was it rape?

[Jaime]

[quote]How? The woman clearly wanted to raise up children in the name of her dead husband. She went to extraordinary lengths to accomplish the deed, even posing as a pagan temple prostitute and knowingly risking death, because she knew she would be accused of fornication and stoned if she couldn't come up with a good reason for being found pregnant (that's why she snagged the signs of authority from Judah - to protect herself and her unborn child from execution). That's a pretty clever woman acting on her own to accomplish what she wants.
[/quote]

But why did she do this? Because without a husband or son, she has no right to her dead husband's property. She and his land are the property of Onan. According to Jewish law, as soon as he provides a son for her, all the property goes to the son. That is why he resisted. If he provided a son, he would have lost the property he gained at his brother's death.

[quote]The pork story is simply a canard. Pork was no more dangerous than anything else, and the surrounding pagan tribes ate it all the time. Why else would there be swineherds? Were people MILKING them? Yet Jesus encountered swineherds with the demoniac and told the story of the Prodigal Son to an audience who was clearly familiar with the practice of keeping domestic pigs. Pigs are good for only one thing - eating.
[/quote]

Again you are in error. Pork is more dangerous. That is why there are processing procedures still today that aren't involved in other meats. Pork has to be frozen to at least 5 degrees farenheit to kill off Trichinella larvae. They had no ability to do that so they were more suceptable to illness and death.

[Kilroy the Ninja]

Back on topic ya'll - unless you believe the thread has run it's course....

[Jaime]

[quote name='Kilroy the Ninja' date='Sep 15 2005, 11:23 AM']Back on topic ya'll - unless you believe the thread has run it's course....
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The point is that some things do change because of culture, including the appropriate age for marriage. The prevailing issue is not that women are menstruating earlier, it is that we are living longer. From a developmental standpoint, 14 year old girls were not more mature 1000 years ago then they are today. They were considered women because there was no such thing as adolescents. Why? Because no one knew anything about psychological development.

There are obvious reasons why this marriage can potentially be regarded as invalid. The mistakes that were made were most likely made long before the girl was twelve. I don't believe for a moment that rushing their daughter to Kansas City was the first major blunder her parents ever made. You don't make screw ups like that without having some practice.

Edited September 15, 2005 by jaime

[Kilroy the Ninja]

[quote name='hot stuff' date='Sep 15 2005, 11:33 AM'] The mistakes that were made were most likely made long before the girl was twelve.  I don't believe for a moment that rushing their daughter to Kansas City was the first major blunder her the parents ever made.  You don't make screw ups like that without having some practice.
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Now that has the ring of truth to it! Is it wrong for me to laugh?

[Carrie]

[quote name='hot stuff' date='Sep 15 2005, 01:33 PM']The point is that some things do change because of culture, including the appropriate age for marriage.  The prevailing issue is not that women are menstruating earlier, it is that we are living longer.  From a developmental standpoint, 14 year old girls were not more mature 1000 years ago then they are today.  They were considered women because there was no such thing as adolescents.  Why?  Because no one knew anything about psychological development.  [/quote]

hot stuff is exactly right.

People used to regard children as "little adults" and treat them as such. With the growth of knowledge in psychological development, we now know the concept of "little adults" is simply a fallacy.

Children go through many stages of psychological development before they can be considered adults. There are lots of developmental theories that I won't bore you with that concur with this conclusion.

[quote]I don't believe for a moment that rushing their daughter to Kansas City was the first major blunder her the parents ever made.  You don't make screw ups like that without having some practice.
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Amen! The fact that they lost track of their twelve year old long enough to meet and have sex with this man is pretty telling.

[skellmeyer]

[quote name='hot stuff' date='Sep 15 2005, 12:15 PM']But why did she do this?  Because without a husband or son, she has no right to her dead husband's property.  She and his land are the property of Onan.  According to Jewish law, as soon as he provides a son for her, all the property goes to the son.  That is why he resisted.  If he provided a son, he would have lost the property he gained at his brother's death. [/quote]

Actually, the law you are quoting comes from Leviticus, which is contemporaneous with Moses. The Judah situation described in Genesis 38 occurred several hundred years before Moses. We don't know exactly what the law was at that time. Many people infer that exactly the same situation applied in Genesis as in Leviticus, but in point of fact, we don't know that this is true.

[quote]Again you are in error.  Pork is more dangerous.  That is why there are processing procedures still today that aren't involved in other meats.  Pork has to be frozen to at least 5 degrees farenheit to kill off Trichinella larvae.  They had no ability to do that so they were more suceptable to illness and death.
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Yeah, and sheep have scrapie and cattle have mad cow disease. Big deal. Pigs, sheep, cattle - every animal is a disease carrier. Cook anything long enough and you kill the transmitting organisms or prions. Again, if pigs were that dangerous to eat, why on earth would anyone bother to keep them domesticated?

The whole reason "scholars" cooked up that pork story was that they were trying to explain that God didn't really speak to the prophets. The prophets were really just men who repeated ideas that were culturally accepted, don'cha' know. These are the same scholars who insist there was no miracle at the multiplication of loaves, it was just that everyone shared their lunch.

The problem here is that you simply accept whatever the "experts" tell you. With the situation in question, the "experts" tell you that a twelve-year old girl is unable to contract a marriage, even though such girls were able to do exactly that for most of human history prior to industrialization. Apparently, having refrigerators changed our DNA or something.

[skellmeyer]

[quote name='Carrie' date='Sep 15 2005, 12:49 PM']hot stuff is exactly right.

People used to regard children as "little adults" and treat them as such.  With the growth of knowledge in psychological development, we now know the concept of "little adults" is simply a fallacy.

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LOL

The brain development argument cuts both ways, you know.

The brain is malleable during its growth phases. During those phases, you want to put the person going through the phase into the situation that he will hold onto for the rest of his life - lay down the right pathways, as it were, raise a child up in the right way so that he does not depart from it.

Now, if you want someone to be a stable, faithful adult, you would put him into a situation where he needs to be a stable, faithful adult and then help him stay stable and faithful while those pathways are consolidating. Then, when the growth spurt is over, the person is much more likely to be a stable, faithful adult. He's been reinforcing the right growth pathways during the critical growth period

This is the model used by pre-industrial society. Adults individually apprenticed 12-year olds into a profession and teens regularly got married and began raising families before they hit their twenties.

Conversely, if you want someone to be immature and unstable, you would make darned sure that he wasn't permitted to enter into a situation requiring either stability or faithfulness during this critical growth period. That way, the good pathways would never be properly consolidated and he would remain unstable and unfaithful when the growth spurt was done - all the neural pathways would be tangled and shot.

This is the model used by the industrialized mass-school system, where hordes of unstable teens are herded into very tight, high-pressure environments to feed off one another. There is minimal adult contact, no one-on-one adult mentoring and the possibility of marriage is entirely forbidden.

As I noted earlier, a capitalist society which grows by separating every person from his money as quickly as possible has a vested interest in creating unstable, unfaithful people. They are easier to manipulate and easier to shear.

So, I would agree that today's age of marriage is a cultural artifact that's backed up by scientific evidence, but I don't necessarily think it helps your case.

Edited September 15, 2005 by skellmeyer

[Norseman82]

Maybe we should look at another case in which there was a mixing of an adult and child and pregnancy resulted: Mary Kay Leterneau (sp?) and Vili Falau. In this case, the male was the child and the female who got pregnant was the adult. Leterneau was put in jail for a time, and after she got out and Falau became an adult they married (although I don't know if it is a valid Christian marriage, as she is Catholic and was married previously and I don't know if it was annulled).

Now, there are differences between the two cases (the Nebraska couple married prior to the legal case, so it is a fait accompli). But even though they are married, I believe the husband should spend [i]some[/i] time in jail for one reason: [i]we need to send a signal to the rest of society that adult males cannot be going after young girls like this!!!!![/i] Now, as far as raising the child, I believe that the two sets of grandparents need to step up to the plate here if the father spends time in jail: the father's parents out of responsibility for their son's actions, and the mother's parent's because they should have kept a tighter vigilance regarding their daughter.

So in principle I agree with cmom's approach.

[Norseman82]

BTW, let's all welcome Catholic author Steve Kellmeyer to the phorum. My apologies if I've "blown your cover".

[quote name='skellmeyer' date='Sep 15 2005, 10:37 AM']The pork story is simply a canard. Pork was no more dangerous than anything else, and the surrounding pagan tribes ate it all the time. Why else would there be swineherds? Were people MILKING them? Yet Jesus encountered swineherds with the demoniac and told the story of the Prodigal Son to an audience who was clearly familiar with the practice of keeping domestic pigs. Pigs are good for only one thing - eating.

I remember working with an Egyptian archeologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign who laughed when someone brought up the "pork was dangerous" myth. If it was so dangerous, why was everyone eating it?

The Israelites didn't pick the meat to avoid, God did.
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Actually, when I worked in the food service industry as a cook, we were trained that pork was one of the foods that had to be prepared properly and utensils and surfaces sanitized. In the OT, it is very possible that the people had not yet mastered how to properly prepare such foods. And it is also interesting to note that the foods listed in the OT as unclean are also considered today to be dangerous [i]if not cooked properly[/i] (shellfish, for example).

As far as to why other ancient cultures eating pork, we must also remember that God expressed to Abraham that his descendants were to be as numerous as the stars, so in the OT time of salvation history, a numerous Jewish people was necessary, so keeping them healthy and safe was important, so we must keep that in mind when we read the ancient OT laws that may make no sense to us today.

(In fact, one priest in a homily mentioned that if the people in the middle ages kept the OT dietary laws, more would have survived.)

[Don John of Austria]

[quote name='hot stuff' date='Sep 15 2005, 10:12 AM']Untrue, the story of Onan is the first representation that indeed women were the property of their husbands. 
No eating pork back then was an easy way to die.  The meat could not be processed properly to be safe.  It wasn't nutritious it was life threatening.  This is why it was immoral.  They didn't randomly pick a meat and say " Hey give this one up"
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It couldn't be processed properly to be safe? What are you talking about the entire rest of the world could process it just fine, pork being eaten safly requires a very special technique called ---- wait for it--- cooking. Yes the secret is reveled, pork must be cooked to be safe. Are you saying the jews couldn't cook?

[Don John of Austria]

[quote name='hot stuff' date='Sep 15 2005, 11:15 AM']But why did she do this?  Because without a husband or son, she has no right to her dead husband's property.  She and his land are the property of Onan.  According to Jewish law, as soon as he provides a son for her, all the property goes to the son.  That is why he resisted.  If he provided a son, he would have lost the property he gained at his brother's death. 
Again you are in error.  Pork is more dangerous.  That is why there are processing procedures still today that aren't involved in other meats.  Pork has to be frozen to at least 5 degrees farenheit to kill off Trichinella larvae.  They had no ability to do that so they were more suceptable to illness and death.
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Trichinella larva are killed at 137 degrees Farenheit, all that is required to make pork safe is cooking it.

[Don John of Austria]

[quote name='hot stuff' date='Sep 15 2005, 11:33 AM']The point is that some things do change because of culture, including the appropriate age for marriage.  The prevailing issue is not that women are menstruating earlier, it is that we are living longer.  From a developmental standpoint, 14 year old girls were not more mature 1000 years ago then they are today.  They were considered women because there was no such thing as adolescents.  Why?  Because no one knew anything about psychological development. 

There are obvious reasons why this marriage can potentially be regarded as invalid.  The mistakes that were made were most likely made long before the girl was twelve.  I don't believe for a moment that rushing their daughter to Kansas City was the first major blunder her parents ever made.  You don't make screw ups like that without having some practice.
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[quote]The point is that some things do change because of culture, including the appropriate age for marriage.  The prevailing issue is not that women are menstruating earlier, it is that we are living longer.  From a developmental standpoint, 14 year old girls were not more mature 1000 years ago then they are today.  They were considered women because there was no such thing as adolescents.  Why?  Because no one knew anything about psychological development.  [/quote]

Right and wrong do not change because of culture, and I have already adressed the "we're living longer" issue, we aren't living longer, not in any way that this would matter for this arguement we simply don't have a 45 % mortality rate before 2 and fewer men are killed in war and fewer women die in child birth, unless killed people have always expected to live until about 70.


Well no one new anything about phycological development-- wow what a shock I though most people where pretty well adjusted, reading diaries and histories of the day seems like people had far fewer psychological issues than today, perhaps it is we who don't undersand psychology.

[Norseman82]

[quote name='Don John of Austria' date='Sep 15 2005, 12:57 PM']Trichinella larva are killed at 137 degrees Farenheit, all that is required to make pork safe is cooking it.
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True, but there is also the issue of handling the raw food and properly sanitizing any utensils. Normally I use bleach/water solution; I don't know if bleach was available to the ancient Isreaelites wandering the desert.

[Don John of Austria]

[quote name='Norseman82' date='Sep 15 2005, 01:32 PM']True, but there is also the issue of handling the uncooked food and properly sanitizing any utensils.  Normally I use bleach/water solution; I don't know if bleach was available to the ancient Isreaelites wandering the desert.
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well it wasn't avialable to everyone else either yet they managed not to all die from trichinosis, God chose to make Pork forbidden, perhaps it was to protect them from the danger of trichinosis, I certianly do not know the mind of God, but it was Gods law and breaking the command of God is what was and is immoral not the eating of Pork.

[Norseman82]

[quote name='Don John of Austria' date='Sep 15 2005, 01:35 PM']well it wasn't avialable to everyone else either yet they managed not to all die from trichinosis, God chose to make Pork forbidden, perhaps it was to protect them from the danger of trichinosis, I certianly do not know the mind of God, but it was Gods law and breaking the command of God is what was and is immoral not the eating of Pork.
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Well, I don't know the death statistics of other ancient cultures, and if there were deaths from trichinosis, they may not have known it as trichinosis at the time. But you are correct, I'm not privy to the mind of God, but considering that God is the Creator of the natural world and as such knows how the natural world works, I would not surprised to find out that God would communicate to His people what could potentially be unsafe to eat at the time.