Rape in the Bible

Whether you are male or female, your life has been affected by the culture of macho-supremacy that fills the pages of the Bible. Every battle of the Feminist movement was made necessary because of the culture that has been gifted us by millennia of religion.  Over-lenient male judges are still prone to valuing property higher than women, when it comes to sentencing rapists, precisely because of our religious past.  Every suffragette's struggle was made necessary by our culture of "women as property" inherited from the Bible.

"The Bible teaches that women are male property, buyable, saleable, abductable... and rapeable." (A.L. Gaylor)

You may disagree with me based on your current knowledge - so read on.

Numbers 31:15-18 Moses said to them, ‘Have you allowed all the women to live? .... Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.'

What is your reaction?

Let's not play games here. There is really only one interpretation of "keeping them alive for yourselves" that we can allow. The enemy were worthy only of death, and the virgins (not the mothers) were worthy only to be enslaved and used for sex. 

We can deduce this from other passages too.   How do we know they were to be used for sex? Because the mothers would have made equally good, if not better, servants.  These girls were obviously to be raped and owned.  Of course that is what happened.  The scribe was just writing down the 800 year old myth, and justifying it by saying that god had ordered it (via Moses).

In this chapter, the young virgins are listed way down the list of the plunder - after the sheep and the asses. It may interest you to realise that we are talking about 32,000 girls here. Thirty-two of these were given as an offering to the priests - to do as they wished with. Sixteen thousand were given out to the soldiers. The rest were used by the rest of the population.

Imagine the feelings in your mind as the mother of one of these girls. Your village was a peaceful one until today. Now your husband and sons have been butchered in battle by an invading religious horde. You know you are about to be murdered, and you know your daughter will then be enslaved and raped, possibly by elderly Hebrew priests.

Maybe you say: "But these were primitive times. That's how people behaved!"

Well, they were supposedly under the command of the all-wise, all-loving unchanging God. If He was making the rules, the Jews should have been as ethically advanced, or more so, than we are today.  Christians who say "God was leading the people out of their pagan, primitive pasts" are refusing to see that god's commands are horrific.  A 21st century street-kid from the Bronx could write more ethical commands than these.

Judges 21:11-12 'This is what you shall do; you shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman that has lain with a male." And they found four hundred young virgins who had never slept with a man and brought them to the camp.

Deuteronomy 21:11-14 "Suppose you see among the captives a beautiful woman whom you desire and want to marry, and so you bring her home to your house: she shall shave her head, pare her nails, discard her captive’s garb, and shall remain in your house for a full month, mourning for her father and mother; after that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. "

No-one enquired whether she wanted to marry her captor. This was rape. It goes on to say that the woman could be turned out (in the middle of the desert) if she didn't please the man.

Zechariah 14:2 (God speaking) "The city shall be taken and the houses looted and the women raped."

Do you really want yourself or your children exposed to these Bronze Age texts?

Isaiah 13:16 (God speaking) "Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be plundered, and their wives ravished."

Have you ever noticed the complete absence of humour in God's manner? It is anti-life.  The effect of religion is sometimes to make good people do appalling things, feeling fully justified by their beliefs.

To sum up:

What we have seen is direct evidence that the Bible is not the word of a compassionate God. It is the wearisome record of a male-dominated religious dictatorship in the Bronze Age, who thought, like every other nation did (and still does), that a god was on their side.

That's all.

Geoff Mather 2007

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