Canter Bridge

Of all the possible exemptions from military service that one a man might imagine, delighting his new wife might seem the least probable and the most appealing.

If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay home and bring happiness to the wife he has married.

Thus does Deuteronomy’s prescription for an integrated society take aim at the peril of absence. Solitude, after all, was the Primordial Man’s first enemy in the early pages of Genesis, a threat long before the serpent appeared. The lawgiver here picks up that threat and assures that the company of the home outranks the camaraderie of the battlefield. Though it may be too much to posit a neat hierarchy of social duties, one that privileges the family over the nation, it is only a small leap to see such social theory beginning its gestation here. Continue Reading »

Famously labeled ‘Torah’, the first five books of the Bible are received as Moses’, the lawgiver’s, legacy.

Yet ‘Torah’ relates the verb ‘to teach’, not ‘to legislate’. Torah is before anything else instruction.

The substantive legal component of this Mosaic anthology is embedded in the story of Israel’s origins, a genesis that this people shares with humanity itself. Common ancestry does not dawdle, however, and the story quickly particularizes its focus onto Abraham’s descendants and then those of Jacob himself. He is renamed Israel, for his habit and privilege of struggling with God. Continue Reading »

The Pentateuch’s development of a world where murdered Abel’s blood cries out from the soil into which it has poured imposes a severe legal mercy upon its organized inhabitants.

What is one to do when blood pollutes the earth beyond redemption unless it is taken seriously enough to be avenged? How will a community keep vengeance from becoming an absolute virtue in the light of the blessing it allegedly maintains?

The Levites, liturgical odd men out that they are, will play a part in the legislative balance that Israel achieves in its constituent documents. We read in Numbers 5 that they will serve as the custodians of a half dozen cities of refuge, enough for each pair of tribes to have claim on one. Proximity, when one is fleeing for one’s life, is not empty promise. Continue Reading »