Thou shalt not kill/murder

Many people have read the sixth saying and concluded that it prohibited all killing. Such an interpretation misunderstands the Hebrew vocabulary—the Hebrew word used here is rāṣaḥ, and it is properly translated as “murder.” It therefore does not pertain to any other sort of killing, such as capital punishment, war, suicide, or killing of animals for food. All those are fully acceptable in Israel, even at times required, and therefore do not stand as contradictory to this saying or to the preservation of order in the covenant community of Israel. Even when Jesus extrapolates from the saying in the Sermon on the Mount in the Second Temple cognitive environment, he extends the meaning from murder to the prior attitude of hate (Mt 5:21). He does not expand the principle to apply it to other ways in which killing takes place.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 255

<idle musing>
Well, that's the final excerpt from this book. On the whole, I found it a mixed bag. They do a good job of describing the cognitive environment of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible—at least prior to the Hellenistic period, when the ANE started to become more hellenized with the resulting change in legal systems.

But, diachronically, their approach doesn't fair as well. They definitely are wedded to the historical-critical paradigm, with all of its pluses and minuses. On the plus side is that they take the historical setting seriously, unlike so many other approaches. On the minus side, though, there seems to be a bit of tone deafness to historical theology, as a reviewer pointed out about all the Lost World series of books.

On the whole, though, I would still definitely recommend the book. There's a lot you can learn from it.

We'll start a new book tomorrow...
</idle musing>

Sabbath

This corresponds with the parallel observation throughout (especially) Genesis-Exodus that human efforts are not especially good at establishing and maintaining order or understanding the covenant as God working to establish and maintain order on humanity’s behalf. This idea represents one of the most significant divergences of Israelite thinking from its broader context (where humans are usually delegated to sustain their own order on behalf of the gods) so it is not surprising that the festival encapsulating this idea has no direct parallel [Sabbath].—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 252

Stolen (divine) identity

The name is equivalent to the identity of the deity, and the divine identity can be commandeered for illicit use. We are familiar with identity theft today, when a symbol such as a credit card number or social security number can be used to abuse or exploit the economic power or authority of an individual. Commandment three works on the same premise and prohibits divine identity theft (used for empty, vain purposes).—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 248

It is, but it isn't

From the preceding discussion we can conclude that the material image was animated by the divine essence. Therefore, it did not simply represent the deity; it manifested its presence. We should not conclude, however, that the image was therefore the deity. The deity was the reality that was embodied in the image.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 242–43

<idle musing>
In my experience, this is the most difficult thing to get across to people who are unfamiliar with the ANE. It is a way of thinking that they have never encountered before, but it is the default view in the ANE.
</idle musing>

So what if they exist!

The first of the Ten Words insists not that the other gods are nonexistent but that they are powerless; it disenfranchises them. It does not simply say that they should not be worshiped; it leaves them with no status worthy of worship.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 238

But it seems wrong!

In accordance with suzerain treaties, no other god (read: ruler) was to be recognized in Yahweh’s territory. The significance of this is that the pantheon/divine assembly concept carried with it the idea of distribution of power among many divine beings. The first commandment becomes a simple statement that Yahweh’s power—at least within the boundaries of Israel—is absolute. He is not one of many who share in the distribution of divine authority. It is understandable that the Israelites would struggle with this concept. First of all, it removes Yahweh from the community of the gods. In the ancient world people found their identity in their place in their community. They assumed the gods did the same. To separate Yahweh from such a community identity would have been a confusing concept. Autonomy and independence were not valued in ancient society, and to ascribe these qualities to their God would have seemed impious.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 237

About that First Commandment…

The availability of the ANE literature brought an increased recognition that the commandment dictated only monolatry or henotheism rather than what we now call monotheism—relating as it did to the question of whom the people worshiped rather than to whether other gods existed. Earlier interpreters had made this same point, but the ANE material tended to push interpretation more firmly in this direction.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 234

You need to know the territory!

The value of the Torah for us does not consist in requiring us to do anything. The value is to see the reputation that Yahweh has established for himself, read through the lens of the ANE context. From the Torah, we can know that the God we worship is not petty, arbitrary, co-dependent, indifferent, or (conversely) cruel, tyrannical, or monstrous. The Torah and the covenant establish these qualities (reputation) in the context of the ANE cultural environment. This is useful to know because many modern people often do not know this. Unfortunately, misreading the Torah usually gives us the opposite impressions because we do not understand the context.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 228

What kind of a God is in Torah?

Without the establishment of a particular divine-human relationship in the Torah—one based on loyalty to a suzerain rather than codependence—the natural reaction to the moral instruction of the New Testament is to psychologize the Great Symbiosis. This means we would imagine that God requires specific actions on our part to meet his emotional and psychological needs—that we are expected to make God happy by satisfying his craving for worship and moral punctiliousness—and that failure to do so will bring horrendous consequences. Indeed, a great many Christians today, having neglected the Torah or failed to understand it, believe exactly this, usually justified by a misinterpretation of Hosea 6:6. At the same time, however, the value of the Torah is not primarily to convey the theological fact that the God of Israel has no needs. Many worldviews already believe that God or the gods have no needs, but the Torah has value for them as well. The primary value for the Torah outside of the original context of covenant Israel is the role it plays in helping us make sense of the New Testament.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 216

What kind of God?

We believe that the Torah also provides revelation for Christians today. As we have noted, however, since the Torah is situated in the ancient world, in the covenant with Israel, and in the context of sacred space, the revelation that we receive (we could call it the canonical revelation) takes on a different focus. The purpose of the Torah was to give Israel—and through them, the nations—an understanding of their God. If we want to understand the value of the Torah today, we might ask what our understanding of God would be if we did not have it. Imagine what Moses might have thought if confronted by Jesus and the New Testament writers in the second millennium BC. Without any further resources, he would have assumed that the God Jesus was claiming to be was more or less the same as the gods he knew from his culture—self-interested and exploitative, expecting Israel to provide for his needs but willing to offer benefits in exchange.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 215

Part of it, but only part…

As we extend these concepts beyond the scope of Israel, it is probably not unreasonable to maintain that God’s people have been given an identity with God and that it is our responsibility to honor God as we reflect him in our lives. Moral behavior would unquestionably be part of that, but only a part.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 206

That slippery word QDŠ

The English word moral does not match the semantic range of Hebrew qdš; a closer English semantic equivalent to qdš is divine. We might note that the vast majority of holy things—such as objects (the temple articles), places (Mount Sinai, Jerusalem), geopolitical abstractions (the land, the nation), or time (the Sabbath)—have no moral agency. When a thing becomes holy, whether that thing is the abstract community of Israel (which is what is addressed in Lev 19, not each Israelite individually) or an object like the ark or the sanctuary, that thing is or does in some way identify something about what God is or does.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 204 (emphasis original)

Ah yes, the proof-text…

Years ago Donald McCullough spoke about trivializing God and referred to this tendency as treating God as the “God of My Cause.” We decide what we want to believe and then dig around in the Bible to dredge up support so we can “take a stand on biblical authority.” Too often the authority of the Bible is not well represented by extracting prooftexts, yet this is one of the major ways that Christians attempt to make the Torah relevant and to resolve controversial issues.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 183

Selective scripture

If we apply the derived principles approach only selectively, then we are the ones deciding what does and does not have value as God’s Word. Inevitably we will choose only the passages that we can readily attach to principles that we already believe are true. In this scenario, we are using Torah not to establish a moral system but to undergird one that we have already decided is valuable and coherent. In this case Torah is used as little more than illustration.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 173

<idle musing>
And we are all only too familiar with that approach, aren't we? It's the recipe for division and strife as we argue about trivialities, siphoning the gnat and swallowing the camel...
</idle musing>

The problem of reducing Torah to a checklist

The key is to have clear sight of the goal and to be committed to doing whatever represents the current wisdom in order to achieve that goal. If we try to reduce the goal to a checklist of practices and behaviors, it is likely that we will lose sight of the larger goal. Extracting a list of principles has the potential to undermine the importance of some of the more abstract ideas.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 164

<idle musing>
Sounds similar to the accusation Jesus made to the Pharisees—and he would likely make to us. We jump through hoops sometimes, but are they right hoops? I suspect that more frequently than we would like to admit, they aren't.

By the way, merry Christmas!
<\idle musing>

About those Ten Commandments...

Others locate the moral law even more strictly in the Decalogue alone. The base assumption is fueled by the equation that morality is achieved by law and that law is intended to produce morality. Given this two-way equation, the Torah, which they identify as law, is seen as being the source of morality, and since the source of Torah is God, the Torah has moral authority. As we have been discussing, this breaks down at almost every level. If the Torah is not legislation and cannot be reduced to morality, the fact that it has divine authority does not establish a divine source for either legislation or morality since neither is the Torah’s intent.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 161

The presence of the kingdom—in the Hebrew Bible!

God’s plans and purposes did not do something to the Israelites (other than give them a status as his people); his plans and purposes worked through them. His plan was not to cleanse them of their sins, provide for their eternal life, reconcile them to God, impute righteousness to them, or take their sin on himself. Instead, what he did was establish his kingdom on earth and dwell among his people as king. In the process, as we can see in hindsight, he was establishing what kind of God he was, so that when Christ appeared claiming to be God, people would have a way to understand that what he meant was not the same thing that the Greeks and Romans would have believed was represented by the word “God.” The Israelites were not anticipating incarnation, but they were to understand that their concept of their God was supposed to be slightly different from the understanding of other gods that both they and their neighbors shared.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 159 (emphasis original)

It's the community!

Torah provided the means for them to be in relationship with Yahweh through the covenant; it did not reconcile them to God by permanently obliterating their sin. (Reconciliation to God is another concept that is absent from Old Testament theology, except in regard to restoration of favor following covenant infidelity.) Individuals could be faithful to the covenant, and that put them in good standing in the covenant community, a community that continued to exist in covenant relationship with Yahweh generation to generation, though individuals would come and go. Individuals who failed to observe the Torah could be cut off from the community so that they would not negatively affect the good standing of the community as God’s people. If the community as a whole failed to keep the covenant, the covenant curses would come upon them and they could lose the covenant benefits (land and the privilege of Yahweh dwelling among them) and instead suffer exile.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 159

Is there continuity?

Salvation from sins is not something that was expected in the Old Testament and is therefore not even a major theme of the Old Testament, let alone its defining and central subject. If one were to try to draw connections between salvation from sins in the New Testament and deliverance from slavery or exile in the Old Testament, again difficult obstacles would have to be overcome since these crises are very different from the problem of sin.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 157

It was never intended that way…

What is important for our study is that we understand that Torah, in the context of the Old Testament, was never intended to provide a way to heaven or a way to pay the penalty for sin fully and finally. It was never intended to do what Jesus accomplished through his death and resurrection. It is therefore not a failed approach; it did precisely what Yahweh intended for it to do. When we talk about Christians not being under law, but under grace, it is a reflection on what Christ has done for us, not a biblical rejection of the Torah as a means of salvation (which it never was intended to be). Non-Jews can neither accept nor reject the Torah because it was never offered to them.—Walton and Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, 155