Been thinking… Some learned historian or Bible scholar should get in touch with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to lend a hand with cold case murder investigations like the one reported in the L.A. Times this morning. Here’s what the paper reported today. A body was found in 1988. Case was never solved. In church this morning the Pew Bible I picked up fell open to Deuteronomy 21. The instructions were there for handling bodies found slain with no sign of who did it:
“When a dead body is found lying in open country, in the land which the Lord your God is giving you to occupy, and it is not known who struck the blow, your elders and your judges shall come out and measure the distance to the surrounding towns to find which is nearest. The elders of that town shall take a heifer that has never been mated or worn a yoke, and bring it down to a ravine where there is a stream that never runs dry and the ground is never tilled or sown, and there in the ravine they shall break its neck. The priests, the sons of Levi, shall then come forward; for the Lord your God has chosen them to minister to him and to bless him in the name of the Lord, and their voice shall be decisive in all cases of dispute and assault. Then all the elders of the town nearest to the dead body shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck has been broken in the ravine. They shall solemnly declare: ‘Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did we witness the bloodshed. Accept expiation, O Lord, for thy people Israel whom thous hast redeemed, and do not let the guilt of innocent blood rest upon thy people Israel: let this bloodshed be expiated on their behalf.’ Thus, by doing what it right in the eyes of the Lord, you shall rid yourselves of the guilt of innocent blood.”
—Deuteronomy 21: 1-9
Any questions?
Well, that's settled then. Now, if anybody wants to know what to do with a woman captured in a battle, the next paragraph (Deuteronomy 21: 10-14) gives explicit instruction.
I'm just wondering if I should get in touch with John Kerry to let him know he can probably find something in Deuteronomy that might help with the Iran problem.
2 comments:
That was written by one of the early redactors of the folk tales that eventually became the Hebrew scripture, written just after the Babylonian Captivity. The brainy types among their leaders were trying to come up with an explanation of why bad things happened to them, and had come up with the idea that it was due to their pissing off YHWH, their god, due to their disobedience, hence a rather paranoid fixation on doing things exactly right in order to please him (or her, or whatever, but probably him, given their extreme male domination).
Imagine how many heifers need to be slaughtered to repent for the dead in Afghanistan, Iraq, and well, syria!!
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