{In which Pascal the existential Russian blue cat continues his beef with Dennis Prager over the scriptural book of Deuteronomy. While Prager praises the book to the skies and declares it to be the word of God Himself, Pascal finds it alternately an embarrassment and an outrage.}
Perhaps because the LORD of Israel knew that the devil is in the details, Deuteronomy contains a surprisingly detailed penal code. For instance, “If two men are fighting,” it decrees, “and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.” A reader is left to wonder how often that sort of thing happened that it had to be explicitly proscribed.
If pity was out, fairness was in: “Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin.” The LORD was not opposed to capital punishment; He only wanted the actual offender to be the one executed. Christians may wonder, did Paul or Augustine neglect this Deuteronomic passage when they authored the doctrine of Original Sin? Also, the LORD also said, via Moses and earlier in Deuteronomy, “I am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the third and the fourth generation…” What, we might ask, gives?
Such quibbles aside, there is much to admire about the Deuteronomic code, e.g., the law that states, “On the testimony of two or three witnesses a person is to be put to death, but no one is to be put to death on the testimony of only one witness. The hands of the witnesses must be the first in putting that person to death, and then the hands of all the people.” The insistence on multiple witnesses was a moral and legal advance; requiring the testifying witnesses to get their hands dirty when it came administering punishment was a stroke of genius, though not one we would likely approve of today.
Over and over, Israel was enjoined by Moses (aka God): “You must purge the evil from among you.” Error was to have no rights, as the Catholic Church later declared; sin was contagious, much like mold, and it therefore had to be eradicated. Desperate times called for desperate measures; after everything the LORD had done to rescue His Chosen People from captivity and to award them land already occupied by other people, He was not about to tolerate any backsliding.
Moving on: as is clear from our contemporary culture wars, marriage and marital issues have always been of concern to God. Surprisingly, according to Deuteronomy, divorce was acceptable to the LORD, but remarrying your ex- was expressly forbidden:
“If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, and if after she leaves his house she becomes the wife of another man, and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, then her first husband, who divorced her, is not allowed to marry her again after she has been defiled. That would be detestable in the eyes of the Lord. Do not bring sin upon the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance.” 1
It is not clear if the woman’s defilement stems from having married a second time or from having been divorced a second time; either way, she was off-limits to her original spouse.
In addition, certain marital duties were to be taken seriously:
If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her. The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel. However, if a man does not want to marry his brother’s wife, she shall go to the elders at the town gate and say, “My husband’s brother refuses to carry on his brother’s name in Israel. He will not fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to me.” Then the elders of his town shall summon him and talk to him. If he persists in saying, “I do not want to marry her,” his brother’s widow shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, take off one of his sandals, spit in his face and say, “This is what is done to the man who will not build up his brother’s family line.” That man’s line shall be known in Israel as The Family of the Unsandaled. 2
Hell hath no fury like a widow scorned by her brother-in-law! We have no idea how many men in Israel became un-sandaled (de-sandaled?), nor do we know how the spurned widow was able to remove the man’s sandal in the first place. The spitting seems unnecessary, but who are we to question the LORD?
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1 This was before Jesus improved his Father’s moral code and prohibited divorce entirely.
2 “Nor shall the pumps work,” added Moses, “for the vandals will have taken the handles.”
Deuteronomy: The Board Game
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