Laws of the Israelites

[kaufmannphillips]

This is the "Judaism" forum - I'll go ahead and point out that if Moses and Jesus are in disagreement, Moses could be the one who's right.

[psimmond]

I’ve always believed they were all from God, but there are some that I just can’t see God saying because they seem to clash so violently with Jesus’ teaching. For example…

There’s a law that tells what you can do with a guy’s daughter after he sells her to you as a slave.

There’s a law that lays out conditions for how to treat multiple wives.

There’s a law that says beating your male or female slave is not punishable as long as said slave can get to their feet in one or two days.

There’s a law that says a person who curses their father or mother must be put to death.

If a wife tries to help her husband who is being beat up by grabbing the testicles of the attacker, the wife’s hand must be cut off.

If a husband thinks his wife has been unfaithful, he is to take her to the priest. The priest will mix dust from the floor with holy water and then the woman must take an oath with a sworn curse. After that she must drink the water. If she truly was unfaithful, she will suffer terrible consequences.

If your brother, son, daughter, wife or close friend tries to secretly get you to worship another god, you are to kill them (all the others will help but you are to strike the first blow).

The usual explanation is that God gave the Hebrew people laws that were meant to regulate existing customs and behaviors and we should not view them as characteristic of God’s moral will. And this may be true, but I see two problems with this view:

1. Yahweh doesn’t come across as one who is interested in regulating sinful behavior.
2. When the Pharisees pointed out to Jesus that Moses permitted a man to divorce his wife if he found something offensive in her, Jesus’ response was quite interesting. He said that going all the way back to the garden of Eden it was not that way and it should not be permitted (unless one’s partner is unfaithful). Then Jesus said that Moses permitted it to appease hard-hearted people (Mat 19:3-12).

Now maybe saying “Moses permitted you to divorce…” was synonymous with “God permitted you to divorce…” but it seems like Jesus is disagreeing with Moses and reaffirming God’s hatred of divorce.

[mattrose]

I noticed on twitter today that Greg Boyd said he just completed the manuscript for his long-awaited book "The Crucifixion of the Warrior God." The glimpses of his position that I have observed over the last few years leads me to believe he's attempting a fairly fresh/radical hermeneutic method for understanding difficult Old Testament texts. The jist of it seems to be that Jesus, as the fullest revelation of God, proves that God has always been incarnational in the sense of accommodating the fallenness of humanity, meeting them where they are, and helping them to move forward. Boyd would say, I think, that God was even willing to appear ugly in order to develop relationship with humanity. Obviously I haven't read the book yet, but I look forward to doing so (though it'll probably take a while).

[psimmond]

mattrose: I'll have to keep my eye out for that book. And that seems like the best explanation if you don't want to entertain the idea that maybe everything attributed to God in the OT wasn't actually from God. It's certainly less controversial.

In some ways that's a beautiful sentiment to say that God was willing to appear ugly in order to develop a relationship with humanity, but on the other hand it seems almost cruel. For thousands of years God's commands defined morality and God's character. For thousands of years slavery, misogyny, polygamy, and a legal system that left little room for compassion and mercy could fit within a godly, holy, and righteous life.

It's just really hard for me to accept that an omniscient, personal, righteous and jealous God would desire this kind of harmful ambiguity.

[Paidion]

Good observations, Psimmond.
(Oops. You must have posted just before I made this post. I was referrring to your previous post. But the one above is good, too.)

[robbyyoung]

I’ve always believed they were all from God, but there are some that I just can’t see God saying because they seem to clash so violently with Jesus’ teaching. For example…

Hi psimmond,

Well I think you will be correct if you keep on believing they were all from God. There is good reason for doing so, because, the alternative is unthinkable. I would first like to point out that there isn't two sets of Sinai Law, One from God, another from Moses. Clarity shows that "The Law" is compromised of:

1. His charge
2. His statutes
3. His ordinances
4. His commandments

There is no dichotomy "In The Law of Moses". The Law of Moses is a patriarchal title, an alternate meaning ascribing what was authored by God:

Luke 24:44 Now He said to them, "These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled."

Deut 11:1 "You shall therefore love the LORD your God, and always keep His charge, His statutes, His ordinances, and His commandments.

Therefore, the Matthew 19:7-8 account isn't in actuality "Moses Command" but God's. If you insist that Moses, himself alone, was the author of certain 'charges, statutes, ordinances, and commandments', then he is guilty of lying. No where in the biblical record do we see this gross misrepresentation of God by Moses. Furthermore, God punished Moses severely for striking 'The Rock', and even sought to KILL HIM for not circumcising his son, it strains credulity to believe Moses lied about certain "Laws", being authored by God, and God just let's him get away with it? There is not even one mention of this grievous sin against God, anywhere on Moses' account?

IMHO, I think this is a little unreasonable.

God Bless.

[psimmond]

robbyyoung,
I don't see where any of the scripture you gave rules out the possibility that Moses created some of the laws. Is there a verse somewhere that says every single law was from God?

Did Moses ever lie? I would say Jesus was the only human who never lied. But this isn't the only possibility. We know that Moses did not write all of the Torah, so if the writer thought these laws came from God and wrote that, we can't automatically say Moses did this. As I said in my post above, I find it much more troubling to say a righteous God gave these commands (see examples in my last post) or later in the OT commanded all babies to be run through with a sword in the Canaan conquest (but the soldiers could keep the pretty virgins for themselves).

[robbyyoung]

robbyyoung,
Is there a verse somewhere that says every single law was from God?

Now what difference would that make to you? If I showed you a 1000 verses you would reject all of them because you refuse to accept a God that troubles you. YOU now hold the key to what's acceptable behavior from God and can reject what YOU believe to be uninspired vs. inspired. Well how do you know what's inspired? Maybe the so-called inspired testimony is a BIG FAT LIE.

This is why God gave prophets to set the record straight. No confusion, either you believed the words or not. We 21st Century folks are dealt historical data, no prophets are coming to set the record straight. Therefore, be a great historian and greek scholar, because you are going to need it, or at the very least, you better be a good researcher.

Question everything? I don't necessarily disagree with you.

God Bless.

[psimmond]

robbyyoung wrote: Now what difference would that make to you? If I showed you a 1000 verses you would reject all of them because you refuse to accept a God that troubles you. YOU now hold the key to what's acceptable behavior from God and can reject what YOU believe to be uninspired vs. inspired. Well how do you know what's inspired? Maybe the so-called inspired testimony is a BIG FAT LIE.

I don't refuse to accept a God who troubles me, but I love God too much to ascribe hateful and immoral commands to him just because a writer/s did so thousands of years ago. I'm not convinced Jesus believed they all came from God, which is why he was able to replace some of them with better laws.

Maybe "inspiration" is not a lie but it doesn't mean what many Christians think it means. I often think writers of scripture might be shocked if they knew that we equated their words with God's words. I'm not saying God has never spoken and been accurately recorded in the pages of scripture. I'm simply suggesting that it may be that we need to use discernment to reject claims that our contrary to what God in the flesh taught.

I'm still trying to figure this out, but I'm not sure it's as simple as accept that God has a dark side and sometimes acts in ways that violate the moral code he has given us or be a heretic...

[Paidion]

If you insist that Moses, himself alone, was the author of certain 'charges, statutes, ordinances, and commandments', then he is guilty of lying.

Robby, how do you conclude from this that Moses was lying? A lie is deliberate deception. If Moses WROTE that God gave particular commands, because He THOUGHT that God had implanted these command into his mind, but was mistaken, he was not lying. I know some people today will say, "I lied" when they have merely uttered a falsehood that they THOUGHT was true. That is not lying.

lie; to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive (from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

I think Moses made some untrue statements when he wrote that God gave certain laws and commandment, but he did not intend to deceive, and so he did not lie.

If I showed you a 1000 verses you would reject all of them because you refuse to accept a God that troubles you. YOU now hold the key to what's acceptable behavior from God and can reject what YOU believe to be uninspired vs. inspired. Well how do you know what's inspired? Maybe the so-called inspired testimony is a BIG FAT LIE.

Robby, how do you know what's inspired? How do you know which books are inspired? Are Paul's letters inspired? Yes? I agree that they are. But that doesn't mean that every sentence he wrote was true. Clement was Paul's fellow worker in spreading the gospel. He wrote a powerful letter to the Corinthian church shortly after Paul and Peter's death. Was that inspired? It was widely read in the meetings of the early church along with the letters of Paul and Peter, even over two hundred years later. Eusebius, the church historian who was an overseer in Caesarea in 314, after having identified Clement as the friend of Paul, wrote concerning concening Clement's letter, "There is one acknowledged letter, great and admirable, which he wrote in the name of the Church of Rome to the Church at Corinth, sedition having then arisen in the latter church. We are aware that this letter has been publicly read in very many churches both in old times, and also in our own day." So why do you not accept Clement's letter as inspired? Is it only because the Catholics who defined "the New Testament Canon" many years later, did not include it in their list?

Inspired writings are not necessarily without error. For example, Jude made it to the Catholic canon, and so it's also included in the Protestant one. Thus it is considered to be inspired. Yet Jude was in error in thinking that the Book of Enoch was written by the historic Enoch, "the seventh from Adam" as he called him.

This is why God gave prophets to set the record straight.

According to the Old Testament, God also put a lying spirit in the mouth of some prophets:

1 Kings 13:18 He said to him, "I too am a prophet as you are, and an angel spoke to me by the word of the LORD, saying, ‘Bring him back with you to your house, that he may eat bread and drink water.’" (He was lying to him.)
1 Kings 22:22 "The LORD said to him, ‘In what way?’ So he said, ‘I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ And the LORD said, ‘You shall persuade him, and also prevail. Go out and do so.’
1 Kings 22:23 "Therefore look! The LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these prophets of yours, and the LORD has declared disaster against you."
2 Chronicles 18:21 "So he said, ‘I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ And the LORD said, ‘You shall persuade him and also prevail; go out and do so.’
2 Chronicles 18:22 "Therefore look! The LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of these prophets of yours, and the LORD has declared disaster against you."