brennen
/
p1k3-wala


								In reference to [http://p1k3.com/2003/7/10 this entry], which was in response to [http://saalon.daemonsong.com/journal.php?history_type=day&day=10&month=07&year=2003 this post by Eric].


								Sources:

								* http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext90/kjv10.txt (Yeah, it's weak. Gotta find some better, nicely formatted etext. And come to that, a better translation.)

								* http://bible.gospelcom.net/bible?  An excellent resource with a bunch of searchable translations.


								== I quote Leviticus, but of course ==


								This stuff is out of context, and doesn't really represent some of the more subtle but equally unpleasant ideas to be found. These are part of a really frickin' old code of law which is equal parts obsolete, context-free, preserved through sheer inertia of tradition, and some pretty good advice. There's stuff like


								:19:18 Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but '''thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself''': I am the LORD.


								(emphasis mine) that takes us directly into the territory of Jesus. Large swaths of Leviticus are remarkably humane and useful and if obeyed would nearly always have served to nullify its uglier bits, as I suspect would the simple humanity of the people involved. My point is not so much that the Old Testament is creepily obsessed with and disgusted by sex and utterly bent on punishing people for it as it is that if you're looking for that, you can find it, and for entirely too many people with entirely too much power, a thousand love-thy-neighbors will never serve to negate a single "their blood shall be upon them".


								-- [Brennen]


								----


								== Saalon's Response: ==


								I was probably too kind on Leviticus in my article, because I find Leviticus to be, at best, completely and utterly useless in every way.  I use Leviticus as an example in a lot of things, though, specifically because it's so out there.


								But what I do want to point out is that the Old Testament ''isn't'' obsessed with sex.  It is creepily obsessed by something, though, and that's "cleanliness."  The Jewish priesthood is bonkers over cleanliness and holiness, and nearly all of its laws are based around keeping clean and purified for worship.  So you've got tons of goofy laws about how this is dirty and that's unclean and if you do this you've got to do that to purify yourself.  And you know what?  If you really read it, ''it isn't about cleanliness either.''  Reading carefully, it's pretty obvious what Leviticus is all about: concentrating power in the priesthood.  The priests must do this, that, accept this, perform this other thing.  Leviticus could easily be retitled ''Why The Priesthood Is What God Loves.''  Leviticus is nuts, but what's funny is, there are later sources in the Bible which would agree with you...


								You were right about it not being a monolithic document, at least in composition.  (Whether it's monolithically the word of God, and has been drawn together by God's power is unprovable, though, because many faithful people will say that while it was composed over a long period time, God's hand shaped the end result.  I'm not going to argue the rightness or wrongness of this, because I ''can't win.''  It's pointless.  Either you believe that or you don't.  I don't, but that's all I'll say.)  And since it isn't monolithic, and wasn't even viewed as such in the days of the Jewish monarchy, you've got interbook commentary.


								The Prophets, without outright saying so, basically bash the kind of Laws that eventually collected in Leviticus.  I don't have the sources on hand, but a number of prophets basically say, speaking for God, "Did I tell you to sacrifice to me?  No, I told you to not lie in wait for your neighbor, not to commit adultery and not to worship other Gods."  In other words, even back then there was a strong belief that the legalism was a human and not God-inspired thing.  Couple that with the overall belief (that I have NO source for, 'cause I haven't finished the New Testament) that the "old law is dead" and Leviticus is clearly the work of someone that even other biblical writers disagree with.


								That was a ramble, but I wanted to clarify the Old Testament obsession thing.  They aren't obsessed with Sex.  In fact, what they blather on about in Leviticus more than anything is Sacrifice, which is so important to the priestly culture (because only they can do it) that they describe it in detail like 100 times.  And while I know your point is that you can go to the Bible to support any number of crackpot views (and you're not wrong), there are some assumptions being made about things that I think are a little off, and I wanted to provide another angle.


								-Sipple


								== and Brennen again ==


								I was just looking at this page and thinking that I'd more or less gone off half-cocked here (on the wiki, not in the original entry) and would probably catch hell for it. (If certain parties are right, I'm literally going to catch Hell for all of this anyway; my bet is on at least the possibility of a God who ''isn't'' an evil bastard, and BlaisePascal can kiss my lily-white ass. I digress, and I'm probably crabbing a line from [[DavidJamesDuncan|Duncan]].)


								I dig the point you make, and it's pretty obvious which one of us has been doing the reading to support writing about this. I got somewhat distracted by the less savory bits of Leviticus-style sexual prohibitions and their closer relatives (blasphemy? kill 'em; hearing voices? kill 'em), and totally neglected the mass of cleanliness-obsessed ritual and hierarchical stuff, along with the larger set of examples one could highlight from the other books and the ways this is fundamentally different from the prophets or the New Testament or the purely literary books.


								When you get down to brass tacks of course, that's the thing - these ''are'' different books, and focusing on any one of them will bring out its idiosyncracies. Trying to harmonize them is part of the reason for the deeply whacked mindset that lurks just beneath the surface of so much Christianity.


								Still, I don't want to let this totally replace my main point, which is not just that the Bible can support things that are fundamentally cracked - even Jerry Falwell would agree with me on that if I phrased it right, men can twist the Word of God to their own purposes after all - but that


								* parts of the Bible are fundamentally cracked

								* it can affect the whole''' (which maybe I didn't point up so much),

								* and we sometimes pretend otherwise'''


								This isn't meant as an attack on your post, just kind of a check against something I've noticed in general - because I know I have done it, and I'm through making the mistake. I hear "the Bible doesn't say that", I've said it myself, and sometimes it's true, but sometimes, if you're looking for it, the Bible ''does'' say that, no matter how wrong it is. (Frex there's the way I think that the most moderate and humane view of sex that can be extracted from the Bible as a whole is still wrong fairly often. I'm digressing again.)


								As regards "the old law is dead", I get the idea that there's a development in early Christian thought, and I think Paul was a big factor here, away from the idea of continuity with the Law - and along with that, away from the old understanding of what the Law ''was''. Thence the whole idea of an "old" and "new" testament. I don't think I really have the full picture here, because it's complicated and part of my knowledge is skewed by the traditional spin of various Churches and theologians. (Short version: The old law and the covenant under which it was kept was a burden and an obligation, Christ either fulfilled or replaced that burden with a new covenant.)


								If I want to come closer to grokking that whole set of ideas, I'm going to have to come at it by just reading the text and really looking at how all the pieces of it relate. Who knows whether I'll make the effort - ideas themselves have this unnerving tendency to fascinate me way more than the exact trajectory of their usually weird histories.


								- [[Brennen]]