How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-women, Anti-science, Pro-violence, Pro-slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture

by Dan Kimball

Here God equates rape with murder, and anytime you see stories of rape in the Bible, it is always shown as an evil act of violence. However, when rape did happen, there was an important difference in determining the best way to respond in that culture at that time. Put yourself, as best you can, in that time and culture. If a woman was raped, she was seen as no longer desirable for marriage. And if she remained unmarried, her life was virtually over. There were few options available to a woman at that time, and without a husband and family of her own, she had little hope for a future. In some cases, being married was a matter of survival. Without marriage she would likely end up neglected and impoverished, an all too common hardship for women in that culture. We see a heartbreaking and gut-wrenching example of this in the Old Testament when a woman named Tamar was raped by her half brother. Not only did she suffer the pain of the rape but there was the even greater danger that if others knew of it, they would not want to marry her. So in this case, she asks her half brother, the one who raped her, to marry her. This is all evil and wrong, but it was a cultural norm back then. Essentially, she was calling her half brother to account for his wrong done to her, making her unmarriable and cutting off her future, by asking him to now provide for her through marriage. It was likely her only option.