Dennis Tuuri

# SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Editorial in the Oregonian this past week. Believe it was this last week, might have been the week before. The timing was interesting. A couple weeks ago, I heard Charles Colson on a tape that I’d received from a fellow down in Corvallis. Charles Colson being interviewed by Jim Dobson on his show three weeks ago about political action. And Colson, the reason I was sent the tape was that Mr. Colson took exception with reconstructionists.

He said that there are people out there who are trying to bring in the kingdom of God through political means. If we just elect the right president and the right congressman, that would produce the kingdom of God on earth here. And Dobson said, “Well, nobody really believes that, do they? That’s a caricature of what the religious right believes.” And he said, “Who’s really saying that?” And Chuck Colson said, “Well, there’s a group within Christianity known as the Reconstructionists that say that.” And they’re theonomists, he said, “And they think this is the way we’re going to do this.” He said, “Their eschatology is different from mine.” And that—which is a key thing. As Steve Nelson who listened to the tape with me last week pointed out, that’s a key thing to observe in that tape.

I’ll bring copies. I’m going to give Keith a copy of the tape this week. And if you want copies, go ahead and give him a call and he’ll make copies for you during the week. It’d be a good thing to write letters to Mr. Dobson and Mr. Colson relative to that talk. But it was interesting. Obviously, it’s an obvious mischaracterization of what reconstructionists believe and what I as a reconstructionist and many of you would hold to as well.

We believe the political arena is just one area over which Christians are to exercise dominion and see from a Christian fashion. Well, I mentioned this editorial. What this editorial was written by a nationally known columnist William Raspberry was called “The Victim Restitution: A Conservative Alternative” and it was about an article published by Chuck Colson on crime and restitution—the alternative to lock-them-up liberalism—published in Policy Review. And the interesting point of Raspberry’s column was that Colson suggested an alternative to the criminal justice system we have, which was restitution to the victim and then even a form of working that off, so to speak, to the person.

I’m sure Mr. Colson wouldn’t call it indentured servitude, but really that’s sort of what he talks about—a little bit in terms of the person working off the debt they owe to the person they’ve offended and making restitution to them. Colson in writing this article chooses interesting categories to place that whole idea of restitution within, and the categories are conservative-liberal categories. Colson writes that the present criminal justice system is a liberal form that conservatives have been kind of sucked into—that penitentiaries are a liberal idea as opposed to a conservative idea—and that restitution is a good conservative alternative.

So Raspberry says that the trouble with the Colson piece is that he finds it necessary to bash liberals in order to make what is essentially a non-political point. Colson writes, “The answer is to be found in a distinctly conservative vision of criminal justice with punishment rather than rehabilitation its goal.” Which is interesting because Raspberry goes on to point out that Colson goes on to show that restitution would help the criminal. It would rehabilitate him because it makes him work and think about what he’s done to the person he’s helping.

So Raspberry says, you know, what’s the difference? You’re rehabilitating just as well as you’re punishing. And that’s what prisons do. Raspberry says, “I believe in prisons. I don’t believe in prisons, rather.” He says, “I’m a liberal and he acknowledges that, but he says it’s not a liberal-conservative issue.”

And he’s right. You see, what it is—restitution is not a conservative answer. It’s a biblical answer. It’s a Christian answer to the criminal justice problems of this country and the criminal justice problems of Portland. Mr. Colson decides to use the existing categories developed by non-Christians and by people—the conservative-liberal categories developed specifically, for instance, in the French Revolution by radical anti-Christian forces.

Why do I bring that all up this morning? I bring it up to remind us that what we’re about is conforming everything that we believe and think and all that we do in life into a biblical system—to think Jesus Christ’s thoughts after him in relationship to all things, including political action. And because we want to talk about Christian political alternatives or biblical political alternatives, some people misconstrue that either unintentionally or intentionally and misrepresent that as trying to bring in the kingdom of God through force.

It’s really bringing in the kingdom of God through persuasion of men to submit themselves to the law of God voluntarily and to get the civil magistrate also to be operating within the bounds of God’s law. This morning, the reason I bring this up is one: to alert you to what’s going on in terms of this debate, and it’s a debate that’s going to be ongoing for the next number of years. You have to begin to think through what are the implications of having a Christian political activism.

I talked about that yesterday at the [conference]. It’s very important we begin to settle those ideas in our mind. But the other reason I bring it up this morning is because it has pertinence to what we’re going to talk about in a couple of minutes here. We talked about a Christian worldview and life view. I was listening to James Montgomery Boyce this morning and he was saying the Eternity magazine is a good thing to read to develop a Christian worldview and life view.

So that’s a phrase that’s getting a lot of popular airplay, if you want to look at it that way. And unfortunately some people think that what we mean by a Christian worldview and life view is having Christian politicians. Well, what we mean is that everything in our world and all of the way that we view life is to be Christian.

And this morning, we’re going to talk about a very specific area. Now, we’ve talked about how the church has backed out of the political arena, backed out of the political process. And that’s bad. But it is. And we’ve said that the Christian religion of this country has become privatized, just dealing with private relationships in the home. But it’s interesting if you think through what we’re going to say this morning in terms of the case law we just read and other implications of God’s law relative to marriage and the specific things required in these case laws—these haven’t been taught either.

The church has taught a truncated gospel by not addressing the political implications of the gospel. But it’s even been truncated in the way it deals with marriage life. We’ve accepted conservative or liberal categories even for what we do in terms of marriage. We want to develop biblical categories.

So what we want to do this morning is look at a very specific area that God calls us to obedience in, and then try to say how can we meet that standard in our own lives individually, in families, and as a church.

We’ve been talking about husband-wife relationships and we said that when we began this series, Adam is the covenantal head of the union. He must begin with addressing the man’s requirements in marriage. He’s the head. He’s responsible. And I think it’s proper in counseling and in teaching and in every other discussion of the husband-wife relationship to center on the husband’s role initially before you get to talking about the wife.

That’s God’s order. We should conform our thoughts and make it our order in terms of dealing with problems as well. We’ve said that the husband has two responsibilities according to Ephesians 5: to nourish and to cherish. To cherish means to guard. To nourish means to develop the wife into all that she is to be as a godly woman, as a joint heir, the gift of life—making heaven out of her life, as it were. Developing a sense of righteousness and holiness in her and helping her to exhibit that to the world. And kind of making a little heaven in our home there in ourselves, in our wives, and our whole families.

The way that Adam was to develop the garden and make it more like the heavenly pattern—and the tabernacle was built according to the pattern that God had shown Moses. So we’re to nourish and we’re to cherish. We’re to guard and we’re to cultivate and bring to full fruition and maturity in Jesus Christ as we are with ourselves.

Of course, we will get to discussing women’s responsibilities and the topic that many of you might have thought I was going to start on—which was submission. We’ll get to that. But first things first, and we want to talk this morning about a specific application relative to guarding. Next week we’ll talk about a specific case of application relative to nourishing—the year of exclusion.

One of the pictures I always use in terms of political action when I talk about political action, I used this picture yesterday, was Nehemiah 4—where you’ve got the rebuilding going on and on the other hand you have the guarding going on. You have men who are building walls with the trowel and they’re guarding the walls as well with a sword from those people that would seek to tear down the work. And that’s what we have in our families and our responsibility to our wives. We’re building, we’re cultivating, and we’re guarding.

And this morning, we’re going to talk about a specific area of guarding. And we’re going to first of all talk about the case law implications—the implications of God’s case law requirements rather of us in our marital relationships. And that’s where our outline starts, and that’s what we’ll talk about now for a couple of minutes.

First of all, I point out here that we’re going to talk about the dowry in case law. And case law might need a little bit of explanation. God gives us ten commandments. He gives us two great commandments. First, there’s a great commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might. And then there’s a corollary to that—which comes out of that, as it were—which is to love our neighbor as ourselves.

And so we have those two great commandments. And then from those commandments, God then gives us ten basic laws—the Ten Commandments. And many people have seen in those commandments a twofold pattern: five commandments to do with our relationship to God—how we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and might. And then how we love our neighbor as ourselves in the next five commandments. You’ve seen that division.

Then you have those ten commandments further explained in the Old Testament according to case law. Case laws are specific applications of those commandments in very particular situations. God doesn’t give us a code book like the state of Oregon gives us—which is, you know, huge—to cover every possible scenario. What he gives us is basic principles, the Ten Commandments, basic law.

He gives us application in specific situations, which then we can use to see how God applied that in that specific situation. And then we can take the way he did it and image our lives after that and apply that law in our lives on the basis of the case law explanation of how that law is to be applied. God describes the equity of the Ten Commandments through this case law process and then also through the historical process in the scriptures—his judging and his blessings and cursings in society. And then he expects us to know those things, know how to apply the Ten Commandments.

Now that’s a lot of discussion about a very minor point you might think—case law. But remember that one of the reasons we’re in the mess we’re in this country is people have chucked case law. They’ve taken the Ten Commandments and moved to their own interpretation of what those mean without using the God-inspired case law that he’s given to us to help us understand how that equity of the Ten Commandments is to be applied in specific situations.

Now, because case law is very specific dealing with a particular situation, it develops still some very general and very applicable principles to all kinds of other scenarios. For instance, Paul quotes the Old Testament case law about not muzzling the ox when it treads out the grain. And he says, well, you know, obviously from that we see that one way to apply the commandment against theft is to make sure that we give the worker his wages. A worker is worthy of his hire.

And so he applies that case law. It isn’t restricted to that. It tells us how to apply the commandment against theft. And so it has a lot of ramifications for what we do individually and corporately in our lives today. And so case law establishes a lot of principles—a very little nugget of truth really, in terms of finding God’s law of specific cases.

So let’s then look at the case-law application of a couple of specific laws in God’s cases that he gives us.

We read the first one from Exodus 22:16 and 17. Let’s look at it again. Well, let’s see. Let’s go to Deuteronomy 22 first, verses 28 and 29. And we read there a parallel account to this account in Exodus 22. Deuteronomy 22 says verse 28: “If a man find a damsel that is a virgin which is not betrothed and lay hold on her and lie with her and they be found, then the man that lay with her shall surely give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver and she shall be his wife because he hath humbled her. He may not put her away all his days.”

Okay. And that is basically the same case here that we have in Exodus 22, which we just read, and we’ll read it again, verses 16 and 17. “If a man entice a maid that is not betrothed” — you notice both those cases begin with the situation being a woman who is not engaged to a man. If the woman is engaged, then she is seen as married already. An engagement in the case law is a very binding contract entered into by a party that establishes the marriage in a prefigurative form there in the engagement itself.

And so if a man takes a woman who is engaged, it’s the same thing as adultery. Okay.

Well, anyway, in this case we have a woman—a man enticing a man who is not betrothed and lies with her. He shall surely endow her. The case here is one of seduction of an unbetrothed woman who is a virgin. And in Deuteronomy 22, it might throw some people that this parallel account says that if you “lay hold on her and lie with her and they be found.”

Some people might be confused by that language. The word “lay hold on” here is a weak form—to lay hold on something. If you look at verse 25 in Deuteronomy 22, it says, “But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field and the man force her and lie with her, then the man only that lay with her shall die.” That’s rape. Okay.

In verse 25, if he forces her, that’s forcible rape. And the penalty, the biblical case law penalty specifically, is death for rape. And that, you know, obviously is what we should be aiming for in our society—that we would like our civil magistrate to punish rape with death.

But verse 28 doesn’t use that same form. He’s not forcing her. He lays hold on her. And so what this implies is a token resistance on the part of the girl. So in both Deuteronomy 22 and in Exodus 22—verses 16-17 of Exodus 22—the circumstance involved is one of seduction.

You know, two people decide to proceed into the rites that are only to be found, according to God’s law, in marriage. And so there’s a seduction that occurs here. What’s the penalty? Many people are confused about this. They think that in this sort of case, it’s the same as rape. When they adultery, the people die. That isn’t the case. Adultery involves married people. Rape involves force. This involves neither—unmarried people, no force. Simple seduction.

What does God say happens in a case like this? What’s the answer to this problem? Well, he goes on to tell us that the answer to this problem is the payment of the dowry of fifty shekels of silver to the wife. In Deuteronomy, it says shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife. In Exodus, it says, “He shall surely endow her to be his wife.”

And so in Deuteronomy, the method of transmission to the wife is through the father. And in Exodus, it points out specifically that she is endowed through this granting of fifty shekels, which was the mohar—is what the Hebrew word is there—the bride price, if you want to look at it that way. I told Richard M. we’d be talking about him this morning because mohar in the Hebrew comes from the Hebrew word mahár. And mahár means to acquire by paying a purchase price.

So I don’t know if Richard M. gave a mohar, but he should have.

So what we have here is the prescription that God provides for this sort of seduction is a dowry. Okay? And the method of payment here is to weigh it out. By the way, it says that he shall weigh out that amount. He shall pay out this dowry. And the very word there for paying it out means to weigh something.

Okay. And then the term used for the payment, the fifty shekels—a shekel was not a coin as such. A shekel referred to a weight in the scriptures. Now that’s real important. It has implications for what real currency is according to the case laws of God’s word. God says that payment is a weighing out process. So the method of payment implies a weight, and then the very coin used implies a weight as well. It is a weight. It’s not specifically a coin. It’s a measure.

When God says that you should have good weights and measures, equitable weights and measures, and not false weights and measures, he’s talking about currency exchange among other things. Okay? So God talks about hard money currency—silver in this case and gold in other cases. That’s real important. We’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes.

In the application of this, the point is the prescription here is to pay a dowry. Now this is case law. And so established from this—and evident in this as well as other scriptures we’ll go through here in a couple of minutes—is that the dowry was an accompanying of marriage. It says he shall pay her the dowry. He shall endow her “according to the dowry of virgins” in verse 17 of Exodus 22.

In other words, he uses a known thing—a dowry of virgins—that was normally given as part of the marriage contract, the marriage covenant. And he says that also applies in cases of seduction. The dowry still must be paid according to this thing that’s already known and already implied in this case law.

And so although the specific case involves seduction, it has implications then for normal marriage as well. You see, that’s the way God writes law. It has all kinds of details stuck into a very tight application.

And so from this we find that marriage should be accompanied by a dowry or a mohar and that this dowry according to the scriptures was fifty shekels of silver. Now, what does that mean today in terms of value? Well, that’s a very difficult question. Nobody that I’ve read is willing to say definitively what a shekel of silver is worth today. Very difficult.

The various estimates I can give you—the various estimates given, and I’ve seen estimates in the various studies I’ve looked at this last week ranging from roughly six months’ wages up to three years’ wages. And so you can—and this is an interesting study to try to do for yourself—is to go through the various payments of land. For instance, there was one plot of land bought for seventeen shekels, another for seventy shekels, and try to get some sort of value. But it’s a very difficult thing to do.

But suffice it to say that fifty shekels was a substantial amount of money. It wasn’t like a hundred dollars or something. It amounted to a lot of wage. And like I said, some people think as much as three years’ worth of normal wages for a typical man who was working at that time. So it’s a substantial amount of money that is turned over to the wife.

In Deuteronomy, it goes to the father. Why does it go to the father in the Deuteronomy passage, and in this particular instance of seduction? The reason it does is because the second prescription here in terms of making the situation right—along with the dowry—is the possibility of marriage.

It doesn’t say they have to get married. It says the husband has to marry—if the gal’s father consents to the marriage. But if the father says, “This is a worthless guy, and you know he’s not a very good person for my daughter,” and the daughter says, “I don’t like him, you know, and I don’t really—this was really a sin on my part and I really don’t want to marry this fellow. He’s no good for me,” and the father hears that and he evaluates the man and he says, “No, this guy is not going to marry my daughter,” then marriage was not required.

The payment of the mohar was required. The payment of the dowry was still required, though, to the wife or to the father if the wife stayed in the father’s household. Okay. Remember that when you read these references to the father of a household, he’s the covenantal head of that unit, isn’t he?

And so if the gal stays within her father’s household, he would oversee that mohar—that bride price that was paid for—until she then married. Okay? And then she would get it. Of course, the father had discretion then, acting as the girl’s agent and acting in his proper role of protector or guardian of the family. He was to guard her against getting a bad husband. And so it was his decision to make, and of course he would take into account the desires and wishes of the daughter.

Okay. The marriage wasn’t required, but the payment of the dowry was.

Now some people have said that one thing this meant was that the father, when the next suitor comes along and maybe put off by the fact that he’s now dealing no longer with a virgin but somebody who’s had relations with another man—that one enticement to him to marry this particular gal—be the fact that he didn’t have to provide that bride price. It had already been provided by another suitor. So she was already endowed. Okay. Possible.

Okay. The third prescription in terms of a case of this was no divorce. And we see that in the Deuteronomy 22 passage. “Because he hath humbled her,” Deuteronomy 22:29 says “he may not put her away all his days.” He can’t divorce her.

Have seduction. What’s the answer? Payment of the dowry. Possible marriage—the girl’s father says whether they’re going to marry or not. If they do marry and the father consents to that marriage, the girl gets the money, she is endowed by him, then they enter into a marriage relationship. But there’s one more difference in terms of that marriage relationship—and that is the fact that he may never divorce her. And that’s specifically laid out in that case law, Deuteronomy 22.

Now implicit in that, of course, is that divorce is permissible for other couples. This was a specific thing put into that particular situation. And God tells us that because he says he can’t divorce her. Why? Because he’s humbled her.

Well, the implication is that if he hasn’t humbled her, he can divorce her—for cause, of course, biblical cause, according to the commandments given in the case laws of the Old Testament and then reinforced with Jesus’s and Paul’s teaching in the New Testament.

Okay. So implicit in this is that divorce is permissible for other couples. We’re going to talk about divorce—probably about four or five weeks from now, actually a couple of months from now we’ll actually talk on divorce specifically for one week. But I want us all to note. I want to point out two things here.

First thing I want to point out is that I was thinking about this. I was talking to somebody at the workshop yesterday, and I was thinking about the talk—the series of talks I’m giving here—and I was talking to them about that. And some people would not like my approach.

You see, some people would rather I talk to the husbands about their responsibilities of guarding and nourishing, and then I talk about to the wife separately about their responsibilities in terms of submission. Now why? Well, because if the wife sits there for a month or two months and hears all the things the husband’s supposed to do and hears that the husband is the covenantal head and that it’s his basic responsibility to govern the family well and according to God’s law, she may then say, “Well, I don’t have to submit to this guy if he’s not doing his part.”

Okay? And that is a danger. So some people don’t like that. They want to close the door. They want to talk to wives about submission apart from what the husband’s doing, and vice versa in terms of the husband.

Well, it’s the same with divorce. We know that divorce and another example is alcohol. We know alcohol and divorce are abused in our times. People get divorces for totally unbiblical reasons. It’s an abomination in the land. And certainly God’s normative standard for marriage life does not have within it the concept of divorce.

But God leaves the door a jar. We know that people are alcoholics. We know people are drunkards in our land. Okay? They abuse. They take what God has given to us as a gracious gift—wine that makes men’s hearts glad and merry—and they abuse it. They come under the control of the flesh instead of being under the control of the Spirit of God.

And so a lot of people would say, “Well, let’s just close the door that God left a jar a little bit, to make sure we don’t have people abusing alcohol, or, you know, not submitting to their wife, or we want to close the door ’cause some people might try to squeeze out the door and get a divorce even though there is a biblical cause.”

You see, but we don’t want to do that. We began by saying we want to have biblical thoughts about everything. We want to conform ourselves to the image of God. We want to think Jesus’s thoughts after him. And his thoughts include that door being a jar somewhat.

Now, why is that? I don’t know. Maybe one reason, one reason I can think of, is that God provides these doors that are slightly ajar as a means of testing people when evaluating their actions. Okay? If people use that door and try to shove it open and try to make it wider than it is, well, that’s sin. And God will evaluate that action and find them wanting and judge them.

The point is, it’s not ours to close the door. Okay? It’s ours to say exactly what the word of God says—it says—and not to add to it or subtract from it.

The second thing I want to say is that you got a situation where God allows for divorce in certain cases, and it may be the intentions in our mind. Now God never mandates divorce—at least not that I found. He doesn’t say you have to divorce. And we may from that say, “Well, in my own life if my wife did this, that, and the other thing, or if my husband did this, that, and the other thing, I’d never divorce her. You know, it’s just not something that I’m never going to do.”

Well, that’s you know, that’s an interesting thing to say, and you may be right and you may be wrong. You know, there’s that old expression about walking a mile in my moccasins before you tell me, you know, how I’m walking correctly or incorrectly. You don’t know. You don’t know what God will bring you to at that particular stage in your life.

You may make all kinds of claims, but until you’ve gone through those things, I don’t think you can make assured statements. God says as part of his grace of life that divorce is permissible under certain situations, and it’s best for people to sever that relationship—not to sever the relationship, but to acknowledge that the offending party has severed the relationship. They put it aside.

We’ll talk more about that in a couple months. But I want to make those two things. One: we don’t close the door if God leaves it slightly ajar. And two: we don’t want to make statements about our future activities that we may then regret having made later in our lives. And we don’t want to evaluate somebody according to an extra-biblical standard.

Okay? In this particular case, though, no divorce was permissible. And so if a church magistrate or a civil magistrate has a guy suing for divorce or a woman suing for divorce because of, you know, biblical reasons—a part of the process of whether or not the church thinks that’s a legitimate thing to do should involve asking the couple involved: If this situation, if this case law applies in their case, did they enter into conjugal relationships before their marriage?

And if they did, you have to tell the husband, you can’t divorce her. I don’t care what she’s done. You’ve humbled her, you can’t divorce her. Okay?

So that’s first case law: Deuteronomy 22 and Exodus 22. And from that, we see that the dowry is important, that it’s part of the marriage process. And we saw a lot of other things as well. But for the sake of summarizing what we’re talking about this morning in terms of guarding, the dowry is important as part of the marriage process.

Exodus 21:7-11. There’s another case law we want to look at for a couple of minutes. Exodus 21:7-11. “If a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the men’s servants do. If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed. To sell her unto a strange nation, he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. And if he hath betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters. If he take him another wife, for food and raiment, and her duty of marriage shall he not diminish. And if he do not these three unto her, then shall she go out free without money.”

Okay, what’s this talking about? This isn’t talking about marriage, normal marriage, is it? Because the woman’s being sold to be a maid service. But it also isn’t talking about slavery exclusively either. Deuteronomy 15:12 says that a maid servant gets to go free in the seventh year. Well, there’s no provision for that here. Okay.

So a woman sold into slavery. Okay, specifically just for slavery—to do the work of the household. And you know, I suppose it’s important for all—just as a little caveat here—when you think slavery, don’t think of “Roots.” Biblical slavery is something different. This woman would then work for the master—the person she was sold to—as a servant, and there were restrictions on what he could do to her, what he couldn’t do to her, or to the man’s slave as well.

In any event, when people are indentured into servitude, which is a better expression, I suppose, in terms of biblical standards—when they’re sold into indentured servitude, they get to go free in the sabbatical year of release if they were, you know, part of the covenant community. And so we don’t have that here. Here she doesn’t get to go free. Why?

Because the situation is neither slavery nor is it pure marriage. It’s a slave marriage, as it were. She’s sold into a marriage contract. Okay? And so it’s a different circumstance from either of those two.

Now, the marriage implied in verse—and I won’t get into all the details of the particular verbiage here—but implied in this case law is that she may have been contractually bound into marriage for either the master of the house or the son of the house or another slave in the house.

In the laws just before this law—in verses 1-6—it talks about a man as a slave and how he goes out in the sabbatical year unless his owners provided him a wife. And so the owner might have contracted to get this gal into an indentured servitude relationship specifically for contracting her to marriage—to one of his slaves, either for himself or a son or a slave. Okay, that’s the situation that this case law addresses: a woman indentured servant but not like a normal one—entered into a covenant, a marriage, or contractual obligation, a covenantal obligation to enter into marriage.

So in marriage is really being discussed here. What’s the prescription for this kind of case? What happens in this kind of situation? Well, the dowry in this case does not go to the girl for her use. The dowry in this case goes to the girl’s father.

Now that doesn’t mean the girl has been sold as a thing. What it means is the father’s being compensated for the loss of her service to the family itself. Okay. But the girl doesn’t actually receive the dowry. The dowry goes to the father of the girl instead of the girl. And that’s an important distinction between regular marriage and indentured servitude. Or concubinage is another word that’s used there.

A concubine is somebody who is unendowed because the dowry went to her father and not to her. Okay.

Secondly, the girl can be redeemed if she’s unwanted as a marriage partner. In other words, she gets this right—that says that if he, if she doesn’t please him in some way, verse 8: “If she pleased not her master who hath betrothed her to himself”—and like I said, the words there are kind of tricky, and it might mean himself; it could be also to his son or his slave—”then shall he let her be redeemed.”

So he contracts this man for the wife, pays the man the dowry, gets the wife now, and then decides for whatever reason, “Well, I don’t want to marry her after all. You know, there’s something about this girl that isn’t good, and I don’t want to marry her.” Then the girl can be redeemed if unwanted. Another thing that means is that the dowry is returned to the fellow. Okay. The father would return the dowry over a period of time if he had to take some time to do it and he’d redeem her back. Then if the man wasn’t going to enter into covenant marriage with her. Okay.

If the girl—the third thing that happens in this case is the girl divorces the man for cause. There is no return of the dowry to the man. That’s found in the last couple of verses there, verse 10: “If you take another wife, her food, raiment, and her duty of marriage shall not be diminished. If you do not do these three unto her, then she will go out free without money.”

Okay? So if the wife goes out, divorces the man for good biblical cause, which includes the things we talked about a couple weeks ago in terms of food, clothing, and conjugal rights—if he doesn’t provide those for her and then she goes ahead and sues for divorce against him or to get out of the engagement relationship, or if they’re married, to get out of the marriage—she gets to go free and there’s no return of the dowry to the man. Okay?

He loses that money he paid because he’s at fault, right? He’s at fault in this sort of case. And so she goes out and there’s no return of the dowry to the man. Her father gets to keep that money.

Now, I just want to point out here—and I won’t get into details—but this is, as we said before, the basis for people to see that the wife has obligations due to her and can indeed sue for divorce if these things aren’t met and refuse to be met by the husband. We mentioned that before. And obviously it wouldn’t just be a really flippant sort of thing, but it is a requirement here of husbands to provide these three things as essential obligations to the wife.

If any of you think you’re not getting those things, you know, don’t come to me and say, “Hey, I divorced my husband last week.” We would want to talk about that and counsel you. Probably you are getting these three things.

Additionally, it’s been pointed out that in a normal marriage, these several of these conditions wouldn’t really apply because in a normal marriage where there’s a dowry given to the wife, she’s got a substantial sum of money there—you know, several thousand dollars—and so she has the provision of food and raiment just in the dowry itself. And so you see, for instance, in the Old Testament, you see lots of situations where the wives, godly wives, have their own tents, their own servants, et cetera, because of this dowry situation.

And so they wouldn’t ever want to be in a situation where they had to actually leave the husband and divorce him because he wouldn’t feed her. Okay?

So in a situation of slave marriage, there still is a dowry. Dowry always accompanies the marriage covenant. The difference is the dowry goes to the father instead of to the girl because there’s a servitude relationship here. The girl can be redeemed by the father paying back the dowry if the man does not want to enter into contractual obligation of marriage and complete the marriage contract that he’s begun.

But if the girl sues for divorce, she gets to go free. If it’s for cause, she goes free and there’s no return of the dowry to that man. Okay.

Okay. So we see from these two case laws then that the dowry accompanies marriage and that there are inherent in the dowry then reasons why it’s important in terms of the marriage contract. And sometimes the dowry money, in the cases of a slave, goes to the father instead of to her. In the cases of a free woman who enters into contractual marriage—not under indentured servitude relationships—the dowry stays with her. She’s endowed then. Okay.

Let’s look at the dowry now in a couple of other scriptures. Genesis 24:53. “And the servant brought forth jewels of silver.” Okay. Well, Rebecca here is going to become Isaac’s wife. And so this is the servant going and obtaining Rebecca as his wife. And the important verse here is verse 53.

“And the servant that has gone to get the wife for Isaac brings forth jewels of silver, jewels of gold, and raiment, and give them to Rebecca. He gave also to her brother and to her mother precious things.” And this is a normal pattern that you’ll see throughout the scriptures in terms of marriage. The dowry in the form of jewels or precious gold or silver or whatever is given to the wife. She’s endowed with this fifty shekels of silver, or it could be greater of course—that’s probably a minimum requirement for dowry. She is given the dowry by the person she’s going to marry, or in this case the servant representing the household and representing Isaac. She’s endowed, and then her parents or her relatives get gifts.

So this dowry—and then there’s gifts. And so that’s what’s going on here. The wife is endowed with these precious things.

I might point out here that Robert North, in an article entitled “Sociology of the Biblical Jubilee” from Analecta Biblica: Investigationes Scientificae in Res Biblica, vol. 4, quoted by Jim Jordan in “Law of the Covenant,” says that the lady retained the payment—talking about the dowry—at least in some cases in the form of coins strung upon her body as ornaments so that if at any time she was divorced she would not be wholly unprovided. Moreover, the cupidity of her spouse would deter him from rashly giving up control of such tangible assets.

So she would occasionally, a lot of times, wear this dowry upon themselves to remind their husband that “I have these assets and if you divorce me these go with me.”

So when the servant brings out things to Rebecca—you know, jewels of silver and jewels of gold and raiment—you see that picture there, that this dowry that she received, a lot of it would probably be worn by her in terms of jewelry. Okay.

Genesis 29:18, talking about Jacob and Rachel. “Now Jacob loves Rachel. He says, ‘I will serve thee seven years for Rachel, thy younger daughter.’” Jacob here enters into a relationship with Laban—representative, of course, of Rachel. And again, the husband provides here for the exchange of the dowry and sets the terms, as it were.

And so the term that Jacob offers and that Laban accepts is seven years. And, you know, that’s a long time. And that’s not a normative sort of dowry, of course, because it’s a lot more than that. But that’s what they agreed to. And Jacob—I think part of this is saying the great love he had for Rachel. And so Jacob’s provision for dowry for Rachel is actually years of service here, okay? And that would accumulate into a cash holding that then would have been transferred to Rachel upon the marriage becoming a reality—okay, instead of Laban paying Jacob. He stores it up as a dowry for Rachel when she marries him.

Okay, and so here again we see a dowry provision in the old covenant in terms of Jacob and Rachel. He chooses Rachel here. He pays the dowry directly to Laban. Okay.

Let’s look at a couple more scriptures. Genesis 34:12. And this is a real interesting case that people talk about. It’s the case with Shechem and Dinah. And we’ve talked about this somewhat before. But so people point out that what you have here is interesting because in Genesis 34, you have going on here a specific obedience to the case laws which would later be enumerated and written down in code form in Exodus and Deuteronomy—we just talked about in terms of seduction.

What I’m trying to say is this: a case of seduction—when they try to figure out what to do with the seduction case law—is followed even though it isn’t even written yet or recorded. So case law probably was known. Much of case law was known prior to the revelation of it. Later it would be written down. In any event, Shechem here lies with Dinah. It’s a case of seduction.

And he then, you know, according to the normal case law that God had provided there, he goes to her father and to her brothers. In verse 11, he says, “Let me find grace in your eyes, and what you shall say unto me, I will give. Ask for me never so much dowry and gift, and I will give according as you shall say unto me. But give me the damsel to wife.”

So again, here you see him saying to the people that control the government of the daughter—the father of the daughter and her brothers—they arranged for the dowry in most cases in the old covenant. And again, that’s because they’re the covenantal representation of the girl. They enter into these things for her and as her agent to protect her. Remember, they’re guarding her still. They don’t want to send her out there to be stuck with the guy that she might be marrying. They’re going to take care of that for her in terms of their guardian responsibilities.

And he says, you know, “Ask for me dowry and gift and I’ll give it to you.” And you have dowry then which would become Dinah’s dowry, and you have gifts that would have been given then to the brothers and to the father. Okay. So again you have that giving of dowry.

Joshua 15. Let’s look at one more here, and we’ll move on from the scriptural examples that God gives us to show us the case law at work. In Joshua 15, we have an unusual dowry. This is Caleb. Now they’ve gone into the land. You remember Caleb was one of the two spies who wanted to go in many years before and wasn’t afraid of the giants.

And now they’re in the land. And Caleb has three sons. It says in verse 15 of chapter 15 of Joshua: “He went up then to the inhabitants of Debir. And the name of Debir before was Kirjath Sepher. And Caleb said, ‘He that smiteth Kirjath Sepher and taketh it, to him will I give Achsah, my daughter, to wife.’ And Othniel the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, took it, and he gave him Achsah his daughter to wife.”

“And it came to pass as she came unto him that she moved him to ask of her father a field. And she lighted off her ass. And Caleb said unto her, ‘What wouldest thou?’ Who answered, ‘Give me a blessing, for thou has given me a south land. Give me also springs of water.’ And he gave her the upper spring and the nether springs.”

Now, what’s going on here is Caleb—asking as representative and guardian of Achsah—sees a way to accomplish both the taking of the town of Debir, which was a stronghold, and also to provide a godly wife for his daughter. Which, of course, is one of the purposes of dowry—to provide godly men to marry women. It’s a weeding out process, as it were. But instead of asking payment here, the payment he asks is that the man conquer this city.

And he knew, of course, that only in the power of God could one go out and conquer God’s enemies. And so he’d be getting a godly husband if he was able to perform this task, which he did. He went out and conquered the city, and then he got the wife because he paid the dowry—the capturing of the city. And then he had land as a result of that.

And so there we have kind of an unusual dowry. But again, we have a process in which the responsibility of the potential suitor is proven—either through specific gifts or through a task that would demonstrate the same things that gifts demonstrated—and provider of this conquered land. Okay, there’s an unusual dowry, but it is still a dowry.

Saul, for not good biblical purposes, undoubtedly, asked a dowry which was also rather unusual in 1 Samuel 18:25. He wanted to see if his potential son-in-law, David, could slay a lot of Philistines. And David did it and provided an unusual dowry through the killing of these Philistines. Okay.

So there’s the dowry in other scriptures. The case law says dowry is part of marriage. And that there are two types of marriage. There’s slave marriage, normal marriage. Normal marriage, the dowry of fifty shekels or more stays with the wife. She’s endowed.

Slave marriage, it stays with the father, and then she doesn’t get that dowry. The father gets the use of that dowry until she dies, or until her children inherit it is what many people think.