Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Today as we continue Moses' final speech, we encountered a wide variety of laws and the first

thing we encountered was a law about divorce. In fact, it's the only law about divorce in the Old Testament, and it's very specific.

We have to look at the cultural practices of the day to see what this law is about, and even still,

it's not entirely clear.

Some believe that this practice protects the first

husband from an adulteress wife while others believe it protects the wife from a

greedy husband. The first husband is the one who gets the bride's dowry, then she would have inherited her second

husband's property when he died, so this law prevents the first husband from exploiting

her for his own financial gain.

Either way, this law serves as a means of protection.

In 24-7, we see again that God is protective of all human life, and that he disapproves of slavery as we know it.

Kidnapping is forbidden and is punished by the death penalty.

It's considered theft, but it's punished by a greater consequence

than theft of anything else, for obvious reasons. We also saw lots of measures to

protect the poor. These were laws instructing people to give back the coat of a

poor person if they'd offered it as collateral, because that's how they stayed warm at night.

It also instructs them to not take a poor person's millstone as collateral because millstones

are used to grind food, so that would mean they wouldn't have any way to eat.

God also commanded that they pay their poor servants when they needed it,

which usually means the same day they do their work,

because they don't have any savings stored up to live on.

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