Fair For Its Day / Religion

• The Bible:
  • "An eye for an eye" was originally instituted to prevent Disproportionate Retribution or long-term cycles of revenge. The term isn't a call for revenge but a limit on justice: no more than an eye may be taken for an eye. In other words, the punishment must fit the crime. (Also, it originated in the Code of Hammurabi, not actually the Bible.) Later passages also imply that monetary compensation was allowed in place of literal violent punishment. Further, the version most people quote is actually a New Testament passage saying that while the law permits retribution, Christians should choose forgiveness instead.
  • Biblical treatment of women and sexuality is often considered horrible by modern standards but were relatively liberal at the time:
  • Both testaments
    • Verses opposing homosexuality. Many ancient societies, including Ancient Rome, tolerated homosexual relations but viewed the passive (penetrated) partner as unmanly, and the relations not as an act of consensual love but as an act of dominance by the active (penetrating) partner over the passive one. A free adult man would almost never want to have the shameful passive role; it was instead often held by a teenage boy, a slave or a prostitute. As Jonathan Rauch puts it, "...'partner' hardly seems like the right word. 'Target' or 'victim' is more like it." Thus the verses oppose relations that were at best unequal and at worst equivalent by modern standards to child sexual abuse and rape. Some commentators even believe they were only intended for condemning this, rather than any consensual, adult same-sex relations.
  • Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
    • Ruth and Esther are Old Testament books completely dedicated to women, and in Esther's case, she saves her own people. Also, when David commits adultery with Bathsheba, it is David who receives the most punishment and blame for engaging with her. Proverb 31 is dedicated to a strong and hard-working wife who has her own business and is thought by some Biblical scholars to have been written by Bathsheba.
    • Israelite daughters (specifically if there were no sons) were also able to inherit property as long as they married a man from their own tribe.
    • Laws commanding adulteresses and other sex offenders to be stoned sound like pretty harsh Honor-Related Abuse. Then you reread them and notice that the man too must be punished. Unusually even-handed, given that even some modern societies punish only the woman and let the man play Karma Houdini. The law wasn't always enforced that way, as demonstrated in the story of the woman caught in adultery, that mentions nothing about her lover being stoned to death along with her, even though he was caught in the act too (which in itself is not a proof for him not getting stoned, though)...
    • One of the case studies presented to Moses in the Walls of Text that make up the Covenant of Law: a man is found having sex with a woman not his wife in the middle of nowhere. The recommendation is to punish him as a rapist because if they were simply committing adultery he wouldn't have bothered to take the woman somewhere her cries for help can't be heard.
    • The Proverbs verse about the Wife of Noble Character is used by some modern sects to demonstrate that a woman's place is in the home tending to her family and to work deemed appropriately feminine, so that they won't be tempted into sin (or tempt others into sin), and their husbands can go off and take care of their own duties. But the passage was actually written not so much to tell women what they should be doing, but to encourage men to appreciate the work their wives were doing, instead of taking their wives for granted. Indeed, the woman in the poem is portrayed as strong and capable and smart. She takes care of her home and family, and her appearance, but she also runs her own business (and she is good at it, too!). Her husband respects her as an equal, his partner in every sense of the word, and he boasts about her to his friends and colleagues. Women are to follow the example of the Wife of Noble Character and use their talents and be the best person they can be... but men are to follow her husband's example and be supportive and appreciative of their wives. Additionally, it must be remembered that she is a Composite Character of all the roles a "respectable" woman of that time and place could have. In other words, just because she can "do it all" doesn't mean that the reader (or reader's wife) must "do it all", or try to fit into roles she isn't suited for or doesn't want, or that her first and most important role is motherhood whether she wants that or not, or feel bad for not being The Ace. (See also, point about the passage not being meant to admonish women.) You may also notice that the wife's husband is an important man busy with law and statecraft, so the wife needs to keep the house running, which is still an admired behavior in many places today. Actually, in an agricultural society, the Wife of Noble Character is shown doing several examples of "men's work"; she buys and owns property and plants it herself (her arms are specifically described as being strong for tasks like these), she collects and owns the profits from the harvest (ancient Hebrew marriage contracts show us that women could own property apart from their husbands and had sole rights over both the land and the profit from it), she is an entrepreneur who transacts on equal grounds with merchants, she orders goods and services long-distance, and she is highly praised for all of it.
    • If a man slept with a woman who was not betrothed to someone else^note  If she was already betrothed to someone else and "did not scream for help" (though consideration was made if she couldn't scream or was not in earshot), that was just plain old adultery, and both the man and the woman were to be stoned to death., and someone found out, he legally was required to pay her father (or nearest male relative if her father was dead) the customary bride price and take her as his wife. He could not divorce her, no matter what. This also could be applied to some cases where the woman was raped, not just instances of consensual sex. This was to provide for any child they may have conceived (a very real possibility in an era before effective contraceptives) and to protect the reputation of the woman's family (it also protected the woman, who would be considered Defiled Forever, ensuring that someone would be forced to support her). Also, while the rapist would be obligated to pay for her upkeep for the rest of her life, she would not be obligated to live with him. Additionally, if the rapist could not afford to pay the bride price, he became a slave to the father for seven years, and was effectively removed from being a "person" as far as establishing a minyan, meaning in order for him to attend public religious services he had to be accompanied by the father.
    • This law has been explained as being an example of why the Oral Torah/commentaries are really, really, really important. With them, the law reads as: if a man rapes a woman who isn't married or engaged, then in addition to all the usual punishments for that type of crime, if she demands it he must pay her (or her father if she's a minor) additional money and marry her, and he may never divorce her on his own initiative.
• The Talmud laws state that the man is to be considered infertile if his wife testifies he "doesn't shoot as an arrow". Today, we would consider it a most ridiculous fertility test, but considering how many societies before and after denied the man can be at fault in these matters, period...
  • New Testament
    • 1 Timothy 2:11-12 ("A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.") may sound radically sexist by today's standards and is quite the bane of feminists everywhere, even Christians. However in the context of the time the first four words "A woman should learn" itself was a radically enlightened idea; most women living that time period wouldn't be educated at all. The remainder of the passage may still sound pretty backward, however, one must consider that there were almost no women at the time with the knowledge or leadership experience to take on leadership roles, meaning that Paul may well not have been forbidding them to teach because they had a uterus, but because they weren't educated enough to do so. Moreover, Paul was speaking from personal experience; he wasn't prohibiting all women in all places and times from ever teaching or assuming authority.
    • While many people think Paul insisted on women covering their heads and having smaller roles in church leadership, another interpretation is that he was quoting the laws of the Corinthians and their response to his initial letter, and in the next verse immediately contradicts this. In the actual passage about women covering their heads (either by means of long hair or a covering), Paul explains that women should have these coverings as a sign of authority over their own heads, lest people use old theological arguments (such as "woman came from man") to claim that women should not be allowed to access God directly. (Then he immediately notes that the head-covering is not an actual Christian custom.)
    • Paul argued that people regardless of race, sex, or class had the same road to salvation in Christ. Following on from this, when listing fellow Christians in the final greetings of Colossians, there are Hebrew, Greek, Latin, male, female, and typical "slave" names, indicating that the early church was diverse in its leadership. In the same passage, he lists the wife's name before the husband, indicating she had a larger role than him in leadership!
    • He also commended some early-church women for their work, such as a deaconess by the name of Phoebe.
    • And, the word for "assume authority" in the 1 Timothy passage, does not appear elsewhere in the New Testament, and it is not the usual word for "authority" (exousia) which Paul and the other NT writers always use. The study of this "assume authority" word shows it is a very hard word, sometimes rendered as "usurping authority" or with the general idea of claiming undue and/or excessive authority. The bottom-line of this is that Paul was not forbidding the usual authority (exousia), but something very specific and most likely inspired by what was happening in Ephesus at the time Timothy was there. For a thorough study of this passage and others related to Paul's view on women in the NT, see this, which is part of a larger study on the role of women in the Bible.
    • Very strict early Christian divorce prohibitions may seem oppressive today but were actually very attractive to Roman women and partly responsible for the rapid spread of the new religion. Under Roman law, it was extremely easy for a husband to divorce his wife or to take a concubine on a whim, but extremely difficult for a woman to obtain a divorce even in cases of severe spousal neglect or abuse. What's more, divorce put women at a severe disadvantage; they were often considered Defiled Forever (and so it was harder to remarry), and many women were not educated (other than being taught domestic skills by their mothers), which drove many such women to begging or prostitution to support themselves and their children. It was not unusual for a rich Roman man to divorce and remarry multiple times, leaving a number of women to fend for themselves. (Alimony and child support did not exist, either.) The Christian conception of marriage as unbreakable but binding for both spouses (though it gives concessions for the unbelieving spouse of a mixed-faith couple to initiate a divorce, at which point the believing spouse is supposed to be free to remarry without stigma) was much more egalitarian. Furthermore, most modern Christians will take for granted that Jesus explicitly states that a man who transgresses his divorce prohibition is guilty of adultery. Judaism being technically polygynist, an improperly divorced Jewish man who sleeps with an unmarried woman is technically not guilty of adultery. Jesus was actually extending adultery law to be more egalitarian.
    • The circumstances surrounding Mary's Mystical Pregnancy. Many modern readers find it uncomfortable, even going so far as to call it rape (which isn't helped by how Word of Dante says she was a young teenager). However, there was no sex (consensual or otherwise) involved; it was a Deus ex Machina. Also, consider that the text explicitly says God told her what He wanted to do and waited for her okay before making her pregnant, instead of just going ahead and doing it even though He could. Given that in her society, women were expected to be passive vessels for childbearing to their husbands (whom they rarely got to choose), whether they wanted to or not, that's more agency than her society would have granted her. Also worth pointing out that God is Omniscient, so God already knew Mary's feelings on the matter before asking; if Mary would have not been okay with it (and she explicitly is okay with it), God could just have picked a different woman who would be.
  • The Bible is also exceptionally progressive in the area of race and social status. Rahab the prostitute is given a place in the lineage of Christ (or, in the Jewish context, that of King David). Specific OT laws are put in place (and repeated multiple times) to protect foreigners passing through Jewish settlements (reminding how the Jews were treated in Egypt as a warning to do better or else). Ruth, who was not a Jew, is given her own book and also a place in the lineage of Christ (again, also the lineage of David). The New Testament is just as radical: Jesus talks to a Samaritan woman at the well, and later tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, where the Samaritan acts more justly than several members of the Jewish elite.^{For context} Samaritans were a largely disliked, at times hated ethnoreligious group in first-century Judea. Isaac Asimov wrote an essay called "Lost in Non-Translation" in which he claims that we're too far removed in time and space from ancient Jewish culture to understand the words "Moabite" or "Samaritan" the way the original audience would have, and suggests reading the books while mentally replacing those words with the name of some ethnic or cultural group that's despised now to understand the impact they were intended to have. Paul stresses the importance that in Christ there is neither "Jew nor Greek, male nor female," and every NT author emphasizes the need to share the Gospel with every tribe, tongue and nation (whether they wanted it or not).
  • Although the Old Testament's discussion of slavery is barbaric by modern standards, it bears mentioning that slavery was present in all ancient societies, and the Old Testament was actually progressive in setting limits on slavery, giving slaves protections that did not exist in contemporary societies. Ironically, modern proponents of slavery who cited the Bible to justify their beliefs observed none of the restrictions that the Bible had specified two to three millennia before.
    • Of course, those restrictions applied only to Hebrew males, so the modern slavers had their loophole. Though since they themselves weren't Hebrew males, it just meant their error was shifted over one category.

• The Qur'an:
  • Sharia law gave Arab women rights that they didn't have in the pre-Islamic period, and in some cases, Western societies didn't have until the 20th century. It might seem unfair to 21st century Westerners that a woman is only entitled to inherit half of what a man inherits if no will is left, or that a woman's testimony is only worth half of a man's in the financial transactions, but when in many societies—including pre-Islamic Arabia—women were not permitted to inherit at all, divorce their husbands, or testify in court, it's actually, well, pretty Fair For Its Day.
  • It allows men to take up to four wives. Modern audiences (and many Muslims in more developed and progressive countries) are disgusted by any allowance of polygamy. However, there is a caveat to that law: the man must show no favoritism and treat all wives equally. Seeing as how polygamy at the time was usually a nobleman having his "main" wife treated like a queen and the others just concubines for his enjoyment, this was actually relatively egalitarian.
    • Also this originated as a way to provide for widows and orphans—by having their new husband take responsibility for them and care for them—rather than being just for the men's pleasure.
  • Muhammad wasn't supposed to live as he pleased, as that would be challenging Allah's authority. Now that would have been hypocritical of him.
    • Muhammad himself had 13 wives, being married to 11 at the same time. This seems hypocritical, but many of them were widows, who would not have been able to inherit (unless he had already changed that law...).
  • The concept of dhimma grants protection to "People of the Book" (Christians, Jews, and Sabaeans). Granted, Christians and Jews living in al-Andalus were second-class citizens and had to pay extra taxes, but this contrasts sharply with the neighboring Spanish kingdoms, where non-Christians were persecuted, forcefully "converted" to Christianity, and eventually expelled. The extra taxes were ostensibly because Islamic law forbids non-Muslims from serving in the military. There was at least one occasion when a Muslim general realized that the military situation required him to withdraw his troops and protection from a non-Muslim village. Because he was withdrawing his protection, he returned the taxes he had collected from the villagers for their defense.
    • In practice, this wasn't always applied the way it should have been. See the Orphans' Decree in Yemen, where Jewish orphans were kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam. Furthermore, barring non-Muslims from the military or owning weapons ensures that non-Muslims are much less capable of succeeding in a rebellion.
• The Druidic version of Human Sacrifice. Most cultures at the time would chose someone destitute or prisoners of war. Druids, on the other hand, would sacrifice rulers and nobles, as they were responsible for the state of society. While still morally abhorrent to modern peoples, they at least typically targeted the government itself rather than slaying a random person.

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