Whoa - 4 pages already.
Did I win my bet?
Depends on how fair your friend is. You should have been more specific in the terms of your bet.
Is capital punishment OK in the US? It’s certainly not OK to do it to just anybody; we only do it to people convicted of serious crimes. And there have been times when it was banned nationally, and there are states that don’t do it now. But I think a fair-minded foreigner would say yes, capital punishment is OK in the US, they elected a President who had presided over 150+ executions as governor, and was proud of it. The fact that it is not practiced in all times, places, and circumstances doesn’t change that.
There are posters in this thread who think that the fact that baby killing was not condoned in all times, places, and circumstances in the Hebrew Bible outweighs the fact that it was not just condoned, but commanded, and not just by one crazy king, but in the eternal Law of Moses, under circumstances that were operative for centuries.
I disagree with those posters. And while rape is not explicitly commanded, “keep the virgins alive for yourselves” is pretty suggestive. There’s also the fact that every law mentioning rape seems designed to protect the father, husband, or fiance rather than the woman, and indeed rape is codified in the Law of Moses as a form of courtship.
Let your friend read the thread, and then it’s up to him.
Here is a good example. The City of Anaheim has a law prohibiting fireworks at any location more than once a week. Disneyland of course has fireworks every night. Disney happily pays the trivial to it fine every week (I assume they prepay to make life simple) and has their fireworks. Clearly the fine is a cost of doing business for them.
Such is the Biblical fine. Which the guy only pays once.
Suuure,:rolleyes: because a half-kilo of silver to a poor goat herder is like a few hundred dollars to a multi-billion dollar corporation. :rolleyes:In any case, Dl has a permit, they do their fireworks perfectly legally.
http://ocdisneyblog.com/2013/03/17/are-disneylands-fireworks-worth-the-noise-and-nuisance/
Oh, so it’s half a kilo? Great, then since precious metals are supposedly inflation-proof, we can get its value in today’s dollars. About $240. So if anything, I overestimated when I said a few hundred bucks. And up to about 2004, I was dead on when I compared it to my $125 greens fee. In any case, hardly a ruinous sum.
And it’s the same price for a rich merchant as for a poor goat farmer. I was going to make a stupid crack about the goat farmer not needing to rape anyone because he had free access to all the sex he wanted, but then I realized that bestiality, unlike rape, is strongly prohibited in the Hebrew Bible. Three different books — Deut says you are cursed if you do it, and I’ve always thought that the curse of the gods is worse than mere execution. Both Exodus and Leviticus settle for the more prosaic death penalty.
That depends on the answer to a question several people have asked, and you have yet to answer. What do you and your friend mean by “ok”, and do you both agree?
Is it OK to kill someone in the US? Self defense is legal, but murder is not. If ‘ok’ in terms of your bet means sometimes allowed, but not always, then the answer is yes. If ‘ok’ means always allowed, then the answer is no.
But precious metals really arent comparable. A worker would get paid about a shekel a month, so it’s *50 months pay.
*
I found it difficult to believe that the fee paid to the priests to redeem your firstborn is five month’s pay, which really would be ruinous to a young couple, so I googled shekels in the Torah, and found this:
"Some have a tradition to give the value of an ancient half shekel before Purim in addition to the three half dollars that are given as a memory of the mitzvah of the half Shekel.[13] This is approximately 8.1 grams of silver. In today’s market, this would equal approximately nine dollars…
“If one sinned and wishes receive atonement by redeeming the number of fasts that it proscribed for that sin, one should redeem each fast for 12 peshitim which is the value of 13.6 grams of silver.[17] This is considered the amount one would spend on food on an average day. In today’s market, this would equal $15.07.”
So if half a shekel was 8.1 grams, and a day’s food cost 13.6 grams, then 50 shekels was about two month’s worth of food (for one), not 50 month’s wages.
I have no expertise in ancient Hebrew finance, and I don’t want to do dueling citations, so I’ll let it drop there. In a previous post, I noted that the same chapter that has the 50-shekel fine has several other verses that range from unsympathetic to hostile toward rape victims, so I really don’t know why it is so important to you to maintain that 50 shekels was a ruinous fine, but I don’t care any more. The OP’s bet IMO is won by the treatment of captive women, and the shabby treatment given to raped Israelite virgins is just an interesting side issue.