This week, Slate features an ongoing dialogue between A.J. Jacobs, who spent a year trying to follow every command in the Bible and then wrote about it in his book The Year of Living Biblically, and evangelical journalist Matt Labash.
When I first heard about the book, it sounded like a stunt to expose all the ludicrous commandments in the Bible and reassure secular Americans that those religious wackos really are as dumb as they look if they actually believe all that stuff. Jacobs admits that he wanted to do a real-life version of the letter that Dr. Laura received a few years ago about her use of Old Testament laws to argue against homosexuality:
I do need some advice from you regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.
When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?
I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
This kind of snarky attitude might have flavored Jacobs’ motivation, but from his comments on Slate it appears that he also went into the experience with a genuine desire to understand what it means to live by the book. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like his views of biblical commandments (especially in the Old Testament) changed much from how he saw them before: as a bunch of wacky rules made up by obsessive-compulsive control freaks. And his evangelical dialogue partner Labash doesn’t do much to challenge that view.
Just a little bit of history helps to put things into perspective. To us, Old Testament law might sound harsh and arbitrary, but it was actually a giant leap forward in the history of human justice and morality.
Take the most famous example, the law of retribution in Leviticus 24: “If anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him.”
To our modern ears, this sounds primitive and cruel. We’re supposed to turn the other cheek, right? That’s what Jesus says in his comment on this verse in Matthew 5, and most of us, Christian or not, have this as an ideal. As Jacobs divulges in Slate, “Much of the New Testament moved me, and I loved trying to live out some of Jesus’ teachings — especially forgiveness, a tough one for me.”
But in the the ancient world, taking an eye for an eye was as close to forgiveness as most people could even imagine. If you purposefully poked out my eye, I would have felt perfectly justified in killing you, your wife and kids, and your pet Chihuahua in retribution. But this new law (strikingly similar to the law of retaliation in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, a sign that God really has instituted every governing authority) would have forced me to acknowledge that you were made in the image of God, and it’s not my right to destroy that image.
Once this basic tenet of respect for life became widespread, God pushed things even further toward godly forgiveness, and that’s when Jesus sprung the turning-the-other-cheek thing on us.
Since the fall of man, God has slowly but progressively shaped humanity to uphold greater ethics and equality. Kind of like the way parents progressively shape their neanderthal-mannered toddlers into responsible young adults. Just because we’re teenagers now doesn’t give us the right to laugh at the way God disciplined us when we were rug-rats 3500 years ago.