Insatiable appetites, destructive unions (Exod 22:16-20)
Exod 22:16-20
When I was a student, I shared accommodation with four other girls, one of whom lived together with her boyfriend. Despite the obviously happy relationship she found herself in, she was musing one day how she would love to try out what it feels like to sleep with another woman. While I found her comment shocking and quite sad, I can see how in a sexually permissive context the doors are thrown wide open for experimentation. As more and more options become acceptable and mainstream, the harder it is to see the weight the Bible places on sexual purity and restraining one’s appetite that lusts for more. While our world has become de-centred from what matters to God, His Word pulls us back to godly restraint.
The first regulation in our reading (Exod 22:16-17) belongs with the previous section (vv.1-15) because, as a case law, it concludes the list of specific scenarios that are connected to financial loss of some sort. However, it also forms a bridge to the following laws that deal with the curbing of excess in some direction. There is no indication that the girl is forced, rather, she is enticed into the relationship and consents to it. Yet, without the protection of the law she would bear the brunt of the consequences. Frymer-Kensky explains this issue well.[1]
A man cannot ‘love her and leave her’: by sleeping with her, he has assumed the obligation to marry her. And he must pay a normal brideprice: he cannot obtain a girl cheaply by first sleeping with her, thus dishonoring her, and lowering her brideprice. But the father is not obligated to give her to him in marriage.
While the details are again alien to a Western context, the point is that the intimate relationship of a man and a woman belongs within the commitment of marriage. Such a setting creates protection especially for the woman who, even today, is often the one left bearing the burden of a casual affair (e.g. if she gets pregnant and faces the choice of single parenthood, the trauma of abortion or adoption).
The cluster of laws that follow deal with a lust for more through forbidden avenues that lead to destructive unions and the severity of the issues is underlined by the death penalty (Exod 22:18-20). A sorceress manipulated reality through magic apart from God and for someone’s desired ends.[2] In the process, a sorceress and the person seeking their help opened themselves to dark and demonic forces. Bestiality was another form of pushing the boundary, this time in the sexual realm (it may have also been used in some pagan cults) and such a union went against God’s created order. Finally, sacrificing to other gods usually involved a banquet (eating the sacrificial meat) and this created a table fellowship between worshippers and their god(s). Worshipping many different gods was a way of ensuring protection, security and a better life, but it created a bond with idols.
We can now understand why Scripture is so severe about these sins. While the pre-marital intimacy is at least in the right direction and can be rectified through marriage, the other unions are not. Moreover, they involve an unseen reality and so their impact is harder to recognise. In the end, it comes down to the same question of trust in God that Adam and Eve faced in Eden. The fruit seemed good and Satan promised that it would make them like God, while the Lord said that it would lead to their death (Gen 3:4-6; 2:17). Like them, we are faced with the choice: do we believe that what God forbids is damaging and that the boundaries He sets are for our good? While in a modern, Western context we have a higher sensitivity to certain ethical issues relating to injustices in the world, recognising the rightness of God’s verdict in sexual matters and in semi-religious practices dealing with the unseen world (occultism, horoscopes, New Age-y influences) is much harder. Yet, what is at stake is our relationship with God whose Holy Spirit indwells us. May we not defile that union and jeopardise our intimacy with the Lord (1 Cor 6:19-20).
[1] Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Virginity in the Bible”, in V.H. Matthews, B.M. Levinson and T. Frymer-Kensky (eds.), Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (London: T&T Clark International, 2004; repr., Sheffield: JSOT, 1998), 79-96 (91).
[2] It is unclear why it is a female witch who is mentioned here, when elsewhere both genders are condemned (Deut 18:10-11). Perhaps there were more female witches or it meant to create a juxtaposition with the male seducer in the previous law. Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus, The JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: JPS, 1991), 136.
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