taking an in-depth look at the Mosaic laws and that is at least my take on the aim of the thread.

 

[Moral Orel]

The point is that to judge a law to be irrational and thereby a forgery by man and not a law laid down by God would require incontrovertible proof but what we have is several different readings and meanings of the Deuteronomic law.

This is out of order, but I want to make sure I point out that I wholeheartedly agree with this statement before I talk about anything else. If everything I think about the OT hinged on this one law, then yes, I would need absolute proof as to how the law should have been interpreted to make a broad judgement about everything else. However, if it seems likely that my interpretation is correct, and it seems likely or is proven that other interpretations about other things are correct, then it would be highly likely that my overall theory is correct.

The reference to the robe as special is taken from 2 Sam 13:18 and Psalm 45:14-15. These are the verses that Vasholz (D. Th. From the University of Stellenbosch and Chairman of the Old Testament Department at Covenant Theological Seminary)

The robes described in those verses are for princesses, specifically daughters of kings, not virgins in general.

The development of the Talmud was done by collecting Mishnah which was the “collection of oral Jewish law and traditions” (Kitchen 228). It was compiled in ca. A.D. 200, which puts it beyond the appointed judges of Israel as prescribed in the OT by roughly 1400 years.

According to Jewish tradition, the Talmud began being transmitted orally at the time of Moses. They were put to paper circa 200, but that doesn't mean when it was written. And true, this will always make what I have to say about the Talmud at least a little questionable, since it can't be verified to be accurate past a certain date. But, we can confirm how Jews saw the law and how they practiced the law a couple thousand years ago. Honestly, I find that more persuasive than someone looking at Bible verses and trying to draw a connection between them that, frankly, doesn't appear to be there. A virgin robe would be even worse for proof of virginity than the stained cloth theory.

However, to claim that man adjusted the original law because God’s law was faulty is not based on sound observation of human history. Man changes God’s law in order to become autonomous and to create a world of his own making, thinking that hedonism and autonomy are the highest achievements of existence.

Sometimes, sure, but every time, no. We are probably just going to disagree on this since you've already disagreed with the morals I pointed out that are different from way back when.

But if my interpretation is correct (which I acknowledge we can never prove completely) then it is a faulty law.

 

[Moral Orel]

That is the point, isn't it? It's one of the "Missing Mosaic Laws..."

Right, and if they had divine laws in place, would they have committed genocide?

They didn't decide to commit genocide all on their own. Whenever they were sent out to kill everything that breathes, it was a direct order from God (allegedly). So what you're asking for is a law that would prevent them from doing something that is a direct order from God. It would be weird to think that would exist.

So like I said, they either executed or raped their civilian POWs, placing them more or less on par with the Nazi regime who tortured and killed their own countrymen. The execution and rape depicted in the Old Testament presumably would not have happened, or would have occurred less frequently, if they had ethical laws on the books regarding treatment of civilian POWs. So to reiterate, I was bringing up a scenario involving Moses regarding a law that seemed to be missing here on this thread about missing Mosaic laws.

You're oversimplifying. Some nations they didn't obliterate, first off. Secondly, they didn't always kill every man, they sometimes sent them to "forced labor". I don't know if this means they were given into bondage to individual owners, or if they had some kind of state-run labor camps. Sometimes they killed everyone. Sometimes they kept just the women alive, and based on the verse I posted, you have to at least give them credit for marrying the girls, and then likely spousal rape happened. You make it sound like they were raping women on the battlefield, and based on the Bible, that isn't likely.

But all of these different things that they did weren't based on decisions of men, they were direct orders from God (allegedly), so a law against it would be strange to say the least.

It is apparent to me that Eleazar was meant to sacrifice everything that was given to him (hence the reason they were referred to as tributes to the Lord).

The GotQuestions.org link has OT Bible verses that explain what the heave offering was. It wasn't to the Lord Himself, it was to their clergy. When they won a battle, everyone got some spoils. The soldiers for participating in the warfare, and the priests for keeping God on their side in order to be capable of winning the fights. It talks about the sacrifices that the priests gave, and those came from tithes, not the heave offering. You seem to think they sacrificed everything they got to God, and that isn't the case.

If Eleazar gets to keep everything that's given to him for himself, that means he makes out with 675 sheep, 72 cows, 61 donkeys, and 32 virgin women. That seems excessive for one guy who didn't even do much of anything at all, but to be charitable to the apologist, it is conceivable. But there are some major problems with that interpretation.

Really? As an atheist, and a bit of a militant atheist at that (no offense) you think that it is strange and unlikely that religious people gave too much stuff to their religious leader who didn't deserve anything? That seems unusual to you?

First of all, it would mean that no sacrifice was made to the Lord at all to celebrate the victory. That seems unlikely if you take the time to read the Old Testament.

No, it just means that they didn't sacrifice all of it. They probably made sacrifices just to celebrate, it just doesn't mean they sacrificed it all. There's no reason to make all-or-nothing assumptions.

I think maybe you're putting too much emphasis on the word "heave". True, they had the "wave" offerings that were called such because of the waving motion, but since only a couple translations use the word "heave" I see no reason to think there was such a "heaving" motion. It's kind of like Christians saying fornication is a sin because they find the word "fornication" in the KJ Bible. But it isn't accurate to translate it that way.

You should already see that as a red flag. If you're defending the Bible, you're probably in error somewhere.

No, atheists come up with plenty of bad theories that they think disproves the validity of the Bible and find plenty of contradictions that aren't really there. There is plenty of bad stuff in the Bible, but that doesn't mean everything every atheist says is gospel. If you asked me where Cain got his wife, I'd correct you there too (and that's a pretty common one).

Every time an atheist makes a claim that's easily refutable, that's a point for the theists. Nobody better kid themselves and claim they aren't keeping score either, both sides are.

I apologize if this is again off topic, but from my position what I see is that we are taking an in-depth look at the Mosaic laws and that is at least my take on the aim of the thread.

I apologize too for slinging it like an accusation. It isn't totally off-topic, and I see where you're coming from, but if we start talking about all the genocide in the Bible, the thread will get derailed fast and the focus on the actual words attributed to God will shift to nothing at all. If you want to start a thread about genocide, I'll be happy to come and contribute, but let's make sure we don't go down that road here.

 

[Nihilist Virus]

They didn't decide to commit genocide all on their own. Whenever they were sent out to kill everything that breathes, it was a direct order from God (allegedly). So what you're asking for is a law that would prevent them from doing something that is a direct order from God. It would be weird to think that would exist.

I agree it is an odd expectation. When apologists insist that God is omni-benevolent, expectation and reality are constantly at odds.

You're oversimplifying. Some nations they didn't obliterate, first off. Secondly, they didn't always kill every man, they sometimes sent them to "forced labor". I don't know if this means they were given into bondage to individual owners, or if they had some kind of state-run labor camps. Sometimes they killed everyone. Sometimes they kept just the women alive, and based on the verse I posted, you have to at least give them credit for marrying the girls, and then likely spousal rape happened.

I agree with all of this, other than the claim that I'm oversimplifying.

You make it sound like they were raping women on the battlefield, and based on the Bible, that isn't likely.

I didn't mean to imply that. I simply refuse to honor the sanctity of a marriage between a rapist and a civilian POW. I cannot refer to a POW sex slave as a wife; I simply find that to be far too absurd and disrespectful to the idea of marriage. But I can see now how my reference to a rape victim/sex slave as a "POW" can induce certain inferences.

But all of these different things that they did weren't based on decisions of men, they were direct orders from God (allegedly), so a law against it would be strange to say the least.

Agreed. But again, this oddity is only a result of the apologist burdening God with standards of morality that he never agreed to.

The GotQuestions.org link has OT Bible verses that explain what the heave offering was. It wasn't to the Lord Himself, it was to their clergy. When they won a battle, everyone got some spoils. The soldiers for participating in the warfare, and the priests for keeping God on their side in order to be capable of winning the fights. It talks about the sacrifices that the priests gave, and those came from tithes, not the heave offering. You seem to think they sacrificed everything they got to God, and that isn't the case.

I explained what a heave offering is and how it is both a sacrifice and something that provides for the priests involved. I explained in detail that they are allowed to eat the heave offerings. You redacted the quotes of mine. As I said, it's fine if you don't want to discuss these matters here, but it's not fine for you to pretend you've debunked my claims when you not only don't address them, but in fact remove them from view.

Really? As an atheist, and a bit of a militant atheist at that (no offense) you think that it is strange and unlikely that religious people gave too much stuff to their religious leader who didn't deserve anything? That seems unusual to you?

I find it more strange that you think the Bible would take the trouble to mention that some priest was given all of that war loot and that the sacrifices to the Lord would go unrecorded.

No, it just means that they didn't sacrifice all of it. They probably made sacrifices just to celebrate, it just doesn't mean they sacrificed it all. There's no reason to make all-or-nothing assumptions.

All of it? I'm not saying that all of the loot was sacrificed. I'm saying that 1/1,000 of the loot was. Half the loot was given to the soldiers, and of that 1/500 was given as tribute to the Lord.

I think maybe you're putting too much emphasis on the word "heave". True, they had the "wave" offerings that were called such because of the waving motion, but since only a couple translations use the word "heave" I see no reason to think there was such a "heaving" motion. It's kind of like Christians saying fornication is a sin because they find the word "fornication" in the KJ Bible. But it isn't accurate to translate it that way.

The word I'm emphasizing is "tribute." These things were dedicated as tribute to the Lord, and then given to the priest. The implication is obvious to me. Tell me, why wasn't the priest given gold and silver also? There was plenty of it. Read verses 20-24. There were lots of spoils of war, and yet Eleazar was only given things that are normally sacrificed to the Lord (aside from the 32 virgins, which of course is the point in question).

No, atheists come up with plenty of bad theories that they think disproves the validity of the Bible and find plenty of contradictions that aren't really there. There is plenty of bad stuff in the Bible, but that doesn't mean everything every atheist says is gospel. If you asked me where Cain got his wife, I'd correct you there too (and that's a pretty common one).

I agree 100%.

Every time an atheist makes a claim that's easily refutable, that's a point for the theists. Nobody better kid themselves and claim they aren't keeping score either, both sides are.

Agreed 100% again.

I apologize too for slinging it like an accusation. It isn't totally off-topic, and I see where you're coming from, but if we start talking about all the genocide in the Bible, the thread will get derailed fast and the focus on the actual words attributed to God will shift to nothing at all. If you want to start a thread about genocide, I'll be happy to come and contribute, but let's make sure we don't go down that road here.

I'm not sure what this means. You were going on about rape for quite a while before I chimed in. I'm not sure how genocide is a different category other than the fact that God commanded and personally perpetrated genocide but only passively allowed rape (unless you consider the case of Mary, which fits the clinical definition of rape, but that is a bit far removed from Mosaic events). By "Missing Mosaic Laws..." do you mean the laws that are missing but that we all agree ought be there, or do you mean the things that are seemingly unaddressed? If it is the former, then the discussion of genocide is quite germane (your comments on the oddity of that notwithstanding); however, since you indicate that discussion of genocide will veer us off topic, I deduce that by "Missing Mosaic Laws..." you're referring to the moral issues which went unaddressed. But I think you're simply wrong to include rape in such a category because the Bible's stance on rape is not unaddressed; rather, its position is quite clear.

 

[Moral Orel]

I agree with all of this, other than the claim that I'm oversimplifying.

You said rape or execute. I was pointing out that they did a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It wasn't simplified to those two things, is what I meant.

I didn't mean to imply that. I simply refuse to honor the sanctity of a marriage between a rapist and a civilian POW. I cannot refer to a POW sex slave as a wife; I simply find that to be far too absurd and disrespectful to the idea of marriage. But I can see now how my reference to a rape victim/sex slave as a "POW" can induce certain inferences.

I only point it out for the sake of semantics. You have to give the little bit of credit necessary or you'll get bogged down with, "nuh-uh, they were nice enough to marry them first!". I'm not defending that it was okay, just pointing out a more accurate way to describe it.

Agreed. But again, this oddity is only a result of the apologist burdening God with standards of morality that he never agreed to.

Here's the way I see the difference between the Law and God's orders on the battlefield. God gets to decide who lives or dies. He decided that anyone who does such and such crime dies. He reserves the right to choose who lives or dies in a battle on a case by case basis. Isn't this irony? I'm playing devil's advocate on behalf of the Bible. Anyways, what purpose is there in making a law that says "no killing POWs" if the only person to decide whether they should die is God Himself?

So the arguments of "genocide is bad" and "allowing rape is bad" come from two totally different directions. One is about what God is allowed to do, and one is about what people are allowed to do. They're both valid arguments, but they take two totally different forms and have two totally different defenses that are really incompatible.

I explained what a heave offering is and how it is both a sacrifice and something that provides for the priests involved. I explained in detail that they are allowed to eat the heave offerings. You redacted the quotes of mine. As I said, it's fine if you don't want to discuss these matters here, but it's not fine for you to pretend you've debunked my claims when you not only don't address them, but in fact remove them from view.

Apologies. Here's what you said about what a heave offering is:

Let me clarify that a wave offering is a side-to-side motion above the altar, and a heave offering is an upward motion above the altar. And they're not waving their hands. They're waving animal flesh. Let's look again at that list of animals dedicated to the Lord: sheep, cows, donkeys, and virgin women. Were they somehow waving a live donkey around? An entire cow? No, they were just waving the guts that they would later sprinkle on the altar. This is consistent with the ritualistic blood sacrifice as I recall reading it back when I was a Christian.

But I don't see this description in the Bible of the "upward motion". From your other article it describes the heave offering thusly:

The latter derives from the Hebrew verb "to raise up" and for that reason is called a "heave offering" in some English versions (cf. English "to heave, " meaning to lift, raise up). However, in ritual contexts this verb actually means "to remove" something in order to present it to the Lord (i.e., to set it aside as a special contribution).​

So according to that it doesn't describe an actual physical motion like the wave offering. It just means it was set aside for the priests.

I find it more strange that you think the Bible would take the trouble to mention that some priest was given all of that war loot and that the sacrifices to the Lord would go unrecorded.

So they didn't say what happened a week later after they marched home. I don't think that's strange. I think it's plenty implied by all the other verses about sacrificing to God that all the men made sacrifices at some point after they returned home thanking God for a victory, but it doesn't mention those either.

All of it? I'm not saying that all of the loot was sacrificed. I'm saying that 1/1,000 of the loot was. Half the loot was given to the soldiers, and of that 1/500 was given as tribute to the Lord.

You are saying that Eleazar and the Levites sacrificed all of their loot though, right? If not, then they sacrificed some of the animals, sold some, milked the cows, and married the girls.

The word I'm emphasizing is "tribute." These things were dedicated as tribute to the Lord, and then given to the priest. The implication is obvious to me. Tell me, why wasn't the priest given gold and silver also? There was plenty of it. Read verses 20-24. There were lots of spoils of war, and yet Eleazar was only given things that are normally sacrificed to the Lord (aside from the 32 virgins, which of course is the point in question).

You didn't finish the chapter. There is also an offering to the Lord, given to Eleazar, of gold.

And we have brought the Lord's offering, what each man found, articles of gold, armlets and bracelets, signet rings, earrings, and beads, to make atonement for ourselves before the Lord.” And Moses and Eleazar the priest received from them the gold, all crafted articles. And all the gold of the contribution that they presented to the Lord, from the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, was 16,750 shekels. (The men in the army had each taken plunder for himself.) And Moses and Eleazar the priest received the gold from the commanders of thousands and of hundreds, and brought it into the tent of meeting, as a memorial for the people of Israel before the Lord.​

Eleazar received gold and loot from the battle and it was referred to as "the Lord's offering".

Is there an important distinction between "tribute" and "offering"? Not that I know of, but I could be wrong. In other parts of the Bible, both are used for cash and both are used for sacrifice.

It just seems kind of greedy to try and prove some en masse human sacrifice. Isn't the one example of human sacrifice to God without punishment enough? Even if you're right, it doesn't say it directly enough for any Christian ever to acknowledge it as true.

I'm not sure what this means. You were going on about rape for quite a while before I chimed in. I'm not sure how genocide is a different category other than the fact that God commanded and personally perpetrated genocide but only passively allowed rape (unless you consider the case of Mary, which fits the clinical definition of rape, but that is a bit far removed from Mosaic events). By "Missing Mosaic Laws..." do you mean the laws that are missing but that we all agree ought be there, or do you mean the things that are seemingly unaddressed? If it is the former, then the discussion of genocide is quite germane (your comments on the oddity of that notwithstanding); however, since you indicate that discussion of genocide will veer us off topic, I deduce that by "Missing Mosaic Laws..." you're referring to the moral issues which went unaddressed. But I think you're simply wrong to include rape in such a category because the Bible's stance on rape is not unaddressed; rather, its position is quite clear.

If we start talking about genocide then we're going to get OnceDeceived in here telling us that's not "her definition" of genocide. Jason already hinted at that sort of argument. That's the kind of thing I'm worried about. Like I said, it takes a totally different argument.

 

[golgotha61]

The robes described in those verses are for princesses, specifically daughters of kings, not virgins in general.

2 Sam 13:18 simply states that the particular robe mentioned was how the King’s daughters dressed but the language does not preclude other virgins in Israel from practicing the same tradition. Nor does the language restrict other virgins in Israel from practicing the tradition of wearing a signifying robe. So to say that only the daughters of the King wore such a robe that signified virginity is not warranted by the language in the verse.

Christians consider the Talmud and their midrashim as being divinely inspired. It also pokes holes in the theory that their society couldn't handle more laws to punish rapists that Golgatha has been supporting.

To my knowledge, Christians do not consider the Talmud or the other extra-biblical Jewish texts to be divinely inspired. At least no Christians that I have come across in my studies. As far as what I said, this is not quite what I posted or at least it is not what I meant for you to understand. What I wanted to get across was that God did not enter into covenant with mankind bearing on us with His complete holiness and judgment. He introduced Himself by means of grace, which means that if He had come into human history bearing on us with all of His holy demands and judgments, then Israel would have perished under the weight of them. He practiced grace and did not demand that Israel to not ever sin or else pay a consequence, He allowed them to sin and yet purposed to use them for His purpose and continuing plan. He does the same in the present with you and me. By virtue of two great commandments (Love God, and Love thy neighbor) we have fallen short and the penalty for breaking these laws is death.

I'm pitching that more of the Bible than they think is allegory. Plenty of Christians see Genesis as allegory. I've had a Christian claim that Job is merely "Hebrew wisdom literature" and not a story of an actual person and actual events, as another example.

It seems completely possible to me that the Christian God could be the one true God, that He interacted with people on Earth, that they wrote about their experiences, but also went too far by attributing things to Him that He didn't say. Or at the very least God spoke in generalities, and people wrote in specifics.

There are those who hold to an allegorical interpretation of Genesis but this is where Christians will often differ. However, allegory used as a method of interpreting Scripture must refrained from in order to “distinguish between allegory as a speech form” and “allegorizing as an interpretive method” (Sandy 260). The temptation to allegorize is the trap that Origen fell into which meant that he “bypassed the historical meaning” which “encouraged the reading of later Scripture back into the text” (Scobie 12). It was the movement of the Reformation that returned authority back to the texts of Scripture which resulted in a “form of biblical theology” (12). The Bible is exactly what God wanted to be recorded and I hold to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

Scobie, Charles HH. "History of Biblical theology." New Dictionary of Biblical Theology (2000): 11-20. Print.

Sandy, D. Brent, and Ronald L. Giese, eds. Cracking Old Testament Codes: A Guide to Interpreting Literary Genres of the Old Testament. B&H Publishing Group, 1995. Print.

 

[Moral Orel]

2 Sam 13:18 simply states that the particular robe mentioned was how the King’s daughters dressed but the language does not preclude other virgins in Israel from practicing the same tradition. Nor does the language restrict other virgins in Israel from practicing the tradition of wearing a signifying robe. So to say that only the daughters of the King wore such a robe that signified virginity is not warranted by the language in the verse.

Let's look at them, ESV version of course (my fav!)

Now she was wearing a long robe with sleeves, for thus were the virgin daughters of the king dressed. So his servant put her out and bolted the door after her. 2 Samuel 13:18​

This is how "virgin daughters of the king dressed". There is no reason to assume that the fact that they were virgins was the only relevant factor to determine how they dressed. There is no reason to assume that poor people had access to special clothes. In fact, when we look at the law about taking a cloak as collateral to a loan, we see that people only had two articles of clothing, in general. Rich folk likely had more. You're making a huge leap to think that this verse points to all girls having a special garment that they have to give up when they lose their virginity. It just isn't there.

All glorious is the princess in her chamber, with robes interwoven with gold.
In many-colored robes she is led to the king,
with her virgin companions following behind her.
With joy and gladness they are led along
as they enter the palace of the king. Psalm 45:13-15​

This one doesn't even say that the princess is a virgin. I suppose we can assume as such, I'll give you that, but if it doesn't even mention her virginity, why would you think her garment is especially for her being a virgin?

It says this is how princesses dressed. We don't need to pay any attention to the fact it doesn't mention other people not wearing those same clothes. If you only have examples of princesses wearing special clothes, and it says "this is how princesses dressed" then there's no reason to think other girls who are not princesses dressed in the same manner. There is no evidence to support the notion that they did.

But most importantly, you haven't addressed the fact that owning a special cloak wouldn't prove anything about the girl still being a virgin. If she had relations with someone and didn't tell her father, she wouldn't throw the cloak out herself. If her father knew, but didn't want to lose money in selling her, then he wouldn't throw it out either.

So even if your theory were right as in how they proved virginity, how is this a better indicator of a girl's virginity? The stained sheet, while completely fallible, would be a more reliable indicator of virginity than whether she owns an article of clothing.

To my knowledge, Christians do not consider the Talmud or the other extra-biblical Jewish texts to be divinely inspired. At least no Christians that I have come across in my studies.

You're right. There was supposed to be a "don't" in there. I edited it because that was a grievous error. No, Christians don't believe the Talmud to be divinely inspired, I know that.

However, I was thinking about our conversation about the Talmud, and the conversation I was having with Jason. You shot down my evidence that I presented from the Talmud to evidence my point, but Jason suggested using the Talmud to show that there were more expanded rape laws in their culture. Would you say that Jason's suggestion was a bad one then? Even if it supported your claim, you wouldn't use the Talmud to prove it, right?

What I wanted to get across was that God did not enter into covenant with mankind bearing on us with His complete holiness and judgment. He introduced Himself by means of grace, which means that if He had come into human history bearing on us with all of His holy demands and judgments, then Israel would have perished under the weight of them. He practiced grace and did not demand that Israel to not ever sin or else pay a consequence, He allowed them to sin and yet purposed to use them for His purpose and continuing plan. He does the same in the present with you and me. By virtue of two great commandments (Love God, and Love thy neighbor) we have fallen short and the penalty for breaking these laws is death.

I know, but here's the point. I'm saying that there should have been one more law: "thou shalt not rape". If what you just said has any relevance to the argument at hand, then adding this one law would have caused Israel to collapse or some other terrible thing. Since we're not talking about outlawing every single thing that is bad, just the worst things of all, then you have to provide some sort of evidence that something detrimental would have happened to their society for having such laws. Saying that Israel would collapse under the weight of every single moral that God holds is a straw man of my argument.

There are those who hold to an allegorical interpretation of Genesis but this is where Christians will often differ. However, allegory used as a method of interpreting Scripture must refrained from in order to “distinguish between allegory as a speech form” and “allegorizing as an interpretive method” (Sandy 260). The temptation to allegorize is the trap that Origen fell into which meant that he “bypassed the historical meaning” which “encouraged the reading of later Scripture back into the text” (Scobie 12). It was the movement of the Reformation that returned authority back to the texts of Scripture which resulted in a “form of biblical theology” (12). The Bible is exactly what God wanted to be recorded and I hold to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

Well then in order to continue holding this view that Moses' claim that God literally told him exactly what laws to write down, you'll need to prove that having explicit laws against rape were either unnecessary or would cause more harm than good, I would think.

I know you discount the Talmud, and I wouldn't expect you to think that it was divinely inspired, but I think it is a good indicator of how the ancient Israelites interpreted and acted upon what was written in the Torah. I don't know what would be a better indicator of how the Torah was interpreted a long time ago.

 

[Nihilist Virus]

You said rape or execute. I was pointing out that they did a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It wasn't simplified to those two things, is what I meant.

Apologies, I should've included enslavement.

I only point it out for the sake of semantics. You have to give the little bit of credit necessary or you'll get bogged down with, "nuh-uh, they were nice enough to marry them first!". I'm not defending that it was okay, just pointing out a more accurate way to describe it.

No. I think my refusal to honor the sanctity of such a "marriage" is completely reasonable.

Here's the way I see the difference between the Law and God's orders on the battlefield. God gets to decide who lives or dies. He decided that anyone who does such and such crime dies. He reserves the right to choose who lives or dies in a battle on a case by case basis. Isn't this irony? I'm playing devil's advocate on behalf of the Bible. Anyways, what purpose is there in making a law that says "no killing POWs" if the only person to decide whether they should die is God Himself?

It seems like you're saying that everything from God that has quotations around it cannot be questioned, but yet the laws given (or not given) to Moses can be questioned. Is this what you're saying?

So the arguments of "genocide is bad" and "allowing rape is bad" come from two totally different directions. One is about what God is allowed to do, and one is about what people are allowed to do. They're both valid arguments, but they take two totally different forms and have two totally different defenses that are really incompatible.

And again, impregnating the virgin Mary without her consent is something most of us would consider to be rape. I don't see much a difference between what God is allowed to do and what his chosen people are allowed to do.

Apologies. Here's what you said about what a heave offering is:



But I don't see this description in the Bible of the "upward motion". From your other article it describes the heave offering thusly:

The latter derives from the Hebrew verb "to raise up" and for that reason is called a "heave offering" in some English versions (cf. English "to heave, " meaning to lift, raise up). However, in ritual contexts this verb actually means "to remove" something in order to present it to the Lord (i.e., to set it aside as a special contribution).​

So according to that it doesn't describe an actual physical motion like the wave offering. It just means it was set aside for the priests.

Again, as I've tried to explain, both are correct. The heave offering is an upward motion above the altar, but it is also something that the priest is allowed to eat afterward. That is why there is all this talk about how the heave offering is something set aside for the priests. Does that make sense?

So they didn't say what happened a week later after they marched home. I don't think that's strange. I think it's plenty implied by all the other verses about sacrificing to God that all the men made sacrifices at some point after they returned home thanking God for a victory, but it doesn't mention those either.



You are saying that Eleazar and the Levites sacrificed all of their loot though, right? If not, then they sacrificed some of the animals, sold some, milked the cows, and married the girls.

No. I'm saying that Eleazar sacrificed what was given to him (because it is his portion that is described as a tribute to the Lord) and that what was given to the Levites was their allotment.

You didn't finish the chapter. There is also an offering to the Lord, given to Eleazar, of gold.

And we have brought the Lord's offering, what each man found, articles of gold, armlets and bracelets, signet rings, earrings, and beads, to make atonement for ourselves before the Lord.” And Moses and Eleazar the priest received from them the gold, all crafted articles. And all the gold of the contribution that they presented to the Lord, from the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, was 16,750 shekels. (The men in the army had each taken plunder for himself.) And Moses and Eleazar the priest received the gold from the commanders of thousands and of hundreds, and brought it into the tent of meeting, as a memorial for the people of Israel before the Lord.​

Eleazar received gold and loot from the battle and it was referred to as "the Lord's offering".

It is true I predicted that if Eleazar was keeping the cattle given to him then logically we should expect him to be given the other war loot also, such as gold. But if you read carefully it specifically says that the gold was brought into a tent to be a memorial. That does not indicate that he had personal ownership of the items. He was (I presume) the high priest and, naturally, custodian of "holy" things, so when things were going to be sacrificed or set aside as a memorial they were given over to him.

The fact that he was given custody of the gold, but not given personal ownership of the gold, further strengthens my case. If you give gold as tribute to the Lord, you'll put it in the temple (but since the temple did not yet exist, they put it elsewhere); if you give cattle as tribute to the Lord, you'll ritualistically sacrifice it.

So your case must be that even though the cattle and the virgins are described as tribute to the Lord, and even though Eleazar did not retain ownership of the nonperishable loot that was given to him, he nevertheless was entitled to personal ownership of cattle and virgin women in an amount that would be quite excessive for one man, and yet reasonable as a sacrifice to a deity (1/1,000th). Further, you deny that a heave offering is a sacrifice and instead insist that it is something set aside for priests despite the fact that I gave you an exhaustive source explaining in detail that both are correct: a heave offering is a ritualistic sacrifice of a certain part of the animal that may later be eaten by the priest and his family.

Is there an important distinction between "tribute" and "offering"? Not that I know of, but I could be wrong. In other parts of the Bible, both are used for cash and both are used for sacrifice.

And so how is something a tribute or offering to the Lord if it's instead given to the priest for his own personal gain? Televangelists didn't exist back then.

It just seems kind of greedy to try and prove some en masse human sacrifice. Isn't the one example of human sacrifice to God without punishment enough? Even if you're right, it doesn't say it directly enough for any Christian ever to acknowledge it as true.

The Bible could say that 2+2=5 and Christians would not acknowledge error.

I think it's reasonably clear from reading the passage that human sacrifice occurred. But it seems to me that you want to only load your arsenal with arguments that are vacuum-sealed air tight, and your reasoning for this is that there are plenty such things. But I happen to think that a person is more likely to experience a personal paradigm shift as a result of a cumulative case of strong arguments rather than one air-tight argument.

If we start talking about genocide then we're going to get OnceDeceived in here telling us that's not "her definition" of genocide. Jason already hinted at that sort of argument. That's the kind of thing I'm worried about. Like I said, it takes a totally different argument.

Well if a person changes the definition of genocide to mean "dishwasher," there's not much use in reasoning with them.

 

[Moral Orel]

Apologies, I should've included enslavement.

They showed restraint at times and simply drove people out too. Sometimes they lost, such as because of God's weakness to iron chariots. Personally, I see the many and varied things that they did as erratic behavior at best and not indicative of an overarching plan or moral code. Boiling it down to a few options makes it seem like there was some order to it all. I don't see that order at all.

No. I think my refusal to honor the sanctity of such a "marriage" is completely reasonable.

I don't honor it either, but I call it what it is. Forced marriage leads to forced sex, of course. But it wasn't just a case of rape. Think of it this way, acknowledging they forced marriage first sets the tone that these girls were raped for a lifetime, whereas calling it rape insinuates it happened just once.

It seems like you're saying that everything from God that has quotations around it cannot be questioned, but yet the laws given (or not given) to Moses can be questioned. Is this what you're saying?

No, I'm saying it's both. The Law isn't questioned, and God isn't questioned. They don't have a law about what to do with enemies because they have a rule to do what God says. As long as they always have God to instruct them, what do they need a law for? So that's the simplest answer to, "where is the law against genocide?". God will tell them what to do.

And again, impregnating the virgin Mary without her consent is something most of us would consider to be rape. I don't see much a difference between what God is allowed to do and what his chosen people are allowed to do.

Sorry, but I don't consider it rape. It's a weird enough idea to be considered separate. God didn't take a human form and have intercourse with her, He just caused her to become pregnant. If a doctor implanted an embryo in a woman while she was unconscious during some other surgery, would you call that "rape" too? I wouldn't. It's wrong, I'm not saying it isn't. But I define what is rape by the harm that is caused by the action, and whatever trauma Mary might have suffered from finding out she was pregnant without having consented to becoming pregnant doesn't compare to the harm a woman experiences from a rape.

Again, as I've tried to explain, both are correct. The heave offering is an upward motion above the altar, but it is also something that the priest is allowed to eat afterward. That is why there is all this talk about how the heave offering is something set aside for the priests. Does that make sense?

I guess so... At best it's hinted at, in my opinion though. It isn't stated explicitly enough for me to champion, or to not acknowledge a decent enough defense that makes it doubtful.

It is true I predicted that if Eleazar was keeping the cattle given to him then logically we should expect him to be given the other war loot also, such as gold. But if you read carefully it specifically says that the gold was brought into a tent to be a memorial. That does not indicate that he had personal ownership of the items. He was (I presume) the high priest and, naturally, custodian of "holy" things, so when things were going to be sacrificed or set aside as a memorial they were given over to him.

The fact that he was given custody of the gold, but not given personal ownership of the gold, further strengthens my case. If you give gold as tribute to the Lord, you'll put it in the temple (but since the temple did not yet exist, they put it elsewhere); if you give cattle as tribute to the Lord, you'll ritualistically sacrifice it.

So your case must be that even though the cattle and the virgins are described as tribute to the Lord, and even though Eleazar did not retain ownership of the nonperishable loot that was given to him, he nevertheless was entitled to personal ownership of cattle and virgin women in an amount that would be quite excessive for one man, and yet reasonable as a sacrifice to a deity (1/1,000th). Further, you deny that a heave offering is a sacrifice and instead insist that it is something set aside for priests despite the fact that I gave you an exhaustive source explaining in detail that both are correct: a heave offering is a ritualistic sacrifice of a certain part of the animal that may later be eaten by the priest and his family.

Look, I'll give it an "I dunno... maybe". If it's true, then it means a massive amount of hypocrisy, not just a massive amount of evil. The Bible is full of denouncement for human sacrifice. And if we're going to claim that they would be hypocrites in this manner, what makes that more likely than they were hypocrites in a manner that allowed them to keep a bunch of stuff for themselves that was supposed to be for God?

Sure, they sacrificed all the animals and ate them, but they could have kept the virgins alive for themselves. Should they sacrifice every part of a heave offering? Sure. But when faced with having to sacrifice a bunch of virgins they just say, "human sacrifice is wrong, God wants me to keep them as my concubines, He just told me so". Given human nature, I find this much more likely. But your theory isn't impossible, and it is backed up by a decent amount of rules that say that is how it should have gone down. I'll give you that.

I think it's reasonably clear from reading the passage that human sacrifice occurred. But it seems to me that you want to only load your arsenal with arguments that are vacuum-sealed air tight, and your reasoning for this is that there are plenty such things. But I happen to think that a person is more likely to experience a personal paradigm shift as a result of a cumulative case of strong arguments rather than one air-tight argument.

I don't like being wrong, so yes, I only like packing heat in the form of air-tight arguments. I think it takes air-tight cases to get people to even consider the strong, but possibly doubtful, arguments.

Well if a person changes the definition of genocide to mean "dishwasher," there's not much use in reasoning with them.

I tried, believe me I tried...

 

[Nihilist Virus]

They showed restraint at times and simply drove people out too. Sometimes they lost, such as because of God's weakness to iron chariots. Personally, I see the many and varied things that they did as erratic behavior at best and not indicative of an overarching plan or moral code. Boiling it down to a few options makes it seem like there was some order to it all. I don't see that order at all.

I don't honor it either, but I call it what it is. Forced marriage leads to forced sex, of course. But it wasn't just a case of rape. Think of it this way, acknowledging they forced marriage first sets the tone that these girls were raped for a lifetime, whereas calling it rape insinuates it happened just once.

No, I'm saying it's both. The Law isn't questioned, and God isn't questioned. They don't have a law about what to do with enemies because they have a rule to do what God says. As long as they always have God to instruct them, what do they need a law for? So that's the simplest answer to, "where is the law against genocide?". God will tell them what to do.

Sorry, but I don't consider it rape. It's a weird enough idea to be considered separate. God didn't take a human form and have intercourse with her, He just caused her to become pregnant. If a doctor implanted an embryo in a woman while she was unconscious during some other surgery, would you call that "rape" too? I wouldn't. It's wrong, I'm not saying it isn't. But I define what is rape by the harm that is caused by the action, and whatever trauma Mary might have suffered from finding out she was pregnant without having consented to becoming pregnant doesn't compare to the harm a woman experiences from a rape.

I guess so... At best it's hinted at, in my opinion though. It isn't stated explicitly enough for me to champion, or to not acknowledge a decent enough defense that makes it doubtful.

Look, I'll give it an "I dunno... maybe". If it's true, then it means a massive amount of hypocrisy, not just a massive amount of evil. The Bible is full of denouncement for human sacrifice. And if we're going to claim that they would be hypocrites in this manner, what makes that more likely than they were hypocrites in a manner that allowed them to keep a bunch of stuff for themselves that was supposed to be for God?

Sure, they sacrificed all the animals and ate them, but they could have kept the virgins alive for themselves. Should they sacrifice every part of a heave offering? Sure. But when faced with having to sacrifice a bunch of virgins they just say, "human sacrifice is wrong, God wants me to keep them as my concubines, He just told me so". Given human nature, I find this much more likely. But your theory isn't impossible, and it is backed up by a decent amount of rules that say that is how it should have gone down. I'll give you that.

I don't like being wrong, so yes, I only like packing heat in the form of air-tight arguments. I think it takes air-tight cases to get people to even consider the strong, but possibly doubtful, arguments.

I tried, believe me I tried...

Thank you, I understand your position much better now. So basically you start with the assumption that the Bible is as infallible as the Christian prefers it to be, and then you go into the issues left unaddressed. One such example is rape, although personally I think, as I said, that the Bible's position is quite clear on the issue.

I agree with everything you said except I want to clarify one thing. If they did participate in human sacrifice, they wouldn't be hypocrites. Like everyone else at the time, they were openly racist. If I recall correctly, they were only prohibited from sacrificing their own children to Jehovah. There's no reason they couldn't sacrifice Midianites, particularly if they were trying to wipe out the race anyway.

 

[Moral Orel]

One such example is rape, although personally I think, as I said, that the Bible's position is quite clear on the issue.

That may be why the thread has such a low turn out. I've only had two people seriously try to refute the idea, and I had to bait Jason to join back in after he touched his toe to the water at first.

I agree with everything you said except I want to clarify one thing. If they did participate in human sacrifice, they wouldn't be hypocrites. Like everyone else at the time, they were openly racist. If I recall correctly, they were only prohibited from sacrificing their own children to Jehovah. There's no reason they couldn't sacrifice Midianites, particularly if they were trying to wipe out the race anyway.

Ick... I think you may be right again. 2 Kings 23:20

The racism angle is tricky though. The line between the religion and the nation and the race is really blurry. If you converted to the religion, you converted to all three at once, like Ruth the Moabite, Jesus' great, great... great Gramma. Another problem only answered by the Talmud, but presents a problem for Christians who think the Talmud isn't credible enough to quote.

 

[golgotha61]

Let's look at them, ESV version of course (my fav!)

Now she was wearing a long robe with sleeves, for thus were the virgin daughters of the king dressed. So his servant put her out and bolted the door after her. 2 Samuel 13:18​

This is how "virgin daughters of the king dressed". There is no reason to assume that the fact that they were virgins was the only relevant factor to determine how they dressed. There is no reason to assume that poor people had access to special clothes. In fact, when we look at the law about taking a cloak as collateral to a loan, we see that people only had two articles of clothing, in general. Rich folk likely had more. You're making a huge leap to think that this verse points to all girls having a special garment that they have to give up when they lose their virginity. It just isn't there.

All glorious is the princess in her chamber, with robes interwoven with gold.
In many-colored robes she is led to the king,
with her virgin companions following behind her.
With joy and gladness they are led along
as they enter the palace of the king. Psalm 45:13-15​

This one doesn't even say that the princess is a virgin. I suppose we can assume as such, I'll give you that, but if it doesn't even mention her virginity, why would you think her garment is especially for her being a virgin?

It says this is how princesses dressed. We don't need to pay any attention to the fact it doesn't mention other people not wearing those same clothes. If you only have examples of princesses wearing special clothes, and it says "this is how princesses dressed" then there's no reason to think other girls who are not princesses dressed in the same manner. There is no evidence to support the notion that they did.

But most importantly, you haven't addressed the fact that owning a special cloak wouldn't prove anything about the girl still being a virgin. If she had relations with someone and didn't tell her father, she wouldn't throw the cloak out herself. If her father knew, but didn't want to lose money in selling her, then he wouldn't throw it out either.

So even if your theory were right as in how they proved virginity, how is this a better indicator of a girl's virginity? The stained sheet, while completely fallible, would be a more reliable indicator of virginity than whether she owns an article of clothing.

The ESV uses the word “cloak” to be produced and would parallel the contention that a marked garment had some significance in determining whether or not the girl was a virgin. This would fall in line with Vasholz’ interpretation that the garment was the signifier of virginity and that the parents were not a part of a deception. In any case, Vasholz maintains that the “cloth” is “wearing apparel” and not some sort of bed sheet or menstrual cloth (62). So, the purpose of me using 2 Sam and Psalm 45 is to simply cast a cartesianesque doubt on the idea that only the wealthy would wear cloaks that signified virginity.

The evidence is not provided in the language to determine one way or the other that the norm was for Hebrew virgins to wear a cloak that in some way signified their virginity. It would appear that since the ESV refers to a “cloak” being used as the evidence of virginity, that it indeed it is marked with some sort of signifier of the girl’s virginity. So, the parents would produce this signifier marked cloak as evidence that there was no deception on their part that their daughter was a virgin.

If the father knew of the loss of virginity of his daughter, there are the laws in Exod 22:15-16 and Deut 22:28-29 that deal with this issue. So, it unlikely that the parents would be knowingly involved in this type of deception. The cloak then was not “’proof’ (a word that doesn't even appear in the Hebrew text) but a statement by the woman's parents that they married her in good faith; they did not knowingly pass her off for anything less than chaste” (63). Now it becomes the challenge of the groom to provide evidence that he was indeed sinned against.

I know, but here's the point. I'm saying that there should have been one more law: "thou shalt not rape". If what you just said has any relevance to the argument at hand, then adding this one law would have caused Israel to collapse or some other terrible thing. Since we're not talking about outlawing every single thing that is bad, just the worst things of all, then you have to provide some sort of evidence that something detrimental would have happened to their society for having such laws. Saying that Israel would collapse under the weight of every single moral that God holds is a straw man of my argument.

You are saying that there should have been one more law, not in a sense of fairness to the culture but to support an argument that if what we think that there are necessary laws that are not made, then God did not author the laws, Himself. So no, not this one law, but to complain and set a standard by which we demand God should have created certain laws, or else we will not give Him credit of authorship of the laws in Scripture. This law in question just happens to one that you have sensitivity to, but others will have their own requirements for needed laws, or God will be deemed unjust or disconnected from His chosen people. God’s concern was directed in other areas of importance for Him and to attempt to rise to be critics of His plan as if we have more wisdom or that we know His mind is ludicrous.

This is not a strawman argument but rather one of cause and effect. If God would cause His full weight of Holiness, righteousness, and judgment to fall on the Hebrew nation in the OT or upon us in this present culture, we would not survive. The understanding is in what His full weight of His right to judge looks like: Revelation. That is the witness as to what His holiness, righteousness, and judgment will look like and would have looked like if it was born upon the Hebrews in the time frame we are looking at in the OT. The strawman is also assuaged by the fact that it is his grace then and now that keeps mankind in a position of continued existence.

Well then in order to continue holding this view that Moses' claim that God literally told him exactly what laws to write down, you'll need to prove that having explicit laws against rape were either unnecessary or would cause more harm than good, I would think.

I know you discount the Talmud, and I wouldn't expect you to think that it was divinely inspired, but I think it is a good indicator of how the ancient Israelites interpreted and acted upon what was written in the Torah. I don't know what would be a better indicator of how the Torah was interpreted a long time ago.

This is where the onus falls on the detractor. Specifically, because of 2 Peter 1:20-22. And before we claim that the Mosaic laws do not rise to prophecy, we need to consider what Peter is claiming. The Mosaic laws were divided into subcategories (casuistic or case law, apodictic law, prohibition law, death law, and the curse) (Hill 63). If there were not an immediate punishment for the law, then the result of breaking the law was against the nation as a whole and God would remove His protection etc. All of Scripture is considered to be under the authority of 2 Peter 1:20-21 and is one of the foundations for the Chicago Statement. This means that the Bible is as it claims and that to deny its authorship to God, one needs to prove that statement and not the other way around.


Also, we would need to make a case that the absence of certain laws was not in keeping with God’s eternal plan. The problem with arguing that necessary laws were omitted, is to claim that we know the mind of God or that we know better what was necessary than God did. If we did have that kind of knowledge and wisdom, then we would be God or as God. That was the original claim by Satan as he tempted Eve: Gen 3:5. We have already seen the result of falling for that lie, and I don’t see good results from falling for it again.


Hill, Andrew E., and John H. Walton. A survey of the Old Testament. Harper Collins, 2000.


Vasholz, Robert I. “A Legal Brief on Deuteronomy 22:13-21.” Presbyterion 17 no 1 Spr 1991. Web. 3 Aug 2016.

 

[Nihilist Virus]

That may be why the thread has such a low turn out. I've only had two people seriously try to refute the idea, and I had to bait Jason to join back in after he touched his toe to the water at first.

Ick... I think you may be right again. 2 Kings 23:20

I swear I'm not a contrarian, but I have to disagree in that I don't think the passage you provide is depicting human sacrifice. King Josiah had been roaming the countryside desecrating pagan altars and pagan tombs by burning the bones on the altars. Verse 16 establishes that this made the altars unclean. Then he does the same thing again in the passage you cite. Notice that he killed the priests and then burned "men's" bones, not "their" bones, on the altar. He was simply defiling a pagan altar. While this is certainly desecration of a corpse, the act was not dedicated to Jehovah and was not intended as a human sacrifice. Even if it had been intended as a human sacrifice, it wouldn't be considered an actual sacrifice since the materials were long dead before they were used.

The ironic part, though, is that among the altars he was destroying were those erected by Solomon. So here we have King Josiah doing what is right by the Lord, and what is his reward? Shortly after this he dies in a hostile land, oh and don't forget the subsequent destruction of his kingdom under the rule of his quarreling heirs. On the other hand, Solomon builds altars for the pagan gods of his many wives. His punishment? He is remembered as the greatest, wisest, and wealthiest king of all time.

As a side note, Josiah is linked to Solomon in verse 13 and if you recall the kingdom split after Solomon's death. So these two kings were the last ones before major political shifts. That might be a literary parallel, thus calling the historicity of the events into question (even though nothing supernatural occurs to Josiah).

The racism angle is tricky though. The line between the religion and the nation and the race is really blurry. If you converted to the religion, you converted to all three at once, like Ruth the Moabite, Jesus' great, great... great Gramma. Another problem only answered by the Talmud, but presents a problem for Christians who think the Talmud isn't credible enough to quote.

Yeah... add "Thou shalt not be racist" to the list of missing Mosaic laws.

 

[Moral Orel]

Notice that he killed the priests and then burned "men's" bones, not "their" bones, on the altar. He was simply defiling a pagan altar.

Well it might depend on translation. I like the ESV because it tries to use a literal translation as much as possible. There are other versions that are quite literal, but ESV does a good enough job I haven't had to have people explain Greek or Hebrew to me yet when I point out specific words. ESV sez:

And he sacrificed all the priests of the high places who were there, on the altars, and burned human bones on them. Then he returned to Jerusalem.

He didn't just kill them, he sacrificed them on the altars. It doesn't explicitly say "to God" so there's a bit of doubt to be had, but I don't know what else you use an altar to God for.

When I point at the link here on the boards, the KJV just says "slew" but I bet that isn't the Hebrew word they used. I'd bet money "sacrifice" is accurate.

Yeah... add "Thou shalt not be racist" to the list of missing Mosaic laws.

Anytime someone mentions racism in the Bible I always like to point out that Jesus was a Moabite (so was David) because I find that contradiction particularly ironically hilarious. There wasn't a pertinent point to be made, I just like reminding people.

 

[Moral Orel]

The ESV uses the word “cloak” to be produced and would parallel the contention that a marked garment had some significance in determining whether or not the girl was a virgin. This would fall in line with Vasholz’ interpretation that the garment was the signifier of virginity and that the parents were not a part of a deception. In any case, Vasholz maintains that the “cloth” is “wearing apparel” and not some sort of bed sheet or menstrual cloth (62). So, the purpose of me using 2 Sam and Psalm 45 is to simply cast a cartesianesque doubt on the idea that only the wealthy would wear cloaks that signified virginity.

There probably weren't bed sheets back then, as you've pointed out. What did people sleep in then? Their cloaks. That's backed up by scripture. They probably had intercourse on their cloaks instead of the dirty ground as well. Therefor their cloak would have the evidence of virginity on it.

The evidence is not provided in the language to determine one way or the other that the norm was for Hebrew virgins to wear a cloak that in some way signified their virginity. It would appear that since the ESV refers to a “cloak” being used as the evidence of virginity, that it indeed it is marked with some sort of signifier of the girl’s virginity. So, the parents would produce this signifier marked cloak as evidence that there was no deception on their part that their daughter was a virgin.

If the father knew of the loss of virginity of his daughter, there are the laws in Exod 22:15-16 and Deut 22:28-29 that deal with this issue. So, it unlikely that the parents would be knowingly involved in this type of deception. The cloak then was not “’proof’ (a word that doesn't even appear in the Hebrew text) but a statement by the woman's parents that they married her in good faith; they did not knowingly pass her off for anything less than chaste” (63). Now it becomes the challenge of the groom to provide evidence that he was indeed sinned against.

Vasholz imagined up this signifying cloak, and because I can't prove a negative, I can't prove it wrong. But the fact that princesses had special clothes is not evidence that every virgin had special clothes, and frankly, it would be quite ridiculous to think that most girls could afford special clothes, particularly when you take note of the verse that says if you have someone's cloak, they have nothing to sleep in at night.

You are saying that there should have been one more law, not in a sense of fairness to the culture but to support an argument that if what we think that there are necessary laws that are not made, then God did not author the laws, Himself. So no, not this one law, but to complain and set a standard by which we demand God should have created certain laws, or else we will not give Him credit of authorship of the laws in Scripture. This law in question just happens to one that you have sensitivity to, but others will have their own requirements for needed laws, or God will be deemed unjust or disconnected from His chosen people. God’s concern was directed in other areas of importance for Him and to attempt to rise to be critics of His plan as if we have more wisdom or that we know His mind is ludicrous.

This is not a strawman argument but rather one of cause and effect. If God would cause His full weight of Holiness, righteousness, and judgment to fall on the Hebrew nation in the OT or upon us in this present culture, we would not survive. The understanding is in what His full weight of His right to judge looks like: Revelation. That is the witness as to what His holiness, righteousness, and judgment will look like and would have looked like if it was born upon the Hebrews in the time frame we are looking at in the OT. The strawman is also assuaged by the fact that it is his grace then and now that keeps mankind in a position of continued existence.

"Special sensitivity"? Really? I'm one of those rare people that thinks rape and child molestation are the worst things you can do to a person? Come on. I'm not talking about something frivolous like copyright law here. Ask anyone to name the top ten most terrible things that you can do to another human, and those things will be on their list. They're not going to list vandalism, although that's covered in the Law. They're not going to list charging interest on a loan, although that's covered in the Law. Top three are going to be murder, rape, and molestation in the minds of the vast, vast, majority of people. So don't pretend there is this one law that I have a personal affinity for, we both know it is one of the, if not the, most harmful things one person can do to another person next to murder.

This is where the onus falls on the detractor. Specifically, because of 2 Peter 1:20-21. And before we claim that the Mosaic laws do not rise to prophecy, we need to consider what Peter is claiming. The Mosaic laws were divided into subcategories (casuistic or case law, apodictic law, prohibition law, death law, and the curse) (Hill 63). If there were not an immediate punishment for the law, then the result of breaking the law was against the nation as a whole and God would remove His protection etc. All of Scripture is considered to be under the authority of 2 Peter 1:20-21 and is one of the foundations for the Chicago Statement. This means that the Bible is as it claims and that to deny its authorship to God, one needs to prove that statement and not the other way around.


Also, we would need to make a case that the absence of certain laws was not in keeping with God’s eternal plan. The problem with arguing that necessary laws were omitted, is to claim that we know the mind of God or that we know better what was necessary than God did. If we did have that kind of knowledge and wisdom, then we would be God or as God. That was the original claim by Satan as he tempted Eve: Gen 3:5. We have already seen the result of falling for that lie, and I don’t see good results from falling for it again.

This argument would mean that innocent women being raped and innocent children being molested is part of God's plan. A perfectly loving God wants these terrible atrocities to occur for some greater good. Do you think that is more likely than men wrote the Bible and were fallible?

You can't tell me that an omnipotent and omniscient God couldn't achieve His plan without all the rape and molestation that would have gone undeterred. If God "can't" then He's not omnipotent. So He must want it to happen this way.

 

[Nihilist Virus]

Well it might depend on translation. I like the ESV because it tries to use a literal translation as much as possible. There are other versions that are quite literal, but ESV does a good enough job I haven't had to have people explain Greek or Hebrew to me yet when I point out specific words. ESV sez:

And he sacrificed all the priests of the high places who were there, on the altars, and burned human bones on them. Then he returned to Jerusalem.

He didn't just kill them, he sacrificed them on the altars. It doesn't explicitly say "to God" so there's a bit of doubt to be had, but I don't know what else you use an altar to God for.

When I point at the link here on the boards, the KJV just says "slew" but I bet that isn't the Hebrew word they used. I'd bet money "sacrifice" is accurate.

I'm still puzzled about the business of the "human" bones instead of "their" bones, but the ESV that you provide is strong evidence of human sacrifice. Looking at the other translations, many have it saying that Josiah slaughtered them on the altar. Perhaps the word "sacrifice" does not actually appear, but the text is clear that the priests are being killed on an altar. Obviously it was not accident or coincidence that they were killed on such a spot.

Anytime someone mentions racism in the Bible I always like to point out that Jesus was a Moabite (so was David) because I find that contradiction particularly ironically hilarious. There wasn't a pertinent point to be made, I just like reminding people.

Deuteronomy 23:2-3 gives two restrictions on who can enter the assembly of the Lord. The assembly of the Lord was the tabernacle when they were in the desert, and then it would later be the temple. A superficial reading shows that Jesus broke both of these commandments when he went into the temple whipping people and overturning tables.

Deuteronomy 23:2 prohibits bastards (mamzer) from entering the assembly of the Lord. But a mamzer does not correspond exactly to our word "bastard." I read what a mamzer is and Jesus does not qualify, despite being born of parents (God and Mary) who were not married.

Deuteronomy 23:3 prohibits a descendant of a Moabite from entering the assembly of the Lord, but the stock response from apologists is that legal bloodlines are reckoned through the males only. Since Ruth was a woman, she does not corrupt the lineage of Jesus. Note, though, that this disqualification would also apply to all of the kings of Judah since David was descended from Ruth also. I think we can all agree it would be inconceivable to bar a king from the assembly of the Lord, so obviously the Jews had already worked around this issue long before Jesus came around.

So in spite of the superficial reading, it appears Jesus dodged a couple bullets there. He was still quite racist, though, seeing as how he refers to gentiles as dogs scavenging for table crumbs.

 

[Moral Orel]

Deuteronomy 23:3 prohibits a descendant of a Moabite from entering the assembly of the Lord, but the stock response from apologists is that legal bloodlines are reckoned through the males only. Since Ruth was a woman, she does not corrupt the lineage of Jesus. Note, though, that this disqualification would also apply to all of the kings of Judah since David was descended from Ruth also. I think we can all agree it would be inconceivable to bar a king from the assembly of the Lord, so obviously the Jews had already worked around this issue long before Jesus came around.

Ahh, but that caveat only works if you place stock in the Talmud being as old as they say it is (back to Moses) and then you open up the door to all sorts of other things. According to the book Christians trust, Jesus was a Moabite. According to the oral tradition that they say is horribly corrupted and not guided by God, He is not a Moabite. See the fun?

 

[Nihilist Virus]

Ahh, but that caveat only works if you place stock in the Talmud being as old as they say it is (back to Moses) and then you open up the door to all sorts of other things. According to the book Christians trust, Jesus was a Moabite. According to the oral tradition that they say is horribly corrupted and not guided by God, He is not a Moabite. See the fun?

Satisfactory demonstration that the Bible is insufficient to address all issues can be world shattering to many Christians, but not to the Catholics. The Catholics already accept a bunch of wacky traditions, plus additional doctrine such as the apocrypha. I don't think their theology precludes the Talmud; their only hurdle in accepting it is overcoming their antisemitism. After all, there is no "Thou shalt not be racist" commandment on the books.