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 adulterous 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 247 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 code 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.

...