Posted: Sep 27, 2017 6:20 am
Animavore wrote:The other is that if a woman is raped and she does not scream for help then she is to be killed.
What progressive rape law is it (for its day) you think the Bible has?
... So, I guess you're just speaking by hearsay and have never read the passage in question.
23 If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, 24 you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you.
25 But if out in the country a man happens to meet a young woman pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die. 26 Do nothing to the woman; she has committed no sin deserving death. This case is like that of someone who attacks and murders a neighbor, 27 for the man found the young woman out in the country, and though the betrothed woman screamed, there was no one to rescue her.
So yeah, the one you mention is basically to prevent lethal false rape charges. The idea is that if she doesn't scream for help, there's a possibility that she was claiming it was rape to get out of the mutual punishment. The man was guaranteed to be killed, either way, and if the woman screamed for help, only the man would be killed (otherwise they wouldn't have specified screaming one way or the other). The woman was only killed if there was no resistance... which, with the level of technology of the time, could only be proved by the occurrence of a scream for help.
Yeah, brutal and not at all good by modern standards, and it only applies to the married and betrothed women... virgins raped this way would be forced to marry the attacker. But, my point is, do you see any law, any law at all, in other cultures or nations of that time punishing people who commit rape? Here, as I've demonstrated, if a man attacked a married woman in an area with no people around to witness, she wouldn't be blamed and the crime of the man would be put in the same category as murder. It may not be MUCH, but it's SOMETHING, and that seems to be more than any of Israel's neighbors at the time had.