Wow. What a monumental, historical day! It is moments like this that I am proud to be part of the United States of America! It is moments like this that I suddenly believe everything the founding fathers set out to do can actually be accomplished! First, the State of California stops unjustly oppressing homosexuals and denying their right of union, and now the Supreme Court finally acknowledges and decrees what we have known since the Second Amendment was first established: that all people have a right to bear arms for their defense. As a Libertarian, I had only dreamed that government would accept and abide by such natural, inalienable rights. But to live to see such a dream come true is almost beyond expression! Because I follow Christ, and because violence and deadly force is anathema to the kingdom of God established by Yeshua, I have absolutely no reason to bear a firearm. I would sooner be killed than possibly take the life of another person. However, I rejoice that government has finally, officially agreed with part of the Constitution and I will continue to look for and fight for (nonviolently of course) the day when government is fully accountable to the Constitution and where there is liberty and justice for all.
When I approached my car this morning and found a small book protruding from my windshield wipers, I knew immediately that I was headed for some absurd, fundamentalist Christian hilarity. And I was not disappointed.
The book is called National Sunday Law. The basic premise is that the Papacy is the first beast of Revelation, the United States government is the second beast of Revelation, and the mark or image of the beast is Sunday worship, which will be enforced in the U.S. on pain of death by federal legislation and constitutional amendment.
Now if that did not make you laugh so hard you shit yourself, I have no idea what would.
As for the Sabbath and what that means in terms of Christianity, see my essay entitled Yeshua and Torah: What Do We Make of Them?
I just finished reading The Temple Scroll by Jacob Milgrom and want to take this moment to say, Holy crap!
Okay, now that I got that out of my system, I need to reverse my saying because some Jews who got that out of their system in the past did not consider it holy. Defecation was a defiling activity in terms of Essene purity strictures. So was sexual intercourse, by the way.
Anyway, back to the Temple Scroll… This document is what is known as rewritten Torah.
That means it takes a bunch of scriptural texts (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy in this case) and has its artistically licensed and/or divinely inspired way with them. Other examples include Chronicles and Jubilees. It basically sets out to portray the way the Temple and everything that takes place inside or around it ought to be like according to the perspective of the Essenes. Two of the Temple Scroll’s departures from Rabbinic and (I would assume) normative Judaism’s tradition which really amazed me concern its purity regulations in terms of defecation and sex (two things that obviously should never have anything to do with each other).
The Essenes, in contradistinction with other sects like the Pharisees, believed that the city in which the Temple resided was under the same purity regulations as the temple itself. So if the Essenes took over, no one who was impure could enter or be in Jerusalem. And that means no sex in the city (I’m sure Sarah Jessica Parker doesn’t count). If you called Jerusalem home, you’d have to remain celibate. Even treating yourself to a little one-on-one time would be prohibited. If you wanted or needed a bit of loving, you’d have to leave the city. But then you couldn’t get back in for three days post coitus.
And a man who lies with his wife and has an ejaculation, for three days shall not enter the whole city of the temple in which I shall cause my name to dwell.
11Q19, Col. XLV, line 11-12
In this day and age, very few people give a shit. So maybe they’d fit in fine in Essene Jerusalem, because nobody would be able to poop therein. And on Sabbaths, you’re really out of luck, because the Temple Scroll placed the community toilets 4500 cubits outside Jerusalem, which was 1000 cubits further than an Essense was allowed to walk on the Sabbath (11Q19 46.15). Six days a week, you may release your bowels. But on the seventh, which is holy to YHWH, if you live in Jerusalem, you cannot. Sundays would really be crappy days.
Or should I say enslaved?
California has now become the second state in the confederacy to stop interfering with people’s liberties and choices when it comes to adult consented union. Hurrah! It is bad enough that government has been denying people liberty of union, but it is worse that it has arbitrarily prejudiced its injustice against certain people—homosexuals. Finally the bigoted individuals who use power for oppression are being overthrown. It wasn’t all that long ago that a black person DARED to sit in a white person’s seat. And now homosexuals have DARED to step into a room of heterosexual marital vow. Thank God for their holy defiance. But there is still a long way to go! There are a lot more tyrannical, anti-Constitutional decrees to throw down before there will ever be liberty and justice for all.
As psyched as I am about this event, I have to wonder exactly WHY so many homosexuals are clamoring for marriage. Is it simply because it has been denied them? Do they see it as a ritual of the privileged or elite to which they no longer want to be segregated? Are they hoping the fight will eventually enable them to come full circle so they can turn the tables on their oppressors in retribution? Is it simply symbolic to them of a goal achieved and a tyrant overthrown? If the last—what a price! To gain one’s freedom and liberty of union from someone who doesn’t and shouldn’t have any authority or say in the matter and then to willingly and even intently seek to surrender that freedom and liberty back is ludicrous! Marriage pales in comparison with domestic union (or partnership), which all homosexuals have been able to do without prejudice and without governmental encroachment. Why turn down such a great thing? Why turn your back on a union that allows you and your spouse to decide for yourselves exactly what is and isn’t appropriate for you, decide exactly what you do and don’t want for yourselves in that union and (if worse comes to worse) its dissolve? Why instead let someone else tell you what your marriage is and what it is not and decide for you how it will be and how things will be if worse comes to worse? Why should anyone else have authority over you and your union with someone else? Isn’t that the whole point of fighting against a government that denies you the ability to make your own choices of union?
Well, if injustice is being overthrown, I am glad. And if someone chooses to embrace marriage, then I say so be it. Do as you will—that is your liberty and right. I support you in making a choice out of your liberty and right. But don’t think I won’t also hold you responsible for the consequences of your choice just as strictly and without prejudice as I do heterosexuals who have put themselves into that situation, reneged on it, and ruined families and lives cruelly and unnecessarily because they were not able to sustain and prosper an institution that they signed up for.
Apart from developing my own personal library in hardcopy, the digital arena has allowed me to amass a considerable electronic corpus of books, articles, and manuscripts (only a few gigabytes) from professional biblical scholarship. A few of my favs include JSTOR (most colleges/universities provide free access even if you already graduated), BiblicalStudies.org.uk (someone loves F.F. Bruce), ETANA, the essential Theology Program (for conservatives), the Biblical Manuscripts Project, the Journal of Biblical Studies, the Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, back issues of Biblical Archaeologist/Near Eastern Archeology, CCEL, Early Jewish and Early Christian Writings, and, of course, early scholastic books can be downloaded straight from Google Books (a lot of translations and other gems are public domain).
Two free caches I recently stumbled on are the Gordon College Bibical eSource web site (click on a scriptural text and it will take you to a page with countless dissertations, articles, books, and even multimedia presentations available in multiple formats) and a horde of articles by Scott Noegel, one of those rare scholars who combines Biblical and ancient Near Eastern scholarship so beautifully. Commence drooling.
If you follow Rabbinic reckoning, the second of the great festivals prescribed by Torah, the Festival/Feast of Weeks/Harvest otherwise called the Day of First-fruits, has now begun! The Mishnah and its Babylonian or Jerusalem Gemarah refer to it as Atzeret (meaning Solemn Assembly). Most Christians call it Pentecost.
Three times in the year you must make a pilgrim feast to me…observe the Feast of Harvest, the first fruits of your labors that you have sown in the field…
Exodus 23:14, 16, NET
You must observe the Feast of Weeks – the first fruits of the harvest of wheat –
Exodus 34:22, NET
You must count for yourselves seven weeks from the day after the Sabbath, from the day you bring the wave offering sheaf; they must be complete weeks. You must count fifty days – until the day after the seventh Sabbath – and then you must present a new grain offering to the Lord. From the places where you live you must bring two loaves of bread for a wave offering; they must be made from two tenths of an ephah of fine wheat flour, baked with yeast, as first fruits to the Lord. Along with the loaves of bread, you must also present seven flawless yearling lambs, one young bull, and two rams. They are to be a burnt offering to the Lord along with their grain offering and drink offerings, a gift of a soothing aroma to the Lord. You must also offer one male goat for a sin offering and two yearling lambs for a peace offering sacrifice, and the priest is to wave them – the two lambs – along with the bread of the first fruits, as a wave offering before the Lord; they will be holy to the Lord for the priest. On this very day you must proclaim an assembly; it is to be a holy assembly for you. You must not do any regular work. This is a perpetual statute in all the places where you live throughout your generations.
Leviticus 23:15-21, NET
Also, on the day of the first fruits, when you bring a new grain offering to the Lord during your Feast of Weeks, you are to have a holy assembly. You must do no ordinary work. But you must offer as the burnt offering, as a sweet aroma to the Lord, two young bulls, one ram, seven lambs one year old, with their grain offering of finely ground flour mixed with olive oil: three-tenths of an ephah for each bull, two-tenths for the one ram, with one-tenth for each of the seven lambs, as well as one male goat to make an atonement for you. You are to offer them with their drink offerings in addition to the continual burnt offering and its grain offering – they must be unblemished.
Numbers 2826-31, NET
You must count seven weeks; you must begin to count them from the time you begin to harvest the standing grain. Then you are to celebrate the Festival of Weeks before the Lord your God with the voluntary offering that you will bring, in proportion to how he has blessed you. You shall rejoice before him – you, your son, your daughter, your male and female slaves, the Levites in your villages, the resident foreigners, the orphans, and the widows among you – in the place where the Lord chooses to locate his name.
Deuteronomy16:9-12, NET
When you enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, and you occupy it and live in it, you must take the first of all the ground’s produce you harvest from the land the Lord your God is giving you, place it in a basket, and go to the place where he chooses to locate his name. You must go to the priest in office at that time and say to him, I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord promised to our ancestors to give us.
The priest will then take the basket from you and set it before the altar of the Lord your God. Then you must affirm before the Lord your God, A wandering Aramean was my ancestor, and he went down to Egypt and lived there as a foreigner with a household few in number, but there he became a great, powerful, and numerous people. But the Egyptians mistreated and oppressed us, forcing us to do burdensome labor. So we cried out to the Lord, the God of our ancestors, and he heard us and saw our humiliation, toil, and oppression. Therefore the Lord brought us out of Egypt with tremendous strength and power, as well as with great awe-inspiring signs and wonders. Then he brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now, look! I have brought the first of the ground’s produce that you, Lord, have given me.
Then you must set it down before the Lord your God and worship before him. You will celebrate all the good things that the Lord your God has given you and your family, along with the Levites and the resident foreigners among you.
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
The Rabbis limit what produce and agriculture specifically apply to The Festival to that elucidated in Deuteronomy 8:8:
First-fruits may be brought only from the seven kinds…
Mishnah, Bikkurim 1:3
For the Lord your God is bringing you to a good land…a land of wheat[1], barley[2], vines[3], fig[4] trees, and pomegranates[5], of olive[6] trees and honey[7]…
Deuteronomy 8:7-8
This limitation was not entirely followed. Some augmented that produce with others not enumerated (Mishnah, Bikkurim 3:9-10).
The Oral Law gives us a glimpse into how the people set apart their produce:
How do they set apart the First-fruits? When a man goes down to his field and sees [for the first time] a ripe fig or a ripe cluster of grapes or a ripe pomegranate, he binds it round with reed-grass and says, Lo, these are First-fruits.
Mishnah, Bikkurim 3:1
I was thinking about the idea of original sin and total depravity the other day… I also started thinking about the foundations of my system of government, framed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Then I started wondering if maybe there could be a major disconnect between the basic foundational principles of my nation and its system of government and original sin or one of the basic tenets of Calvinism.
Original sin and total depravity seem to resonate with Hobbes when he spoke of the natural state of humanity. Obviously, Hobbes disagreed with Augustine and Calvin in that those men believed there was something called Goodness existing as a supreme moral objective measurement outside of and apart from humanity. However, there does seem to be a parallel in terms of the outworking of original sin, total depravity, and Hobbes’ conceptions. For just as natural humanity cannot or does not tend toward any good according to Hobbes, so the idea behind original sin or total depravity seems to be that humanity naturally cannot or does not tend toward goodness either.
The Founding Fathers, however, did not follow Hobbes. Their opposing position (after John Locke) was not only that human nature had an absolute moral authority, but this morality was part and parcel of the nature of humanity itself so that humanity naturally knew right from wrong apart from any kind of law or government and did, in fact, tend toward or attain goodness. And because moral goodness was something we can know and something we can put into place naturally, government therefore does not provide us with the methods or means to become good (goodness doesn’t begin with law).
This stood in contrast to Hobbes, who’s conception of humanity’s nature meant that government or law was the reason for morality, virtue, or goodness. The logical end of the two sides is that under Hobbes and so it seems under original sin or total depravity, one must give up their natural rights, their natural morals, or their natural human condition in exchange for that goodness, freedom, or right that are granted from a Sovereign, whereas for the Founders, the Sovereign made goodness inherent and inalienable
to the nature of humankind so that in forming government or law, humanity didn’t give up freedom or right in exchange for goodness, but rather to better protect, secure, and prosper the goodness already present.
I am therefore left to ponder whether or not those who hold to the dogmas of either original sin or total depravity are fundamentally opposed to the very principle on which the government of the United States is established.
