Original source: https://hipandthigh.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/does-the-bible-teach-that-a-woman-has-to-marry-her-rapist/

Does the Bible teach that a woman has to marry her rapist?

28 “If a man finds a young woman who is a virgin, who is not betrothed, and he seizes her and lies with her, and they are found out,
29 “then the man who lay with her shall give to the young woman’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife because he has humbled her; he shall not be permitted to divorce her all his days.

That passage, it is claimed, describes a young woman who is violently raped by a thuggish man, and rather than being punished, he is told that if he marries her all will be forgiven. The young woman has no choice in the matter. She and her family must comply. And they can never get divorced.

Atheists often complain that it is passages like that one that makes them hate religion.

So are the biblio-haters right? Does the Bible teach that rape victims must marry their rapist, assuming they aren’t married to begin with? A modern day example would be the college freshman coed who gets date raped at a Saturday night frat party forced to marry her frat boy rapist.

Some preliminary remarks before we even delve into providing a response.

First, as I noted in an article on the sex-trade and the Bible, atheists love to abuse those types of passages in the OT. They always cite them out of historical context and often times butcher the translation. But who says atheists like to play fair in these discussions?

After they quote their pet verse, the atheists proclaim how Christians are ignorant of their own Bibles because they cherry-pick verses. Christians need to be consistent, argues the atheist. If they are gonna hate on gays and not allow them to be married, for example, they need to be prepared to own slaves and not eat lobster. That of course is a dishonest, lazy way of offering objections because it doesn’t seek to truly engage the position.

But secondly, and more to the point, why, according to the atheist’s particular view of the world, is this law a “bad” thing? Why should we care? Why should it make them “hate religion?” Continue reading →