I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

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Today, I am reading and commenting on Deuteronomy 21-23.

The commands for dealing with an unsolved murder are interesting.  They assume that if the murder had happened in a town, someone would have witnessed it and it would be solved.  More importantly, the elders of the nearest town were required to offer a sacrifice for the murdered person and vow that they did not commit the murder themselves and that they did not know who did.  Can you imagine what would happen if we had a similar law in place in our major cities today?  What would happen if the mayor and members of city council had to pay out of pocket for every unsolved murder in their city?

There are two passages here concerning sexual purity which are not exactly related but which I am going to touch on together.  The first is something which can be easily overlooked.  The Israelites were allowed to have sex with women they captured in battle.  However, if they did so, those women were no their wives and they had they were obligated to them just as they were to a wife obtained in any other fashion.  This combined with several other passages leads us to the conclusion that the Law only sanctioned sex between a man and a woman if they were married.  There is the suggestion that if a man and a woman have sex, they are married.  

OK, I changed my mind and decided to make this second part on purity its own paragraph.  Several days ago I came across a post on FaceBook which suggested that the idea of virginity as we understand it today was a novel idea when Christians started referring to Mary as a virgin.  This passage shows us that this is not the case.  This passage lays out clear boundaries about determining if a woman was a virgin when she went to her marital bed for the first time.  If a man falsely accused a woman of not being a virgin when he married her, he was obligated to pay a severe fine and to support her as his wife for the rest of her life no matter what happens otherwise.  The point I wanted to make is that while Hebrew, and many other languages of the ancient world, did not have a separate word for virgin and for unmarried young woman, this was not because they did not have the concept of virginity as we understand it today.  Rather, the reason those words were interchangeable was because the social mores of the time assumed that an unmarried young woman was a virgin.