Reading: Exodus 19-21, Psalm 23

Laws. The word “law” has an extensive definition in most dictionaries, indicating the verbose nature of the legal profession. Early in legal history (about 3800 years ago), the Babylonians wrote their extensive laws down and posted them throughout the empire. It would be like the entire US Code being set up on street corners. Today, the legal profession requires extensive education and a difficult test, and still many legal experts will say understanding the law has grown so complex it is a fool’s errand.

We are about to embark on a long series of laws, rules, regulations, and instructions from God to the people of Israel. We’ll be reading about them for the next 17 days. Let’s get it out of the way now: reading this will get repetitive, dull, and difficult. It is the words of God to an ancient people and outlines a covenant agreement God makes with them that does not apply to us today. Why then are we reading it? There are two big reasons. First, while it does not apply to us, it did apply to them, and those people are the major players in the rest of the story the Bible is telling. To understand that story, one really must understand this. Second, these are instructions from God, and they reveal something of the character of God and the means by which he will be carrying out his grand plan to restore humanity.

Fortunately for us, we get to start with a story. After three months in the wilderness, the people of Israel finally arrive at Sinai. God has Moses tell the people to purify themselves, because God is going to show up and speak to them. This purification, which we will see a lot of, is of a different order than what many of us think of as “purity” today. This purity had less to do with a lack of sin, confession, repentance, or good behavior than one might think. This is ritual purity, and it was all about separation from the consequences of the human problem- primarily death but also the outworking of the curse. God also has Moses set boundaries on the mountain itself, because if the people get too close to God, they will die. Anyone who disobeys orders and touches the mountain is not even to be touched, but stoned to death from a distance.

God appears in a dark cloud and calls Moses and Aaron up to the mountain, but he speaks to all the people, given for the first time what is famously known as the Ten Commandments. This is another subject on which a whole book could be written, and in fact that is in large part what the next 17 days are about: these ten commandments expounded, explained, and applied. For the purposes of our story today, what is important is the reaction of the people: they are freaked out. Unwilling to hear from God directly, they back off and let Moses carry God’s messages to them. God has already told Moses that this was part of the point: to raise Moses’ authority in the eyes of the people and make them listen to him.

Now we have to tackle some laws. I’m not going to go through each and every one, but I do want to point out that every law God gives to Moses ties back to one of the ten commandments he gave the people. He starts with proper worship. He bars images made to represent God, as well as other gods. He bans fancy altars used to worship him. God will accept worship only from an altar of earth and stone, and that unworked by humans. Humans will not define the terms of the worship of God.

The laws about slaves are awkward, but we must remember that slavery was a part of their world. Remember how God put the day of rest in place, limiting the work of the people? Here we see something similar. Slavery among the people of Israel will be a temporary affair. One enslaved will go free after seven years, unless he wishes to join the household permanently. A daughters “sold” in order to marry a man or someone in his family is not to be mistreated and cannot be resold to a foreigner. If she is married and the man marries another woman, he cannot neglect her or she can leave. There are laws about manslaughter, the rights of a slave to go free if badly mistreated, the responsibility of owners for the actions of their animals, and on and on. The one constant in these laws is that they constrain the response to things that were already considered crimes. In comparison to other ancient codes of law, these laws are incredibly progressive. God is setting up Israelite society to stand in stark contrast to the people around them by a commitment to a fair and just system, in which the social status of someone (even a slave!) does not determine the level of justice available to them, accidents are treated differently than intentional crimes, and the rights of women are much, much greater than anywhere else in antiquity.

Tomorrow we will continue the story and see how these laws conclude, as well as continue the story of God’s purification of Israel as a people who he can use for his purposes.