“When you go out to war against your enemies, and Adonai your God hands them over to you, and you take prisoners, and you see among the prisoners a woman who looks good to you, and you feel attracted to her and want her as your wife; you are to bring her home to your house, where she will shave her head, cut her fingernails and remove her prison clothing. She will stay there in your house, mourning her father and mother for a full month; after which you may go in to have sexual relations with her and be her husband, and she will be your wife.-Deuteronomy 21:10-13
Let’s take a look at the procedures to be undertaken when a foreign woman is taken captive by an Israelite soldier who takes a liking to her during a holy war.
We are told she is to do the following:
-Shave her hair
-Cut her fingernails.
-Throw away the clothing she was captured in.
In addition, the Hebrew soldier is to take her into his home and allow her to mourn her parents for a full lunar month or 30 days.
What is the meaning behind all of these instructions?
The answer is simple.
These are the necessary steps she is to take in order to change her gentile identity to that of an Israelite.
In those days as it is today, the women in each culture had their own distinctive hairstyle, fashion sense, and the way they decorated their fingernails.
By discarding all of these things, she was cutting off all the symbolic ties of her old gentile life.
The same thing goes for the mourning of her mother and father.
Here’s the thing.
Her parents may or may not have been killed during the Holy War (although there is a good chance they probably were killed).
Either way, if she is going to be grafted into Israel, she has to forget her parents.
Once she becomes one with her new Hebrew husband and assumes her new Hebrew identity, she is to forever give up all her natural familial associations.
You think I’m joking?
I’m not.
This is Jewish HALACHAH which is based on the Laws of God.
Per HALACHAH, once a person converts from being a Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or whatever into being a full-fledged member of HASHEM’s Kingdom, they are no longer considered the son or daughter of their biological parents.
God knows that the former gentile who was grafted in came from the womb of a heathen parent.
Yet it doesn’t matter.
This also has many serious implications on a practical level.
Per HALACHAH, this means a Jewish man or woman is prohibited from living with a gentile woman or man under the same roof even if that woman happens to be his biological mother.
“But it’s his mother!” you protest.
No she’s not is what I’m saying.
Per God’s Law, she is no longer his mother (if she’s a gentile) and his father is no longer his father.
However, if one’s former mother or father gets sick or needs help especially as they get older, I’m not saying this means you’re not allowed to take care of them or help them out.
I’m just telling you what HALACHAH says on the matter.
And if you think this is just some Old Testament or Jewish traditional teaching, think again.
The New Testament (which is a Hebrew book) echoes a similar notion.
Check out these verses:
“Yeshua said, ‘Yes! I tell you that there is no one who has left house, brothers, sisters, mother, father, children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the Good News, who will not receive a hundred times over, now, in the ‘olam hazeh, homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and lands — with persecutions! — and in the ‘olam haba, eternal life.'”-Mark 10:29-30
Or
“If anyone comes to me, and doesn’t hate his own father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he can’t be my disciple.”-Luke 14:26
Heck, forget the New Testament, we also have the same notion echoed in Genesis, the first book of the Torah where we’re told that a man and a woman are to leave behind their main identity as being a part of their parents’ household…
…and create a new identity as a married couple by cleaving to one another and becoming one flesh.
In a sense, what we’re being presented with here in Deuteronomy is similar to the process of being born again.
Here in Deuteronomy, a prisoner woman says goodbye to her gentile identity and her original Canaanite family for a new Hebrew identity and family.
Likewise, in the New Testament, Yeshua is saying leave behind your old identity and your old life and be born again as a member of the Kingdom of God.
CONNECTING THIS TEACHING TO THE NEW TESTAMENT
“Therefore, remember your former state:
you Gentiles by birth
— called the Uncircumcised by those who,
merely because of an operation on their flesh,
are called the Circumcised —
at that time had no Messiah.
You were estranged from the national life of Israel.
You were foreigners to the covenants
embodying God’s promise.
You were in this world without hope
and without God.
But now, you who were once far off
have been brought near through
the shedding of the Messiah’s blood.
For he himself is our shalom
— he has made us both one and
has broken down the m’chitzah
which divided us by destroying in his own body
the enmity occasioned by the Torah,
with its commands set forth in the form of ordinances.
He did this in order to create in union
with himself from the two groups
a single new humanity and thus make shalom,
and in order to reconcile to God both
in a single body by being executed on
a stake as a criminal
and thus in himself killing that enmity.”
-Ephesians 2:11-16
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