Yes – that you’re living in a fantasy world invented by atheists. I have known dozens of biblical scholars and not a one would agree with your slander.
1 Like
And there are at least two seminaries near me that would not agree. I know some of the staff at one and have audited courses at the other.
1 Like
Seminaries do not all teach the same thing. Technically, finishing seminary does not make one an academic bible scholar.
I’m sure it’s possible to meet dozens of Bible scholars in a lifetime who all agree that Moses existed. That does not change the fact that the consensus among academics is that Moses was at best a myth or a metaphor. And it’s academics who decide how these things are taught at the university level. Not your Sunday School teacher.
Here’s an example of what I am talking about. A Bible Scholar teaching that the Jews believed it was ok to rape your neighbor’s virgin daughter as long as you pay the father when you are done. He has a PhD and that’s how he was taught to read the Bible.
They are not hard to find. Not as common as Bible Scholars who believe Moses was myth/metaphor.. But still..
I am sure the PhD’s who graduate from these seminaries would disagree. Or do you have a pecular definition of “academic bible scholar”?
What percentage is required to reach consensus?
Most Christian universities hire professors with a range beliefs but most will align with the beliefs of the university. Heck I went to a state university and the teacher of the NT literature class was a YEC Baptist.
Dan is a Mormon and it shows in most of what he does. I still enjoy watching his videos but take what he says with a hefty pinch of salt. And even he doesn’t always agree with the consensus.
I am not going to dig into the OT to verify, but I am pretty sure your characterization of the consensus opinion is more than a little bit over the top.
2 Likes
You should. I have. I even wrote my own refutation of it and saved it on my hard drive because it’s such a common argument. Would you like to see it?
Better yet, since you and @St.Roymond keep telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about, why not show me how either of you would refute it? It should be easy for you guys because you know so many Bible scholars.
Best to end there and leave it at that.
Seminaries vary widely reflect traditions and affiliated denominational preferences. Bob Jones, Seven Day Adventist, and Union Theological seminaries have limited common ground. Some seminaries unabashedly prize dogma over evidence from archeology, history, and literary analysis. Given that doctrinal and interpretive differences can never be empirically resolved, consensus is not going to happen. Put another way, any claim of theological consensus usually just up front discounts the validity of alternate perspectives as if they do not exist.
2 Likes
So they all disagree with how virtually every English Bible translates Deuteronomy 22:28-29?
Saying the Jews believed it was okay to rape someone’s daughter as long you paid for her is a questionable interpretation. The Levitical laws include all kinds of guidance for restitution after a crime. That verse in context is regulating what should happen after the crime to make restitution, it’s not declaring rape okay. I mean, I get how women find it disturbing that rape was wrong in the eyes of the ancients, not because it violated the bodily autonomy and human dignity of a woman, but because it violated the property rights of her father or husband. There was no concept of consent in that time, its anachronistic to impose those constructs on the text. The laws were regulating a Bronze Age tribal society where women were property and men had to pay bride prices for virgin brides. God didn’t institute that custom, the Levitical law was given in that context, to regulate customs that already existed. As distasteful as it is to modern sensibilities, laws like this one actually served to protect women more than they would have been protected in the prevailing culture. At least there were some consequences for the rapist.
5 Likes
They had a concept of sexual consent.
Deut. 22:25 “But if a man finds a betrothed young woman in the countryside, and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. 26 But you shall do nothing to the young woman; there is in the young woman no sin deserving of death, for just as when a man rises against his neighbor and kills him, even so is this matter. 27 For he found her in the countryside, and the betrothed young woman cried out, but there was no one to save her."
Yes. I agree that one has to interpret the ancient law as a family unit, too.
On the more extreme side was the retribution of Dinah’s brothers against the clan of her rapists.
I really like “The Enemy In the Household” perspective, by Caryn Reeder (I haven’t read it all yet, but Onscript did a good interview).
You may have had a similar experience–In the West African culture, my father was frequently offered camels for my sisters, as young as 10-12. Looking at it from my Western culture, I was horrified; I remember a delegation with a 40 something year old man and friends, talking with my dad. However, in a tough culture, I imagine there are a lot of other factors–parents wanting their daughter to have a stable household (like Tzeitel and Lazar Wolf in “Fiddler on the Roof.”) I remember the description of 26 yo Tuareg who was very tender to his 14 yo old wife (I knew the man personally, but had not met his wife). .
One online movie of a Nigerien wedding, “For the Best and For the Onion,” is helpful, too.
For the Best and for the Onion - Wikipedia
I think it’s still free on line, but I’m having trouble finding it at this point.
You have have presented the rape reference as an contrary example, but have not provided your own interpretation. What is your view of inspiration in regards to Deuteronomy 22?
28 “If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, 29 then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days.”
I’ll go first. Firstly, a sanction never means the sanctioned activity was “ok”. The officer does not write you a traffic violation and then says if you are willing to pay this it is ok to speed. So that would be a dumb argument and there is no way a scholarly consensus holds it was ok to rape.
Second, call it dispensation, call it whatever, but a great deal of the Pentateuch legal code is a product of the sorry state of human dignity in the ANE, represents the beginning and not the end point of God’s instruction to man, is expressly repudiated by Jesus and Paul, and that is something that gets glossed over in statements of literal, plenary, inerrant, inspiration. If one is rigidly bound to such a theology, then all the genocide, slavery, and moral quandary comes with the package.
4 Likes
The root verb that is translated often translated into seizes or rape doesn’t have a singular meaning. It can mean “to play” the flute or it can mean “to capture” a city. That’s a wide range of meaning. And it isn’t even the word used which clearly defines a rape in the verse that almost immediately precedes this one.
It’s often assumed that it means rape here because other ANE cultures had the same law. But that doesn’t actually seem to be true. I don’t see that we have evidence that such a bizarre law was ever actually enforced in any ANE culture, specifically that one literally capture your neighbor’s daughter, rape her and become his neighbor’s son in law. Maybe there is but I can find any. But the punishment for literally capturing your neighbor is DEATH under the Mosaic Law.
What would be punishment for a gang rape? What would be the punishment for a couple of unbetrothed teens who sneak at night to have sex?(which is what I think this verse is talking about in the first place) There are several other reasons to give why this doesn’t all add up.
Yes, In ancient pre-industrialized societies, the benefit of physical strength is more pronounced and relied upon for physical labor and defence. And sons and daughters would be sold into slavery when they were not able to sustain themselves. They couldnt just go get a job at McDonalds. But that BIG step to infer from this to say I could sneak into my neighbors tent, tie up his daughter and perhaps whack unconscious with a club and carry her away and rape her and that the punishment for that would be marriage. That legally it would be view the same as a seduction.
That certainly would have gave the Romans plenty to talk about during their occupation of Judea!
I disagree. Simply acknowledging that that women don’t want to be victims of violence and need help escaping is not “having a concept of consent.” Women were regularly trafficked. They were put in harems. They were sold into marriage and concubineship as children. They were considered part of war plunder. The whole David and Bathsheba story is prototypical of how women did not have rights. The modern concept of consent, where women have the right as autonomous agents to give and revoke permission about what happens to them or what activities they engage in is very recent, even in Western culture.
3 Likes
Does anyone have any evidence that Deut 22:28-29 is actually talking about rape?
Here’s a technical discussion of the Hebrew translation if you are really interested.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/1f45eod/is_the_translation_of_deuteronomy_222829_incorrect/
It’s talking about a violent sexual assault. But their construct of rape was not focused on violating the bodily autonomy, rights, or human dignity of a woman. They didn’t have those rights, they were property. In their construct of rape, the focus is on violation of property rights and making restitution for property damage. It’s kind of a “you break it, you buy it,” mentality, because virginity had a monetary value in their betrothal system. Women were sold into betrothals and marriages for negotiated bride prices, and there was a whole economic system around that.
2 Likes
There is also a compelling argument that such a notion would be, or is, “dead on arrival.”
Most religious scholars say that the timelines in Genesis are not potentially “historically” accurate, so anything based on or derived from them would also, by definition, be potentially inaccurate.
Also, the Old Testament was pieced together from 10’s of thousands of fragments, and not written by 1 individual from a single source text. The Book of Genesis was “written” by at least 3 or 4 different people, and not just Moses sitting down with the biblical equivalent of a typewriter.
There is a Hebrew word, Pathah, which means to seduce, which is used in Exodus 22:16 and Job 41:9.
If a man seduces a virgin who is not pledged to be married and sleeps with her, he must pay the bride-price, and she shall be his wife.
If my heart has been enticed by a woman,
or if I have lurked at my neighbor’s door,
But that word, allowing consent, is not used for here. The word used in Deuteronomy, Innah, is found in 2 Samuel 13:14, Judges 20:5, Genesis 34:2
But he refused to listen to her, and since he was stronger than she, he raped her.
During the night the men of Gibeah came after me and surrounded the house, intending to kill me. They raped my concubine, and she died.
When Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, the ruler of that area, saw her, he took her and raped her.
These are instances of force and violence, not serenading. The interpretation of the Deuteronomy passage as rape is lexically and contextually justified. In any event, the concern in Deuteronomy does not seem to be the degree of force or resistance at all. Rather, the distinction from prior verses in the chapter is that the woman here is unbetrothed, as the same activity involving a betrothed woman is adultery and is stipulated as a capital crime for the man and possibly the woman.
Even if your interpretation here is defensible, it is an outlandish litmus test for the value of Biblical scholarship and a seminary education.
2 Likes
It’s just a discussion actually. It’s not technical. I would again reiterate that Dan Macallan linguistic arguements are weak. Other comments in this thread refer to the LXX. But they fail to understand that Hebrew was basically just a liturgical language to most Jews. So the Hebrew Torah and Bible would have been the main authoritative source of Hebrew linguistics back in 250bc. At this time war and violence was a much more common theme in the Hebrew Bible.
Similarly to how the modern Hebrew language was constructed..If the Hebrew Bible talked more about flute playing than it did about violence and war, then that would have changed the modern Hebrew language.
@Christy at this point, I think this web forum should be shut down. It is a facade. Think about that.