Image from Life, Hope & Truth
[First posted in 2014, part of the series discussing the five books of Moses, chapter by chapter. —Admin1].
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Continuing the listing of do’s and don’ts of behavior toward God’s creation — man, beast and land — take notice of specific instructions regarding —
- giving the land time to replenish itself (vs. 11),
- and the beasts of burden rest from their labors (vs. 12)
- and the special regard for classes of people who are usually neglected—the poor and the ‘sojourner among you’.
The very fact that these are stressed in YHWH’s guidelines for living is evidence enough that then as it is now, there is the tendency to neglect or ignore the universal and practical value of ‘sabbaticals’ as well as the equal status of all individuals in the eyes of their Creator.
The New Testament teaches that the ” OT Law” is no longer operative because after Jesus’s sacrifice, it has been done away with and NT is all about ‘GRACE.’ It calls obedience to Torah as “legalism”, casting negative implications to obedience to law, and specifically God’s Law, and more specifically Law as given on Sinai in the retitled “Old” testament which was originally the TNK. What is the word for a situation where nobody minds the law because it is obsolete. . . “lawlessness”? Is that the right way to live?
Think about this as you continue reading through the 613 (the number of do’s and don’ts in Torah)— what is it in these rules that say they are anything but the GRACE of YHWH the Law-Giver? Is not YHWH full of GRACE, making sure that humans in community learn to treat each other graciously, with mutual respect, with regard for the other’s dignity whatever his stature is in life? He does not require this at the cost of selflessness or giving up one’s own rights to make room for the other; it is ultimately all about what is JUST, as well as what is RIGHT for all parties. Is that not GRACE?
Why would Christian teaching say we are under GRACE and not LAW? By the grace of Divine Providence, He gave laws to regulate every aspect of human life; without Torah encapsulated in the 10 Declarations, look at Torah-ignorant or Torah-disobedient humanity and its dismal behavioral track record!
What would have worked in the wilderness community should work in every society, then as now. These are universal and timeless teachings about interrelationships, a result of YHWH’s GRACE, who in His providence and wisdom, carefully and explicitly instructs all of humanity—- through this mixed multitude within Israel— what works best to the benefit of all.
Other-centeredness, that’s the greatest Torah instruction that every human should learn and apply. That’s grace and law! Instead of claiming “we are under grace, not law”, Christians should praise the God of Grace and Law, YHWH, for instructing all humanity how best to live with one another in His world.
YHWH’s TORAH is GRACE and LAW!
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[Translation: EF/Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses. Commentary are by S6K and from AST/ArtScroll Tanach.—Admin1]
Image from The Grace Life Blog
Exodus/Shemoth 23
1 You are not to take up an empty rumor.
1. You shall not bear a false rumor. This injunction begins a group of laws intended to enforce the concept of equality before the law and equity in social behavior, regardless of social standing or condition of enmity or amity. The prohibition on bearing false rumor is reminiscent in formulation of the third of the Ten Commandments, but instead of pertaining to solemn oaths, it addresses the capacity of ordinary speech to do harm.
Do not put your hand (in) with a guilty person, to become a witness for wrongdoing.You shall not put your hand with the guilty. The Hebrew idiom, here literally translated, transparently means to be in league with someone. This injunction stands in a relation of intensifying parallelism (a typical pattern in biblical poetry) with the immediately preceding one. Distortion of the truth is involved in both, but there is an intensification from rumor mongering to perjury.
2 You are not to go after many (people) to do evil.
2. You shall not follow the many for evil. The last word here could also be rendered “harm”. The most straightforward way to construe this verse is as an injunction to cling to one’s own sense of what is right despite the temptation to follow popular opinion, including when popular opinion is bent on the perversion of justice.
To go askew, to skew it in support of the many. The Hebrew, as the translation may suggest, seems a little awkward because “to go askew” (lintot) appears to be unnecessary and perhaps a little confusing when followed by the same verb in the causative form, lehatot, “to skew”. It is conceivable that the repetition was introduced to underline formally the notion of skewing or tilting justice, which every person is enjoined to avoid.
And you are not to testify in a quarrel so as to turn aside toward many-(and thus) turn away. 3 Even a poor-man you are not to respect as regards his quarrel. [AST: Do not glorify a destitute person in his grievance.]3. Nor a poor person shall you favor in his dispute. Throughout these laws, “dispute” (riv) refers to contention in a court of law. The principle of equality before the law requires the avoidance of any juridical “affirmative action”—one must give no preferential treatment in court either to the poor man because of his afflictions or to the rich man because of his power.
4 (Now) when you encounter your enemy’s ox or his donkey straying, return it, return it to him. 5 (And) when you see the donkey of one who hates you crouching under its burden, restrain from abandoning it to him- unbind, yes, unbind it together with him.
5.your adversary’s donkey sprawling under its load. This is the first, but by no means the only, expression of humanitarian concern for animals in the Torah. The suffering of the beast must take precedence over a person’s hostility toward the beast’s owner.
6 You are not to turn aside the rights of your needy as regards his quarrel.
6-9. Whereas verses 1-3 address the obligation of adherence to justice for all citizens, this related subgroup of injunctions is directed to judges.
6. You shall not skew the case of your indigent in his dispute. This formulation is the complement of verse 3. No one should grant preferential treatment to the poor man in justice, but here the judge is reminded that the poor should not be prejudicially mistreated in court. “Case”, mishpat, can also mean “justice”.
7 From a false matter, you are to keep far!
And (one) clear and innocent, do not kill, for I do not acquit a guilty-person.7. I will not acquit the guilty. The judge is implicitly thought of as a surrogate of God, obliged to enact only what is right, as God does.
[AST: Distance yourself from a false word; do not execute the innocent or the righteous, for I shall not exonerate the wicked.]
8 A bribe you are not to take, for a bribe blinds the open-eyed, and twists the words of the righteous.
8. blinds. . .perverts. The aphoristic parallelism sounds rather like the Book of Proverbs. The sighted. The Hebrew adjective designates both those who have the faculty of sight and, by metaphorical extension, those who are keen-sighted. As a kind of gloss on the term, a parallel law in Deuteronomy substitutes for “sighted” the explicit “wise” (the sense of the term in modern Hebrew).
9 A sojourner, you are not to oppress:
you yourselves know (well) the feelings of the sojourner, for sojourners were you in the land of Egypt.9. the sojourner’s heart. The Hebrew is nefesh, “life” “inner nature”, “essential being”, “breath”.
10 For six years you are to sow your land and to gather in its produce,11 but in the seventh, you are to let it go and to let it be,
11. let it go. The Hebrew verb shamat means “to release”, “to allow to slip out of one’s grip.” The noun derived from this verb, shemitah, is the general term for sabbatical year.
that the needy of your people may eat,
And your people’s indigent may eat of it. The motive for the sabbatical year is a partial redressing of social inequity, thus linking it with the immediately preceding laws. The ecological advantage of allowing fields to lie fallow is not mentioned.
and what they (allow to) remain, the wildlife of the field may eat. Do thus with your vineyard, with your olive-grove.
12. so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and your bondman and the sojourner catch their breath. Unlike the Decalogue, but entirely in keeping with the context of the present code of laws, the rationale for the Sabbath offered here is neither theological (God’s resting after creation) nor historical (the liberation from Egyptian slavery) but humanitarian. “Catch their breath” (wayinafesh)is represented in most translations as “be refreshed.” It is cognate with nefesh, most probably in the sense of “breath”, and is related to the verb nashaf, “to breathe hard or pant”. The idea of catching one’s breath is consonant with the representation in Job and elsewhere in the Bible of the laborer panting from his work and longing to draw a long breath of relief after labor.
12 For six days you are to make your labor, but on the seventh day, you are to cease, in order that your ox and your donkey may rest and the son of your handmaid and the sojourner may pause-for-breath. 13 In all that I say to you, take care! The name of other gods, you are not to mention, it is not to be heard in your mouth.13. And in all that I have said to you, you shall watch yourselves. This summarizing command reintroduces, in the next clause, the obligation of loyalty to the single God and thus serves as a transition from the group of laws bearing on justice and social equity to the laws of the pilgrim festivals, which are national, seasonal expressions of fealty to God.
14 Three times you are to hold pilgrimage for me, every year.
14. Three times. The word for “times” here, regalim, is diffirent from pe’amim, the word used at the beginning of verse 17. Both terms mean “foot”, the apparent connection with “time” being the counting of times with the tap of a foot.
15 The Pilgrimage-Festival of matzot you are to keep: for seven days you are to eat matzot, as I commanded you, at the appointed-time of the New-moon of Ripe-grain- for in it you went out of Egypt, and no one is to be seen before my presence empty-handed;15. appear in My presence. The original form of the Hebrew indicated “see My face [or presence],” but the Masoretes revocalized the verb as a passive, “to be seen” or “to appear”, in order to avoid what looked like excessive anthropomorphism.
16 and the Pilgrimage-festival of the Cutting, of the firstlings of your labor, of what you sow in the field; and the Pilgrimage-festival of Ingathering, at the going-out of the year, when you gather in your labor’s (harvest) from the field.16. Harvest…Ingathering. The Festival of Flatbread (“Passover” is not used here) would be in April. The harvest (Shavuoth) of first fruits would occur in late May or early June, and Ingathering (Succoth) the harvest of most later crops, in late September or early October.
17 At three points in the year are all your males to be seen before the presence of the Lord, YHVH. 18 You are not to slaughter my blood offering with anything fermented. The fat of my festive-offering is not to remain overnight, until morning.19. You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk. This famous prohibition would become the basis in rabbinic dietary regulations for the absolute separation of meat and dairy foods. Two different kinds of justification have been proposed for the prohibition. Maimonides and many after him suggest that the law is a response to a pagan cultic practice know to the ancients of eating a kid prepared in its mother’s milk. There is no clear-cut archaeological evidence of such a practice—Maimonides merely inferred it interpretively. One fragmentary mythological text in Ugaritic may in fact refer to this culinary item, though that reconstruction of the text has been disputed. The other approach, espoused by Abraham ibn Ezra (a little tentatively) and many others, is to explain the prohibition on humanitarian grounds. The sensitivity toward animals previously evinced in this group of laws gives some plausibility to the humanitarian possibility. Since no actual aggravation of the animals’ suffering is involved, the recoil from this commingling would be on the symbolic level; the mixture of the mother animal’s nurturing milk with the slaughtered flesh of her offspring, a promiscuous joining of life and death.
AST Notes:
- The commandment of the first fruits applies to the seven species for which the Land of Israel is known: wheat, barley, figs, grapes, pomegranates, olives, and dates. Because bikkurim symbolize the Jew’s devotion of the first fruits of his labors to the service of God, the trip to Jerusalem was celebrated in every town along the way with music and parades.
- The prohibition against cooking meat and milk applies to all ages and species of sheep (and cattle); Rabbinic law extended it to all kosher meat and fowl. the Torah mentions this prohibition three times, from which the Sages derive that there are three elements of the prohibition. It is forbidden to cook the mixture, to eat it, and even to benefit from it (Rashi).
- The concepts symbolized by these festivals—freedom, the seasons, and prosperity—are at the root of human existence and happiness. By celebrating them in Jerusalem at the resting place of God’s Presence and by bringing offerings to mark the occasions, we acknowledge Him as the Lord Who controls all aspects of life.
S6K: A new reader of TORAH once wrote us, exasperated with all these rules he could not understand: “what has this not boiling of a kid in its mother’s milk got to do with us today?”
Frankly, we’re clueless ourselves, except to connect it with compassion for a young animal being prepared for human food, to at least respect the mother of the kid by not using her milk. Still, it doesn’t make sense since neither the kid nor the mother goat is conscious of that artificial compassion, since the kid would be eaten after being cooked!
Vegans, vegetarians claim that aside from the health benefits of eating no meat, there is that conscious respect for life that we can never replicate, that only the Creator can give, including animal life; why indeed should an animal be slaughtered to satisfy human appetite for meat?
20 Here, I am sending a messenger before you to care for you on the way, to bring you to the place that I have prepared.
20. I am about to send messenger before you. Although modern rationalist commentators have sought to explain this as a metaphor for providential guidance, the frankly mythological terms of the preceding narrative—the pillars of cloud and fire, the Destroyer in Egypt—invite us to imagine the messenger as a fearsome agent of God, perhaps human in form like the divine messengers in Genesis, leading the people through the wilderness.
21 Take-you-care in his presence, and hearken to his voice, do not be rebellious against him, for he is not able to bear your transgressing, for my name is with him.21. he will not pardon your trespass, for My name is within him. The messenger is not only a guide for the Wilderness wanderings but an unblinking executor of divine surveillance. The mention of the divine name is the earliest of a scattering of biblical references to a quasi-mythological notion of God’s name as a potent agency in its own right. This idea would be elaborately developed in later Jewish mysticism.
AST: Behold! I send an angel before you to protect you on the way, and to bring you to the place that I have made ready. Beware of him—hearken to his voice, do not rebel against him, for he will not forgive your willful sin—for My Name is within him.
22 So then, hearken, hearken to his voice, and do all that I speak, and I will be-an-enemy to your enemies, and I will be-an-adversary to your adversaries.
22. I shall be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes. The perfect parallelism of this statement recalls the symmetry of a line of biblical poetry, and several verses in this concluding section of the Book of the Covenant approximate the formal balance and high solemnity of poetry.
23 When my messenger goes before you a nd brings you to the Amorite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, and the Canaanite, the Hivvite and the Yevusite, and I cause them to perish: 24 you are not to bow down to their gods, you are not to serve them, you are not to do according to what they do, but: you are to tear, yes, tear them down, and are to smash, yes, smash their standing-stones.24. tear them down. The verb here, haras, indicates that the object is the idols, not the idolators.Pillars. The reference is to cultic pillars, or steles.
S6K: “mal’ak” for “angel” or “messenger”, those created spirit beings who carry out divine errands; that would include the ‘adversary’ or ‘ha satan’ who, as we have repeatedly explained, is an obedient mal’ak carrying out his assigned adversarial role in connection with humankind. Notice the instructions to listen to the voice of this mal’ak, why? . . for My Name is in him..
25 You are to serve YHVH your God! and he will give-blessing to your food and your water; I will remove sickness from amongst you, 26 there will be no miscarrier or barren-one in your land, (and) the number of your days I will make full. 27 My terror I will send on before you, I will panic all the peoples among whom you come, I will give all your enemies to you by the neck.
27. turn tail. The Hebrew refers to the nape of the neck, which the fleeing enemy shows to his pursuer.
28 I will send Despair on before you so that it drives out the Hivvite, the Canaanite and the Hittite from before you.28. I shall send the hornet before you. There is some question about what is sent: the noun tsir’ahappears in the Bible only three times, all in the context of the conquest of Canaan. The strong consensus of later Hebrew tradition—there is some dissent—is that it refers to a noxious stinging insect. In that case, the word functions here as a collective noun (rather common biblical usage for animals) and refers to dense swarms of hornets. An alternative I would like to propose is that the root is related (with consonants reversed) to the verb ra’ats, “to smash”, and that this is a mythological rather than a zoological entity, the Smasher (or Smashing), which would be strictly parallel or equivalent to “My terror” at the beginning of verse 27.
29 I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wildlife of the field become-many against you.29. lest the land become desolate. The Hebrew writer, faced with the discomfiting report of the tradition available to him that the conquest of the land, underwritten by solemn divine promise, took more than two centuries, is driven to find some explanation for the delay. (The Book of Judges will propose three rather different explanations). The prospect sketched here of a suddenly depopulated land overrun by wild beasts and too big for the Hebrews seems intrinsically implausible, and it is hard to square the notion of Israel awaiting its own natural increase (“until you are fruitful”) with the figure offered earlier of 6000,000 adult males, which implied a total population of well over two million.
30 Little by little will I drive them out from before you, until you have borne-fruit and possessed the land. 31 And I will make your territory from the Sea of Reeds to the Sea of the Philistines,The Red Sea. In this context, this is the more plausible geographical reference of yam suf, rather than Sea of Reeds, which would probably be a marshland in northeastern Egypt.
from the Wilderness to the River. For I give into your hand the settled-folk of the land, that you may drive them
out from before you.
29. lest the land become desolate. The Hebrew writer, faced with the discomfiting report of the tradition available to him that the conquest of the land, underwritten by solemn divine promise, took more than two centuries, is driven to find some explanation for the delay. (The Book of Judges will propose three rather different explanations). The prospect sketched here of a suddenly depopulated land overrun by wild beasts and too big for the Hebrews seems intrinsically implausible, and it is hard to square the notion of Israel awaiting its own natural increase (“until you are fruitful”) with the figure offered earlier of 6000,000 adult males, which implied a total population of well over two million.
32 You are not to cut with them or with their gods any covenant,32. You shall not make a pact with them or with their gods. Ibn Ezra, with his keen eye for connections, relates the previous verse to this one: even though God will give Israel this vast expanse of territory (presumably, filled with subject peoples), the temptation of embracing the gods of the native population must be resisted.
33 they are not to stay in your land, lest they cause you to sin against me, indeed, you would serve their gods- indeed, that would be a snare to you.
For the relevance of the Sinai commandments to our world today, please read this excellent article by Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: The Politics of Revelation.
http://www.chiefrabbi.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Yitro-5773-v2.pdf