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 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 here honored the woman by giving her a 30-day period of time to mourn and grieve all she has lost before marrying the Israeli man. If for any reason things in the marriage went south, God protects the woman by requiring the man to treat her with honor, not like she's his property. Please don't miss God's heart in this. Even though so much of this seems archaic, we can still see God's plan to provide for the woman through the man and to protect her if the man fails to honor her well.

We have a few more laws dealing with the relationships between men and women, some of which pertain to a woman's virginity. There are a lot of ancient traditions, some of which are also cringeworthy, about how a couple should approach their first night of marriage. Most study Bibles and commentaries will have more info on this if you're curious. One of the many detrimental aspects of sexual infidelity was that it could potentially threaten the tribe's economy and land inheritance as God had distributed it. So it was important for them have laws to protect against this. Moses also sets out a few standards for determining whether a woman has been raped or not. I know the portion saying, If it happened in the country and if it happened in the city, have the potential to be confusing. But here's the is behind it. If the encounter happened in the country, even if she screamed, no one would be around to hear her, so she was given the benefit of the doubt. If it happened in the city, people would be around to hear her screams of objection. God's heart is justice here, and he's setting up rules that can help people make determinations about what really happened on a case-by-case basis.

There's one other potentially confusing thing I want to cover. First, there was the section where Moses gives laws about not mixing different things together: seeds in a field, animals for plowing, and fabrics in a garment. We don't really know the reasons behind these laws, but the commentaries I read suggested that it had something to do with reminding the Israelites of the importance of being set apart from other nations who don't follow Yahweh. These laws may have served as little daily reminders of how they were to be separate. It's also worth noting this passage mentioned not yoking a donkey and an ox together, but they also wouldn't mix two of the same animal with varying degrees of strength. A yoke is a piece of wood that goes across the animal's necks to hold them together while they pull a plow. And if you have one strong animal and one weak animal, the strong one can move fast, but the weak one move slower, and they end up going in circles. So if you've ever heard Paul's command from 2 Corinthians 6:14 that says, Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers, that's what he's talking about. Paul doesn't want us to end up going in circles, following Christ while yoked to someone else who isn't.

It makes it nearly impossible to move forward. What was your God shot today? There were two sections about curses that stood out to me. In 21:23, in the laws about a man who is punished by being hung on a tree, the law says, His body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed. Paul referenced this law in Galatians 3:13 when he said, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree. Christ took on the curse for us. And again in today's reading, in 23:5, Moses said, The Lord your God turned the curse into a blessing for you because the Lord your God loved you. This was in reference to Balak's efforts to get Balaam to curse the Israelites in numbers 22-24. And today's reading reminded me of all that, of how God reverses futures. He takes the thing we deserve, what we've truly fully earned, which is the curse, and absorbs it himself through his death on the cross so that we might receive the blessing, just like the Israelites did.

The God who turns my curse to a blessing is the God I want to worship forever. He's where the joy is. Okay, Bible readers, it's time for our weekly check-in. And guess what? You are right on time. No matter how many days it took you to get to day 77, you're 77 days deeper in God's word than you were before we started. What have you learned?

What has stuck with you? Today was not a light day of reading. For many of us, it may have felt a little too heavy on the cursy and cringy parts.

But when things seem dark in the reading and in our own lives, look for Jesus. He's where we'll find our hope.

Ask him to give you eyes to see him as you read. Ask him to give you wisdom. That's a prayer scripture promises God will answer with a yes, according to James 1:5.

So I'll see you back here tomorrow for more of him and his wisdom.

Keeping scripture in front of us in a place where we see it often can help encourage us and remind us of God's truth. And there are few things in front of our faces more than our phone screens. That's why my friends at Hope Nation have made 14 phone backgrounds with scriptures for you to choose from. To download your favorite, click the link in the show notes.