Numbers 31:18, Deuteronomy 21:10-14, R*pe Cases
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This article reexamines the foreign female captive in Deuteronomy 21:10–14 through the lens of intersectionality and suggests that this text describes what contemporary international law scholars have identified as genocidal rape:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.32.1.04
This paper uses two contemporary ethnic genocides to underscore the impacts of war on women described in biblical texts, particularly Num. 31:17-18, Judges 21, and Deuteronomy 21. The analysis uncovers gendered patterns of warfare aimed at group annihilation. Rape and other forms of gender-targeted violence are intentional means of diluting the purity of the victims’ group that result in the social death of women, an erasure of their past identities:
According to David P. Wright in a book on slavery and gender in the laws of the Hebrew bible:
“If you are a female chattel slave, you should expect to submit sexually to your master. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230113893_8
Abstract: Biblical law and narrative describe a world that is quite agreeable to a man—specifically a man who is successful in his occupation or is wealthy, and one who is an Israelite. If you are not an Israelite, male or female, you might end up as a chattel slave, you and your children permanently enslaved, passed on as property from one generation to the next, and ruthlessly beaten. If you are a female chattel slave, you should expect to submit sexually to your master. If you are an Israelite male but unsuccessful in your trade or otherwise poor, you might be enslaved for some time, even your whole life, to pay off a debt, and be subject to beatings. If you are an Israelite woman, you might be enslaved to pay off your father’s or husband’s debts, and you could be forced to marry your father’s creditor.
Judges 19:25 uses יָדַע which might be translated as “to know”. Holladay provides “6. sexual relations: have intercourse w.”, so a euphemism for sexual relations that means rape. This passage pairs it with עָלַל which in the hitpael Holladay indicates can be “(sexually) abuse (a woman)” but only cites this passage. In the hitpael, it can also be rendered “make a fool” (as cited by Holladay: Exodus 10:2; 1 Samuel 6:6).
Genesis 34:2; Judges 20:5; 2 Samuel 13:22, 32; and Lamentations 5:11 uses עָנָה which in the piel can mean a few different things, including “humiliate”. Holladay provides “2. violate, rape (a woman) and cites the Genesis passage.
Isaiah 13:16 and Lamentations 5:11 uses שָׁגַל which Holladay says can be “lie with (a woman)” or “be lain with” depending on the construction. He also makes this note: “this vb. considered obscene by Masoretes, and sakab everywhere substituted”.
לָכֶֽם is just a collection of stems: לָ is the preposition “for” and כֶֽם is the reflexive plural pronoun “yourself”. There is nothing specifically about לָכֶֽם that means rape.
Nili S. Fox makes this note:
“Only young girls who are virgins are left alive and presumably taken captive (Deut. 20.14-14). Since lineage was determined patriarchally, they do not pose the danger of producing Midianite sons who can avenge their fathers.” (pg. 329). Jo Ann Hackett makes this note: “Even male children are killed, presumably to ensure the extermination of Midian, but cf. Judg 6-8. The women who are to be killed are all those who might have been involved in sexual relations with Israelites men; see 31.16; 25.1.” (pg. 249)
Wilda C. Gafney in Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne describes this story as an example of the phenomenon of “rape-marriages”:
As a consequence of the Midianite war, the Midianite women and children are taken as booty. The value among the women and girls is in their availability for rape-marriages. In the biblical text these unions are legitimate conjugal unions that produce children who are recognized as legitimate members of the Israelite community. These unions are rape-based because of the lack of consent to these unions and concomitant sexual intercourse, not just in the contemporary sense. The normative practices associated with conjugal unions in the Hebrew Scriptures— negotiations between families, consent of the parents or the woman herself— are not present in these narratives.
Gafney connects Numbers 31 with the passages in Deuteronomy describing sexual abuse of captive women:
The Torah will enact statutes (in Deut. 20-21) regulating the practice of abducting women and girls for procreative use and offering some limited protections to the abducted women and their children. This practice endured and continues to endure in the world beyond the text because it is effective. It demoralizes the conquered, and when the children of these unions are counted as the children of the victors through forced impregnation, they simultaneously build up the community of the victor, while eradicating the community of the conquered. Forced impregnation is a tool of genocide, particularly when combined with the extermination of all the males in a conquered society. The modern world has seen it in Bosnia, Serbia, Rwanda, Darfur, and the Congo, and most recently in territories controlled by Daesh.
On Numbers 31,
Lākem just means “for you/to you”, but the context makes it clear that virgin women and girls are selected as war prisoners, with the above implications.
Using Baruch Levine Anchor Bible translation and commentary on Numbers 21-36:
17″Now, then, kill off every male among the young children, and kill off, as well, every woman who has known a man through lying down with a male. 18″But you may spare for yourselves all the young children among the females, [and those] who have not known lying down with a male. 19″As for you, you must then remain outside the encampment for seven days. And as for anyone who has taken a human life, or anyone who [otherwise] had contact with a corpse-you must purify yourselves on the third day and on the seventh day, you and your captives. […]
30 And from the half share assigned to the Israelite people you shall appropriate one unit out of fifty, from humans, and from cattle, and from mules, and from flocks, of all species of animals, which you shall then deliver to the Levites, who are charged with the maintenance of YHWH’s Tabernacle. 31Moses and Eleazar, the priest, did as YHWH had commanded Moses. 32The take, in excess of the spoils plundered [individually] by the men of the fighting force, announced to: Flocks-675,000; 33Cattle: 72,000. 34Mules: 61,000. 35Humans: From the women who had never experienced lying with a male: Total of humans: 32,000.
Robert Alter notes in his Hebrew Bible translation and commentary:
all the little ones of the women. This phrase is a literal representation of the Hebrew, which sounds equally odd. The obvious sense is: all the young females not yet nubile. This leads Rashi and others to infer that sexually mature virgins were included in the massacre, though that inference seems to be contradicted by the emphasis on “the women who have not known lying with a male.”
On the aforementioned focus on sexual use:
That young girls were valued primarily for their sexuality is also apparent in biblical references to virgins taken as booty in war (Num. 31.17, 18; Judg. 5.30, etc.)
Footnote from PRESSLER’s Wives and Daughters, Bond and Free, published in Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, p156.
- And Baruch Levine again: In effect, they applied to those fellow Israelites the law of Numbers 31: 13-20, which, for itself, had been aimed at their enemy, the Midianites, sparing only unmarried women, who would eventually be suitable brides for Israelites from other tribes, as the story unfolds. The rule of Numbers 31:13-30 served them well in this regard precisely because it fell short of the severity of the harshest ḥerem, as we shall see.
As Kawashima puts it in Could a Woman say “No” in Biblical Israel:
Can one speak, in particular, of “women’s rights”—or “human rights” in general, for that matter—in biblical law and literature? As various Priestly and Deuteronomic laws attest—apropos of inheritance and property (Numbers 27 and 36), vows (Numbers 30), sexual crimes (Deuteronomy 22:13–29), and others—women did not constitute autonomous entities before the law in biblical Israel, not to mention the ancient world at large (in fact, neither exactly did men, as we will see). As a result, women possessed, for lack of a better term, few if any “rights.” As Tikva Frymer-Kensky recognized—while failing to draw out the ultimate consequences of her insight—they specifically lacked the power of “sexual consent,” which resided in the father and then the husband.1 To follow this premise to its logical conclusion: If the modern concept of forcible rape is defined as a nonconsensual sexual encounter in which the “object” of the encounter is also its “victim”—the one whose rights have been violated—then there was no such thing as forcible rape in biblical Israel’s legal system.2 Biblical law, inasmuch as one might posit a coherent view on this matter, does recognize the possibility of a forcible sexual encounter, but it defines it as a particular case of the more general crime of illicit sex, and identifies the “victim” of this crime as the father or husband whose claims over the “object” of the crime3—daughter or wife—have been “violated” (‘innah).4 The underlying system becomes particularly visible in the case of a sexually available female, namely, an unmarried, unengaged virgin, for the legal (Deuteronomy 22:13–29) and literary (2 Samuel 13) evidence suggests that she could not effectively refuse a sexual advance. That is, she might refuse and even resist said advance, but since she was not a fully endowed legal entity, her refusal did not carry legally binding force—hence Rebekah’s precarious position, as an apparently single woman, among the men of Gerar.
- New Oxford Annotated Bible:
- 31.1–54: War against Midian. A fictional account of the destruction of the entire Midianite nation by the Israelites without a single casualty. This Priestly story is a sequel to the account of the intermarriage between the Israelite man Zimri and the Midianite woman Cozbi (25.6–18). The story provides the Priestly interpretation on a range of topics associated with war, including the role of priests, the evaluation of male and female captives, spoils, and the purity of soldiers.