Show Her No Pity

Use Them and Lose Them, Ladies!

Women had it hard in Biblical times. Even an act of self-defense (or should I say other-self-defense) came with a hard punishment. An eye for an eye. If you’re a man. If you’re a lady, well, you might just lose a hand for getting a little too grabby.

In Deuteronomy 25:11 and 25:12, the punishment for grabbing a man’s junk is outlined.

11 If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts.

12 You shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.

Grabbing a man’s junk for the hell of it. Bad form. Sure. But cutting a hand off for that seems, well, a bit much. Never mind losing a hand in defense of your man.

Just a guess here, but this may be a case of altered value systems. In the old, old days, a man’s junk was his life force. Hell (excuse the word), men in Biblical times used to swear oaths on their groin. Damaging a man’s pride was probably seen as depriving him of his manhood (in essence, killing him, for all intents and purposes). Any woman who did that was, so the theory goes, his murderer. Looking at it that way, the loss of a mere hand might be seen as lenient.

This begs the question: How did such a Biblical law ever come to pass? Was it common for a woman to manhandle her husband’s attacker or did one particularly flagrant offender bring this law into being? To that feisty lady, all I can say is–you go, girl!

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