Torah Posting: משפטים
Okay, we made it to my favorite part! The endless lists of boring rules! No, I’m not kidding. As I have written before but not yet had the chance to elucidate using the primary source, I really believe this where the good stuff is. But let me be clear what I mean: This is the stuff that gives form to the spirit-body of the Jewish people, specifically. It’s the “practice instructions,” to use a Buddhism word. The reason it’s couched in 304,805 letters of stories about a particular people is that those are the people to whom the instructions are given.
So it’s not like these instructions are the secret code for getting into Heaven™ for all humanity or something. They’re spiritual teachings calibrated to the Jewish lineage. Anyone, Jewish or not, can learn about that lineage from them. Jewish people can wrestle with them as God’s commandments upon us, as is our inheritance.
So that said, I will write about these litanies in detail in order to try to reflect something about their principles and mechanics as ancestral Jewish wisdom, which should be of interest to anyone, though for purposes that are quite different for Jewish and non-Jewish people.
This parashah’s rules begin rather ironically by outlining the ethics of slavery for Israelite slaveowners. I think it’s fair to assume the irony was less dramatic closer to the text’s origin in time. The power of beginning the everyday economic laws of the Torah with the ethical treatment of slaves is, of course, due to the fact that the Israelites had no such protections when they were slaves in Mitzrayim. This is a pointed statement that Israelites are to treat their slaves better than they themselves were treated as slaves — you know, in a world-period when slavery was not understood as universally inhumane. Think of this as progress.
But that doesn’t mean you have to find the progress good enough. I certainly don’t; some of these rules are awful. As you may have heard, lots of rules in the Torah are awful. What I would say as preface — and not as apology — is that the content of the rules is contextual, situational, cultural. It is the form of the rules — even the very proposition that there should be rules — that is the spiritual payload. You may try, as an exercise, to transpose these rule-forms into other, later cultural contexts and see how they might be adapted. That is the process known as rabbinic Judaism, and it is the essential principle of how Jewish law is made, upheld, and lived.
Like, just to be clear, it is no longer in accordance with Jewish law to own slaves. We’re just looking at the state of the law from a time when it was.
The term of a slave is capped at six years; they shall go free in the seventh, as is the mystical structure of all temporal reality starting at Creation and upheld down to the days of each week. If the slave enters slavery married, the slave’s spouse will go free, too. If the slave has children while in slavery, the mother and children shall remain with the master, which is not great progress if you ask me. The slave’s alternative to leaving them behind is to pledge eternal loyalty to the master, who then pierces the slave’s ear and makes the term of slavery lifelong.
Then comes a section about daughters sold into slavery by their parents. This must have been a sensible economic (and gendered) reality for some people at the time. But even here, the Torah is making an effort to impose some guardrails on a practice that would surely have been far more horrible without them.
If the slave woman (or girl, probably) proves displeasing to her master, he does not have the right to sell her; he has to let her be redeemed by her parents. He broke faith with her, the Torah says. If the master wants to marry her off to one of his sons, he must deal with her כמשפט הבנות — according to the law of free maidens (literally “daughters”). If the master takes another (the text does not say another what, but presumably another woman/girl as a slave), he must not withhold from the first one her food, her clothing, or her conjugal rights, meaning her right to bear the master an heir with an inheritance. If he fails her in these ways, she shall go free.
Again, this is not pleasant to think about, but just try to keep it in context and recognize that what’s happening here is that the Torah is beginning its first post-slavery long stretch of legal code by establishing protections for slaves.
Next come the laws you’d probably guess would come first outlining the prohibitions of and punishments for basic types of violent crime. Warning: A lot of them are capital crimes. Fatally striking someone intentionally is punishable by death. If you do it by accident, God will provide the perpetrator a place to flee. Murder of conspiracy is punishable by death, even if the perp has to be dragged away from God’s altar to carry it out. Striking your father and mother? Death penalty. Kidnapping? Death penalty. Insulting your parents, death penalty. These are all sort of elaborations on 10 Commandments rules.
If two people fight, and one injures the other, and the injured party requires medical care but does not die, the assailant’s only punishment is to pay for the injured party’s time off and health care. I guess the take on this one is that such civil penalties would have been sort of modern and humane at the time, rather than continuing with the death penalty theme even for something that turns out all right in the end.
If a slaveowner beats their slave to death, they are guilty of murder. More establishment of the personhood of slaves. But it’s a pretty curtailed personhood, honestly; if the slave survives a day or two and then dies, that’s not murdery enough to count as murder because the slave is their master’s property. Nice try.
If a pregnant woman miscarries as the result of a physical altercation around her caused by other people, the punishment for the one who started it shall be a fine as steep as she — well, her husband — wants to impose. This is an interesting metaphysical statement about the “personhood” of the unborn. Other damage caused, though, shall be “נפש תחת נפש” — “soul for soul.” Then, you know this part: eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.
I’ve noticed that there is a prevailing contemporary use of these passages to describe an uncivilized kind of justice. Like, “an eye for an eye” is a barbaric, ancient calculus, and nowadays we mostly handle things according to more subtle, nuanced, civil formulae. Do you think that’s really true, though? Doesn’t the system of justice we have in a country like, say, the United States of America mostly seem like a sort of veneer nobody really finds quite sufficient, perhaps meant to paper over the real instincts and primal desires for “eye for an eye”-style justice that people actually harbor in their hearts?
To me, that kind of repressive symbolic justice is the essence of the compromise people make in order to have a “civilization,” and when I read the Torah’s plain, primal code here, it communicates something harsh and real to me about what living by God’s law must be like. I think these laws serve as a warning: If you’re going to have a society that’s close to God, you’re going to have to be really careful not to do wrong.
More laws: If a slaveowner injures a slave to the point that they lose an eye or a tooth, the slave goes free.
If an ox kills a person, the ox shall be killed (and not eaten), but the owner is not punished. If the ox has a habit of hurting people, though, and the owner has never done anything about it, and then it kills a person, then the owner is culpable, but a ransom will be imposed in exchange for the owner’s life, and the owner must pay. The punishment is the same if the ox gores a minor, but if it gores a slave, the punishment for the ox’s owner is a medium-ish-sized fine. Oh well.
I think the next set of laws can be summarized, since presumably no one reading this will be held accountable for the particulars: Causing injury to someone else’s animals — whether your own actions or the acts of your animals did it — requires restitution, but the dead animal is the problem of the person whose negligence caused the mess.
The fine for theft of an ox is five oxen; the fine for theft of a sheep is four sheep — a similar proportion, but the animal that does work is more valuable. Then it starts to get into stuff that’s a bit esoteric and probably made more sense at the time. This is, I think, the first time I will refer you to the rabbinic commentaries for interpretation. For example, if the thief is caught while tunneling and beaten to death, there’s no punishment for that, but then the text says, “If the Sun has already risen, there is bloodguilt in that case,” and the thief must pay, et cetera. What the hell does that mean? Apparently (according to the commentators), it’s a metaphor that means, “If you catch the thief and don’t kill him because he is smiling and willing to deal with you.” I certainly wouldn’t have figured that out without Rashi to explain it.
Various other stipulations apply having to do with the thief’s ability to pay, what happens if the stolen merchandise is eventually found, and so on. Just remember this was surely a matter of everyday importance at the time.
The next section establishes a person’s responsibility to damage to another’s land or goods through negligence. The importance of sworn testimony is also established; a person’s solemn word counts for a lot in this culture.
Then it is established that a man who “seduces” a woman whom he has not married and has sex with her must marry her, which is a financial transaction, and if her father will not give her to him, he still has to pay the bride-price. Again, this sounds absolutely brutish and horrible to modern ears, but if you can keep it in context, it is a protection.
Okay, but what the hell, though? All these sort of almost-but-not-actually-civilized laws about the finer points of hitting people are supposed to be the ✌️“manual of Jewish spiritual practice”✌️? How can this possibly be of value in that way? I think that you have to allow that what’s happening here is about establishing safety on the basic survival level. The elaborate religious culture we’ll get to later cannot be built upon a basis of fear and terror and lawlessness. The Torah is establishing here that every aspect of society is interrelated and of equal importance to God.
The next few laws are a bit clearer on the spiritual practice point. You shall not tolerate a “מכשפה,” a feminine noun usually translated as “sorceress” or “witch.” This may refer to a particular practice that would have been widely known at the time. Often, it’s clear from context when the Torah forbids some spiritual practice that only the foreign version of it counts; the Jewish version would simply not be considered “witchcraft” per se, for example. It would not be prudent to assume someone from outside this text’s cultural context knows what it is clearly enough to execute someone for doing it. But I do think it’s fair to say this establishes the Torah’s antipathy towards outlaw magic of some kind. It would be fair for a Jewish person to assume that there is some kind of ancestral suspicion of such practices as part of their lineage. What one should do with that is far from clear from this one line, as can be plainly observed from the millennia of documentation of Jewish witchcraft.
After that, bestiality is dispensed with as a capital crime.
Making sacrifice to a god other than יהוה will get you cut off.
You may not wrong or oppress a foreigner, for you were strangers in the land of Mitzrayim. This is one that I feel continues to hit with 100% force throughout Jewish history as it unfolds from here.
The leaders of the community may not mistreat widows or orphans; God will wipe them out for that.
The charging of interest on loans to other Israelites is forbidden. If you borrow a garment from your neighbor as a token of a transaction, you must return it before the Sun sets; what else will they sleep in? These are about high ethical standards in transactions amongst your people.
Things start to ramp up towards more clearly religious law here. No cursing (like as in The Dark Arts) for political purposes. No delaying in making your agricultural offerings to God. No eating animals killed by beasts; this is a teaching of dietary purity.
No carrying false rumors or maliciously siding with the guilty as a witness, or with the powerful who might oppress someone else, but nor shall you show deference in a dispute just because one party in it is poor. No lying in testimony. No bribery. Then the demand not to oppress the stranger is stated again; this parashah is getting that composite mashup feeling to me again.
Now, finally, some actual religious calendar observances.
Every seventh year is established as a sort of agricultural Shabbat; the fields and trees must be left to grow wild, and the needy and the animals must be allowed to gather and eat from it. The same applies in microcosm on the seventh day of each week, as we know, but here the text explains that it is in part for the sake of letting the laboring people and animals rest.
A line is inserted here reminding us to keep all these charges and never to mention even the names of other gods. This feels like a pause before an important new section.
Now the three annual festivals are established. The spring festival of unleavened bread in commemoration of the exodus, which was already described when the people did it the first time, is established as the first. Then the the feast of the harvest of the first fruits is established as the second, then the ingathering at the end of the year is the third. More is given on these two new festivals in different contexts later. Details are given on the pilgrimage the men must make to give the offerings of these festivals.
“You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” is said in here. This becomes a commandment of major dietary importance to Jewish people later, interpreted very broadly to mean that dairy and meat are not to be consumed at the same meal. You’ll have to take my word for it that there is a lot of case law on this point, but the plain reading to me feels like it might maybe possibly only apply to the specific brutality of eating animals with the milk of their actual biological mother, especially since we already saw Avraham serve dairy and meat to literal angels to eat earlier. But you know, oh well, it’s complicated.
God now explains that the people are going to a new, promised land to observe all these laws, and God will send an angel before them and drive out all the indigenous people, and it’s very, very important that the Israelites not pick up those indigenous people’s religious practices along the way but rather bring all these new ones there. That has great karma on it, huh. God then promises that no one will get sick, no women shall miscarry, all the people’s enemies will be terrified and run away, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Am I the only one left to conclude from this that, if these things do not actually come to pass in the land, the people must be doing something wrong?
This first big payload of laws is done now, and God tells Mosheh to come up again with Aharon, Aharon’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, and 70 elders. Mosheh should then come closer, but everyone else should stay back. Mosheh repeats all the laws here, and the people verbally affirm them together. Mosheh then commits to writing these commandments down. Early in the morning, he sets up an altar with 12 pillars, one for each tribe, and he instructs some assistants to make major animal offerings. Mosheh sprinkles some blood, and then he reads the written record, and the people affirm that they will obey again. Mosheh sprinkles some of the blood of the offerings on the people now to show he’s very serious, and then this party of priests goes up.
“And they saw the God of Yisra’el,” it says, “and under God’s feet was like a sapphire road as pure as the sky.”
God allows the elders to be here, and they feast on the offerings under this heavenly apparition.
God then calls Mosheh higher up the mountain to give him tablets of stone with all this inscribed on them. It’s kind of confusing; Mosheh just wrote it all down, and now God is going to give him the stone version. But in any case, that sounds serious. Mosheh goes up with his attendant, Yehoshu’a, and he designates Aharon and Hur as the judges of mundane matters while he’s gone.
God’s cloud of glory covers the mountain for six days, and on the seventh day, God calls to Mosheh from inside it. From the ground, the people see a consuming fire on top of the mountain. Mosheh goes up inside of it, and he does not come down for 40 days and 40 nights.
🔷
