Deuteronomy 22

The BFG by Roald Dahl--now a movie directed by Steven Spielberg with a screenplay by ET scenarist Melissa Mathison--was one of my favorite books when I was a wee one. One if its major premises (and no, I'm not talking about logic and enthymemes) was that giants roamed the world, picking children out of their cozy bedrooms at night to guzzle like potato chips. (In fact, one scene of the book has a character describing the varying tastes of children from different nations. You can just imagine Dahl's eyes glinting gleefully as he wrote this scene.) This notion would be rather horrid in real life, but imagine if a ruling body actually sanctioned this behavior. What if whoever was in charge said that giants were free to take and gobble up as many children as they wanted--right in front of the parents--as long as they just left the parents alone?

That's basically what verses 6-7 say, only involving birds instead of humans. If an Israelite sees a nest with a bird sitting on its eggs or with its young, he or she can take the young but must leave the mother. Now, I'm not a vegetarian, and if I had to make a choice between saving a pet bird and saving a human about whom I knew nothing, I would save the human every time. Still, how much does it stink to be a mother bird watching your kids be taken away from you and consumed? Makes me wonder if the bird would rather be taken along with its young--kind of like that "Mother and Child Reunion" chicken and egg soup you sometimes see in Chinese restaurants. (I do find that name morbidly humorous.)

Most of the other rules in this chapter have to do with rather sensitive matters. I do like that a man falsely accusing his fiancee of being a non-virgin is punished. The punishment is still one-sided though: if the man is wrong, he's merely fined (verse 19), but if the woman is, in fact, a non-virgin, she's stoned--on the steps of her father's house! (verse 21) I wonder, though, how exactly the Israelites proved or disproved if a woman was a virgin. As we know today, no reliable test for virginity exists. Unless, of course, the woman's stomach starts growing and something starts kicking around in there.

I do find the punishment for a man raping a virgin disheartening--the man is fined and then forced to marry the woman with no possibility of divorce (verses 28-29). How terrible would your life be if you were forced to marry the person who took away your virginity? Both the woman and the rapist would have to live with each other for the rest of their lives. Not a happy note to end on, but despite the airy, flippant tone of these posts, I do find myself caring about real issues from time to time.