God’s Truth
The Law of Moses
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
The Law of Moses
Now Dr Ernest Phibber takes us on a hypocritical survey of the Law of Moses, telling us how successful it was, and still is, and all this despite Jews being unpleasant, treacherous types. It is all possible because God, not the Jews, is responsible for the Mosaic Law. It tells us to love one another (Leviticus 19:18) and Jesus was incarnated simply to remind us of it. We are told that the Jews had to love strangers (Leviticus 19:34) because they had themselves been strangers in Egypt and had been badly treated.
Fine, Phibber, but what if they were badly treated by strangers in their own country? What if they were ruled from abroad by strangers? According to the Law of Moses they were not allowed to have foreign kings (Deuteronomy 17:15). So, according to God’s Laws, they were to resist those who were imposing a foreign king on them, yet should love them as well! That is a very difficult contradiction in God’s Laws, and most Jews at the time of Jesus considered that since God had led them into this patch of land as the promised land then they should make sure that God’s commandment to keep it their own outweighed God’s commandment to love the strangers who lived among them.
The Mosaic Law is quite sensible bearing in mind its antiquity. If our guide or any other Christian or Jewish person wishes to believe the commandments in the Pentateuch were handed down by God then it is up to them. What we do know is that they were actually written by scribes and sages around 400 to 200 BC drawing upon Jewish tradition but also on ideas that were novel at the time. Much of the ritual was probably freshly written for the new institution, the Jerusalem Temple. No doubt some belonged to tradition but much of it was newly codified on the basis of the experiences of exiles who had seen the long established religion of Babylonia in action.
These early civilisations in the Middle East were built by men just like us. We are in no way superior to them intellectually. We simply have several thousands more years of experience behind us. The several thousands of years of civilisation that had gone before were sufficient for men to realise that certain foods were unhealthy, certain practices were unhealthy and certain ways of behaving were disruptive.
Moses did not walk down a mountain loaded down with slabs. He is the myth explaining how ways of living learnt by experience were codified. The code was really written after the Persian colonization of Judah. Phibber can give the men of several thousands of years ago no credit. If they passed down to us a wonderful and comprehensive legal system it must have been the work of God. Judging by Phibber and his ilk, we must be regressing—those primitives were actually superior to us!
Phibber believes the story of Moses and his slabs and, in case we are not impressed by him or the bible, he seeks to sway us by telling us it was the view of “the greatest living Englishman”, meaning Winston Churchill. Now Phibber was writing after the death of Churchill which was in 1965. Churchill’s fame came as the British leader in the Second World War. So from then until his death he could be described as “the greatest living Englishman”. Phibber quotes Churchill out of office in the 1930s when he was at certainly living but is it accurate to refer to him then as the “greatest living Englishman”? Wells, Thomson, Dirac and—if Phibber really means British rather than English—Lloyd-George, Shaw and many others must have had a better claim in the 1930s. This is a minor inaccuracy to raise, you might say, but it illustrates the carelessness of this man boasting his high qualifications, who would claim to show us God’s Truth.
Creation Mythology
More examples follow that of Moses. We get two paraphrases of two non-Jewish creation myths and a comparison with the creation myth of Genesis to prove that the Genesis myth is superior. Perhaps the authors of Genesis and its translators are better writers than Dr Ernest Phibber but what does it matter—it is all mythology and we need not bother about it, except as social anthropology. Yet our scientific guide apparently believes it and not the even better discoveries of modern science regarding origins! “The biblical record still makes sense in this scientific age”, he insists. Yet Genesis 1 seems to be gibberish.
It says that the earth was created at the same time as the heavens and they were all made of water. Then God created light, and day and night before he had created a firmament or a sun. Next he divided the water that evidently filled the universe and created the firmament. Now God creates dry land and puts trees and plants on it but he still has not made the sun. On the fourth day he creates the sun and the moon and so gives a basis for the night and day which he apparently created three days ago. We need not go on. The story is a very good attempt of pre-scientific men to account for the world they experienced. But it is not true—merely God’s Truth, and the timing in it shows it refers to an ancient week long ceremony celebrating the creation, not the creation itself!
Phibber now gives us a whole chapter, highlighting interesting “coincidences” in the Jewish Scriptures, the conclusion of which is “they are the hallmark of true history, not fiction”. Our scholarly professor is adept at setting up Aunt Sallys which he then adroitly knocks over. Out here we are not disputing that much of the Old Testament is Jewish history. I spent some time above pointing out that so-called prophetic passages are actually history, so it would be inconsistent to deny it now. The scriptures are peculiarly good history considering their age, but they are mixed with legend—modified history—and myth, not history but moral and aetiological stories meant to explain things, and they have since been edited often and even rewritten.
Thus, Phibber refers to Goliath who was killed by the youthful David. Our tutor quotes the giant’s height as six cubits and a span which is 9 feet 9 inches but many of the oldest Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament give four cubits and a span, a much more reasonable height of 6 feet 9 inches. Unless there were two giants one of these heights is wrong. In fact, a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls supports the smaller and more realistic Goliath of the Greek texts. We might ask, if the bible is the work of God, why he does not take better care of it? In truth it does not matter a jot whether the text reads four cubits or six cubits because the incident is surely symbolic of the insignificant and inchoate group of Hebrew tribes defeating much more powerful neighbours, the Philistines whose name gives us the word Palestine.
Phibber now gives us a tortuous analysis of the failures of firstborn sons in the scriptures leading up to the fact that God was reserving the success of a firstborn for his own son, Jesus. The curious thing about this little bit of God’s Truth is that Phibber knows he is talking baloney but remains convinced of the validity of his argument even though he actually refutes it himself. He does this by telling us that some firstborn sons might have been successes but the scriptures do not tell us so. Josiah is given as an example because he was born when his father was only sixteen (2 Kings 21:19-22:1). God’s Truth is having your cake and eating it.
Furthermore, Israel was God’s firstborn nation. Yet another flop!
“What creates such harmony?” asks our tutor. “Your imagination”, can be the only answer.
Harmony
As if to prove it, Phibber produces a similar “harmony”, that of the word “sweat”. Sweat is mentioned only three times in the bible, in the Garden of Eden—the sweat of the brow that the descendants of Adam have to suffer as punishment for his sin, in the Garden of Gethsemane—the sweat as of blood of Jesus, the redeemer of the human race from sin, praying before his capture. Interesting so far! We remain agog! What about the third mention? It is in Ezekiel 44:18. But it has no mention of a garden and mentions sweat, not as an act of sweating, but that clothing which contains wool is inclined to cause sweating and should therefore not be worn. This is part of Ezekiel’s vision of a huge heavenly temple. Nice try, two match and one is out. No! According to Phibber all three match because the one in Ezekiel means that Christ’s redeemed disciples are freed forever from the “sweat” (suffering) that Adam brought into the world. Well, fancy that! Amazing stuff, this God’s Truth. The bible is historically true but when it is not, it is allegory, so you take your pick accorsing to whatever suits you best.
The next harmony Dr Ernest Phibber wants us to know is that there are four women mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy of the line of David. They were all gentiles who had married into Israel. The conclusion of our mentor is that they were mentioned in the lineages because their Old Testament stories “condemned the rulers of the Jews for their narrow mindedness”. According to the Mosaic Law Jews were not allowed to intermarry and regarded gentiles as “little better than animals”. What Phibber seems to be saying is that it proves God’s message was for a wider audience than just the Jews but the Jews tried to keep it to themselves—as ever, it is all tortuous. If Phibber is correct they were mentioned deliberately by the author of Matthew.
However the fact that these women had married into the Jewish nation indicates that this particular law of Moses was not adhered to very rigidly by the Jews. As to the purpose of their inclusion in Matthew, could it not be interpreted more straightforwardly as a veiled indication that the mother of Jesus was herself a gentile? Gentiles could become Jews despite our teacher’s assertion about the narrow-mindedness of Jews. Perhaps, the gospel writer is telling us that Jesus’s mother was a gentile proselyte of Judaism. It seems just as likely as the weird harmony Phibber accepts.
The final harmony boils down to the fact that Jews habitually referred to themselves as Israel though the country of Israel constituting ten of the tribes had been destroyed by the Assyrians. Our tutor believes God’s book is telling us that the ten tribes were not in fact lost. It’s a harmony if you want it to be but for most of us it’s a nothing at all.
The whole of Palestine is only small. The Hebrews had not conquered the country, then called Canaan, but rather were already in it or were absorbed into it, so they certainly interbred extensively with the indigenous people. The Hebrew tribes, though supposedly allocated separate areas, were therefore never purebred and certainly intermixed with each other. Similarly the surviving two tribes never seemed to have any separate existence despite Paul’s insistence that he was a Benjaminite. It’s a bit like someone called Fitzgerald claiming to be a Norman. Perhaps it’s true but after a thousand years we’re all a bit Norman and a bit Angle and a bit Saxon, etc. So it was with the Jews 500 years after Persian colonists, romanticised as twelve to correspond with the signs of the Zodiac, supposedly colonized Canaan. The Egyptian Ptolemies had pushed the date of the colonization back a millennium and made the Jews emerge from Egypt but with the name the Egyptians seemed to prefer, the Israelites. Jews could call therefore themselves Jews, Israel and Hebrews. What more harmonisation is needed? None! But dressed up as God’s Truth it sounds impressive.
Summing up his arguments so far our tutor says, “Some of it may be coincidence but it all can’t be”. Well I don’t know whether “coincidence” is the right word here—“untrue” is probably better, and we have seen in each case he quotes that there is a perfectly sensible answer which does not require the hand of God except for someone who is already in the land of the blind. Phibber tells us “the evidence cannot be explained away”. Perhaps he is right but it can certainly be explained without God wiggling His finger in actual history as opposed to that imaginary variety called sacred, and that is what we have done.
