Dear Families and Friends of Peace,
This week I’d like to share some thoughts from last night’s conversation during Confirmation, which I think are incredibly important for all of as we read and do our best to make sense of the Bible.
After focusing on the Ten Commandments last week, this week our Confirmation group focused on all 613 of the laws given in the first five books of the Bible. The laws existed to help people better love God and their neighbors better, and they were also contextual—meant for a certain people at a certain time.
We also discussed the reality that some of the Old Testament laws have been, and continue to be, misinterpreted and misused. This gives us a choice: we can either ignore them, or we can try to better understand them and what their purpose was. I prefer option #2, particularly so that we can stop current and future exploitation of those passages.
For example, the 10th Commandment says, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
I have two things to say about this.
First, this commandment mentions slavery. Does that mean God approves of slavery? Absolutely not! But unfortunately, slavery did exist and was commonplace at that time, so when Biblical authors mention it, they are just speaking to their historical reality. And in contrast, it’s important for us to remember that the 10 Commandments were given to Moses in the process of liberating them from slavery in Egypt!
Our God is a God of liberation! God tells Moses, “Say therefor to the Israelites, ‘I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians, and deliver you from slavery to them’” (Exodus 6:6). And later in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he says, “It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore, keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1).
Second, the 10th Commandment mentions not coveting your neighbor’s wife—but there is a failure to acknowledge women as anything more than part of a man’s family or property.
This is because society then was very patriarchal–and we still haven’t fully recovered. Men held the most power, and women had very little. Marriages were arranged, and women seldomly had a say. Even in the New Testament, there are mentions that women should submit to men and should not have authority over them. Generally, women were not treated well, plain and simple.
But understanding that context reminds us that things were far from perfect in that time period (hence the need for Jesus), and that the people who wrote the Bible were often men who grew up in those patriarchal societies and had their own particular biases. It’s okay, and important, for us to acknowledge those circumstances, and it’s even more important for us to uplift women as the beloved children of God they are.
Take these biblical women for example: some of Jesus’ most faithful followers were women, and the women were the first ones to see and proclaim the Risen Jesus. Ruth’s faithfulness and boldness led to the birth of King David, who also happens to be an ancestor of Jesus. And Esther’s bravery and refusal to submit to evil singlehandedly saved the lives of thousands of Jewish people in the ancient Persian Empire. And those are just to name a few…
Context is important for understanding biblical passages and discerning their purpose–as well as for considering how we apply them to our modern day context and everyday lives.
Grace and Peace,
Joe