Ki Tetze — Control Your Passion: What the Captive Woman Law Says About Every War Since

Heebie Jeebies, and Why That Reaction Misses the Point

At first sight, the law concerning a captive woman taken in war gives many readers — myself included — the heebie jeebies. I am by nature a peace lover. I don't like to fight, I don't like war, I don't hate people from other races or colors. This reaction is especially sharp now, with everything that has been going on in the world, after the United States pulled out of Afghanistan so suddenly and the Taliban swept the country with the intent of establishing an Islamic Caliphate under Sharia law — a medieval, dark-ages legal system, the atrocities of October 7th and many other events of past years.

But the rule for interpreting any ancient text is this: you must understand it within the historical context in which it was written. You cannot judge a text written over 3,000 years ago by the cultural standards of the 21st-century West. And when you actually do that work, this text becomes one of the most remarkable moral documents in the ancient world rather than one of the most troubling.

There are three distinct restraints built into this law. First: don't act like a beast. If you want this woman, you cannot simply take her — you have to make her your legal, proper wife, under all the obligations that creates. Second: the thirty days of mourning in your own home, surrounded by your family, your grandmother, everyone watching — that will definitely cool down your desires. You have shaved her hair and cut her nails and taken away some of her immediate beauty; that alone will make a man think twice. Third: the text specifically says "after that you may go in to her and be her husband" — meaning you have already lived in the same house for thirty days without touching her. If you still want her after that, the only way you can have her is as a legal wife, under a Ketubah — a written contract of obligation, including a financial price you would owe her if you ever divorced her.

And if, after all that, you don't want her anymore? The Torah says you cannot sell her and cannot treat her brutally — you must release her as a free woman. She cannot be forced into slavery or concubinage. There is no law this gracious anywhere else in the ancient world, and not even in most of the world today.

What the Ancient World — and the Modern World — Actually Did

Compare this to what we know happened, and continues to happen, without any restraint at all. The Armenian massacre by the Turkish people saw one and a half million people massacred over a few weeks — tens of thousands of women, wives, and daughters raped in front of their fathers, children cut to pieces in front of their mothers. The Japanese in Korea and Manchuria during World War II organized "comfort houses" with girls who had not even passed puberty. Palestinian Arabs carried out massacres in Hebron on August 24, 1929. More recently, the Russian Army and the Wagner Group in Ukraine have engaged in indiscriminate public rape of women, with grandmothers gang-raped by multiple soldiers and mutilated in front of their own families. American soldiers in Vietnam and Russian soldiers in Ukraine have largely gone unpunished for such acts. Many countries still have not condemned Turkey or demanded reparations for the Armenian genocide more than a century later. And then we have October 7th with all its atrocities and all the things that happened in Syria in the past years.

There is even a strange historical footnote connected to mass rape in war: the reason Jewish identity today is determined by the mother rather than the father, as it was in biblical times, traces back to the 2nd century AD, when Roman legions mass-raped Jewish women after the fall of Jerusalem. Thousands of babies were born to those women. Had Jewish identity continued to be determined patrilineally, those children would not have been recognized as Jews at all — multiplying an already enormous tragedy.

Set against all of this, the Torah's restraint — given more than 3,000 years ago — stands miles above the most celebrated ancient legal codes: the Code of Hammurabi, the Twelve Tables, the Tang Code. None of them come close to commanding a soldier to control his passion, give a captive a month to grieve, and release her unharmed if he changes his mind. The Torah is not the problem here. As Paul writes:

The Torah does not create the impulse toward cruelty in war. It is the one ancient document that consistently restrains it.