Quote Originally Posted by MadSativa
I could have swore their was a sex before marriage commandment. I think that would fall into that however it would be crazey if some guy married her just to rape her. Not that raping her is not psyko in the first place.
Yes, that's true. In the same chapter I quoted above, actually right before the passage I quoted, is the bit where it says that a woman is to be stoned to death if on her wedding night her husband discovers she has already had her cherry popped.

Sex was basically the purpose of marriage in Israelite culture. You didn't ask your wife's permission to have sex. You owned her. Marriage and the virginity commandments were just a way to make the sexual relationship exclusive, so that if the woman got pregnant the man could be assured that he was the father. If the woman was not a virgin when she was married or if she committed adultery during the marriage, the man would not be assured that he was the father. That's why they considered it such a heinous crime.

In fact, if a man had his eye on a virgin that he wanted to be his, all he had to do apparently was rape her, pay 50 shekels of silver to her father, and badda-bing badda-boom she's required to marry him. That commandment is in there because a non-virgin would have no chance of marrying anyone else, and would actually have to be stoned to death if she did. So "God" (i.e. whoever was making this shit up) decided it was more merciful for her to be forced into marriage with a rapist than to be unmarried forever, or even worse, for her to enter into marriage with someone she did not lose her virginity to.
Oneironaut Reviewed by Oneironaut on . Why no commandment against rape? What does the Bible say about rape? A lot of Christians don't read the Bible so they don't know, but they assume that somewhere in there is an explicit statement that rape is always immoral. And of course, if we do a little digging, we're bound to come up with something like that...right? The closest I could find was this passage from Deuteronomy 22, where God is laying out his laws to the Israelites and instructing them on how to deal with cases of rape. A few comments on this verse. Rating: 5