The Law Again

          My son, keep your father’s commands and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.  Bind them upon your heart forever; fasten them around your neck. When you walk, they will guide you; when you sleep, they will watch over you; when you awake, they will speak to you. For these commands are a lamp, this teaching is a light, and the corrections of discipline are the way to life, (Proverbs 6:20-23)


                Some people like to scoff at the Mosaic Law with its (to them) bizarre requirements for cleanliness: clothing having to be made of only one type of cloth, food restrictions, planting restrictions, etc. I believe there were reasons for those laws; reasons that go beyond the arbitrary declarations of a schizophrenic deity. In some cases, those laws maintained a healthy society. In other cases, the laws separated the Jews from the societies around them. The Jews were to be counter-cultural, and therefore not engage in activities practiced by other nations in their worship of foreign gods. And in some cases, the laws were how the Jew could rest assured that he was pleasing God. This last one was something that the other religions didn’t tend to have. If those following other religions didn’t get what they asked for, they could have no idea what the problem was.

         I saw two posts on Face Book this morning. The first was about a woman who had married a Lebanese man. When the couple divorced, the woman sent their son for his weekend with his father, and his father took him to Beirut. The woman is still trying to get her son back. The other was about a sixty-five-year-old man marrying a twelve-year-old girl with the permission of her parents, and the reactions of Americans who stumble on the photo shoot. I don’t happen to think the second is real. I think it was a set up to show people’s reactions. I believe it does happen and that the parents who allow their daughters to be married that young have what they think are good reasons.

          We are disturbed by these things, perhaps even outraged. We think we have every right to be because we believe our way of life is scientifically sound and wise. I’m not saying we’re necessarily wrong about some of our laws. Some are controversial, and I believe some are bad laws. That’s not the point now.

          The point is that we are judging the Law from inside our own legal system without applying the same judgment to our own. The woman who married the Lebanese man, and the people around them assumed that the cultural differences between the husband and wife were trivial things. We assume with her that there is no good reason for him to take her child. But there is every reason if his religion is the truth faith. (I don’t believe it is the truth faith, but very likely, he does.) How could we not expect him to take his son?

          There are reasons that parents would arrange for their twelve-year-old daughter to marry a sixty-five-year-old man. If he has money, she will be cared for for the rest of her life, and not end up in a marriage with some pauper. He will protect her from the abuse of other men. He will prevent her family from the shame or a promiscuous daughter and ease the financial burden she places on the family. We think, “how sick” but from their perspective, we are the sick ones – in our society where sex by the third, or even first, date is normal, where anything and everything we want to do is supposed to be granted to us.

          As we look at the Law of Moses, then, before we pass judgment on it based on isolated pieces, perhaps it would be wise to consider each as part of a whole. And here is the whole that I believe forms the foundation of those parts. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength – love Him to the exclusion of everything else, and then love your neighbor as yourself.