What Kind of People did Moses Have in Mind

We are reading the laws right now and I have slipped into a bit of literary exercise. I am reading them just like you read a science fiction novel, where you are supposed to be deducing bits and pieces about the environment and culture from what people say.

Specifically, I have been thinking about what kind of person Moses seems to have in mind–who is the target of his laws–who is the ‘you’?

Oddly enough the picture I am getting is the Scottish Highlands.  Maybe Albania or the old English-Scotch border with its micro-clans and hundreds of hill forts.  The picture I have is that Moses is addressing patriarchs, these small-scale Big Men, leaders of large households, gentry.  Those are the ‘you.’  Are they the same as the ‘elders’?  I don’t know, but probably.  The elders maybe are the older portion of that group.  And I get the impression that Moses identifies with them.  These are the ‘you’ whom he is addressing, but they are also, for him, ‘us.’

So these laws have a certain baseline of unquestioned racismsexismclassismethnochauvinismbossism by our standards.  I knew that going in.  What is surprising to me is the overall picture of these people though.  Moses seems to think that they are fundamentally quite decent.  As a lawyer, I am reading these laws and seeing  huge holes that could be manipulated easily by someone with ill intent.  So that doesn’t seem to be on Moses’ radar at all.  He isn’t envisioning a low trust society where people try to manipulate the rules generally, his mind just doesn’t work that way.  His background assumption seems to be that of course people are trying to follow the rules and if some odd person was deliberately phariseeing them they would face immense social pressure–  It Just Isn’t Done.  This is not a low-trust society.  So you have rules that seem more like the rules at a Country Club than they do the formal universal laws we are used to.

We think of the Law of Moses as being the rules for a fundamentally wicked and nasty people, but they aren’t that, they would be a dead letter immediately if that is who the Israelites were.

But on the other hand, despite Moses thinking they are fundamentally decent, they also seem to have feuds and fall into violent hot rages and violent hot lusts frequently.

I am doing some reading on the Borderers in Britain and the Scots-Irish in the US right now and perhaps this is coloring my view, but the two groups seem very very similar.  I don’t think its a coincidence that the frontier religion was known for its Old Testament quality.

The tragedy of the Old Testament, if you want to call it that, is that over time what we are seeing is people trying to rules-lawyer a Good Ol’ Boys personal code into a thicket of minute regulations for a settled agricultural society with a corrupt elite.