Chapter 13 Chapter 12 Why the Bible Begins

I was reminded of a rabbi who asked his class a ridiculous-sounding question in a synagogue school, a question asked by a real ignorant!He asked us, "Why does the Bible begin with God's creation of the world?" The answer to this question seems obvious: "Why doesn't the Bible begin with the beginning? Isn't the origin of the world the most reasonable starting point?" However, the rabbi answered us , the law book is a law code, not a history book, and the law code should start from the first legal article. This question was not first raised by this rabbi.Rashi, an authoritative Jewish interpreter, raised this question in his earliest articles on the Bible: What is the "reason" for the Torah to begin with Genesis? The Jewish law code should logically begin with the first commandment of the Ten Commandments, not with the story of the creation of the world.Rahi argues that "the Torah did not necessarily begin with the creation of the world" and wonders why God would.He went on to offer an unconvincing and nationally arrogant answer to his own question:

The book of the law begins with the creation of the world because the book of the law wants to convey the thought of the Psalm: "God made his people know his strength, so that he could give them the land of other nations." Therefore, if other nations in the world say to Israel You are desperadoes, because you conquered the seven nations that lived in Canaan. "(Israel) can then answer that the whole world belongs to one God, and bless him, after God created the world, he gave it to those peoples, and then, according to his will, he took the world from them and gave it to us."

This answer is insufficient for several reasons: First, there are many other stories in the Bible that support Israel's right to live in the Holy Land.Second, the question raised by Rashi himself is not only questioning why the Jewish law code begins with describing the creation of the world, but actually contains another more profound question: why does a law book contain so many stories in it? , instead of just listing legal provisions?Why does the Book of the Law list a long genealogy and tell stories from the creation of the world, from the Great Flood, Abraham's killing of sons to sacrifice, the deeds of Jacob and Joseph, and the death of Moses?However, Rahi did not provide an answer to such a question.

Let me put forward a point of view here, which not only answers the question in the narrow sense: Why did the Torah begin with Genesis?Also answer its broad level: If the Torah is really a legal code, why does it contain so many stories, especially in the part of "Genesis" and "Genesis". I think that because the Torah is a legal code, it should contain the stories of that era to highlight the necessity of laws and regulations.As I will show in the last chapter, Genesis, and all the stories in it, can be seen as the preface to the Ten Commandments and the Law given by God at Mount Sinai.However, even though the law book has been promulgated, the development of the story continues uninterrupted, the concept changes, and the law gradually takes shape.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, a former U.S. Supreme Court justice, taught us that the life of law is experience, not logic.So the legal books in the Bible are based, at least in part, on the experience of the people who received them.If we don't know what these people have experienced, it is difficult for us to understand why there is such a law.This is why the story of Genesis must be listed before legal codes such as Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.The first half of the book continues the story of "Genesis", and then leads to the climax of God coming to Mount Sinai to give the book of the law.From then on, the narration of the story continued, and the laws and regulations began to be interspersed in it.Just as experience must precede law, so storytelling must precede law.

The beauty of the Bible, from what I see as a law teacher, is that it combines storytelling, legal texts, and the use of "memorized experience" to highlight the moral elements of each code. "Do not persecute the Gentiles, because you were Gentiles when you were in Egypt, so you understand how the Gentiles feel" This passage can be said to be a model law extracted from the experience of the Jewish nation.Therefore, "experience in memory" can be said to dominate the whole Bible and various comments on the Bible. If the great code of law, the Torah, is nothing more than a list of laws, the reader must wonder what grounds these laws have.This is because some provisions seem reasonable, but others are difficult to understand without reference to Jewish history.

The Bible was the first book to combine storytelling and legal canon.Codes of law that predate the Bible, such as the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, and the Code of Law, are purely lists of laws, without explanation of historical background or exposition of morality.Other early narrative works, such as Homer's epic poems, are purely stories and do not have relevant legal provisions.But the Bible is different. Most of the legal provisions in the Bible are sprouted and thrived from the narration of the story, and the experience of the protagonist of the story is used as evidence to show that the legal provisions are correct and reasonable.There is a category of laws in the Bible called "unrationalized laws" in Hebrew called chukkim, which are considered to be used to test the piety of faith, but there are exceptions.

So it should come as no surprise that God in the Bible finds a rational basis for his own laws, not just enacts them.After all, it was the same God who made the covenants with Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and the Jews.Moreover, God is also a god who allows humans to argue with him, and sometimes even accepts human opinions and changes his mind.In addition, as we have seen, God is also a "constitutional monarch" rather than a dictator, and his people have the right to ask God to explain the laws he has established. Some scholars who study the Bible and ancient law have noticed that the Bible has its own uniqueness, that is, the Bible will find a reasonable basis for its laws.They found that the legal clauses in the Bible are often followed by "clauses" to provide explanations for the legal clauses, just like the passage we mentioned earlier to treat the Gentiles fairly, we see a "because" The leading clause—"For you also were Gentiles"—is explained.In addition, the commandment "the seventh day is the Sabbath" is followed by the clause "for it took God six days to create the heaven and the earth" to explain why it is so prescribed.In the Ten Commandments alone there are several clauses preceded by words such as "because," "therefore," "in case," and "therefore."The "Deuteronomy" contains more than one hundred "motive clauses" used to state the motivation of its legislation.

Professor David Weiss Halwni, a contemporary leader in Jewish studies, explained that the widespread use of motivational clauses shows that "biblical law does not use full imperative sentences, so (usually) have to justify themselves He cites other ancient Middle Eastern legal codes for comparison with these motivational clauses in the Bible, and draws a conclusion: "It can be said with certainty that the 'motivational clause' is a unique feature of the law of Israel or the Old Testament." Professor Harifni believes that this characteristic of having to justify the law has something to do with the character of the Jewish people.He writes that the "Jewish imagination" predisposed them to accept "straightforward, line-by-point laws" and claimed that the Jews could not rely on indisputable laws without room for leeway Live, because making the law a golden rule will only lead to dictatorship, which the Jews "sincerely oppose." Harifni's emphasis on the innate and instinctive special character of the Jews makes me feel that this is really a combination of Jewish genes and history. Generalize.However, I really cannot refute Harifni's point that the Bible exhibits a basic characteristic of Jewish law, which is its tendency to find reasonable reasons for interpretation (call it 'democracy') rather than direct Command, which is different from the dictatorship that prevailed in the ancient Middle East. "

From ancient times to the present, Jewish law has always had the color of this kind of debate. The Talmud preserves the opinions of dissenters for posterity; in Midash, man and angel, angel and God, all argue with each other.In this "Talmud" oral Socratic teaching method, students know that none of the answers to questions is perfect. No wonder the Bible describes the Jews as a "hard-talking" nation.However, there have also been reactionary currents in Jewish history, and Jews have looked to extremely good and charismatic rabbis or military leaders for authoritative law.Needless to say, the Jews also debated these currents.

Whether the Bible uses stories to justify the legal provisions, making the Jews more argumentative; or the Jews are born like this, so the Bible adds stories to the legal code.In any case the result is the same: there is a different Bible in the world, because it justifies the soundness of its laws; Accept unreasonable laws.And these are the seeds of democracy. The special thing about the law book is that it is a legal book based entirely on the experience in memory!That's why the Torah opens with a wonderful story of how fallible human beings struggle with envy, temptation, vengeance, lust, selfishness, and other vices in the absence of law. The open-ended narrative method allows all kinds of interpretations to be explained, and they bring dialogue and freedom of mind.Like the open-ended clauses in the U.S. Constitution, the story of Genesis includes due process, equal guarantees, cruel and unusual punishment, absolute faith and trust, and freedom of speech, etc. Today, timeless.However, from ancient times to the present, the devil is not the only one who quotes Bible stories to support his despicable behavior. In fact, everyone from mortals to angels is quoting scriptures.There are also many politicians and religious leaders who have quoted a certain Bible story as a talisman for their actions.Not only was it quoted by the Puritans and African-American slaves, but it was also quoted by Lenin, and they all cited it with justification, but no one quoted it more properly than the other. Biblical stories are not a blueprint for liberalism or conservatism (although both sides want to keep it for themselves). Bible stories stimulate, challenge, and confront any orthodox system, including politics, religion, society, economy, law, etc.Biblical stories may seem simple, but they contain the most profound philosophical, theological and legal issues.If a good teacher and a group of students are stranded on an uninhabited island, as long as they have a copy of "Genesis" in hand, the teacher can give some excellent courses covering many fields. In the next chapter, we will focus on some metaphysical issues in the Genesis story.

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