The God Of Sex

That's some rather twisted thinking that belies the realities of rape. There's no good reason to assume a woman could be heard in the city -- e.g., say she's sexually assaulted at a party with loud music -- any more than in the countryside. Not that I would expect the OT to capture the reality of rape very well, given its disturbingly patriarchal origins.

Not at all. The focus is on "justice" for the man who "possesses" the rape victim as his property (e.g., a father or a husband), given that -- under the patriarchal system delineated by much of the OT -- women were viewed as property. Non-consensual sex with a woman was thus hardly seen as an injustice against her, but rather as an injustice against another man. That's why a woman who still lived in her father's home and had consensual sex with other men was to be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 22:13-21): she has done an "outrageous thing" by violating her father's honor. Like you said in an earlier post, context matters -- and, in this case, the context is a viciously patriarchal society which is bolstered by the laws of the OT.Not a good model for justice today, and it wasn't a good model for justice ever.

That's quite irrelevant.

No, he didn't, otherwise he wouldn't have raped her.

Whether or not a raped a woman is given "quite a bit of protection and justice" from the point of view of the patriarchal Hebrew society described by much of the OT narrative depends entirely on comparison to, first, other patriarchal societies of the time; and second, to other societies that were not structured on the patriarchal system.Compared to the laws of other patriarchal societies of the ancient Near East, I can find very little evidence that the Mosaic Law gave substantially more protection and justice to the rape survivor. For instance, the Mosaic Laws surrounding rape of a virgin -- betrothed or unbetrothed -- are quite similar to those described by the Code of Hammurabi. So using other patriarchal societies -- like, say, ancient Babylon -- as the points of comparison with OT law, there seems precious little justification for the notion that Mosaic Law offered "quite a bit" of protection and justice to the survivor.What is quite clear, instead, is that Mosaic Law stridently supports and perpetuates the viciously patriarchal social organizations of the cultures in the region. Women -- rape survivors included -- are routinely viewed as property of other males. So there is a focus in Mosaic Law on ensuring that the property owner of an unbetrothed virgin -- namely, her father -- receives compensation for the violation of his property: because the rapist must marry the woman, he must pay the father a certain sum of money. OT law -- and particularly Mosaic Law -- thus upholds the ideology of women as property, effectively reducing survivors of rape to little more than objects of currency.Further, when compared to non-patriarchal societies -- of course -- Mosaic Law is no giver of protection and justice to women.That's one reason why PaulK's contention that "Of course following some parts of the Bible - even when they relate to sex - would make things worse" is perfectly correct. It also means that applying an ancient text -- that glorifies patriarchal violence -- to human affairs, whether now or in the past, is a surefire way to cause a change in culture for the worse instead of better.Edited by Genomicus, : No reason given.