Theology in the Raw - Is the Old Testament Law Filled with Punishment, Legalism, and Arbitrary Rules? Dr. Dru Johnson

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

Be sure to check out our “Extra Innings” conversation where we discuss what the Old Testament actually says about sex outside of marriage. Surprisingly, there’s no explicit verse in the OT that forbids it. To listen to the full conversation, become a member of the TITR community at https://www.patreon.com/theologyintherawDr. Dru Johnson (PhD, University of St. Andrews) is Templeton Senior Research Fellow and director of the Abrahamic Theistic Origins Project at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford. He is also a visiting professor of religion at Hope College, director of the Center for Hebraic Thought, editor of the Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Biblical Criticism series, host of The Biblical Mind podcast, and cohost of the OnScript podcast. And, he’s written a bunch of awesome books including his recent book Understanding Biblical Law: Skills for Thinking With and Through Torah, which forms the basis of our fascinating conversation. 00:00:00 Introduction00:01:36 What Is the Old Testament Law?00:04:00 Does "the Law" Mean the Ten Commandments or the Entire Old Testament?00:06:24 The Law Is More Than Rules: Understanding Biblical Law00:08:52 Does "Eye for an Eye" Mean Literal Retribution?00:14:28 Reading Old Testament Laws as Principles, Not Just Rules00:18:07 "You Shall Not Murder" vs. "You Shall Not Kill"00:22:49 How to Learn Ethics from Bible Stories00:24:53 Does the Bible Endorse Polygamy?00:25:58 Why the Laws of Moses Are Different from Other Ancient Laws00:28:11 Moses, David, and Other Morally Complex Bible Stories00:33:44 Are Women Portrayed Better Than Men in the Bible?00:38:13 How to Apply Biblical Narratives Today00:41:25 Biblical Discernment vs. Looking for Easy Answers00:45:21 How Should Christians Read Difficult Old Testament Laws?00:51:13 Why Were Old Testament Punishments So Severe?00:57:17 Restorative Justice in Ancient Israel: Why Were There No Prisons?01:00:31 The Sons of Korah and Other Difficult Old Testament JudgmentsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I think it's really important for Christians who value the voice of Scripture, though, to really self-reflect. Take a moment to think about how you think about law. We're American, so we have these very constructed views of legalism. Laws are rules. You either break or you keep the laws. That view will not help you at all with biblical law. It's in fact that it will confuse your understanding of the law. Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology and Rob.

My guest today is one of my favorite Old Testament scholars. Dr. Drew Johnson has a Ph.D. from University of St. Andrews. He is Templeton Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Abrahamic Theistic Origins Project at Weakleaf Hall, University of Oxford. He's also visiting professor of religion at Hope College, director of the Center for Hebraic Thought, editor of the Rutledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Biblical Criticism Series, host of Biblical Mind podcast and co-hosts of the On-Script podcast. He's also written a bunch of awesome books, including his recent book, Understanding Biblical Law. which forms the basis of our fascinating conversation.

Also, be sure to stay tuned for our Extra Indians conversation where we talk about what the Old Testament says about sex outside of marriage, since there's no verse in the Old Testament that forbids it. If you want to listen to our Extra Ineatis portion of this episode, then head over to patreon.com forward slash theology in New Ra. Become a member of the theology in the Ra community. Okay, please welcome back to the show, The One and Only, Dr. Drew Johnson.

Why don't we start with defining law? You and I, it just kind of comes probably second nature. You see law, you know exactly what it is. But I think a lot of people, especially they're reading a New Testament. And Paul seems to be kind of against the law. But then James is cool with it. And Paul, in other places, seems fine with it. And Jesus seems fine with it.

But is he? You know, like there's New Testament readers, I think, can get confused. Like, what do we even talking about here? So when we talk about biblical law, what exactly we're talking about? Well, you are right-to in that even scholars debate what is law. And so, I mean, there was an entire SBL session on, does Deuteronomy even count as law, right? That it might be carved out because it's doing something under a covenantal framework. I mean, I would say first and foremost, we talk about the word Torah or Torah, which is the word that we translate often.

into law, which is a little bit of a disservice, which I'll talk about in a second. But essentially, if you just replace the word law with instruction, everywhere you see the word law instruction, and Paul, maybe you leave it, right, because he seems to be talking about when he says works of the law in Galatians, he seems to be talking about traditions that have built up around the law that are not necessarily bad unless they're prioritized over certain features of law, which Jesus obviously critiques as well. You know, you tithe meant Dylan Kuman. That's a tradition that's been built up.

And he says, and so you should. Like, good for you. But don't do that and neglect the weightier matters of the law. Right. So there's a concern about the traditions that build up around the law. The law itself is just instruction. So when you see Paul talking positively about the law, he's talking about instruction from our God through his prophet, for his people,

for the sake of all the families of the earth. So I want to make biblical law great again, if I can say that. Because it got tarnished a bit by Luther and more so Luther's cronies, right? We need to get our Maba hats, huh? Wait, wait, no, no. Oh, gosh, I bunched that one. Mublical ga. Yeah, it doesn't roll off the tongue.

So, okay, yeah, instruction. So what, which instruction? Like we're talking about the Pentateuch or the Ten Commandments or just the laws in particular, are narratives, genesis included in that. Yeah, okay. So that's a fair question. So I would say when we talk about biblical law, I think most people are referencing the, like, and he commanded him saying, right?

Those phrases have these formulaic phrases or God said to most. us say to the people, right? And then you have this, you shall, you shall not. And we have case law or casuistry, what you call, when a man is fighting with another man, when a woman does this, right? So you're giving instances, which I think are very important for thinking about what law is doing. I think it's really important for Christians who value the voice of scripture, though, to really self-reflect, take a moment to think about how you think about law, where I'm So we have these very constructed views of legalism. Laws are rules.

You either break or you keep the laws. Take that, you know, like if I could do some family systems therapy here. Thank that view of yourself of law, you know, for its service to you in America. You know, when you're driving your car, you'll need that view of law. But ask it to step out of the room for a while because that view will not help you at all with biblical law. It's in fact that it will not only help you, but it will confuse your understanding of biblical law. law. So a lot of what I was doing in this book was trying to look at better ways to read law rather than worse ways and just focus on, well, what makes the better ways, better ways

to read law? And for Christians who value the voice of scripture, again, you go back to Genesis 2. Before anything has gone wrong, God commands the man. It literally says, and he commanded the man saying, eating, you shall eat from every tree of the, he gives a law. I mean, he gives instruction right there at the beginning before anything has gone wrong. So law is not an accommodation to the fall. It's actually law like work, like marriage, like Sabbath. These are all things that existed before anything went wrong. So it turns out that we apparently we need to instruct each other and that's okay. Interesting. Instruction has a pre-fall foundation to it. So you say it's not just a list of rules and regulations. Can you expand on that? Because when I hear thou shalt,

that sounds like a rule and a regulation. Yeah. Yeah. So the law itself functions as instruction. Within it, you will have certainly some commands that are just kind of black and white. You either keep that. So, but they're few. I mean, most of them are few and they're difficult. So I use the example, I think, in the book of, you know, you shouldn't eat blood of animals, right? You either do or you don't eat blood. I mean, there's not a lot in between. But even then you could say, like, well, I don't know. Did you bleed the whole animal out?

Yeah, well, did you bleed it all right? It's an extra rare steak. Yeah. You get degrees, right? Yeah. But even things, I think one of the things that happens in, and I will say there's some influence of Jewish midrashic interpretation of law going on here as well, which remember when we're talking about Jewish interpretation of law, we are already talking about a

Greco-Roman Hellenistic Jewish understanding of law, right? So we're not talking about an Iron Age understanding of law. And so they really are already appropriating in some ways and developing their own views of legal frameworks where you do break or keep. So when you go back to the law itself and you say, okay, I ask in class, I'll say, what's just an easy, non-negotiable law in scripture and they'll say something like well thou shalt not kill right and you go great uh is that is that a rule that you should keep yes okay let's let's just game it out for a second who gave that rule um god on mount you know on mount sinai um he wrote it with his own finger right into the tablets apparently uh what had god just done in egypt well he just killed a bunch of people right

children too right uh he killed a bunch of people right the hands that carried down the those tablets from the mountain. What had he done with those hands? Well, he'd murdered somebody as well, right? And then when they got down the mountain and he breaks the tablets, what does he said about doing with the Levites? They end up going and killing 3,000 of their countrymen. So now tell me, what does thou shalt not kill mean, right? You quickly realize, oh, that's not a rule. That's a principle. And now I need lots of instances, concrete instances of how do I keep this principle and be faithful to what God is trying to instruct me here? And you get those.

You get when two men are fighting and one of them accidentally dies, that's not murder, right? But if one of them lies in wait, right? If one of them brings a plow or shovel into the fight, that can count as murder, right? And so they're giving you concrete instances to clarify what the principle means and what it doesn't mean, right? what's included with the principle and what's not. I'll give you one really famous example that gets overlooked constantly on this issue. And because the principle is stated and then two concrete instances are immediately given to clarify. And it's eye for and eye, tooth for tooth in Exodus 21.

You know, it talks about two guys getting in a fight. And if there's injury, you know, then wound for wound, burn for burn. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Eye for tooth. tooth is the famous phrase because it's used in ancient Near Eastern law. It's used in all three iterations of the law in the Pentateuch and the Torah. So it is kind of the catch phrase, eye for and eye, tooth for tooth. So you get eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, life for life, burn for burn, foot for foot, everything, right? Next sentence, if any one of you has a slave, male or female,

and you strike them in the eye and you break their eye, then you must release them, right? Next sentence, if any of you have a slave, male or female, and you strike them in the tooth, then you must release them. So you have the principle, eye, for an eye, tooth for tooth, which is almost impossible to work out how you should follow this law because it's a principle. It's not a rule. And then the next two concrete instances tell you, and by eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, what I mean is when one of you has power over somebody, you better not physically abuse them.

Right. I mean, I think that would be the takeaway there, right? you're not the victim in the eye for an eye tooth for tooth. You're the perpetrator. That's what the concrete instances tell you. That'll be different in all three iterations of an eye for and eye, tooth for tooth, because they all aim at three different instances, three different situations. But in the first situation, so when Jesus is talking about,

you have heard it said eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, he instantly turns to this passage because he's talking about power differential. If anybody strikes you in the eye, notice he says, give him the other cheek, which is between the eye and the tooth, right? So he's like, turn the other cheek here. And so he's talking about you can be vulnerable, right? In Exodus, it's if you have power over somebody, you cannot mistreat them physically.

For Jesus, he says, no, in this new kingdom, you can be vulnerable. Let him hit you the other side. So that indicates to me that he's specifically thinking about Exodus 21's version of the law. So I used to think that creatine was basically for Jimrats trying to maximize gains and get bigger muscles. But the more I looked into the research,

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Okay, that's 25% off your first pack and 20% off your subscription of brain boosting bars delivered straight to your door. Start building brain health into your everyday with Mosh bars. Thank you, Mosh, for sponsoring this episode. So just so I understand the difference between rule and principle, like when you say rule, it's not so much a rule. I'm saying it's not like this absolute universal, literal, whereas principle has some flexibility. to it. I'm thinking of, you know, speed limits. Yeah. Oh. So principle is this broad, like, it could mean a million things, like the do not murder, right? You're like, is this murder? Is this murder? Well, what if I twist the knife this way? What if we're drunk, you know, or whatever?

The concrete instances then shape, they sculpt the principle down to like, you know, here's what we're actually talking about, right? Be kind to your sister, right? That's a principle. It's like, well, do you want me to shower her with gifts every day? Well, no, no, no. I just mean, like, don't hit her and don't tease her, right? Like, I'm the concrete instances, I'm narrowing down the wedge of exactly what I mean by the principal. Or if she goes in on a murdering spree, your sister's an axe murderer, you lock her up into prison, right? Yeah.

So that's, it's, there's situational, there's situational flexibility or, or, yeah. Yeah. It's not telling you the nitty, gritty what to do in every single instance. It's given a... Because it can't. And we can't do that even in modern law. We attempt to do this more in modern law. But in this common law view, it's like we're trying to guide you into city.

Like, you're going to hit bumps, all kinds of things that we can't discuss, right? So Leviticus 18 is an infamous passage, right? You shall not have sex with your close relatives. And then somebody's like, great. What counts? Like cousin, right? First cousin, second cousin. Interestingly, cousins don't count in this discussion.

It then begins to list all of these aunts, uncles, mothers, daughters and mothers, right? Yeah. By the way, you can almost put a name from the book of Genesis next to almost every one of those sexual encounters. Yeah, I do in the book. Especially when you get to Jacob and Lee, right, you shall not take a woman and her sister as a rival wife. and you're like, okay, I think we know who you're talking about here, right? But if you go through that list, you'll very quickly generate people that it would seemingly be on the list but aren't named by the list. So thinking of grandmothers are not listed here, right?

So grandmothers can't have, they presumably you would want to say you can't have sex with your grandmother as counting as a close relative. But the list is just there to create a paradigm which you have to extend its logic out into other circumstances. So it's not exhaustive is what you're saying. It can't be, right? It would be, even though many people when they read through, you know, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus Numbers, Deuteronomy, it feels exhaustive, right? But it's not anywhere close. It's really giving you principles, guiding principles, and then concrete instances to help narrow

down to say this is what we're talking about. And then sometimes it gives you some very hard and fast rules like Yisham I eat blood. Those are very few and far between. Don't commit adultery. There's, that's kind of, even don't commit adultery. I mean, even, right, like, okay, well, what do you mean? Non-penetrative sexual acts or penetrative sexual, right? So Jesus then pulls back and says, look, this is what the Torah was always saying. It's like, this all begins with your intentions and your affections and your, you know, how you entertain things in your mind, kind of thing. Real quick, I want to circle back to the

little footnote to the Thou shalt not kill because a lot of people debate or assume, you know, well, it's not saying don't kill, it says don't murder. Is that in the Hebrew? Is that distinction clear? Yeah. So there is

a murder distinction, but then the question is well, when is killing murder? Right. So what, and that gets back to the if two guys just go to blows and one of them happens to fall and hit is. it's not murder, right? They make a concrete instance for that and say, like, if that's what happens, that's not

what we're talking about. So it's not forbidding any killing. It is a specific kind of intentional, unjust, whatever, and then we need to explore what unjust. Because I mean, a lot of people, like, in the, you know, just war, nonviolent, whatever debates, you know, it's like the Bible doesn't, you can go to war, kill the enemy. And there might be some collateral damage, but that's not, that's justified. of blank, blank, blank this context or something, and the Bible doesn't. Well, even the concrete context of you can kill somebody if they come into your house,

right? Right. You know, according to the Torah. But you don't have to, right? That's one of the notable carve-up here is that if somebody breaks into your house, you can actually, it's not necessarily, it's not necessarily a capital crime, right? And so if you look at ancient Near Eastern law, the idea that you separate out, thievery from capital crimes is pretty new. I think it's the Hebrew Bible is the first place to do that

where they say, look, stealing people's cows does not equal getting executed. So your life is not worth the value of a cow, which is a, you know, if you're in that situation, that's a good thing, right? Yeah. You are going to be indentured to that person now. You don't go away to prison because that's not how the justice system works in the Bible. Hey, there are no prisons. There's no incarceration and biblical justice. B, you now have to conscribe yourself to the person you stole from to pay back the four cows or four sheep.

So you actually come in closer contact with the people you've wrong rather than being sent away and locked up kind of a thing. Interesting. Oh, wow. Okay. So that makes sense. So you're saying most, if not all biblical instructions, when I say biblical, we're focusing on, you know, Old Testament laws instructions.

that they are more principally driven than rather than giving absolute specificity to exactly what this looks like in every situation. It makes me think of how we're supposed to interpret the proverbs, although proverbia, that's probably even more expansive, right?

They're, you know, raise up a child in the way you should go and then the anyone, depart from it is not an absolute promise to, you know, if you do it, if you homeschool your kids and don't let them watch it, write at our movies, you know,

they'll be awesome Christians, you know. We've seen how that turns out. Yeah, that tells about perfect. Every time. Every time it works, actually. Yeah, and that's why I had to use the, that's why I wrote that fictional narrative. It's like a murder who done it. So a young girl finds a dead body in between two villages. And then the question is, how do he die?

Even once they, you know, and the question, and it's, it was not hard to generate an instance of a guy dying that was immediately outside of any of the stated laws, right? Where it could have been a murder. It could have been blood guilt. and then kind of I was trying to depict how at the village level, which is almost where all of justice would be worked out in ancient Israel,

like how would they go through the tour and think through what do they do in this situation? There's some guidance, but not total guidance. And so that's why I created the murder who done it to kind of show you like it gets complicated very quickly. Even though you think there's all these commands here, you can very quickly run out of instruction.

This is the fictional narrative you have in your book understanding biblical law. Yeah, it's like every other chapter. So you get a little chapter of like, here's what's going on with law. And then you get a chapter that on a good day illustrates kind of what you just read. But it's an ongoing narrative. It's an unfolding story with a very dark ending from what people are talking. Which the editor is Baker, the first version I submitted, they're like, that's way too dark of an ending. You lighten it up a little bit.

Okay, so I don't know what the take with this what you will. That doesn't surprise me that you would have the ability to create a dark ending. I'm not saying you're a dark person. I just think you're, you have a darkness here. What is the relationship or I guess the role that narratives play? Oh, yeah. So in what way is Genesis, for instance, the narratives in Genesis part of instruction or the first half of action? or the first half of Exodus.

And because we often talk about the difference between the is and the ought, just because something is in the Bible, events recorded, doesn't mean we ought to do that. In fact, in most places, we probably ought not to do what we read about the narratives. And yet narratives do have instruction. It just doesn't, well, I don't know. Let me stop there because I'm answering my own question. You've done a good job in your work of thinking through,

like helping people separate out is from, aught in narrative. I always say, I picked up this phrase somewhere and I don't remember where, but narratives are often prescriptions disguised as descriptions. And so go back to the list of Leviticus 18. You know, it's not happenstance and it's important that, you know, all of those sexual relationships with close relatives that you can actually turn to a, sometimes. a very long story in Genesis and see what this looks like, right? So you can imagine, I mean,

you and I have both had, we've survived the teenage years with children, right? You can imagine a young man thinking to himself like I might have at some point. I don't know, what could possibly go wrong with marrying a girl and her sister, right? Like, I don't know. That sounds like a good idea. Two for one. I kind of know both of them. One set of in-laws to deal with. You know, you could really sell yourself that idea, right? And then you say, and if there's a little note that's like, see Genesis, you know, the second half of Genesis, right, for why this might not go. And now you have a very robust, concrete telling of a story of all the ways that's going to turn sideways on you in which you might not have ever been able to imagine. So the narratives,

I think are in some ways. I'm actually writing an article for Christianity today right now. on polygamy and polyamory. And so just looking at like, does the Bible prescribe polygamy, multiple, multiple marriages, living marriages, right? And my general takeaway will be every single description of a polygamous marriage is bad. Like there's not a single one that you'd have to squint sideways, drunk in the dark at a mile before you would ever say like, there was something good going on there. They are all creating problems for everybody all the time.

So there are some exceptions to that, of course, like lever at marriage where you bring somebody in for protection and often give them children to help protect them and secure the future. But yeah, so I think the narratives play a fundamental role. It's also important to note here, you know, and you know, and you know, this as well coming from the New Testament with Greco-Roman background. If you haven't read a lot of the surrounding literature, it's really hard to appreciate how radically different this all is in the Old Testament. And one of the things that's very difficult to appreciate is that the Torah mixes narrative with poetry, with law, just all to ritual, like all together, like that's just normal. If you're in the ancient areas, there is no such, I mean, ritual text are ritual text. And that's

all that's in the ritual text. Legal text are legal text. That's it. Like, Code of Hamarabi, the most you get is a little preamble saying why Hamaravi has the street cred to write these laws. Yeah, ritual text, epic text are narratives only, right? There's no mixing of genres, right? So the fact that they very intentionally, in Iron Age literature,

blend these genres together are telling you, we, like, the fact that Leviticus has narrative in it is saying, this is intended to be read together. These are footnotes cross-references in which these somehow make sense together. And you don't have to take large leaps of imagination to see how those two fits. So the Old Testament is unique in ancient Near East literature and weaving together these different genres. That's interesting. I never knew that. It's the only one that does it.

Wow. And it doesn't get talked about a lot in biblical literary stuff, you know, like Bob Alter, Robert Alter and Mayor Sternberg. they'll note this. I think, yeah, I don't know why it doesn't get, I mean, it gets noted always that this is a bizarre feature of the Hebrew literature. But then it creates arguments as, of course, as you and maybe your listeners will know, this also then creates the conditions by which they can say, well, none of that poetry was sitting right next to that story.

That was all added from a different source. None of that law was sitting right next to that narrative. It was, you know, that was all blended in a later story. Sure, it's a later canonizer redactor, scribe that did that, but nevertheless. Right. Yeah, even if you say that, there was at least a value for that blending at some point. So somebody saw the obvious connections between these laws and the book of Genesis. So the narrative is, does have a sort of otness baked into it that I would imagine makes it a little more difficult to interpret.

How do you know when the is is giving you an ought and what ought is it giving you? One of the classic examples in Genesis that does have kind of an answer built in. I don't know if this is correct or not. When I talked to Old Testament scholar, I always get a little nervous. But like Genesis 34, the slaughter of the Shackamites, when they, when Dinah, the sister of the sons of Israel was raised. raped, right? Wasn't she? Well, or she was...

There was something going on. Something going on. Assault or not. Yeah, he took her, right, which can... Oh, right. Okay. Multiple meanings. She was probably mistreated abused on some level.

Yeah. And they, and they, the Levites went in and slaughtered the second night. Yeah. Her brother. This is probably. Oh, okay. So, all right, butchering the story. Anyway, and you kind of left wondering, well, part of the story.

of me, he's like, yeah, go get them. You're like, wait. But is it vengeance? Is that justified? You're not sure. But then at the end of Genesis, right, aren't the, well, now I'm confused. Wasn't that the Levites that were condemned for their violence? Yes.

Levi and Simeon. Yeah. Joseph's blessing, slash blessings. Yeah. Yeah. Genesis 48, 49, 49. Yeah. Or Joseph throws shade, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. On everybody except for Judah, who probably deserves. the worst. But, yeah, so is that an example? Aside from all the details, would that be an example of like a story where it's a little unclear? Like, are we supposed to celebrate this? Is it being condemned? Because the narrator in the story doesn't come right out and give his perspective. Narrators typically don't. They want the reader to do that, right? Yeah. Well, the narrator of the book of the Kings is like, and that was evil in the

of Yahweh, right? You get that all the time. And you're waiting for it. Yeah, the role of ethical ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible is, I mean, there's a great Shira Weiss wrote a great monograph on this. She's a philosopher, Jewish philosopher, but reads Hebrew natively, and she's a great reader of the biblical text. And she actually thinks this is a strategy, like to force you to wrestle

to not get, you know, this is a way the Hebrew Bible operates in the world. We're not given, and I would just argue, this is how Jesus operates in the world. I'm not handing out answers here, guys, right? Consolation prize is you go away confused. Winner is you go away chewing on something, right? And you're actually like rolling it over like a proverb going like, wait, is this true this way? Is that good, right? In the totality of the Torah, I mean, I think Genesis would be my,

You know, when students say, well, it says in Genesis, I'm like, look, don't, we're not going to pattern any of our morality off of anything we find in Genesis unless we have really, really good systematic reasons for doing that, right? But in general, like, that's a no-go. You don't want to be doing anything those people are doing with a few exceptions. Same thing with somebody like David, right? You don't want to do anything David's doing except with a few exceptions. There's a few exceptions. And there's a whole question, like, why is it all negatively loaded? Why are the heroes of the faith?

Why are you getting mostly negative information on the front? And then like, oh, yeah, and they also obeyed God or they also stood up at this key time and did this thing they should have done. It does seem to be prescriptive as well. And I think when I say this in a classroom full of Christian students, they get very nervous, right? Because it's almost like the church has flipped the script. and said, yeah, yeah, don't pay attention to Abraham prostituting his wife twice, and then teaching his son Isaac to do it as well in the exact same way.

No, pay attention that he has a man of faith, right, before he was circumcised. He believed in God and was credited to him as righteousness. Paul was making a very specific point. And Paul knew everybody in the room knew all the stories of Abraham, right? Like when he's writing to the Romans, he's like, okay, this is a Jewish, this is a Jewish heavy church, right? Like they're going to know all the shade that Genesis throws on Abraham. And even there, Paul does use Abraham as an example of God justifying the ungodly, which is. Yeah, okay.

So there you go. So he's making a very, like despite all of that, right? Despite that God still used him and there's these redeemable qualities. So I think that's, I think that kind of description as pretext. prescription is part of what we really missed in preaching, preaching the good news, right? Why Jesus is, why Jesus is so good in light of this. Why we don't get a hero narrative with Jesus. We just get very blunt description that has little flaw outside of, you know, some character

flaw, not character flaws. Social faux pas, right? Jesus is full of those, but otherwise good. It's, you know, can I take a little cap? Chase once another shiny object here. And this is going back to a prior discussion we've had before. And obviously my recent work on women in the Bible, I was shocked at how while women quantitatively don't appear nearly as often as men in the Old Testament,

when they do, they're often the opposite. Like they're often like they are sometimes even flawless. Like what, like David, many flaws. He's still this, you know, character that we all celebrate. What flaws does Abigail have? Right. What about the two? She's married to a fool.

Which she might not have chosen, right? Right, right. Or, you know, that the two midwives in Exodus one, or all the women in early chapters of Exodus that there's not a whole lot we have on them, but what we do have is pretty pristine compared to these really complex and even really faulty characters. the male characters in Exodus and, and you've written on even, you know,

bad women in the Old Testament. Right. And so, I'm not saying, and so, of course, since women are human, there's got to be evil women.

But if you add up how many women are, and I haven't done the math on this, but is it shocking? Is it intentional? What's going on here? That when, that again, quantitative,

qualitatively, when women are, mentioned, they're often much more glowing characters than the men who dominate the story. What's the, I don't know. Yeah. And not just glowing, but I would say what's really striking as well, maybe less so Exodus, but when you get into Samuels, you know, judges, Samuels, Kings, they are guiding voices, right? They're not just, they're not just good character, you know, good, you know, godly women.

Like, they're the ones who are right and the men around them are wrong. Right. Yeah. And interesting, I always point out to churches because they always want to go with the trope that women are more emotional and men are more cool-headed and logical. I was like, well, if you have very narrow definition of emotional, then yes, okay, fine. If you go with a more broad definition of emotional. But it is usually the men who are hot-headed rash emotional, and it's the women who are coming in

and calming them down and helping them see the kind of cold logic of what's what's happening. And that's Abigail and David. Yeah, certainly with Abigail and David, right? So in steering them around their emotions, right, their emotional hurdles, like Gideon as well. Like, I don't want to go up without you, right? And it's like, hey, Debra's like, that's not the game we're playing. Barrick. That's not what we're doing.

Barrick, not Gideon, right? Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I got it. So yeah, it is striking the role of women. It's so striking to me that it's very difficult for me at this point to not see that

as prescriptive of women's roles in the world in general, right? It's not just like, hey, women have played these roles. Now, some people would say, well, it's because the men around them were failing that they did. I'm like, okay, in some cases, that's clearly true, which I'm not sure what lesson you're supposed to take from that. because men still fail today, you know, organizationally and individually. And, but, but there are also instances where there is, you know, like Deborah, of course, or the midwives where the men aren't even, like, I always, when I read Exodus one and two with a class,

I'm like, where are the men in this story? Like, not a single man stood up, right? Right. And that was just depicted as cold, hard reality of their situation. And when they did, when a man finally did stand up, Moses, his solution is to murder somebody, right? And like, it's so narrow-minded. Well, I'll just murder this one guy. And then that will ease the oppression of my entire people, right?

So, yeah, I can't see how that's not in some way guiding for us about how to think, even if it's just imitatio, right? Like, be like these women and not like these men. Yeah. Right, right. Anyway, so that little caveat. But, yeah, so let's go back to the law. an instruction. Oh, I wanted to say one more thing about narrative because it's interesting to me.

I don't know if it would be interesting to you, but there's another way in which narrative shows up. Asnaut Bartur has wrote a monograph on this, and I never noticed it until I read her work on it, is that the laws are themselves framed narratively in a way that doesn't happen in the ancient Near East. So the Lipid Ishtar or the coat of Hamarabi, they have very, you know, if a man, you know, if a man does this, then this is the consequence. If a man does this, this is the consequence. And then you get these phrase, and it's not all of them, but it happens if you, so it speaks directly to the Israelite, if you see a donkey struggling under its burden, even your enemy's donkey, right? And so all of a sudden there's a setting. It's a little micro narrative, as she says. There's a setting like you're somewhere watching somebody's donkey, right, struggling under its burden.

Or you see an enemy's donkey gone astray, right? Or you see your neighbor's donkey gone astray. And then you become the resolution to the conflict of the story, right? Like you enter a narrative and say, you must go aid the donkey. You must, like you become the natural solution to the problem the story has created. and you have a vantage point. I think you see something like this going on even in Paul's instruction, right? So he talks about, you know, if you're sitting at a table at a Gentile's house and something

is put in front of you, right? So he doesn't just say, hey, if they feed you this, right? He actually has you at the table, reclined, looking as a dish comes down and tells you, that's going to create a conflict for you. And you just don't, you know, just leave it be, right? to eat whatever is served to you, right? And so that's this style of like putting the person in the case, the situation, in order to help them feel the tension and also become the matter of resolution as well.

Interesting. It's just like literally speaking, it's a very innovative way to do law. It's certainly nobody else in the ancient Aereast is writing law that way. This would be another episode, but throughout our conversation, I just keep imagining how the book of Matthew is structured and how it has these interesting connections to Moses and law and the Torah and the whole Testament story. But even there you have this blending of narrative and law, right? Chapters 1 to 4 narrative, 5 to 7 law, 8 to 9 narrative, 10. Not really law, it's all red letters.

You know, speech narrative, speech narrative, throughout. And scholars have explored kind of like, what's the, relationship here. Usually the narratives are kind of teasing out or interacting with the previous speech that Jesus just gave. And poetry there too. Like he's speaking poetically. Parables. Yeah. Yeah. Parables kind of reflect on. Like, yeah. The proverbs. And it's almost like the Old Testament story kind of extended in. Yeah. Reenacted in the life of Jesus, which is very Mathian. Okay. So going back to these laws. you've helped explain that there are more principles than rules.

And that makes sense. It's challenging because I think some of us depends on your Enneagram number. Some of us just need, what do I do? When do I sin? When do I not sin? Give me the black and white. You're saying Torah is just not, it can be frustrating for Enigram 8s, right? Right.

It's a wisdom tradition. Or Enigram 1s. Yeah, it's trying to develop discernments, not answers, right? because you need discernment in all the new situations that are going to arise that can't possibly be covered by the law. It can't be covered by a written document. Let's put it that way. Even today, we can't. Even though we have computer storage, we still cannot create enough laws to cover all the circumstances,

which is why courts are full of case law. Right. And why we can't define what pornography is, but you know it when you see it the famous. Right, right, right. You know what we see it really. Right. Who was that senator that had to go? I don't know. I've heard so many people repeat that.

Or it was a judge. It was a Supreme Court judge where they had to like actually go watch pornoes. Did you hear about this? I didn't know that, though. Yeah, yeah. They were in the early cases of pornography. They were like having to go watch pornoes and then deciding whether they were pornographic. That's where that phrase came from.

Anyway, so yes, that's part of the problem. That's how I treat pornography. That's how I treat speed limit. That's how I treat speed limits. Yeah. You know, like I'm full of traffic. I'll police do as well. Yeah, they do.

I mean, if you're, okay, so I'm from L.A. You know, let's just say the speed limit is 65 on L.A. freeway. Yeah, right. Flow of traffic is typically 75, maybe 80. If you're going 60, 60, that's a hazard. Right, right. That is dangerous. And you're like, well, the limit is 55, so I'm going to, you know, I'm still going

and almost the limit. Well, like, speed limit. What does that mean? And, you know, I don't know. But that rule, though. And I think this is one of my own, like, realized the metaphors here. This is one of my paradigm shifts I had while I was writing this book is we think of breaking and keeping the law. Like you either do or you don't.

Like we think of it like pregnancy. You either are pregnant or you're not. There's nothing in between, right? And the problem I realized at some point when I was explaining some of this to people, they were like, but it says you shall keep the law. And I was like, it does say that. But it doesn't mean it the same way we mean keeping the law. So, and then the light switch flipped for me, which was, oh, the Hebrew word keep there is a metaphor. And it's the same metaphor used for keeping sheep or keeping a garden, right?

And Eden, right? You shall work and keep it. So it's actually the same word in English, but it's a completely different metaphor than breaking or keeping. Keeping means you keep it according to like a light switch. You keep it off or you keep it on, something like that. here maybe you cultivate the instruction of God, right? Instead of keeping the law, it actually means something like cultivate the instruction. So you have to tend to it and you have to see how it grows in different directions.

Very simple things too. The Torah focuses on an agrarian subsistence bartering culture, basically. When it says pay somebody, they usually mean food and a certain weight of food, right? Well, eventually they're going to move into a coinage economy, a currency-driven economy. So what do all of those bartering laws and weight of food laws? How do those translate into currency? Well, they had to figure that out. They did, right?

They worked out what currency would look like in that situation. But that's not something written into the law. That's something that has to be translated. And that's as you moved into different types of economies in the Iron Age and beyond. But even within, again, you can imagine a thousand circumstances. As soon as you read any law, any statute that seems to be. be a very clear rule. Like if two men are fighting, a favorite one I really enjoyed talking about in the book was, you know, two men are fighting and a woman is watching her husband fighting this

man and her husband is losing the fight, right? This is the setup. This is a pretty specific situation. She cannot go rip off the testicles of the man who is winning, right? And if she does, then you chop off her arms. It's the only time in the Torah where there's a punishment of chopping any part of a body off, right? That's the only time they ever say chop something off, right? And you're like, I mean, I've been in street fights, you know, when I was younger. I'm just trying to imagine a situation where a woman would even ever get a clean grab. Like, like what would, especially since her husband's losing, right?

If her husband was winning, he could pin the guy and be like, all right, come over here and rip his testicles off. But that is, do you have any more insight? I mean, that sounds like a Quinn Tarantino movie. And I've got Brad Pitt in there somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. That's intended to be funny or is that an actual thing that has happened in? So another thing that you find, and I'm writing a book on Jesus.

Jesus is teaching of the law right now. Jesus is not afraid to use extreme circumstances, overstatement and exaggeration that he clearly does not mean at all. Right. But of course, we run into Christians all the time. And it's like, well, but he said. And you're like, he did not mean hate your mother and your father. and you know. Right, right, right.

Same thing here. I think this is an extreme overstatement. Like, it's almost a caricature of a situation. And then one of the things I try to push in the book is when you run into things like this, start looking around. Like, what's the thing they talk about before this? The thing they talk about before this is just weights and measures. So you can't use fake weights if you're in the marketplace. And immediately after this, it talks about the amicalites.

go, you need to go destroy the amicalites. Why? Because they picked at the weak and the straggling people in the wilderness as Israel was along the way, right? They came after the weak ones on the, on the tail side. Now you start seeing like a pattern emerge. Like, okay, someone's using sheet weights. Well, who would ever know they're using sheet weights? Because you and I don't own an official set of weights, Canaanite weights or whatever. And so we just have to trust the people that they're not switching out. And by the way, they've, archaeologically, they have found. sheet weights. They're marked with, you know, how many grams, not grams, but, you know, so many units on it and it's like half the weight, the actual, but it looks to the exact same size as the

thing. So this is a thing, as you can imagine. And so what do you see emerge from this is, these are all situations where people can take advantage of somebody, right? Like, you know, going from simple to grotesque to extreme with the amicalites. And I think that. think the extreme example, like with the woman in the testicle grabbing, like you have a situation there, again, I think an imagine situation where you can imagine why you as the wife would want to jump in and help, right? Your husband's getting beat up, right? But there's no risk of murder. There's no like stones or tools in the situation. He's just getting beat up. He's getting his butt handed to him, as we say, right? And you can imagine in that situation, you might be tempted in like, what can you do as a woman to hurt

hurt this guy who's beating up your husband, you might be tempted to do. Even in that situation, you can't take advantage of a guy who's not paying attention, you know, whatever. That would be my walk away. But you only see that when you kind of triangulate what's called the miscellaneous laws. Yeah. What's in the biblical translations, the English translations, usually just throw miscellaneous law over these sections. Right. And because they're like, we don't know what to do with. Yeah. This is a weird collection of laws. We don't know what to do with. Right, which fair. But I say, like, just look around and see if there's some common connections being made here.

And in that case, it seems like a pretty obvious one that they're basically don't take advantage of people when they're at their moment of vulnerability. That principle is all over the Torah, right? Like the worst crimes you can commit in the Torah are taking advantage of people at their moment of vulnerability. And what's key here too, and then I'll shut up is vulnerable people aren't poor people. orphans, widows, those are not the vulnerable people. Those are some people who are vulnerable, but the man who's fighting your husband is a vulnerable person. The wealthy man who's accused of murder falsely is a vulnerable person.

Anybody can fall into the category of vulnerability. And so the Torah is very concerned. Wealth does not secure you. Like Neibut's vineyard, right? Later we see the story. Neibut was a wealthy man who had developed a really good vineyard. That did not protect. him from being falsely accused and murdered, right, under a capital law, right, by a malicious witness,

as it's called. So they're very concerned about protecting vulnerable people and you and I and everybody we know can slip into vulnerable situations and out of them as well as life goes along. That's interesting. Wow. Yes, so they're not ripping off his testicles. It's like, gosh, extreme examples. So you can fill in the blank.

Like, that obviously means you also shouldn't step on his toe or something. You've kind of covered. Right. And you are not going to forget that example. Like if you're thinking about the Torah being read out loud for the people as they're standing there. Like even if you were tuned out for a little bit, you hear this like she'll not grab and tear his testicles. You're like, wait, wait, what? What did I just miss? Or she gets her hand chopped off.

Right, right. Or she gets her hand chopped off. So on the hand chopping off, let's segue a little bit into some of the seemingly barbaric, harsh. misogynistic, cruel unfairness that, especially critics of the Bible will always point out, but even believers reading the Old Testament, you're kind of like, I wouldn't mind if that wasn't in there, you know. Can you give us some examples of what those are and how should we read those as modern Christians? Yeah, I kind of give an apologetic push for, like, look, the biblical instruction is not aimed at punishment. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

It's almost always aimed at reconciliation, as we would call it, restoration, right? So the guy who steals a sheep has to pay back for sheep. And we, of course, you just have to remember that view of law that we carry around with us is if you keep the law, if you don't keep it, you get punished. Punishment comes as fines. It comes as imprisonment, all kinds of things. Probation. It just does not seem to be the bent of the law. It's, okay, you stole a sheep.

If you're stealing one sheep, you probably don't have four to pay back, which is the requirement. So now you're going to have to indenture yourself. There's a little bit of deterrence here. There certainly is deterrence in the brutal side. Like if you, you know, kill somebody, then their family can come kill you, right? Which to us sounds so brutal, right? So I was looking, I looked up the psychology of law. And I was looking at studies on these issues of deterrence.

it turns out that capital punishment is not a deterrent at all for capital crime. So like you can tell people all day and all, like you do that, you can get the electric chair. It has very little deterrent effect. I shouldn't say at all. It has very little deterrence. Except if you're in a place where you commit the crime, there is a court hearing and then you are executed within, you know, a year or six months or maybe. even a couple weeks. Then it has a very high deterrent effect. What even has a higher deterrence effect is that's where the state takes on your case, right? Like somebody killed your sister,

the state takes your case. They act on your behalf. They do all the punishing. They do everything. What has the highest deterrent is when you kill somebody's sister, right? And her brothers are now like, we are tracking you down for the rest of history. We are going to find you and kill you and probably do something, you know, horrible to you along the way, that actually has an extremely high deterrent effect of people. I was looking into Bedouin laws in the Negev. These are all oral law, some written, but it's essentially like the question comes up, how do female shepherds, female shepherds, how do they live miles and miles away from their fathers and brothers out in the wilderness where strange men will pass them and encounter them. Like, how do they, how do they do that?

Well, the answer that you'll get from Bedouin communities is, oh, because they know we will hunt them down and kill them. If like, you're not going to get away with it. We're going to figure out, and we'll kill their whole family. You know, there's some, you know, blood feud kind of stuff going on there as well. There's poetry. I was reading Clinton Bailey's book on Bedouin law. And he points out, you know, there's all this poetry about a father who's like his saddle heavy bags are not relieved until he found his son's killer and murdered him, right? So that's not punishment. That's not framed as punishment in scripture. That's framed as, you know, accounting for a blood guilt, basically. It could be the same if somebody, if you don't build safety measures on your roof and they fall off

and die in the night, same thing could happen, right? So their family can hunt you down and kill you if they find that you have blood guilt. That's part of the situation I ladled into the story that I wrote for the book. Is the Torah legalizing that, or is it just a threat? So if the family does hunt them down and kill them, like, that's completely justified. It is justified, but it has to be, this is life for life, right? So you can't go kill their whole family. family, right? So it is restraining the kind of violence that you can do. Also, you have a place

you can hide, a city of refuge, right? Which, interestingly, cities of refuge, they're not unique to Israel. What is unique about Israel is there's only one thing they account for, and that's blood guilt. If you've killed somebody, a city of refuge can protect you until the cases meet it out. In other cities of refuge in Mesopotamia, like if you stole in something you can go there, right? There's other crimes that get, you know, if you're accused of a crime, you can go to these cities, not in Israel. It's only for blood guilt. If you've murdered somebody or your neglect has caused the death of somebody, then you can go to the city. Now, it doesn't guarantee to protect you. It just means you're going to get due process that the Levites are going to

adjudicate your case. And yeah, so you can you can stay there in the city of refuge. So again, these are protection-oriented measures, unless you're guilty. And that's been decided. Two witnesses have come forward and said, no, this person did this, right? The harder parts are things done in secret, obviously. My wife, you know, she's gotten into all these crime podcast or whatever. And she's just like, man, it was just so easy to murder somebody in the 70s and get away with it. And now, like, I mean, there's a whole, I mean, there's actually a question in criminology today.

why are there no more serial killers in America? It's like they might still be serial killers. You just caught them on the first or the second murder. Because of cameras and technology. So you get those kind of punishment. You do get, I don't know if punishment is the right word because I guess if you steal a sheep, you have to pay back for sheep. That sounds more like, again, it's a, or you have to pay back a minimum of 120%

if you break something or lose something of somebody else's. It's kind of acknowledging something more than the thing is broken. There's, you know, like, relationally. And this is, you know, again, if most people are living at the village level, this is all necessary because there are no jails or, there are jails and prisons in the ancient Near East. Israel is just doesn't have any and they're not ever commanded to build any. Well, wait.

So they did exist in the ancient world and Israel did not. So that was intentional. Do you know why? Yeah, yeah. I mean, even in thinking. about 586 when Babylon is invading Jerusalem. So you're talking about the tail end of their Israelite rule in the land. There still is no jail in Jerusalem. Jeremiah has to be lowered into a cistern. Right. There's no, there's no prison, right? So the entire system of justice,

you have, this is caricaturing a little bit, but you have two choices. Like you either, it's a capital crime, which there's very few of those that you can commit in Israel, and according to the Torah, or you have to be restored in some way to your community. And so a lot of the law looks like, how do we live together, despite the fact that people are going to harm each other and harm relationships and break each other's stuff and break vows and break trust and have all kinds of normal problems that everybody has throughout history. How do we keep this thing together? And especially, you know, once you have tribes and clans, how do you keep from going into

blood feuds between tribes and clans as well? And so the tour is pretty animated on this front of maintaining restorative justice. And I think most people think about the capital crimes, sexual capital crimes. Yeah. I did spend a few pages in the book because this came up in a class where I had a student say, just flippantly and say like, you know, you get killed for everything in the Old Testament. And I was like, okay, well, is that so, right? Name everything. Let's like, like right now, let's put it on the table.

What do you mean? Blaspheming, sexual crimes, um, disrespecting authority, which would be your parents or God, right? Which, blasphemying, and then various types of murder.

So I looked up the American code. Like, what, what can you get executed for in America today? Like right now. Now, if I did that in 1970, there would be a lot more things.

Like, rape was a capital crime in, in a lot of states up until the 70s. Um, but even if you push to today, where a lot of, people, a lot of capital crimes have been taken off the board. I don't want to say it's twice as much, but it's many more things you can get executed

for in America today than you can in the Old Testament, right? So some of it's just norming the data. Some of it's weird stuff like something had like you can't plant a bomb at a bus station. Like that's a capital offense. You're like, okay, clearly some, oh, this is the weather underground in the 1970s who's planting all these, you know, thousand bombs at bus stations and parks. That was clearly a response to them, right? Yeah.

What about some of the ones that seem like the death penalty is overly harsh, like the disobedient son or isn't, is it numbers 15 picking up sticks on the Sabbath? Right. Boom, dead. Or you have weird stories of like the earth swallowing up. Was it numbers? Cora. I forget what they did.

Were they grumbling or? Yeah. Well, they, okay. Well, let's let's start with that one because that's divine. That's a divine. judgment. So that's a little different than here's how humans should take. But again, you just kind of have to norm the data, right? So court uses to say, who is Cora and why is he protesting, right? Corra is a coethite. And if you read the first part of numbers, this is why dropping

into, I'm not telling you anything new, but why dropping into passages can be dangerous. So if you read straight from numbers 1 to 16, you will have heard at least twice, maybe three times, that Cora is a coethite. And what are the coethites? They're Levites. It's a clan of the Levites and their special responsibility is the Holy of Holies. They're the ones who pack up the Holy of Holies. They're not allowed to have any wagons. All the other Levites, the Holy Place Levites, the courtyard Levites, they all get wagons to put their gear on. The Coethites are not allowed any wagons because they have to hand carry everything because that's what the ark was designed to do, right? It's got poles in it. Which you'll later see

in the Book of Samuels where they put the Ark of the Covenant on a wagon. Is that Uza? So is Uza? I literally just wrote that down in my notes. The guy who got struck dead from Asa as a coathite, but they put the arc of the covenant on a wagon, which is exactly what you're not supposed to do. Right. And presumably they would have known this. So they're already breaking the rules going into it.

Okay. But here, so you have the people who are in charge of the Holy Holies. Their charge against Moses is God is, his holiness is everywhere. There is no special holy place for God. He's with everyone. Oh. So they kind of did a Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall kind of a thing. Like it almost feels like an argument for omnipresence.

I don't know if I can go that far, but kind of like, God's with all of us. He's not in that special room in the back. And we would know because we're the guys who take care of that room back there, right? So it was a special charge. So what Moses does is very telling for all kinds of reasons. And I'll try not to, you know, go after shiny objects here. But he says, look, our God's, tells them put them out, put some sensors in their hands with incense for offering. And then Moses

says to the people, look, if these guys die like everybody dies, they're old and die, have diseases, et cetera, fine, I've made all this stuff up. I invented the whole tabernacle thing. But if God does something new and opens the ground, then you'll know that these guys are actually despising Yahweh, literally the words, despising Yahweh. So it's set up as an experiment with a, like, it's like, defense it's like a litmus test with an actual outcome that is discernible to all of israel who is watching it happen and then they take those incense pans and hammer them onto the altar so every time you go give your all your sacrifice from that point on you're seeing the pans of the guys who got burned up by god and the other ones who went down so that one is a judgment by god and

i would put that sabbath breaker um even the the arc of the covenant story way out in samuels God is trying, you know, especially in the Torah, God is trying to create a kind of people that need to become just and righteous for the sake of all the families of the earth. And this is the same thing with the people who have the orgy to the golden calf. Like it's, you know, death is bad, but it's, you know, it's the judgment that we all suffer under and theirs comes earlier and violently in that case. Not to be flipping about it.

But it's kind of like, you are completely unusable to the, right, to the trial. My dad was a Vietnam veteran, and he talked about pacifist who they went along with a draft. They went all the way into an infantry combat unit. He was in infantry in Vietnam. They went all the way out in a firefight, but they would never fire their rifles. And people didn't hold it against them. My dad, I was like, didn't you hate these guys, you know, because like they put your life in danger, right? They're not doing their job.

They're supposed to be watching a sector or whatever. And he goes, no, I think we all got it, you know. But they're just useless to you. Like they're not only, they're worse than useless. You can't trust them at all. And you have to like do more work because they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing. And I get, I just invented that example off the top of my head. So maybe the parallel doesn't work exactly.

But as far as it goes, that's the kind of feeling you get towards these people. Like you can't bring people who watched all 10 plagues, heard Moses's teaching, came across the Red Sea, saw all that. And then their first impulse is to have an orgy to a golden calf. Like, you can't use those people and creating justice and righteousness. Because idolatry creates oppressive human trafficking, sex trafficking, right? You can't, like, use people who want to go back to those kinds of systems and thinking. So it's less about punishment and more just like, you can't go along. And by the way, that happens to all the people who come out of Egypt.

They are not usable. In military terms, they are not serviceable. you can't do anything with them. And so their children have to go forward in their place. So it's a kind of a fairly standard reaction to people who are not on board for justice and righteousness for the sake of all the people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Do you have a few more minutes or do you have to go? Yeah, yeah. Okay. I got one more question. I got one more question. It's going to be a little bit of a detour. But while I have you, I love just how knowledgeable you are the Old Testament, how you don't give just thin answers like you. I love how you discussed the complexity. I want to ask you about

what does the Old Testament say about sex outside of marriage? Not adultery, but sex outside of marriage. This question comes up a lot. But we're going to push this to the extra Indians portion of this podcast, which is just for our theology and the rock community. If you wanted to access this part of the podcast, head over to patreon.com.com forward slash theology in the raw. become a member of the the Algerian community.