God's Real Target in Both Testaments Is Too Simple for Us to Comprehend
Image of Bible open to 1 Sam. 15:22 by author and ChatGPT Listen to the whispers in the Hebrew Bible, to the shouts in the New Testament The challenge Change is hard for individuals, especially baked-in beliefs and traditions we have followed our entire lives … beliefs our pastors, rabbis, politicians, neighbors, grandparents, and ancestors obeyed. Major societal changes require a war, a famine, a plague, or a metaphorical earthquake of some kind to make them happen. Moses certainly wasn’t the first lawgiver. The museums of Europe display stelae (standing stones with engraved writing) with law codes that predate Moses. The introduction to the law code of Hammurabi claims that the gods chose him as king to keep the strong from oppressing the weak. Moses drew from those early traditions when he wrote his own. The most famous example is the concept of an eye for an eye. The idea was to match the punishment to the crime to forestall the kind of escalation that leads to generational ...