Essay su Deuteronomio 24:78

Continuing the concern for holiness in the area of sexuality, Deuteronomy prohibits what occasionally happens in Western society—a woman remarries her first husband after her divorce from another man. Such behavior was considered ritually polluting in ancient Israel. It may also have been connected to the fact that the first husband, if the woman remarried him, would thus be receiving property from another man’s wealth (the second husband’s).

A parallel to Ex. 22:24–26, which, in contrast to other cases of comparison between the two legal collections, has the more emotional tone. On the other hand, our passage emphasizes the dignity due even a debtor.

“Oppression” here consists of delaying the payment of a worker’s wages. The “calling out” to YHWH recalls a similar cry of the oppressed in Ex. 22:22, 26. Overall, the rhetoric of the passage far exceeds that found in a parallel text in the Holiness Code (Lev. 19:13).

An issue of deep concern to the exiles in Babylonia, this questioning of free will is raised a number of times in the Bible. In Ex. 22:23, God was to punish oppressors by making their “wives widows, and [their] children orphans”; Deuteronomy has toned this down by punishing the evildoer and not his or her children. Cf. Fishbane (1988) for discussion.

The three classic powerless groups in Israel and elsewhere have been mentioned before, but now receive help based on a particularly Israelite rationale: the people’s historical experience of having been oppressed in Egypt. For a parallel passage, cf. Ex. 22:23–24.

This humane military rule may stem from a tradition separate from the one in 20:7. In any event, it appears to acknowledge sexuality as a part of marriage separate from procreation.

Even debt is a situation that must be handled sensitively; unfair collateral is not to be taken.

The capital crime here would appear to be the sale of specifically an Israelite as a slave.

As detailed in Lev. 13–15, tzaraat was some kind of skin condition that rendered a person temporarily unfit to be in the sacred camp. It was formerly identified with, and translated as, leprosy, but that is now felt to be incorrect by virtually all scholars. The law recurs here, among examples of injustice, because the disease was often viewed as the result of a person’s wrongful behaviors.