Day 65 Deuteronomy 24-27

            More lists of rules.  Don’t muzzle an ox while it’s treading the grain.  Listen to the priests about how to treat skin diseases.  Newly married men get a year off before they can be drafted.  Don’t kidnap other Israelites and sell them into slavery.  Kill Amalekites on sight.

            More rules about dealing with the poor.  Make sure to pay your field hands every night.  Don’t deny justice to the foreigner or the fatherless.  Don’t be too thorough harvesting your field; leave a little behind for the poor.

            Then, at the end of all that, Moses tells the elders of the tribes that once they cross the Jordan River, half the tribes go up Mount Ebal to pronounce curses and half go up Gerezim to pronounce blessings.  We only hear the curses here though.  Over a dozen or so stanzas, the Levites and the other Israelites on Mt Ebal curse anyone who abuses the weak, acts with injustice, or sleeps with family members.

Day 62 Deuteronomy 14-16

            Only eat animals that have cloven hooves and chew their cud, or have undivided hooves and do not chew cud, but not animals with only one or the other.  There are some birds you can eat and some you can’t.  Also, bats are a kind of bird.

            Tithing according to Moses is taking ten percent of your crop to the temple and eating it there with God.  At least that’s what the passage sounds like to me, my commentary casually mentions that it goes to the priests but doesn’t really back that up with anything.  A quick scan of a couple websites yields that the tithe was supposed to come in the form of a big feast, but you had to go to the temple for your tithe feast and include the priests.  Ten percent of your crop for the entire year makes for a huge feast, so I guess the excess probably went to maintain the temple too, or something.  Every third year your tithe went to the Levites and the needy staying in Levite towns.

            Every seventh year you have to cancel all the debts you hold against other Israelites.  There are a lot of rules here for taking generous care of the poor and helping out others when they fall on hard times, but it’s all only for other Israelites.  It sounds like you can do pretty much whatever you want to foreigners, like they’re completely outside the social contract.  Likewise for slaves.  If an Israelite sells himself to you in servitude, you can only keep him for six years before letting him go, but foreigners are yours forever. Classy.

Day 37 Leviticus 19-21

            Chapter 19 of Leviticus is the miscellaneous section for all the laws that don’t fit neatly into one of the other categories.  Most of it is pretty simple and intuitive.  Don’t cheat your neighbors. Don’t steal. Don’t worship idols.  Don’t do things that endanger your neighbor’s life.  There are a couple interesting parts though, that don’t seem to make any sense at the outset.  Don’t wear a shirt made of two different kinds of cloth.  Don’t cut your hair around the temples or trim the edges of your beard.

            I’m wearing a cotton/polyester blend t-shirt right now so where does that leave me?  I’ve heard that these things are forbidden because, at the time, they were practices associated with worshiping other Gods.  That makes sense, but it bothers me a lot that we don’t see that written in the actual text.  My problem is that we’re okay basically ignoring this rule because we feel we understand why it exists and it doesn’t apply the same way anymore.  We need to be really careful doing this kind of thing though because it puts us in a place where we’re telling ourselves “Well, God said that, but he really meant this.”

            Now I feel that it’s really important that we take the context of these passages into account as much as possible.  We sometimes forget that these things were written down at a certain time and place in a certain culture and, even if Moses is quoting God as accurately as he possibly can, you simply can’t completely separate that from his environment all of the time.  We need to try to account for that, but we are still in kind of dangerous territory when we try to tell ourselves that we can completely disregard something from the Bible.

            Of course, there’s some debate about what our relationship even is to the Law in the Old Testament, so I guess we’ll just have to revisit issues like this later in the context of the New Testament.  All I know is that you’re unlikely to get out of a speeding ticket by explaining that you understand why the speed limit is 25, but it doesn’t apply to you at this time.

            God says that when you collect your crops, you should leave some there and not be too thorough.  This is so the poor can come through and pick some grapes to eat.

            Punishments are pre-determined for the laws we’ve been given so far.  Most of them involve death, usually by stoning, but if you marry a woman and her daughter then all three of you are burned to death.  Other infractions get you cut off from your people.  There’s no fine and a night in jail punishments outlined in here though.  The lightest punishment is permanent exile.

            The priests have even stricter rules to live by.  They are not allowed to mourn except for a close family member.  The High priest is not allowed to at all.  None of them can marry a woman who has been a prostitute or divorced.  The high priest has to marry a virgin.  If a priests daughter becomes a prostitute then it is disgraceful to her father.  She has to be burned to death.