Yuku free message boards

Yark Hutprancer ~

YH: ... "your short, little, completely unsupported blurbs are just going to lead to more of me trying to wrestle information from you. MORE DETAIL PLEASE!"

Y'know, there /are/ various Bible commentaries and similar resources. Did you try browsing the stuff at Bible Gateway and Studylight and sites like that?

WR: "No, after the /betrothal./ Betrothal preceded the wedding-day."
YH: "Can you please give some support for this so I can be sure this is not just being made up by you on the fly?"

It sounds like you already found such support in the Wikipedia article.

WR: "Because the odds were high that in such a scenario, she would rapidly become indigent."
YH: WHY? More detail please! Support! Links, apolgetics books, published commentaries, "the bible says so," anything!"

Just think it through. A girl with no money, alone and unsupported by family, would tend to become indigent.

YH: "I fail to see how this set of guidelines was necessary when TODAY they are not necessary, yet the very same threat of some guy leading a girl away from Jesus still exists."

Can you see how it was necessary for students to keep the guidelines in the Student Handbook of their high school, but it is not necessary for them to abide by the Student Handbook after their graduation?

YH: "I fail to see why people were not allowed to marry foreigners, but are allowed to today, when we still can't be sure how the woman will be treated."

During most of the period in which Israel existed as a nation in the Old Testament, practically all foreigners were not worshippers of YHWH. There were some exceptions (Ruth, for example, was a Moabite, but she adopted Judaism and was on that basis accepted into the Hebrew community, and went on to marry Boaz), but as a rule, foreigners and foreign gods went together. Today, the covenant-role of the physical nation of Israel is parallelled by the spiritual nation of the Christian church. Within the church, there is an overlapping principle: as a rule, Christians seeking someone to marry should try to find someone of like faith.

WR: "Just because one man didn't consider a girl suitable didn't mean that no one would."
YH: "So could the guy who bought the girl but decided he didn't want her sell her directly another to Israelite? Or did he have to redeem her and then HER family would have to sell her off again?"

The impression that I get is that if the purchaser decided that he didn't want her after all, he could put her up for redemption, and at that point her family could buy her back. But if her family refused to buy her back at the full redemption-price, another Israelite male (but not a foreigner) could do so. And if no other Israelite make did so, then her family could buy her back at a lower price.

YH: "What would be a reason that a girl wouldn't please one master, but might please another?"

Personal tastes, I suppose. He might discover that she was a lousy conversationalist, or a terrible cook, or an incompetent seamstress. Or, if he was a widower with children, the newcomer might turn out to be not-so-friendly with his children. There could be oodles of reasons.

WR: "Because God called the Hebrews in a temporary setting in which the available alternatives (at least the ones that didn't involve compromising people's moral autonomy) would be even more inhumane."
YH: "Would you mind translating that into a language a high-school student would understand? I have no idea what you meant."

I mean that when God called the Hebrews and gave them the Law, He was beginning their training rather than ending it. Some of those laws were concessionary, or were build on concessionary foundations. In this respect, the Hebrew nation may be liked to the Greenhouse of God. The soil was weak, capable of absorbing a limited amount of disruption. So God, according to His wisdom, transplanted some trees and planted some seeds. Regulations of slavery such as the one discussed here is an example of a seed -- it's not the full-grown expression of God's will.

In the case at hand, I think that the main motivation for a husband and wife selling their daughter would be a desperate need for cash, so that they could buy food with the money received (and have one less person to provide for), and their daughter would "marry up" and be provided for. Clearly this is not an ideal scenario (and, per the Law's arrangement in which the nation's faithfulness would result in abundant harvests, would only be resorted to when the Israelites weren't living up to their part of the deal and underwent resultant hardship) but it seems more humane than the alternatives of the whole family's starvation, or of simply abandoning the daughter, or of selling a daughter to foreign slave-traders.

Yours in Christ,

Waterrock