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Oh, all right...
I would like to tackle just this one point. There were many parts of the "natural order of things" that the writers of the bible did contest (hence the requirement for laws). Things such as eating pork, homosexuality, usury, etc. are specifically condemned. The point of using slavery as an example is to show how the writers of the bible do seem to pick things to condemn or approve that most benefit themselves, and not justice, compassion, or any other "good" quality.
Okay, I'll give this a shot.
Before we get going, let me say this: I'm sure that most or all of this is already known to everyone here, but just in case, I'm going to go over it anyway. I'm not implying that anyone is ignorant about anything. Okay? Besides, Morry has gone to bed and I feel like writing. (Morry is the 98-year-old man that I care for 24-7. That's why I have so much free time to post.)
Hokulele, you'll find your bottom-line answer at the end of all this, and I think I can promise you that you won't like it.
Well, there's a lot here. Let's start with the kosher laws.
Any rabbi will tell you that God gave us no reasons for the dietary laws, but we are allowed to guess. This is more or less the consensus guess from the tradition.
In Judaism, blood may not be eaten. The prohibition is absolute in the Torah, and is the reason for the specifics of kosher slaughter and meat preparation.
The whole idea behind the kosher laws is to minimize the shedding of blood. The creatures that are OK to eat are all ruminants with split hooves; grass-eaters. Any creature that kills or eats meat itself is forbidden. Humans who ate them would be considered participants in that bloodshed. Pigs are omnivores; they have fangs, like dogs. Can't eat 'em. It's clearest with the birds; the forbidden birds are listed (unlike the animals) and they're all raptors--hawks, owls, like that.
(The Jewish ideal is vegetarianism, and many Jews
are vegetarians. It's easier than messing with finding kosher meat.)
I don't think the kosher laws benefit anybody but the animals and the
shochet (kosher slaughterer). Why the animals? The slaughter has to be painless.
Homosexuality? Beats me. Some theories are that it was associated with pagan temple prostitution, or with some practices of Israel's neighbors--it was pretty much OK with them (e.g., the Greeks)--but I don't think anyone really knows. It doesn't appear that the Bible is even aware (so to speak) of homosexuality as a lifestyle or sexual orientation, as we are today. It seems to be talking about the occasional act of homosexual anal rape, which was associated with revenge or humiliation. One clue, if you want to get into text-criticism technicalities, is that all the passages about gay sex come from the H source, which regarded any kind of sex that couldn't make babies as an "abomination."
All the branches have dropped that prohibition long since, except the Orthodox--and some of those congregations are quietly dropping it, too.
I can't imagine who that prohibition would benefit.
The usury laws have gotten us into a lot of trouble over the centuries. Jews are forbidden to lend money
to other Jews at interest. That's mostly ignored now, of course--it has to be; if a Jew goes into a bank for a loan, and the loan officer happens to be Jewish, they don't suddenly drop the interest charges. There are still "Hebrew Free Loan Societies" in any town with a significant Jewish population, though, that lend money at zero interest to Jews in need--and sometimes to others; I myself borrowed $1,500 from the Dallas HFLA long before my conversion was completed (I was unemployed at the time).
Anyway, in the Middle Ages, Christians had the exact same rule; they could not lend money at interest
to other Christians. Well,
somebody had to do it, and since Jews had few other ways of making a living, some became moneylenders.
In medieval Europe, Jews were forbidden to own land, do they couldn't be farmers. They were barred from the guilds, so they couldn't be craftsmen either--stonemasons, carpenters, butchers, bakers, like that. What was left was cottage artisan work: tailors, cobblers, knife sharpeners, jewelers. That, and being a merchant, buying and selling--and moneylending. Jews have always been small-town and city people, since medieval times. They weren't allowed to be anything else.
Remember Tevye in
Fiddler on the Roof? He had a cow, not a farm. That was
shtetl life; the small villages set aside for Jews in Poland and Russia, the only places where Jews were allowed to live. That way of life is literally extinct now. There were 5 million Polish Jews before WWII. By the end of the war, only a few thousand were left.
Well, anyway, the moneylending biz didn't work out so well for us. People went into debt to the Jews in their community, and every now and then they'd decide it was a good idea to run all the Jews out of town, or, better, just kill them all, and settle their debts the easy way. If the local baron or lord (or the czar) owed them a lot of money, sometimes he'd set it up and pass out the swords or muskets or whatever. Happened pretty regularly. The word is "pogrom."
(Jews have a saying whenever the different branches, or different people, argue about some belief or practice: "When the pogroms start, it won't matter." that's one reason we've learned to both stick together and leave each other alone. The pogroms always--
always--start again. We watch the Christian far right a lot more closely than any atheist.)
The image of the greedy Jew moneylender has stuck to us for centuries, mostly courtesy of Will Shakespeare's Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice. the ironic thing is that old Will probably never met a Jew; we had been expelled from Britain for hundreds of years before his birth, and weren't readmitted till long after his death.
I don't know who that law benefited, either.
Here's the answer you're not going to like:
Nobody, ever, just sat down and made this stuff up.
Whether you believe in God or not--whether there
is a God or not--
the people who wrote the Bible, and worked out the laws, and changed the interpretations of both, all through the centuries, DID believe in God.
The Alphabet Gang--you know, Y, P, H and the boys, who wrote the original, lost documentary sources of the Bible, were writing down oral traditions and stories
that they believed to be true. The "redactor(s)" who edited those documents and brought the Bible to its present form,
believed them to be true, too. And the men (mostly men, but not all) who worked out the details of Jewish law--and revised it, and re-revised it,
as the Torah commanded us to do, believed in them too.
Nobody ever just got in a smoke-filled room and decided to put the Jewish pig farmers out of business. These people were really trying to work out what God wanted them to do, and they did it from the conviction that God wants justice, and fairness, and freedom, and equality for all his people.
Those very first writers and commentators probably had just as hard a time with the tales of bloody massacre and
genocide as we do today; but what could they do? Those were part of the stories that were handed down, and though they tried to make sense of them so the narrative "flowed," they didn't feel that they could just leave them out. We've been trying to work out a benign meaning for them since they were first written down. Still working on it, too.
Same for the sages who derived the laws from Scripture; they didn't think they had the right to just make up laws on their own--though sometimes they
did find a way to make sure a law was never enforced, as with capital punishment (I've got an old post somewhere about that). It virtually never happened.
Through it all, the supreme authority was never the Bible itself, but the tradition of interpretation that we believe has been handed down alongside it, beginning with Moses at Sinai. It's called the "Oral Torah," and like it or not, we don't believe that the Bible can be understood without it.
And we
do get to change what it says and means. In fact, we have to. God said so. Unlike, say, Baptists, we never get to say, "Okay, now we have all the answers. Open your mouth and close your eyes..." We have to keep on figuring it out in every generation.
Anyway, there you go. Thanks for the opportunity to write all this stuff down. More than you probably wanted, but that's the way I'm wired.
You know what I love most about this forum?
It's the first one I've ever been a member of where nobody complains that my posts are too long.
Thanks, everyone.
Peace.
Charles
I'll check it out!
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