Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Deuteronomy 23, Yet More Laws!

Jeremy Rosen | Making Sense of the Bible: Deuteronomy 23, Yet More Laws!

- Hello, everybody. Not everybody likes the organ. I don’t normally like the organ as not my favourite instrument by any stretch of the imagination and it has all kinds of strange associations and yet this is a bach, toccata and fugue and I just find it amazing. And so it’s not my normal type of music, but I thought something that I like and not unusual I would present to you. So we now start chapter 23 and we’re going through all the laws that have been mentioned, all the parts of the constitution that we have had up to now. And the one thing that strikes us about this is that there seems to be no system here, no systematic priority of the laws. So for example, last week we had something about cruelty to animals and treatment of animals and then we jumped to all kinds of different things. And this week again, we’re going to have something like to do with animals. Last week we had something to do with sexual behaviour and now we’re going to have some of that again. We talked about warfare and we are going to talk about warfare again. So in one sense, you could say this random collection was just somebody putting together all the laws they could in any particular way. But another way of looking at it would be to say that there’s an intention here. And the intention is to try to say, don’t try to say this is more important than that. Scales of priorities, they’re all important. Everything has to be considered as significant and important as part of the constitution. Even things that you may never encounter or situations that might not apply to you an individual. These are all important ideas. So I think one has to look at them as ideas, obviously based on legal systems that existed thousands of years ago.

And the fun is to say, “Can I find anything relevant in that to me, to us to today?” There are certain things that we won’t and certain things that we will. So having given you this kind of introduction, let’s turn to chapter 22 of Deuteronomy and we start with the, sorry, it should be 23, we should be starting up, not 22. I’ve picked up 22 from last week here on my screen. So let me get to 23. 23, chapter 23 verse 1. A man should not take , to take a man should not take is a very interesting term. It is used of marriage. If a man takes a woman. Some people want to point out that taking is contractual, it’s acquiring. And in one sense it is because the idea even in biblical times are, if you marry somebody, you are making a commitment. It’s a commitment like a financial commitment or like a social commitment. So if a man takes, and that could just be having sex with, it couldn’t necessarily, didn’t necessarily mean to marry the wife of a father. Now is that after the father is dead, after he’s divorced the wife, but it looks like under no conditions should a person have sex with somebody who your father was either married to, involved with. He should not reveal the garment of your father, of his father. That’s another strange term. What do you mean to reveal the garment of to uncover the clothing? In other words, to disrespect. So we are dealing here with a notion of respect. Respect for the father. Now you may think that this is very strange and how many people would marry or want to marry their father’s wife.

But if you go back to the books of the Bible, those that deal with the period of the judges and of the kings that we are going to come to later this year, not so much later, but later. And you will find that what happens is that when you challenge the dynasty of the previous king, maybe your father, as in the case of the sons of King David who challenged their father’s rule. One of the first things they do is take the king’s concubines and sleep with them. Another way of saying, I’m the boss now. So if that was mentioned in the Bible, it must have been a pretty common thing to do at that time. And we know from annal of Alexander the great long after the Bible, a thousand jurors after in a sense that this was common when you conquered, you took over the wife and either merited or had her as a concubine. So this is a reference to something which we would think of as just a matter of respect, but they take as more important because it’s an act that can often indicate rebellion. And now jumping to something totally different and yet in a way it’s not completely different because it’s going to have something to do with who you marry and who you don’t marry. So we’re still in the marrying line and here’s a strange statement which the rabbis really debate about quite a lot. means somebody who is injured in his genitals but the term is wounded in the genitals. Or the member that you use to defecate or to relieve yourself has been cut off Such a person.

Should not come into the community of God. Now this sounds absolutely terrible. I mean some people are born with different genetic conditions and the rabbis were aware of that. Because after all, there is, as we’ve mentioned before, the idea of the androgynous, the hermaphrodite, all of whom are regarded as normal members of the community. But they can’t if you like, respond in the normal way that most people do respond. And therefore there are certain laws that apply to them such as marrying like-minded or like physical human beings. But they are still members of what we call the community. Are these people being thrown out of the community? No, say the rabbis, they say two important things. Number one, we are not talking about somebody who is genetically that way. We are not talking about somebody who’s born that way. We’re talking about something that happens in the course of life that damages your reproductive facilities and if they are therefore damaged, you can’t expect somebody to want to marry somebody who can’t produce children with if it’s known from the beginning, not if it’s accidental, happens for something later on or something we don’t know about. So, what essentially they’re saying is, there are certain people who you can’t normally, you shouldn’t normally marry, somebody who cannot reproduce. So is understood by the rabbis to mean to be part of the reproductive system of the community. You can every out of the respect you are a member of the community, a hundred percent.

So here you have first of all this somebody who is in a physical way, not what we would call the norm, although that doesn’t mean to say they are abnormal, it is just that they are not the norm. Verse three follows in a similar issue, and this is one of the most controversial issues and I remember when I used to debate as a young rabbi with people from reform and conservative backgrounds who wanted to claim that the Bible was not only primitive but irrelevant. The always brought up the idea of the . And the is something that still troubles me enormously to this day in theory. The term mamzer is normally referred to in English as a bastard, although I’m glad to say that here the English says misbegotten. In other words, somebody who was born out of a forbidden marriage. Now in English a bastard is somebody illegitimate. But that doesn’t apply in Judaism, we don’t have this idea that somebody born out of wedlock is somehow deficient in some way. We don’t. What we say is that somebody, or what the law is saying is that somebody who comes from a marriage that is forbidden, that’s to say from incest, a product of incest or a product of adultery where the marriage has been betrayed. And we say that too cannot come in the in the community of God. But that again, as in the previous case, means you are still a member of the Jewish society and the Jewish member, there are certain people you cannot marry. Now you’ll say that this is cruel and horrible and as we are going to see later, we don’t punish children for parents. So, what is this all about?

Well, first of all, the name mamzer is very strange because it doesn’t occur in any other context. It’s not used in the Bible as a curse in any way, although we now in our society do use it as a curse. But it’s probably from zer, which means a stranger and mom met him from a strange mother or from a strange source. Now when it goes on to say to the 10th generation not what the rabbis understood this to mean is that, the mamzer can marry other people actually by implication can marry out and still be part of the community. But the return to normality or the usual takes time. Now it’s a remarkable feature that throughout the Talmudic tradition, there is this strong desire never to prove that somebody actually is a mamzer. We try to avoid it under all conditions, but there are some situations where you can’t avoid and you can’t avoid it because people make an issue of it. I want to refer to the famous Langer case in Israel, going back Psalm, what, some 50 years or so. These two children born of an adulterous union were technically speaking mamzerim. The chief rabbi at the time Rav Goran said, “Look, we’ve got to find a way of clearing this up. We don’t want to make an issue of it and I will find a way of clearing it up.” And there are various ways one can, one can question the question the evidence, the basis for it, all kinds of issues. And in fact he then declared that these two twins were not mamzerian. But at that stage, rather like now there was this huge rift between the secular and the religious. And the secular objected as they do now, and to some extent I agree with them, to marriage laws in Israel being based on the laws of the Torah.

And they said, we want to take this case to the supreme court because we want to make sure that for the future this situation does not arise and we want to assert the fact that Jewish law has nothing to say with the secular democratic state of Israel. So they made an issue of it and this brought the whole thing to public attention and everybody made a fuss. Now what’s interesting is if you go back to the Talmud, you will find a reference to an attempt in Alexandria in Egypt where you had a very, very big Jewish community. It got larger and larger after the Romans destroyed a most a of Judea where they wanted to compile what’s called A book of your genealogy, which originally was reserved only for the genealogy of priests. But then in Alexandria, because intermarriage became so popular and so common, they decided 2000 years ago that they wanted to establish this genealogical document to prove who was who. And the rabbi said, “No, we are not going to allow this. We don’t want people to start finding fault with others.” And came up with this famous phrase that, If somebody tries to say that somebody else is invalid or has a suspicious genealogy, then they themselves probably are covering up their own crimes. So going back 2000 years ago, you have this idea that we do not want to look into things too deeply. And to some extent that has carried on into our generation in other areas quite different to this to you know, we might know that somebody is an adulterer and a public person and betraying.

But that doesn’t mean to say we necessarily want to make a public fuss about it. We may want to do something about it behind the scenes. But nevertheless, the whole question of this mamzerut remains a problem and it’s a problem that can be avoided. The problem is what happens when you produce actual evidence. And one of the examples of actual evidence is another case. There’s another case we are going to come to recent shortly of divorce. The divorce is allowed in Jewish law and one of the conditions of divorce is that if the divorced wife then has intercourse with another person, she may never remarry the original man. But if she doesn’t, then they can always come back again afterwards. And sometimes in divorce proceedings, the adulterer is actually named. And if the adulterer is actually named and she then has children, then it’s very difficult to get around the problem of the mamzer. The only way to do that would be to find a way of annulling the original marriage, which is a possibility that the rabbis have but reluctantly do they use it because they don’t want them to make the children of the first marriage somehow seem not right. So it’s very, very complicated this issue and therefore in one sense it would be much easier if the issue was removed from the books, but it isn’t because our tradition is to leave everything there even though the things may be if you like problematic. So the question of the mamzer is problematic, but I want to assure you that as a general rule, everything is done to get run the problem and to not make it an issue.

But nevertheless, if you want to pick on something which is problematic, this would be the best thing to pick on. And following in this footsteps, we now have something else. In verse four. An ammonite and a moabite should not come that’s to say cannot marry into the Jewish people. Why? They too to the 10th generation shall not come in. And so ammonite and a moabite are linked to mamzer and therefore it is possible that mamzer originally did not mean an ordinary person, but maybe somebody from an alienation and therefore that would not apply to the way the mamzer is used in halakha today. So, that’s a possibility given this proximity of the two cases. Why the ammonite and the moabite? Why does it not say any other? Why doesn’t it actually say the Canaanites who have been told not to have anything to do with? Ammon and Moav were the two tribes dissented from Noah, sorry, descend from Lot. Lots intercourse with his daughters when he thought or they thought that there were no other men around and therefore they were born into immorality. And as tribes they are considered immoral and morality, sexual morality was one of the crucial distinctions between the Israelites coming out of Egypt and the nations they were going to live in and amongst. You will then say, hold on. Hold on a minute. Wasn’t Ruth a moabites? And wasn’t Ruth the grandmother of King David? And she was certainly accepted and David therefore is descended and the rabbis had a problem with that one and they said yes. The text says very clearly Ammoni and a Moabi a male ammonite and a male moabite does anything about women.

So you see how they can make use of ways of getting round laws to deal with a problem that they didn’t expect to find. But basically Ammon and Moab were two tribes that also when the children of Israel came out of Egypt did not give them support. The Israelites said, “Please can we pass through your territory? We will pay for anything or any damage we do, we will not take advantage of you. We just want to pass through on the other side.” And both of them said no. So Ammon and Moab count as inhospitable and that trait of inhospitality is such an in important one that they made this point in order to explain why. And so verse five explains it. All the tribes around they never came and supported you when you needed bread and water. When you came out of Egypt. And not only that but they tried to undermine you. Or they hired Balaam, this guy we’ve dealt with previously, this magician to come and curse you to come all the way from all the way from the Mesopotamia between the rivers . And if you remember- God didn’t want to listen to Balaam. And he turned what was a curse into a blessing. Because God loved you. So here we are going back to the story of Balaam in the book of numbers and it shows how significant this guy must have been at the time that they keep on referring back to him. And they make this such a big issue. Know your enemies. Your enemies are not going to be kind people, they’re going to be people who curse you. They will not provide you support and that must ring certain bells in this day and age. Don’t try and make up with them.

For as long as you are around. Because they are inherently endemically, anti-semitically, genetically opposed to you. But having said that, I don’t want you to take this to be something that leads you to hate people because hatred is not going to get you anywhere. Hating your enemies isn’t going to help you just avoiding them and trying to persuade them. But whatever you do in verse eight, important principle. You must not hate the Edomite despite what I’ve told you about how terrible Ammon and Moab may be, sorry, the Ammon and Moab may be Edom who is also a non-Jew who also is not very supportive to you at that particular moment. And therefore you might think that this should apply to everybody. The answer is no, don’t hate the Edomite. Because in a sense he comes from the same stock as you. So although it’s true, so did Moab and Ammon, they came from Lot’s family, which was actually Abraham’s family. But of course Edom who is Esau comes from a later generation and has come from a time when there’s been time to, if you like, absorb Abraham’s values, not part of you, but you must hate him. And not only that. Do not hate an Egyptian. Whatever you do, do not hate an Egyptian. You were a stranger in their land and not all of them are going to be bad even if the experiences were bad. And therefore any children they have by the third generation gives them time to absorb your value system. They can marry into the Jewish community. So here we have a series nine sentences of laws that are to do with family, maintaining the family, the kinship within the nation. You can bring certain people in, but we want to make sure the nation procreates, continues, preserves marriage and family. And these are laws designed to protect that. And now we switch to something completely different in verse 10 say, If you ever have to go to war. Be very careful about anything bad. Now what does this mean? Is this the first reference to ethical warfare? We’ve already had references to warfare before in the previous chapters.

So we know there are laws limiting how you go to war and what you do at war. Now we have something else. Does this include or exclude what we’re now going to hear? Verse 11. If you have a person- Because he becomes impure, because of something that happens at night. Now that can mean one of two things. Either he has a wet dream or alternatively he does something, he has sex at night. That person has to leave the camp. Should not come into the camp. In verse 12, but by the time you come to evening time. He washes in water, goes to the mikvah or whatever it is. When the sun sets . He can come into the camp. Now, that law up to now has been a law applied only to priests. When priests come into contact with anything impure, either externally or internally, they touch something impure their body or something or they physically have a , they cannot enter the temple. They cannot eat from special food until they’ve gone to the mikvah in the evening and then they may. So this is exactly the same thing that applies to priests now applying in conditions of war. So conditions of war are conditions if you like, that are not the norm. And in a sense we have to treat it as holy. It’s a holy war in a sense, which means laws of holiness have to apply. But then the Torah goes on to explain something which seems to deviate from what I’ve just said. It says . You should have a place outside the camp. And there he should go to this area outside the camp. And outside the camp. And then you should have a place. And one way of understanding this is where- can mean your arms.

You should place your arms, place your arms outside of the camp until you actually start fighting. But can also mean a pit. It can mean a hole. And then when you sit outside. You should then make sure you’ve dug a hole for where you sit. And you should then cover up your what’s come out of you, your excrement after that. So you have two possibilities here. One of them referring to make sure you have a place where you keep your explosives outside of the camp so they don’t explode and injure people in the camp. And in addition, don’t shit in the camp. In other words, we’ve got to worry about hygiene, we’ve got to worry about the camp being a place where there will not be infection or won’t smell badly, whatever it is. You should make sure that you have outside your dwelling places, which we can extend wherever you are, proper sanitation. So here you have the first indication of the importance of sanitation. We haven’t mentioned it up to now. You’d think it might not merit a reference. I don’t think there’s any reference in the American constitution to sanitation, but there is here, very important. And in verse 15, why do we say this? God is with you in the camp. That is to say God’s presence is with you even in war. So don’t think that war allows you to break every law in the book and God’s presence is there. To help you win because you are fighting a war of morality. You are fighting a just war. And therefore your army should be a holy army. Nothing immoral or nothing unpleasant should be amongst the camp.

Very interesting, this whole idea of war being holy, the whole idea of creating a holy encampment, being aware all the time of the presence of God, being aware all the time of your morality and your sensibility to other people you are working together with and fighting together with and living in camps which might take a lot of time until you go back to normal society and then taking those lessons back to normal society. 16, we jump to a totally different question again. Do not return a servant to his master. Because he fled from an evil master to you. 17. He must allow him to stay with you. Give him sanctuary. In the places which God gives you to give sanctuary these cities of refuge. He can go there too, but . So that he should be okay. Do not oppress him. Do not mistreat him. Look at that law, 3000 years ago and what was happening in America in the 19th century. It’s absolutely unbelievable, unbelievable. And yet who is accusing who of being a genocidal lunatic, evil people? I mean anybody who claims this as themselves be defined as evil. Verse 16:23. Don’t hand a servant over to his master when he runs away from him. He should be able to stay with you. You must give him refuge. You must allow him to carry on and don’t oppress him. 18, another very strange one. You should not have a prostitute in Israel. No Jewish person should become a prostitute. Neither should any man. From Israel be a . A prostitute. Prostituting your body, desecrating your body is not acceptable. Now look at the language here. This is one of the words and there are several words that have opposite meanings. Kadosh means holy.

You make yourself holy. It’s a decision you take to be part of a holy people, to behave in a holy way, to raise your game morally. It means holy is good. You should sanctify the Shabbat, make it holy. Doesn’t mean make it a prostitute. But the same word can mean you desecrate your body. So for example, there’s a word hate, which in the Bible means to sin bad thing. But it also means to purify. To purify the altar. So, what this means is a person is neutral, neither inherently good or inherently bad. He or she can behave well. He or she can behave badly. It’s a choice. Now, I know there’s a lot of debate about how much choice we have, but however much we are determined, there are still clearly areas where we can exercise certain degrees of self-control if we choose to. So, essentially what we’re saying is everything in life is neutral. It depends what you make of it. So is a misuse of a body, is misuse of a body. That’s what a prostitute is. And on that issue we continue to why it’s so bad because it was linked in those days with temple prostitution. And so in verse 19, don’t bring the reward of a prostitute or the price of a dog. We’ll come to that in a minute. Into the house of the Lord your God. For anything which is a religious act. Because both of them are unacceptable. And is a price for what we would call in English, buggery, misusing a female, misusing an animal, any of these things that were part of pagan society, of worshipping their gods. You should not do even in a world which is not as pagan, although you might argue that this world of ours is just as pagan under a different name of any previous society. And having then dealt with that, we move on to another subject altogether. We’ve talked before about the laws of charity.

The laws of charity are not the laws that we have now where we give money in that way, but the way in which we help other people and we help other people by giving them work, by supporting them. Here we have this law of lending for interest. We are not allowed to lend money for interest because interest accumulates. It becomes a massive burden. And as a result, people can be indebted forever. And therefore, within religious societies, every religious society has what’s called a gemach. A gemach is made up of the Hebrew word. A loan-free society where money is lent for free. And that is one of the conditions of setting up a Jewish community just as you have to build a synagogue and mikvah and you have to have people who take care of the dead. And you also have to have a gemach, a free-loan society. So lending money is the priority when it comes to charity. And therefore . Don’t oppress the term . Means to squeeze. But it’s used of interest. Either in terms of goods, money or food or anything else that you can hand over expecting a reward and expecting an increase in the return. You are welcome to do this to people who aren’t citizens like the laws in any society that apply to citizenship privileges that don’t apply to Samuel who’s not a citizen. So, what’s going on in the outside world, that’s their business. If they do it that way, you can join in with them. But to your citizens and to those of your family, your brothers, you must not lend. So, that God will bless you.

Everything you do . On this earth. And as you know, that’s a controversial issue that we’ve dealt with before. What does reward and punishment mean? Does it mean to individuals? Does it mean to society? And of course, this is one of the issues that, one day we will get to the Book of Job and you’ll see the whole Book of Job is devoted to this whole issue of what do we mean by reward and punishment and is it true and in what way can it be true? Then we have something else, 22. Neder, vows were very important in those days. They still are today. Marriage vows. A vow was a commitment to God. So once again, this is to do with, “Do you respect authority, do you respect God?” And it was very important. And people would take vows all the time. If you know, if only my son passes this exam, I will donate to something or I promise I will pay her to charity dinner for money for something. And then you don’t. But that’s a betrayal of your commitment. Don’t delay paying. Don’t say, oh yeah, next year I meant it, but next year. You’ll be responsible if you commit something to God, then you will be in trouble. That’s true. Jewish law draws a distinction between those vows that are vows to God. What a vow is, what the language must be. It’s not just saying, I promise, or something like that.

It has to be much more serious than that. So don’t fail to commit yourself to what you said to God. If something comes out of your mouth, you must commit yourself to do it. Something you would vowed to God . As a free will offering . Which you willingly said, you must stick to. So again, this is something that clearly has relevance to the temple, relevance to God at that stage, giving a sacrifice or some donation, but can be applied generally to fulfilling one’s charitable commitments. Verse 25, another interesting law. When you are passing through the vineyard of your neighbour, and . You may pick grapes . To satisfy yourself . As much as you can reasonably take . But you can’t put it into a basket to carry away. You can eat on the go. If you are passing through, you’re surrounded by fruit. Why not? A limited amount. That’s also considered to be a form of charity, but it’s a form of sensitivity to a human being because you’re surrounded by food and you might be hungry, you might be starving. Why not? And similarly, in verse 26, . When you pass through a field of your neighbour. You want to break off some grain or some, anything that’s growing from the ground, you may cut it off in your hand in order to eat it. You can’t bring a knife and start cutting big chunks. So here is, if you like, a human consideration, which you might say ought to apply to people nowadays working in food processing. If you’re surrounded by chocolates all the time, can you eat a chocolate or can you not? This is an interesting issue, but this is basically part of the charitable, communal, humane atmosphere that the Torah wants to create. And so at that point, we come to the end of that chapter and we will close down that part and go to the questions. Question and answer.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Romaine says, “The laws are protecting at once primitive people from what?”

A: Now, this is a very good question. On the face of it, they’re saying, we are protecting you from idolatry, from idol worship. Now when we think in terms of idol worship, we think of standing in front of statues or giving food to statues or worshipping statues. But that’s not the major issue here that the Torah is concerned with. You can see from what we’ve been going through that it identifies paganism with immorality. With having no moral ethical standards. You are worshipping your God, but you can worship your God in any way that you want to. And so it was common in most societies at the time when the Torah was written to have temple prostitutes that people would go to the temple, the pagan temples to give of their bodies, to defecate, to have sex dedicated to the gods, either with priests or with the first male that came along. This was the female contribution to society. They may have seen it as a useful way of procreation, but nevertheless, those societies were societies with no moral code.

And it’s very interesting because there are people today, and I’ve mentioned this before, but since you raised the issue, I’ll mention it again, who have claimed that Christianity and Hinduism, for example, are pagan societies because , strange ways of serving God, they have idols and images and neither Islam nor Judaism have images. And there was this famous rabbi living in in the Middle ages called . This wonderful, brilliant man wrote great commentary on the Talmud, an expert in so many different areas. And he challenged the definition of idolatry. And he said, idolatry does not apply to somebody who is a that they have a moral code. And since Christianity, since he doesn’t mention Hinduism, have moral codes, they do not count as idolatrous in the biblical sense. You might want to apply it in some other way. That’s up to you. And therefore the laws in the Torah against idol worship are in our terms against immorality. And so we have to think of it in terms of immorality.

Diane says, “I admire applying to today, but have concern about those foods who accept the rules literally. Diane, I can’t answer that because I agree that too much that , people can interpret the way they want to. And there’ve always been people in Judaism who have interpreted the ways differently, whether these are sex of one sort or another, or different variations of Judaism. And I’m concerned too, I’m concerned about people who abuse the law. There are in every society, people who abuse the law and I regret it. I consider this to be a desecration of God’s name and I share your sentiments entirely. Thank you, Janet. Thank you, Carla. And thank you from Holland and to anybody else listening from Holland at the moment. And thank you, Rita. And as always, , I’m so grateful to you for your approval. And thank you everybody for joining and I will see you please garden next week as we draw to the end slowly of the book of Deuteronomy.