Deuteronomy 22:23-24 commands that a betrothed virgin who is raped/lies with a man in town, and the man, both be stoned to death, because 'she did not cry for help.'

This is genuinely one of the harder OT penal texts, and the honest first move is to read it in its immediate legal unit rather than in isolation. Deuteronomy 22:23-27 is a single casuistic (case-law) unit with two paired scenarios distinguished by location: in the town (vv. 23-24), where a cry for help could plausibly have been heard and rescue was possible, silence is treated as circumstantial evidence of consent within an evidentiary system that had no forensic investigative apparatus; in the open country (vv. 25-27), the law explicitly exonerates the woman completely — 'there was no one to rescue her,' and only the man is executed. The text's own logic is therefore not 'blame the victim for not resisting enough' in the abstract; it is an ANE casuistic evidentiary presumption keyed to opportunity for rescue, and it goes out of its way to build in an exception precisely for the coercion scenario the objection is worried about. Gordon Wenham and other commentators on Deuteronomy's legal form note this is standard casuistic (if-then) case law, not modern statute, and its function is public juridical, not purely moral instruction. That said, honesty requires conceding real difficulty: this remains a capital-punishment regime for consensual premarital sex within betrothal, applying a binary evidentiary test (audibility) that a modern legal system would rightly regard as inadequate, and unlike Deut 22:25-27's country case, town cases carry a real risk of misapplication against genuine victims who were silenced by fear or threat rather than absent. Comparative ANE law (Middle Assyrian Laws, Hammurabi's Code) shows Israel's law is not uniquely harsh and in several respects more protective of women than its neighbors, but 'less bad than Hammurabi' does not by itself dissolve the moral weight of the town-case provision.

Classical Christian theology (following the Westminster Confession 19.4 and Thomas Aquinas's treatment of the 'judicial precepts' of the Mosaic Law) has long distinguished the moral law (permanently binding, e.g. the Decalogue's principles) from the judicial/civil law given specifically to govern ancient Israel's theocratic nation-state, which 'expired together with the state of that people.' The underlying moral principle — the seriousness of sexual sin and the duty to protect the vulnerable — carries forward into the New Covenant; the specific penal sanction, tied to Israel's unique covenant polity, does not transfer as a universal mandate, which is exactly why the church has never sought to re-impose it.