Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Moses continues his farewell speech today, and he covers a wide variety of laws in these three chapters.

We don't have time to touch on them all, so I'll just pull a few

from the ones that might have been the most perplexing from our reading, most of which pertain to

relationships between men and women. But before we get there, I want to remind us about a few

things just so we have the proper framework for what we're encountering here. God is not setting up a utopian society where everything is ideal.

God is meeting the people where they are and giving them a framework for a functional society

where people are treated with at least the bare minimum level of respect. When God addresses

something like multiple wives, it doesn't mean he's putting a seal of approval on it.

It means he's acknowledging that it happens. And he's giving them honorable ways to respond to an

imperfect, sinful situation. We'll hit some challenging passages today, and it's important for us

to remember not to overlay our cultural experience onto theirs. Speaking of which, let's go over the first

tough segment, marrying female captives. For anyone in Western society today, this idea is really

cringe-inducing. We even balk at the idea of arranged marriage, and this feels like it fringes on our

idea of love and marriage even more.

One of the things we have to remember about this society is that marriage rarely fit our

modern ideas of love. Very rarely did a woman especially marry for love. They often married

as a means of being provided for. So the situation we've got here is that the Israelites would have conquered a

city and killed all the men, but taken the women and children alive. Some of these women would have

been absorbed into the society. But if a man found a woman he wanted to marry, it's quite likely

she wouldn't have objected. And this law God set out here honored the woman by giving her a 30-day period

of time to mourn and grieve all she has lost before marrying the Israelite man. If for any reason,

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