When Amnon presses his sister Tamar to sleep with him, she begs him to ask the king for her hand in marriage. Was such a marriage really an option in ancient Israel? After Amnon rapes Tamar, King David is angry, but silent. Why is it Absalom who feels compelled to avenge her?
Long before the discovery of Hammurabi’s laws—whose stated purpose is to protect the weak from abuses of power—Ibn Ezra intuited a similar principle underlying the Covenant Collection.
Look and see! A sexually assaulted Jerusalem resists being blamed and shamed by Lamentations’ male narrator and demands that YHWH recognize her suffering.
I don’t defend the Torah’s ostensibly immoral laws, but I do try to understand what motivated them.
A woman raped in the field is not punished for adultery, seemingly because rape is like murder (Deuteronomy 22:26). This odd analogy is the result of a misunderstanding of the verse’s use of a rhetorical device, parallelism with alternation.
If an Israelite wishes to marry a woman taken captive in war, she becomes part of the Israelite community and is protected from future re-enslavement. Uncomfortable with the Torah’s permission of this marriage, the rabbis declare it to be a concession to man’s “evil impulse,” an idea reminiscent of Jesus’ assertion that the Torah allows divorce as a concession to humanity’s “hard heart.”
1 Maccabees recounts how Mattathias instigated a rebellion against the Greeks out of zealotry against Jewish idolatry. Later midrashim tell how Mattathias’ daughter Channah goaded her father and brothers into fighting the Greeks to protect her from being raped by the local governor.
We cannot imagine anyone but Dinah as the victim, but does the Torah? Do the Rabbis? Understanding the story of Dinah and its reception in historical context can help us reflect on the role of women in ancient Israel and the meaning of sexual violence in a patriarchal society.
Why is the Benjaminite city of Gibeah portrayed as another Sodom—and who is the anonymous Levite from Ephraim who arrives there with his concubine?
Is the Torah concerned about Dinah's consent? Why is Dinah not given a voice in the story?
Are the Torah’s laws perfect or do they reflect biblical times and can adapt as society develops? The punishment of a rapist is a good test case for thinking about morally problematic biblical laws.
A Comparative Analysis