Chapter 6. The Torah: The Law Was Never Neutral

(This chapter opens Part III, The Witness of the Whole Bible. Part III walks the reader through Scripture in the order it comes to us, Torah, Prophets, Gospels, Acts, Epistles, Revelation, and asks, one section at a time, what kind of people this Book actually describes as belonging to its God. This chapter takes up the first five books.)

If you spend any real time inside Conservative American Christianity, you learn quickly that the Old Testament, and especially the Torah, is treated in a very particular way. It is quoted when it is useful. It is dropped when it is not. Leviticus 18 comes up often. Leviticus 19 rarely. Deuteronomy is mined for its warnings against idols and its promises of national blessing, and passed over quickly when it starts describing how a nation is supposed to treat the poor, the foreigner, the widow, the debtor, and the enslaved. The Ten Commandments are printed on courthouse lawns. The Jubilee is treated as a footnote for scholars.

That selective reading is a choice, and it is not the choice the Book itself invites. The Torah, taken as a whole, is not neutral. It is not a general-purpose religious document from which each generation can freely pick and choose the parts that flatter its politics. It is a specific vision of what a specific community, freed from a specific empire, is supposed to become. And the vision is, from the first page to the last, weighted. It bends, again and again, in the same direction. Toward the vulnerable. Toward the freed slave. Toward the foreigner passing through. Toward the field left unharvested on purpose so the poor can eat. Toward the year the debts get cancelled and the land goes back.

If the Torah bends that way, and the movement bends the other way, one of them has misread the other. This chapter is going to argue that it is not the Torah.

Beginning at the beginning

Genesis 1 is where the argument starts, and it starts with a sentence that has been read so often that its force has been worn smooth. "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." That sentence is doing more than it looks like it is doing. In the ancient Near East, the phrase "image of God" was a technical term. It was the phrase used, on the walls of Egyptian temples and Babylonian palaces, for the king. The king was the image of the god. The king was the one, in the whole society, in whom the divine likeness was said to dwell. Everyone else was, at best, the king's subject. At worst, his property.

Genesis takes that phrase and does something with it that would have been, in the world it was written into, close to political scandal. It applies the phrase to every human being. Not to Pharaoh. Not to the king. Not to the priest. To the couple in the garden. To the field hand. To the midwife. To the foreigner at the well. Every one of them, in Genesis, carries what the surrounding empires said only the ruler carried. That is not a devotional flourish. It is the foundation on which the rest of the Torah's ethics is built. Any arrangement that treats some human beings as more image-bearing than others has, from Genesis 1 forward, a problem with the text.

Hold that in your mind, because it is going to come back on every page. When Genesis 4 has Cain kill Abel, and God asks, "Where is your brother?" and Cain answers, "Am I my brother's keeper?", the question is left hanging over the rest of the Book. The Torah, and everything that follows it, answers Cain's question with a slow, patient, unmistakable yes. You are. You always were. You always will be. A theology that lets a Christian shrug at the fate of his brother has, at that point, walked out of Genesis 4 on the wrong side.

The Exodus is not a metaphor

If Genesis is the ground, Exodus is the hinge.

The central story of the Old Testament, the one every later prophet returns to, the one the Psalms sing about, the one Jesus reenacts in his own baptism and his own forty days in the wilderness, is not a story about personal salvation. It is the story of a people, held in bondage by the most powerful empire on earth, whose God hears their cry and comes down to get them out. That is the sentence. Read it slowly. Their God hears their cry and comes down to get them out.

"The Lord said, 'I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians.'" That is Exodus 3. That is the moment at the burning bush. Every claim the Torah later makes about who this God is, and what this God expects, is anchored in that moment. The God who speaks from the bush is not neutral between Pharaoh and the enslaved. He is not standing above the conflict, waiting for both sides to come to the table. He has taken a side. The side he has taken is the side of the people at the bottom of the empire.

This matters, because Conservative American Christianity has, in practice, developed a theology that treats God as fundamentally neutral in political conflicts. Both sides sin. Both sides need Jesus. Both sides fall short. That framing sounds humble, and in certain contexts it can be. But when it is applied to a conflict between a Pharaoh and a slave, it is a lie. The Torah does not treat that conflict as symmetrical. It treats Pharaoh as the object of God's judgment and the enslaved as the object of God's rescue. When a modern movement, faced with a modern conflict between the powerful and the crushed, insists on standing above it in the name of biblical balance, that movement is not being biblical. It is being Egyptian.

Once the people are out, the Torah spends the next four books telling them, in extraordinary detail, what kind of society they are now supposed to build. And here is where the movement's selective reading breaks down completely, because the society the Torah describes is not the society the movement wants.

The law that keeps naming the foreigner, the widow, the orphan, the poor

Open Exodus 22. Open Exodus 23. Open Leviticus 19. Open Leviticus 25. Open Deuteronomy 10. Open Deuteronomy 14. Open Deuteronomy 15. Open Deuteronomy 24. Open Deuteronomy 26. Read them, in order, in one sitting, and count how many times four particular categories of person show up. The foreigner. The widow. The orphan. The poor. Also called, together, "the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow," or, in some translations, "the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow."

You will run out of fingers.

"Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt." "Do not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry." "When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner." "The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt." "He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt." "Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge."

This is not a devotional theme. This is a legal code. These are not general encouragements to be kind. They are binding obligations placed on the community, backed by God's own promise to hear the cry of anyone the community fails.

Notice, too, the reason the Torah keeps giving. Not, "because it is nice." Not, "because charity is a virtue." Because you were foreigners in Egypt. The Torah expects the community's memory of its own suffering to shape its treatment of the next generation's suffering. A people that has been on the underside of an empire, and been rescued, does not get to turn around and become the empire it was rescued from. That is the whole logic. When the movement, in the twenty-first century, treats foreigners at its own border as a threat to be repelled, and does so while quoting the very Book that grounds its identity in the memory of being a foreigner rescued by God, it is not being conservative. It is being amnesiac. It has forgotten the sentence that shows up, in one form or another, on almost every page of the law. You were foreigners in Egypt.

The Sabbath, the sabbatical year, and the Jubilee: a whole economics

The Torah is not interested only in personal charity. It builds, into the legal structure of the community, a set of resets designed to keep the gap between the powerful and the vulnerable from becoming permanent. There are three of them, and every one of them cuts against every instinct of a market-first culture.

The first is the Sabbath. One day in seven, everyone rests. Not just the head of the household. Not just the citizens. "You shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns." Everyone. The slave rests the same day the master rests. The immigrant rests the same day the citizen rests. The ox rests. The Sabbath is a weekly, public, embodied reminder that no human being was made to be worked without pause, and that no economy that requires human beings to be worked without pause is a righteous economy. The movement, which has spent decades cheerfully defending the erosion of any protection workers ever won, has, on this point, a Torah problem it does not know it has.

The second is the sabbatical year. Every seventh year, in Deuteronomy 15, debts among Israelites are to be cancelled. Read that sentence again. Debts are cancelled. Not restructured. Not forgiven at the lender's discretion. Cancelled, by law, on a seven-year cycle, because the Torah understands, with a clarity most modern economies have lost, that unchecked debt is a mechanism by which the poor are permanently ground into the dust. The text even anticipates the workaround. "Be careful not to harbor this wicked thought: 'The seventh year, the year for cancelling debts, is near,' so that you do not show ill will toward the needy among your people and give them nothing." Deuteronomy 15:9. The Torah knows the human heart. It knows that a lender, seeing the reset coming, will tighten his fist. It commands him, instead, to open it.

The third is the Jubilee. Every fiftieth year, in Leviticus 25, three things happen at once. Debts are cancelled. Slaves are freed. Land goes back to the family it originally belonged to. That last one is the radical one. In an agrarian society, land is capital. Land is inheritance. Land is the difference between subsistence and starvation. The Torah, understanding this, will not let land accumulation become permanent. Every fiftieth year, the accumulation resets. The rich man who has spent his career buying up his neighbors' fields watches, on the Jubilee, as those fields walk back to the neighbors. The system will not let him become a landlord in perpetuity, because the God of the system has said, "The land is mine; you are but foreigners and my tenants." Leviticus 25:23.

Is there evidence that ancient Israel actually observed the Jubilee at full scale? Not really. Most historians think it was aspirational more than practiced. That is often trotted out by defenders of the movement as if it settled the matter. It does not. The Torah put the Jubilee in the law regardless of whether Israel obeyed it. God's word, in the movement's own theology, does not lose its authority because human beings failed to keep it. If anything, an unobserved command indicts the community that ignored it. The prophets, as we will see in the next chapter, took exactly that view. They looked at Israel's failure to keep the sabbatical and Jubilee provisions and said, in effect, "That is why the exile is coming."

A modern movement that reads the Torah, sees the Jubilee, and concludes that God has nothing to say about the systemic accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, has not read the Torah. It has skimmed it.

The stranger, one more time

I want to slow down, before this chapter ends, on the single most repeated ethical command in the whole Torah. It is not the command to worship God alone, though that one is central. It is not the command against murder or theft or adultery, though those are foundational. The most repeated single command in the Torah, by a wide margin, is the command to love, protect, and do justice for the foreigner. Scholars have counted it thirty-six times, in some form, in the five books. Thirty-six.

There is no other social command in the Torah that comes close to that frequency. Not one. If a reader wanted to identify, by sheer count, what the Torah is most anxious that its community not get wrong, the answer would be, without contest, the treatment of the stranger.

Now put that next to the modern movement. Put it next to the political vocabulary the movement has adopted about immigrants. Put it next to the imagery. Put it next to the laughter at rallies. Put it next to the policies the movement has cheered, at the border and inside it. Put it next to the pastors who have blessed the policies. Then open Deuteronomy 10, and read the sentence one more time. "He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt."

That sentence is not from a progressive commentator. It is not from a liberation theologian. It is from the mouth of Moses, in the Torah, in the movement's own Bible. There is no honest way to hold that sentence, and the movement's actual posture toward immigrants, in the same hand at the same time. One of them has to go. The movement has, in practice, decided to let the sentence go. It just has not said so out loud.

The kings the Torah did not want

There is one more piece of the Torah that the movement's version of Christianity finds it convenient not to notice. It is in Deuteronomy 17. It is the law of the king.

The Torah does not exactly command Israel to have a king. It anticipates, wearily, that they will want one, and it lays out the rules for the king they will eventually demand. Those rules are worth reading, because they describe, in almost point-by-point contrast, the kind of leader Conservative American Christianity has spent the last decade embracing.

"The king, moreover, must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself." That is, he must not amass military power for its own sake.

"He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray." That is, he must not treat other human beings as trophies for his appetite.

"He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold." That is, he must not use the office for personal enrichment.

"When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law." He is to write it out, with his own hand, from the priests' scroll. "It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites." That is, he is to be a lifelong student of the Book, not a lifelong opponent of it, and he is never, at any point, to consider himself better than his fellow citizens.

Set that against any leader the movement has, in recent memory, treated as anointed. Any leader at all. Ask, honestly, which of the four requirements the leader meets. Not one. And yet the movement has, in the pulpit and on the airwaves, wrapped that leader in the very Bible that laid down those requirements. The movement has not simply overlooked Deuteronomy 17. It has inverted it. It has taken the Torah's warning against a certain kind of king and turned it into the Torah's endorsement of exactly that kind of king. There is no reading of the text that supports this. There is only a movement willing to do it anyway.

What the Torah is asking

I want to end this chapter carefully, because the Torah does not end its own instructions with a summary line either. It ends, in Deuteronomy, with Moses standing on Mount Nebo, looking across the Jordan into a land he will never enter. The people, behind him, are about to walk into everything the law has been preparing them for. Moses will not go with them. The book closes on his grave, in a valley in Moab, and the note that no one knows where it is.

What he leaves them with, in Deuteronomy 30, is a sentence that has been read at every Jewish funeral since. "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live." Choose life. Choose the God who freed you. Choose the law that protects the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, and the poor. Choose the sabbath that gives every creature rest. Choose the Jubilee that keeps the land from being swallowed. Choose the king who reads the book and does not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites. Choose the memory of Egypt over the temptation to become it.

That is the Torah's ask. It is the whole Torah's ask. And a movement that reads the Torah and does not hear that ask has not read the Torah. It has read a version of it that someone, somewhere in the loop, edited for its comfort. The next chapter, on the Prophets, will be about what happens when a community walks past that ask for long enough that God finally sends someone to say it out loud again, in the street, at the gate, until the community either listens or breaks.

Turn the page. The prophets are waiting, and they are not gentle.