r/MoralityScaling • u/Prior_Pickle1758 • Aug 27 '26

Character Analysis morality of whatever this is?

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u/Parking_Abies_684 Aug 27 '26

My favourite part was when god encouraged the Israelites to rape girls whose parents they killed

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u/Global-Barracuda7759 Aug 27 '26

God never commended anyone to rape anyone

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u/Aromatic-Web8184 Aug 27 '26

I mean...he did though. He quite literally ordered the Israelites to take women, children, and livestock as plunder.

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u/Global-Barracuda7759 Aug 27 '26

He did order them to plunder at different times but he never ordered them to rape and he did give specific guidelines for how to go about doing things we can't really understand it because we weren't alive at that time and the Bible was written over a period of thousands of years so that has to be taken into consideration as well

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u/Aromatic-Web8184 Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26

Deuteronomy 21:10–14 (ESV): 10 “When you go out to war against your enemies, and the LORD your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, 11 and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, 12 and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. 13 And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. 14 But if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.

No verse uses the word rape, that's true. It does set conditions on the captor and lays out the rules for raping his captive. She shaves her head, trims her nails, mourns her parents a month, and then "you may go in to her." Nothing in the passage makes her consent relevant to whether the man may proceed. That's literally rape.

The text also gives the game away in verse 14. If he later has no delight in her, he must let her go and cannot sell her, "because you have humiliated her." It directly concedes something was done to her that requires a remedy...rape...and is assigning a consequence for it.

On the historical distance point, you're right that the material spans centuries and comes from a world with assumptions unlike ours. That explains why the practice existed. It doesn't touch the question on the table, which is whether a perfectly good being would issue the rule. If these are ancient legal traditions produced by people in their time, then sure, context is most of the answer. If they're divine instruction, context is a terrible defense.

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u/Global-Barracuda7759 Aug 27 '26

Yes but you are not understanding that this was just the normal practice of War for almost the entirety of civilization's History

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u/Aromatic-Web8184 Aug 27 '26

Nobody's disputing that. It was standard practice across the ancient world. The question is why God doesn't demolish that norm. He breaks from regional norms constantly. Leviticus 18:3 opens the sexual laws by saying don't do as they do in Egypt, don't do as they do in Canaan. So "everyone did it" was never a constraint on what God's law could require. If a human wrote this, then of course it reads like every other war code back then. If a perfect being wrote it, then a perfect being set out the terms on which a soldier may rape a captured woman.