“If a man seduces a virgin who is not engaged, and he sleeps with her, he must certainly pay the bridal price for her to be his wife. If her father absolutely refuses to give her to him, he must pay an amount in silver equal to the bridal price for virgins.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the charges that sometimes gets leveled against the character of God is that He is a misogynist. That is, that He hates women. This charge is absurd on numerous levels, of course. The whole modern concept that women should have equal rights as men came out of Christians examining the teachings of the Scriptures and insisting on their consistent application. No one worldview produced anything similar to what Christianity has given the world in this regard. What we see here gives us a glimpse of how God sought to build this assumption of equality into His people from the start. Let’s talk about what we see here.

Let’s start here with a couple of reminders because it has been a little while since we’ve encountered a law like this one. Reminder number one: these laws weren’t for us. We don’t have bride prices anymore (at least in this culture; they still exist in other parts of the world). There’s no legal penalty if two people sleep together when they’re not married, and honestly, there shouldn’t be. That doesn’t mean there’s not still a relational and social penalty for it – there very much is, and many, many people are paying it whether they want to or not – but that’s a biblical standard that should be passed on by worldview training at home, not held in place with political and judicial measures.

And since perhaps you are thinking it, let’s take just a minute to talk about. The argument against the biblical perspective on sexual morality here usually takes the form of Christians being told that “you cannot legislate morality.” What this really means is that the objector doesn’t want for the Christian to work to enshrine her particular understanding of sexual morality into law. The objector here is just fine seeing his own take on morality legislated. The notion that you cannot (much less should not) “legislate morality” is nonsense. It’s a clever argument that has very successfully convinced many Christians to give up on this point yet which is not rooted in any kind of logic or sense. All laws legislate morality. Every single one of them. The question is not whether you can do it, but whose moral vision is going to be legislated. The better question is which moral vision leads to the most positive social and cultural outcomes for a given society. That’s a data-driven question that can be answered with facts and figures (and right now the facts and figures are increasingly supporting a Christian vision of morality, but we’ll save that for another time). Enough on that for now.

Again, the first reminder is that this law wasn’t for us. We’re not beholden to keep it as followers of Jesus, and, of course, people who aren’t followers of Jesus were never beholden to keep it in the first place (unless they are Jews who are ostensibly holding to the Law of Moses as their legal standard, but we’ll save that for another time too). The second reminder is that if we try to grapple with what we see here solely through a modern cultural lens, we’re not going to stand a chance of making any positive sense out of it. We’ll be able to make plenty of negative sense, but positive sense will elude us.

This was a law given to people operating on an ancient understanding of morality. It is not chronological snobbery to say that they didn’t know and understand as much about God’s character and the moral vision that comes out of such an understanding as we have today. God was still in the process of revealing it to the world in those days. As a result, rather than hitting them in the face with a moral fire hose that would have accomplished very little good, as we have talked about several times on this journey, He met them where they were and began leading them forward from there.

In those days, women were expected to be chaste. There was a very high cultural value placed on that. There was a high amount of honor attached to it (which in the context of an honor-shame culture meant a great deal). Marriages then were not primarily for love, they were arranged affairs designed to create or strengthen a union between two tribes or two families within a tribe. Women were often looked on as goods to be traded, not unique and precious individuals created in the image of God. As such, the party purchasing a certain product wanted to know they were getting it in the best possible condition. In this case, that meant the woman needed to be a virgin. This was such a big deal that they used various means to confirm virginity upon consummation of a marriage. A woman’s turning out to not be a virgin was a very big deal.

A woman in that kind of a situation was often at risk of being very, very alone. She could have been rejected by her family. She was definitely going to be rejected by her fiancé and his family. She could have been facing expulsion from her entire community. Meanwhile, even though it takes two to tango, the guy was often let off the hook. After all, what proof was there of any particular person’s involvement with her? She bore the physical marks of having lost her virginity, but anyone could have done that. It was her word against his, and hers wasn’t considered very good.

We may read these couple of verses here and recoil in horror from that, but that’s because we not only don’t understand very well what was happening culturally, but we also live in the midst of a culture that doesn’t understand marriage very well and openly celebrates sex outside the God-created context of marriage. Anything we find in the Scriptures that cuts against that current cultural grain we automatically find ways and reasons to reject as old, antiquated, hateful, and so on.

But put the thing in its context and a different picture emerges.

For starters, look at the assumption of guilt here. The woman is not assumed to be guilty at all. The man is. Think for a second about how many different cultures (including those framed out by Christianity) assume on the guilt of the woman when a sexual sin has been committed. It’s always the woman’s fault. She wasn’t modest enough. She was asking for it. She should have done this or that. Guys always escape responsibility. Well, that’s not entirely true. In some ways our modern culture has swung the pendulum way over in the other direction in ways that are often terribly unfair and unjust toward guys. That’s a separate issue worth exploring another time. Historically, though, even where women have been innocent, their guilt has been assumed from the starting line in these kinds of matters. But not here.

If a man seduces a virgin. He talks her into it. He is the motivating factor for the offense. She is the victim. This idea would have been almost laughably countercultural in that day. Instead of being made to pay some unjust penalty, she is protected here. If there is openness to the idea, the couple can be married. In fact, that’s the preference here. If these two have sex and they are not married, then they’re going to have to fix that. The guy – not his family – is going to have to pay the bride price to her father, and they will be married. This would have acted as a means of discouraging guys from thinking with organs other than their brains. Getting caught slipping up here could be really, really expensive. If the girl has absolutely no interest in this, though, and manages to convince her father to block the union, she’s entirely off the hook while the guy still has to pay the bride price. And I know the whole idea of a bride price sounds awful and demeaning, and it is, but let me remind us once again that God was meeting the people where they were and bringing them forward from there. He met them in their brokenness and pointed them in the direction of wholeness. That’s the kind of God we serve.

So then, what does any of this mean for us? Well, directly, not very much. Again: We aren’t liable for this command. But think for a second about what this means in terms of how God thinks about women. He wants them to be valued. He wants them to be cherished. Cultures tend to be male dominated because men are physically bigger and stronger than women. Far too often, religions (including various cultural expressions of Christianity) have picked up on this naturally misogynistic bias and incorporated it into their operating principles. What God consistently points His people to, though, is the idea that women have value too. In fact, their value is equal to that of men, and they should be treated accordingly. They should not be abused. They should not be taken advantage of. They should not be objectified for men’s pleasure. They should be treated with respect and dignity, with compassion and kindness. And if we mess that up, especially within the context of marriage, God is going to hold us guys accountable for that. The apostle Peter says no less than that God won’t listen to our prayers if we don’t treat our wives well. And if that idea freaks you out a bit…it should.

God loves women – He did create them after all – and when His people have operated consistently with His character, they have created cultures in which women are highly and properly valued. Indeed, although our past is riddled with examples of our not getting this right, there has been no force so powerful in human history in terms of advancing the place and protection of women in society as the church. The reason for this is deeply rooted in a whole manifold of passages just like this one. Thank God for women. They are a gift indeed.