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

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I want to start by commenting on the implications about how Moses commands the Israelites to treat captive women.  If they want to have sex with one of them, they need to marry them, after giving them a month to mourn their family.  Once they had sex with the captive, they could no longer sell them.  At any point after having sex with them, if they no longer desired to treat them as a wife they had to let them go free to wherever they wanted to go.  They could not go back to treating them as a slave.  The only time a man was allowed to have sex with a woman was if she was his wife.

I also want to comment on the command regarding a stubborn and rebellious son.  A careless reading of the passage makes it seem heartless, but let us look closely.  When the parents take their rebellious son before the elders of the city, they are to affirm that he is stubborn and rebellious, and that he is a glutton and a drunkard.  The implication of other laws means that all of that must be true.  The true meaning of this passage is that the entire community is to aid parents in raising their children to be good citizens.  If a son goes through puberty and is too strong for his parents to discipline him, and he refuses to accept their discipline, the entire community is to aid them in applying discipline.

There is a saying I learned as a child (not from my parents), “Losers weepers, finders keepers.”  This passage tells us not to follow that saying.  If we find something which was lost, we should return it to the one who lost it.  It does not give us the option of just leaving it where we found it.  And, if we do not know who lost it, we should hold it in trust until they come looking for it.  The same section goes on to tell us that not only should we return lost goods to those who lost them, but if we see someone struggling with a task, we should aid them.  In this context, it refers to an animal which is struggling with its load, but there are other passages in the Pentateuch which clearly show that the obligation to aid others extends beyond just that.

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