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, but if a man found a woman he wanted to marry, it's

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