Old Testament: Manual to Success?

[popscythe]

Inflammatory title, no?

That was not my intention. Rather, I wish to open up the discussion of the specifics of the Old Testament and why they may have come about. I'm talking about dining practices, hygienics and any/all of the other great stuff in the OT/Torah. Not if they are useful today, but why they may have come about at the time.

Let me start it off with what brought this discussion to mind locally: Be fruitful and multiply. It seems to me that a lot of guidelines for living in the OT are geared towards outbreeding the competition. (And maybe towards not eating all the good pack animals.) The general idea that with more people comes greater chance of success was pretty prevalent in the olden times (and probably true in most cases) but there are a lot of far reaching implications that survive even to this day. If you're laying with men and beasts as a strong young guy, you're less likely to create more strong young guys, right?

This is a really crass, layman's example, so I'm hoping some of you scripture scholars will help me out here. There are a lot of (sometimes contradictory) codes of behavior outlined in this sweet scroll, so lets have at 'em!

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Dietary purity laws were often just a form of price control.

E.g., we know from Pliny the Elder that rye bread wasn't exactly well liked, and it was often mixed with wheat "to mitigate its bitter taste, and even then is most unpleasant to the stomach".

E.g., barley also wasn't exactly the most loved cereal to use in bread. The Romans only fed it to the gladiators, for example. It's not hard to imagine that some would try to mix it with wheat too.

Also, supply wasn't exactly elastic. The different harvest times, for a start, ensured that everyone would try to have more than one kind of cereal growing if they could. But not everyone could. E.g., the rise in soil salinity in Mesopotamia eventually made whole swathes of land unsuitable for wheat.

Bottom line is that you couldn't have everyone grow wheat, if they don't like barley or rye bread. So some people tried mixing it.

Such mixing would create some extra demand for wheat even by the poorest classes, rising its price. Much to the displeasure of those who could afford all-wheat bread.

Enter purity laws. It angers the Lord if you eat above your station like that

It wasn't only an OT phenomenon, btw. The German Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot) in the late middle ages made it illegal to make beer out of anything but water, barley and hops. It also set a fixed price for beer, making it even more obvious what it's real purpose was. But at any rate, it made for example wheat beer flat-out illegal, again, to prevent demand for wheat by the brewers too.

(And it's delicious irony to see wheat beer today proclaiming proudly on the label that it's brewed according to the medieval purity law. It ranks up there with kosher pork, as irony meters go.)

ETA: for a bit of fun, even adding yeast is against that old purity law.

 

[popscythe]

Haha, interesting.

Anyone have any dirt on why you're NOT supposed to cut your hair if you're a goat herder from a couple thousand years ago?

 

[aviolet4u]

^ I don't know about that. But my mother believed that women were to grow their hair really long so after they die and wait in line for judgement a few thousand years they'll have something to cover their private areas.

 

[popscythe]

That makes a lot of sense. After all, you wouldn't want someone who is so pure that they made it to the line for judgement to lose their place for sproinging a butterfinger (crispity crunchity, peanut buttery) because your hair wasn't long enough.

 

[Madalch]

Haha, interesting.

Anyone have any dirt on why you're NOT supposed to cut your hair if you're a goat herder from a couple thousand years ago?

To mark you as being from "the tribe that doesn't cut its hair" as opposed to being from those heathens from "the tribe that braids their beards" or those devil-worshipping "tribe that tattoos their chins" or those goat-stealing "tribe that dyes its hair green".

A large portion of the dos and don'ts from Leviticus are there to prevent the sacred tribe from being absorbed by other tribes. Do not worship their gods, do not follow their ways, do not break bread with them. Kill them, rape them, enslave them, steal their land- fine, but don't treat them as equals and start intermarrying with them.

 

[popscythe]

Interesting. By the way, Obama makes a far better vulcan than syler did. He's got that voice, too.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Well, you have to also understand that a lot of religious hocus-pocus is post-facto made-up reasons why the Lord sent some drought, or why he lifted it, or whatnot.

It's not even just an NT issue. An American Indian tribe has a legend about how a curse was lifted because a woman ate roasted chestnuts. Apparently the evil spirit thought she's so tough that she eats embers from the fire, and buggered off

That said, if by hair you mean the Samson incident in Judges 16,

1. The point is more that you shouldn't trust a woman, and the plot device used is more like simply that Samson had a secret weakness. Sort of like Achiles's Heel. In a sense, it doesn't matter _which_ weakness it is, just something they wouldn't have guessed otherwise. (Much like a repeat of the riddle incident in Judges 16.)

Now these guys weren't exactly Homer class, as I keep saying, so it's a bit shoddier than Achiles's Heel. For a start there is no particular reason given why Samson's hair is his weak point or source of strength. (Or WTH of a house could have 3000 people on the roof alone.)

But, eh, for a bunch of backwater goat-herders it could be worse.

2. The whole theme seems to be a modification of another theme that was _very_ used in ancient times: castration.

There are a bunch of gods, who rose to power by castrating the former top dog. E.g., Cronus (father of Zeus) earns his position at the top by castrating his father, Uranus. And the middle east had its own share of gods and heroes who lost something under the belt.

The idea that being no longer a man disqualified one from being a ruler would continue even in more civilized places like the Byzantine Empire, and as late as 1041 AD, when Michael V castrated all male members of John the Orphanotrophos' family to eliminate them as potential competitors for the throne.

And they used a lot of euphemisms for getting castrated in legends, in any case.

Samson might have got to lose his hair instead of his family jewels, simply because of Deuteronomy 23:1: nobody who got castrated or had his male organ cut off, may enter the assembly of the Lord. It's pretty much an automatic excommunication. So, since they want him to remain the Lord's darling to the end, and a holy mythical figure, they can't take his nuts away. He loses his hair, he loses his eyes, but by Jove he's still got his package intact.

3. Well, I prefer the Edible Dirt version anyway

http://eddirt.frozenreality.co.uk/index.php?id=312

 

[popscythe]

I love when something that happens TO you gets you excommunicated. Those are my favorites.

How about the work prohibition on the sabbath? I did some reading on what's considered "work", varied, as you know, but riddle me the answer to this one anyway, you papyrus perusing professional. My favorite part of those prohibitions is the penalty: Execution.

 

[Meadmaker]

How about the work prohibition on the sabbath?

That's easy. You like weekends, right? You don't want to work every single day, right? Making it a religious command meant that no one could force the hired help to work every single day of their lives.

Of course, like many religious laws, people get a bit carried away with trying to follow them to the letter, and forgetting the spirit of the law, but the basic idea of having a day of rest seems like a darned good one to me.

 

[rjh01]

A day off a week is more than good for the workers. It is good for the employer. You can get more out of workers by working them 6 days than 7 days a week. After all they do need 1 day a week to do their own chores and recover from any minor wounds.

 

[Athyrio]

.....I'm talking about dining practices, hygienics and any/all of the other great stuff in the OT/Torah. Not if they are useful today, but why they may have come about at the time...

Deuteronomy 23:13 -

And thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee:

Although I poop inside my house, I still piss liberally upon my trees and bushes. It's a Southern man's expression of freedom.