Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Comparisons between the Bible and the Koran

Doranwen, you said this in your post:

Where in the Old Testament do you find rules restricting men's right to practice wanton polygamy, treating women as goods to be traded off at the highest bidder and mistreating and cheating on women while holding on to them as their wives? As I read the Old Testament, I could actually find no such restrictions, apart from the criticism I referred to earlier against Solomon for having a thousand wives and concubines. If you bear in mind that the Koran allows men to have four wives, you have to admit that having a thousand of them seems a bit extreme by any standard.

Another man who had many wives, though not a thousand of them, was David. The Bible criticizes David for committing adultery against Uriah, the husband and owner of the beautiful Bathsheba, but David is certainly not criticized for being unfaithful to his own wives. Where in the Old Testament does it say that a man must not be unfaithful to his wife?

There is another story about David, told in bits and pieces in the Books of Samuel and the Books of Kings and/or the Books of Chronicles. It is the story of how David has to flee from his son Absalom. (The reason why Absalom hates David is that David has not taken action against his oldest son, Amnon, after Amnon had brutally raped Absalom's favorite sister, Tamar.) Because David fails to punish Amnon, even though he knows what has happened, Absalom slays Amnon himself and then threatens his father. David flees. But he leaves about ten of his concubines behind to "guard his house" - at least that is what it says in my Bible. Absalom comes to David's house and rapes the concubines, apparently in retaliation for what Amnon, David's favorite, did to Tamar. Later, when Absalom is defeated and killed, David returns home. He locks his defiled concubines in their special little house, where they have to sit, as if in their own private jail, until they die.

That is from 2 Samuel 20:3. I guess we should be grateful that David didn't execute his concubines, and that he actually fed them.

This passage from Exodus 21:7 shows that it was certainly okay for a man to sell his daughter as a slave. And if she had been sold, she didn't have the right that the male slaves did to be set free after seven years:

It is clear from the verses that follow that some girls were sold in order to become wives. We are certainly talking about buying and selling wives. I can't remember that the Old Testament makes any general restrictions about how and under what conditions women could be sold. It does say, admittedly, that if a man has bought a woman as a slave in order to marry her, he is not allowed to sell her to a foreign people if she doesn't please him. (But maybe he can sell her to another Hebrew.) It also says that if the woman he bought doesn't please him, he shall either let her go or else go on feeding her. I guess that explains why David didn't starve his raped concubines to death.

Look what happens if a man takes a wife (probably after buying her) and hates her:

Okay, the man married a woman, had sex with her, and disliked her. Maybe he thought that she was not a virgin, or maybe he just wanted to accuse her of something. Then what should the woman's parents do?

The parents have to find the wedding sheet that the couple spent their wedding night on, and show it to the elders of the city. So what happens if there is blood on that sheet?

Well, the groom will be forced to pay a fine to the woman's father, and the groom will not ever be allowed to divorce his bride (which he might apparently otherwise have done).

Okay, so what if there really was no blood on that wedding sheet?

Well, in that case all the men in the city shall help stone the accused woman to death in front of her father's house!

Then there is the story about Judah and his daughter-in-law, Tamar. Tamar was married to Judah's eldest son Er (Judah had probably bought Tamar for his son). However, Er died before he had given Tamar any children, and according to the law at the time, a woman who had been left a childless widow had the right to marry her dead husband's younger brother, if he had one. And Er had a younger brother, Onan. So Onan had to marry Tamar, but he didn't like it, and he deliberately spilled his seed on the ground instead of making Tamar pregnant. This made God so angry that he killed Onan.

Now Tamar had been left a childless widow again, and so she had the right to marry Judah's youngest son, Shelah. But Judah refused to give her Shelah. At the same time, Judah refused to let Tamar go, so that she could marry into another family.

Because Tamar wanted children, and because she had the right by law to have a child by Judah's family, she dressed herself as a prostitute and covered her face. Then she went to the road that Judah used to travel and waited for her father-in-law. When Judah saw a prostitute by the roadside, he was immediately "up" for a bit of extramarital sex, and Tamar became pregnant from their encounter. Guess what happened?

Well, Tamar could produce evidence that it was Judah who had made her pregnant - he had given the prostitute his signet ring as payment - and Judah had to acknowledge that Tamar had the legal right to ask for a child from Judah's family. So he didn't execute her. But he had no qualms about holding Tamar a "prisoner" with him and then sentencing her to death for becoming pregnant, while he gave himself the right to go to prostitutes as he liked.

In a previous post, I have descibed what happened in the three last chapters in the book of Judges. What happened there can be described as a splatterfest, with the wholesale rape, dismembering and mass murder of women. Interestingly, the story is not followed by a general sharp warning to treat women better than that. It is clear that the Bible does not approve of what happens in these chapters of Judges, but the only comment it makes is that this happened before the children of Israel had a king. Anyway, the people who committed these atrocities were not pagans, because it is clear that they believed in God, and they actually communicated with God during parts of the atrocities, too.

There really is a passage in the Old Testament where a father admonishes his son-in-law to treat his daughters well and not take himself other wives as well. That is Laban, who makes a covenant with Jacob on these terms:

But this is an individual case, not a general rule applying to all women of Israel.

Can the Mosaic laws about the treatment of women really be seen as improvements? Can we assume that the pagan societies that existed earlier treated their women even worse? Can we reasonably assume that those other societies gave men the right to rape, sell and kill women everywhere as they pleased and with no punishment at all? I don't think it is possible that a society can survive if it allows its women to be killed, raped or sold with no restrictions whatsoever.

Muslims often say that the rules of the Koran meant an enormous improvement for Arab women at the time, because women were treated so horribly in pre-Muslim Arabia. Yes, maybe that was the case. However, few of us are all that impressed with the laws and rules that the Koran makes about women, because we think, and rightly, and these rules do not grant women equal rights with men. Why should we be so impressed with the very harsh and sometimes horrible rules and stories of the Old Testament?

Ann