Answer a Fool: Doesn't the Bible Teach That An Ox Is of More Value Than a Woman?

The Gospel of Salvation and Coming Judgment

Warning, the following message may be offensive to some audiences. These audiences may include, but are not limited to, professing Christians who never read their Bible, sissies, sodomites, men with man buns, those who approve of men with man buns, man bun enablers, white knights for men with man buns, homemakers who have finished Netflix but don't know how to meal plan, and people who refer to their pets as fur babies.

Viewer discretion is advised. People are tired of hearing nothing but doom and gloom.

The message of Christianity is that salvation is found in Christ alone, and any who reject Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

The issue is that humanity is in sin, and the wrath of almighty God is hanging over our heads.

They will hear his words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath come, they will be consumed and they will perish. God wrapped himself in flesh, condescended and became a man, died on the cross for sin, was resurrected on the third day, has ascended to the right hand of the Father, where he sits now to make intercession for us.

Jesus is saying there is a group of people who will hear his words, they will act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment come in that final day, their house will stand.

Answering a Fool and the Show’s Purpose

Welcome to Bible Bast, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask. Listen and enjoy this midweek installment of Answering a Fool as Pastor Tim answers a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.

In these shorter episodes, Pastor Tim answers objections from internet trolls in an effort to help them go home and rethink their lives. Troll hunting is hard work, but hey, someone's got to do it. Now, without further ado, here's Pastor Tim.

On this episode of Answer a Fool,.

The Claim That the Bible Values an Ox over a Woman

We will be answering the question, Does the Bible teach that an ox is of more value than a woman? Now, whenever a Christian seeks to speak to a moral issue, we'll have any number of atheists with their superior intellect and their vast knowledge of the scriptures deign to come and impart upon us ignorant plebeian Christians information in the scriptures that we believe that we have fundamentally never considered before, that fundamentally undo everything that we have believed and tried to advocate.

And so an example of this would be an example that we recently received on our podcast. We received a couple of comments of individuals essentially saying that we should ignore whatever the Bible has to say about a particular topic because the Bible teaches that an ox is of more value than a woman.

And the assumption is, well, aren't we so much more advanced than the people during that time and basically with their superstitious and patriarchal backwards kind of beliefs and basically anything that the Bible says is basically a product of its own time and we know better now and everything else.

Now, what are we to make of this kind of argument? Does the Bible teach that an ox is of more value than a woman? What does the Bible say as it relates to this subject? Now, the passages that were appealed to by these atheists were two passages.

The first passage is 2 Samuel 24, 21 -24 and Deuteronomy 22, 28 -29. One atheist basically was making the argument that the Bible teaches that an ox is of more value than a woman and another atheist corrected the first atheist and essentially said that the Bible is not teaching that an ox is of more value than a woman but that an ox and a threshing floor combined is of the same value as a woman.

But either way, it's superstitious and silly and backwards and we should ignore anything the Bible has to say because it's so ridiculous. Now, one of the things that I tried to point out to these atheists is that in the text in 2 Samuel 24, 21 -24 the text says that David bought the threshing floor and oxen for 50 shekels of silver and oxen is actually the plural of ox and so it seems like that even the careful atheists failed at basic reading comprehension and was unable to see that David was able to purchase multiple oxen for 50 shekels of silver plus the threshing floor, so there's that.

But the part of the problem here is that what's actually happening in this passage is that there is an assumption being made that when you read Deuteronomy 22, 28 -29 there's an assumption here that the bride price that is paid for a bride is essentially the equivalent of a father selling his daughter to a man as a piece of property.

And this kind of assumption basically it essentially reveals that the atheist has little to no understanding of how these customs actually formed and what the purpose was behind these customs and why these things would happen.

It basically just makes a hash of customs that are unfamiliar with us and we don't understand the purpose behind them. And so one of the things we want to do is go ahead and read Deuteronomy 22, 28 -29 and actually discuss what the purpose of a bride price actually was and why it was not the moral equivalent of a father selling his daughter as a piece of property to a man in marriage.

Deuteronomy 22 and the Bride Price

So Deuteronomy 22, 28 -29 says, If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed and seizes her and lies with her and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman 50 shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife because he has violated her.

He may not divorce her all of his days. So at this point, this 50 shekels of silver is the bride price that the man would pay in order to marry the daughter. Now this bride price was a custom that, as I've said, we're unfamiliar with.

To our modern ears, when you hear price and then attached to a woman, one bad assumption you might make is that this is the moral equivalent of slavery, when in fact it's really nothing of the kind. Now the reason why there was such a thing as a bride price in the Bible is because if you think about things from a biblical worldview, one of the things to realize is that today, if you compare and contrast the worldview we have today with the worldview that they had in the Bible, one of the things to realize is that we don't value women at all.

So we think it's a fairly trivial thing in order to get married to a woman. We basically conceive, because we don't value women, and then we have no parental responsibility that we've taken upon ourselves to protect a daughter, one of the things to realize is that we're living in the kind of society that basically makes marriage about as easy as it possibly can be made.

And so marriage today doesn't show honor and respect to women. The easy marriages that we enter into actually show contempt for women. And this kind of contempt that we actually show for women is evidenced by the fact that a woman can basically enter into a marriage with a man and be filled with all sorts of promises from a man.

A man can, as men have been known to do, basically make a lot of promises to a woman and just persuade her and convince her to marry him and then basically be very different than the kind of man that he described himself to be.

And so when you're in a situation right now where there is basically no social contractual obligations associated with marriage whatsoever, that marriage is essentially just a simple decision that's made with very little societal contractual arrangements attached to that, with very little parental involvement attached to that, one of the things to realize is that there's many a woman who could enter into marriage and be deceived fundamentally by a man who's filled her head with all sorts of promises that he has no intention of delivering upon whatsoever.

The Bride Price as Protection and Social Contract

And so one of the things that has happened, one of the things that happened in the biblical worldview as it relates to this bride price is that this bride price was typically a few years' worth of labor that a man would pay to a father as security for the daughter's hand.

And so that had a variety of purposes that was attached to it. So a man would pay that bride price to show that he's a serious person who's trying to enter into a serious agreement. This bride price was a barrier that would help differentiate the type of man who has no ability to provide whatsoever for a wife with the type of man who is a hard worker, as evidenced by the fact that he's going to save up a few years' worth of labor in order to put up a bride price for a wife.

He'd have to work a few years to show that he's a serious person, that he's a hardworking person, that he has character, that he's able to have delayed gratification. All of that working is going to establish him as a person who has character.

And if you compare that kind of arrangement with the kind of arrangement we have today, you can be a man who basically just fills a woman's head full of dreams and basically just persuades her that you're some wonderful person.

And then you marry her and you basically take her and you're still living in your parent's basement and have no intention of actually providing for her. And you basically deceived her about the nature of the kind of man that you actually are.

But then this was a social contract. It was a protection for the wife. And it was a protection against poor marriages that could happen as far as that goes. And then it also formed as a security in the case that the husband actually died.

Now there is this few years' worth of wages that is laid out for the woman in order to help her to take care of her basic needs in the case that the husband would die through war or something along those lines.

And so far from belittling a woman, the idea of a bride price was essentially a kind of safety net that the father would engage in in order to essentially separate the men from the boys as it relates to who's going to marry a daughter.

So far from being some kind of thing that objectified women or turned them into a piece of property, it was actually a form of safety for women. And anyone who's going to look at a bride price and think of it as equating women with a piece of property really doesn't have any idea what the purpose of a bride price actually was.

Closing Appeal Against Trolls

This has been another installment of Answering a Fool with Bible Bashed. As always, if you would like to be included in one of our Answering a Fool episodes, feel free to respond to us on our Facebook, Twitter, or Gab posts with a disrespectful, sarcastic, often off-topic comment that shows you did not thoughtfully engage with anything we have actually said.

And we will do our best to include and answer to your trolling comment. Keep in mind, the days are short and trolls are in abundant supply. But, we will do our best.