Deuteronomy 22:13-21 (Part One)

"Frodo," here is more of that attention you seem to want!  I finally had the time to write the first of a two-part, comprehensive series on what Deuteronomy 22:13-21 does and does not mean for you, since you have clearly written as if you deny the premises stated below or what follows from them by necessity, inside or outside of Biblical veracity.  I will try to write the second part soon, but remember that many other posts that have been released this year have been scheduled out months or more than a year in advance in some cases.  I do not at all usually write something and schedule it for a day or so out in advance.  As such, I will write part two when I have the time to devote to it outside of work and the like.  Is the Bible sexist against either gender when it comes to sexual expectations for men and women?  Not at all, as texts like Deuteronomy 22:13-21, which deals with a specific scenario in which a woman lies about her virginity before marriage, do not say or necessitate what some people believe, such as that only women can or should be virgins Biblically speaking, that virginity is strictly equated with an intact hymen, and so on.  Since many philosophical facts independent of the Bible or about what the Bible teaches about general morality are prerequisites to realizing this, I will address them first.

The Nature of Conscience

The following is true regardless of whether the Bible is.  Conscience is only a subjective sense of morality.  Conscience could exist if there is nothing good or evil, though if this is/was the case then it simply could not correspond to anything but a person's mind and its feelings or preferences.  If morality does exist--not cultural consensus about what is supposedly good or evil, not personal approval or condemnation of something, and not belief in morality, but actual objective moral obligations--conscience is still subjective.  An individual person's "sense" of morality also might be entirely miscalibrated or lost over time so that it does not align with what is righteous, but the more important fact is that a subjective sense of morality cannot tell you if morality really exists or what its exact obligations are.  All it reveals is that you feel a certain way, that the thought or sight or mention of a particular thing makes one horrified or uncomfortable or furious.  This is all many people go off of when cornered about why they believe in a certain religious moral framework or endorse a particular society's laws.  They can pretend like there is more to their motivations than gratifying personal conscience, but this might not be the case.  If the obligations of Deuteronomy 22:13-21 really do correspond to a moralistic deity's nature, then conscience means nothing.  If Christianity is not true, since there would not be any other moral-theistic system with actual evidence pointing to it, no one would actually hold to moral positions except on the basis of preference.  Maybe a given moral idea is true as long as it does not contradict logical axioms or some other necessary truth, and maybe it is false.  No one would have any basis for actually believing such a thing either way.

Mosaic Law Describes The Biblical God's Unchanging Commands

As for the endurance of Mosaic Law's obligations according to the real tenets of Christianity, the Law is presented as inherently good (Deuteronomy 4:5-8) and as being complete enough that one can find or logically derive all of Yahweh's moral nature from it (Deuteronomy 4:2).  The only things that could change about the universality obligations, which are rooted in the nature of an unchanging deity (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17), is that some of them could not be binding outside of a particular context.  My wife and I cannot be obligated to offer sacrifices to the priests if there is no sacrificial system and priesthood in place, for instance.  This does not even have to do with whether animal sacrifices as prescribed by the Bible are really morally good.  If I cannot do something, it is by logical necessity not evil for me to not do it.  All of the precise sins with the status of crimes and the exact punishments for those sins as outlined in the Bible, from minor assault (Exodus 21:18-19) to cursing one's parents (Leviticus 20:9), are detailed in the Torah and would not be only for a given societal structure to uphold, but for all cultures at all times.

These laws and the obligations they reference (which would not be mere words or customs, but legitimate obligations that transcend the human mind) are not overturned or declared tyrannical in the New Testament.  The moral epistemology of conscience aside, Jesus affirms Mosaic Law and literally says he is not overturning it (Matthew 5:17-19).  He also approves of the execution of people who curse their parents (Exodus 20:17), for instance, while chastising the Pharisees for not doing what the Law actually demands while contriving and submitting to mere social norms (Matthew 15:1-14).  Jesus was not opposed to the very laws the Father he wholly submitted himself to revealed.  As for Paul, he is presented, as any thorough Christian thinker would be, as a theonomist who says he is committed to everything the Law entails (Acts 24:14) and that the Law is not sinful and, in fact, is necessary to know one's moral obligations (Romans 7:7).  This on its own refutes the idea that he believed in conscience over Mosaic Law and that the Law could be improved upon.  Paul's comments on conscience in Romans 2:13-16, after all, are that Mosaic Law is written on people's hearts (this would not contradict conscience being subjective and unverifiable).

Not About Sex Before Legal Marriage

Something that needs to be mentioned about Deuteronomy 22:13-21 is that it obviously is not about sex before legal marriage being evil (it is not necessarily sinful Biblically), and especially not just for women.  From the passage itself, this is clear from how in this limited case law, it is the woman lying about her virginity that is the issue.  Outside of this passage, Exodus 22:16-17 already addresses the scenario of two people who are neither engaged nor married to each other having sex.  The man and woman are under most circumstances to get married, unless there is parental objection (or if the relationship would be abusive for either party, for that is already grounds for divorce in Exodus 21:9-11 and Deuteronomy 24:1-4).  Casual sex is sinful.  Sex before legal marriage is not universally immoral according to the Bible.  Moreover, God did not create human governments; people did.  Legal marriage is inherently a social construct because it by nature cannot exist apart from a culture, and yet, God told the first humans to procreate and called their state very good (Genesis 1:26-31).  Premarital sex in the conventional sense is not automatically sinful, so a woman or man not being a virgin when she/he is married would not inherently be a moral failing.

The Gender Equality Of God's Image

Also of great relevance to the issue of gender and moral obligation is the verse in the referenced portion of Genesis (1:27) that says men and woman are equal.  Men and women, whether or not the Bible is true, could not have moral obligations that are exclusive to them unless it has something to literally do with their anatomy, the only difference (along with physiology) between men and women.  That which is good and could be done by both would be good or even obligatory for both and vice versa.  More than just this, there is not and cannot be such a thing as different personalities that are "masculine" or "feminine" that one's genitalia dictate.  It does not logically follow from having a penis or vagina that one is stoic or emotional, hypersexual or asexual/demisexual, or prone to lead or prone to follow.  It also is not the case that just because one person of a given gender thinks or acts in a certain way that another person of their gender will, for people are individuals.  These truths are not grounded in or revealed by petty science or social customs, but pure logical necessity.

To list just some things, men are not Biblically obligated to put themselves in harm's way specifically for women, disregard their emotionality, or consign themselves to silence or denial if they are sexually abused by women--which happens twice, not that many people acknowledge this, in the very first book of the Bible between Lot's daughters in Genesis 19 and Potiphar's wife with Joseph in Genesis 39.  Women are not to be confined to the home of they do not wish to abstain from professional work elsewhere--my god, Proverbs 31 by itself refutes the idea that the Bible prescribes this for women, as the woman is praised for her business productivity and her husband is the one who in this window of time is not working!  They are not to seek to be or be externally pressured to be a mother if it does not suit their personality, just as they, like men, are not prohibited from leadership in the Torah or showing part or the whole of their bodies publicly [1].  Nothing is sinful on Christianity, certainly not on the basis of gender, that God has not condemned (Deuteronomy 4:2).

Female Masturbation

Now, back to Deuteronomy 22:13-21.  One of the most idiotic things I have ever heard about this passage is that it supposedly condemns female masturbation.  I have already shown that neither women nor men are morally required by default to be virgins when they get married according to the Bible.  Thus, this cannot be what the passage is about.  However, I have also had the person to whom this series is addressed say that women in particular were not allowed to masturbate in Israel because they were allegedly demanded to be virgins prior to marriage, which this person assumes from Deuteronomy 22:13-21 is equated with having an intact hymen (demanded by God or by a Hebrew culture they think is repudiated hy the Bible at large, they did not strictly specify)!  The hyman part will be focused upon in the next part of this series.  Regarding masturbation, only a fool would think that the Bible is condemning something it never directly or directly mentions.

It does not prohibit masturbation, which of course means it does not condemn it for either gender, and to cite Deuteronomy 4:2 yet again, nothing is to be condemned that God has not condemned.  Never once does the Torah or anywhere else in the Bible condemn masturbation by either gender.  It is a permissible act that can be a deeply introspective, delightful expression of sexuality.  Still, even then, a woman could masturbate without "breaking" her hymen, so this objection is based on non sequitur fallacies that are not only logically erroneous, but that also distort what the Bible does and does not say and the scientific possibility of different forms of masturbation for women.  The clitoris could be manually stimulated without ever entering the vagina, for instance.  Neither the exterior nor penetrative kind of female masturbation is Biblically sinful, whether inside or outside marriage or with or without visual/mental stimulation from something like sensual images of the male body.  None of this is condemned directly or by logical extension in Mosaic Law.  Anyone who is a Christian and objects is not only irrationalistic, but a legalist like the kind Jesus opposed among the Pharisees.  Anyone who is not a Christian and objects that this is not what the Bible really teaches is a goddamn fool as well.

Part One's Finale

The wording of laws that happen to mention a specific gender, the relevance of Deuteronomy 22:13-21 to prostitution, the real criteria used to probabilistically evaluate if a woman was a virgin, the frequency in which this law is prescribed to be carried out, and the equivalent male obligation to not lie about virginity will be tackled in the second part.  All of this is either philosophical background to the issue of ethics and gender as a whole and Christian morality in particular, as well as well as setup for the details in the next part that will dive into the Deuteronomy text in question.  No, Yahweh of the Bible is not some sexist bigot against women or men, but whatever is or is not immoral, though we cannot prove that any moral system is true as opposed to probably true (inconsistent moral systems are false by necessity due to contradicting themselves and logical axioms), our feelings and our society's collective habits are necessarily, demonstrably meaningless and irrelevant.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/05/bikinis-are-not-sinful.html