Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
The Captive Wife and the Firstborn
Deuteronomy 21:10-17
10 When you go out to battle against your enemies, and Yahweh your God delivers them into your hands and you carry them away captive, · WEB
A woman taken in war is given a month to grieve and the standing of a wife, and a father may not disinherit the son of the wife he loves less.
Two laws about people with no bargaining position, and both work the same way: they take a situation the law did not create and impose conditions that make it survivable.
The first concerns a captive woman. A soldier who wants her may not simply take her. She is brought to his house, and then a month passes.
In that month she shaves her head, trims her nails, takes off the clothing of her captivity, and bewail her father and her mother a full month Deuteronomy 21:12–13. Her parents are almost certainly dead in the war she was captured in, and she is given the full mourning period for them.
Every element of it works against the moment. A man's desire was described as immediate — he saw and desired Deuteronomy 21:11 — and the law puts thirty days and a funeral between the seeing and the taking. Whatever else that month accomplishes, it makes her a person with a history rather than plunder, and it gives the impulse time to fail.
What follows is a marriage, not a concubinage: you shall go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife Deuteronomy 21:13.
And if he later tires of her, the protection is absolute. You shall let her go where she desires; but you shall not sell her at all for money. You shall not deal with her as a slave, because you have humbled her Deuteronomy 21:14. She leaves free, and she chooses where. The one thing forbidden is treating her as property, and the reason given is what he did to her.
The second law concerns inheritance where a man has two wives, the one beloved and the other hated, and the firstborn belongs to the one he loves less Deuteronomy 21:15.
The temptation is obvious and the ruling is flat. He may not give the son of the beloved the rights of the firstborn Deuteronomy 21:16. The double portion goes to the actual eldest, for he is the beginning of his strength Deuteronomy 21:17.
A father's affection may not be converted into law. The son's right rests on a fact — the order of birth — which no preference can alter, and a boy whose mother is out of favor cannot be quietly disinherited for it.
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