This page was originally written 23 July 2017.
A single witness shall not arise against any man for any offense, or any sin, whatever kind of sin he commits. Upon the testimony of two witnessess, or upon the testimony of three witnesses, a case may be established.
If a false witness arises against any man to give false testimony against him, then the two men who have a dispute will stand in front of Yahweh, in front of the priests and the judges whom there will be in those days. The judges will make a diligent inquiry, and if it should be the case that the witness is a false witness, giving false testimony against his brother, then you will do to him as he intended to do to his brother. You must put away the evil from among you.
Then those who are left will hear, and be afraid, and will no longer commit any such evil among you. Your eye must not pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
(Deuteronomy 19:15-21).
It would be easy to imagine that the Hebrew ”ish” is only there as a generic masculine, of a sort that is dying out in English, and that a really accurate way to render the intent of these laws in English is to use gender-neutral language. And several translations do. Deuteronomy 19:15a (NIV), “One witness is not enough to convict anyone accused of any crime or offense they may have committed.” (NLT) “You must not convict anyone of a crime on the testimony of only one witness.” (ESV) “A single witness shall not suffice against a person for any crime or for any wrong in connection with any offense that he has committed.” (Holman), “One witness cannot establish any wrongdoing or sin against a person, whatever that person has done.” (NET) “A single witness may not testify against another person for any trespass or sin that he commits.”
I would submit that the language doesn’t just reflect a language with different gender conventions, but that it also reflects a legal system with different standards of justice for men and women. To translate Deuteronomy 19:15-21 in a gender-neutral way distorts the meaning of Deuteronomy’s conception of justice. Deuteronomy explicitly uses the word ”ish”, man in Deuteronomy 19’s description of protections in the justice system against false accusation. A nearby law referring specifically to women shows that they did not enjoy these protections.
To recap: to convict (a man) of any sort of accusation requires not just one, but two or three witnesses. And if someone is found to bring a false accusation, the “eye for eye” principle applies — the perjurer is given whatever punishment he would have exposed the innocent man to.
Here’s Deuteronomy 22:13-21.
Suppose a man takes a wife, and has relations with her, and hates her, and brings an accusation of shameful deeds against her, and damages her reputation, and says, “I took this woman, and when I was with her I discovered that she was not a virgin.”
Then the father of the young woman, and her mother, will take and present the evidences of the young woman’s virginity to the city elders at the gate. And the young woman’s father will say to the elders, “I gave my daughter to this man as a wife, and he hates her. And now he has accused her of shameful deeds. But here are the evidences of my daughters virginity.” Then they will spread the cloth before the elders of the city. Then the elders of that city will take the man and flog him, and fine him one hundred shekels of silver and give them to the young woman’s father, because he damaged the reputation of an Israelite virgin. She will be his wife, and he is never permitted to divorce her.
But if the accusation is true, and evidences of the young woman’s virginity are not found, then they will bring the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city will stone her with stones until she dies, because she has behaved recklessly in Israel, whoring in her father’s house. You must put away the evil from among you.
To convict a woman of having sex prior to marriage, you don’t need two witnesses. You don’t even need one witness. In fact, if a man goes about spreading a rumor about his wife’s chastity, the burden is on the girl’s parents to prove that she didn’t lose her virginity prior to marriage. If the parents do not have possession of the appropriate bloody cloth, she is to be killed by the community. Or, more accurately, by the men of her city.
Note also that the penalty for a false accusation is not proportional. If the accusation is upheld by the law, then the wife gets death by stoning. If the husband is lying, he only gets a monetary fine and a flogging. If he had, instead, accused a man of a capital crime and been found to have perjured himself, he would have been killed. There is also the additional detail that the woman is married to him for life even after he accused her falsely of a capital crime, and despite the fact that he hates her. There is no provision in biblical law for a woman to divorce her husband under any circumstance, while a man was allowed to divorce a woman.
This isn’t, by the way, some isolated outlier in biblical law. The same assumption of female guilt occurs later in Deuteronomy 22 when it comes to rape victims in cities — as far as biblical law exists, all sex discovered within cities is assumed consensual, and a married woman who is raped and does not scream in a city is to be put to death.
Men are protected not just from mere suspicion, but also from being convicted on the basis of a single witness. It is only women, according to biblical law, who have to prove their innocence. Translations shouldn’t whitewash this.