[If the maltreatment of prisoners and animals are perpetuated to this day such that international laws have been set up to prevent cruelty and ensure humane and kind treatment of humans and beasts, all the more similar laws were needed in days of antiquity when barbaric acts were the order of the day.     […]

[So this is where the New Testament verse comes from, about taking down from the cross the dead body of the crucified Jesus.     Read the last verses under: LAWS OF KINDNESS, THE EXPOSED CORPSE OF A CRIMINAL.  And yet John 19:38-42 adds a strange phrase “but secretly for fear of the Jews” . . […]

[In the past chapters, we heard from the God of Israel who instructs His chosen people how to worship, what to eat, how to weave cloths, even gives prohibition on transgender dressing, etc.; and now here are instructions regarding conquest of the Land or ‘laws of warfare’:  first offer ‘shalom’ and if the perceived enemy […]

[What does the command to establish a ‘city of refuge’ signify about the justice of the God of Israel?  That there is provision and even mercy for unintentional sin.  In fact, all the sacrifices at the Tabernacle/Temple were all for unintentional sin since, as we are taught, there is no sacrifice for intentional sin because […]

[Truthfully?  I’m a bit disappointed at reading the criterion for determining a true prophet from a false one:  A true prophet’s word eventually comes to pass while a false prophet’s doesn’t.  That’s plain common sense, not even a revelation.   What if the fulfillment does not happen within our lifetime but centuries, if not millennia […]

[Who better to be King than the King of kings, the Lord of lords, Creator and Master of the universe—YHWH Himself?  What better form of government than that which He instituted for His chosen people, a theocracy?   Who else but the predictable answer:  the true and only Divine King, Who leads and guides and directs […]

[Is this declaration possible?  Yes, only in a ideal Torah-centric society that focuses on other-centeredness, that gives special treatment for the disadvantaged in society: the widows and orphans, the stranger; which requires that original landowners be given back their land on Jubilee year and that debts be cancelled on sabbatical year.   Does such an […]

[Really . . . has a god of any religion ever prescribed the diet of his devotees? None but the One True God who is creator of every living thing, Who designed some to be fit for human consumption; yet even with such permitted animals, there is a ban on what part is not to […]

[In time and culture and religious practices, we are so far removed from the ‘idolatrous’ foreign nations being referred to in the Hebrew Scriptures: we don’t offer our children and young virgins at the altar of the gods of our creation or imagination, we do not indulge in the ‘abominations’ that Israel’s God YHWH wanted […]