Ibrahim wrote:It needs to be addressed by anybody who considers the Bible to be divine revelation. I've always found that taking ancient laws on their face and noting that they are contextually obsolete is much more direct, honest, and effective way of addressing them than making excuses, twisting meanings, or throwing a tantrum because somebody had the nerve to bring up something that's written in the Bible.
How does one take something at face value from something pertaining to an alien community? There is something funny about this insistence on Biblical clarity and with the NIV no less. We aren't even breaking out the Masoretic or Septuagint texts.
I'm doing incredulity as hard as I can here. This is kindergarten stuff and extremely facile. But I'm unsure whether I should be more disbelieving that we are actually going through the "naughty bits" of scripture or that you, a reasonably intelligent man, can say some really stupid things. I mean where to begin?
With what divine revelation means? With how odd it is that you are certain about the context of something written thousands of years ago by a people who no longer exist? That somehow this ties into Christians in general, who read all scripture in the light of Christ? I mean...I can think of English words in the last five hundred years that have had such a shift as to make them foreign outside of the community using them. The English Reformation has made worship; prayer; adore all sorts of weird....and I'm supposed to be concerned that KJV-only Joe Bob has his own opinions that the law should be bible-based, even though his argument never makes it past the social stage where it is brought out to be ostracized and beaten by the sophisticated. All this because the NIV- a pan-Protestant compromise from the 1980s'- uses the word rape? For the perspicuity of scripture, no one has demonstrated better than the Bl Cardinal Newman, the impossibility of deriving the doctrines from scripture alone, without the aid of tradition, or the distinction between the ceremonial, civil and moral precepts of the OT. But it is all pretty clear otherwise, that's what we're supposed to buy?
I mean, this has more straw than the scarecrow from wizard of oz. And it's such a sloppy tu quoque. "Well the Bible says this and then uses that rape in der laws, which is badd!....so *derp* it's ain't morale [which musta be one of them i-talian werds] either!"
You wanna start somewhere? As a Catholic I don't believe in the doctrine of private judgement which undermined the authority of scripture in two ways. Firstly, why should revelation be confined to the canon of scripture? The more radical reformers, like the anabaptists led logically to the Society of Friends with their emphasis on the inner light (for which they could quote scripture in abundance)Secondly, it provided no security for the text of scripture, for it was inevitable that this would be subjected to the same process of textual criticism that the humanists applied to classical authors and to Justinian’s Corpus Juris.
So invoking the OT civil law (and conflating it with the moral law) is incoherent to me to begin with, but to condescend that it must be explained away as contextualized primitivism is silly and special pleading. There is no "intelligence" there- you are just tendentiously assuming that yours is the superior answer, and whether that is true or not needs to be proven by you...and it is something I don't think you can do, because if you could, you'd have done it by now.
So, we live in a society that doesn't punish crimes against religion, and (unlike antiquity) considers rape a public wrong- what does this have to do with civil law in the Bible?
or
What about one nation's civil law has to do with laws of characters?
Positive spin.
So more than a thousand years of tradition on the subject is just positive spin to head off any scandal to future moderns. Makes total sense. But tell me, how many crazy pills am I supposed to swallow to buy this?
The point is that the Hebrew is being translated as "to seize" or "to lay hold on," which is also the original meaning of our word rape. They are equivalent terms, the meaning is clear.
actually the two words, don't quite sync up like that:
shakab
to lie down (Qal) to lie, lie down, lie on to lodge to lie (of sexual relations) to lie down (in death) to rest, relax (fig) (Niphal) to be lain with (sexually) (Pual) to be lain with (sexually) (Hiphil) to make to lie down (Hophal) to be laid
taphas
to catch, handle, lay hold, take hold of, seize, wield (Qal) to lay hold of, seize, arrest, catch to grasp (in order to) wield, wield, use skilfully (Niphal) to be seized, be arrested, be caught, be taken, captured (Piel) to catch, grasp (with the hands)