Today’s Reading: Exodus 22, 23 & 24

Rules, rules and more rules! There are rules about cows, oxen and sheep, rules about wives, rules about money, rules about thieves and about a hundred other rules contained in just a couple of chapters. (Fear not, there are many more rules to come!) So what’s with all these rules? Was God just trying to make life as complex as possible for his “chosen people?”

Well, we have to remember that for these people, everything was being started from scratch. In fact, they didn’t even have a place to call home. They were just traveling through the desert, surviving on very little food and wondering why in the world they had left their former life in Egypt. And, just like every society that has ever started from scratch, the Israelites needed a framework for their civilization.

Think of it this way: Imagine the early days of the United States of America. There were groups of people who had come here from all over Europe, all with different ideas of exactly what this new world and new life would mean for them. Now, imagine if in those early days, just as the nation was being birthed, no one had thought of drafting a constitution. Imagine that some free-spirited leaders decided that every person would just do what they thought was right, rather than having a bunch of rules written down. What kind of chaos would have ensued?

Not only would the people have had no way of knowing what was or wasn’t acceptable, but there would be no way to have a court system that worked – no way to have any consistency or fairness in judgement. In short, a nation without a constitution is a nation without governing power and, in essence, is no nation at all.

And so it was with ancient Israel. This was, after all, not even a nation yet. They were really just a gigantic family – the family of Israel. They were just beginning to be birthed into a nation and the formation of a type of constitution or series of laws was necessary for them to continue to function properly. And so, much like our constitution, the people of Israel were given a series of laws and, in some cases, the punishment that was to be exacted upon someone who broke one of those laws.

Now, there are some sticking points in these laws for us modern readers. Some of the instructions about wives and slaves seem archaic to us. And, in fact, they are. Some have questioned how God could condone slavery or the seeming use and abuse of women. The truth is, we simply don’t have all of the story here. Depending on which biblical scholars you choose to listen to, there are a few possible explanations for the inclusion of these types of laws.

First, it could have been that God simply desired for humanity to function differently back then. He certainly had that right, since he created us. For those who ascribe to the idea that the Bible is the inerrant (or, without error) word of God, this is really the only option available in regards to your thinking about why God included these laws. The Bible tells us that God doesn’t change. However, it is possible that the way that he related to people and the way he wanted us to relate to each other has changed over the centuries to better suit his plans.

A second option – one available only to those who don’t believe that the Bible is inerrant – is that these were not laws spoken from God, but were, rather, laws created by Moses and perhaps some of his close advisers. The thinking goes that since God gave Moses the Ten Commandments – the basic tenants upon which laws should be built – that God also gave him the authority to establish the details of how those laws were constructed and implemented. Moses, then, in order to have some level of consistency among his newly-appointed judges, would have needed to think through specific scenarios and had specific responses available to all who were judging cases. And so, Moses, armed with the Ten Commandments from God, would have set out to create laws that related to the specific situations he saw around him – situations that took into account the cultural norms of the day and which, from Moses’ perspective, were perfectly normal and didn’t call for any major changes. Slavery had become a cultural norm in those days and Moses would have had no reason to assume that people would no longer own slaves.

A third option, of course, is that God did, indeed speak all of these rules into existence, but that somewhere along the way, some things got added in, mistranslated or otherwise misunderstood. The Bible was, after all, oral tradition before it was ever written down. Again, this option is only available to you if you don’t believe that the Bible is inerrant.

There are probably countless other theories regarding why God seems to take a nonchalant attitude toward slaves and women here and elsewhere in scripture, but I think the primary thing to note is that when these passages are read in the historical context in which they were written, the issues of slavery or the treatment of women would not have raised any red flags among the people.

And perhaps that’s the point. You can only change so many things at once, after all. Maybe God decided to get people moving a few steps in the right direction and trusting him before he began completely turning their cultural paradigm upside down.