Thursday, 9 January 2025

If you follow my decrees and are careful to obey my commands … - Leviticus 26:3

Today's Scripture Reading (January 9, 2025): Leviticus 26

On Mount Sinai, God handed Moses the Law. We call Moses "the Lawgiver," but whether he was is part of a debate. I recently spoke with a friend who asked, "How much is from Moses?" The point is that in popular culture, we have somehow come up with the idea that God gave Moses the Big Ten, and Moses or the priests came up with the rest. I wish I could say that it is a silly question, but it is one with which even the experts struggle. Some experts seem to believe that the ten and maybe a couple more regulations were given to Moses, but maybe centuries later, the priests came up with the rest.

Moses spent a lot of time up on the mountain. Long enough that the people got disillusioned, he was on the mountain long enough that the people thought their leader might be dead, long enough to cast a vision and develop a plan to make a golden calf. Moses was on the mountain long enough for Aaron to convince people to donate gold, melt it, shape it, and devise a liturgy to worship a golden calf.

However, was it long enough for God to give all 613 laws to Moses? Our roadblock is that if God gave all of the Law to Moses, he would need more than two tablets to write it down. But our hesitancy arises out of our dependency on the written word. I keep going back to my public school days. I remember having a math test in school, and one of the prevalent questions was, "Is it an open or closed-book test." And part of our issue as kids was that there would never be a time in the real world when we couldn't look up the formula in a book. So why make us memorize it?

I remember a psychology class I took back in my university days. The final the professor had devised was an open-book test. More than that, it had no time limit. You could bring as many books as you wanted into the class and take as long as you wanted to write the final exam with the understanding that we couldn't leave the room until we were done. Leaving the room meant that you had finished the test. No bathroom breaks were allowed, and there would be no skipping out for a sandwich or a drink of water. We could even bring food and drink into the room, but ultimately, our bladder would be the timer for the exam. The average person brought four or five books into the final, and the average time spent on the exam was right around the three-hour mark. But it was an exam for the literate.

My final highlights a problem we have with the Israelites. Moses had grown up in the Pharaoh's palace in Egypt. He would have benefited from all the educational opportunities provided to the palace's children. Moses could read the tablets that God gave to him. But he was likely the only one. The rest of the nation was made up of slaves. They had been born enslaved and probably expected to die in slavery. They hadn't received any education beyond whatever was necessary to do the bidding of their masters. 

We live in a literate society. I know we are not all literate, but the vast majority of us are. We recycle the same questions I asked in public school; I can always look this information up, so why should I memorize it? But for Israel, outside of Moses, the reverse was true. I can't look this information up because I can't read, so I must memorize it.

One of the things that we run into with the Bible is that it is likely that most of the books of our Bible were written down long after the content was actually authored. There was no hurry to write down the information because most people couldn't read it anyway. And the people became very adept at remembering large swaths of information. As a result, there is no reason to believe that all of the Law wasn't given to Moses, even if it wasn't written down on stone tablets.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Leviticus 27


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