What is the greater evil?

[Elijah John]

What is the greater evil, picking up sticks on the Sabbath? Or Stoning that person to death for doing so?

[Difflugia]

In the Theology, Doctrine, and Dogma subforum, "of course" it's history. Here in Christianity and Apologetics, that's an argument you'll have to support.

I did.

No, you told us what you meant by history, but didn't justify why we should think the Bible is such beyond Newton's "marks of authenticity."

Plural and incompatible.

Okay. How is it incompatible?

Joseph's father was either Jacob or Heli, but not both.

Like God ordering the death of one gathering unauthorized sticks, one would presume.

Exactly. And here we are thousands of years later talking about the law and a man who was punished for disobeying it. And they say history is just a set of lies agreed upon!

What does that have to do with Isaac Newton's "marks of authenticity?" Since that's the only justification you gave for the Bible being history, I'd think you might want to defend your justification.

[DavidLeon]

How about stoning for adultery? That WAS the law. Is stoning for adultery just fine with you? Jesus interrupted a single example of it, citing the odd point that only sinless folk had the right to execute people for adultery. Following that logic no one could be punished for anything. It is long past time to be using Bible verses as a guide to morality. The Jewish law was about control, not about morality; a point Jesus tried to make. It is ironic that today so many who call themselves 'Christian' continue to do the very same literalist, nit picking, self righteous nonsense that Jesus preached against.

Actually - I hate to nit pick, but what you are talking about is spurious. John 7:53-8:11 only appears, with variations, in later manuscripts during the 6th century. So . . . there goes your logic. A-heh . . . anyway, the Jewish law wasn't about control, or if it would have been it didn't work very well at all.

[Mithrae]

But I doubt very much the orders originated from God. More probably from the barbarity of the theocratic ruler known as "Moses", who it seems was using God to shore up his own iron fist.

That makes sense given the immediate context of the story, but if the story itself wasn't supernaturally preserved, how likely is it that it preserves a real memory of a real Moses issuing an order and falsely attributing it to God?

Scholars that accept some form of the Documentary Hypothesis universally consider that pericope (Numbers 15:32-36) to derive from the Priestly source, which most scholars think is exilic or post-exilic. Rather than recording a genuine memory from the thirteenth century BCE, it's a story that supports a theocratic agenda from the sixth century.

It seems to me that the moral/legal structure lying behind this story and much of the Pentateuch in general centers around three pillars of personal holiness (doing right as part of one's devotion and duty towards Elohim; hence laws against worshiping other gods, prescribing regular feasts and sacrifices etc.), community cohesion (doing right as a consequence of identifying and fellow feeling towards other Israelites; hence laws forbidding intermarriage, reinforcing attitudes of homogeneity by forbidding mixed cloths/seeds etc.) and punitive deterrence (doing right because you'll be harshly punished if you don't!).

The Israelites and Jews obviously didn't have our level of technical and social sophistication; for all the emotional pontification which seemed evident in that 2019 thread I cited earlier, the simple fact is that our more comfortable world was painstakingly built century by century on the foundations which "barbaric" societies such as the Torah portrays laid down. But in that theoretical framework I'm envisaging, I wonder whether this story really matches the 6th or 5th centuries? Since the Sabbath was probably the first or second most important command the Israelites had emphasizing personal holiness and devotion to Elohim (rivalled only by the proscription against other gods) and easily the most important command reinforcing their common identity and community cohesion, it would make sense if violating the Sabbath - flaunting two of the most important pillars of law and order in their society - were met with a harsh response from the third, a particularly strong deterrent message. But off the top of my head that would only seem to really match the mostly rural and even semi-nomadic kind of tribal society reflected in the early traditions of the J and E sources, rather than a much more established 6th century nation-state.

I suppose in a 6th or 5th century setting it could be viewed as nothing more than a "Do what I say or else" fable? Would the Babylonians or Persians even have allowed the killing off of their tax-generating subjects for seemingly trivial religious infractions?

I'm trying really hard to figure out why this means ordering a guy's death for picking up sticks on the sabbath wasn't evil. Even if we accept for the sake of the argument that the Law really does accomplish what you say, it's reasonable to think that there's a better way of enforcing it than slaughtering transgressors. Modern traffic laws save lives and would probably work that much better if we executed speeders, but we don't because to do so would be unconscionable.

I'm reminded of the 'keyed car' conversation in Pulp Fiction; "They should be killed. No trial, no jury, straight to execution." I'm sure we've all empathized with that on occasion - encountered people so fundamentally and maliciously inconsiderate regarding even the most basic social norms that we can only assume that most if not all of their interactions with others are similarly debased, and there may well be no depth to which they wouldn't sink given half a chance. In modern society we have strong enough pre-emptive security and criminal investigations to make serious breaches of the law at least a somewhat risky prospect, and enough in the way of social safety nets, broad socialization of children, community development and targeted programs such as counseling and medication that comparatively few folk should be tempted towards serious criminality to begin with.

But in a bronze or early iron age, mostly rural or even semi-nomadic society most of that technical and social sophistication was absent, and it may well have been considered important to identify and 'take care of' such debased individuals pre-emptively... rather than waiting for them to kill or rape before giving them a punishment which we in a more luxurious era might deign to allow as potentially "just."

[DavidLeon]

I'm trying really hard to figure out why this means ordering a guy's death for picking up sticks on the sabbath wasn't evil.

There's a couple different ways I could answer that. The first being it obviously was evil. But evil is a subjective term. The Hebrew term for evil is ra, which can also be translated in various ways. Ugly, disingenuous, bad, malignant, envious, gloomy. AND calamitous. So, the KJV of Isaiah 45:7 says God created evil. That's okay, but a more accurate modern translation would read calamity. I can give you an illustration, since everyone loves a believer's illustration. Quick and painless. A parent tells his child not to play in the busy street; something bad (Hebrew ra) could happen. The child thinks his parent is just evil (ra) for not letting him have any fun. The kid plays in the street anyway, gets caught and is punished, like maybe grounded for it, which the kid thinks is calamitous (ra). Ra, ra, ra, huh? At least the kid wasn't hurt.

I've seen a woman get stoned to death. Recorded on a cell phone from some Muslim country. I couldn't finish it. It was evil. I'm not defending the process. My argument is that it is important to understand why. My argument has nothing to do with how it makes me feel, or trying to justify God's actions. That, to me, would be foolish.

Even if we accept for the sake of the argument that the Law really does accomplish what you say, it's reasonable to think that there's a better way of enforcing it than slaughtering transgressors. Modern traffic laws save lives and would probably work that much better if we executed speeders, but we don't because to do so would be unconscionable.

Like I said, evil is a subjective term. When I was a kid I would have gotten my . . . I think I have to watch my language here . . . bottom beat with a belt or solid wooden object we called a 2x4. Literally. Today that would be unconscionable. Now go back thousands of years people looked at death differently. But, even now, like I was telling someone else earlier today - if the alleged psychopath tells you not to pick up the sticks I recommend you don't. To a lot of people who were raised in a time different than my own where discipline is a "time out" being beaten by a 2x4 seems unreasonable.

And on the other hand, you have a god that is so mad that someone broke His (let's face it) ritual rule, that His solution is to stone the guy to death.

I thought we had established that. In fact drove it firmly into the ground. We're trying to understand why. Not so much to judge, but to understand why.

Whether or not the story is fictional is a red herring. It's the difference between an evil act and the story of an evil act. If we're discussing the act itself, it doesn't matter if the story's fictional.

I agree completely. I often tell atheists this when I debate them.

Why? What good would it do Moses to make up that rule?

I would think that would be pretty obvious. "God made all of these rules that I'm giving you and he told me to kill anyone that breaks them, even if the rules are stupid." I think that works whether the rules were written by God, Moses, or a 6th century priest.

Think about that. I thoroughly enjoy debating with atheists, but one of the difficulties for me in doing that is when they mix an emotional or ideological response with a logical one. An example: to say the Bible is fictional is a logical conclusion. Not accurate in my opinion, but logical. To angrily say it was written by bronze aged goat herders and simultaneously put forth the intellectual concept that it was written post exilic makes me wonder. Moses didn't write the Law to control people. If he had done it would have been a remarkable failure and we wouldn't be talking about it now. Besides, he was under the same law they were. So, if it was fictional it was poorly thought out in it's presentation. Especially, and I want to make this absolutely clear; especially if it was written hundreds of years after he existed.

[Difflugia]

It seems to me that the moral/legal structure lying behind this story and much of the Pentateuch in general centers around three pillars of personal holiness (doing right as part of one's devotion and duty towards Elohim; hence laws against worshiping other gods, prescribing regular feasts and sacrifices etc.), community cohesion (doing right as a consequence of identifying and fellow feeling towards other Israelites; hence laws forbidding intermarriage, reinforcing attitudes of homogeneity by forbidding mixed cloths/seeds etc.) and punitive deterrence (doing right because you'll be harshly punished if you don't!).

All of which would, to my mind at least, have utility as a way to maintain community identity and cohesion during a period of exile.

Since the Sabbath was probably the first or second most important command the Israelites had emphasizing personal holiness and devotion to Elohim (rivalled only by the proscription against other gods) and easily the most important command reinforcing their common identity and community cohesion, it would make sense if violating the Sabbath - flaunting two of the most important pillars of law and order in their society - were met with a harsh response from the third, a particularly strong deterrent message. But off the top of my head that would only seem to really match the mostly rural and even semi-nomadic kind of tribal society reflected in the early traditions of the J and E sources, rather than a much more established 6th century nation-state.

Using Richard Elliott Friedman's The Bible with Sources Revealed as the source delineation, the Sabbath isn't mentioned in J or E at all. In Genesis through Numbers, the Sabbath is mentioned only in P passages or those of a late redactor (Ex. 20:1-11 is "likely to be an independent document, which was inserted here by the Redactor", p. 153). In Deuteronomy, the Sabbath only appears in its version of the Ten Commandments (which could be a late redaction as well, but even if not, it was potentially written just decades from the coming Exile). In the Deuteronomistic History, the Sabbath is only discussed three times (2 Kings 4:23, 11:5-9, and 16:18) and described simply as a ritual requiring one to "go out" and then "come in" (weird in light of Exodus 16:29). The only other pre-exilic mention is in Isaiah 1:13, which mentions it opposite the "new moon" (chodesh) in the same way that 2 Kings 4:23 does (is the pre-exilic Sabbath the full moon?).

Every other mention is exilic or post-exilic. The exilic prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Third Isaiah (Isa. 56 and following) talk about a weekly Sabbath, as do the Chronicles and Nehemiah. No pre-exilic prophets do.

As an interesting side note, Friedman himself disagrees with other scholars and thinks that P was early, reflecting some preserved historical tradition of the Exodus and the Tabernacle.

It's not implausible that the pre-exilic Israelites counted days into regular weeks, but there's no certain evidence of it, either. Canaanite literature, for example, includes references to seven-day events like festivals and mourning periods translated as "weeks", but not of the general marking of time or a cyclical worship period.

I suppose in a 6th or 5th century setting it could be viewed as nothing more than a "Do what I say or else" fable? Would the Babylonians or Persians even have allowed the killing off of their tax-generating subjects for seemingly trivial religious infractions?

I'd seriously doubt it.

But in a bronze or early iron age, mostly rural or even semi-nomadic society most of that technical and social sophistication was absent, and it may well have been considered important to identify and 'take care of' such debased individuals pre-emptively... rather than waiting for them to kill or rape before giving them a punishment which we in a more luxurious era might deign to allow as potentially "just."

Actually, I just did a quick search on the phrase "to death" to find such things as "he must be put to death." All but one of five "to death" verses in E refer to someone actually committing violence and the other is for having sex with an animal. P and Deuteronomy are chock full of "to death" things for ritual and religious reasons, but both of those were thought to have been written during more civilized (in the sense of "city-dwelling") periods. Perhaps the "put to death" punishments in the rules were meant as a sort of hyperbolic anachronism hearkening back to a time imagined to be more barbaric and pointed for emphasis, but without any real teeth.

[Mithrae]

It seems to me that the moral/legal structure lying behind this story and much of the Pentateuch in general centers around three pillars of personal holiness (doing right as part of one's devotion and duty towards Elohim; hence laws against worshiping other gods, prescribing regular feasts and sacrifices etc.), community cohesion (doing right as a consequence of identifying and fellow feeling towards other Israelites; hence laws forbidding intermarriage, reinforcing attitudes of homogeneity by forbidding mixed cloths/seeds etc.) and punitive deterrence (doing right because you'll be harshly punished if you don't!).

All of which would, to my mind at least, have utility as a way to maintain community identity and cohesion during a period of exile.

Fair point. But either way the issue is whether such strict laws and real or fabled harsh punishments were necessary to maintain a well-functioning society, or at least somewhat effective in doing so and perceived as necessary. If so, then language describing those customs as "evil" or the like would seem to be more a matter of emotionalism from a privileged perspective of a further thirty centuries of technical and social development, than a reasonable evaluation of the story's own merits and shortcomings.

###

Using Richard Elliott Friedman's The Bible with Sources Revealed as the source delineation, the Sabbath isn't mentioned in J or E at all. In Genesis through Numbers, the Sabbath is mentioned only in P passages or those of a late redactor (Ex. 20:1-11 is "likely to be an independent document, which was inserted here by the Redactor", p. 153). In Deuteronomy, the Sabbath only appears in its version of the Ten Commandments (which could be a late redaction as well, but even if not, it was potentially written just decades from the coming Exile). In the Deuteronomistic History, the Sabbath is only discussed three times (2 Kings 4:23, 11:5-9, and 16:18) and described simply as a ritual requiring one to "go out" and then "come in" (weird in light of Exodus 16:29). The only other pre-exilic mention is in Isaiah 1:13, which mentions it opposite the "new moon" (chodesh) in the same way that 2 Kings 4:23 does (is the pre-exilic Sabbath the full moon?).

Every other mention is exilic or post-exilic. The exilic prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Third Isaiah (Isa. 56 and following) talk about a weekly Sabbath, as do the Chronicles and Nehemiah. No pre-exilic prophets do.

Hosea 2:11 and Amos 8:5 along with Isaiah make three distinct prophets mentioning a Sabbath in the period even before the fall of the northern kingdom. The grouping of weekly & monthly holy days doesn't seem unusual - surely less so than having a pair of monthly holy days but having a lunar name for only one of them. But in particular, what about the first chapter of Genesis? I'm not familiar enough with all the ins and outs of how particular passages are believed to come from one source or another to find them particularly persuasive; as an amateur reader the presence of two obviously divergent creation myths would seem to be one of the best reasons for inferring two distinct early sources! Similarly with all the references to Sabbath in Exodus chapters 20, 23, 31 and 35; these chapters with such distinctions as makeshift altars of unhewn stone (ch.20) vs. portable altar of wood overlaid with bronze (ch.27) and exhaustive instructions for a portable tabernacle (ch.35ff) to my mind would suggest sources ultimately derived from two distinct and early/semi-nomadic sets of traditions. I'm not sure how they come to be assigned to a P source... and I'm always naturally suspicious of the ever-useful Redactor But my ignorance on those points is more or less tangential to the thread topic in any case.

But in a bronze or early iron age, mostly rural or even semi-nomadic society most of that technical and social sophistication was absent, and it may well have been considered important to identify and 'take care of' such debased individuals pre-emptively... rather than waiting for them to kill or rape before giving them a punishment which we in a more luxurious era might deign to allow as potentially "just."

Actually, I just did a quick search on the phrase "to death" to find such things as "he must be put to death." All but one of five "to death" verses in E refer to someone actually committing violence and the other is for having sex with an animal. P and Deuteronomy are chock full of "to death" things for ritual and religious reasons, but both of those were thought to have been written during more civilized (in the sense of "city-dwelling") periods. Perhaps the "put to death" punishments in the rules were meant as a sort of hyperbolic anachronism hearkening back to a time imagined to be more barbaric and pointed for emphasis, but without any real teeth.

Maybe I've got it all backwards; perhaps in less civilized societies where everybody knows your name social cohesion would be an inevitable consequence of mutual dependency and, for all but the worst offenses, more nuanced measures like social exclusion/shaming could be more effective than harsher punitive deterrence. Whichever the case may be - whether the story/law comes from earlier or later in Israelite history - they were still circumstances lacking most of the privileges and sophistication which we often take for granted, I'm not convinced that our gut reactions towards the inevitably harsher laws of a harsher period are really justified.

Christian hyperbole about this guy's death preventing the extinction of humanity aside, such harsh enforcement (real or fabled) of the Sabbath law seems to have been effective not only in helping to ensure a functioning, coherent society of iron age Israelites/Jews, but through thousands of years of dispersion and intermittent persecution over the past two millennia as well! I've seen some critics boast that they could "easily" devise a much more humane system to accomplish similar ends, but I don't think I've ever seen them actually attempt to do so (let alone produce a plausible result without obvious anachronism).

[1213]

What is the greater evil, picking up sticks on the Sabbath? Or Stoning that person to death for doing so?

I would say the one who don’t obey the law in that case is eviler, he doesn’t care even if the whole nation is destroyed, as long as he can do whatever he wants.

[Zzyzx]

.

What is the greater evil, picking up sticks on the Sabbath? Or Stoning that person to death for doing so?

I would say the one who don’t obey the law in that case is eviler, he doesn’t care even if the whole nation is destroyed, as long as he can do whatever he wants.

A whole nation destroyed because someone picked up sticks? A whole nation destroyed because someone didn't obey a rule?

Really? That seems farfetched even for apologetics.

[Elijah John]

What is the greater evil, picking up sticks on the Sabbath? Or Stoning that person to death for doing so?

I would say the one who don’t obey the law in that case is eviler, he doesn’t care even if the whole nation is destroyed, as long as he can do whatever he wants.

How would breaking a law like that destroy a whole nation? And just because he did, isn't concluding that "he doesn't care...as long as he can do whatever he wants" a bridge too far? Seems like some kind of non-sequitur or some other manner of fallacy.

[1213]

What is the greater evil, picking up sticks on the Sabbath? Or Stoning that person to death for doing so?

I would say the one who don’t obey the law in that case is eviler, he doesn’t care even if the whole nation is destroyed, as long as he can do whatever he wants.

How would breaking a law like that destroy a whole nation? And just because he did, isn't concluding that "he doesn't care...as long as he can do whatever he wants" a bridge too far? Seems like some kind of non-sequitur or some other manner of fallacy.

The person showed he didn’t care about the law, and when people begin to do so, and ignore the law, the nation begins to erode and ceases to exist. One person itself is not the whole nation, but if one is allowed to do so, also others will follow, until the nation is destroyed.