“If you wish to know how civilized a culture is, look at how they treat women” … Bacha Khan I agreed with the statement. A friend … seeking to discredit OT culture as well as God’s law challenged me … that to accept this statement as true, I must “reject the 10th commandment that lists women as property and places her between the house and donkey as mans possession. Here is my response to that friend: “Your premise assumes the order of “possessions” in the 10th commandment is a measure of their relative worth. Because your premise is flawed, your argument crumbles accordingly … and on multiple counts: 1. Supposing a wife to be possession at all … to state then her value to lie somewhere between a house and a donkey from the wording of the commandment … displays ignorance of God’s word … since elsewhere, the penalty for killing a wife is death, while for farm animals it is only restitution plus a penalty. 2. The wording of the commandment does not specifically list the neighbor’s children, therefore they lie in the “anything” category. In an effort to diminish the value of women … you logically must also diminish the value of blood children to that below an ass and the hired help … this of course is an absurdity. 3. You make a pejorative implication that a wife under God’s law was “a possession” … in the same sense that property was a possession. This too is faulty conclusion. A woman was “a husband’s wife” to the same degree that the man was “a wife’s husband”. In the patriarchal government God gave Israel, the man, being more powerful than woman, was given the responsibility of leadership. His role was to protect and administer the family. In that sense was the wife … and children, even the grown children, under his authority. If the husband happened to be the head of a clan, the other heads of households were subject to his authority as well. To summarize, God’s intended relationship between a husband and wife in the Old Covenant was the same as in the New, namely: A man was NOT to multiply wives to himself … that he love and protect his wife … and if necessary, lay down his life for her, as Christ did for the church.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 16:50:09 +0000
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