When Encountering Troubling Scriptural Verses

Perhaps the more apt title would be: “When you read things in the Bible that greatly disturb you.”

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Many read or study the Bible for inspiration – a motivating force to help lead a better or a morally driven life, thus designed to help become better servants of God, or just better people. That is, individuals who see God’s Biblical commands as guideposts for a good life.

It may seem radically simple – God tells us what we should do, and we simply follow in order to gain His good grace. Scripture, after all, consists in significant part of morally-based commands. And if the world at large would choose to follow them consistently, we might begin to imagine a better world order. That is, indeed, the mentality that has existed since the foothills of Sinai.

What, though, if when we read Scripture we discover commandments that are openly antithetical to the morality that is preached by today’s recognized thought leaders (or even by ourselves) as bedrock principles by which to live? So, for example, if the Bible were to have obligated mankind to be racially intolerant, how could we possibly wish to comply? Would we aspire to follow that Biblical directive? Or, given mankind’s evolution since the giving of the Laws at Sinai, would we, without fanfare, defy them — hoping that God would nonetheless “understand”?

Among the Laws contained, for example, in Parshat Mishpatim that are so hard to reconcile with modernity might be these: 1) the “Hebrew slave” and 2) the “eye for an eye” regimen. While neither are permissible today under civil law, the rabbis interpreted or (perhaps) “manipulated” the text of the “Hebrew slave” (the “eved ivrie”) to maintain that he wasn’t really a slave. This despite the offending nature of the master/slave relationship that, we’re instructed by the rabbis, was only designed to enable a debtor to work off his debt to his “master.” Or are we simply moved to that way of thinking as a result of presentism — a decided need to interpret the past through the lens of present-day attitudes and values?

And likewise for the rule dictating “an eye for an eye” – barbaric as it facially appears (and surely would have seemed to the rabbis who later interpreted it in a far less onerous way, albeit without a textual foundation to support it). The rabbis, in this instance, took the liberty of declaring that it really meant that the word “eye” only means the financial value of the eye — “not literally the offender’s eye, silly.”)

And perhaps more important in some respects, especially in today’s world, consider the unusual commandment contained at Exodus 22:27: The people “shalt not speak ill of their civil leaders.” It is, of course, perfectly sensible for God to enjoin mankind from criticizing our leaders in ways that might undermine their leadership. Must we, though, also remain silent if these leaders choose to rule in an extremely appalling manner? Does God actually want us to withhold negative critique of them, even when criticism is urgently needed from the body politic? Or did God merely demand our “silence” during those distant days of yesteryear when it was God Himself who selected our (theocratic) leaders – i.e., Saul, David and Solomon – lest we, albeit perhaps unintentionally, be viewed as criticizing God Himself given that He Himself appointed them?

It has for a long time been my personal “apostasy”, as some have argued to me, to overtly challenge the validity of the rabbis “interpreting” (lacking a better word) the Torah’s commandments, such as in the instances of the Hebrew slave or “an eye for an eye”, ostensibly in order to make these laws seem less offensive to mankind in these post-Biblical times. This, lest the religion’s followers potentially abandon their belief system as being out of touch with modernity’s perception of what is acceptable to mankind’s far-more-modern way of thinking.

Perhaps, though, I’ve had it backwards. Maybe God truly intended that the rabbis, as they themselves actually have maintained, have a hand in speaking to mankind for Him or on His behalf — lest God’s seeming decision to not speak directly to mankind any longer relegate us to His rulings that were handed down in unambiguously ancient times that may have made total sense then, but seemingly no longer do (with presentism clearly at play).

What those of us who don’t totally buy into the notion of an “Oral Torah” having been handed down to Moses simultaneously and alongside the “Written Torah” will never know for sure is whether God intended to accord “the rabbis” carte blanche — allowing them to take the measures that they have over time to modify the stated requirements of the religion precisely in order to modernize them and make them more (shall I say?) tolerable to us.
Finally, and lest it go unsaid, if the potential for presentism didn’t indeed exist, how tolerable would our – or would any — religion actually be?