Bloody, Brutal, Barbaric: Part 3: Better Answers: Better for Questions about Genocide and War Rape

Ch.4: Reading the Bible Redemptively

READING THE BIBLE REDEMPTIVELY: ENGAGING TWO HORIZONS

Reading the Bible redemptively works from the premise that “movement is meaning.” Even as we read a text as it is on the page to determine its meaning within its lterary context, we must pay attention to its social, historical, and canonical contexts to get a the movement of its meaning that represents the underlying spirit” (103) of the biblical material as a whole.

CONCLUSION

We must read the Bible both looking backwards and looking forward. If we only read it looking backward from our vantage point in the present we will see only much that seems foreign, primitive, retrograde, and even repulsive to us. And it is! But we also look forward from the text toward its eventual fulfilment in Christ, we may see “a redemptive side, which often contains partial or incremental movement toward the betterment of human beings.” (103).

That these redemptive movements, or trajectories, do not rise to the level of their final realization in Christ or even our best contemporary insights is what makes this approach incremental. The movement (mentioned above) constitutes this trajectory as a coherent whole. It binds these incremental stages into a meaningful ethical datum. Partially or incrementally better than the norm in their context makes them redemptive. Only the look forward and the look back together do justice to the complexity reading ancient texts entails.

Ch.5: War Rape (Part One): The Ugly Side

Dt.21:10-14 is the “pretty woman text.” After a military battle in which an Israelite warrior sees a beautiful captive woman and is strongly attracted to her physical appearance, he may take the captive woman as his wife.

Our modern ethical standards make this practice repulsive. There is an undoubted ugly side to this practice. But there is also a redemptive aspect.

THE TROUBLING SIDE: ETHICAL PROBLEMS

What’s wrong with this text as it stands (looking backwards at it)? Let us count some of the ways:

-patriarchy, war, sexual property, overvalued external beauty, only one month for a woman to grieve her people’s loss in war and her capture, forced or coerced marriage, coerced sexuality, marital rape, battlefield rape permitted 

Among the assumptions of that time that blinded them to these issues and prevented them from seeing what we see as ethical problems: arranged marriages, no legal concept of marital rape, and so on. We have the Hague and Geneva Conventions in addition to a full biblical revelation which enables us to see what they could not and creates for us the problems are dealing with here.





TWO ADDITIONAL ALLEGED ETHICAL PROBLEMS 

Two remaining ethical issues associated with the pretty-woman passage require attention:

-that progeny purity is the real/true motive for the one month waiting period, and

-battlefield rape is permitted for Israelite warriors.

However, the evidence for these two alleged problems is skimpier and less persuasive than for the above.

EMBEDDED BLINDERS TO RAPE

The ancient world’s assumptions created numerous blinders (we noted a few above) that make our ethical assessments of them (looking backwards) necessary and, at the same time, anachronistic (which makes looking forward imperative as well).

(1) antiquated rape laws in general, with women treated as sexual property 

(2) dominance of arranged marriages, which in many cases amounted to a type of rape/sexual coercion 

(3) no legal concept of rape within a marriage (only in premarital cases)

(4) no view of rape by soldiers as a war crime against humanity.

This shows how the war events we find in the Bible could hardly have been other than they were. It shows as well how difficult and complicated making changes in a good direction can be given the limits of our own horizons.

CONCLUSION

One must concede that the biblical laws governing the practice of Israel’s holy war were far from the best possible ethic. That is one side of the story that must be heard and openly acknowledged.

Ch.6: War Rape: The Redemptive Side

To see this attractive side, we will need to momentarily set aside our contemporary (Hague/Geneva conventions) lens of war ethics and instead look at Deuteronomy 21 and Numbers 31 from the vantage point of the world in which they were written (looking forward). Looking this direction, we find a much-restrained ethic and even some surprisingly positive developments around war rape (the ways Israel differed from the accepted ethics and assumptions in incremental yet redemptive way.

WAR RAPE IN AN ANCIENT WORLD

Simply put, within ancient warfare the rape of women and young girls was a common practice. In fact, it was so common that it became part of the honored artwork of the day—artisans chiseled war-rape scenes into stone monuments, engraved them on coins, and painted them on walls. The rape of enemy women in ancient warfare was accepted, expected, and celebrated—worn as a badge of  honor.

Psychologically, rape enacted defeat at a far deeper level than mere killing on the battlefield. It reminded the defeated how we were not able to protect their most prized persons and property. Rape was the ritualized climax to the killing on the battlefield.

Some of the sexualized imagery the Bible uses, tent-peg images, female body-part language, lifting skirts, intend to a reader’s sensibilities. It withholds none of the ugliness and terror of war rape in the ancient world.

NO BATTLEFIELD RAPE

For Hebrews nothing stands out more from its ancient war context is the prohibition of rape (of any kind of sex) on the battlefield or on the journey from the battle site back to Jerusalem. Just when the fighting was at its height or in the flush of victory, Israel’s forces were not permitted to commit sexual violence on top of that.

Case against Battlefield rape:

To begin with, in contrast to surrounding cultures, Israelites were not permitted any sexual acts within the temple setting as part of its worship (Lev 21:7, 9; Num 15:39; 25:1-4; Deut 23:17-18; 1 Kings 14:24;  15:12; 22:46; Hos 4:4; 2 Macc. 6:4; see also Rev 2:14, 20). Thus there were no male and female temple prostitutes or ritual sex in worship.

These same mores seem present in Israel’s military practices too. The Ark symbolized the reality of God’s presence in battle in which it accompanied Israel (Num 10:35-36; Josh 6:7-13; 1 Sam 4:3-11; 11:11). This makes Israel’s warfare a holy or sacred act and thus requires a raised state of devotion of the warriors and of the battle activity—both are consecrated to the Lord (Is 13:3; Jer 6:4; 22:7; 51:27-28; Joel 3:9; Mic 3:5; see also 1 Sam.21:1-5/Urriah). The presence of the ark with the army all the way back to Jerusalem made the postbattle collection of goods and travel back to Jerusalem a sacred space.

It would make little sense to prohibit sexual intercourse with captive women during the various stages of a prolonged war but make it acceptable for a brief period once the battle was over.

Perhaps such sexuality laws played a part in the way human beings related to each other in these highly vulnerable contexts (worship & war), where sexuality was easily open to abuse. From a Western perspective the laws of Leviticus about cultic purity, menstruation, and sexual prohibitions seem weird. But these taboos against sex during menstruation, war, and worship seem to reflect a concern to curb unchecked male power and imposed sexual intercourse with women in vulnerable settings.

NO GLORIFICATION OF WAR RAPE IN ISRAEL’S ART

After wars in the ANE rulers would often hire artisans to place portraits of (implied) war rape—the sexual ravaging of women and girls—on city walls, coins, statues, columns, and paintings to commerate the event.

There’s no such art extant in Israel though not much of its art has been recovered. However, in its literature Israel lacks such descriptions as we find in foreign writers. For example, an Assyrian war scene of two soldiers raping a woman finds its counterpart in written documents (1) with  explicit threats of rape and sexual ravaging of enemy women in  curse formulas, (2) with the inclusion of rape in the victory records  of war annals, and (3) with the seeming allusion to war rape in an  annual celebration festival. This is true all over the ANE. However, biblical accounts do not glorify war rape in their annals or threaten their enemies with the sexual conquest of their women. While God threatens Israel herself with being raped by foreign armies, the action is obviously different and raises different issues.

So these first two redemptive points are closely connected. If Israelite warriors were not permitted sexual contact in or after war, it would follow that there would be no artistic representations of that non-event.

NO RAPE OF TEMPLE SLAVES

Now if sex was a part of the ancient worship setting, as it was in surrounding nations, then war-captured slaves given to the temple would be a natural resource for ritualized sex acts and/or sacred prostitution.

Therefore, if all this is the case (and W/O argue there is evidence of both), we have another redemptive aspect of Israel’s war practices in relation to rape. War slaves (as well as domestic debt slaves) would be extremely vulnerable to the whims of temple managers in such circumstances.

In sum, female captives of war likely functioned in positions vulnerable to perpetual rape as slaves owned by and serving ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian temples. The good news with Israel’s war-rape story is temple sex with war captives (or anyone else in the temple) was not permitted. Israel’s sexual boundary lines in the religious domain were clear and absolute. Since no temple prostitution or sacred-ritual sex of any kind was permitted in the worship of Yahweh, Israel’s war practices did not result in women being repeatedly raped as sex slaves for religious purposes.

REDUCED RAPE OF DOMESTIC SLAVE PROSTITUTES

Some women captives unfortunately ended up belonging to a soldier or slave purchaser who would then rent them out for sexual use. Such slaves were a major source for domestic prostitution. The slave owner kept the female slave within his household and had the right to hire her out for sexual purposes. While one might not think of general prostitution as war rape, clearly it functioned as such in the ANE.

However, it appears that Israelite males were socially restricted in their use of prostitutes. Israel’s commitment to sex being acceptable only in the context of marriage in Israel had at least some redemptive impact on the issue at hand. While prostitution was legal and moderately accepted in other cultures, in Israel both were roundly reject

The pretty-woman text of Deuteronomy 21:4-10 shows how one established a sexual relationship with an attractive captive woman. The soldier had to jump through a number of hoops which reflect back on prostitution of war slaves. There is no either-or here: to marry the attractive slave. While Deuteronomy 21:4-10 does not address battlefield rape, it  does carry strong implications for postwar slave prostitution that  typically happened in ancient households through hiring out  slaves.

REDEMPTIVE ELEMENTS IN DEUTERONOMY 21:4-10

redemptive elements: 

1. a month-long waiting period  (one week was standard mourning time)

2. mourning/assimilation rituals: hair, nails and clothing (time to express grief ritually with enactments destroy previous sources of joy not to be suppressed by warrior’s desire for sex); The three grief-related rituals may have been intentionally selected by the biblical author to highlight the folly of pursuing external beauty alone.

3. marriage covenant before sex 

4. prohibition against selling the woman as a slave (must divorce her which made her a free woman). The prospects for a divorced foreign woman in that culture would not have been great. But her life as a free woman would likely have been better than being sold as a permanent chattel slave.

5.concern voiced for the woman’s honor. The consequent restriction on the male (not selling her) and the framing of the language (you humiliated her) are redemptive, for they together place blame on the one with power. That the biblical authors would care at all about the honor of a divorced female war captive is nothing short of amazing, given their ancient horizon.

CONCLUSION

When read within the horizon of an ancient world, redemptive signs in Israel point to some incremental steps in directions we might want to applaud. While clearly not where we want to end up we can recognize a trajectory we can affirm without accepting—something many today cannot find their way to do. We can even be thankful for what they meant then and there while firmly rejecting them as adequate for today.

In sum, then, these redemptive incremental signs with regard to war rape include:

-no battlefield rape 

-no artwork or literary counterpart that glorifies war rape 

-no rape of temple-slave prostitutes (war captives as a source) 

-reduced rape of domestically owned slave prostitutes (war captives as a source) 

-restrictive measures placed on Israelite warriors attracted to a beautiful captive woman 

-a one-month delay for mourning 

-mourning/transition rituals that permit intense grieving 

-marriage covenant before sex 

-in the event of divorce, no selling the woman as a slave (she is a free woman) 

-concern voiced for her honor (placing blame for the divorce on the male)