Monday, April 21, 2014

Leviticus 21-22

(April 1, 2014)
Once again my mind was drawn to the symbolism of what was happening here, but that isn’t what I wanted to write about.  Instead, I wanted to write about how impressed I was that Moses actually believed that he was speaking for and to God.  These statutes that are recorded here are not ones that, with their symbolic nature, you would have expected to developed naturally.  Some, perhaps, but not all of them.  If I were preparing a religion, it would have been very different from this (not that I expect that they thought the same way that I do, but nonetheless).  Whomever wrote this chapter believed that he was communicating God’s will.

That leaves us with two options.  The first is that Moses is the author.  If Moses thought that he was communicating God’s will, then we have a hard time stating that he was mislead himself – after all, he claimed to have spoken with Jehovah face-to-face.  So if Moses wrote what we have in this chapter (and I believe that he did), then this chapter becomes a powerful testimony as to the truthfulness of the existence of God.

The only other option is that a subsequent believer, putting traditions down to paper, wrote what is written here believing centuries after the fact that they were true.  This seems unlikely.

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