Exodus 7-24 The Sequel

I  am still pondering what the implications are for faith if parts of the Bible are untrue. The church claims that the entirety of Scripture is infallible and is the word of God. But does the Bible itself make that claim?

The most famous Bible quote on the subject is the following:

All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. (2 Tim 3:16,17 NASB)

From this passage all we can gather is that the Bible claims the words we encounter in it are useful for teaching in the ways of God. No claim is made that these are the facts as they actually happened.

I wonder if as a church we hold the Bible to standards it cannot possibly live up to, and was never intended to live up to.

An argument I have frequently encountered is that that the Old Testament was written in a way that people would have understood at the time, and is not meant to be held up to the scrutiny we expect from historical documents today. This theory seems plausible but flawed to me. The truth is always more powerful as it is – unvarnished and unembellished. The Bible is meant to stand as a document for all people, in all times. I cannot imagine God would allow the Old Testament to be written, knowing that hundreds of years later people would lose their faith as a result of factual inaccuracies, exaggerations and untruths.

I am left trying to construct something concrete and foundational. A line I can draw, to say “This I can trust and believe in. This actually happened as it is written”.

For the time being I have decided to carry on and, to use a popular line of Christian jargon, “live in the tension”. So I’m going to park that particularly flummoxing issue for the moment and turn to the moral implications of the text. Oh fun! Something a bit light hearted and easy!

First of all, when reading Exodus I struggled with the notion that God hardened the heart of Pharaoh so he wouldn’t free the Israelites, thus demonstrating God’s power and protection over His people. This seems like a violation of the free will that is central to the Christian faith.

Articles online (see bottom of page) argue that Scripture says in different places both that “Pharaoh hardened his (own) heart” and “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart”. Both were involved in the process - Pharaoh hardening his own heart by choosing to continue in his arrogant behaviour, and God hardening Pharaohs heart by removing any trace of His presence or grace in his being and leaving him completely to his own sin. This is consistent with other parts of Scripture where it says that, whilst God always wants us to return to Him and will always welcome us, at some point He will leave us to our own choices. This therefore explains how the account in Scripture can be consistent with a God who is good.

The next issue I encounter is where God states that He would visit "the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the third and the fourth generations."   God punishing an individual for their own actions is one thing, but punishing children for sins of their parents I cannot accept. Study guides inform me that this line does not, as it sounds, mean people are punished for the actions of their parents or grandparents. More that sin habits tend to run in families and we inherit the behaviours of our parents, therefore if a parent raises their child in sinful behaviour, the child is likely to continue that sinful behaviour in their own lives, and the lives of their children.

So far so good. But now for some Biblical sexism!
When talking about the rules for keeping Hebrew Servants (a common job at that time, akin to a modern factory worker or office drone like myself) the Bible says: “If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free (after six years) as menservants do”. So what’s the deal here? Are women not granted the same rights of freedom after six years like men are? After a bit of research I find that fathers often sold their daughters into slavery (for the purpose of being married off into the owner family) if they got into financial difficulties. Whilst this certainly seems abhorrent, I am advised that this practice was similar to that of arranged marriages which exist today, and the daughter would not leave after six years as they were now married into the family. Personally, I'm still not sure this sits easily with me, but at least this view provides some context.

The most disturbing passage I encountered in these chapters is the ruling that:
“If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property”.

When reading this passage, the only note I made in the margin was: “WTF?” underlined several times. I cannot believe that the same God who was incarnated in Jesus would state that it’s ok to beat a slave as long as they recover in a couple of days because the slave is the owner’s property. It seems to go against everything we believe, and everything Jesus preached, about hating injustice and valuing everyone as your brother

The only article I could find that addressed this matter admitted that the writer was troubled by this passage too. However, they point out that the rules for a slave being beaten were exactly the same as those stipulated for a free Israelite who was beaten so the law treated injured parties the same, regardless of whether they were slave or free.

Some Christians claim that these types of commandments were actually radical when taken in context, because no one legislated about the civil rights of slaves at all at the time. Therefore to grant rights of any kind to slaves was a startling move of compassion on God’s behalf. I suppose there is an argument that people weren’t ready to accept equal human rights for everyone and needed to be ‘raised’ into goodness in stages as parents raise a child for adulthood. 

However, I find this idea less than satisfying, precisely because as Christians we so often refute the idea of ‘relative goodness’. If we talk about ourselves as ‘good compared to most people’ (as some have applied to the Hebrews here) then as a church we preach that our relative goodness still falls short of the perfect standard God would require for us to get into Heaven on own merits. Yet here God is dictating a law that falls well short of our own modern human standards, let alone His perfect standard.

I’m about two weeks behind on blogging the Bible, although luckily I’ve caught up on my reading (mainly because the next few chapters are lists of the materials that went into constructing the ark so don’t require much in-depth study or throw up lots of difficult questions). I would love to hear anyone’s thoughts on the issues I have raised in the course of reading Exodus, and I’ll continue to pray on the matter. If anything occurs to me I’ll post it here!

Have beautiful, peace-filled and fun-filled weeks, everyone.


http://www.abercrombie.cc/ds/q1109/q1109.html
http://www.catholic.com/blog/trent-horn/why-did-god-harden-pharaohs-heart
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/god_iniquity_third_fourth_generation.html
http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/how-god-visits-sins-on-the-third-and-fourth-generation