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 have 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.

...