Monday, March 31, 2008

So Much for the Grand Compromise: Leviticus 19:19-37

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

God's in the middle of a really cool discussion of the Ten Commandments when suddenly he starts talking about purity regulations again. I'm not sure what to make of it; it's possible that some of it is an extension of God's commandment that the Jews worship him alone. This implies a purity of thought, belief and action which permits no compromise. Symbolically, that lack of compromise is reflected in verse 19, which prohibits mating different kinds of animals, planting different crops in the same field, and wearing clothing woven of different kinds of materials. People who want to take the Old Testament literally should therefore be cautious about using mules, or about wearing clothing made of mixed cotton and polyester. Both are symbolically disrespectful of God.

In verse 23, God moves on to some more purity codes, some of which are much more than merely symbolic. The Israelites are not to eat from the plants of their new land for a minimum of four years (three of which are an absolute prohibition, and the fourth a complete sacrifice unto God). The fourth year is universal holiness, in which all the fruits of the land are "an offering of praise to the Lord." Only then may the Israelites begin to eat the fruits, once the land has been sanctified. Then God moves into some more I-am-the-only-God statements: don't eat meat with the blood of life (part of the earlier sacrificial regulations); don't cut up or tattoo your bodies, and thus remove their purity; don't practice divination or sorcery (apparently divine casting of lots doesn't count after all); don't "degrade" your daughter by selling her into prostitution. God gets off track again and starts talking about Sabbaths, then finds his place in his notes again and actually repeats the command against sorcery, this time ordering the people never to seek out "mediums or spiritists."

The remaining four verses are a mishmash of postscripts that probably should have gone somewhere else and had to be added in as optional extras (or not so optional, as the case may be). God extends respect to parents to respect to all elders: "rise in the presence of the aged, show respect for the elderly and revere your God." He extends the principle of deception to include "dishonest" weights, scales, and standards. And finally, he reminds the Israelites once again to take care of the foreigners amongst them, reminding them that "you were once aliens in Egypt." That's an interesting point to close on, because God rephrases it again as "love him [the alien] as yourself." So now we have love your neighbour as yourself and love the alien as yourself. Leviticus 19 has some of the most radically broad social justice provisions in the entire Old Testament, and God draws all of them out of the Ten Commandments. I like it.

I've left one verse out. Three, actually: a bizarre little insertion at verses 20-22 which talks about men sleeping with slave girls that don't belong to them. According to these verses, if you sleep with a slave girl who is "promised to another man," you've committed an offence and have to sacrifice a ram. But you don't have to die (and neither does she), because she's a slave girl, not a free Israelite woman.

The adultery commandment hasn't yet appeared in God's reformulation of the Ten Commandments, so it would seem this is the most God wants to say on that subject. It's quite disappointing - after extending the principles of the other commandments, God narrows this one. Is this the best that can be done? On the one hand, it does give a few unmarried women some more freedom from ownership - but only in the sense that they're owned as slaves rather than as concubines, and therefore men's sexual rights to their bodies are a little murkier.

It's disappointing and I think God can do better - Jesus certainly does when he talks about adultery. It's also completely out of place here; God presents all the commandments out of order, but this one seems randomly thrown into the middle of the purity codes. I'd accuse a scribe of adding it in later, but you'd think a scribe who wanted to edit the commandments would do a better job of it. Sorry to end the grand compromise proposal on such a disappointing note, but I think the adultery provisions of the Leviticus 19 commandments is bullshit. It's not just that I disagree with it - it's that something this narrow and specific just doesn't make sense given the general flow of the writing here. Leviticus 19 started out strong but wandered considerably in the middle.
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Sunday, March 30, 2008

Dave's Compromise with Focus on the Family, Complete with the Sacred Rights of the Poor: Leviticus 19:1-18

This post is part of a revolutionary commentary on the Bible by the Church of the Orange Sky.

It's time to redeem the Ten Commandments. I was skeptical about some of the implications in them before, but I like this set a lot better. I said before that Leviticus 19 was a series of social justice rules. I'm still right, but in fairness it's more than that - it's a mishmash of the Ten Commandments (repeated with some extrapolations), some social justice rules, and some symbolic purity regulations. After ranting repeatedly about the injustices of the Levitican laws, I have to say that this chapter is my favourite in the entire commentary to date.

My NIV chapter calls this "various laws" - but they're wrong! It's a conservative editor's attempt to downplay the significance of this revolutionary chapter!

Indeed, reading this chapter has made me so excited that I'm prepared to issue, on behalf of the Church of the Orange Sky, a groundbreaking compromise proposal to those who speak for the religious right. The Church of the Orange Sky is prepared to negotiate a common plan for legal and political activism based on the principle that if we're going to legislate morality based on Leviticus, we have to legislate morality based on Leviticus. The Church will support their attempt to re-institute their regressive principles of sexual ownership rights - under which homosexuality is outlawed - if they agree to give equal time to legislating the charity provisions of the Ten Commandments - some of which are here in Leviticus 19. They won't, of course, which gets me off the hook.

Here, God re-interprets and extends the Ten Commandments in a way somewhat reminiscent of Christ's sermon on the mount in Matthew, which had the same objective, though it took it in somewhat different directions. It's also a little difficult to get that this is what God's trying to do, because he has trouble presenting the commandments. They're all out of order, but they're there. Then, and only then, does he move on to the purity regulations, and after getting those out of the way, he's back to the troublesome issue of honesty and charity.

God begins with the Protestant fifth commandment - honour your father and mother. Originally this was justified on the grounds that it would give you a blessed long life, which prompted my Men's Bible to wax eloquently about family values. Presumably that's still true, but God doesn't mention it again. This one isn't an important commandment to elaborate here. It's kind of telling, really; so much for all the nonsense about God being focused on the family.

After a brief reference to the Sabbath, God discusses idols. This discussion is expanded from the original form - don't make idols or gods - to some specific warnings about sacrificing to God. God has to be very careful about the sacrificial process because he doesn't want it to veer off into heretical idolatry. To this end, sacrificial material gets a time limit: it's only holy for three days, after which any use of it would "desecrate" the holiness of God.

Then we're back to Sabbath-keeping. God makes clear that the Sabbath is important for several reasons - respect for God, but also rest and renewal, as God symbolically used the day after creation. Rest and renewal is gained not through taking no action, but through not doing economically productive work. This is not just for your benefit, but for others, God argues in Leviticus 19. To this end, when you harvest your fields, you must stop before the job is complete. You must go through the vineyards only once, and you must stop before you've reached the edge of the field. If you drop anything along the way, you can't pick it up. Once you've finished, whatever is left belongs by sacred right to the poor and to the "alien," i.e. the foreigner.

This is one of several of what I think are fundamentally essential and normally blatantly ignored commandments within the old law. The notion that the poor and the marginalized have specific rights granted to them by God for their own protection is something conservatives are unwilling to accept, and something alien to the capitalist doctrine of personal gain and independent enrichment which our culture has largely accepted. And I'm only talking about the poor here! What about the other half - the part about "the alien"? The notion that immigrants, especially immigrants have sacred rights to charity and welfare is something I suspect many people would not want to accept.

God appears to skip over the commandment on theft with just a brief reference. This might make it seem like he's not interested in challenging the traditions of property and personal ownership (in contrast, Jesus deliberately and extensively subverts them in the gospels), but in reality it's because he's combined two commandments here, merging theft and deceit together. That's also hard to tell because the Ten Commandments specify only bearing "false witness" against your neighbour, whereas in Leviticus 19 God generalizes this to the much broader "do not lie."

The resulting commands reveal just how broad God thinks this command really is. No deceit is permitted - which presumably includes lies of omission and false implication. Refusing to pay your workers at the end of every single working day is considered theft (so much for biweekly paycheques)! Hindering or harassing the deaf or blind is evil. Showing favoritism in justice is a perversion of justice. Slander is lying and therefore wrong.

Then it's on to the sixth commandment. This is the one that conservatives infamously abuse, saying that "thou shalt not murder" is limited to a few forms of unauthorized killings; it's also the one the pacifists like to broaden to include all killing. I thought only Jesus expanded it in the gospels, but here God does it too. Verses 16-18 represent a substantial expansion of the commandment; it's murder, according to God, if you (a) hate your brother, (b) seek revenge or bear a grudge, or (c) "do anything that endangers your neighbor's life." Finally, God concludes the section with the well known phrase, "love your neighbour as yourself." What can I say? It's aweseome.

So there you have it. The Ten Commandments, Revised Version.
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Saturday, March 29, 2008

More Christian Sex; Masculinity, Property, Primitive Paternity Testing - and Environmental Protection?: Leviticus 18, 20

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Leviticus 18-20 is another of those weird oscillations where the laws jump unpredictably between behavioral prohibitions and social justice. It's particularly pronounced in this case because Leviticus 20 is basically a repetition of Leviticus 18, except with particular punishments specified for each offence. What's up with that? Earlier, I jokingly claimed that different chapters reflected which draft-writers showed up to the meeting on that particular day. It's a silly theory, but seriously, why does this happen? There's no apparent reason that God would be talking to Moses about what the NIV calls "unlawful sexual relations," would lose his train of thought and start talking about charity and harvests, then return to the same "unlawful sexual relations" once again.

The sex laws in this part are, for the most part, ones we still keep today - you can't sleep with your mother (or your father's wife, as the Bible puts it), your sister (this one's so important God mentions it twice!), your granddaughter, your aunt, your uncle's wife, your wife's mother (or daughter), your sister-in-law. Done with specific women, God moves on to a series of miscellaneous laws: no sex with "a woman... during the uncleanness of her monthly period," no sex with other men, no sex with animals. Weirdly, in the middle of the sex laws he gets off the subject and, out of nowhere, warns the Jews not to sacrifice any of their children to Molech. What's going on with this verse? It seems like a later addition, it's so out of place - why, at this point in time, would he be referring to a specific false god by name? It's a strange and sudden introduction to whoever this Molech character is supposed to be.

What are we to make of these strange laws? A conservative literalist has no problem - we should just keep all of them, no questions asked! (Why this doesn't translate into similar political campaigns to ban banks charging interest to their customers is beyond me, since the Bible said that was a sin too.) Liberals could just reject them, but strangely, they don't, even though they have a perfectly reasonable argument -- this is the 21st century and we don't need to follow all the rules set down by some goatherders 3000 years ago. Some of them actually do this, though most fall into the same trap as the conservatives in arbitrarily proclaiming which "cultural" and "ceremonial" regulations can be dumped and which have to be kept. Others, more disturbingly, twist the verses out of context by taking the one that seems like a later tradition - the one about sacrificing children to Molech - and arguing that everything that follows (i.e. homosexuality and bestiality) are about banning pagan religious practices. I'm not buying it. No Christian group that I know of supports removing the law on bestiality, and that one occurs in the same context as homosexuality. May as well admit it: the Old Testament laws say homosexuality is an affront to God.

The justification God uses for these laws, especially in chapter 18, is an interesting and peculiar one. It's not, God implies, simply that the Israelites are expected to keep his laws or else he'll kill them. Instaed, God describes an unusual moral relationship between Israelites and the land they live in. Immoral behaviour makes the land "defiled," too, and it "vomits out its inhabitants" when they commit grave sins. Therefore, "if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you." This phrasing is especially ironic in light of the fact that modern-day evangelicals routinely condemn Christian environmentalists for embracing "pagan nature worship" whenever they talk about taking care of the planet. (A quick Google search should turn up plenty of results on this, or you could just go find an environmental debate thread on Rapture Ready or Christianity.com.) I guess God is guilty of pagan nature worship too!

Even more interesting is the implication that human sin is equivalent to, or leads to, environmental degradation. Today, a lot of evangelicals get most irate when it's suggested that human action is destroying the environment. They proclaim that this is a bunch of tree-hugging hippies trying to take over the government, when in reality nothing we do could destroy God's beautiful creation. So much for that bullshit. God himself says that we destroy the environment.

The sex laws in chapter 20 add an additional layer of meaning, and some additional context that helps us, I think, to explain the Levitican position on sex, and particularly on homosexuality. Most of the chapter is about ownership and paternity rights: women are property and inappropriate sex is therefore an abuse of someone else's property, particularly important in the case of sex because inappropriate sex could lead to inappropriate pregnancy and cause confusion about paternity - something a rigidly patriarchal society must avoid at almost any cost. Overlaid over this is the need to protect and preserve the sex order within which this ownership of women is justified - which is why homosexuality is banned, and bestiality is banned in a particular way.

Notice that every sex law except one is written for men. Certainly chapter 20 prescribes punishments for everyone involved, but they're all written in the form: man does action X to woman Y, and this is sin. Women don't initiate these acts. Chapter 20 specifies what makes the inactions immoral, and this is where the property issue becomes apparent. A man can't sleep with his father's wife - this would "dishonour his father." You can't sleep with a daughter-in-law, because this would offend your son; with a neighbour's wife, because it would offend your neighbour; with an aunt, because this would offend your father; and so on. The offence isn't against the woman involved, or even - apparently - against God, because sleeping with an unmarried woman isn't part of these laws. It's part of some other laws, but that will come later. Here, women belong to men and sex is permitted only with your own property. The only property you can't have sex with is a "close relative" like a daughter, and that's because you're holding daughters until they become the property of another man, their future husband. Thus far no one seems all that concerned about prostitutes, because they're already dishonoured by their freedom; no one owns a prostitute.

It's important to preserve this sexual hierarchy, in which men own and women are owned, and this is where the Levitican commands about homosexuality and bestiality come into play. To God, sex is an act of penetration followed by an "emission of semen" into the vagina (recall the earlier Levitican commands about uncleanness, and Onan's fuck-up way back in Genesis). It is a specific form of property ownership in which a man owns a woman's body and uses that body for recreation and procreation. For two men to simulate such an action is an abomination because it goes against the established "natural order of things." Under the Levitican and Exodus slavery laws, men can own other men, but only as servants, and only with certain restrictions and protections - i.e. they can own their labour, but not their bodies. When two men have sex, one of the men is symbolically becoming a woman, and that is a grave affront to the ancient Jews' hegemonic patrimonial masculinity.

To this end, notice that God is cheerfully unconcerned about lesbians. It's possible that this is because, like most of the loudly heterosexual men you'll find in the average pub, he thinks that lesbians make good porn. It's more likely that Leviticus doesn't care about sex between women because it's not really sex - there's no penetration by a penis - and because, as a result, there's no "abomination" against nature - because they're already both women. No one is being reduced and owned in sex acts between women, at least not in any way that they weren't already.

In contrast to the homosexuality laws, there's something that stands out about the bestiality laws which follow: they're written for BOTH men and women. This is an exceedingly rare event in Leviticus and so it's something that bears mentioning: God specifically declares that a sin has occurred both when a man has "sexual relations with an animal," and when a woman "presents herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it." Sex with animals is generally wrong because it's not natural penetration (especially because no pregnancy can result); for a woman to do it is doubly wrong because she is symbolically being owned by an animal, i.e. she is "presenting herself." This is why only the command about bestiality specifically mentions women - to a man, both homosexuality and bestiality subvert the appropriate form of sexual ownership, but to a woman, the principle of ownership could only be subverted by sleeping with an animal. According to Leviticus, even a woman outranks a farm animal.
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The Priests Win a Religious Monopoly! And Also, Don't Drink Blood: Leviticus 17

This post is part of a revolutionary commentary on the Bible, sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Most people think Leviticus 17 is about not eating or drinking blood, and I can understand that. As usual, God is lecturing Moses on appropriate and inappropriate methods of sacrificing animals, when it occurs to him that people have eaten blood, which completely sidetracks him. He begins ranting on the subject, banning the eating of blood no less than four times in four verses. The rationale for the law is interesting: according to God, "the life of a creature is in the blood." Now I guess I know where the Jehvah's Witnesses get their ideas about blood transfusions from. I'm not sure how a literalist would harmonize this claim with modern biological science, but it explains some things. Blood is life; blood is holy. This is why specific measures are taken with respect to the blood of sacrifices.

The logical conclusion from this goes well beyond the treatment of human blood, though, because God is talking about animals, not humans. Don't eat the blood, because this would be consuming the life of the animal; consume only its flesh. If we re-interpreted the principle in light of our contemporary understanding of life and the body, these verses would appear to be leading us towards vegetarianism. There's a long history of Christian vegetarianism, well before the Millerite and Mormon religions that emerged in America in the 19th century started recommending it - among Catholics, Orthodox, Quakers, and more recent charismatics, to name a few off the top of my head - but I'm not sure if any of them use this interpretation of Leviticus 17.

When I started reading this section, I thought I was going to say that the blood regulations were a quaint and primitive reflection of Israelite tribal culture, but I can see a logic behind them. I have no real reason to claim this was how the ancient Jews understood it, but I find it intriguing nonetheless. If I were still an evangelical, now would be the time I would write that the Holy Spirit spoke to my heart as I wrote these words and gave me an inspired interpretation of the text. Perhaps he/she/it did, but I'm not going to take the Lord's name in vain by blindly attributing to him everything that I do.

Anyhow, I'm getting off track, just like God did. Before he lost the plot, God was talking about sacrifices. It turns out that some of the Israelites were sacrificing to God wherever they were - in the camp, in the fields where they kept their animals, and so on. Originally, God describes such unauthorized and inappropriate sacrifices as "bloodshed" - a crime for which Israelites must be "cut off," but later on in the lecture, he starts claiming that it's actually idolatry, beacuse some of the sacrifices being made are apparently to "goat idols," or "goat demons," depending on the translation. Awesomely, the KJV - as it always does in such cases - translates such idolatry as "going a-whoring." Sometimes I hate the KJV, but sometimes I love it, and this is one of the latter times.

There are two possible interpretations of the first half of Leviticus 17, and neither of them are entirely pleasant. The first, which strikes me as the pessimistic and conservative explanation, is that once again, the Israelites are an unbelievably faithless people. It hasn't been all that long since the debacle at Mt. Sinai, when a large number of Israelites had to be killed as punishment for making a golden calf while they were bored. Now, already, they've decided to make new gods, this time modeled after goats? What the fuck is wrong with these people? Paganism isn't just a religion, it's a crippling addiction. It's almost tempting to believe that humans are so irredeemably wicked that they just can't do right no matter how impressive miracles they're shown, but I'm not buying it. It doesn't make sense that a people who can look up to the front of the camp and see the clouds and fire of God hovering over their porta-temple is going to wander out into the fields and sacrifice to various idols. I suppose this position does become plausible if a considerable number of the Israelites never did accept God's authority to begin with, but then that raises the question of why they keep following him around.

The other explanation fits with my general thesis for Exodus, which is that God is using his authority - or, I suppose it must be admittd, the idea of his authority is being used - to establish a new social order in which priests hold most or all of the religious and political trump cards. Worship of God must be mediated by the priests; therefore, it must take place at the specific location (the porta-temple) where the priests are permitted to meet with God. You cannot worship him on your own.

This becomes even more significant when you consider that at least some of the sacrifices "in the open fields" were burnt offerings (see, for example, v. 17:8). But when they bring these same sacrifices to the porta-temple, God says, they must be offered as peace and fellowship offerings. For such offerings, God specified several chapters earlier, the sacrificing priest earns a commission in food taken from the sacrifice. Hence God has now banned sacrifices for which priests wouldn't be paid. This appears to be a pre-emptive amendment to John 14:6 -- i.e. "I am the way, the truth, and the life; and no man comes to the father except through the priest!"

When I first read all the instructions for the sacrifices and offerings, I thought this information would be useless to me. I was quite wrong - it's turned out to be quite handy.
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Banishing Goats: Leviticus 16

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

More regaling stories of manly men worshipping their manly God through manly rites like killing an animal and pouring its blood over their heads.

First, God tells Moses that he's tired of Aaron coming and going as he pleases. He decides to levy a cover charge for entering his club, equal to one young bull. He also must wear his magic clothing, including his magic underwear (the Bible calls them the "sacred garments"). He has to pay for the bull himself on these occasions, God warns.

Next, God creates a new ceremonial day, the Day of Atonement. (In Hebrew this is Yom Kippur.) On this day the community is to present the high priest with two goats and he's to draw lots for the goats. It's interesting that God's will is revealed through rolling the dice. More early Israaelite divination, perhaps?

At any rate, the goat that "wins" gets killed in a sacrifice. The other becomes the "scapegoat." The high priest lays hands on the goat, professes the sins of the people, and then banishes the goat into the wild. According to the Biblical justification, "the goat will carry on itself all their sins to a solitary place."

It's an interesting ritual. It's also really the origins of our word "scapegoat," which is a slightly abbreviated form of "escape goat," the term first used by Tyndale in his translation of the Bible in the 16th century. So far this is the only goat who actually gets to survive the Israelites' tribal rituals - the only animal at all, actually. This goat is not killed in place of Jews for their sins - instead, the Jews' sins are transferred to the goat and he is symbolically ejected from the community. Not surprisingly, Christians have drawn the obvious parallel between the Jewish scapegoat and Jesus Christ - my Men's Bible makes this very argument, along with some irrelevant and typically self-loathing blather about how we are "constitutionally" evil and only God could remove our sins onto Jesus. (To give you a taste of the symbolic self-flagellation, the author of this particular "inspirational" passage says that only God sacrifices; that we can't and won't sacrifice; that sin has destroyed us; that we always push God away; that we are hostile to God; that we refuse to forgive God his righteousness or let him forgive us; that we reject dependence; and that we are proud. Jesus fucking Christ. Give it a rest, Mr. Tim Stafford.)

I think it's kind of a cool ritual, and a welcome break from the Levitican blood-letting.
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Friday, March 28, 2008

More Christian Sex, and Priestly Profits: Leviticus 15:16-33

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Ancient Jewish sex, anyways. I figured this deserved its own chapter as a tribute to Dave's Fabulous Christian Sex Challenge®.

Once again God displays an impressive grasp of human biology. The section, interestingly, starts with a discussion of what a man should do after "having an emission of semen" when a woman is not involved. Unsurprisingly, conservatives don't bother bringing up this verse when looking for rationalizations for proclaiming that masturbation is a heinous mortal sin, since the implication of this verse would seem to be that it's alright, or at least that it sometimes happens. The man is made unclean for the rest of the day, which is the same prescrpition, intriguingly, for having sex with a woman. In both cases, God specifies that the "emission of semen" is the component of the act which makes everyone involved "unclean" for a day.

Always a big fan of equality, God specifies that women's "flows of blood" make them unclean as well. These are particularly unclean, however; a menstruating woman is not only unclean but makes anything she lies on or sits on, unclean as well. She also has to bring a sin offering to the priest, of course, because she has to "atone" for her sin.

Aside from the misogyny involved, there's an interesting twist to this sacrifice. Recall that sin offerings, according to the Levitican instruction manual, are given whole as food to the priest. Each woman therefore gives one dove or pigeon to the priests for food on a fairly regular basis. There are a little over 600 000 non-Levite men over twenty years of age and capable of fighting at this time (according to the census records in Numbers). If we add in the Levites and some teenagers, then assume the physical sex ratio is about one to one, that probably means there's at least three-quarters of a million women donating about one pigeon a month to the priests. This particular rule alone therefore nets the priesthood about nine million birds a year. I'm not sure whether the Israelites had enough captured birds available to handle this. If they did, it makes the priesthood the leading consumer in that industry, as well.
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Thursday, March 27, 2008

The Priest-Doctors: Leviticus 13-14

This post is part of a revolutionary BIble commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

According to Leviticus, the ancient priesthood basically did pretty much everything when it came to the Jewish services sector: in addition to being holy masters of the revels, they were heavily invested in sacrifice management, agriculture, and justice. And, according to these chapters, they were doctors. Leviticus 13-15 is the Merck Manual of the Old Testament. God teaches Moses and Aaron to diagnose all kinds of infectious and non-infectious skin diseases. The treatment is pretty standard: anyone with a discharge or an infectious disease is unclean and must live outside the camp for a period of time, usually a week, after which they shall bring an offering to the priests and be re-examined. All of these offerings are waved rather than burned, which I guess means you could stretch the text as a justification for the privatization of healthcare.

I've been referring to "infectious skin disease" so far, because occasionally the NIV betrays a disturbing sense of modernity and translates words in ways that make sense. If you prefer an older translation, all of these diseases are going to be pronounced "leprosy." This could easily lead you to believe that the Bible is obsessed with that particular disease; again and again, God describes a skin problem, and pronounces "it is leprosy." The repetitive solemnity gets kind of Monty Python-ish after a while.

On the one hand, not all of the rules here are necessarily bad. It's basically quarantine and isolation procedures dressed up in the form of divine laws about cleanliness and purity.

On the other, God's knowledge of medicine sometimes leaves something to be desired. Sure, he does take the effort to reassure people that baldness, including pattern baldness, aren't evidence of impurity (13:40-42). But some of the treatments don't seem entirely logical - the "cleansing" ritual for leprosy, for example, involves a strangely specific and unusual ritual in which the priest smears blood and anointing oil on the right ear, right thumb, and right big toe of the afflicted.

The mildew discussions are where it starts to get really weird. Not just human bodies but also clothing and even houses can get infections, too. Once again the priests are to inspect the afflicted item. God pronounces the priests public health inspectors, with the authority to shut down buildings for a week if they have unacceptable "mildew" contamination. The ultimate reaction is to demolish the house, but there are a few cautionary steps to move through first.

However, if the house's infection clears up on schedule, God says, another bizarre ritual must be performed, which you'd think would cause the house to be even more dangerous. The priest must take two birds and some wood and thread. He kills one of the birds over a pot of water, mixing the blood and the water together. Then he dips the live bird into the pot, along with the thread, and sprays the concotion around the house. Finally the live bird is released back into the wild.
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Women are Dangerous and Unclean and Inconvenient: Leviticus 12

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

The medieval scholar who wrote numbers all over my sacred scriptures took the trouble to assign an entire chapter to this very brief description of Hebrew women. The numbers are necessary in order to highlight the fact that this is sandwiched directly between unclean food regulations and rules about infectious skin diseases. Women's bodies are kind of like that.

According to the Levitican God, pregnancy is unclean. God actually says that giving birth is basically equivalent to menstruation, except worse. It renders a woman unclean not just for a few days but for many weeks! She is required to bring a burnt offering and a sin offering to God to atone for what she has done. The Bible justifies this on the grounds that there has been a "flow of blood" from her which requires atonement. As usual, the Bible lets poor people bring smaller sacrifices.

Aside from the fact that God seems to imply that giving birth is something that a woman must atone for, which no doubt would worry the pro-family conservatives had they not already been able to bury this chapter, what's intriguing about this is that giving birth to a daughter is a greater transgression than giving birth to a son. The latter makes the woman unclean only for 40 days; if you give birth to a daughter, you are unclean for 80 days. What makes female bodies so dangerous?

I'm not sure which part of this misogyny irritates me more, although in fairness, soon we'll get to the chapter that says that sex makes men unclean as well. (This might just be because of their contact with the female body, of course.) Usually the churches I have gone to have argued that we are not required to keep the "mere" regulations about cleanliness and purity in the Old Testament, because what matters are the ones that deal specifically with sin. This is coupled with a similar argument about the New Testament, in which we are free to ignore the "cultural" verses from Paul - "cultural" being essentially an arbitrary term we apply to marginalize whatever we find just too objectionable, like not letting women speak in church, or not letting women speak in church unless they're wearing veils, or letting them speak but not teach, or a variety of other instructions which don't seem entirely consistent. There are two problems with this.

First, saying that we don't need to "keep" a regulation is usually a codeword for "I don't agree with this regulation," which is quite another matter entirely than saying you're simply not bound by it. And what matters here is not whether Jewish and Christian women today are required to make some sort of atonement for the "sin" of childbirth, but why thsi moral code we claim comes from God would suggest they do so in the first place. Even if we are dismissing some regulations as merely "cultural" or merely about "cleanliness," etc., we're still suggesting that we're free to violate rules allegedly established by God. We should be honest enough to say why we're doing this, and in this case at least, I have to believe that the theological justification has followed from, not led to, our real position on the matter.

The second problem is that I'm not sure we're being honest with the texts when we attempt to categorize them so. Leviticus isn't making clear distinctions between "cleanliness" regulations and laws about "sin." Some of the former can be said to exist - in the previous chapter, for example, contact with inappropriate animals rendered you unclean for a day and required you to wash your clothes, but it doesn't appear to have been a sin requiring a sacrifice to gain God's forgiveness.

What, however, are we to make of the Levitician birth regulations in today's chapter? The Bible says women need to make burnt offerings and sin offerings. Back in chapter 4-5 (the medieval scribe screwed up the numbering on this one, I'm sorry to say), sin offerings were needed when someone "sins... and does what is forbidden" and wishes to repent of that act. Some of the things which required a "sin" offering clearly relate to cleanliness - like touching unclean carcasses - while some of them clearly relate to what we would still call sin - like perverting justice or making "thoughtless" oaths.

It's possible that, rather than some obscurantist theological arm-waving, we can just say that the Levitican law has some good moments but is generally the moral code of an obscure and long-dead tribe of Levantine goat-herders which clearly has no lasting value to those of us who are not Jews today. This, of course, would ruin the authority of those who claim the Bible is a coherent divinely-written monolith. Even without that, I would need to contrive a reason for why I like some of the social justice regulations even while I dismiss most of the rest. Doing so is going to require quite a rant and I'm still building up to that point. In the meantime, remember that women are dangerous. They're liable to become unclean for long and inconvenient intervals.
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Divine Dieting Regulations: Leviticus 11

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Seemingly for no particular reason, God decides now is the time to establish some laws regarding food for someone other than the priests. The list is pretty extensive: you can eat cattle but not camels, rabbits, hyrax, or pigs, because to be eligible to eat, an animal must both chew its cud and have a split hoof. God does not explain why both are necessary. A similar double-requirement is instituted for water animals - which must have both fins and scales. Rules for birds and insects seem much more arbitrary, and God even describes the bat as a bird species, something which must give the "creation science" literalists fits. Ultimately God justifies these measures on the grounds that "I am the Lord who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy."

At some point I'm going to have to discuss why modern-day conservatives feel justified in arguing that these cleanliness and purity regulations can be completely ignored even while they worry unceasingly about other prohibitions such as that against homosexuality. I don't think there's quite enough to go on yet and I have more relevant things to talk about with respect to the following chapter.

In the meantime, I think it's just worth noting some of the other things that God feels are "abominations," the word also used to condemn homosexuality later in this book (the NIV translates these as "detestable" rather than the more traditional and much cooler term). Here's the list of abominations so far: dolphins, whales, and all other sea life that lacks fins and scales; eagles, vultures, the "black vulture" (which the KJV translates as ospreys), kites, ravens, owls, gulls, hawks, cormorants, storks, herons, bats, four-legged insects (this is a ludicrous translation since insects by definition have six legs; shame on the NIV for its incompetence!), and every "creeping" or slithering creature.
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Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Two Counts of "Unauthorized Fire Before the Lord": Leviticus 8-10

This post is part of a revolutionary commentary on the Bible, sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

I thought we'd already taken care of the ordination of Aaron at the end of Exodus, but I was wrong! The author of Leviticus records, in breathtaking detail, Moses's dressing-up of Aaron in fancy priest clothes, the slaughter of animals to mark the new priesthood, and so on. Aaron and his sons get the meat that's left over. I really do mean "breathtaking" for this section - I am nearly bored to death, which would indeed take my breath away. Aaron and his sons, after eating, have to stay at the Tent of Meeting for one full week, or else they will die. God seems very worried that if he doesn't threaten to rain down fire and death, Aaron will refuse to stay and cuddle after the ceremony's over, and will instead scamper off for a drink with the lads.

As it turns, out, Aaron's sons did indeed go out drinking a little too much. On the eighth day, things start out well with yet another major sacrifice - a bull, a goat, a calf, a lamb, an ox, a ram, and some grain - and Aaron and his sons gather up all the blood and drench the altar with it. On this occasion, God decides to impress everyone by lighting up the sacrifice himself, a miracle for which all the people "shout for joy and falle facedown."

After this, though, things go downhill quickly. Two of Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, decide to burn some incense for God. God doesn't approve: hilariously, my NIV describes their sin as "offer[ing] unauthorized fire before the Lord." (Some older translations actually call it "alien fire," which I think is even better.) This is not just a parking-ticket misdemeanor; immediately, God sends out his own, authorized fire and burns them alive. Moses is completely unsympathetic, telling Aaron that the prompt executions were necessary because God wanted to "show myself holy in the sight of all the people." According to my Bible, "Aaron remained silent" as Moses spoke. Of course he did. God just killed two of his kids! What does one say in a moment like that?

Moses has Aaron's cousins carry the remains out of the camp to be disposed of, then speaks to Aaron and his remaining two sons, warning them that if they mourn for their kin, they too will be killed by God, "and the Lord will be angry with the whole community." Why God will be angry with all Israelites for this is not made clear. Moses sends the priests back to the Temple of Meeting. What follows is an exceedingly rare moment, in which God actually speaks to Aaron rather than Moses: from this day forth the priests must not drink any alcohol when they go to the Tent of Meeting. See what happens when you let a drunk run your worship service? People get killed! God seems to be explaining to Aaron that Nadab and Abihu had to be killed to illustrate just how important it really is that all Israelites follow the rules. Priests are not above the law!

Despite the tragedy, Aaron's surviving kids just refuse to learn their lesson. Later, after some more sacrifices, Moses orders them to take the remaining grain and food from the sacrifice and "eat it in a holy place." He finds it necessary to repeat in full, agonizing detail God's earlier decree that thiw would be a "regular share for you and your children," etc., etc. Later, Moses comes back and finds that they committed the serious but obviously not capital crime of burning the rest of the goats meat. Moses berates Aaron's sons for not eating what was "given to you to take away the guilt of the community." See what happens when priests hesitate to take full payment for their services? Aaron manages to placate Moses on this occasion with some baffling mishmash about sin offerings and burnt offerings.
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The Idiot's Guide to Animal Sacrifices: Leviticus 1-7

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

I don't particularly want to read Leviticus, or Numbers afterwards, because I recall them being very dull books. The dreary, tedious Levitican regulations are a marked contrast from Genesis and most of Exodus. To compensate for boredom I shall simply have to saturate these essays with more sarcasm. I know I should be worried, because my Men's Bible has a paragraph at the beginning of Leviticus which, instead of the usual inspirational "improve your walk with God nonsense," tentatively cautions that "as you read this book, some of it may seem dull and boring. But think about how holy God is, how he wants you to serve him in every part of your life and in all you do." Alas, the observation and the imperative don't seem to connect logically.

Leviticus begins lethargically, with God lecturing Moses on every detail of sacrificial procedure and ritual. If you want to know how to sacrifice bulls, sheep, goats, pigeons, or grain, here's how to do it - right down to the treatment of individual organs, in some cases. The priests get a cut of the proceeds in exchange for the sacrificial services they provide: for a grain offering, for example, the priest shall select a "memorial portion" which is burned by fire, and take the remainder to the priests for food. No yeast is permitted in such a grain offering, a recurring theme in the Bible. Strangely, thrown into the provisions on ch. 6, God forbids the eating of fat or blood. Whoops.

Since Jews dropped the sacrifices 2000 years ago and Christians never had them, you might think there's little to be had in these chapters. I'm inclined to agree, unless of course you ever find yourself in the midst of a strange sect of orthodox Jewish reconstructionists, in which case this preparation will diminish your shock as you watch the high priest "wring off the head" of a pigeon and then "tear it open by the wings."

However, the sacrificial system does continue to enforce the supremacy of the priesthood which was heralded in Exodus. All sacrifices, and by extension all means by which people may receive absolution from God for their sins and thus avoid ending up like the 3000 slaughtered at Mt. Sinai, are conducted by the priests. All males in priestly families are entitled to partake of food from eligible sacrifices. Priestly food is holy food; if somene who is unclean dares to eat it, they must be "cut off from his people." God specifies that the priests must receive this "portion of th eofferings... as their regular share for the generations to come." Sacrifice sounds like it may become a profitable service industry - on the other hand, one has to wonder what the rank-and-file of the Levites thought of being conscripted into a primitive Bronze Age meat-packing industry, which is essentially the best analogy we can draw for the gruesome business of washing, preparing, and separating meat and organs from sacrificed animals.

Arrangements for sin offerings represent the new social hierarchy God is apparently constructing. The most serious "unintentional" sin is that of an anointed priest. This is followed by a sin of "the whole Israelite community," of a leader, and finally of "a member of the community." The required punishment reflects the position of the sinner: priests' and communal sins require the killing of a bull, leaders may sacrifice male goats, and individuals may sacrifice female goats. This concept of a sin by "the whole community" is an interesting one and quite out of place in our typically individualistic understanding of sin today. I can think of a number of sins of "the whole community" we ought to consider making some confession of or atonement for.

Despite my misgivings about the new hierarchy, it's also worth noting that God makes specific provisions for economic inequality - something he didn't bother with in the census "tax" in Exodus, but which does seem to concern him in Leviticus. Individuals who have no goats may bring sheep; if they cannot afford either, they should bring two birds (one gets burned, one gets drained of blood by the priest). If they can't afford birds, they may bring some flour. Either way, the priest still earns his commission.

Chapter 7 closes dramatically with the concluding statement that "these are the regulations for the burnt offering, the grain offering, the sin offering, the guilt offering, the ordination offering and the fellowship offering." As you can see, there's a sacrifice to be made on pretty much every occasion. I doubt I'll be able to remember the types of offerings, let alone the details. Perhaps it's unfair to blame the author for being dull; after all, we've had 3000 years to improve the theory and practice of manual-writing, and have very little to show for it. At least there's no idiotic warning labels like "do not perform this sacrifice underwater" or "do not run with burning sticks."
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Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Final Reflections on Exodus: Rise of the New Priesthood

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Over the course of Genesis, as intra-family politics got more and more violent and the patrimonial system clearly collapsed, God withdrew from first-hand direct interactions with characters - as well as with the reader - to become a silent, mysterious figure pulling the strings from the shadows, leaving Joseph as his dubious and opportunistic spokesman. Essentially, God abandons the family of Israel to a trap of its own making - the newly authoritarian state of Egypt.

After abandoning his people to slavery while he cooks up plans for the future, God returns in Exodus to institute a new social order, this one based on what presumably is supposed to be a stabler and more effective hierarchy, one based upon the supremacy of a divinely appointed priesthood over the rest of society. The chief of the new order - Moses - functions as spiritual, political and military leader of Israel all rolled into one, though by the end of the book, God is clearly attempting to shift the locus of power from Moses as individual to his Levite family as a lasting institution. Rather than Moses himself, God selects Aaron to be the patriarch of the new priesthood. This seems to be a strange choice, but Moses, unlike the Genesis patriarchs, is notably weak on the subject of family himself: his (and Aaron's) father is notably anonymous, he is raised by an Egyptian woman, and his own sons are nearly absent from the narrative.

Even the priesthood seems to be fairly unreliable - given Aaron's foolish experiment with the golden calf - but next to the elders of Israel and particularly to Moses, the masses of unnamed Israelites are dangerously faithless. No miracle seems awesome enough to hold their attention for more than a few days. Even God is a dubious figure at times - he slaughters Egyptians in order to "glorify" his name, loses his temper and nearly annihilates the Israelites only a little while after he frees them, then picks Aaron's family as his high priests, apparently forever. Though God once again speaks directly to the reader in Exodus, as he didn't in the closing chapters of Genesis, it's significant that he really only speaks to Moses and Aaron, and spends a sizeable chunk of the book unwilling to reveal himself fully to the undependable Israelites.

Despite this, I think Exodus is supposed to be an optimistic story. God liberates his people from slavery and leads them to a promised land. He even does their fighting for them; we haven't yet descended into the gritty genocides of the following books. God and Moses kill thousands of people in punishment for the debacle at Mt. Sinai, but afterwards, all appears to be more or less forgiven: God's cloud returns to guide the Israelites, Moses institutes laws which provide at least a few protections for the disadvantaged, and a portable temple is prepared. Though they had wandered astray days before, the people seem glad to participate in building this temple, as it is built through a surplus of donated supplies and volunteer labour. God even gives the Israelites a magic light every night.
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Monday, March 24, 2008

The Lord Forgives? Exodus 35-40

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

If there's anything duller than an instruction manual, it's a riveting blow-by-blow account of the Lord's favourite manual labourers, Bezalel of Uri and Oholiab of Ahisamach, as they move through the instructions and create the desired "tabernacle."

Moses begins by prescribing an absolute day of rest on the Sabbath. It occurs to me that the purpose of this is not simply a purity regulation intended to mimic and honour God's own day of rest (it is this too, but even God's day of rest was clearly theologically unnecessary, so there must be some other purpose). A day of rest from which no one, even a slave, can at any time ever be exempted is, like the requirements for free agriculture in the seventh year, a check against exploitation. Unlike, for example, the Seventh Commandment on adultery, the commandment on the Sabbath is notably free of exceptions. This, perhaps, is part of why Jesus was critical of the Jewish establishment in the New Testament, alleging that they had perverted the Sabbath; at that time the Sabbath was misused to prevent charity to the poor and needy.

Afterwards, Moses issues essentially a fundraising call. Interestingly, all the necessary provisions for the Tabernacle are to be provided through "free-will offerings"; there is no flat-tax imposed by God or by Moses or by anyone else. And these free-will offerings are provided by both men and women; the Bible is quite careful to specify that "all who were willing, men and women alike," contributed to the project. It is an interesting moment in the early history of a system which is systematically precluding women from any interaction with the divine. Ultimately the people bring too much and Moses orders them to cease their donations.

With the Tent of Meeting completed, Aaron and his sons are brought and anointed. Aaron, as originally promised, becomes high priest. It's a peculiar choice - you'd think God could find someone better than the ringleader of the golden calf affair, but apparently not. All is forgiven, at least for Aaron, presumably.

God makes another interesting choice: he orders that the high priesthood is to be a hereditary office held by Aaron's descendants. Why? During Genesis, God routinely displayed blatant contempt for traditional inheritance rights; virtually all of his chosen patriarchs aren't the eldest son, and some of them actively conspire against the eldest son. Moses doesn't even have a father - at least not one worthy of mention, anyways. What has persuaded God that a traditional inheritance structure has regained its worth?

Once all the requisite rituals have been performed, the Bible records that God's magic cloud descended upon the tabernacle and his "glory... filled the tabernacle." God's presence was so overwhelming that at first even Moses couldn't make his way in. Strangely, Exodus closes with the optimistic claim that from that day forth, God's cloud traveled with the Israelites, guiding them in their wandering; "the cloud of the Lord was over the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel during all their travels." God seems to have calmed down enough to travel with the Israelites after all. It's a touching moment.
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The Second Ten Commandments: Exodus 34

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

After being mooned by God, Moses heads up the mountain again for the latest set of rules. Because Moses broke the first set of stone tablets, God promises to make a new pair. Strangely, the new Ten Commandments have nothing to do with the old ten (or at least, what we call the old Ten Commandments. These ones are, in order: don't make treaties with foreigners; don't make idols; celebrate the annual feasts; give every firstfruit and firstborn animal to God; respect the Sabbath; and don't cook a young goat in its mother's milk (there are actually ten commandments but I've combined a few for the sake of brevity). Interestingly, God requires Moses to write this set of commandments, perhaps because he's still grumpy over the original set getting smashed up. That's kind of strange because originally God promised to write on them at the beginning of the chapter. The new rules are specifically called "The Ten Commandments" in v. 28, leaving us to speculate as to when the Jews pulled a switcheroo and left us with the other Ten from chapter 20.

It might be going too far to call God insecure, but his introductory remarks to Moses in ch. 34 seem unnecessarily long and descriptive, and a trifle misleading, from what we've seen to date. God descends in his magic helicopter and announces, "The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation." He seems to have forgotten that a couple of days before, he was on the verge of annihilating the entire tribe, before Moses convinced him to rethink the plan.

God has grown increasingly concerned about the pagan tribes inhabiting Israel's promised land. He actually orders Moses twice not to "make a treaty with those who live in the land." All religious icons and idols are to be destroyed, and there is to be no intermarriage. God has little faith in his people, claiming that "when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices. And when you choose some of thier daughters as wives for your sons and those daughters prostitute themselves to their gods, they will lead your sons to do the same." So, Israelite boys must not go out chasing the pagan girls. Fall for a pagan chick, and you'll fall for her god. You might think that a God with routinely impressive and devastating miracles would attract the wives of his followers, not lose them to some other god, but clearly this isn't the case.

Moses comes down the mountain and, unbeknownst to him, God has made his face glow. The Israelites are as afraid of a man glowing in the dark as we would be today, so they shy away from him. Eventually Moses approaches the leaders of the community and all the Israelites follow, to receive the new sets of commands. He takes advantage of the new glowing-face trick to institute another barrier of separation between himself and the people: Moses will now wear a veil except when he is meeting privately with God, and except when he emerges from those meetings to speak on God's behalf.
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Who is Less Reliable -- the Priest, the Congregation, or God?: Exodus 31:12 - 33

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

In these two chapters, the Israelites rebel, make a "golden calf" idol for no apparent reason other than that they're bored, and the priesthood (except for Moses) basically goes along with it, which is a pretty cynical indictment of the Jewish clergy if you ask me. The conservative authors of Exodus managed to regain control at the next editorial meeting, however, and the general theme is not the faithlessness of Aaron (though this is apparent) but the power of Moses. Moses plays a sort of divine lion tamer. God is wild, angry, vengeful. It is Moses who goes up to meet God, he who challenges God, he who defends the people from God and ultimately channels God's powers for Israel's benefit. Way to go, Moses!

The faithlessness of the Israelites, in many ways, beggars belief. Moses has been up on the mountain for quite some time now, and in the camp people are getting restless. They go to Aaron, whom - we must remember - is Moses's close kin and not just that but is high priest of God in his own right. He may not realize all the riches that are in his store for him and his sons, but he's been with Moses since the beginning of the Egyptian insurgency and he's seen the power of God on every occasion Moses has.

The mass of the Israelites, an apparently unanimous and indistinguishable multitude of spiritually weak and greedy morons, decides they want a new god, and go to Aaron to ask him for one. Aaron, good priest that he is, agrees to make a god - one out of all the women's gold jewelry. It's interesting that women's jewelery is the source of this new god; is this a criticism of jewelry, of women, or both? In any event the Israelites get all their gold together, gold which God intends to be used in his own Tent of Meeting, and Aaron makes "an idol cast in the shape of a calf." Then he proclaims that "these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt." The next day, he proclaims a festival, at which the people "sit down to eat and drink and get up to indulge in revelry." I'm not sure which is more inexplicable - the people's decision to make a new god, or Aaron's ready acquiescence to this project. It's a strange moment in Exodus - on the one hand we again see the general contempt for the faithless masses that we saw before, but on the other hand, this is an extraordinarily brutal and subversive criticism of the priesthood, as well.

Later, when an irate Moses demands an explanation for the festivities from Aaron, the high priest is unable to offer anything even approaching a real justification. He simply blames "these people," who are "prone to evil." Aaron mystifies the origins of the golden calf idol he has made, telling Moses that he "threw" all the jewelry into a fire "and out came this calf!" Uh huh. Sure, Aaron.

In the meantime, God has seen the rebellion and apparently gets quite upset - indeed, were he human, we might say he has flown off the handle. He tells Moses to go back down to the people, who he calls "stiff-necked," and leave him alone. Then he says that he is so angry with the Israelites he's going to "destroy them." Once the carnage is complete, God promises, he will "make [Moses] into a great nation." That's an interesting promise; it's essentially one that he's given before, in Genesis, but now he's going to wipe the slate and start over again, sort of like he did in the flood.

Unlike Aaron, Moses plays the role of a proper priest and mediates for his people before God. If God slaughters them now, he points out astutely, the Egyptians will conclude that God wanted to punish the Israelites, not to liberate them. Theefore God should "turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people." He even implies that any murder by God here would be breaking God's promise to Abraham, Isaac and Israel. Strangely, the Bible says that "the Lord relented." A pity Noah didn't speak as eloquently or courageously as Moses does; we might have been saved a lot of trouble in Genesis. Is God joking when he declares his destructive intentions to Moses? Is he testing them? Is his will to destroy the Israelites really thwarted by a single human prophet? Is God so emotionally volatile that sometimes he needs to be talked down by his human children? It certainly gives some added credibility to the Jewish priesthood - "You must let us continue to mediate between you and God, because remember, we saved your lives from his righteous anger on previous occasions, and if we hadn't, you'd be dead now."

Whatever happened, God gives Moses two stone tablets with the Ten Commandments written on them. Moses climbs down to meet up with Joshua, who, being a soldier, thinks that the sounds coming up from the camp indicate there is fighting going on. It isn't, Moses assures him, but when they arrive at the scene of the revelry, now it is Moses's turn to "burn with" righteous anger. He throws the tablets at the people, and they smash to pieces. Then he takes the calf idol, grinds it into powder, scatters the powder into some water, and makes the people drink it. Water miracles have been quite important so far in the Exodus story, but usually the Israelites aren't suffering because of them - if anything it's the Egyptians who usually suffer. Aaron whines that the people asked him for a new god, so he gave them one; in Moses's eyes, according to my Bible, this proved that "Aaron had let them get out of control." So the people are a mob of rambunctious children, basically.

You'd think Moses had gained control of the people, if he'd managed to make them drink that tainted water and before that had even busted up their new god. But he clearly hasn't, because after all that has happened, he calls "whoever is for the Lord" to assemble with him at one end of the camp. Only the Levite tribe comes - all of them, apparently. Moses commands them to arm themselves with swords and then "go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor." The Levites kill three thousand people on Moses's command.

This is a very curious result. Moses has not prescribed any limits on the massacre which is to take place, yet clearly there are some. In the census records in Numbers 1, each tribe numbers approximately forty to sixty thousand men strong. (The Levites aren't counted in the census, but we may safely assume they are of comparable size.) Clearly the vast majority of the Levites did not kill their "brother and friend and neighbor." And if they did do so, this introduces more problems - wouldn't this mean Levites were killing other Levites? It is a very strange circumstance. Once the killing is done, Moses gets his tribe back together again (because he is a Levite himself, don't forget) and thanks them for their work: "You have been set apart for the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day." Jesus said relative to our love for God we ought to hate our kin. The Levites took it one step further and killed their kin, it would appear - though again this raises the question of how, if "all the Levites" rallied to Moses at the beginning of this raid, many Levites had to be killed for their faithlessness during the same raid.

The sin of the golden calf is evidently so severe that God is no longer willing to talk to the Israelites, according to chapter 33 - an odd conclusion given that he wasn't willing to appear to them before either, but still, it reaffirms the general theme of a priesthood-led society that has emerged in Exodus. Moses returns to God after his Levite killing spree and begs that God forgive their sin. Initially God agrees, but then he equivocates and suggests that "the time for me to punish" them has not yet come; and when it does, "I will punish them for their sin." In the meantime, the killing of the 3000 is a useful sacrifice for staving off God's righteous rage. Instead of killing them all, Moses bargains God down to "strik[ing] the people with a plague." Way to go, God!

Once the people are suitably disease-ridden, God speaks to Moses again. He intends to keep his promise to give the freed slaves a new "land flowing with milk and honey," but he isn't going to accompany them anymore, "beacuse you are a stiff-necked people." Their rebelliousness is so great, God implies, that he won't be able to control himself in their presence: "I might destroy you on the way... If I were to go with you even for a moment, I might destroy you." He sounds almost grumpy here, keeping his word because he's promised it to so many generations of Hebrews but no longer as happy about it as he was when he brought the Israelites out of Egypt via the Red Sea. The peace and tranquility of God's new utopia has been broken and he doesn't like it.

In contrast to the faithless Israelite children, Moses seems to grow considerably in his walk with God (I've been waiting to use that cliche). He erects a provisional "tent of meeting" outside the camp so that he can talk with God at a safe distance from the Israelites. God descends in the form of a "cloud pillar" to talk with Moses "as a man speaks with his friend." Only Joshua is permitted anywhere near these cloistered visits. By the middle of Exodus 33, he exercises considerable influence with God: he asks that God "teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you," which he justifies on the grounds that he leads the Israelites who are "your people," and God agrees to give him "My Presence." My Bible actually capitalizes the word Presence, which is stupid, because ancient Hebrew doesn't have capital letters, which means the editors of the NIV just thought there was some mystical importance to the word. No doubt someone somewhere thinks this is a codeword for the Holy Spirit.

Once God promises Moses his "Presence," Moses successfully bargains with God to return that Presence to the Israelite community generally. His reasoning is, once again, sound but quite manipulative: "How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unles you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?" God ponders that and agrees readily. Once again Moses has changed God's mind.

Then Moses goes what appears to be a step too far: "Now show me your glory." That this is phrased as a bald imperative is interesting. God agrees anyways, though, saying he will "cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion." But there are limits even to Moses's power: God will do this only if Moses does not look upon his face, "for no one may see me and live." This is kind of strange given that before the two of them were suppoesd to have been meeting face to face, "as a mean speaks with his friend." I guess God is two-faced, and it's the second one we're worried about here. At any rate, Moses stands on a bluff while God flies past him, and lets Moses only see his back. Basically God agrees to moon Moses.

Exodus 31-33 cements the new priesthood-led power structure of the Israelite tribe. The people have proven that they cannot be trusted - that, given the opportunity, they will promptly make new gods. Even some of the priests can't really be trusted, but the Levites redeem themselves by killing some of the rabble-rousers. Aaron gets to keep his status as high priest, and Moses, who along with Joshua was apparently the only leader to remain faithful throughout, becomes Israel's sole remaining link to God (at least until Aaron's priestly garments are ready for action). God has become a dangerously wrathful force and the priesthood's authority is justified not only on the grounds that they serve God for the people, but that they serve the people by protecting them from God's wrath.
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God's Custom-Made Religion: Exodus 25-31:11

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

God spends a mind-numbing six chapters of Exodus describing in precise detail to Moses everything he will need to know to conduct religious rituals: the appropriate places, the appropriate props, and the appropriate participants. I see very little reason to go through it piece by piece. At one point, God tries his hand at being an interior decorator, showing Moses some samples of the lampstands he has in mind. Later he moves on to fashion design for the priests. Even the type of underwear they should wear during rituals is important to God - if they get the details wrong, they will "incur guilt and die." After giving his instructions, God even goes so far as to select specific craftsmen who will oversee each aspect of the construction phase. If you like long, lengthy instruction manuals, I highly recommend reading Exodus 25-31.

The God of Exodus is clearly very concerned about not just his own holy places but about the dignity and honour of his high priests. Great attention is given not just to God's props but to high priest Aaron's "sacred garments." First, he gets what's called an "ephod." We might as well translate this as "asdphi" - because neither word means anything! No one seems to know what an "ephod" is, so we just transliterate the word and leave it in place. It's clearly some sort of special garment the priest will wear, and that's all we get.

What's interesting about the priest's clothing is the strange symbolic power attached to them - something that my Protestant background has particular trouble with. The breastpiece, for example, is worn for "making decisions." Whenever Aaron wears the breastpiece, he must carry with it a device called "the Urim and the Thummim." Once again, no one knows what "the Urim and the Thummim" acutally were, but given the context, it seems apparent they're some sort of method of divination. Usually today Christians would denounce this as black witchcraft, but I guess the Old Testament laws do permit some forms of the study of omens after all.

The ordination of priesthoods is a wet and dirty affair. After their fancy clothing is prepared, God instructs bulls brought to the altar. Bulls and rams are burned for God, then sheep's blood is poured on the heads of Aaron and his priests. After the head, they get blood poured onto their hands, and then onto their feet (specifically, "the big toe"). Some of the meat is specifically spared from the burning; God orders it "waved" before him and then given to the priests for food. Then and only then do we get to the issue of anointing oil; unsurprisingly, perhaps, the anointing oil still carries some queer significance in certain Christian groups, including charismatic ones, even though the blood-splashing is universally rejected. Some modern-day money-changers are actually willing to "sell" you some of the Exodus anointing oil - here, for example - which is quite stupid because Exodus 30 clearly states that the oil is a "sacred formula" and if it is used by people who aren't Jewish priests, those people must be "cut off" from the congregation. Whoops.

It is interesting how much space and effort the writers of Exodus give to details of an area that most Israelites will never be permitted to see, and to clothing only a handful of people will ever wear. On the one hand, it's a sign of honour to God - the creation of a privileged and decorative meeting place for those occasions on which he descends to speak to the priest or the prophet. On the other hand, I can't help wondering why these deserve so much detail when we skirted through one brief story after another in Genesis and the first half of Exodus. I noted in a previous post that the new covenant was based on the supremacy of the priest caste. God appears to be cementing and legitimizing this supremacy further by privileging them with such a rich set of commandments. After all, right now the nation of Israel is essentially a group of nomadic refugees, according to the narrative. The rich cloth and precious metals needed for the new project are therefore, we may presume, a considerable expense for the Jewish people.

In order to offset the costs of the new "Tent of Meeting," God proposes the first census, and the first flat tax, based upon that census. Each Israelite male over twenty is to pay a "ransom" fee to the priests so that they may be free of sickness. God very specifically insists that rich and poor must pay the same fee: "the rich are not to give more... and the poor are not to give less." This appears to be a one-time tax which will be "a memorial for the Israelites before the Lord," as well as paying for "the service of the Tent of Meeting." God doesn't explain why everyone must pay the same fee, or what will happen to any among the Israelites who weren't able to take money with them from Egypt, or have blown it all on cheap trinkets and souvenirs in the meantime. I guess they're screwed. For those who can afford to pay, a bonding and rite-of-passage ritual is prescribed: everyone will line up on one side of a line, then walk up to pay the priests, and then "cross over" to those who have paid.

As I recall, the census is a weird instrument in the Bible. I think someone gets punished severely for one later on. I'll consider it in more detail if it's not a false memory of some sort and it eventually comes up again, but in the meantime it's worth noting that Exodus 30 appears to suggest that sickness could result from participating in the census without paying the fee. Is a census sinful? What kind of sickness does a census cause? Is this mere superstition? Why would the people need to pay to atone for participating in a ceremony which God has orderd them to participate in? Seems like a convenient method of legitimizing fund-raising by the priesthood, to me, but here God seems perfectly on side with the proceedings. He may even be the one contributing the sicknesses.

Women will be pleased to know that under the Exodus laws they don't need redemption. I'm reaching a bit on this one but the Bible doesn't bother to specify that women participate as well, and given the context it appears only to be men who are involved in the ceremony. Whether this is because women can't be redeemed anyways, they're not worth counting, or their lives just aren't worth half a shekel (the prescribed price for each man to pay), I'm not sure.
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The Covenant of Removal: Exodus 23:20 - 24

The following post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

At the beginning of Exodus 24, Moses and the elders of Israel affirm the covenant. Once again, God clearly specifies that only Moses may "approach the Lord; the others must not come near." Moses does this, then comes back and relates the laws that wer given, and the people agree "with one voice" that they will follow the commandments. It's probably a very touching and powerful moment for this assemblage of freed slaves. The next day, they celebrate with a number of sacrifices, a repetition of the laws and thier affirmation to obey God. (It's easy to think of the Israelites as though they were pretty much culturally the same as us, so it's worth noting the gory nature of this ritual: the prophet scoops up the blood of the slaughtered bulls and flings it over his people, splashing them with blood in the name of God.) Once the sacrifice has been performed, the elders of Israel have become more righteous in God's eyes: he permits them to come up with Moses to meet him, and appears to them standing upon "a pavement made of sapphire, clear as the sky itself." Then Moses heads up the mountain for another set of commandments, taking Joshua with him and leaving the elders in charge. Joshua hasn't done much yet, though he gets his own book later; here in Exodus, he's simply described as an "aide" to Moses.

This covenant involves some text at the close of ch. 23 which I left out of the last post because it isn't about the law. God provides some specific promises about how the Israelites will go about claiming territory. He will give the Israelites "an angel" to guard and protect them, and to give them instructions. God describes him like sort of magic spokesman: "if you listen carefully to what he says and do all that I say, I will be an enemy to your enemies and will oppose those who oppose you."

It's interesting that in this first covenant, we don't see any specific references to the homicidal or even genocidal approach the Israelites are later commanded to take, and which in my clearly flawed memory I was expecting to read here. God appears to intend to conduct any killing that is necessary by himself: as the Israelites advance, "my angel will go ahead" and will "send terror" and "confusion" to each nation in Israel's path. They will be scared, and they will "turn thier backs and run." God describes himself not as a massacring warrior but as a harassing and irritating force: his angel will play the role of a "hornet." And it will do so gradually, because if all the nations were wiped out at once, the land would go barren and the Israelites would have to spend too much time dealing with "wild animals."

Indeed, the only explicit war the Israelites are commanded to partake in will be the annihilation of other gods, not other people. As they advance, God explains, he will "wipe out" the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites and Jebusites. The Israelites will follow behind and "demolish" the gods, and "break their sacred stones to pieces." The new country, God promises, will stretch from the Red Sea to the "Philistine sea," and "from the desert to the River." (My Bible specifies in footnotes that this means the Mediterranean and the Euphrates; this is speculation but seems plausible.) This would pretty much mean that Israel is claiming all of its present-day territory, parts of the Sinai peninsula, and parts of what is now Syria, Lebanon, western Iraq, and northern Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, at this point the focus seems to be on the removal of indigenous groups, not their extermination. God is going to give the Israelites a new land after their exodus by chasing out some other tribes, thus causing other exoduses (exodi?). These people, he specifies, will be "drive[n] out before" the Israelites. They must not be permitted to remain in the land, because they will "cause you to sin against me, because the worship of their gods will certainly be a snare to you."The fact that a covenant of removal seems like a relief is probably relative only to the covenants of genocide which eventually follow, as it becomes clear that the indigenous peoples will not be "drive[n] out" but in fact will be slaughtered.

Another point which bares some reflection is the curious claim that the indigenous gods will "ensnare" the Israelites. By "gods" we may or may not mean actual entities here - earlier God speaks of the gods as idols which may be smashed rather than other gods like himself - but, particularly if that's true, what's going to make these other gods so tempting? God has demonstrated to the Israelites some pretty fucking incredible powers - so much so, indeed, that even the Egyptian magicians were convinced of his divine authority. What are these local gods going to do that's going to so impress the Israelites that they forget about the exodus? Is God planning on taking an extended vacation during which he expects the fickle Israelites to begin doubting his existence?
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Sunday, March 23, 2008

Rules, Rules, Rules: Exodus 20:22 - 23

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

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First, a note on a previous post. It has been brought to my attention by one regular foe of the Church of the Orange Sky that openly calling for inconvenient verses to be "shoved under the carpet" - which were indeed my words, I beliee - is an inappropriate approach to Biblical studies.

Not so, sister! As any honest conservative scholar will admit, the Bible is chock full of seemingly inconsistent statements, in large part because it was written by a large number of people, some of whom were elitist priests, some of whom were elitist military and political leaders, some of whom were cranky anarchistic prophets, and some of whom fit somewhere in between. Thus we must "harmonize" the Bible, an ironic thing to do to "inerrant" Scriptures but actually a necessary thing to do - even conservatives agree on that! - because the Bible is in fact so unharmonious that it requires extra-special efforts to impose order upon it. The process of harmonization proceeds by burying unwanted verses under large and impressive piles of more appropriate ones, producing an intricate and often quite implausible "synthesis" which often makes even less sense than any of its component parts, then finally tying the whole mess together with confident and thunderous rhetoric and possibly some arm-waving thrown in for good measure. It is this process which I propose to undertake, knowing that in doing so I will have the full support of generations of conservative scholars who have adopted much the same methodology.

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Now, to business.

Having overawed the Israelites with his impressive fireworks at Mt. Sinai, God sits down with Moses to have a long chat about the rules. This is the first of a large number of sets of laws handed down, ostensibly via direct revelation from God to the prophet, which comprise the bulk of the remainder of Exodus as well as parts of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. After some brief instructions about how to make an altar (complete with a warning that God doesn't want to see any naked priests), God spends almost two chapters describing how people and animals are legitimate property and how you can resolve disputes that inevitably occur when the people you own get damaged in some way.

There's a tension in Exodus. On the one hand, there's some basis for the sort of rigid hierarchical social order that the nation of Israel clearly eventually adopted; on the other, there's still some remnant of awareness of the ethical implications of liberation from Egypt. Thus the laws of Exodus are a strange fusion of what is now conservative theology and liberation theology.

Implicit in these chapters is an acceptance of slavery and patriarchal rule over the household, with an assumption that people who are not free Isarelite men are eligible to be owned. God, as described here, does not seem inclined to liberate the slaves of the Israelites to the same extent that he liberated the slaves of the Egyptians. Amidst a long list of death penalties, God permits the sale of daughters, and even suggests that if a slave is married while working for you, you, not he, own his wife and children (and can therefore keep them even when you free him). All punishments are modeled on that well-known aphorism, "a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound." To this end God is sometimes surprisingly specific, among other things specifying a fine if you accidentally hit a pregnant woman and cause a miscarriage. This verse is usually used by pro-life activists to claim quite fictitiously that the Old Testament bans abortion; one may see that it is fiction because a fine clearly does not compensate for human life, and thus it follows that if God's laws really were meant to communicate that the unborn fetus is a human life, they would not prescribe a fine for the death of that fetus. Depending on how one reads this verse, it is quite plausible to argue that in the eyes of the Law a miscarriage on its own is "no serious injury." (Come to think of it, miscarriage is a really stupid word; it sounds as though you were carrying around a baby and accidentally dropped it.)

God's laws for property are also very specific, and no doubt gun-toting Second Amendment lovers will be happy to see that you have the right to kill a thief invading your home. (Those same people will doubtless be very disturbed to hear that this privilege is granted only after nightfall; if you kill a thief during the day, you are guilty of murder and must be put to death.)

On the other hand, God clearly intends to restrict the ability of his chosen people to oppress themselves and others. Israelite servants must be freed in the seventh year of their sevice (unless they choose to stay with their master for the rest of their life; apparently it's an either-or choice). You can sell your daughter into slavery, but anyone who buys her has an obligation to take care of her (the Biblical text actually says he must do so even if she "does not please the master," which might be a euphemistic reference to our first exception to the Seventh Commandment). If you beat your slaves so badly you knock out a tooth or damage an eye, you must free them by way of apology. God promises he will create sanctuary cities where criminals may flee to.

God also provides a considerable list of social and judicial responsibilities (alternatively, only the liberal writers showed up to the drafting meeting for chapter 23, and took the opportunity of the conservatives' absence to shove through some ameliorating amendments). Hilariously, my always-well-subtitled New International Version Bible starts off the section it calls "Social Responsibility" in the middle of chapter 22, with the instructions that if you sleep with an unbetrothed virgin you have to marry her, that if you see a "sorceress" you have to kill her, and that you also must kill people who have sex with animals and people who sacrifice to other gods. Social responsibility, indeed!

The "social responsibility" section actually begins at 22:21, with the admonition that you must not "mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt." The section closes at 22:9 with a repetition of this: "do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt." Sandwiched in between are a variety of social justice rules, and in many of them God explicitly sides with the poor and needy:

- if you exploit a widow or orphan, "I will certainly hear their cry. My anger will be aroused."

- if you lend money to the poor and charge them interest, or take the cloak from a poor person and do not return it, "I will hear, for I am compassionate."

- justice must be impartial, not siding with "the crowd" or otherwise showing "favoritism." Specifically, "do not deny justice to your poor people."

- you must rescue the lost or over-burdened animals of others, even if they belong to "your enemy" or to "someone who hates you."

You also aren't supposed to blaspheme against God or "curse the ruler of your people"; it's interesting and somewhat disturbing that those two are lumped together in the same commandment.

After this, God provides rules for the Sabbath - specifying that slaves and aliens must also be permitted the Sabbath, and that during the Sabbath year (i.e. the seventh year) every field be thrown open to the poor so that they may harvest it. Then there are some new festivals - three per year, one to remember the exodus from Egypt, one to celebrate the coming of the harvest, and one to celebrate the end of the harvest season. And finally, an extra rule is thrown in as an afterthought: "do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk." That's a bit of an odd one.

It would be tempting to pick and choose some laws that seem particularly useful and downplay the others. The suggestion that even your enemy's beasts of burden deserve your attention, for example, would appear to foreshadow Christ's later teaching that we love our enemies and our persecutors. The specific attention to the poor and the needy also seems useful to invoke, and actually requires considerably more social responsibility than the religious right is usually prepared to accept. Where, for example, are the laws banning interest on loans, or giving the poor legal access to farmers' fields? Instead the right takes comfort in the ideology of capitalism, suggesting that the real way to help the poor is not to force them into "dependence" upon charity but to force them to look after themselves. Whatever the merits of economic theory applied to social problems, clearly they have no meaningful relation to the laws given in Exodus.

Having said that, I am reluctant to fall into the same trap of picking and choosing useful laws. I haven't actually come across anything all that objectionable yet, but I'm anticipating doing so shortly. I find it extremely unconvincing when, for example, churches suggest that there are certain codes of moral behaviour from the Old Testament which remain relevant, while others - those relegated to the role of religious purity, etc. - may be safely chucked away. My primary problem with such a claim is that the Bible itself doesn't make any such explicit distinction, nor does it give us guidelines for the process of categorization. Inevitably what such a process ends up being is a way of justifying and legitimizing one particular group's view of what moral laws are desirable and which ones are unwanted, all wrapped up in an unconvincing theological package. I'll have to reflect more on this once we get to a section I actually find too objectionable, but in the meantime I'm going to stay noncommittal.
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The Ten Proposals: Exodus 20

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary by the Church of the Orange Sky.

I don't actually want to write this post. For some reason in the last commentary the Orange Sky inspired me to say I would discuss the Ten Commandments separately, and so now i must. There are, however, at least two grand ironies about conservative interpretation of the Commandments which is worth bringing up.

I also don't actually like the Ten Commandments, at least as Christianity usually treats them. Maybe they're the ideological inspiration for the rest of the laws that follow, but it's also difficult to disentangle them from the patrimonial context in which they written by the priests (the last commandment, for example, instructs that we "not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor." One wonders whether these items are listed in order of importance - should I sell my wife before I give up my house, but not before I give up my ox or donkey?

Whoever wrote Exodus doesn't actually count the Commandments, so it's interesting to see that people have subsequently recounted them. The Jews, most interestingly of all, actually use what we call the preface as their first commandment: I am the Lord your God. The Catholics lump togehter "no other gods" and "no idols," but the Protestants separate them out: "no other gods" and "don't make idols" are two separate commandments. In some ways the Catholic counting system actually makes more sense here, since the text specifically says an idol takes "the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them." I can only assume that the Protestants decided to re-number the Ten Commandments so that they can burn the Catholics for having icons without accusing them of having other gods, which would clearly be untrue. (The Catholics' counting is equally convenient for them, of course, since they can say that revering icons and idols and so on doesn't count as having other gods.)

Everyone keeps the same count for most of the rest, including the Jews, but then we get to the one on coveting and envy, which poses a clear problem, because while you could fudge on the rest and say they apply to everyone, clearly the last sentences apply only to men, or maybe to men and lesbians, I suppose. Wives, in the plain language of the commandment, do not covenant with God - rather, they are possessions of the men who covenant with God. Those who suggest we ought to be taking "God's laws" seriously and applying them to everyone, then, must take the unusual step for a Biblical literalist of actually adding rules into the Bible - specifically, that when the Bible says "you shall not covet your neighbor's wife," it actually means "you shall not covet your neighbor's husband or wife." The very concept of "coveting" implies ownership by someone else, and this ownership is not mutual, though Paul would later re-interpret marriage in 1 Corinthians to be an agreement of mutual submission and mutual ownership (and then would subsequently re-interpret it again to clarify that men were still in charge).

My second and related complaint about how the Ten Commandments are often treated today is that people somehow see them as absolute commands, always of course qualifying them - I can't count, for example, how many conservatives have confidently informed me that killing in the name of the state is perfectly okay because the Ten Commandments are only against "murder." Well, that's fair enough, but if you really wanted to interpret what "murder" meant, or "adultery" in the case of the seventh commandment" as another example, in all fairness you really ought to judge how the early Jews interpreted such concepts. This is why I didn't want to talk about the Ten Commandments separately - we haven't seen all these later qualifiers yet - but rest assured they are there. In the coming chapters and books following Exodus 20, readers will learn that "thou shalt not kill" doesn't apply to your human property (i.e. slaves, who you can kill with impunity), and there are a few other exceptions too. Adultery is an even more qualified term - the Bible makes clear you shouldn't do it, but so long as the woman isn't married (and especially if she isn't an Israelite, or is your slave), the writers add in a virtually limitless series of plausible scenarios in which you can freely have sex with her. I know a prophet in Saskatchewan who has thus proposed that the laws of Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy amend the Sixth and Seventh Commandments to read "Everything goes, because boys will be boys"; or perhaps, seeing the later requirements that mistresses be financially supported, "Thou shalt not commit adultery unless you can afford it, and also you can have sex with slave girls because that doesn't count."

The Ten Commandments, whatever their original divine inspiration may have been, are communicated to us by and through a rigidly patrimonial culture which possessed, among other things, numerous forms of ownership of human beings which we now reject: ownership of wives, ownership of slaves, etc. We have to re-interpret the Ten Commandments, because we simply cannot relate to them as the original writers would have; and even the religious right knows this, because they re-interpret the Commandments too. And no one seems to regard them as a truly fixed set - the Jewish scribes spent a meaningful chunk of Leviticus and Deuteronomy writing in exceptions to the Seventh Commandment.

Two further irritations remain. First, I hate it when evangelists - it is usually evangelists - attempt to universalize the Ten Commandments and apply them to everyone. They don't apply to everyone. God gave them to the Jews and only to the Jews. Nothing in the text involves God saying "These laws are laws by which I will judge every human being and send people to hell if they don't obey them." Granted they look like very good things to do and not to do (I am personally against killing, for example), but nowhere does God claim this is a standard against which he intends to judge all of humanity. So fuck you, Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, with your asinine Way of the Master brainwashing "techniques."

Second, the Ten Commandments are not the cornerstone of English common law, any more than Christianity is the cornerstone of Western democracy. I shouldn't have to say this, but clearly it's necessary, because both statements are made routinely by the religious right. Christian activists sparked a ludicrous shitstorm a few years ago over the presence of a Ten Commandments monument in an Alabama courthouse, which was scheduled to be removed on the grounds that it violated the separation of church and state. At the time I was still frequenting Christian forums and I remember evangelicals' irrational rage at this affront to American freedom and democracy.

Any notion that the Ten Commandments actually have any meaningful relationship to our criminal legal system is of course moronic. Our laws don't ban other gods, they don't bidols, they don't ban misuse of the Lord's name, they don't protect the Sabbath, they don't require honouring mothers or fathers, they frown on but don't prohibit adultery, they only prohibit lying to the state, and they certainly don't prohibit coveting; indeed, our entire free-market system is based on the assumption that people covet. Murder and theft are the only things that the Ten Commandments and the Western legal system universally agree should be prohibited. This isn't saying much, because pretty much every culture has some rules regarding murder and theft, even if he definitions and the consequences differ. In the past a few of the other commandments were in the law too, but it's time to toss this notion that there's any inherent meaningful connection.

The fact that the Jewish law will subsequently clarify several of the commandments by writing in exceptions and limitations and interpretations, and that everyone today continues to re-interpret the commandments to fit their own particular cultural agendas, leads me to my conclusion, which is that they aren't much use as eternal and fundamental moral laws for human behaviour, and that pretty much everyone implicitly agrees with me on this, even if they don't admit it.
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