Be Made New: Financial Freedom
February 25, 2024Pastor Josh Yancey presented today's message, "Be Made New: Financial Freedom." A video of the message is here.
The comments I make below are purely tangential to Pastor Josh's message with only the slightest of connections. Think of it as taking a side trail along the way.
Do Not Cook a Young Goat in its Mother's Milk
This verse (above) comes from Exodus 23:19b.
Pastor Josh mentioned this verse in his discussion of First Fruits - consecrating to God what is God's.
There have been many interpretations of what this verse really means. Some say it's a prohibition on idolatry, on doing things that pagans did. Some say it's a prohibition on incest. Others say it's from an ancient cultic play that ends in a marriage rite and/or a fertility rite. Still others say the verse calls for compassion to animals (in numerous ways). Others say it's from ANE pottery, paintings, and the like that bore images of mothers nursing their young.
Regardless of what it really means, it certainly provided a basis for what became the rules of kosher in Judaism. One of the foundational rules of kosher is not to mix dairy with meat.
Ultimately, I think the key takeaway here is not to confound life with death.
For an excellent and thorough discussion of the various arguments about this verse's meaning, see Jacob Milgrom's article: here.
And by the way, Dennis Prager references Mr. Milgrom numerous times throughout his verse-by-verse lectures on the Torah. Milgrom's work contributed to Prager's understanding that this and many other difficult verses in the Torah boil down to understanding one of the Torah's key themes: separations (God-Man, Nature-Man, Male-Female, Holy-Profane, etc.).
And one of the very most important distinctions is life-death. Do not confuse those two! Do not worship death like the Egyptians did. There are very few references to an afterlife in the Torah. Prager suggests this is because God wants us to focus on living a good life here on earth; the afterlife will take care of itself.
Clean/Unclean and Pure/Impure
Pastor Josh also touched on the issue of clean and unclean in his message, and I'm going to shoot of on another tangent from there.
Many times in the Torah (and elsewhere in the Bible), you will run into English words like clean, impure, etc. These do not mean what we moderns would assume they mean. They have nothing to do with dirty, unhealthy, or anything like that. Rather, they mean things associated with life (clean/pure) and things associated with death (unclean/impure). The Hebrew words are tahor (טָהֵר) and tamay (טָמֵא֒) which have no good English word translation but mean effectively "life-focused or life-capable" (tahor) and "death-oriented or unrecoverable" (tamay).
If you carefully look at the list of kosher and non-kosher foods, you see that the kosher foods tend to be associated with life and order and the non-kosher foods are associated with death and dis-order. For more, click here.
In this regard, life and death can be literal (brain active or inactive) or more metaphorical: live in relationship with God or be dead to God.
Bonus
Babel: It's About the City, not the Tower
These thoughts are primarily from Leon Kass' book, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (chapter 8 in Kass' book).
We often refer to this story, Genesis 11:1-9, as the Tower of Babel. And indeed, the tower is a part of it. But the key message in this story is about cities.
Kass makes some interesting points:
1. Why a tower in the story at all? He reminds us that this is the story that immediately follows the Flood story. Perhaps they wanted some "high ground" available just in case. If that's what they had in mind, they forgot (or never knew) that God promised to never destroy the earth again. Another reason might be that towers were somewhat common in ANE cities; note the ziggurats of Babylon. A high ground to watch over approaching enemies comes to mind. By the way, there may be a relationship between Babylon and Babel.
2. This is the first Biblical story of a city. It follows a period of peoples living largely on their own far and wide. In a way, gathering in a city is a bit counter to God's post-Flood instruction to increase in number and fill the earth (e.g. spread out).
3. If the tower was in any way for "reaching heaven," it is counter to the Torah's instruction to stay focused on living this life on earth.
4. God apparently finds the humanist dreams of the Babel citizens inappropriate. God permanently interrupts their ability to continue with various languages by which few understand many others. God apparently does not like unrestrained human power. In fact, he may well see their efforts as trying to obtain god-like stature.
5. Humans try to make their own order, not God's.
6. The text suggests that Babel was the city, not just one of many.
7. To be of one language is to be of one mind. Group think is rarely good. And remember, language was not God given (in Creation). It simply appeared, presumably a human invention, when Adam was asked to name all the animals. Language portrays less about what the world actually is and more about what man wants it to be. Language has apparently become more persuasive than God's Creation.
8. Previously, speech was used to name things, question authority, shift blame, etc., now for the first time it is used "to exhort others to action, to enunciate a project." God's Creation began with His speech. Now man is trying to build a world with speech. It's clear that man is imitating God.
9. Man-made bricks are previously unknown in the Torah. It's a major advance in altering the world.
10. Cities are entirely a creation of humans, a human institution. You can see how a city would tend to reinforce the notion that man can provide for his own safety and needs, to control and master his own world. As Kass puts it, "what Aristotle celebrated (in Politics), God views with suspicion."
11. Note there's no mention of a king or hero, unlike other ANE stories. It's just humanity.
Humanity trying to make a name for themselves.