The Bible underneath it
God and Women
Not culture drifting around the text. The laws themselves, in his own voice.
How this page works
Narrative and law are kept separate here, because critics who blur them get dismissed, and deserve to. The horrors of Judges 19 and Genesis 19 are stories the text records, in an era it explicitly condemns ("everyone did as they saw fit"). This page is about the other category: statutes presented as God’s own commands.
The laws
The captives. Numbers 31:17-18: "kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." The verse offers no comment on what "for yourselves" means for the girl. Deuteronomy 21 supplies the protocol for war captives: she shaves her head, pares her nails, and mourns her father and mother a full month, "and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband." Her consent is not mentioned because it is not a variable.
The price of a daughter. Exodus 21:7 begins "And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant." The law regulates the sale with real protections. It never questions the selling.
The valuations. Leviticus 27 sets redemption prices for vows: an adult man, fifty shekels of silver; an adult woman, thirty. The schedule runs from infancy to old age, and the female price is lower in every bracket.
The virginity trial. Deuteronomy 22:13-21: a bride whose "tokens of virginity be not found" is brought "to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die." A false accuser is fined and loses divorce rights. There is no corresponding law about male virginity anywhere in the code.
The ordeal. Numbers 5 prescribes a ritual for a wife suspected of adultery: bitter water, and a curse asking the LORD to "make thy thigh to rot, and thy belly to swell." There is no ordeal for a suspected husband.
The silence. 1 Timothy 2: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence," grounded not in culture but in creation order and Eve’s deception. 1 Corinthians 14:34-35: "Let your women keep silence in the churches... for it is a shame for women to speak in the church."
What a person was worth, by law
Leviticus 27 sets the redemption price for a person vowed to the Lord. The schedule runs from infancy to old age.
| Age | Male | Female |
|---|---|---|
| One month to five years | 5 shekels | 3 shekels |
| Five to twenty years | 20 shekels | 10 shekels |
| Twenty to sixty years | 50 shekels | 30 shekels |
| Sixty and above | 15 shekels | 10 shekels |
Leviticus 27:3-7, King James. The female price is lower in every bracket, at every age.
What is true on the other side
- Several of these laws were protective by the standards of the neighborhood. Assyrian law punished a rapist by handing his wife over to be raped. Israel’s captive-bride law bans resale and enslavement. The comparative point is true in full. Then notice what it concedes: the laws are ancient Near Eastern legislation, ranked against other ancient legislation, which is this page’s entire thesis.
- The famous "marry your rapist" law is genuinely contested. The King James reads "lay hold on her, and lie with her," a weaker verb than the unambiguous force verb three verses earlier, and the modern renderings that print "rapes her" are making an interpretive choice. Present the range honestly; the law is grim on either reading, since the woman marries her assailant or seducer for life, but do not flatten a live translation debate.
- Jesus is the strongest counter-evidence, and it is real: he taught women, traveled with them, and the first witness of the resurrection is a woman in all four gospels, in a culture that discounted female testimony. Galatians 3:28 declares "there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."
- Serious scholarship questions the harshest New Testament texts. Most critical scholars hold that 1 Timothy was written after Paul, and a real scholarly line argues the 1 Corinthians 14 silence verses are a later insertion, since some early manuscripts carry them in a different location. These are open questions, not settled facts; cite them as such.
Genesis 3:16 ("he shall rule over thee") is stated as a consequence of the fall, not a command. 1 Corinthians 11:3 sits in the same chapter as "woman is not independent of man, nor man of woman." Ephesians 5:22 follows "submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God" and precedes a heavier command laid on husbands. 1 Peter 3:7 calls wives co-heirs in the same sentence critics quote. Quoting any of these out of their own paragraph is the mirror image of what this site accuses apologists of doing.
Why this should make you question
The defense that works, these were humane laws for their time and place, is also the concession that ends the argument. Laws indexed to a time and place are what human legislators produce. The claim on the table was that these words came from outside any time and place. A moral vision that never once exceeds its own century needs no author beyond it.