Rape in the Bible: Moral Guidance for Modern Life?

[Deuteronomy 22:23] If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her,
[24] you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death-the girl because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man's wife. You must purge the evil from among you.
[25] But if out in the country a man happens to meet a girl pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die.
[26] Do nothing to the girl; she has committed no sin deserving death. This case is like that of someone who attacks and murders his neighbor,
[27] for the man found the girl out in the country, and though the betrothed girl screamed, there was no one to rescue her.
[28] If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered,
[29] he shall pay the girl's father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.
[30] A man is not to marry his father's wife; he must not dishonor his father's bed.

These laws about rape deal with the rape as if it were a crime not against the woman who actually suffered the rape, but against the woman's father or her betrothed. She appears to possess no inherent value as a human being; she possesses value only as a man's property.

Imagine what kind of outcry there would be in America today if this became the law: rapists must be married to their victims, in order to punish them for their crime against the victim's father. Some rape victims might be put to death along with their attacker if they are deemed not to have screamed.

This might have been 'progressive' for the time and place when it was written, but what guidance does it give us today, other than to show how much our ideas of justice and righteousness have evolved?

So it's worth asking, is this truly the eternal wisdom of the Lord? Surely it gives us reason to doubt whether or not we should think of the Bible as any sort of "moral guide to modern life." One alternative is to suggest that the Bible has value today as one step of many in an ongoing journey of exploration into righteousness and the human relationship with God.

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