You might like to take a look at this website, Hebrew root word studies. "Jealous" is at the bottom.Apeitheo said:I was unaware that the word 'jealous' meant something different in Hebrew. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.
You can't lift someone out of the water without getting your hands wet. The Mosiac laws were a schoolaster (in the words of Paul) to the Hebrews, to teach them and lead them out of sin. You have to understand the culture to appreciate the significance of the laws. Women were "property", just like slaves. But they didn't live in a Capitalist post-industrial world like we do, so "property" didn't have the demeaning connotation you automatically attach to it, at least not in principle. If your happiness and livelihood depended on your property, would you neglect or abuse it? Take for instance their herds of cattle. Every one of them were more precious than his house or its contents, because they were their income. But without laws - slaves and women could be considered less important, less valuable. So their were laws making sure they were treated as people, not objects.Although I still stand by my statement that the Bible seems to succumb to Human law of that time, such as woman have a lower status then men, and in some cases, women being treated as almost property. Slavery being justified in the Bible, and people being stoned. I wouldn't think God would base his laws around the law of that time, nor would his law follow verbatim the laws of the people. That is my explanation to all the terrible things that have happened in the Bible, that it was humans who made the law, not God.
That laws existed to regulate the treatment of women and slaves and criminals didn't mean they were less important - it gave them importance. It gave them rights. If you read up about it, you'll see that most other cultures didn't give these people any rights.
The most disturbing thing about those laws weren't that they weren't strict or subversive enough, it was that they were necessary at all. Why do people need laws telling them to love, not to steal, not to commit murder? Isn't it in order to make punishment justifyable.
Words themselves don't make things wrong - it's the way those words are applied. There is no doubt that many of the practices of the Israelites were unacceptable by today's standards - but you have to ask how we came to have today's standards at all. You object about the death penalty of stoning, but they didn't have electric chairs or "humane" injections! You object about slavery, but these people didn't have unions and democracy and human rights - the Bible was their first introduction and only understanding of human rights! Many of those laws were made by humans, you're right - but their intention was to bring people into accountability where there was none. What made them divine laws, was that their punishment would be exactled by God himself, the God of righteousness and justice. They wouldn't get away with immorality anymore.
I don't know about you, but if with all the human rights movements and high moral values of today's world, we haven't gotten any nearer to comply to them. Whether it's murder with the hand or with the mouth, we simply adjust to make our sins to more devious, less "detectable" by laws. The problem with the Biblical laws aren't that they didn't enforce absolute morality, it was they that couldn't.
Why do people make laws, you think? To make us better people? To set the standards? Who decides those standards, and when will the laws be strict enough to eradicate crime completely? Think about it - the more laws we make, the more criminals we create. When Jesus came, He brought the standard in line with himself, He made it God's standard - human laws didn't do the trick, so in essence we all became cirminals. And now everybody is complaining about how that brings people down, makes us out as evil when they're not. Newsflash: we're now no more righteous than the Israelites were slavery, property, stoning and all. We're still just trying to redeem ourselves. If you take God out of the picture, you can adjust laws up or down as much as you want, you still won't really know what you're trying to do.