Five scholars answer the same question here. The Bible records a woman pushed out to a mob, a father who vows a burnt offering and is met at his door by his daughter, a command to leave nothing alive that breathes, and a law that seems to hand a violated young woman to the man who took her. What is a faithful reader supposed to do with it?
Their shared answer is a method. Read the whole passage in its own world, and keep apart what the text reports, what a law regulates and what God approves. Their disagreements show up when the method is applied to particular passages, and those disagreements can be traced to specific evidence.
The voices are:
