ICYMI: How Old Testament Laws Can Shape Christians Today (Carmen Imes) Ep. #233

Speaker 1 (00:02.894)
This is the biblical mind podcast

produced by the Center for Hebraic Thoughts.

Speaker 2 (00:22.424)
Creeper.

A lot of Christians come to the Old Testament and they assume that when they’re reading ancient laws that these have all been done away with in Christ. That the Old Testament saints

in order to be saved had to follow all these rules and now Jesus has come along and he’s offered us salvation for free and so now we are just invited by faith in God to be part of his family. And this is a terrible misunderstanding of the Torah. The laws were never Israel’s means of salvation. They were always a way of expressing the status they had already been given as God’s people.

And so was their mission in the world. It was their way of living as God’s people, a way of living in freedom. God did not talk to the people in Egypt and say, here’s a checklist of rules, and if you can keep all of these, then I will get you out of here. But if you screw up, I’ll have to leave you as slaves to Pharaoh. He doesn’t say that. He delivers them first, just on the basis of their trust in him that he would be the deliverer. They paint the blood on their doorposts.

Speaker 1 (02:07.126)
Jesus saying things like, I’ve not come to abolish the law or the prophets, but to fulfill them. So Jesus is very much pro-Torah, and I don’t think he’s pro-Torah because it’s before his death and resurrection, and then that changes afterwards. He is calling people back to covenant faithfulness.

And could you remind our listeners who you are again?

My name’s Carmen Imes. I’m a professor of Old Testament at Prairie College up in Three Hills, Alberta.

The issue you raised with the law, the idea of rules and keeping them, think, correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like it’s very confusing for Christians because they hear the story about the Pharisees, who are all about keeping rules, but Jesus came to kind of liberate us from this idea of rule keeping. And it sounds like you’re saying, well, rule keeping isn’t the paradigm. That’s kind of what it’s setting us adrift. So I wonder, a lot of people are going to hear that and say, well, okay, well then why are there rules?

Yes. Yeah, and the Pharisees, I think, actually have a problem not with taking the Torah too seriously, but with not taking it seriously enough because they are treating it like a checklist. If they can just do these, you know, 613 things and they think of them in very narrow terms, then they must be righteous. Whereas Jesus, when he goes on in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5 to talk about the law, he is actually

Speaker 1 (03:35.982)
calling them to a higher standard and calling them to a greater accountability. So it’s not just that you’re not supposed to murder, but even if you’re angry with your brother, so angry that you say, fool, you’re in danger of the fires of hell. So he is conceiving of murder far more broadly than they have. If they haven’t put someone to death, they think they’re okay. And he says, no, your anger is murderous.

And so therefore you’re guilty. so Jesus is consistently calling people to what I think is back to the heart of the law. don’t think he’s raising the bar from Sinai. I think he’s actually calling people back to the original intent of the Sinai instructions. They’ve made it too small. They’ve made it a list of rules to keep instead of a lifestyle to embody that demonstrates covenant faithfulness.

I was just gonna ask you about that.

Speaker 2 (04:34.936)
So even that, don’t hate your brother in your heart or anyone who’s hated that dictum of Jesus, I take it when you say he’s going back to the Torah, he’s going back to parts like Leviticus where it literally says, do not hate your brother in your heart.

Yeah, I think he’s reading the laws in concert with each other. And I actually think if we go back to the Ten Commandments, we can see a really early clue that this is how they are supposed to be read. The Ten Commandments do not work very well as a checklist because you get to the end of the list and it says, shall not covet. Well, how would anyone ever be able to affirm that they haven’t coveted?

It’s not something that could be tried in court or that you couldn’t find evidence for it because it’s a heart issue. Coveting happens completely internally. So the only two people who will know if you’ve coveted are yourself and God. And I think Jesus uses that as a lens through which he reads all the commands so that murder is not just the external thing that we could see evidence that you’ve done it, but it also includes the internal heart attitude that would have

resulted in murder if it was fully carried out.

Yeah, it’s almost as if he believes, you know, as a New Testament prophet that not only what is going on inside determines how we should act on how we behave, but actually how we behave also can inform how we view the world as well. So it doesn’t cast one out for the other, but sees them in, like you said, in concert. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:10.754)
Yeah, and he goes on, I you can go through the Sermon on the Mount, you you shall not commit adultery, but I tell you, anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. So he again is calling people back to that heart issue. Then he goes on to talk about divorce and oaths. He points to a command that they’ve used to justify divorce. Well, Moses said we could give a certificate of divorce.

our wives and then it’s over, Jesus says, better yet, don’t. Don’t divorce at all. Better to be faithful. And then he says, you’ve heard that it was said, don’t break your oath, which of course it says in the Torah to fulfill your vows that you make, but better yet, don’t make vows in the first place. Being the kind of people who are so trustworthy, you don’t need to

to underscore what your intentions are by swearing an oath about them. And so he is showing that the law was not the end game, but that it was supposed to be food for thought and ways of shaping our thinking about the world. Not that, if you just do these things, you’re set, but that these are your introduction into a lifestyle of exhibiting the character of God in the way that you live.

Can we zoom in on this oath making thing for a second? So we go back into the Torah, we’re going to find laws in a couple of places, and I’m saying laws in the sense of teachings that say things like, you know, if a man makes an oath, then it’s on his head. But, know, if his daughter makes an oath, can remove the oath from her.

or a brother can remove the oath from her. And so I think some people might look at that and say like, doesn’t, okay, so Jesus says better yet not to make an oath or I love his retort about the marriage, you know, divorce. He’s like, well, yeah, it’s cause you guys are schmucks. mean, think that’s how he’d say it. But quit being schmucks basically. I, so if we don’t find that specific teaching, don’t make oaths, but this kind of like,

Speaker 1 (08:24.043)
Right, right.

Speaker 2 (08:35.743)
a man can’t remove a foolish oath from his head, but a woman can have it removed. What do think is going on? I mean, I think this is another instance of it’s not clear how you would or wouldn’t follow the rule or how the rule is teaching. So, what do you think Jesus is doing there with oath making?

I think in the ancient context, this is an accommodation to a particular type of culture, a patriarchal culture in which women are bound to obey their fathers and their husbands, and the structure of society is set up so that they must. so I think this is actually a helpful, like that there’s an override if a young woman has made an oath

that then contradicts what her father asks her to do. Let’s say she promises to marry someone, but she’s actually not the one who gets to make that decision because in ancient Israelite culture, the fathers would have arranged for the marriage. He can override the oath or vow that she made and she’s not considered guilty in God’s because she’s in this patriarchal system. So I think this is actually God’s grace to the woman.

because she can’t always carry out her oaths. It’s not always within her power to do, so then there’s like this special escape clause for her. But again, better yet, don’t make oaths at all. Just be trustworthy people. And I imagine that by Jesus’ day, the culture had shifted somewhat in terms of how oaths are made and carried out, but it was still a patriarchal culture.

Yeah, it does make you wonder. is a Jesus Day is a patriarchal culture, but it’s a different patriarchal culture than in the days of Samuel or Saul. Right. So that you have Hellenism that’s come in. have these supposed sayings that better is the Torah to be burned and left in the hand of a woman. And you come out of that, you come out of the Hebrew Bible and you’re like, where did they get this? Right. Women were like, this is not going on in the Hebrew Bible. I often wonder like if this is just straight up Hellenism that’s infected.

Speaker 2 (10:48.798)
Judaism. this going back to, I’m not going to leave this oath thing alone because you’re ripping so well on it. It’s interesting to me though that the men don’t get an escape clause. If a man makes a rash oath, he’s held to it. And then we see a series of stories, you know, in the history of Israel, including Saul, David and Jonathan, or not Jonathan, but people who are making, and Jephthah, I mean, you can think of making rash oaths and it costs people their lives.

yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:18.656)
wise women have to come up to them and like talk them out of it. Right. So it reminded me of the phrase, was it gynocentric interruptions where the woman has to come in and like basically calm down the man who’s done something dumb. So. Yeah, how do you see? So I just put together a whole theology there in a few seconds, but do you see that interpenetration of story and Torah working together in the Hebrew Bible or do you think the story is just kind of happenstance of history?

Yeah, time out here.

Speaker 2 (11:49.122)
despite the Torah.

I think it’s a beautiful thing the way that we have law or instruction in the Old Testament that it is embedded in story. It is not a separate thing. It’s knit into the stories and you can see lots of connections between laws and stories. And I hadn’t made that particular… I hadn’t thought through that particular connection before, that series of all the rash oaths that have been made. For sure, in the Torah, when God says that a man can’t get out of his oath,

but a woman can if her father overrides it. I think it’s calling men to a very high standard of accountability for their words. You better not just sling stuff around because it is going to put other people at risk. It’s going to bind the community in such a way that you’ll be stuck with the consequences of the oath you made. So it’s no wonder to me that Jesus would come along later and say, hey guys, how about you not make oaths at all?

It’s not like it’s extra spiritual to swear by the gold on the temple that you’re going to do something or to swear on the footstool of God. It’s better for you to be the kind of people who are so known for doing what you’ve said you’ll do that you don’t have to take an oath.

Speaking of oaths, so I’m going to let up on it just a little bit, but really not really. The I heard you mentioned something in an interview with somebody else and I don’t remember who the interview was, but I had completely forgotten about this until you said it. And then a lot of things snapped into place. The Ten Commandments, we we depict them in our public monuments as one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten on the other tablet. Yeah. And you reminded me that that’s probably not what they were. So.

Speaker 2 (13:38.254)
Can you connect God’s oath-keeping with the physical, why it’s two tablets and what they do with those two tablets?

yeah, I’d love to. So if you read carefully through the stories of Exodus, you’ll see that there are two tablets that are engraved with the commands. We’re told that they’re engraved front and back, and we know the size of the ark in which they were kept. So we have a rough idea that they can’t be too much bigger than what would fit in the ark, which was a cubit by a cubit and a half. A cubit is roughly the measurement between a man’s fingertips and his elbow.

So these are not actually even as large as Carlton Heston’s commandments tablets that he carries down from the mountain in the movie. But most people through history, most interpreters have tried to figure out which commandments go on each tablet. And more recent studies of ancient Near Eastern treaties have confirmed that it’s typical practice when you’re making a treaty between two parties to make duplicate copies, one for each party.

And so when Moses comes down from the mountain and he’s carrying two tablets, they would have had 10 on each. We don’t need to figure out where they split in two. Each tablet would have all 10 commands and the people would have seen him with these tablets and said, we’ve just entered into a treaty because this is how treaties work. You etch them on stone and duplicate copies. Now, normally in a treaty context,

you would each each party would take their tablet home and they would store it in the most holy place of their temple, their God’s temple. And the idea is that their deity who’s in the most holy place or whose presence is represented there would be able to read the treaty or covenant and they would be able to hold each party accountable for keeping up their end of the deal. Well, in the case of Israel, there isn’t another party

Speaker 1 (15:40.28)
God is making a covenant with His people, and so there’s only one temple or tabernacle. And sure enough, Moses puts the tablets in the most holy place of the tabernacle. But because he puts both tablets in the same place, I think what we’re supposed to see there is that God is binding Himself to the covenant. He is going to look out for His own faithfulness as well as Israel’s. There isn’t another party to the covenant who can like

stand over and against God to make sure he keeps up his end of the deal. It’s just he’s like swearing by himself. So he gets both copies.

It sounds very much like Genesis 15 too, if you see that as a language.

Yes. Yeah, when God makes the covenant with Abraham, they cut the animals in two. And normally, I’m told that both parties of the treaty would walk between those pieces as a way of self-improcation, bringing a curse on themselves. May this happen to me if I break my end of the deal. And in the case of Abraham, he falls into a deep sleep and sees in this vision a smoking

fire pot and a flaming torch that move between the pieces, as if to say if these elements are representing God, God is the one who will bind himself again to the covenant and make sure that he is faithful to keep it. And Abraham is just simply the recipient of God’s faithfulness.

Speaker 2 (17:19.854)
you

Yeah, that’s actually, I hadn’t even thought about it there were two elements in Genesis 15. Yeah.

There’s a brand new book by Michael Morales, Exodus Old and New. He made a suggestion in there that I find intriguing. He sees that as a precursor of the pillar of fire and pillar of cloud, which it’s a, when the people leave Egypt, they’re following this pillar and it would have looked like kind of a pillar of smoke in the daytime and it would have looked like a pillar of fire at night.

And he sees this as because they pass through the Red Sea or the Sea of Reeds that this image with Abraham is kind of hinting at that to come. And it’s possible in that he even says in that context, your descendants will be slaves for 400 years and then I will bring them in. So there’s actually Exodus resonance in the context. when they actually cross the sea, here’s where it might break down a little bit. When they actually cross the sea, the pillar

stands behind them, blocking Pharaoh from following them. So they go through, but then the pillar quickly moves over and begins leading them again. So it may work. It’s an intriguing plot.

Speaker 2 (18:39.308)
That language in Genesis of this smoking fire pot and brazier, it’s very cryptic anyway. is. I like that. At least it makes some connection somewhere else. Yeah. So I wonder, when thinking about, and I think you made this point earlier and now you’ve given us an example of it is that law is not just rules to follow. It’s not dictated that way, but it actually comes in a particular history between God and his people.

And I think what you just said about the covenant making of the tablets and even Genesis 15 there, that makes sense of that. When we think about law in the ancient Near East more generally, you know, I think one thing that many Christians don’t appreciate unless they take a class or read a book on this is how this is a unique feature of the Hebrew law, that this isn’t exactly how it works in the rest of the day. It’s not like other people didn’t have laws and didn’t have their gods involved in some of the laws.

Right. But maybe you talk about how law functioned in the ancient Near Eastmore Broadway.

Sure. So in other ancient Near Eastern cultures, they do have collections of laws, but these laws are not embedded in a narrative. The combination of law and narrative together are quite unique to the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. I think the state of the question in Hebrew Bible scholarship right now is that laws did not function legislatively the way that laws today function legislatively.

Ancient Israel and the surrounding nations did not have a highly developed court system where people stood trial. And even when they did have judges who deliberated in cases where there was a question of obedience or violation, those judges are not bound to apply the laws in legislative ways. The laws functioned for them more like paradigm

Speaker 1 (20:39.022)
a paradigm or a list of possible examples over which they would deliberate to come up with a wise response. So it’s not to say that there’s a complete distinction between law today and law in ancient times. think I see this today, if a police officer pulls you over for speeding, there is a specific law on the books that tells what the maximum penalty is for that.

many miles per hour over the speed limit in this kind of a speed zone. And if it’s a school zone, it’s a different kind of thing. But you do always have, the police officer does have the discretion of letting you off the hook if he feels like, you know, if you’re in labor on the way to the hospital or there’s some kind of emergency, you may get a free pass in a way that, so the law, even our legislative laws today,

don’t function in completely black and white ways. But in the ancient world, it’s even more so the case that laws were collected as a way of exhibiting how wise a king was. So a king like Hammurabi has this law collection on display. And this doesn’t necessarily mean that every one of these laws was enforced in his domain, but rather that

He is such a wise king. Look at all of the possible scenarios he has thought of and he has come up with a wise response to it. So it’s more hypothetical than applied and meant to generate wisdom. So various scholars have suggested this and have studied this concept in the Bible as well. Michael Lefebvre has a book on law codes. I don’t have the title of his dissertation in front of me, but it’s a very well-written book in which he

talks about, he traces the after effects of the laws at Sinai through the rest of the Hebrew Bible and determines that most of them were not applied in a legislative way and that Israelites didn’t think of law legislatively until the Hellenistic period. so it wasn’t until, you know, in New Testament times, we can see legislative application of the law, but we don’t see that before the Hellenistic age, so maybe 300 BC.

Speaker 1 (23:04.386)
So

We should note that, because we’ve said Hellenism, I’ve said it and now you’ve said it, that Judaism becomes a slightly new thing in the Hellenistic period because of Hellenism, because of Greek ideas.

in Greek language and Greek rule. so prior to that time, you have a law that says if your son is rebellious, take him to the city gate and stone him, but you in fact don’t have any stories indicating that they actually did that. Now that doesn’t mean that they never did, but there is a sense in which I think what we can see is you’re not required to stone your son, but that’s the maximum penalty.

to someone, probably an adult son who is so rebellious that it’s wreaking havoc in the community, it’s important to put an end to it. But the stoning is like if he’s unrepentant, if no one can reason with him and come to a better solution. It’s not like the moment he is rebellious, you stone him and there’s no room for conversation. So the actual-

Really, this was just a parenting tool, think. You can always look at your kid and be like, you want to go to the elders and talk about this? Or do you want to spend the year at home?

Speaker 1 (24:22.312)
dear. So I think, I think again, Lefebvre makes a strong point that just because the laws are listed there does not mean they were all enforced in the court of law or on a consistent basis. They were, they were standing there as a sober reminder of how important it is to be faithful to Yahweh. And here are all the ways you can live out your faithfulness or here’s a

Not not even all the ways. Here are some sample ways you can live out your faithfulness to Yahweh.

you

you

Speaker 2 (25:05.134)
wonder, because you teach Christian students like I do, and I think a lot of people, they hear all this and they go, great, fine, I’m on board with this. And then at the same time, and I think I was this way at one point too, is like trying to find the quickest logical way to ditch all the laws of the Old Testament so we could say we’re free under Christ. And then you have to point out like, well, you know, Jesus did animal sacrifices and he did probably mikveh baptisms, which weren’t part of the law, but part of the cultural appropriation of the law.

And Paul is arrested in the temple courts giving animal sacrifices to prove that he’s not teaching the abrogation of the So I wonder what’s your kind of go-to, this is still part of the church, even though we don’t practice these particular laws.

You know, Jesus says that when somebody comes to him and asks him about obedience to the law, he says, or the greatest commandment, he says, love the Lord your God, love Yahweh your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. And so a lot of Christians think, see, all we have to do is love, we can stop thinking about all the rest of the laws. Well, that’s what the rest of the laws are expressing. They’re expressing love for God and love for neighbor. They’re illustrating

What does love for God look like? What does love for neighbor look like? Here are a host of ways that you might live this out. And so we actually continue to need these laws because they give us examples of how we might express them in every area of our lives. So what I would do with students when they ask questions about the law is I’d say, let’s go back and look at some example laws. Let’s talk about what

does this law express in that ancient context? And how might we express the same principles today in our society? one example that’s come up in class that is kind of a fun one is Leviticus 19 verse nine says, not reap to the edges of your fields. Let me.

Speaker 2 (27:11.187)
Leave them for the poor and the sojourner.

Yep, that’s the one. I’m just going to get it in front of me so I can quote it properly. So Leviticus 19 verse 9, when you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am Yahweh your God. So for the first time I’m teaching in a rural context. Prairie is

In a small town, we’ve got about 3,400 residents and we’re surrounded on all sides by wheat and canola fields, little bit of flax and some peas, but mostly wheat and canola. And so I actually have a lot of students who come from farms. And so I’ve asked them, so you, who are farmers, do you obey this law? And they’re like, well, no, we don’t. Because if, if we didn’t harvest our whole field, nobody is going to come pick that.

the foreigner and the poor are not going to come and harvest the edges of our That would actually be trespassing and it would be, so it would be a waste of food for us to leave there. So then I said, well, how might we live out this principle on farms today? What would be a way we could, we could still sort of lean into, to what God is asking of ancient Israel. And they said, well, somebody said, well, we could harvest our entire crop and then we could donate part of our crop to the local food bank.

said, all right, well, that’s a cool idea. What do the rest of you think of that? And somebody said, that’s not quite the same thing. Because when you don’t harvest your whole crop, the poor and the foreigner still are having the dignity of a day’s labor. They’re actually coming and harvesting by hand. And they’re eating because they worked. And so a food bank is an important social service. And we’re not saying to do away with that.

Speaker 1 (29:09.624)
but to donate part of your harvest to the food bank isn’t quite accomplishing the same purpose as that ancient law. So then I said, well, what do we do? And somebody suggested, what if we provided jobs for people who are poor or who are foreigners who might have trouble getting work otherwise? What if we employed them on our farms? And so we began to talk about who are the people on the fringes of society today who might have difficulty finding work.

someone who’s not able to work consistently because of health issues, or someone who’s just been released from prison and so they can’t pass a background check, or somebody who doesn’t have a green card. Like, are there people on the fringes of society who would be willing and able to work, but they haven’t been able to, and could you provide work for them? And everybody loved that idea. And then I said, well, there’s a problem here. Only some of you are farmers. What about everybody else? How does everybody else live out this command?

And so we began to talk about how could other businesses follow these same kind of practices? How, if you own a local grocery store, can you employ people who wouldn’t normally be employable? Can you provide work in some way? No matter what kind of a business you own, you could begin to put this into practice, even if you’re not a farmer. So that’s one example, but we could pull out any number of laws and have this

through the same process of deliberation. It’s not as though you can go through the law and say, take your black Sharpie and cross out all the ones that don’t apply to you. Well, I’m not a farmer, so I don’t have to think about that one. No, this law actually expresses something of a principle that God wants the community of faith to emulate, and that is compassion.

for those who are on the fringes of society, that you would be a hospitable people and that you would give people the dignity of work. So doesn’t matter whether you have a farm or not, you can do this.