Without wanting to sound tired and make people bored, can I just say how inexpressibly thankful I am that society does not follow Old Testament laws as a model for how 21st-century Canada should run?
That may sound overly broad, but I have never been more convicted in that statement than I am today. Yes, there are many laws in the OT that would greatly benefit people in this day and age (regular forgiveness of debts, obligatory help for the underprivileged, respecting the property of those around you, not murdering each other, etc)... Then there's this one:
28 "If a man finds a girl who is a virgin, who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her and they are discovered, 29 then the man who lay with her shall give to the girl's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall become his wife because he has violated her; he cannot divorce her all his days.
Wait. What?!
Well, at least this kind of thing clearly couldn't possibly be something that would be enforced in this century, on this planet, in these times.
Think again.
But, say the people who are still in favour of tearing down the separation of church and state and instituting a much more "Christian conservative" legal framework (I'm looking at you, No-Abortions-For-Anybody and Divorce-Should-Be-Illegal), this happened in a Muslim country, operating under laws that were culturally inspired by Islam...
Yup, and yet here we are, having read the exact, foundational edict for that law, right in the Old Testament.
If the Moors had been beaten back out of Morocco when they were beaten back out of Spain, but culture there had progressed in a similarly traditional and fundamentalist way, this law could still very easily exist, and would have a "Christian" traditionalist judge as its advocate. Everything about that sucks.
Reading the Old Testament is hard, and it's not just because reading is hard, and reading older things tends to be even harder. The real difficulty I'm seeing in going through the Old Testament is the roller coaster of emotion that it takes you on.
Directly before this nauseating portion of scripture is a collection of sundry laws that swing wildly from appearing utterly common-sense and laudable to seeming completely arbitrary and meaningless.
Two examples of each:
Cool:
- If you find something that belongs to someone else, either return it or keep it safe until they come and get it (22:1-3)
- Put a guardrail or something on your roof so that nobody falls off (22:8)
What?:
- Absolutely no blended fabrics (22:11)
- Everything's got to have tassles (22:12) {but no girly clothes on men (22:5)}
Now, there may well be reason for those, or may have been at the time, that made them sensible things, but my main point is that reading through the laws of the Old Testament flies right in the face of blanket interpretations (ADOPT ALL THE LAWS! Wait...these are not so good).
Subtlety and nuance are hard.
I've always wondered about the blended fabrics, myself. Pork, I get, it was a perilous meat. The rape-divorce laws make sense in the context of the time. But where's the harm in a nice wool-linen smock?
ReplyDeletehttp://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/03/14/200577.html
ReplyDelete"Moroccan girl commits suicide after being forced to marry her rapist"
It's obviously sad for a number of reasons, one being that some people believe that societal, cultural and judicial evolution is impossible, another being we think this kind of behavior couldn't happen in our backyard. Banning abortion and birth control is a few short steps from forcing women to marry their rapists- AGAIN.