Deuteronomy xxviii.
56 The tender and delicate woman among you, which would not adventure to set the sole of her foot upon ground for delicateness and tenderness, her eye shall be evil toward her husband of her bosom, and toward her son, and toward her daughter, and toward her children which she shall bear; for she shall eat them for want of all things secretly in the siege and straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee in thy gates.
64 Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.
68 And the Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, thou shalt see it no more again: and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and bondwomen, and no man shall buy you.
This is addressed to men as most of the injunctions are, as to their treatment of woman in general. In enumerating the good things that would come to Israel if the commandments were obeyed, nothing is promised to women, but when the curses are distributed, woman comes in for her share. Similar treatment is accorded the daughters of Eve in modern days. She is given equal privileges with man, in being imprisoned and hung, but unlike him she has no voice in the laws, the judge, the jury, nor the manner of exit to the unknown land. She is denied the right of trial by her own peers; the laws are made by men, the courts are filled with men; the judge, the advocates, the jurors, all men!
Moses follows the usual ancient idea that in the creation of human life, man is the important factor. The child is his fruit, he is the soul. The spirit the vital spark. The woman merely the earth that warms and nourishes the seed, the earthly environment. This unscientific idea still holds among people ignorant of physiology and psychology. This notion chimes in with the popular view of woman's secondary place in the world, and so is accepted as law and gospel. The word "beget" applied only to men in Scripture is additional enforcement of the idea that the creative act belongs to him alone. This is flattering to male egoism and is readily accepted.
E. C. S.
In the early chapters of this book Moses' praises of Hebrew valor in marching into a land already occupied and utterly destroying men, women and children, seems much like the rejoicing of those who believe in exterminating the aboriginees in America. Evidently Moses believed in the survival of the fittest and that his own people were the fittest. He teaches the necessity of exclusiveness, that the hereditary traits of the people may not be lost by intermarriage. Though the Israelites, like the Puritans, had notable foremothers as well as forefathers, yet it was not the custom to mention them. Perhaps the word fathers meant both, as the word man in Scripture often includes woman. In the preface by Lord Bishop Ely, to what is popularly known as the Speaker's Bible, the remark is made that "whilst the Word of God is one, and does not change, it must touch at new points the changing phases of physical, philological and historical knowledge, and so the comments that suit one generation are felt by another to be obsolete." So, also, it is that with the higher education of women, their wider opportunities and the increasing sense of justice, many interpretations of the Bible are felt to be obsolete, hence the same reason exists for the Woman's Commentary, which is already popularly known as the Woman's Bible.
Deuteronomy is a name derived from the Greek and signifies that this is the second or duplicate law, because this, the last book of the Pentateuch, consists partly in a restatement of the law, as already given in other books. Deuteronomy contains also, besides special commands and advice not previously written, an account of the death of Moses. Johnson's Universal Cyclopedia states that "the authority of this book has been traditionally assigned to Moses, but, of course, the part relating to his death is not supposed to be written by himself, and indeed the last four chapters may have been added by another hand." DeWette declares that Moses could not have been the author. He not only points to the closing chapters as containing proof, but he refers to the anachronisms in earlier chapters, and insists that the general manner in which the Mosaic history is treated belongs to a period after the time of Moses. And Rev. John White Chadwick in his "Bible of To-day" declares that "Prophetism created Deuteronomy." He speaks of Malachi, the last of the Prophets, as the first to mention the Mosaic law, and says that in the eighth century before Christ there was no Mosaic law in any modern sense. The Pentateuch in anything like its present form was still far in the future. Deuteronomy more than a hundred years ahead. Leviticus and Numbers nearly three hundred. * * * The book of Deuteronomy was much more of a manufacture than any previous portion of the Pentateuch. * * * Not Sinai and Wilderness, but Babylon and Jerusalem, witnessed the promulgation of the Levitical law. Its priest was Ezra and not Aaron; but who was its Moses the most patient study is not likely ever to reveal. The roar of Babylon does not give up its dead. It would seem as if the Rev. Dr. George Lansing Taylor shared some of these ideas when, in his poem at the centennial of Columbia College, he said:
"Great Ezra, Artaxerxes' courtly scholar—
Doctor, ere old Bologna gave that collar,
A ready scribe in all the laws of heaven,
From Babylon ascends, to Zion given,
Armed with imperial power and proclamation,
To rear God's house and educate a nation.