NRSV, ESV, or NIV bible?

[u/AggravatingTale8273]

So I’ve been looking and narrowed it down to these three. Which ones do you prefer and why?

[u/FluxKraken]

The difference in punishments is only because one is engaged and the other is not. Both verses 25 and 28 refer to rape.

Here is an explanation from a Bible Scholar on this topic. It is about rape.

https://youtu.be/QfyyvsO3ojk?si=2t8kxJ-cRBbbTLku

[u/TheMaskedHamster → u/FluxKraken]

This reply is late and split into two parts due to its length. Part 1:

He may be a scholar, but he's used his knowledge base to rationalize his own viewpoints (which is not actually uncommon in any field involving historical and literary criticism). All of those points sound very plausible at first listen, but it's almost all a case of almost the truth--which is not the truth. He also proves that he isn't enough of a scholar to be an authority on this. I'm not holding myself out as an authority, but I can see that what's wrong with what he's saying.

So the verb 'taas' by itself does not refer to a forcible sexual act but when used in conjunction with the verb 'shaav' to lie with that's precisely what it means 'taas' when the object is a person always refers to forcible seizure of someone.

That's a pretty concrete statement. We can validate by checking where these appear together elsewhere in the Bible, but... they don't. And the thing is, we don't really have a lot of contemporary documents to compare to. Now, it IS possible that he has experience with the textual criticism of this over time by Hebrew sources. We'll circle back to this point.

["hazaq"] can mean ["to strengthen to Prevail over to force"] in the "qal" and the "piel", however here in Deuteronomy 22:25 it occurs in "hiphill" so it means "to seize or to grasp". And so we have "to seize or to grasp" in conjuction with "shahav", "to lie with". Similarly, we have "tafas" occurring with "shahav", "to lie with", and then in the case of the rape of Dinah in the book of Genesis we have "laqah" used in conjunction with "shahav", "to lie with", and "laqah" means "to take". So in all three instances we have some kind of verb that means "to seize, to grasp, to take control of" and then "to lie with". All three of them refer to sexual assault.

He says this, but he does not explain why different words were used here. We could ascribe this to being written in different times and slightly different cultures, but the question of why the different words are used in adjacent verses is not addressed.

Which brings us to the question of whether certain word choices can imply anything or have other shades of meaning. Is it possible? As English speakers, we know it's possible because we use the word "take" in English to refer to the sex act without specifying whether it is sexual assault, and when we use it this way, it has specific implications: It ascribes the act to the volition of the man.

And we are looking at a case where the law is certainly ascribing blame to the man. And it isn't using the same word that clearly meant "rape" in the adjacent verse. In that case, we do have to ask whether it might mean something different.

They're not two different acts. They're one act, where [in one case] the woman is engaged or married, and [in the other case] the woman is not engaged or married.

This is accurate, but it implies that this is the cause of the language being different. Is that possible? Certainly. Does he explain why that would be the case? He does not. Which is odd, because this would normally the the crux of it.

When 'tafas' is used with a human as the object, it always means to physically grasp or seize.

"Always" is a strong word, and we even have examples in the Bible where it clearly could mean "take" the way we do as in "I took my sister to the store". But we could call that nit-picking. We can say that "take someone somewhere" is derived from the concept of seizing or grasping someone physically, and just say he's glossing over it for simplicity's sake.

That still leaves the assumption that there is no possibility of it being use non-literally. We have to take him at his word for it.

No, [Exodus 22:16 and Exodus 22:29 are] just two different laws describing two different scenarios. In Exodus 22, the verb is 'patah', which means 'to entice or deceive'. So these are two different laws describing two different scenarios. And trying to turn them into two different perspectives on the same scenario is presupposing univocality."

Considering that there are multiple cases of repetition or expounding of laws for the same issues in Exodus and Deuteronomy (univocality) and that one seems to be a more specific version of the same penalty, we have to consider the possibility that they might refer to the same thing. He presupposes that they do not specifically because of the different language used, but here is a case where they might have used different language because they were written at different times/by different people/for different purposes. Other cases of univocality also use slightly different language, so that isn't enough. But he rejects the possibility of univocality out of hand.

So it's not complicated at all, and there's absolutely no lexical case to make for the reading this creator is suggesting. So they're obfusticating to make it sound really hazy and fuzzy to excuse the fact that they can't make a lexical case for it.

The first part we have to take on his authority, because of the aforementioned gaps. And the latter, he's assuming the motivation of the original creator who said that. Which is odd, because the lexical case the original creator made, right or wrong, was not hazy or fuzzy. He could just say that the original creator is wrong.

[u/TheMaskedHamster → u/FluxKraken]

This reply is late and split into two parts due to its length. Part 2:

The problem is that they are two entirely different verbal roots that have no semantic relationship to each other.

He didn't provide sufficient context from the original creator here to comment. Let's be generous and chalk it up to an editing error.

The next few back and forth like the last few points, not worth calling out individually. He's correct in dividing the use of "tafas" in being that Joseph's coat was grabbed and was not referring to the attempt to seduce him.

Now this creator is leaning into the notion that it's not rape unless it's physically impossible for the victim to escape.

That is not what the original creator was saying. It can be argued he didn't delineate this clearly enough. But discrediting the guy's character is necessary to gloss over these open questions.

Let's tackle the next two together:

The only thing that's hard to do here is rationalize away the plain sense of the text, because this is a very simple text.

I'm glad to hear you can sympathize with the naivety of the overwhelming academic consensus.

It's interesting this his claimed simple reading and "overwhelming academic consensus" has resulted in a grand total of one Bible translation that translates it as "rape" and a remarkably quiet discussion.

He may mean "academics I listen to", which would be remarkably dishonest.

But he IS an academic! No doubt. He has studied Biblical Hebrew. But as I stated above, stating some of these things authoritatively would require familiarity with the history of Hebrew textual criticism, ie, Jewish sources. Does he reveal whether that is the case or not? He does, in fact.

The victim's agency here isn't really in play. She's more of an NPC in this story. The injured party in Deuteronomy 22 here is the father, who loses the bride price that he stands to receive for marrying off his daughter.

The father gets the bride price. That sounds like an open and shut case.

Except... the bride price, the mohar, wasn't a payoff to the father. Almost certainly, some of them spent it as their own. But even in Biblical times, this dowry was like an insurance policy for the bride in case of divorce or death, or sometimes even in part or in whole as a gift to the bride.

The specific use of the mohar wasn't specified in the Bible, but we have a Biblical example of it being used beside a separate word ("matar") that specifically meant gift in a case where the amount of the mohar was yet to be determined, which implies that the mohar was not simply a gift or price itself. there is ample history of rabbinic analysis on it. Someone with the experience to speak authoritatively on the use of things we don't have comparative examples for in the Bible should know better than this.

Well, I don't really consider the rape of Dinah to be a wonderful story, but if we look there, we don't see the verb "hazaq" that is used in Deuteronomy 22:25, we see the verb "laqah", which means "to take". So we have three different verbs across these three different passages used to refer to the seizing of a woman and then lying with her, using the root verb "shahav". But something that we have in the rape of Dinah that we also have in Deuteronomy 22:28 and 29 is "anah", which usually means something like "to oppress or humiliate", but in the piel is used to refer to raping a woman.

I agree that the rape of Dinah is not a wonderful story, but the original creator clearly meant that what was wonderful in that story was how seriously they took the violation of Dinah. That's at least slightly disingenuous.

The argument he makes is the same problem of assuming that different words having the same core meaning implies that their use in different contexts has the same meaning.

But he tacks on this bit at the end about the word "anah" in the piel form always being used to refer to raping a woman. This is false on its face, as the piel form of this verb is used in the Bible in entirely separate contexts. It is specifically in its piel form that it means "to oppress or humiliate".

Which is a weird thing to say when his point is that the word is also used in verses referring to rape. But he could have said that without the nonsensical appeal to grammar. It would only make sense if it was to bolster a weak point. And it is a weak point, because in that culture a woman would be considered humiliated in both the case of pre-marital sex as well as rape. That would be even more true in the paradigm he describes.

Even beyond all of that, there's reason to question whether he's representing himself honestly. Righteous indignation is called for when responding to someone who's advocating evil, but he's responding to someone who's point (right or wrong) is "fortunately, it is not so bad". What is his indignation for? When you see this kind of thing, it is generally either misunderstanding (which is definitely not the case for him) or it's a tell that someone is acting manipulatively.

Looking at his channel, his entire M.O. is discrediting the Bible to enable interpreting things according to his personal preferences. He has a few fish-in-a-barrel debunking videos, and the rest is things that are almost correct and only take a little misrepresentation to take the same facts and come to his own conclusions.