The female captive; or, Divine regard for woman's safety and honor.
Any one who is acquainted with the fearful license practiced among many nations towards female captives taken in war, can surely appreciate the humanizing influence which the injunction in this paragraph was intended to exert. The law here laid down may or may not be abstractly the best; but if it was the best that the people could bear: if it would certainly lift up the people a step higher in their regard for womanly honor: if, moreover, it would have the effect of enforcing a restraint upon the passions of men at that most perilous of all times, even that of war,—then the hallowed influence which was shaping Hebrew legislation becomes clearly manifest. A woman taken captive as a prisoner of war was not to be a plaything of passion, but was to be dealt with honorably; to feel that she might part with the symbols of slavery, enter into relation with the covenant people, become invested with the rights of a daughter of Israel, and learn to worship, love, and glorify Israel's God! (For details, see the Exposition, and also valuable remarks in Keil and Jameson.) And if, in the issue, there was no true and proper home for her, she was to have that most precious of blessings—liberty! In opening up the theme suggested here—Divine care for woman's safety and honor—some seven or eight lines of thought may be taken up and worked out by the preacher.
1. Here is a Divine protest against the tendency of men to make woman a mere tool of passion. This book is the charter of woman's honor and happiness.
2. Our God would aim at bringing about the true nobility of woman, by means of educating the people up to the standard at which it shall be a point of honor with them to insist upon it.
3. To secure this end, Spate laws should be stringently framed.
4. Not even in war-time, nor in connection with our soldiery, is it ever to be tolerated that woman should be at the mercy of the stronger sex.
5. The right place of woman is in the love and protection of one to whom she is dearer than his own soul; and no more honorable place need she desire than that assigned her by Solomon in his description of "a virtuous woman." Many of the holy women of Scripture illustrate this.
6. Under the gospel, woman's position is yet more strikingly asserted. "In Christ Jesus there is … neither male nor female." In religious relationship man and woman are, caeteris paribus, on an equal footing.
7. While, in the home, the wives are to be in subjection to their own husbands, yet the sway of the husband is to be with a love pure and tender, like that of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it is only where the purifying and love-creating power of the gospel is known, that woman rises to her right position in the home, the family, the social circle, and the nation. The legislation on her behalf, which Moses began, has been going on under Judaism and Christianity for long ages, with what results we know in our happy homes. But how much we are indebted for these happy homes to the influence of Jewish and Christian law, can best be told by those who know the dark places of the earth, still "full of the habitations of cruelty."