Looking for best rationale for the war captive laws of Deut. 21

[Pergamum]

Deut. 21:

When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive,

11 And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife;

12 Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house, and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails;

13 And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife.

14 And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast humbled her.

How would you preach this passage or cover it in a Sunday school lesson?

 

[BGF]

I highly recommend this method for finding a wife. It's how I met my lovely bride almost 19 years ago and we're as happy as we could be.

 

[Pergamum]

Can you buy her a wig for a while after she has her head shaved? And must she go "Full Sinead O'Conner" for a period of time?

 

[Mushroom]

Grace, grace, and more grace. The battles of the Israelites were horrific but necessary. Their enemies, delivered into their hands by our sovereign God, could expect no quarter for their wickedness, and yet in the midst of that bloody ordeal here is given a tender escape for a few. She is called to acknowledge her parents by her mourning, and then to attach herself to the people of God through marriage. Having done so, if the man proves unfaithful to his pledge (divorce given for the hardness of their hearts), he is precluded from dishonoring her as spoil.

Even in the very hard things our God is merciful.

I'm sure there's theological error in that, but it's what came to my faltering mind.

 

[BGF]

Can you buy her a wig for a while after she has her head shaved? And must she go "Full Sinead O'Conner" for a period of time?

I might say head covering, but that may turn this into a different discussion.

 

[Peairtach]

and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails;

and she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her,

These will be ceremonial holiness provisions. To join with God's people she must put off the uncleanness and culture of the Gentiles.

and bewail her father and her mother a full month:

And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast humbled her.

These provisions show a degree of compassion and respect to a captive enemy woman, but yet made in God's image, that would not have been common among the Ancient Near Eastern nations of the time.

The passage would come under the general rubric of

He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.(Matt 19:8)

The Lord was ameliorating the worst excesses of certain cultural practices and ameliorating war by introducing certain rules like we do today e.g. no mustard gas, etc. Maybe it discouraged rape of captive women, also, by implicitly excluding it (?)

In the modern world we would only take captive enemy combatants and not their wives and children. If we saw a beautiful female enemy combatant in a POW camp - being run according to the Geneva Convention - we wouldn't just take her but ask for her hand in marriage.

 

[Peairtach]

This from Christopher Wright's New International Biblical Commentary on Deuteronomy:

The female prisoner of war. Here we have another law that on first reading seems not only remote from our normal experience but superficially harsh. But on closer inspection, it furnishes a good example of the value of asking the kind of questions suggested in the introduction to this book, for getting at the underlying objecives and priorities of OT laws. We might like to live in a world without wars and thus without prisoners of war. However, OT law recognises such realities and seeks to mitigate their worst effects by protecting the victims as far as possible. If we ask whose interests this law serves, the answer is clearly the female captive. If we ask whose power is being restricted, the answer, equally clearly, is the victorious soldier. The law is thus a paradigm case of the OT's concern to defend the weak against the strong, war being one of the most tragic human expressions of that situation.

There are four ways in which this law benefits the captured woman. (a) She is not to be raped or to be enslaved as a concubine, but is to be accorded the full status of wife (vv.11,13). The instruction in Hebrew is quite clear that only marriage is intended. (b) She is to be given time to adjust to the traumatic new situation and to ritually mourn for her parents who are now dead as far as she is concerned. This is to take place within the security of her new home, not in some prisoner or refugee camp. (c) The law compassionately restricts even the soldier's "bridegroom's rights," by postponing any sexual intercourse with the woman until this month of mourning and adjustment is over. (d) If the man finally changes his mind and will not undertake marital responsibility towards her, she is to leave as a free woman. He can take no further advantage over her by selling her as a slave. Thus, the physical and emotional needs of the woman in her utter vulnerability are given moral and legal priority over the desires and the claims of the man in his victorious strength. The case could be written up as a matter of human rights . Deuteronomy characteristically prefers to express it as a matter of responsibilities. As such, its relevance is clearly applicable beyond the realm of war to all kinds of analagous situations of weakness and power.