Miscellaneous Laws
- Get ready. These ones are all over the place.
- First, help your neighbor's ox or donkey if it wanders away or falls into a ditch.
- Also, women shouldn't wear men's clothes and vice versa. This is probably a law because the worship of Ishtar, an ancient goddess of fertility, used cross-dressing in its rituals (source). The writers weren't as concerned with cross-dressing as with worshipping not-God.
- If you find a nest on the ground with eggs, you can eat the eggs—but not the mother bird.
- Put a protective barrier around your roof to prevent accidental death. Very good call.
- Next up: laws against mixing crops, plowing animals, and threads.
- And now for something completely different: put tassels your garments. Like this.
- If a man accuses a woman of not being a virgin when he married her, her father and mother must provide proof of her virginity. If proof is provided, then the man will be punished, pay a fine to the girl's father, and never be allowed to divorce her. If there is no proof, the woman shall be stoned for prostituting herself. Yowza.
- A man and a woman caught in adultery are to be killed.
- If man meets an engaged woman and sleeps with her, he must be stoned. Whether or not the woman is stoned depends on where the act occurred. If she was in the city, she will be stoned with him because she didn't cry for help. If she was in the country, she will live because she may have cried out, but no one may have heard her.
- Sounds specific, right? Well, this is a great example of the urban-rural divide in this text. The writers had to account for both situations because their power extended across urban and rural areas.
- A man who meets a woman who is not engaged and sleeps with her must give her father 50 shekels. They must marry, and he can never divorce her.
- A man should not marry his father's wife. Translation: you can't marry your stepmother after your father has died. Sounds self-explanatory today, but there were rules back then for a reason.