Torah

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God's Word? Concerning modern scholarship and those bloodthirsty Bible passages

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God's Word? Concerning modern scholarship and those bloodthirsty Bible passages

QUESTION:

How do scholars explain bloodthirsty Bible passages?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Skeptics seeking to disparage the Bible and, with it, Judaism and Christianity, cite certain passages in the Bible that depict all-out warfare as mandated by God. Consider Israel’s “conquest” of Canaan under Joshua, and a notably bloodthirsty passage like Deuteronomy 20:16-17, which says “you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them … as the LORD your God has commanded.”

Readers can see how that issue might, to say the least, be relevant to debates about some events in recent decades.

There’s been intriguing recent discussions of this complex issue. Even conservative evangelicals, who defend the Bible’s historical accuracy, are reinterpreting such passages, as we’ll see.

“Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary,” issued by Judaism’s Conservative branch, freely admits a modern reader “recoils” from a demand to wipe out a population group. It says the context is the Canaanites’ “abhorrent” deeds. Verse 18 goes on to explain combat is necessary so “they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices which they have done in the service of their gods.”

Scholarly commentaries think ritual sacrifice of children was a major part of this. The context of such verses is said to be “the Torah’s abiding fear that these pagan nations will lead Israel astray.”

Here’s another part of the context. Risking any military advantage from surprise, Joshua informed Canaanites in advance about the invasion plan so they could flee from bloodshed, and he first offered a peace settlement before resorting to combat. (That was relatively humane for the cruel culture 3,000 years ago.) The same point is underscored by a classic source in Orthodox Judaism, the “Pentateuch & Haftorahs” compiled by Britain’s longtime chief rabbi, J.H. Hertz.

This Orthodox Jewish commentary also observes that the Israelites’ need for a homeland is part of all human history, including for most western nations.


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Doctrine and fashion: As Iran protests persist, what women's clothing does Islam require?

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Doctrine and fashion: As Iran protests persist, what women's clothing does Islam require?

THE QUESTION:

As Iran protests persist, what women’s clothing does Islam require?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The facts are these. On September 13, Iran’s morality police arrested 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for violating the legally required Muslim dress code for women. She was wearing the mandatory head scarf (hijab), but apparently it did not correctly conceal all of her hair. Three days later, Amini died while still in police custody. The government blames a heart attack, but suspicions that she was abused run rampant.

In the spontaneous uproar that resulted, refusal to wear the hijab became a symbol of resisting oppression as protests across the nation targeted not only restrictions for women but expressed over-all rejection of the harsh theocratic regime that has ruled revolutionary Iran the past 43 years. At this writing, at least 200 Iranians have reportedly been killed and 1,500 demonstrators arrested.

Azadeh Moaveni of New York University wrote in The New York Times that resentment boiled over in part because women in Tehran’s wealthy and politically-connected elite flagrantly ignore the Muslim dress laws without arrest.

There’s always been vigorous discussion of the complexities about exactly what attire is properly modest and thus faithful to Islam.

Responding to events in Iran, Deina Abdelkader at the University of Massachusetts Lowell contends that clothing rules “have nothing to do with Islamic tenets” while Muslim countries have imposed — or forbidden — forms of women’s attire in order to proclaim their ideology, whether secular or scrupulously religious.

Islam’s fundamental concern here is not unique, since religions normally advocate modesty and propriety. In particular, Jewish tradition associates attire as part of a general admonition in the Torah (Deuteronomy 23:15, JPS translation): “Let your camp be holy; let Him [God] not find anything unseemly among you and turn away from you.”


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A religion question and so much more: What is Judaism?

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A religion question and so much more: What is Judaism?

THE QUESTION:

What is Judaism?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

How are we to comprehend the series of attacks on American Jews during the holiday season? Why were there 1,879 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. during 2018, by Anti-Defamation League count, which was double the 2017 total and the third-worst year on record?

Whatever the explanation, the three-word question above was the headline and subject of an online article just before the recent repellent events. Author Dennis Prager is a religiously and politically conservative Jew whose talk show airs on many “Christian-formatted” stations in the Salem Radio Network.

Prager said he raised this very fundamental question because “fewer and fewer Jews know anything about Judaism,” and many non-Jews “erroneously identify Judaism with what most Jews believe,” namely some vague secularized outlook.

This is no easy question because Jewish identity has a dual nature, religious and ethnic. Many Americans who consider themselves Jewish may be religiously Buddhist, or atheistic, or could care less about any religion and see their identity only as a cultural heritage. Also, unlike Christianity, Judaism is not a religion with defined creeds and confessions.

The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 told us Judaism is quite simply “the religion of the Jewish people,” which doesn’t get us very far.


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No 'proof texts': Wheaton College scholar seeks to shelve Old Testament moral rules (updated)  

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No 'proof texts': Wheaton College scholar seeks to shelve Old Testament moral rules (updated)  

The unending debate over the Bible and same-sex relationships is the most troublesome one for U.S. Protestantism since the Civil War.

It first broke into the news agenda big-time 47 years ago at a conference of the large United Methodist Church.  As religion specialists well know, an emergency Methodist conference that opens Saturday in St. Louis is to weigh whether the UMC will split over this.   

Simultaneously, a book on sale next week has potentially explosive relevance: “The Lost World of the Torah: Law as Covenant and Wisdom in Ancient Context.” Of course, “Torah” in the title refers to the Old Testament’s first five books and also the material therein normally called biblical law.   

The book – nota bene -- does not emanate from liberal “mainline” Protestantism. The publisher, InterVarsity Press, is evangelical, and the authors are veteran Wheaton College (Illinois) Old Testament professor John H. Walton along with son J. Harvey, a University of St. Andrews doctoral student. 

“We cannot reconstruct a moral system from the Torah or any part of it,” they contend. “That is not what it [the Torah] is designed to do.” Rather, “order in society was the goal, and it was achieved through wisdom,” not biblical  “legislation” or “rules.”  The Old Testament God was simply not “imposing morality or social ideals on Israel through the stipulations of the Torah.” 

Writers should, of course, read the complete book to fairly grasp the argument, but chapter titles well summarize the key points.

“We cannot gain moral knowledge or build a system of ethics based on reading the Torah in context and deriving principles from it.”

“The ancient Israelites would not have understood the Torah as providing divine moral instruction.”

“Torah cannot provide proof texts for solving issues today.”

The Waltons specify that this holds for the venerated Ten Commandments, and for Leviticus 18, where God’s “statutes” abominate homosexual acts as well as adultery, incest and bestiality. Regarding same-sex activity and gender identity, the authors warn against extracting “biblical principles” to “substantiate a particular position today as if that position is thereby built on moral absolutes.”

That should provoke hot responses from traditionalists, Jews included. The book follows the shelving of Old Testament dictates proposed last year by another prominent evangelical, megachurch preacher Andy Stanley.


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Why do Jewish and Christian Bibles put the books in a different order?

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Why do Jewish and Christian Bibles put the books in a different order?

GORDON’S QUESTION:

Why is there a different order of the books of the Hebrew Bible in Jewish and Christian editions?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

As we’ll see, there’s revived debate about this. For starters, one key fact is that the contrasting lists did not result from conflict between Judaism and Christianity but rather the varied sequences used by Jews.

Overview: The Jewish Bible and Protestant Old Testament have the same contents, but list the books in different order. Catholicism’s ordering is similar to Protestants’ but its “canon” (recognized Scriptures) includes “deuterocanonical” books not found in the Jewish and Protestant Bibles, while the Orthodox add further deuterocanonical materials.

Jews organized the biblical books into categories in this order: (1) Law, or Torah, the first five books with specially revered status. (2) Prophets or Nevi’im, a confusing label since this sections begins with books of history, followed by prophets ending with Malachi. (3) Writings or Kethuyim, a variegated collection dominated by the Psalms, including books accepted as Jewish Scripture later than the Law and Prophets. The initials T, N, and K produce the acronym Tanakh that Jews use for the Bible.

With ordering, the chief issue is where to fit Chronicles (or 1 and 2 Chronicles) and whether it properly concludes the Hebrew Bible. Chronicles, which repeats much of the history covered in the colorful Samuel (or 1 and 2 Samuel) and Kings (or 1 and 2 Kings) was compiled round 400 B.C.E., many centuries after the events.

Unlike Samuel and Kings, the Harper Study Bible observes, Chronicles omits most “references to the defects and the sins of David and Solomon,” emphasizes “the Temple and the Davidic line,” virtually ignores the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and warns and encourages future generations.


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