Tag Archives: bible

Emor: and the principle of proportionate Justice

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A piece of case law enlivens this sidra. The son of an Egyptian father and an Israelite mother gets into a fight with an Israelite man and utters a blasphemy against God. He is put into prison while the people go to find out from God what they should do.  God speaks to Moses and tells him to bring the man out, that everyone who heard the cursing should lay their hands on his head, and that everyone shall stone him till he died. This does happen in the text, but first there is an interlude of six verses where we are told about the death penalty for murder, then the requirement for compensation in the case of an animal that is killed; then the requirement for appropriate compensation when a person is maimed – lex talionis, the law of eye for eye and tooth for tooth. Then there is a reprise of the law that if one kills an animal one should ‘make it good’ and if one kills a person they shall be killed, followed by a reminder that there is one law for both the stranger and the home born because God is our Eternal God  – and only then are we told that the people did as commanded in the case of the blasphemer – they brought him out of the camp and stoned him, as God had commanded Moses.

We have to ask ourselves – why is there a disruption in the smooth flow of the narrative? Why this strongly framed reminder that the law is given by God, that human life and animal life are both to be taken seriously, if not seen as equal in compensation?

Rabbi Moshe Feinstein teaches that the interruption in the narrative comes because this is the first time in the history of the Jewish people that judicial capital punishment is enacted. Murder has certainly happened before – Cain killed Abel, Moses killed the taskmaster – but judicial execution is something else.  We are reminded that life is not cheap, that taking a life can be a response only to something so heinous that no other punishment is adequate. So in between the sentence and its enactment there is a pause – for reflection, to remind us that the  event is not carried out in a state of heightened emotion, to consider whether this is really what has to be done, to remind us that the taking of life is a terrible thing.

The interpolation in the text is one that catches our attention. First found in the book of Exodus, the law of lex talionis – of retaliation and retributive justice is one that must be unpacked thoughtfully. While a surface reading may understand the text to be demanding that whatever is done by the perpetrator should be done to the perpetrator, any sense of justice would be outraged by the lack of equivalency in such a response. People are not identical so any retaliation would not be identical. For example to remove the eye of a person who already has poor sight might cause effective blindness. So rabbinic exegesis makes very clear that this is about compensation for damage rather than a mechanistic damage to others. It reminds us that human life is valuable, diverse and complex and must be thought about, cared for and appreciated.  And why is this excursus here between the sentence against the blasphemer and his execution? Surely again to remind us that all justice must be proportionate, equivalent to the crime, and must be thoughtful about the people to whom the justice is to be applied.  Whatever we may think about biblical law, it is set against systems of either randomly applied justice or justice which favoured some over others. This text teaches us that one law is applicable to all, and that that law has to be considerate of all the people it serves. It is a principle well worth upholding.

The Assaulting of Mrs Lot: Parashat Vayera

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I have a particular fondness for the bit part players in bible, and Mrs Lot, whose story is told in Vayera, is someone who deserves more attention than she often gets, and she certainly deserves a more appreciative inquiry into her story.

Poor Mrs Lot, who is given no name in the biblical narrative, and who seems to be chained in marriage to one of the less attractive personalities in Genesis.

Lot is the nephew of Abraham, the man who might have inherited from him, except that his behaviour was such that he ruled himself out of the dynasty. Lot shows himself in biblical narrative to be self centred, greedy, and without much common sense. When he leaves Abraham it is because they cannot reconcile their arguments over shared use of the grazing land, and Abraham says “”Let’s not have any strife between you and me, or between your herdsmen and mine, for we are brothers. Is not the whole land before you? Let’s part company. If you go to the left, I’ll go to the right; if you go to the right, I’ll go to the left.” And Lot’s response?  “Lot looked up and saw that the whole plain of the Jordan was well watered, like the garden of the Eternal…Lot chose for himself the whole plain of the Jordan and set out toward the east. The two men parted company: Abram lived in the land of Canaan, while Lot lived among the cities of the plain and pitched his tents near Sodom.  Now the men of Sodom were wicked and were sinning greatly against the Eternal”.

When the Angels come to Sodom Lot does have the grace to invite them to his home – he clearly understands that they would be in danger alone in the town, but that is his one understandable action.  Mrs Lot is hidden when they come home. She is not involved in the work of hospitality, but her husband prepares the food. The angels do not seem to know she even exists until the following morning.  She does not go to try to persuade her married daughters to leave with them – Lot does, and his sons in law laugh at him. Presumably his reputation as a fool is known, but maybe Mrs Lot would have had a better chance. She is not consulted when her husband offers their two unmarried daughters as a sacrifice to the rampaging townsfolk who are angry that they cannot make sport with the strangers, and it is the angels who take charge after this extraordinary proposition. Her husband does not hurry to save her and the two daughters – again it is the angels who physically take hold of the family and transport them outside of the city walls. And critically nobody ever tells her not to look back when they flee – Lot was told, but he doesn’t seem to feel the need to pass on the information.

Now Mrs Lot had to die in order for her daughters to believe that no human beings were left and that it was their duty to repopulate the world with their father. She is a device in a narrative, not ever fleshed out or understood. The midrash tries to give her some background, but sadly cannot detach itself from protecting Lot and therefore deciding that she is the baddy in the story. They pun on the word ‘salt’ (melach) suggesting that when the poor came to the door to ask for bread (lechem, same three root letters) she refused them as she had no compassion (chemlah – same root letters). But I prefer to think of her as the victim who got away. The domestic abuse she clearly suffers is ended, and her husband becomes a drunken incestuous figure who fathers the two traditional inimical tribes the Moabites and the Ammonites. But she is free, standing tall and glittering with crystals, still there near the Dead Sea, and the Talmud (Berachot 54b) tells us to say two blessings when we see her – the blessing of God who remembers the righteous, and the blessing of God as the true Judge.  The rabbis who discuss this teaching assume the righteous who was remembered must be Lot, and the blessing “Dayan Emet” is to remind us that her death was a punishment, but in the words of Mandy Rice Davies: “they would, wouldn’t they”.

I like to think that she was the righteous one who had been through enough, had lost her home and two children in the cataclysm and was destined to live alone in a strange place with her abusive and foolish husband and her remaining daughters. God released her from that horrific future.

In life she was unnoticed and treated without honour. But in death she stands proud and dazzling, remembered and blessed long after the disappearance of her unlikable husband. Baruch Dayan HaEmet – Mrs Lot received the blessing of the righteous.