W. Shaw Caldecott LAW, IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
3. THE GENERAL CHARACTER AND DESIGN OF THE LAW
Both in civil matters and in ceremonial the Law had to deal with men who lived in a comparatively early age of human history. Its rules were
necessarily adapted in both departments to the standards of the age. At the same time they inculcated principles, the working out of which would by degrees bring about a great advance in men’s conceptions both of what is true and of what is right.
1. The Civil Law:
As J.B. Mozley says (Lectures on the Old Testament), “The morality of a progressive revelation is not the morality with which it starts but that with which it concludes”; yet the excellence of the Old Testament Law is evident, not only in its great underlying principles, but in the suitability of its individual rules to promote moral advance.
(1) Servants and the Poor.
We have already noted the similarity between the “judgments” of Exodus 20 and 21 and the “judgments” of Hammurabi, in respect to form and subject. Notwithstanding the practical wisdom found in many of the latter, there is in one matter a marked contrast in spirit between them and the former, for while both the Law of the Covenant and its enlargement in Deuteronomy guarded the interest of and secured justice, and mercy too, to slaves and the poor, the laws of Hammurabi were framed rather in the interests of the well-to-do. Compare (e.g.) with the rule as to a runaway slave in Deuteronomy 23:15 f, the following (Code of Hammurabi, section symbol 16): “If a man has harbored in his house a manservant or a
maidservant fugitive from the palace, or a poor man, and has not produced them at the demand of the commandant, the owner of that house shall be put to death.” The Law indeed permitted slavery, an institution universal in the ancient world, but it made provisions which must very greatly have mitigated its hardship. It was enjoined, both in Exodus and in
Deuteronomy, that after six years’ service a Hebrew manservant should
“go out free for nothing,” unless he himself preferred to remain in servitude (Exodus 21:2-6; Deuteronomy 15:12-18). The rule in Exodus 21:7-11 as to women servants was not exactly the same, but it nevertheless guarded their interests, while Hebrew women servants were afterward included in the rule of Deuteronomy 15:12. A still greater amelioration was brought in by a later rule connected with the law of the Jubilee as set out in Leviticus 25:39-55. Again, though servitude was permitted on account of debt, or as a rescue from poverty (Exodus 21:2,7; Deuteronomy 15:12), manstealing was a capital offense (Exodus 21:16).
(2) Punishments.
The rule of Exodus 21:22-25 (“eye for eye,” etc.; compare Leviticus 24:19,20; Deuteronomy 19:16-19) sounds harsh to us, but while the justice it sanctioned was rough and ready according to the age, it put a restraint on vindictiveness. The punishment might be so much, but no more: and the same spirit of restraint in punishment is seen in the rule as to flogging (Deuteronomy 25:2 f). Similarly the rule that murder was to be avenged by
“the avenger of blood,” a rule under the circumstances of the age both necessary and salutary, was protected from abuse by the appointment of places of refuge, the rule with respect to which was designed to prepare
the way for a better system (see Exodus 21:12-14; Numbers 35:9-24;
Deuteronomy 19:1-13).
(3) Marriage.
The marriage customs of the Mosaic age permitted polygamy and
concubinage, marriage by purchase or by capture in war, slave-marriage, and divorce. The Law allowed the continuance of these customs, but did not originate them; on the contrary, its provisions were designed to restrict the old license, giving protection to the weaker party, the woman, limiting as far as possible the evils of the traditional system, a system which could not suddenly be changed, and preparing the way for a better. Consider the effect of the following rules: as to slave-wives (Exodus 21:7-11); captives of war (Deuteronomy 21:10-14); plurality of wives (Deuteronomy 21:15-17); adultery (Exodus 20:14,17; Deuteronomy 22:22); fornication
(Deuteronomy 22:23-29; 23:17,18; Leviticus 21:19); divorce
(Deuteronomy 24:1-4); Levirate marriage (Deuteronomy 25:5-10); incest (Leviticus 18:6-18); marriage of priests (Leviticus 21:7,10-15); royal polygamy (Deuteronomy 17:17).
(4) Sabbaths and Feasts.
The law as to these, though partly ceremonial, yet served social ends. The Sabbath day gave to all, and particularly to servants and the poor, and domestic cattle too, a needful respite from daily toil; it also served men’s spiritual welfare, and did honor to God (Exodus 23:12; Deuteronomy 5:14,15; Exodus 31:12-17). The seventh year’s rest to the land — it also
“a sabbath of solemn rest, a sabbath unto Yahweh” — was for the land’s recuperation, but it served also to safeguard common rights at perhaps a time of transition as to customs of land tenure: connected with it also there were rules as to release of slaves and relief of debtors (Exodus 23:9-11;
Leviticus 25:2-7; Deuteronomy 15:1-18). The observance of the Sabbath year as a rest to the land seems to have fallen into disuse, perhaps as early as some 500 years before the Babylonian captivity (2 Chronicles 36:21), and it is probable that the Jubilee (the design of which seems to have been to adjust conflicting rights under new customs of land tenure and in the relation of employer to employed) was instituted to take its place (Leviticus 25). The law as to the annual feasts insured both the social advantages of festive gatherings of the people, and their sanctification by the worship of God, and the public recognition of His hand in matters agricultural and political, which were either the occasion of, or connected
with, these gatherings. Considerate liberality to the poor and dependent was, on these occasions, especially enjoined (Exodus 23:14-17;
Deuteronomy 16:1-17; 12:12,18,19).
2. The Ceremonial Law:
We have already noted that the conception of sin as uncleanness, rendering the sinner therefore unfit for the presence of God, must have been an outgrowth from the earlier conception of purely ritual (physical) uncleanness. This development, and an accompanying sense of the heinousness of sin and of its need of atonement by sacrifice, were undoubtedly brought about by the gradual working of the law of the sin offering (Leviticus 4:1 through 5:13; 12 through 15; 16). Similarly the rules as to guilt offerings (Leviticus 5:14 through 6:7) must by degrees have led to a true conception of repentance, as including both the seeking of atonement through sacrifice and restitution for wrong committed. The sin offering was, however, a peculiarly Mosaic institution, marking a development in the sacrificial system. The only sacrifices of which we have any trace in pre-Mosaic times were meal and drink offerings, whole burnt offerings and sacrifices (or, to use the Levitical term, peace offerings).
(1) Origin of Sacrifice.
We read of the offering of sacrifice all through the patriarchal history, and farther back even than Noah in the story of Cain and Abel; and there can be no doubt that the Levitical scheme of sacrifice was based upon, and a development (under Divine ordering) of, the sacrificial system already traditional among the Hebrews. Sacrifice was undoubtedly of Divine origin; yet we have no account, or even hint, of any formal institution of sacrifice. The sacrifices of Cain and Abel are spoken of in a way that leaves the impression that they were offered spontaneously, and the most
probable assumption would seem to be that the very first offering of sacrifice was the outcome of a spontaneous desire (Divinely implanted, we may be sure) in early men to render service to the higher Being of whose relation to themselves they were, if ever so dimly, conscious.
Prehistoric research has not yet been able to present to us a distinct picture of primitive men; and even if the results of anthropology were more certain than they can yet claim to be, what in this connection we are concerned in is the conceptions, not of early men everywhere, but of the early ancestors of the Hob race. However infantile their ideas may have been and probably
were, there may well have been far more of elementary truth in them — in simple ideas Divinely implanted — than students of anthropology have any knowledge of. Sooner or later early men did make offerings to God; and as the Mosaic sacrificial system was certainly based upon the patriarchal, so we may fairly assume that the ideas underlying the latter were an
outgrowth from those which underlay the sacrifice of the patriarch’s own still earlier ancestors.
It is well observed by Dr. A.B. Davidson (Old Testament Theology, p.
315) that the sacrifices of Cain and Abel are called a minchah or present;
and this idea of sacrifice as a gift to God most easily accounts for the facts with which we have to deal in the history of Old Testament sacrifice. When early men first made offerings to God, they probably did so in the spirit of young children who give gifts to older persons without knowing whether, or in what way, the gifts will be of any use to them. They simply give in affection what is of value in their own eyes. The one only thing of prime value to the earliest men must have been food; hence, offerings to God were everywhere in the first place offerings of food. But here a difficulty must soon have arisen, for men must have become convinced very soon that the Divine Being did not feed upon the food offered, at least in men’s way of feeding. Ultimately, among the Israelites, the idea of His actual feeding became eliminated altogether (Psalm 50:13,14), but in the
meantime the difficulty seems to have been met by the assumption that the Divine Being consumed an inner essence of food; and this being supposed to be set free by fire, food offered in sacrifice came to be burnt in order to fit it to become the food of God. This certainly appears from Leviticus 3:11,16 (compare Leviticus 21:6,8,17,21).
Coming, however, to animal as distinguished from vegetable sacrifice, we do not find that its origin can be accounted for as at the first being an offering of food. We learn from Leviticus 17:10-14 that the essential part of animal sacrifice was the offering of the blood, and that blood was offered because blood was life. The idea that life can be given by giving blood lay at the root of a custom which must have been well-nigh universal in primitive times, that of blood covenanting (see H. Clay Trumbull, Blood Covenant). In this, two persons would give each to the other of his own blood, drawn from the living vein. Persons united in blood covenant were supposed, by the commingling of their blood, to become actual sharers of one life. To give to another of one’s own blood was to give one’s own life, i.e. one’s own self, with all the dedication of love and service which that
would imply. Now a similar idea would seem to have lain at the root of the primitive offering of blood to God: it was the offering of the life of the offerer.
In the very first blood offerings it is probable that the blood offered was the blood of the offerer, and that there was no infliction of death — only in this way the dedication of life. The dedicatory rite of circumcision may have been a survival of sacrifice in this its earliest form; so also what is narrated in 1 Kings 18:28. When, however, the blood offered had come to be the blood of a substitute, and that a substitute animal, the sacrifice would come (no doubt soon) to include the slaughter of the animal and further the consumption, in whole or in part, of its carcass by fire as an offering of food.
(2) The Levitical Ritual.
Whether the above theory be accepted or not, in so far as animal sacrifice became an offering of food, it would stand in line with vegetable sacrifice;
but in both the excellence of the Levitical ritual stood in this, that while it was framed for a people whose conceptions were in a stage of transition, it was yet adaptable to higher conceptions, and fitted to become at length symbolical of purely spiritual truth. It was through the teaching, not only of prophets but of the Lcvitical ritual itself, and while it was still in full force, that the words of Psalm 50:13,14 were uttered: “Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer unto God the sacrifice of
thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the Most High.” The Levitical ritual, as respects animal sacrifice in particular, was so framed as, on the one hand, to keep alive the idea of sacrifice as the offering of life, not of death, of life’s dedication, not its destruction, and therefore to make it a true type of Christ’s living sacrifice. On the other hand, the rules of sacrifice guarded against abuses which, as a matter of fact, sprang up widely among the heathen. The rule, e.g. in Leviticus 1:2 and elsewhere, that “ye shall offer your oblation of the cattle, even of the herd and of the flock,” excluded human sacrifice. The rule that the first act in every sacrifice must be to slay the creature offered excluded the infliction of unnecessary suffering. The detailed rules as to the offering and disposal of the blood, and the varying modes of disposal of the carcass, kept alive the essential idea of all such sacrifice, and saved it from degenerating into a mere heaping up, as in Egypt, of altars with mere loads of food. The rules of the peace offering, clothing it always with a spiritual motive (see Leviticus 7:12,16), raised it
to a level far above the sacrifice of that class among the surrounding heathen, guarding it against their licentious festivity (compare Hosea 2:11-13; 4:13,14; Amos 2:8; 5:21-23) and gross ideas as to the part of God in the feasting.
(3) The Law Truly a Torah.
In every one of its departments the Law proved itself to be indeed a [torah]
directing God’s people in the upward way; leading them on from the state of advancement, such as it was, to which they had already attained by Moses’ time, to higher and higher standards, both of faith and of duty, till they were prepared for the gospel of Christ, who Himself said of the old Law, “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5:18 the King James Version).
Meanwhile we have, in the teaching of the prophets, not a counter
influence, not a system rivaling the Law, but its unfolding, both inspired of God, both instruments in His progressive revelation. “To obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams” were the words of Samuel, a faithful servant of the Law, and himself a frequent offerer of sacrifice. What the Law was to the heart of devout Israelites in the prophetic age is seen in the fervent words of Psalm 119.