“When a man sells his daughter as a concubine, she is not to leave as the male slaves do. If she is displeasing to her master, who chose her for himself, then he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners because he has acted treacherously toward her. Or if he chooses her for his son, he must deal with her according to the customary treatment of daughters. If he takes an additional wife, he must not reduce the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife. And if he does not do these three things for her, she may leave free of charge, without any payment.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

There’s a memorable scene from the series, West Wing, when President Bartlett publicly embarrassed one of his critics. Bartlett is a Democrat (being the protagonist of a show developed by Aaron Sorkin, of course he is). The critic is a religious conservative who has a popular call in radio show where she has been critical of the President and his policies and has taken a conservative stance on a handful of social issues including homosexuality. In front of a roomful of reporters and supporters, Bartlett asks the critic what kind of price his daughter would fetch if he sold her into slavery. This is followed by a series of other questions whose purpose is to show that this critic’s traditional understanding of the Old Testament is silly, and thus so are conservatives. Well, this next law starts with the verse Bartlett cities about selling a daughter into slavery. Let’s talk about what this means, what it doesn’t, and why this doesn’t take away from our image of God’s character in the Old Testament.

The first question to ask here is this: was Sorkin through Bartlett right that this passage is about a man selling his daughter into slavery? If you simply survey the major English translations, the answer to that question is not at all clear. Some of them translate the relevant Hebrew word as “slave.” Other translations use the word “servant” or “maidservant.” The CSB that I have used pretty consistently on here for years obviously chooses the word “concubine.” So, which is it?

Well, like we talked about yesterday, the same Hebrew word can be translated as both “slave” and “servant.” They didn’t draw a line of distinction between those two ideas the way we tend to do today. There are still servants all over England, for instance. Many of them serve in Buckingham Palace. That is considered a good and noble profession. Slavery, however, has been illegal there for a very long time. All this means is that when we encounter slavery in the Scriptures it did not look the same as it has more recently and still does today.

That all being said, that’s not the word being used here in v. 7. The word here is the word amah. It refers to a female servant who would eventually become a concubine or even a wife. In other words, slavery almost certainly is not the best translation, nor is it the best image for us to have in mind when considering this situation. With all respect to President Bartlett, he was mistaken. In fact, he was mistaken on his entire approach to the Old Testament law over the course of his mic drop soliloquy, but that’s another matter. For what it’s worth, his critic was mistaken in her approach too. In fact, what Sorokin did in that scene was to create a straw man (a straw man that, unfortunately, too many Christians have offered up to the culture as the real thing) of an orthodox Christian theology that he pummeled with glee.

So, “slave” isn’t the right word here, but why would God give license for a man to sell his daughter as a servant? Well, let’s go back to one of our basic principles when it comes to understanding the Scriptures, but especially the Old Testament. We have to understand the culture. And, we have to take that culture as the lens through which we understand the text. If we try to grapple with it from out of our modern cultural assumptions, it’s not going to make any sense. Things they did and which made sense to them don’t make sense to us anymore because we don’t do them that way. We don’t have to do them that way. But they did. That doesn’t necessarily make them right and us wrong, nor does it necessarily make us right and them wrong. It simply is.

In that culture (and, frankly, many cultures around the world today still), marriages were arranged affairs. Love didn’t have anything to do with it. That is a uniquely modern and western phenomenon that we have exported around the world. I think it is a good phenomenon, but it is a deviation from the historical norm. In the ancient world, marriages were arranged and the reason for a particular arrangement was often primarily economic in nature. A certain arrangement might prove to be beneficial for the girl’s family’s business. It might, though, simply be about giving her a better life than her family was going to be able to provide for her. A very poor man who wanted his daughter and potential future grandchildren to be able to not struggle to make ends meet and to put food on the table might arrange a marriage for her to a much wealthier (and usually older) man who could provide for her in a way her father was never going to be able to do.

These kinds of arrangements would often begin when the daughter was much younger than we are comfortable imagining. But, the concept of adolescence is a uniquely modern and western one as well. In the rest of the world and for most of human history, you were either a child or an adult. And, the line between the one and the other was puberty. As soon as a child hit puberty, it was time to start taking on adult responsibilities including, for the girls, becoming a wife. Thus, a girl as young as 12 or 13 might be given to a man as a servant with the expectation that she would eventually become a wife. This might be a second wife situation (and thus the translation “concubine”), or it could be that his first wife had died, perhaps in childbirth, and he was looking for a second, but primary wife.

Another feature of the culture then that we don’t very well understand today was the bride price. The bride price was a monetary gift (that was often in the form of goods or livestock and not literal money) paid by the husband to the girl’s father. It was intended to cover the economic loss her father was going to suffer by not having her as a part of his family any longer. The more hardworking and dependable the girl was, the higher her bride price would be. The social reputation of her family helped raise that amount too. In the kind of situation we see being regulated here, the future husband would be paying not only the bride price, but also, because she was going to start out as a servant, the wages of her service. This is the reason for the commercial language about the whole thing. There would have been a contract that both parties agreed upon and fulfilled.

This was an economic transaction. But, it is not right to imagine a father just wantonly selling off his daughters to get rich. While perhaps there were some deadbeats dads who thought in such terms, there probably weren’t many. These were fathers who were seeking the best life for their daughters and potential future grandchildren as they could get for them. That’s very different from how we think and operate today, but it’s not quite the horrible situation we typically (and ignorantly) imagine it to be.

So, that’s all the cultural background to what’s going on here. What are we to do with the laws here themselves? What is the purpose of these laws? What God commanded the people here – and remember, this almost certainly came out of a situation in which a man was advocating for his daughter when one of the arranged marriage situations went badly and the husband was trying to get out of the contract at the girl’s expense – was all about putting in place boundaries and protections for women in a culture that generally didn’t have those and tended toward treating them like property.

Indeed, as much as there were cultural things going on here that didn’t necessarily devalue the women involved, when you start having financial transactions involved with moving people from one situation to another, it’s hard not to start thinking about them as property and not fully human. God didn’t like that. At all. The point here was to elevate the value of women from where it was. Just because we have internalized and enculturated this message in a way they had not (although given the disastrously ubiquitous nature of things like pornography, human sex trafficking, and the transgender movement’s ongoing attempt to push biological women to the side in favor of men who think they are women, arguing that we value women more than the ancient world did is a debatable point) doesn’t mean what we see here wasn’t still a giant leap forward for its time.

The laws we see here were all about making sure the value of women was protected and honored. A man could not bring a girl into his home with the promise of her one day becoming a wife, and then casually toss her to the side when she didn’t please him. He could not take her on as a wife for one of his sons and then kick her out when the marriage didn’t work. If he brought her into his house, he had to provide for her and give her the rights – all of the rights – he assured her and her father she would be given in that original contract. And if he failed to do that, he was going to take an enormous economic hit for his behavior. What God wanted the people to understand was that even if they were tempted to not value women very highly, He did. The laws we see here would have been most welcomed by the girls and their families.

God consistently meets us where we are and grows us from there. He was doing it way back then. He’s still doing it now. You don’t have to get yourself in shape for God. You simply have to go to Him. He’ll meet you where you are and bring you forward from there. He’ll do this because Jesus has paved the way. He has opened the door, we simply have to go through it. And you can…with His help. He’s waiting patiently but eagerly.