Deuteronomy without Apologies
I decided to read all of Deuteronomy. I’m sorry.
Some of the good bits.
- Nowadays the canonical thing to do if your child, say, goes off the rails and decides to get married at a black mass is to attend the thing to show them that you love them, and only pretend to mouth the parts where they chant hail, Satan.
If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers;
…. thou shalt surely kill him
That’s a little different.
- Deuteronomy 14:23, a passage making it sound like people were supposed to pay their tithing to themselves. Huh? For a big feast? The idea of mandating that people use part of their surplus for a party is pretty cool, but I must be reading it wrong.
And thou shalt eat before the Lord thy God, in the place which he shall choose to place his name there, the tithe of thy corn, of thy wine, and of thine oil, and the firstlings of thy herds and of thy flocks; that thou mayest learn to fear the Lord thy God always.
Some of the rest is really hard to understand. It’s ok just not to know. It’s really tempting to just say, ‘that doesn’t make sense, the OT must not be inspired.” Its easy to make fun of the Marcionists but there is a real problem there and the Marcionists were at least willing to grasp the nettle. Sometimes though you can grow by trying to understand how it might be that the tender God you know may have also been the God of the Old Testament.
- You can marry a captive woman if you cut off her hair and trim her nails
- If you find a murder victim in a field and can’t find the murderer, sacrifice a heifer there to turn away God’s wrath (this one makes some sense ot me, actually. If you can’t find the murderer, you need some kind of response to the murder)
- Virginity is the best (OK, not impossibly foreign to us there)
- Don’t crossdress (bizarre, how would such things even occur to someone)
- You can’t remarry your divorced spouse if they had remarried someone else in the interim even though they were divorced again or widowed
- My personal favorite. A woman can join in a brawl to help her husband. And she can squeeze a guy by the privates (apparently). but not both at the same time.
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | No Tag
seriouslypleasedropit
October 21, 2022
Moses endorsed by Jesus, so Deut is alright by me.
Lot be said for witnesses testifying of each other.
Zen
October 21, 2022
I really suspect some of these are Moses just trying to give the people training wheels to spirituality.
For instance, the commandment to not poop in the middle of camp. Seriously? Do I have to make a commandment about everything?
Maybe sometimes, it is just a matter of setting a line somewhere, but the exact place to put the line isn’t the most relevant part. For instance, I bet we could have just as easily been told, in our day, to only have two piercings in ears, and not just one. The point is stopping before you are desecrating your body.
Vader
October 22, 2022
I am of the view that precious little of Deuteronomy was actually inspired writing of Moses. The original fifth book of Moses existed only in fragmentary form when Josiah launched his reformation, and there was a lot of interpolation. Further contamination took place during the Exile.
The five books of Moses the Nephites knew seem to have prescribed the death penalty only for murder.
But it would not trouble me unduly if our Deuteronomy turned out to be close to Moses’. THe Israelites were a stubborn, stiff-necked bunch, even in their own histories.
Eric
October 22, 2022
I heard one Jewish commentator say that the instruction for parents to stone a rebellious child was a step up from what was done previously. Under the law of Moses, parents had to bring their case to a council of elders and get their permission, whereas before that parents could just have their rebellious child stoned on their own authority. Some things in Deuteronomy seem outright barbaric to us, but were a step up from what the Israelites were coming from.
I suspect a lot of the bullet points G listed have to do with culture signaling–that Israel is different from its neighbors. Trimming the nails and hair of an emancipated foreign woman probably has a hygiene component to it as well; in cases where her hair and nails were already clean, it would just be a “best practices” thing.
When I come across troubling things in the Bible, I tend to assume that something has been deleted from the text that would add more nuance or mitigating factors.
Vader
October 22, 2022
I think there is a lot to the “step up” idea. Cultural context matters a lot, but because it was ingrained in culture, there was little reason to elaborate — the recorders of scripture simply assumed the reader understood.