Friday, August 04, 2006

An interesting penalty

My family is going through the book of Judges in evening devotions, and there is a very interesting penalty for disobedience described in Judges 2:1-5; the angel effectively says "You failed to drive out the Canaanites, so you will live next to them."

No fire from Heaven, no war by the Levites, no invasion from Assyria or Babylon. More or less, it's "you made your bed, now you'll sleep in it."

The result? Israel repented for decades--until the elders who had served Joshua died. Let this be a lesson to those who would shield us from the natural results of our sin!

5 comments:

Mercy Now said...

This is paying the dues for your actions which amazingly was considered to be normal at one time. Now, it seems like the mindset is do whatever you feel like and there is no consequences when in fact there is. Humn, interesting that some things will always stay true throughout time like the Bible.

Mark said...

In some cases, the penalty for rape was . . . marriage.

An old joke: Marriage isn't a word. It's a sentence.

Bike Bubba said...

??? That's the penalty for seduction, not rape. Huge difference, bro.

Though you would be correct that an initial penalty for seduction would be having that sexual bond made with an object of lust, not love.

Mark said...

It really depends on whether or not someone was around to hear the incident, doesn't it? It's always seemed to me that there were some subtleties that I was missing about when people got stoned and when the got married.

Bike Bubba said...

Mark, I have a hunch that if a girl was secretly forcibly raped (the "out in the fields" part of the Torah) might tell her dad the truth when the man who raped her asked to marry her. The boundary between seduction and rape isn't quite as vague as many would claim.

This is especially so in light of the fact that the cost back then of getting a girl drunk ("candy's dandy, but liquor's quicker") might be starvation. Wine was primarily a food back then, not an inebriant or social affair. To drink to drunkenness meant no wine in the months before the grape harvest.