We’re getting into some pretty important stuff in the Good Book. Since last week, Israel has been liberated from Egypt and today we have the ten commandments. These are related events, mind you. The offering of the law, which begins with these ten commandments, is part of a covenant – a sort of solemn contract or sacred agreement – between God and Israel. In fact, the word typically used in Hebrew here (‘berit’) is also used to describe treaties between nations. So this is sort of a legal arrangement between God and Israel, albeit a sacred one. “I did for you (by getting you out of Egypt); now here’s what you can do for me. You can keep this law.” The escape from Egypt has been completed (though the settling of Canaan won’t happen for a while), and so Israel and God are talking terms. And this language will continue throughout the Old Testament. God will often say to Israel through prophets, “because you failed to keep my law, the following bad things are going to happen” or we’ll read that this or that king of Israel failed to keep a covenant and then bad stuff will happen to Israel. When Israel breaks the agreement by disobeying the law, by violating the terms they’ve agreed to, then God isn’t obliged to uphold his end of the bargain either. And often, in the Old Testament, God doesn’t.
I give you these fifteen . . . ten. Make that ten commandments!
Like many of our modern legal documents, there’s a lot of fine print here. The ten commandments are a handy summary, but today and in many of our days to come, we’re going to spend a lot of time reading detailed accounts of the specific subtleties and minute variants of the law that God and Israel are agreeing to. For the modern reader, much of this can appear quite cruel and ruthless. “And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death” (Exodus 21:17) is one example of a pretty rough rule. There wouldn’t be many teenagers running around if we observed this one real close these days. And, especially in this chapter, death is a pretty common form of punishment for all manner of misbehavior.
But if you try to imagine the world four or five thousand years ago, it’s pretty progressive stuff. To the people who first heard and read this law, there was a radical sense of equality in this. Why? Think of how these things are framed: if any man kills another . . . if a man kidnaps another . . . if a man marries, etc. This law makes no distinction of class. The laws don’t read, “If a king injures a plumber,” or “if a powerful man plunks a poor one.” These laws apply to any and every man, all the same. For example, in Egypt, Pharaoh pretty much did whatever he wanted. The law didn’t apply to him. Or rather, he was the law itself. Whatever he said was it. But in the young, not yet established nation of Israel, all were subject to the law, powerful and poor alike. If a judge or a priest or a powerful man committed a crime, he was on the hook for it. The law applied equally to all.
Sort of. Not women, and not servants or slaves, not foreigners, all of whom have special circumstances described in detail here and elsewhere. But even the sense that all men (though just men) had equality before the law was a pretty big step back then. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot: if you’re a homeless beggar and a prince knocks out your tooth, this law says that prince owes you a tooth back. That’s big stuff. There are the roots of a real sense of human equality in this. They may be only roots of course, but perhaps when we think of the law this way, it makes more sense later on when we hear Jesus tell us that he fulfills rather than abolishes this law. By overturning “the eye for an eye” statute we read earlier in Matthew, Jesus fulfills a sort of legal and moral progressivism that the law of the Old Testament initiates.
Happy reading,
Matt
St. Barnabas Reads the Bible 