The Laws of the Beautiful Captive

Because of the war, I’ve been paying attention to goings on in Israel. Thus I know what I would not normally know, that it is the holy month of the new year there, and that today’s Sabbath reading includes something called “the laws of the beautiful captive.”

I hadn’t heard of this, but it derives from an episode in Deuteronomy. Islam has a similar but much less kindly set of laws for women taken in war. The Greeks of the Homeric period exercised similar conduct, but with no clear restrictions; probably both of the religious standards represented a positive improvement in the treatment of captive women. 

Men, of course, were always killed in the bitter wars; or subjected to unrestricted slavery in the less bitter ones.

The rabbis who formalized the Torah apparently found the laws already uncomfortable, and suggest that they are a concession to the hardness of human nature. Interestingly to me, the Jewish article I cited above ends with a reflection on how the rabbinical commentary compares to the teaching of Jesus on divorce. 
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2 comments:

  1. J Melcher12:04 PM

    Is there not the fully practical long term consideration that the woman taken captive might have been newly impregnated by -- and have deeply loved -- the man her captor just killed? A 30 day wait would tend to provide evidence that either the captive woman has a new and additional biological/psychological bond with her previous man, so has reason to hate her captor, or in the alternative suggest that a new bond can be formed by starting up a new life together. Seems to me a lot of Old Testament Heaven-sent Laws and interpretations of law can be construed as highly practical.

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  2. Texan997:09 PM

    That's what I thought of, too--Jesus's exasperated explanation that human beings needed laws to lessen the harshness of divorce, not because divorce was good, but because bad divorce laws made a bad practice much worse. Better not to kill your male enemies or take your female enemies captive, but if you must, at least put some ethical constraints on how you do it. And it's not as though, in that day and age, they could very well adopt the women into the tribe as independent citizens and put them to work in the pink collar jobs observing a prudent celibacy while they hunted for a suitable husband. People were in families one way or another, or they were in dire straits and a horrible problem for the community.

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