Then the LORD said, "The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know." Genesis 18:20, 21.
Dear Abby Meets Elijah
Sodom and Gomorrah.
The names alone conjure up images of the worst kind of impropriety and immorality. In Genesis 18, God went down to see if their sins were really as bad as he had heard. They were. I wonder if he has checked on us lately?
In the last several years, a voice has arisen within the American popular culture defending traditional Torah(Hebrew) instruction, guidance; specifically, the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Often translated "law" or "Pentateuch" values and norms. It is the voice of radio talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlesinger. She is something like a cross between Dear Abby and Elijah the Prophet. She manages to make a living out of dispensing advice from a Torah perspective. Her candor and remorseless rebukes make her undeniably entertaining, but what is really unique is her championing of Torah ethical values and norms in modern culture. She is anything but diplomatic or politically correct. So shocking and appalling is her political incorrectness that when Dr. Laura made an attempt to capture a television audience, protests erupted all over the country. She was accused of being bigoted and homophobic.
The protests availed. Advertisers began to pull their sponsorship from the stations carrying her television show. The outcry against Dr. Laura was so great and her words of Torah were so insulting that the television networks themselves went down to see if Dr. Laura was as bad as the outcry that had reached them. Dr. Laura's television show was quickly removed from several stations or at least assigned to the 4:30 a.m. time slot.
Actually, the protesters need not have wasted their efforts. The television show was mediocre. It did not possess the sharp-edged spontaneity that made her radio show listenable. Left to itself the television version of Dr. Laura would not have survived the competition of moral giants like Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones.
Pushing the Hot Button
But is Dr. Laura really a bigot and a homophobe? Probably not. Instead, like many conservative Christians, she simply takes a hard stand on morality. She is not willing to accept the popular notion of moral ambiguity. She regards God's law as the arbiter of truth, and that entails a belief in moral absolutes.
But it was not Dr. Laura's defiance of liberal feminism, nor was it her opposition of day-care parenting, nor was it her strong pro-life posture that won her the "most-hated conservative" status in American culture. The issue that sank Dr. Laura's ship was her refusal to accept homosexuality as a normal and healthy lifestyle. Standing on the basis of Torah, Dr. Laura declared homosexual behavior to be abnormal and aberrant.
Her refusal to acquiesce on this issue cost her her credibility in the mainstream media, but it won her the love and affection of conservative Christians around the world. The condemnation of the homosexual life-style is an issue near and dear to the hearts of conservative Christians everywhere. There are few remaining moral issues that can incite as much passionate vehemence in believers as the gay issue does. Homosexuality has been a "hot-button" in the church for the last decade. Yet despite our rancorous rhetoric against it, the gay agenda has advanced unabated even within the seminaries of the church itself. Many denominations around the world are now officially sanctioning homosexuality as a viable lifestyle and even going so far as to perform gay marriages and to ordain openly homosexual clergy. The relentless advance of the gay agenda has created such an atmosphere of panic and homophobia in the Church, that we Christians were quick to embrace Dr. Laura as one of our own...even if she is Jewish.
As part of the conservative Christian response to the homosexual movement, we are quick to point to specific Torah passages like Leviticus 18:22 to justify the hard moral line we are drawing. But according to our own theology, this methodology is flawed.
An Anonymous Letter
When the Dr. Laura controversy was at its height last winter, I received the following email that was apparently widely circulated. It was so widely circulated and popularly applauded that the writers of the ultra-liberal television program "West Wing" wrote it into the plot of one of their episodes. It is still being waived around and continues to circulate on the Internet.
Dear Dr. Laura, Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's law. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.
When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How should I deal with this?
I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggests in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her? I also know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
Now I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself? Then, Lev. 25:44 states that I may buy slaves from the nations that are around us. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans but not Canadians. Can you clarify?
A friend of mine also feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 10:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? And Lev. 20:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Despite his misapplications and his tendency to violate context, the author of the email to Dr. Laura does make a good case. How can we derive unchanging ethical and moral absolutes from a document we routinely disregard and declare irrelevant to life in the modern world? How can we claim that God's word is eternal and unchanging while at the same time teaching that it has changed?
Abominations
In what is certainly his strongest argument, he compares eating shellfish to homosexuality. Both are described by Torah as abominable to God.1 The Hebrew word used in both instances is to'evah. It is a word used to describe an object that elicits a reaction of disgust and distaste. It is rarely used in the first four books of Torah, but finds several applications in Deuteronomy. The book of Devarim(Hebrew) literally "words"; the book of Deuteronomy tells us that God is disgusted by idolatry, child sacrifice, divination, sorcery, witchcraft, spell casting, channeling spirits and consulting the dead. In addition, the Torah says that God is also disgusted by the employment of prostitution in worship, gender cross-dressing, remarriage to a previous spouse who has remarried and inaccurate weights and measures used to defraud.2 All of that is to say that God is disgusted by sin. Whether those particular sins disgust him more than others is not certain. It should be enough of a deterrent to know that those things disgust the LORD.
All of the above abominations receive a resounding "Amen" from conservative Christians everywhere. We are quick to add Leviticus 18:22 to the list. Therein God describes homosexuality as an abomination to the LORD. But our "Amen" gets caught in our throat when we are told that eating unclean animals is also an abomination to the LORD. How do we reconcile condemning homosexuality while going out for the Red Lobster "all-the-shrimp-you-can-eat-special" on Friday night?
Three Torahs or One?
Typically the reconciliation is accomplished by dividing the Torah into three separate domains of legislation. The Torah seems to contain laws pertaining to morality, laws pertaining to civility and laws pertaining to ceremony. Based upon these three domains of application, our theologians dice the Torah into moral law, civil law and ceremonial law. We are then able to proceed by saying that the ceremonial laws and civil laws were obsolesced by the Gospel. Only the moral code remains valid through the new dispensation of Grace.
This explanation seems to satisfy our disillusioned Dr. Laura listener's objections. His questions regarding the shellfish, Shabbat [(Hebrew) Sabbath; the seventh day of the week, which God blessed and set apart for rest and holiness.], sacrifices, priesthood and purity laws can all be dismissed as ceremonial laws long ago shed by the faith. His questions regarding slavery can be dismissed as civil laws, also invalidated by the Gospel. Only the moral code remains in force today, which happily includes the prohibition of homosexuality. The three-fold explanation is, however, flawed at its core, and does not withstand modest scrutiny. There are not three Torahs. "One Torah and one manner shall be for you," (Numbers 15:16).
I was recently invited to teach about Torah at a local Fundamentalist-Christian Bible school. During the question and answer time, one of the students stood up and asked, "How can we know if a particular law is moral, civil or ceremonial? The Bible doesn't seem to make any distinction." It is an accurate observation. It is an observation no more lost on the anonymous author of the email to Dr. Laura than it was on that first year Bible student. The distinction between moral, civil and ceremonial laws is artificial and arbitrary. It is a contrivance created for the convenience of a theology that holds the majority of Torah legislation in disdain.
At no point does Torah give any indication of a separation between moral and ceremonial law. The ceremonial laws of the prohibition of idolatry and the law of the Sabbath are listed along with the moral statutes regarding murder and theft. The Torah lists eating unclean animals as just as much an abomination as cross-dressing and necromancy are. God has not drawn a line of distinction between ritual laws and ethical laws, but we have.
And because we have, it is possible for our theologians and seminarians to condone homosexuality even in the clergy of the church. Any scriptures condemning such behavior can be readily dismissed as antiquated ceremonial laws, and not part of the essential morality of the Bible. Following this line of reasoning, nothing can be said to be essentially and absolutely wrong or right. Rather, everything is subject to possible reinterpretation and dismissal as part of the obsolesced body of ceremonial legislation.
By wrongly dividing the word of God into arbitrary categories, some of which we have declared no longer valid, we have dug our own theological grave and handed the shovel to the opponents of the Gospel. Now we can only scream in protest as they scoop the dirt in on us. The Dr. Laura email is a big scoop of dirt for which we have little answer.
Eternal and Unchanging?
The email is a delightfully amusing parody of our fundamentalist approach to Torah. The anonymous writer of the letter astutely observes that we have a double standard when applying Scripture. We only use those passages of Torah that support our moral predispositions. We regard passages that buttress our predispositions as eternal and unchanging. Commandments within Torah that do not support our already existing ethical and religious contrivances, however, are disregarded as obsolete.
To be fair, the writer takes some liberties with Torah himself. Most of his points are made from misapplication of specific commandments. He achieves the ridiculous by taking a commandment out of its given context and placing it in a different context. The resulting anachronism is the source of the humor.
How we choose to respond to his arguments, however, will either make or break our case against homosexuality and every other moral absolute we hope to derive from Scripture. If we allow him to embarrass us into explaining, "Well those things are all ceremonial and cultural things that have been done away with," he will respond in kind. He will say, "The prohibition against homosexuality is also a ceremonial and cultural issue that has been done away with." We may try to bring in certain NT passages from the Pauline scriptures to counter his argument,3 but these are ultimately futile because Paul derives the authority of his arguments from Torah. If the Torah foundation is malleable, so are the arguments based upon it.
If however, we maintain that the Torah is unchanging and immutable, as our Master did, then we find ourselves on firmer ground to answer his objections. Let's step in for Dr. Laura and answer these questions for her.
Sacrifice:
The emailer describes his neighbor's objections to the burnt offering in the back yard. I can empathize with his neighbor. The sacrifices described in Leviticus are only permitted within the Temple and must be facilitated by a Levitically pure priesthood.4 In the absence of an existing Temple, the rites of sacrifice cannot be practiced. That is not the same as saying that those laws are obsolete or done away with. YeshuaThe Hebrew/Aramaic name of Jesus of Nazareth. (lit, "salvation")'s sacrifice certainly fulfilled the spiritual components of the sacrificial system, but fulfilling and obsolescing are two different things. The book of Acts shows us that the believers remained engaged in the Jerusalem Temple system, long after the death and resurrection of the Master. Obviously they did not regard the Temple worship as obsolete.
Ever since the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the sacrifices detailed in the Torah have not been possible (and will not be possible) until the Temple is rebuilt. The email author's transference of those laws from their Temple context to the suburban American backyard raises some humorous possibilities, but ultimately it is an irrelevant argument.
Purity:
The email author also speculates about contact with ritual impurity, namely women in menstruation. Like the laws of sacrifice, the purity laws have a relevant context only when there is a functional Temple. The purity laws of clean and unclean are designed to protect the pure sanctity of the Temple precinct and priesthood. In the absence of the Temple, the purity laws are only vestiges of a very different world. That does not mean the purity laws are obsolete or done away with. If a Temple was rebuilt in Jerusalem tomorrow, every worshiper going up to that Temple would be bound by the laws of clean and unclean.
Women in menstruation are only one possible source of ritual impurity. He selects that particular one because it will incite the strongest reaction. By transferring those laws from their Temple context to the postmodern culture of the West, the author of the email again paints a comical scenario, but one that has no real bearing on the relevance of Torah.
Priesthood:
The reference to the defect in eyesight is actually Leviticus 21:18, not 20:20, but our comedian has overtaxed himself with the reference to 20/20 eyesight and mistaken it for a verse and chapter reference. Regardless of the error, the eyesight law is on the books only in regard to the priesthood of Israel, and it is a reference to blindness, not astigmatism. It is part of a list of prohibitions that forbid a maimed priest from facilitating the sacrificial service of the Temple.
Our modern sensitivities and equal opportunity dogmas are offended by a passage like Leviticus 21:18. Like the sacrifices themselves, the priests handling them needed to be without defect. A priest with a disqualifying defect was still fully employed within the priesthood and had the rights to all venues of the priesthood except for the sacred service of the altar.
Still, even if the author of the email had perfect 20/20 vision and was without any form of physical defect, he is forbidden to approach the altar unless he is a direct and certifiable descendant of Aaron. There is no wiggle room here. And again, those laws are relevant only when there is a Temple or altar to approach in the first place.
Slavery:
The author of the email plays on emotions evoked by our historical memory of American slavery. He claims that Exodus 21:7 suggests a man sell his daughter as a slave. Actually, the passage in question does not suggest that a man sell his daughter as a slave. Rather it addresses one of the unpleasant possibilities of life in the Ancient Near East where a debtor might find himself or family members being taken into slavery in lieu of unpaid debt. The Torah seeks to protect a woman who might be caught in that barbarous system of economics by insuring her right of redemption and forbidding her resale to another. Thus she cannot be used as a sexual slave, passed from owner to owner. She must be treated with dignity and accorded her rights.
The Torah law he criticizes is actually one meant to defend the cause of the slave and the rights of women. Far from being obsolete, it is from Torah laws like this one that the world has learned to treat women with the respect and dignity.
He goes on to cite Leviticus 25:44 as granting him permission to buy slaves from Mexico or Canada. This time he is correct. The passage he is citing is part of a prohibition of buying Israelites (which arguably includes believers) as permanent slaves. The Torah allows fellow Israelites to be purchased only on a temporary basis, and then only as a type of "hired-hand." After seven years, or at the year of Jubilee, the Israelite slave is released and must be paid for his labor. The same passage does, however, allow for the purchase of heathens as life-long slaves. Of course, slavery is illegal in Canada, the United States and Mexico, so even if he were to find some heathens for sale in either Canada or Mexico, he would have other legal issues to deal with. He again makes a satirical point by transferring the world of the Ancient Near East into Western society. But pointing out that the Torah condones slavery is not the same as proving that Torah is no longer relevant.
Corporal Punishment:
The email author accuses his neighbor of Sabbath violations and wonders about the death penalty associated with the sin. The death penalty assigned to Sabbath-breakers and to other grievous sins of Torah were not vigilante-style executions as our anonymous author imagines. Those sentences were determined through a court of law employing the adversarial system of justice. If such a court of justice (namely the Sanhedrin) existed today and had jurisdiction in the United States, and the accused Sabbath-breaker was not a heathen, but was demonstrably obligated by Torah to keep the Sabbath, then he would be well advised to get a very good lawyer. The anonymous author of our email could stand as a witness of the prosecution in the trial, but a guilty verdict would not be achievable without an additional witness. Also, intention to belligerently break the Sabbath would have to be proven. If all of those criteria were met, then an execution under the auspices of the court would commence.
It strikes us as barbaric and antiquated to imagine someone being stoned to death for breaking the Sabbath. But our self-righteous indignation is the result of us holding the Sabbath in much lower esteem than God does. We have considerably less trouble imagining a court of law putting a murderer to death because that is a reality still present in our cultural milieu. The Sabbath is the most often repeated positive commandment in the Scripture. It may not seem like a big deal to us, but apparently it is to God.
Unclean Animals:
The email author drives his finest point regarding the eating of unclean animals. Deuteronomy describes it as an abomination to God, just like homosexuality. Yet even the most right-wing among us conservative Christians will enjoy a little lobster tail once in a while. So how can we condemn homosexuality?
In that case we must either acquiesce to the notion that parts of the Torah have been abolished, or, the other possibility, that we have been wrong about the shellfish, and the rest of the kosher(Hebrew) proper, permitted by Jewish law. Often used to describe food that it is permissible to eat. laws.
Certainly we could turn to several NT passages that we have interpreted to be abrogations of the kosher laws, but that would only prove his point about the eternal, unchangingness of God's Word. If what was called an abomination in one case is now called breakfast, why shouldn't an abomination in another case now be called healthy human sexuality? This is certainly neither the time nor the place to write out an argument in defense of the Biblical dietary laws. Besides, it may just be my own cynicism showing through, but I'm willing to bet that we will embrace homosexuality as God ordained and permitted before we are willing to give up shellfish and bacon!
Sorry Dr. Laura, we tried. Score one for the homosexual movement.
This article originally appeared in First Fruits of Zion's Bikkurei Tzion and is reprinted here with permission. All rights reserved by First Fruits of Zion. No part of this article may be copied or reprinted in any form, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (printed, written, photocopied, visual, electronic, audio or otherwise) without permission of the publisher. To acquire permission to translate this material in any form, please contact First Fruits of Zion, Inc. Brief quotations are permitted with citing of author, source and publisher. Visit the First Fruits of Zion web site.
- 1. Although the author of the letter cites Leviticus 10:10 as his proof text, the text he had in mind was probably Deuteronomy 14:3.
- 2. Idolatry: Deuteronomy 17:4, 13:14, 7:25, 20:18; Child sacrifice: 12:31; Divination, sorcery, witchcraft, spell casting, channeling spirits and consulting the dead: 18:10-12; Prostitution in worship: 23:18; Cross-dressing: 22:5; Re-remarriage: 24:4; False weights and measures: 25:16.
- 3. Romans 1:26, 27 spring to mind.
- 4. Deuteronomy 12:13,14
