Deuteronomy 21:10-14--Marrying Female Captives

Deuteronomy 21:10-14
English Standard Version
​
Marrying Female Captives
10 “When you go out to war against your enemies, and the LORD your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, 11 and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, 12 and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. 13 And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. 14 But if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.

---

We've now jumped back into rules for warfare and the capture and treatment of female prisoners.  Are the Hebrews allowed to take the women that they keep alive a spoils of war as wives for themselves and their sons?

There would be a process for such a thing to happen and while the passage is not clear here, I don't see that God commands or gives allowance for multiple marriages.  Marriage is supposed to mirror our relationship with the LORD and it is supposed to be one man and one woman in an "forever" bond (until death breaks that bond), but our covenant with the LORD is eternal so that not even death can separate us from each other--in fact it will bring us even closer together.  God's intent for marriage was just the way He made it to begin with--one man with one woman.

The beautiful foreign slave woman that the Hebrew man wants to take as his wife would have to go through several things that were probably to be a process of her losing her identity with her old culture and giving up things that would have been connected to her foreign gods.  When the man would bring her into his home, she would have to shave her head (usually not permitted of Hebrew women) and pare her nails.  She would change clothes from those she was captured in so that she had nothing to look at to remind her of who she was, and she would then have a period of mourning/grieving for all those that she lost and would not see again, because all the males of that city would have died and she was going to be losing her identity and become bound to this Hebrew man.  She would be his family now and would no longer have an identity with her culture or family.

Only after this period of mourning (and this time was long enough for her to have had a period or to see if she missed her period and was already pregnant, and it also gave the chance for any symptoms of any diseases that she might have to expose themselves so as the man would not catch any sexually-transmitted diseases/infection from her unknowingly), then he could go in and have marital relations with her and consummate the marriage.

Now there is a stipulation here that seems more like a provision or an allowance than something that God would love for his people to do since we know that God hates divorce and we already talked about how the marriage covenant is supposed to display the covenant of salvation to all.  If the man stopped loving this woman, he was to let her go anywhere that she wanted (she was to be treated as if she was free)--she was never to be treated as a regular slave that could be sold for money.  She lost everything she had for this man and God said that she would at least walk away with her freedom and what dignity she had at that point if the man no longer wanted her.

I praise God that we don't have to worry about Him changing His mind about if he loves us or not.  When He decides to love us, though we too were foreigners and rebellious against all He is, He brings us into His house and cleans us and takes us as His own and He will never stop loving us, for He loved us all enough to die in our place to purchase us.  So then in Christ we are both free from the slavery of our old lives and now are bound by love to a new Master that as we are slaves of Christ, though it is a slavery we willingly agree to as we know that our Master loves us and will always take care of us and do what is best for us.  We are not only His slaves, but He calls us both His friends and His Bride.