On the Bible & Forced Pregnancy  🔗 **Source:** [On the Bible & Forced Pregnancy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVb4NUoQU6U) > [!note]+ Document Notes > --- > tags: [hebrew-bible, biblical-law, war-captives, ancient-near-east, critical-scholarship, reception-history] > author: Dan McClellan > source: Dan McClellan (YouTube) > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVb4NUoQU6U > date created: 2026-09-21 00:00 > --- > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > # 🏷️ Title: On the Bible & forced pregnancy > ## 🧭 Table of contents > - [📝 Summary](#-summary) > - [📖 Main content](#-main-content) > - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) > - [📚 References](#-references) > - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) > - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) > - [✅ Action items](#-action-items) > - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) > - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) > - [❓ Questions](#-questions) > - [🔮 Future research](#-future-research) > - [💡 Implications](#-implications) > - [🧠 Learning styles assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) > - [📊 Accessibility assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) > - [🌍 DEIB assessment](#-deib-assessment) > - [✅ Logical validity](#-logical-validity) > - [🛡️ DARVO analysis](#️-darvo-analysis) > - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) > - [🔄 Refactor appendix](#-refactor-appendix--on-the-bible--forced-pregnancy) > ## 📝 Summary > - **What happened.** Dan McClellan, a scholar of the Bible and religion, defends a claim he posted on Twitter/X after pushback. In 35 minutes he reads three Hebrew Bible chapters — Judges 21, Numbers 31, and Deuteronomy 21:10–14 — and stacks eleven secondary sources on top of them to argue the texts assume captured women will be used for sex and reproduction without their consent. > - **Why it matters.** The trigger was a social-media exchange: an account called "the Hellenist" proposed repealing women's rights to solve a fertility crisis, another account labeled that "morality without God," and McClellan objected that the Bible contains the same prescription. His video shifts the question from polemics to what critical scholarship actually says about three specific chapters. > - **Key stakeholders.** Biblical scholars (Raymond Westbrook, Susan Niditch, Katherine Southwood, Shaye Cohen, Monica Isabel Ray, Temba Rugwiji), study-Bible editorial boards (JPS, Jewish Study Bible 2nd ed., New Oxford Annotated Bible 5th ed., Westminster Study Bible, SBL Study Bible), apologists who objected to the tweet, and lay readers of these chapters. > - **Risks and tradeoffs.** The argument's weight rests on scholarly consensus about implied purpose rather than an explicit textual statement that reproduction is the goal. McClellan concedes that Numbers 31's initial command comes from Moses, not directly from Adonai, and that Judges 21 is narrated as a problem rather than a divine command. His thesis therefore covers a gradient — silence, co-signature, prescription — not a single uniform divine order. > - **Bottom line.** Across the three chapters, McClellan argues the deity's stance moves from narrative silence (Judges 21) to ratification of a human command (Numbers 31) to direct legal prescription (Deuteronomy 21), and that at no point in any of the three is the captured woman's agency or consent mentioned. > ## 📖 Main content > **The thesis and the gradient.** McClellan structures the video as a three-chapter escalation. He says explicitly that the chapters "go from something that is represented as problematic all the way to something that is actually prescribed in the law," and that this ordering reveals "a bit of chronological development." His claim is not that every passage carries a divine command; it is that God in the text either says nothing, co-signs, or prescribes, and that the woman's consent is absent in all three cases. > **Judges 21 — narrative, not command.** After the Levite's concubine episode in Judges 19 and the civil war in Judges 20, the surviving Benjaminites lack wives because Israel swore an oath not to give them daughters. Israel devises two workarounds: destroy Jabesh-gilead for skipping the muster and extract 400 virgins from it, then instruct the Benjaminites to ambush and carry off the dancing women of Shiloh. McClellan reads both as authorial critique, not divine instruction — the framing device is the book's refrain about there being no king and everyone doing what was right in their own eyes. The women are taken for one demographic purpose: keeping a tribe from being blotted out. > **Numbers 31 — command from Moses, ratified by God.** Israel wages war on Midian at Adonai's order, kills every male, and brings back women and children. Moses becomes angry that the women were spared, orders the killing of every male child and every non-virgin woman, and directs that the virgins be kept "for yourselves." McClellan's structural point is that the deity is silent during Moses's command and then speaks afterward — instructing Moses and Eleazar to inventory the plunder "both human and animal," to set aside 1 in 500 for the Lord from the warriors' half and 1 in 50 from the congregation's half for the Levites. The inventory totals McClellan reads out are 675,000 sheep, 72,000 oxen, 61,000 donkeys, and 32,000 persons. He treats the tribute instruction as divine ratification of Moses's disposition of the captives. > **Deuteronomy 21:10–14 — law.** Here the instruction is legal and prospective. A warrior who desires a captive woman brings her home; she shaves her head, pares her nails, discards her captive's clothing, and mourns her parents a full month, after which he may "go into her" and she becomes his wife. If he is not satisfied, he must let her go free and may not sell her for money. > **The Hebrew terms McClellan flags.** He identifies the verb rendered "treat her as a slave" in Deuteronomy 21:14 as a hitpael form (he pronounces it "amar," which in that stem carries a commercial sense) and argues the better gloss is "treat her as a commodity." He notes Westbrook's point that *shalach*, usually rendered "release," doubles as the technical divorce verb in Deuteronomy 24:1, and that the woman is divorced "to herself" — Westbrook's reading is that she recovers ownership of her own juridical personality. He also flags the piel of *anah* for the "dishonored/humiliated" clause. > **The shaving-and-paring ritual.** McClellan argues that hair, nails, and clothing are the removable markers of ethnic identity — parts of the body that regrow and can be cut without injury — so the ritual strips the captive's prior identity. He cites Monica Isabel Ray's 2025 *Journal of the American Academy of Religion* article reading head-shaving as a ritual of enslavement, and Susan Niditch's argument that the treatment is a rite of passage that is also a form of aggression, converting the woman "from them to us." > **Virginity as a loophole.** Drawing on Katherine Southwood and Niditch, McClellan explains why the texts spare virgins specifically. Under a patrilineal logic, a woman who has not had intercourse is an unmarked slate; she carries no group identity to transmit and so poses no danger of producing avenging Midianite sons. Southwood calls virginity "a loophole to the usual roles," clashing with the herem/ban ideology that would otherwise require total destruction. That is the mechanism McClellan uses to close his argument: if the point were labor or companionship, virginity would be irrelevant; it matters only if the point is whose offspring the woman will bear. > **The contested claim and McClellan's answer.** Objectors argued the texts never say reproduction is the purpose. McClellan's response is inference to the best explanation plus convergent scholarly testimony: the JPS Torah Commentary ("kept alive as slaves or wives"), the Jewish Study Bible 2nd edition (patrilineal lineage removes the avenger risk), the New Oxford Annotated Bible 5th edition ("the male warriors may marry them"), the Westminster Study Bible (enslaved girls used for sex would become pregnant, and their offspring inherit enslaved status), and the SBL Study Bible ("slave wife or concubine"). Shaye Cohen's *The Beginnings of Jewishness* reads "for yourselves" as unambiguous sexual use; Tem [00:00:00] Does the God of the Bible prescribe forcing women to become pregnant without regard for their consent or agency? Hey everybody, I'm Dan Mlelen. I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion. And the other day, the Twitter algorithm decided to show me this tweet on the bottom by an account that goes by the Hellenist. And this is a deeply stupid, deeply misogynist, deeply anti-feminist account. But they say the solution to the fertility crisis is simple. repeal women's rights and force them to have children. That's it. That's the solution. And then another account that goes by mining responds by quoting the proverbial non-Christian who says [00:00:39] morality exists without God. And then this account shares this tweet labeling it morality without God. And this is not accurate because the Henist is not talking about morality without God. just morality without the Christian God. The Hellenist is always talking about Zeus. So, it's not morality without God, it's morality without the Christian God. However, I have a problem with both of these tweets. And my problem with the mining account is the following. I said, "God in the Bible repeatedly endorses and even in some instances prescribes forcing women to become pregnant without any regard whatsoever for their consent or agency." And I had [00:01:24] a lot of push back on this tweet, but I want to share three different chapters from the Hebrew Bible that are related in that they're all talking about capturing wives, taking wives from war captives. And they go from something that is represented as problematic all the way to something that is actually prescribed in the law. And I want to talk about what's the same across these three different chapters and also what's different. And I think we can see a bit of chronological development here. But I want to talk about these three chapters. And I want to talk about the fact that we do seem to see God prescribing [00:02:06] forcing women to become pregnant without regard for their consent or their agency. And I want to start in Judges 21. And we've got a bit to read here, but the story here is after Judges 19 where we had a Levite who had to go capture an escaped enslaved person and they're coming back and they find themselves needing to spend the night in somebody's house. And they're in the Benjaminite territory. They're around Gabia. And all the men of the town surround the house and demand that the Levite be let out so they can basically sexually assault the Levites. And they say, "No, take my virgin daughter, the man who owns the house." And this man's [00:02:51] concubine and you can do with them what you please. And the Levite ends up shoving his concubine out the door and she is sexually assaulted throughout the night, ends up dying. And then in chapter 20, everybody else in Israel gets really upset and goes and wages civil war against the Benjaminites. And then we pick up our scene in chapter 21. Then the Israelites said, "Who out of all the tribes of Israel did not come up in the assembly to the Lord? For a solemn oath had been taken concerning whoever did not come up to the Lord to MsPa, saying that one shall be put to death." But the Israelites had compassion for Benjamin their kin and [00:03:33] said, "One tribe is cut off from Israel this day. What shall we do for wives for those who are left? Since we have sworn by the Lord that we will not give them any of our daughters as wives." They said, "Is there anyone from the tribe of Israel who did not come up to the Lord to Mizpod?" Turned out that no one from Yabesh Gilead had come to the camp to the assembly. And specifically, this is talking about the assembly to go to war against the Benjaminites. For when the role was called among the people, not one of the inhabitants of Yabesh Gilead was there. So the congregation sent 12,000 soldiers there, and commanded [00:04:12] them, "Go put the inhabitants of Yabeshill to the sword, including the women and the little ones. This is what you shall do. every male and every woman who has lain with a man, you shall devote to destruction. And they found among the inhabitants of Yabashgilead 400 young virgins who had never slept with a man, and brought them to the camp at Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan. Then the whole congregation sent word to the Benjaminites who were at the rock of Remon, and proclaimed peace to them. Benjamin returned at that time, and they gave them the women who they had saved alive of the women of Yabesh Gilead. but [00:04:49] they did not suffice for them. The people had compassion on Benjamin because the Lord had made a breach in the tribes of Israel. So the elders of the congregation said, "What shall we do for wives for those who are left since there are no women left in Benjamin?" And they said, "There must be heirs for the survivors of Benjamin in order that a tribe may not be blotted out from Israel. Yet we cannot give any of our daughters to them as wives. For the Israelites had sworn, "Cursed be anyone who gives a wife to Benjamin." So they said, "Look, the yearly festival of the Lord is taking place at Shiloh, which is north of Bethl, on the east of the [00:05:26] highway that goes up from Bethl to Sheckchham and south of Leabona." And they instructed the Benjaminites, saying, "Go and lie and wait in the vineyards and watch when the young women of Shiloh come out to dance in the dances. Then come out of the vineyards and each of you carry off a wife for himself from the young women of Shiloh and go to the land of Benjamin. Then if their fathers or their brothers come to complain to us, we will say to them, "Be generous and allow us to have them because we did not capture in battle a wife for each man. But neither did you incur guilt by giving your daughters to them." The Benjaminites did so. They [00:06:03] took wives for each of them from the dancers whom they abducted. Then they went and returned to their territory and rebuilt the towns and lived in them. In other words, the rest of the house of Israel realizes that this civil war has made it so the tribe of Benjamin is at risk of dying out. They don't have enough women to reproduce. And so they tried two different tactics to get the Benjaminites enough women to reproduce because they made this oath during the civil war that none of them would give their daughters to anyone of the tribe of Benjamin. The first thing that they do is go take all these girls from Yabesh Gilead, the group that they [00:06:46] destroyed for not coming up to fight against the Benjaminites. But that wasn't enough young women. And so then they said, "All right, well, we can't give them to you, but we can have you come take them from us, and that way we're not giving them to you, and that'll work." And so these two different tactics are presented as problematic by the author. This is not the author saying, "God commanded us to do this." It is the author presenting the tribes of Israel as finding a solution to the problem of the tribe of Benjamin being cut off. So it is some kind of inner Israelite discussion of how we can get wives for the tribe of Benjamin that [00:07:32] involves capturing wives. These are young girls who are virgins who obviously did not agree to go become the wives of the Benjaminites so that they could produce children for the tribe of Benjamin. So they're being forced to become pregnant and to bear children against their will or at least with no regard for their agency or consent. But this is not coming from God. This is the outcome of there not being a king in the land. Everybody just doing what seemed right to them in their own eyes. But we have a couple of other passages where the agency of Adonai, the God of Israel, is more directly involved. And first, I [00:08:11] want to go to Numbers 31. The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "Avenge the Israelites on the Midianites. Afterward, you shall be gathered to your people." So Moses spoke to the people, saying, "Arm some of your number for the war so that they may go against Midian to execute the Lord's vengeance on Midian. You shall send a thousand from each of the tribes of Israel to the war. So out of the thousands of Israel, a thousand from each tribe were conscripted, 12,000 armed for battle. Moses sent them to war, a thousand from each tribe, along with Phineas, son of Eleazar the priest with the vessels of the sanctuary and the trumpets for [00:08:48] sounding the alarm in his hand. They did battle against Midian as the Lord had commanded Moses and killed every male. They killed the kings of Midian, Evie, Rem, Zur, Her, and Raa, the five kings of Midian, in addition to others who were slain by them. And they also killed Balum, son of Baor, with the sword. The Israelites took the women of Midian and their little ones captive, and they plundered all their cattle, their flocks, and all their goods. All their towns where they had settled, and all their encampments they burned. But they took all the spoil and all the plunder, both people and animals. Then they brought the captives and the plunder and [00:09:29] the spoil to Moses, to Eleazar the priest, and to the congregation of the Israelites at the camp on the plains of Moab by the Jordan opposite Jericho. They were not supposed to do this because they were supposed to kill everyone. But they decided to keep some of the plunder, some of the booty, which included objects, but also people. Moses, Eleazar, the priest, and all the leaders of the congregation went to meet them outside the camp. Moses became angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war. For Moses said to them, "Have you allowed all the women [00:10:08] to live?" These women here on Balam's advice made the Israelites act treacherously against the Lord in the affair of Peor, so that the plague came among the congregation of the Lord. Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves. camp outside the camp seven days. Whoever of you has killed any person or touched a corpse, purify yourselves, you and your captives. On the third and on the seventh day, you shall purify every garment, every article of skin, everything made of [00:10:48] goats hair, and every article of wood. Eleazar the priest said to the troops who had gone to battle, "This is the statute of the law that the Lord has commanded Moses. Gold, silver, bronze, iron, tin, and lead. Everything that can withstand fire, you shall pass through fire, and it shall be clean. Nevertheless, it shall also be purified with the water for purification. And whatever cannot withstand fire, you shall pass through the water. You must wash your clothes on the seventh day, and you shall be clean afterward. You may come into the camp. And this is where God gets involved. The Lord spoke to Moses saying, "You and Eleazar the [00:11:27] priest and the heads of the ancestral houses of the congregation. Make an inventory of the plunder captured, both human and animal. Divide the plunder into two parts between the warriors who went out to battle and all the congregation from the share of the warriors who went out to battle. Set aside as tributes for the Lord one item out of every 500, whether persons, oxen, donkeys, or sheep. take it from their half and give it to Eleazar the priest as an offering to the Lord. But from the Israelites half, you shall take one out of every 50, whether persons, ox and donkey or sheep, all the animals, and give them to the Levites who performed [00:12:08] the duties of the tabernacle of the Lord. Then Moses and Eleazar the priest did as the Lord had commanded Moses. The plunder remaining from the spoils that the troops had taken totaled 675,000 sheep, 72,000 oxen, 61,000 donkeys, and 32,000 persons in all, women who had not known a man by sleeping with him. So here we have a command to take the women who have not known a man, so virgin women, and keep them for yourselves. And as we're going to see, the overwhelming majority of scholars agree this is a reference to using them sexually to keep them as sex slaves, as concubines, as wives, something like that, where their [00:12:56] agency, their consent is disregarded, and they are to be kept for reproduction basically. However, the command didn't come initially from God. The command came from Moses. But then God co-signs it by saying, "Okay, here's how you're going to distribute all of the booty, whether human or animal, including make sure that the priests that Eleazar and the Levites get their share." So God co-signs Moses's command that is imposed following the disobedience of the Israelites in failing to kill all of the women. And this is despicable in a variety of different ways, including having them kill all of the juvenile and toddler men [00:13:48] who didn't do anything at all. But they're keeping the virgin women alive so they can be used for reproduction. And we're going to talk a little bit about why it has to be the virgins and what exactly is going on here and how it fits into ancient war ethics. But before we do that, we're going to look at one more passage. We're going to look at Deuteronomy 21 verse 10. When you go out to war against your enemies and the Lord your God hands them over to you and you take them captive. Suppose you see among the captives a beautiful woman whom you desire and want to marry. And so you bring her home to your house. She shall [00:14:27] shave her head, pair her nails, discard her captives garb, and remain in your house a full month mourning for her father and mother. After that, you may go into her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. But if you are not satisfied with her, you shall let her go free and certainly not sell her for money. You must not treat her as a slave since you have dishonored her. And the verb for treat her as a slave here is actually amar beginning with an and it's in the heat pel. And this has reference to engaging in trade. So it's more like treat her as a commodity than treat her as a slave. But here we have a [00:15:11] commandment given to Israel by Moses from the Lord from Adonai to do a certain set of things. If they see a woman among the captives, they've just killed her whole family, but if you like the way she looks, here's what you do to make her your wife. Again, without regard for her consent or her agency. So, this woman is going to become again a sex slave, a concubine or some kind of wife. And I want to talk about what it says she has to do. She has to cut off all her hair. She has to cut her nails. She has to get rid of her garb. And this is interpreted in a variety of different ways on social media. People want to [00:15:57] suggest it means a lot of different things, but there's not much else that could be going on here except some kind of excision of former identity, whether ethnic or in relation to their free versus enslaved status. This is talking about removing some of the removable parts of the body that are associated with ethnicity. And this actually goes back to some anthropological research about how the nails and the hair are kind of the removable features of identity. That they are parts of your body that continue to grow but can be cut off without damaging the body, without hurting the person. And so removing them or at least cutting them down is a way [00:16:51] to remove one's identity. And then clothes obviously are a central feature of ethnic identity as well. So you're getting rid of that clothing as well. But let's look at some scholarship on this. A particularly interesting article from just last year by Monica Isabel Ray is headshaving as a ritual of enslavement in Deuteronomy 21 10-14 from the journal of the American Academy of Religion. And there's a very interesting argument going on in here, but the idea here is that having the woman shave and cut her nails and get rid of her captives garb is basically a way to render her an enslaved person. But this may not be all that's going on [00:17:32] here. Next, I want to look at this edited volume that brings together the writings of Raymond Westbrook, one of the most authoritative voices on biblical law. But we have a chapter discussing the female slave. given in the red box at the bottom. I now propose to analyze two biblical laws in light of my understanding of the law of slavery and marriage. The first is Deuteronomy 21:10-14. We just read that, so we can skip over that. There is no question of slave concubinage here. The text explicitly refers to the formation of marriage and to its termination by divorce. The Hebrew shalak, usually translated release or the like, is also a technical [00:18:10] term for divorcing a wife, as in Deuteronomy 24:1. And three, in my analysis, the captive woman is initially a slave. Marriage makes her a free person, but subsequent termination of the marriage revives her previous status. Her husband becomes her master again, and therefore can in principle sell her as a slave. The law forbids him to do so. Instead, he must divorce her to herself. Lan Sha. This curious and seemingly redundant expression is another facet of splitting the jeritical personality. The woman is reunited with herself. That is, she receives back the ownership of herself that was seated to her captor when she became a slave, [00:18:56] regained during marriage but lost again to him following her divorce. Note, there's been nothing stated about the agency of this woman in terms of any impregnation or any children that she has. Now, also just a little bit ago, Salon edited a book called Ritual Violence in the Hebrew Bible, New Perspectives. And there's a phenomenal paper in here called The Traffic in Women: Exchange Ritual Sacrifice and War by Susan Naid. And one of the collections of texts that Night Edge talks about here is precisely Deuteronomy 21, Numbers 31, and Judges 21. And I want to look at this section that's highlighted in red. Deuteronomy [00:19:38] 21 provides a fascinating set of procedures and rules that all have to do with areas of socructural stress, discomfort, and anemy. The person found dead in the open country in the absence of witnesses or suspects. The case of the man who has two wives, one beloved and one disliked, and inheritance obligations to the son of the non-f favorite. The rebellious son subject to capital punishment. The proper and timely burial of a criminal hung as guilty of a capital crime. And in the midst of these, the treatment of the female war captive taken as a wife, including boundaries for her dismissal should the man find her undesirable. [00:20:14] After all, the very placement of this law pertaining to captive women suggests questions about legitimacy, difficult moral decisions, and emotional ambivalence. The insistence that she not be sold or treated as a slave because you have disrespected/humiliated her. Again, the PL of Ana is employed suggests that perhaps capturing women is not the ideal way to obtain wives. The woman has been transformed from them to us via bodily treatment. Pairing of the nails, shaving of her head, and changing of her clothes. Again, this process is a ritual pattern, a right of passage, but also a form of aggression. That's a change in identity is imposed by the [00:20:54] conqueror. Numbers 31 alludes to the women as war spoil within the contours of a priestly perspective. Only those women who have not yet known a man can be transformed from them to us can provide acceptable wombs for Israelite seed. And Naidage goes into more detail about what's going on here in her 1993 book, War in the Hebrew Bible, A Study in the Ethics of Violence. Next, I want to talk about Katherine Southwood's book, Marriage by Capture in the Book of Judges, an Anthropological Approach, which is going back to Judges 21, but is also going to talk about our other two passages. However, what is especially [00:21:32] interesting in this text is the similarity of attitude towards virginity and ethnicity as is displayed in Deuteronomy 21:10-14. In both cases, the virgin women are able to assimilate through ethnic intermarriage. This is particularly strange in the context of war where consciousness of ethnicity is usually stronger owing to threats to one's own ethnic group's boundaries. In theory, women from another ethnic group are important for boundaries. Acting as symbolic border guards and biological reproducers of members of ethnic collectives. Therefore, raping women in context of war serves to humiliate those who are defeated. However, in Numbers 31 and [00:22:13] Deuteronomy 21:10-14, our expectations are crushed. In these texts, virginity is represented as a loophole to the usual roles. Instead of the expected black and white approaches to ethnicity, which one might also expect in a text using the ban, we have a third dimension of ideological layering resulting in a clash between mass slaughter of the enemy and a concern for purity to be preserved and maintained. As Naiditch comments, this priestly attitude to killing in war differs significantly from banning texts in which all is to be destroyed, sometimes even including domestic animals, and has a different symbolic [00:22:53] map. And that's from Nidish's 1993 book that I just referenced about war. Virgins are represented as one exception to the usual rules, as Gray explains. And then we have a quote here that's supposed to come from a commentary on Joshua and Judges from 1986. It actually does not come from that commentary. It actually comes from Susan Naid in this book from about 25 years ago, the Oxford Bible commentary. And here is that passage in full verses 10-12. This partial imposition of the ban suggests parallels with Numbers 31, a priestly war account. In both narratives, all males are killed, but women who have not known a man sexually are spared. The [00:23:32] context of and worldviews behind the war episodes differ. Numbers 31 reveals a view suggesting that the virgin girl is an unmarked slate differing in identity from sexually active women who have been marked by men and from men of all ages who carry in their persons the identity of the group. The woman who has not had intercourse is treated as a sort of fresh fertile ground available for a man's seed. In numbers 31, virgin girls are not tainted with moabitete contagion and become the bearers of Israelite offspring. And then back to Southwood's book. Thus, as with Deuteronomy 21 10-14, virgins are seen almost as [00:24:16] ethnicityless beings who only gain an ethnicity once marked by sexual activity with a man from one or another of the groups. However, unlike Deuteronomy 21:10-14, the text does not mention any rights which the Midianite virgins must initially undergo, but remains focused on the purity of the Israelites. And what I'm pointing out with all of this is that in all three of these cases, these women are intended to become again sex slaves, concubines, or wives, and to therefore provide children for the nation of Israel, for the tribes of Israel, for these men. They are going to be made pregnant. And in all three of [00:25:00] these cases, since these are women who have been captured, their agency, their consent is obviously immaterial. In all three of these cases, the God of Israel either says nothing about women being forced to become pregnant without regard for their agency or their consent, or God co-signs, or God themselves is directly responsible for prescribing how this is going to go about. Now, let's look at the Torah, a woman's commentary, edited by Tamar Consenazi, and Andrea El Vice. We have here some commentary on numbers 31. The phrase known a man carnally. The editors say Moses's demand that all such women be killed is based on the women's [00:25:42] presumed culpability in the incident at Bal Peor. However, such regulations that make a woman's sexual history essential to her destiny also imply that the intended role of women captured in war is sexual. This symbol of conquest may also help with the demographic problem, namely a shortage of women because of higher female mortality, usually from childbirth and ensuing complications. Shai Cohen's 1999ish, I think, book, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, and Uncertainties, discusses Deuteronomy 21 and Numbers 31. This law allows the Israelite warrior to bring home and marry a beautiful war captive. [00:26:21] Since Deuteronomy elsewhere prohibits marriage with Canaanites and even orders their extermination, we may presume that our text is speaking of non-Canites. Nevertheless, the law is remarkable. For here, Moses permits marriage between an Israelite warrior and a foreign woman. Similarly, Deuteronomy 20:14 permits the Israelites after conquering a town that has refused to surrender to take as your booty the women, the children, the livestock, and everything in the town and enjoy the use of the spoil of your enemy which the Lord your God gives you. If the range of activities covered by the word enjoy the use, the Hebrew [00:26:58] literally means eat, is not clear here, the implications of Numbers 31:17-18 are unambiguous. Moses enjoins upon the returning warriors to kill their Midianite female captives who have lain with a man. But spare for yourselves every young woman who has not had carnal relations with a man. We may be sure that for yourselves means that the warriors may use their virgin captives sexually. Then from the journal for smitics, we have a paper by temba ruguiji entitled confronted with a god who sanctions the rape of minors. Reading numbers 3117 through 18 from a pastoral hermeneutical perspective. So this is someone from a devotional [00:27:43] perspective saying this is what's going on in this text. Let's figure out what we can do with it in the red box from the abstract. The biblical text neither condemns rape in general nor addresses rape of little children. The opposite seems to be the case. Numbers 31:17-18 portrays Adonai as sanctioning the rape of minors, that is girls, preceded by the killing of both boys and unmarried women found guilty of losing their virginity through sexual intercourse. And you can read that paper if you'd like to see the argument there. But now I want to go through some study Bible commentary that further demonstrates that the majority view of scholars is [00:28:20] that in numbers 31 as we can see explicitly in Judges 21 in Deuteronomy 21 that the purpose of these captured women is to serve as available wombs for men to be used sexually to reproduce for the men so that the men can multiply their number. So, first I want to go to the JPS Torah commentary on numbers. We have verse 18, the word spare. Rather, spare for yourselves. That is, the virgins are to be kept alive as slaves or wives. And the reality is that it's probably a little of both. But even if they're wives and not slaves, they have no agency or consent related to when that sex happens and what results from the sex. And as we've already seen the [00:29:09] other two directly parallel situations where we're taking wives after combat, these are captive women who are being taken by the soldiers. The point is precisely reproduction. The point is precisely to provide offspring for the men, for their tribe, for the house of Israel. There's not really another plausible reason for these texts to be concerned for these men having sexual play things. It's not just about enjoying sex with women. It's specifically about reproduction. Here from the second edition of the Jewish Study Bible, Numbers 31:es 15-18, the commentary says, "Only young girls who are virgins are left alive and [00:29:53] presumably taken captive." And then we have a compare Deuteronomy 20:14 and 21:10-14. Since lineage was determined patriarchally, they do not pose the danger of producing Midianite sons who can avenge their fathers. That these women are going to be used to reproduce is a given. And then from the fifth edition of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, the underlined portion, verse 18, only virgins are acceptable captives, meaning that the male warriors may marry them. And then from the Westminster Study Bible, which also uses the updated edition of the New Rabi Standard Version, we have the underlined commentary. The virgins are spared for [00:30:35] yourselves, that is for marriage or enslavement. Enslaved girls overwhelmingly were also used for sex and would become pregnant. This is a way to breed more enslaved folks and the offspring of those unions would become cattle enslaved folks. And then we have from the SPL study Bible. We're looking at Deuteronomy 21:10-14. A foreign woman acquired as a spoil of war. See also 20:14. Who becomes a man's slave wife or concubine may not later be sold for profit by the husband. So we have another endorsement of at least Deuteronomy 21's very clear expectation that these captured women become either slave wives or concubines. So whether [00:31:28] the person is enslaved, becomes a concubine, becomes a wife, the notion that they are to be used for sex and for procreation in order to reproduce is considered a given across the critical scholarship and even a lot of the devotional scholarship. So the folks who objected to my tweet on the ground that the text doesn't clearly say they're intended for reproduction don't really have a leg to stand on. You can't really come up with a plausible alternative function for these women. And the reason why, at least in Numbers 31, it was specifically the virgin women who are kept alive for yourselves. That's obviously referring to keeping them [00:32:10] alive for sexual purposes and for procreative purposes more specifically. This is not just so they have a sexual play thing. This is not just so they have somebody who can do the dishes. This is so that they can be used for sex, for procreation, because more children was always something that was desired by men in this time period. And you can see in Judges 21 that the concern is the survival of the tribe, their reproduction, so that one of the tribes of Israel is not entirely cut off. You can see Deuteronomy 21 very clearly laying out the process for taking a woman captured in war and making her your wife, transforming her [00:32:53] from an enslaved person into a wife. So that the children would be Israelites. The process is all about scraping her pre-existing ethnicity off and replacing it with whatever ethnicity is impregnated within her. And numbers 31, the taking of female captives who are virgins for yourselves from battle very clearly is directly parallel is doing the same thing. This is about provisioning women who can become again sex slaves, concubines or wives. Whichever of those different social levels is going on, the point is precisely reproduction. There's not really a good case to make that that is not in view and that that is not the [00:33:41] main purpose of taking these women. Obviously, this is God either condoning or prescribing, forcing women to become pregnant without regard for their agency or consent. Because in all of these passages where either Moses or God or somebody else is saying, "We're going to do this. We're going to do this. We're going to do the other thing," at no point is the agency or the consent of the captured women ever even acknowledged. Much less part of the prescriptions, much less part of what the men have to do in order for this taking of these wives to be sanctioned by God. their agency or their consent isn't really relevant even for freeborn women [00:34:27] who are made wives. But it's definitely not relevant for women who come from other societies or come from other tribes who are captured in battle in order to be turned into sex slaves, concubines or wives. These passages make clear that what I said was precisely accurate. that in the Bible, God either condones or prescribes forcing women to become pregnant without any regard whatsoever for their consent or their agency. That's pretty clear from the Bible. And objections to this are just rooted in dogmatism. They're not rooted in any actual careful and critical analysis of what's going on in the text and what they are most likely intended [00:35:10] to be accomplishing and intended to be communicating. Very clearly they're intended to communicate that it is okay to take captured women as sex slaves, as concubines, as wives, so that they can be the means of your reproduction, your procreation, so that men can have children, so that their line can be perpetuated, so that their tribe can grow, so that they can contribute to the strengthening of the house of Israel. And the agency and the consent of the women involved is just utterly immaterial. And the fit for this video has been the Flash., On the Bible & Forced Pregnancy, Dan McClellan, 01m32jrzes60tz0z283zgcp2e8.