When Scripture Hurts: Reading Deuteronomy 21 as Women

When Scripture Hurts: Reading Deuteronomy 21 as Women

 There are passages of the Bible we would rather skip.

Not because we don't believe the Bible matters. Sometimes it is precisely because it matters so much that certain passages are difficult to read. We encounter words about women's bodies, sexuality, marriage, violence, pregnancy, family, and loss—and suddenly reading Scripture is no longer an abstract exercise in interpretation. It is an embodied experience. It lands in us.

Deuteronomy 21:10–14 is one of those passages.

The law prescribes a scenario in which an Israelite man who goes to war, takes captives, sees a beautiful woman among them, desires her, and takes her as a wife. The law then describes a series of actions: the woman's hair is cut, her nails are attended to, her captive clothing is removed, and a month is set aside for mourning her father and mother in the man's house. Only then does the text say that the man may take her as his wife. [Read the fuller study of this passage by Melissa Ramos].

The passage is brief. But what is left unsaid is haunting.

What might this kind of captivity have meant for a woman? What relationships might have been severed? What might have happened to a captive woman's body before she entered an Israelite household?

These questions bring us into the territory of hermeneutics—the work of interpreting Scripture. If we are to have or offer a faithful reading of this Scripture, then some questions must be asked.

What constitutes a faithful reading of the Bible when we encounter a passage that is deeply troubling?

Faithful to whom? To God or to the Bible itself?
Faithful to the traditions of our faith communities?
Or faithful to the reader who has to live with what the text says?

These questions matter because every interpretation has assumptions behind it. Sometimes those assumptions are made visible. Often they are not. We inherit ways of reading that have been shaped by generations of commentators, communities, theological commitments, and cultural expectations. And those inherited readings can make some questions seem natural while making other questions almost impossible to ask.

At Religion for Her, we want to make room for those questions.

We prioritize women and the feminine in our readings of the Bible—not because women are the only people who matter in Scripture, but because women's experiences and perspectives have so often been pushed to the margins of interpretation. We prioritize stories about biblical women and focus on women as readers. And we attend to forms of theology that feel, resonate, and ring true to the feminine.

That means sometimes asking what happens when we allow a woman's experience to become the starting point for interpretation.

Reading the woman in the law

Deuteronomy 20–23 contains a collection of laws touching on war, marriage, family, sexuality, domestic life, divorce, and other aspects of community life. These chapters contain material that can be incendiary and deeply sensitive for contemporary readers.

Deuteronomy 21:10–14 is particularly difficult.

We cannot recover the experience of a historical woman from these few verses. But we can notice what the text makes us imagine. We can notice what we feel when we encounter a law that describes a woman's body, her clothing, her mourning, and her movement into a new household without giving us access to her own perspective.

And perhaps that gap matters.

There is another layer to uncomfortable Scripture: sometimes the text does not simply tell us about someone else's experience. It brings something forward in us.

A woman reading Deuteronomy 21 may grieve for the woman represented in the law, even though the text gives us so little access to her life. She may feel anger. She may feel confusion. She may think about her own experiences of vulnerability, coercion, loss, marriage, motherhood, sexuality, or bodily autonomy. She may recognize something she wishes she did not recognize.

And then the reading becomes personal.
This, too, is part of interpretation.

When our own bodies enter the reading

We bring our histories, our bodies, our memories, our fears, our hopes, and our communities with us. Those things inevitably shape what we notice and what we cannot ignore.

Some of us may have been taught that we shouldn't bring our full selves to the reading of Scripture. We might be told that our emotions could lead us into a distorted or even corrupt reading. But perhaps there is another kind of distortion in pushing our emotions and embodied experiences aside—in refusing to read as whole persons and to notice what surfaces within us as we read.

Perhaps the question is what we do when these feelings or insights arrive.

We don't always have to resolve the tension. A faithful reading does not necessarily mean making the Bible comfortable. A faithful reading might not make a troubling passage acceptable. It may not even mean resolving every ethical problem the text raises.

Sometimes faithful reading means refusing to look away.
It means allowing grief to be grief.
Allowing outrage to be outrage.
Allowing confusion to remain confusion for a while.

It means noticing the places where Scripture unsettles us rather than rushing to explain those places away.

And perhaps there is something healing in that kind of honesty.

What if allowing our responses to surface is itself part of the work of faithful reading? What if we can bring our discomfort before God rather than believing that faith requires us to suppress it? What if healing sometimes begins with giving the tension somewhere to go.

These few verses open questions that deserve much more attention than a brief blog post can give them.

In “A Captive Woman's Transition to Wife,” Melissa Ramos examines the bodily and domestic actions described in Deuteronomy 21:10–14—the cutting of the woman's hair, the treatment of her nails, the removal of her captive clothing, her month of mourning—and asks what these actions reveal about the transition from captivity toward life in a new household.

Read the full article at TheTorah.com. And then, perhaps, come back to the passage.

Not to make it comfortable. But to read it honestly.