Such things are in the same category as Moses' allowance for divorce, which, as Jesus says, Moses permitted "because of their hardness of heart."
This can be seen all through the Old Testament, whose precepts are always gradual and partial, always needing correction from the New.
The Hebrew Scriptures often miserably demoralized and scandalized me, when I was reading them in a fundamentalist way, with an essentially static, ahistorical point of view.
But this was an error. Isolating single verses or even chapters is like snipping single frames out of a film: you can't see whether a guy is just inclining casually aslant, or if he's exerting himself as hard as he can against the countervailing winds of Superstorm Sandy.
The Hebrews in Deuteronomy, so lately slaves living the most debased sort of existence in the forced-labor camps of Egypt, are being nudged--- barbarian people -- over a course of lifetimes and centuries, towards a gradual but splendid culmination: the revelation of the Son of God.
Here's how St. Paul, the mentor of St. Timothy, warns this half-Jewish half-Greek disciple against misinterpreting Scripture:
(1 Tim 1)
The end at which our warning aims,
is charity, based on purity of heart,
on a good conscience and a sincere faith.There are some who have missed this mark,
branching off into vain speculations,
who now claim to be expounding 'the law',
without understanding the meaning of their own words,
or the subject on which they pronounce so positively.The law?
It is an excellent thing,
where it is applied legitimately;
but it must be remembered that
the law is not meant for those who live innocent lives.It is meant for the lawless and the refractory;
for the godless and the sinner,
the unholy and the profane;
for those who lay violent hands on father or mother,
for murderers,
for those who commit fornication or sin against nature,
the slave-dealer, the liar, the perjurer.All this and much else
is the very opposite of the sound doctrine,
contained in the gospel I have been entrusted with,
that tells us of the blessed God and his glory.
In other words, these commands and laws were meant to restrain, in stages and by degrees, the evils which were absolutely endemic in barbarian societies. They were used to slave-dealing, fornication, murder. If men were used to torture traitors to death, the command would be to kill, not torture; if they were used to maim a thieving slave by amputation,the command would be to flog but not maim. A captive woman might become a wife, but not a chattel; if this should prove unsatisfactory, the man can free her but not sell her.
Anyone will have major comprehension problems if he pries the Bible apart from the Church. because the Bible is not a manual of systematic morality. It is often not moral, and systematic? -- not even close. No one can read it intelligibly outside of the "Principle of the Whole" (=cata holos,, i.e., its Catholicity) by which the Scripture is rightly interpreted by the whole of Revelation, which is not a "what" but a "who": Jesus Christ Our Lord.
Law is not a magic spell, a formula of words which always "works". In each instance, one must carefully discern its voice, magnitude and direction. Law is not a point, it's a vector, a directed line segment, pointed, aimed at a goal. To read it intelligently, read it as directional, as in motion, as in the Church, God's arrow though time.
Mrs. Don-o, your entire justification rests on the foundation that changes to moral behaviour must be gradual, in stages, each stage generations and thousands of years apart, critically relying on the assumption that sudden, radical change is impossible.
What reasons have you accepted to convince yourself that such a scheme is the only way?