Bible Study

This chapter has two remarkable passages about freedom. The first concerns escape from slavery. a condition that is presumed in the 10 commandments (see Deuteronomy 5:15, 21), as six-year bondage for Israelites (for instance, Exodus 21), and as the permanent fate of conquered peoples (for instance, Leviticus 25), and even on into the New Testament (1 Corinthians 7:21ff).

Since the institution of slavery is so widely presumed, and even supported, in texts like these, it is important to recall the strand of liberation texts which include:

Deuteronomy 23:15-16 Slaves who have escaped to you from their owners shall not be given back to them. 16 They shall reside with you, in your midst, in any place they choose in any one of your towns, wherever they please; you shall not oppress them.

We are not to aid or abet the slave-owners. We are not to be instruments in the oppression of others. But more than that, and of truly great significance, the text repeats in four different ways that the now free people are free to find their home within the community, wherever they choose. They are, in other words, to be able to live without fear, not as fugitives but as fellow-citizens.

I wonder if this was one of the texts lifted up by the abolitionists and the Friends who worked with the underground railroad? If so, the significance must have been lost, as Friends didn't have a particularly great record of accepting freed slaves as embraced members of the Quaker community.

I also wonder if Paul had this text in mind in his correspondence with Philemon about the escaped slave Onesimus.

Philemon 8 For this reason, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do your duty,... 12 I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you ... 16 no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother -- especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

[An excursus on the hermeneutics of slavery and gay and lesbian issues in scripture. Progressives often cite Friends efforts against slavery as a parallel to homosexuality, the presumption being that in time we will see that the oppressive texts should no longer prevail. It is important to note that within scripture there are important countervailing texts to the laws about slavery, whereas there simply are no such countervailing texts to those that condemn homosexuality While the scriptures have many disturbing slavery-upholding texts that were used by Christians to defend that abominable institution, the great, arch-typical work of salvation in the Hebrew Scriptures is the freeing of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt, and this understanding carries through in the New Testament to Paul's great principle that, (Galatians 3: 28) "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." The scriptures, in other words, held the principle of liberation in the area of slavery, despite its acceptance "on the ground." In the area of sexuality, the scripture theme of liberation is celebration of heterosexuality and celibacy -- other forms of sex are seen as oppressive.]

The second great freedom text in this chapter is even more relevant to the current situation where many people are oppressed by economic slavery:

Deuteronomy 23:19 You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent. 20 ... so that the LORD your God may bless you in all your undertakings in the land that you are about to enter and possess.

The part of the text I omitted gives permission to charge interest to foreigners. Because Jesus obliterated the distinction between neighbor and foreigner, I take this text as a fundamental challenge to capitalism and "wage slavery," which system is entirely dependent upon capitalists loaning money at interest.

How to live in such a way as to grant freedom to escaped slaves and free ourselves from the clutches of interest-capitalism is a mystery to me. But the word of God suggests that we try.

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In his Journal, John Woolman tells of a defining moment in his childhood when he killed a mother bird for sport and then realized that the chicks would suffer. He felt that he had to return to the spot and kill them to end their suffering.

Here is the instruction in Deuteronomy. I don't know if John Woolman was aware of it at the time.

Deut 22:6-7 6 If you come on a bird's nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, with the mother sitting on the fledglings or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. 7 Let the mother go, taking only the young for yourself, in order that it may go well with you and you may live long.

In the same chapter, speaking of finding some animal or article that a neighbor had lost, the instruction is: Deuteronomy 22:3b "you must not remain indifferent." (Tanakh translation)

It is nearly impossible in this age of information overload not to become indifferent. But the charge of God is not to be indifferent to the suffering that specifically comes before you.

Jesus was confronted one day with a crowd of men who brought before him a woman they intended to stone to death. She had, they said, been caught in the very act of adultery. It is a grievous sin, and in this very same chapter of Deuteronomy, it is a crime deemed worthy of death. Here is the story:

John 8:4 they said to him, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. 5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" 6 They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.

Of course, there is a great deal of speculation about what he wrote. The story is silent on the subject and, generally speaking, I think that if the scripture doesn't answer a question, that is likely on purpose. However, it seems almost certain to me that Jesus was recalling this verse:

Deuteronomy 22 22 If a man is caught lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman as well as the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel.

The accusers had quoted the law incorrectly, for it reads, "both of them shall die." The law was as concerned with the adulter as with the adulteress. Where was the man?

The charge of God is not to remain indifferent to the suffering that comes before us. Jesus was not indifferent to the law and the demands of righteousness -- he later told the woman to "sin no more." But the first task, is to choose life. The first task is empathy. The first task is to resist indifference and hardness of heart.

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Deuteronomy 21 contributes two passages which frame the story of the passion of Jesus. The chapter opens with a procedure for clearing the country of guilt for a corpse found in the open of someone murdered by someone unknown. And inquiry is made and then a heifer is killed:

Deuteronomy 21:6-7 6 All the elders of that town nearest the body shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the wadi, 7 and they shall declare: "Our hands did not shed this blood, nor were we witnesses to it.

Is it possible that Pilate did not mean to reference this?

Matthew 27:24 So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, "I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves."

Jesus is the innocent man who was murdered outside of the city by someone "unknown". Despite his hand-washing, Pilate shares the guilt -- but so do all who rebel against the peace and justice of God.

The chapter closes with a law limiting to one day the time that someone executed is allowed to hang from a tree.

Deuteronomy 21:22 When someone is convicted of a crime punishable by death and is executed, and you hang him on a tree, 23 his corpse must not remain all night upon the tree; you shall bury him that same day, for anyone hung on a tree is under God's curse. You must not defile the land that the LORD your God is giving you for possession.

Paul referenced this in his reflection on Jesus' execution.

Galatians 3:13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us -- for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree" -- 14 in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

To be executed and hung on a tree -- this is the fate of God present with us in the flesh. Justice -- the intent of the law -- ultimately fails to reach its intent. It is always perverted, and violence and death result even from the best intent of the law. through the death and resurrection of Christ, God breaks free of the law -- even his own law -- and gives us life through the Spirit.

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Deuteronomy 20:1 When you go out to war against your enemies....

If we take (as I wish to) a conservative approach to scriptural authority and insist that the entire canon of scripture is inspired and authoritative, then it is necessary to say that the law of divine warfare that comprises Deuteronomy 20 was either ignored in fact or was a later idealistic schema inserted as a literary device into the narrative of the conquest.

For instance, the law here calls for the annihilation of the Canaanite population:

Deuteronomy 20:16 But as for the towns of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive.

This simply did not happen. One of the clearest proofs of this is the first chapter of Judges which goes into considerable detail about areas where the Canaanites were permitted to continue to live in land occupied by the different tribes. For instance:

(Tanakh) Judges 1:28 And when Israel gained the upper hand, they subjected the Canaanites to forced labor; but they did not dispossess them.

What then is the point? The Deuteronomic law was intended to strengthen our faith in the fundamental belief (1) that God is present as warrior to protect the people -- therefore the warfare is not in to be conducted by either great numbers or by those who lacked faith in God's presence, and (2) that the greatest danger to the people of faith is syncretism with other faiths.

This is the concern of verse 17:

Deuteronomy 20:17 you shall annihilate them -- the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites -- just as the LORD your God has commanded,

But, if the actual setting in life is as the Jewish Study Bible comments suggest: "at a time when ethnic Canaanites would already long have assimilated into the Israelite population", then the question was actually intended as a spiritual one for the Israelite community. What is there in me that has a Hittite spirituality? What is there in me that smacks of Canaanitism? That alien spirituality that is taking me away from the holiness of God needs to be annihilated.

This is how the early Quakers tended to use these texts. Applying the teachings of the New Testament that (Ephesians 6:12) "our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers" they would see their own inward spiritual struggles as God fighting the Canaanite nature in themselves, or in their preaching they would hope to slay it in others.

Much more could be said about what it means to believe vigorously in God's presence among us as warrior.

1. it means we are not to be afraid (even of the terrorists).
2. it means that we allow God to fight and we do not presumptuously take up arms (only pacifists live us to this).
3. it means that the appearance of vastly superior force is irrelevant (and nuclear weapons are the functional equivalent of rejection of God's protection).
4. it means you cannot have military conscription because the law requires anyone who is disheartened to be dismissed.
5. it means that the earth must be protected. This is the emphasis of the final instructions that trees must be preserved.

It is one of the great ironies of modern struggle of the State of Israel against the Palestinian population in the occupied territories that one of the significant weapons of the Israeli settlers has been the uprooting of Palestinian owned olive trees.

Deuteronomy 20:19 you must not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them. Although you may take food from them, you must not cut them down.

Here is the bottom line: When we take God's warfare into our own hands we inevitably become the violators of the law of divine warfare.


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Deuteronomy 19:21 Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.

Here we stumble across the law of retaliation again, not as before (see Exodus 21:22ff; Leviticus 24:19ff) in the context of cases of criminal assault, but this time in context of a false witness.

The false witness seeks to use his or her words to pervert the courts for personal gain. This is not merely an assault on truth and decency, but an assault on the whole community. The false witness undermines the enterprise of justice. Here, the law of retaliation feels most appropriate.

"19 you shall do to the false witness just as the false witness had meant to do to the other. So you shall purge the evil from your midst."

But it is almost impossible for a Christian to read these words with recalling how Jesus worked with them:

Matthew 5: (38) "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' (39) But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also;(40) and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; (41) and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile."

Our contemporary Quaker theologian, Walter Wink, has taught us to read these words in the context of the occupation of Israel by the Roman army, and to see in Jesus' teaching the clever arming of an oppressed people with the weapons on nonviolent resistance. I'm sure that he is right.

But, even so, the underlying truth is that spoken by Martin Luther King, Jr.: only love has the power to turn an enemy into a friend. Jesus teaches his techniques of "non-resistance" as an alternative to the law of retaliation in the hopes of bringing restoration. Even in the context of Deuteronomy's concern with the false witness, Jesus' words raise the possibility that the deceiver may be reached and restored into the life of the community. This is better than mere justice. This is grace and truth.

But if we cannot have Gospel, let us at least have justice. Here, I am Ghandian: nonviolence (the way of Jesus) is only for the strong.

Of course, our contemporary situation is not Roman occupation of Israel, but American domination of much of the world. This text reminds us of the importance of truth speaking to the maintenance of a just community. Unfortunately, at the centers of power, false witness has become the norm. This text asks us to purge that evil from our midst.

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Our hunger is to hear the living word of God. If God does not speak directly, or if being in God's presence is too terrible for us to stand as was the experience of the Israelites in Moses' day, we long for a prophet. To meet this longing, God made this promise:

Deuteronomy 18:18 I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command. 19 Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable.

Peter quoted this verse in the great sermon he gave after he and John had healed the lame beggar at Solomon's Portico. In applying this word to Jesus, he adds the admonition, "You must listen to whatever he tells you."

Acts 3:22 Moses said, 'The Lord your God will raise up for you from your own people1 a prophet like me. You must listen to whatever he tells you. 23 And it will be that everyone who does not listen to that prophet will be utterly rooted out of the people.'

These were key words for George Fox, who taught Quakers to apply them not only to Jesus in his ministry before his death, but even more to Jesus in his resurrection, in his continuing role as our Inward Teacher and the living head of the church. In Moses we have the proto-type: here is the law-giver who is empowered and authorized by God to speak forth the law. In Jesus we have the continuing presence of the one who can alone speak the law with grace and truth.

The difficulty, of course, is that we don't all hear the Inward Teacher with clarity, and when it comes to our life together we depend on God still to raise up prophets to speak the word to us today. Because of this understanding of authority for our personal lives and for the life of our faith community, Quakers have to exalt the gift of prophecy. We depend on one another to be the prophetic instrument who may be called upon to speak out of the silence to give forth the word of God today.

And, we have to discern, "Is this prophet speaking with Divine unction?" Indeed, and more terribly yet, "Am I speaking with Divine unction?"

20 But any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak -- that prophet shall die."

From the time of Deuteronomy to now, the community that relies for its life on the living word of God that comes to it through the mouth of prophets has to take this question seriously. It is death for us to reject the word of God. But woe to that man or woman who dares to speak a word as if from God when it God has not given that word to be spoken.

In this chapter Deuteronomy gives as a test, that if what the prophet says does not take place the Lord has not spoken it. Unfortunately, in an earlier chapter (Deut 13:1-3) it is acknowledged that a false prophet could foretell something that does come true, and still be false. The only safe test is whether the prophet speaks in the name of the Lord -- and that only the deepest sense of "the name of the Lord" meaning that whatever the prophet speaks must cohere with the essence of God's character. To discern rightly the authenticity of a prophetic word, then, we must know intimately the timber of God's voice in our own experience and in the rich record of Scripture.

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Deuteronomy 17:14-20 14 When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, "I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me," 15 you may indeed set over you a king whom the LORD your God will choose.
....18 When he has taken the throne of his kingdom, he shall have a copy of this law written for him in the presence of the levitical priests. 19 It shall remain with him and he shall read in it all the days of his life, so that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, diligently observing all the words of this law and these statutes,...

This long passage is extraordinary as a prototype of constitutional government. The King is not the law-giver, but the law-reader and the law-obeyer. Earlier in the chapter, autonomous courts were described, empowered to decide every case, including capital cases as long as there were at least two witnesses. So there is a judiciary independent of the king as well. And in the closing verses, the principle is laid out: even the king is not above the law:

20 neither exalting himself above other members of the community nor turning aside from the commandment, neither to the right or to the left....

What are the dangers of unconstitutional authority?

Deuteronomy 17:16-17 6 Even so, he must not acquire many horses for himself, or return the people to Egypt in order to acquire more horses, since the LORD has said to you, "You must never return that way again." 17 And he must not acquire many wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away; also silver and gold he must not acquire in great quantity for himself.

First and foremost: the likelihood that illegitimate authority will form military alliances with other repressive regimes. This is the meaning of "horses," for they were the "guided missiles" of the day.

Second: the likelihood that these alliances (formed by kings through marriage with the daughters of other kings) would lead to the worship of other gods. The worship of other gods, of course, means the loss of the ethic of justice (see the last chapter).

And finally: the danger of the corrupting power of wealth. With unchecked authority (read the deregulation of the economy), wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of a few. Power is likewise concentrated, and "Egypt" (symbolically the land of slavery) has been imported into our midst.

Militarism; legal oppression; and economic stratification: these are the dangers of illegitimate authority. Against these stand the word of the Lord.

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