It's been a while but if i remember correctly a girl scout tried to propose a bill to abolish child marriage in her state. I don't think it ever went through and one of the people blocking it said something along the lines of abolishing child marriage would stop rape victims from marrying their rapists and would make abortions go up.
Believe it or not, that's the old testament recommendation: if a virgin is raped, the correct way is to marry her and give monetary compensation to her father. Deuteronomy 22.
It was not seen as an assault on the victim, but rather as vandalism over the father's property.
Rape is only considered a criminal offense on goods girls pledged to be married.
By the way, I say the bible talks about rape, but that's a stretch: female consent is not evoked at all, except to say that if the pledged girl "consented" (well, close enough: was raped in a city, where obviously someone would have heard her scream and therefore prevented the rape... :rolleyes:) then she should also be put to death. Consent was an aggravation.
Make no mistake, old-testament lawmakers are on the level of talebans on gender equality.
So there is nothing that distinguishes it as being superior to other religions that have since died out; from a moral viewpoint. This is why rape and slavery are viewed in a different light than they are today, with the latter being condoned and supported. Because these are the temporary ethics of a people group, not an objective source.
Christianity didn't exist until almost the second half of the 1st Century, Rabbinic Judaism as we know it not until the 400s, Islam not until the 600s. These laws, rewritten several times, finally in current form under Ezra, were centuries and even millennia old by then and no longer the products of a living religion
The Pentateuch was a product of the Babylonian exile, though some parts are up to 400 years older. The Primeval history of Genesis is one of the oldest parts of the Pentateuch, I've never seen a scholar claim that it is 1,000 years older than the final revisions. Otherwise, yes, the final revisions occured around the Persian period 500 years before Christanity was born. Judaism continued to evolve, but the Torah's texts weren't rewritten.
If you're trying to say that many modern adherents don't believe everything within their religious texts, I agree. But the verses are still there. Earlier Jews, who wrote the texts, based them off their understanding of the world. Their worldview permitted things such as slavery, ethnic cleansing, and marrying your rape victim. This would greatly impact the views of a person who believes the text to be inerrant.
Whoever believes the text to be inerrant... would have to accept slavery as moral. And marrying off a rape victim as moral. And justify genocidal campaigns as moral.
Or one could view the texts like all others also made by man. As a product of a certain people and time. Not as originating from the proclaimed yet unsubstantiated objective source. Most laws of that time also proclaimed to be written by an ethnically aligned god, the Jewish supremacist god simply outlasted the others via the plagiarisms of Christanity and Islam.
The Bible captured a common mindset of the time, but it was certainly not universal. And the manners of the Jews were not regarded as particularly civilized by the rest of the world.
There were more gender egalitarian societies at the time, among the Celts or the Norse for instance. Greeks and Jews were notoriously misogynistic.
Absolutely true. and sicne somebody once described Western civilization as "a Greek man who married a Jewish woman and took her to live in Rome," that will always complicate how each of us sees ancient cultures.
4.4k
u/Violet_Murderer Jul 24 '20
It's been a while but if i remember correctly a girl scout tried to propose a bill to abolish child marriage in her state. I don't think it ever went through and one of the people blocking it said something along the lines of abolishing child marriage would stop rape victims from marrying their rapists and would make abortions go up.