Deuteronomy

Fidelity and Truth

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 71-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 071

Dictation Name: RR187AM71

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. This is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will He heareth us. Having these promises let us draw near to the throne of grace with true hearts in full assurance of faith. My voice shalt Thou hear in the morning oh Lord, in the morning will I direct my prayer unto Thee and will look up. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father who of Thy grace and mercy has made us Thy people, members of Thy eternal kingdom. We come into Thy presence rejoicing in Thy past and present mercies. We open wide our mouths that Thou mightiest fill them for we look unto Thee and our hope is in Thee. We commit unto Thee all our loved ones, we pray for those who are ill, we remember those who are in distress and we give thanks that Thou art able to do all things. Bless us this morning as we give ourselves to the study of the things of Thy kingdom. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is from Deuteronomy 22:13-21. Our subject: Fidelity and Truth. Deuteronomy 22:13-21.

“ If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her,

14 And give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid:

15 Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate:

16 And the damsel's father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her;

17 And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter's virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city.

18 And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him;

19 And they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days.

20 But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel:

21 Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father's house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.”

This is not a popular text with feminists nor with anti-feminists who are humanists because it clearly and emphatically gives priority to the family and to the parents. The father in particular is seen as centrally important and the matter of honor is stressed. The word honor has become almost obsolete in recent years but it is basic to this text. The seriousness of the matter is seen by the fine cited in verses nineteen, uh, in verse nineteen, a hundred shekels or weights of silver. A shekel was not a coin. In antiquity it was a weight. It was a very important amount of weight, we shall come back to that, well let’s consider it now. In First Samuel 9:8 we see that a quarter of a silver shekel was a good gift to give to a very wealthy man you were honoring. A quarter of a shekel. A half of shekel was the extent of the pole tax to maintain the civil order. We find this in Exodus 30:15 and Nehemiah 10:42. The fine of one hundred shekels of silver was virtual confiscation of an estate. To put it in present day terminology without attempting to give a literal translation of the meaning or value it would be like fining a man a hundred thousand dollars. That’s a considerable fine. It was virtual confiscation of the man’s estate. Very obviously the honor of a family and its daughter could not be lightly impugned. But this was not the only penalty for slandering one’s wife. The husband making a false accusation was also to be chastised or beaten. To question the honor of a family and its daughter, to question the honor of your wife without cause therefore was not something done casually or frequently.

The man making the false accusation was not killed because he had to support the wife whose honor he had questioned. Well this was obviously to a great extent a self-enforcing law. The penalty was such that no man dared question his wife’s premarital virtue unless there was certain proof of it. He would be a fool to do so otherwise which is not to say that men have not been fools over the generations. The evidence was not limited to the cloth used when the hymen was broken. Now the family is God’s basic institution in society. It has priority over church and state, it is man’s first and basic government and the primary area of worship and the practice of religion. To undermine the family is to undermine society, a fact well known to our immoralists today and for any man to wage war against his wife in such a manner was not only stupidity but a signal offense. Now there is an important fact about this fine. It is twice as severe as the fine for seduction given in verses twenty eight and twenty nine which is fifty shekels of silver. Deuteronomy 22:28-29 and Exodus 22:16-17 are related texts. The payment in Exodus 22:17 is called the dowry of virgins, it was a considerable sum. Thus fifty shekels of silver being a large sum and an equivalent probably to the total income of a young man for three years, you can imagine what a penalty of a hundred shekels was. To defame one’s wife deliberately and wrongfully was a very serious offense. In effect, it was a kind of capital punishment because from that time on he was virtually a slave.

In verses twenty and twenty one we are given the penalty if the husband’s charge is true. The wife is executed near the door of her father’s house. This is death for the wife and dishonor for her parents. The husband who is guilty of slander lives on as the virtual slave of his father in law who now commands his wealth as a trustee for his daughter and grandchildren. The wife who is guilty dies because her duties can be assumed by another woman. Now in terms of modern humanistic law marriage and the family constitute a private arrangement between two peoples. The societal implications are increasingly neglected and the personal and peripheral nature of sexuality and nature are stressed. The Christian family is seen by many as the great road block together with the church to a new world order. As a result the legal aspects of family life are trivialized. Since World War Two it has increasingly been the practice to reject substantial reasons for divorce unless a great deal of wealth is at stake. Only then will such matters as adultery be considered and at late even in such cases it is waning. If marriage is essentially a private and purely personal arrangement this is logical. If it is basic to social order the present trend is suicidal. The woman who goes into marriage unchaste is, we are told in verse twenty one, said to have brought folly in Israel. This means it is an outrage, a case of the worst case of disorder. It is an assault on social order, it is treason. It is significant that in this case the husband does not seek or secure a divorce. According to Deuteronomy 24:1-4 divorce was not difficult to obtain. If the divorce represented simply willfulness on the part of the husband he could not get the return of the dowry which was a substantial sum. Only by challenging and proving the wife’s prenuptial un-chastity could he regain the dowry or of marital un-chastity as well.

The penalty for adultery is death. And in effect the wife’s offense here is prenuptial adultery; it is contempt both for her parents and her future husband. She has impugned her father’s honor. All of this is done by a court of law. A marital offense on the part of either husband or wife only dishonors the respective families but also the nation. The sin strikes at the family, at the nation, and at God. After a judgment against the husband he could not divorce her. She could continue to live with him or return to her parents, in either case her support was guaranteed for life. This however did not make her immune to the penalty for adultery. She was now free from the required obedience to her husband but not obedience to God’s law in all things. Her father now was the authority. Not only family honor but national honor was at stake in her actions. If sinful it was folly in Israel, an outrage and a fundamental disorder. It means a refusal to recognize moral and religious laws, it is an assertion of a private desire over the entire social order and against God. Personal acts have social consequences but it is basic to the modern outlook and the sin in every generation to insist on purely private acts having no social consequences, or if they do they must give way to personal choices. Such thinking is anarchistic and produces a society of a pragmatic and lawless character. The modern attitude is in that instances such as this it is none of society’s business what a woman or a man for that matter does. One scholar uses the word ‘vulgar’ in discussing this text. One can say perhaps that all sin is vulgar and in bad taste but is no less serious to the life of the family and society.

There is another aspect to this law, it tells us how very serious defamation of character is in God’s sight. The world today considers defamation of character routine practice, the courts are not interested in it, but this stress is made also by our Lord in the New Testament. Thus the laws concern is not only with ‘thou shalt not commit adultery’ but also with ‘thou shalt not bear false witness’. This law was a great restraint throughout the centuries in that it made it unwise for a man to defame his wife to her or to anyone else. She had to be treated with respect. There is another very important aspect. Lang observed long ago with regard to this particular law:

“Man is free only as he maintains veracity. The lie destroys his true freedom.”

Man is free only as he maintains veracity, the lie destroys his true freedom. Why? Because a lie moves a man from the real world into a world of fiction and his life begins to rest on falsity. Truth gives us a freedom in the real world God has made. We are to live all our life in God and therefore in truth. Because a lie moves men and nations from the free world into fiction and slavery men and nations must require a true witness or else theirs is a course of disaster and ruin. And this as Lang saw many generations ago is why this law is important and why over the centuries its implications were recognized and honored. The very heart of life and in all the peripheries of life freedom requires veracity, the truth. The lie destroys freedom and a society where the lie begins in the family will soon perish. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God we thank Thee for Thy word. We thank Thee that Thy word is so telling, so basic to all of life and so simple. Grant us grace to understand Thy law and to live in terms of it. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson, or any comments, yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] We are in a state now where very few people dare tell the obvious truth about minority groups of all kinds. They are unwilling because they are living in terms of fiction to tell the truth in any sphere of life, and so libel laws, slander laws, have all perished. They are impossible to enforce in our current courts. And people who write as a number have of late including…what was his name, Jared, uh, your friend who was a speaker also last weekend.

[Same man] Jared Taylor.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Some amazing slanders have been the result of his book, the people who refuse to recognize the truth attack him for having called attention to it. And a society goes into slavery as Lang saw when it abandons the truth and we are moving very rapidly into a slave world. Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes you are absolutely right. This calls for truth in every area of society. We cannot build relationships on lies, we cannot build a culture on lies and we have a particularly horrifying illustration of this today. Our president is routinely called a liar as is his wife and we have people calling attention to the fact that what they say is fraudulent, dishonest, a willful misrepresentation of the truth. Now with regard to the health care bill statements have been made which have been directly in contradiction to what the measure states. Deliberately so done. Now, that means that the lie is now in high places because it is also in low places. And truth which is the bond of any relationship is no longer present to hold the various forms, aspects, of society together.

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] We have had a vast segment of our economic life depend on truth. The monetary market, the stock market, the purchase of gold and silver coins all depends on truth because the business is conducted by telephone. And the past two three years we have seen some very, very serious cases of dishonesty here when people have reneged on a purchase when there has been a sudden drop in the market. Now, unless there’s a return to a moral standard among the people that’s only going to continue to increase and will destroy the market. This is one reason why the market prefers to have investments made through mutual funds and the like. Because they cannot afford to be banned from the market. The individual can call into a broker and renege. But now more and more it is pushed into mutual funds, this is the advice given, go through the mutual fund because they will have the funds and then place the order. So the market is trying to protect itself from dishonesty and it’s limiting our freedom. Yes?

[Question] The text talks about a token, is it true that the father used to retain those as proof of his daughter’s virginity.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Same person] Well if he had them at the beginning how perverted the man that refused that she was not a virgin by the token he has agreed that she has fulfilled…

[Rushdoony] It was not just that, it was a whole body of evidence, you see. That was taken as one form but it would be people who would give evidence that way and this way. It was, that was singled out as one thing but it was a regular court hearing.

[Same person] Could the man ever make restitution enough to regain the authority in his family?

[Rushdoony] Only if his conduct were such that the wife would allow him then to have some authority but the father would be authority. This made it very difficult for a man to shoot off his mouth to his wife or to anyone else impugning her integrity.

[Same person] [unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well, at this point he has come to trial and it would happen only when a man was so foolish he began to believe his own lies, which is not unusual. Well if there are no further questions let us bow our heads in prayer.

Our Father, Thy word is truth and we come to Thee mindful that men and nations have forsaken Thy word, have chosen a lie and slavery over truth and freedom. Use us oh Lord as instruments of Thy truth that we may again have a rebirth of freedom. Bless us we beseech Thee in Thy service and now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.