You asked for answers, people are giving them to you, and yet you’re still having issues.
The other day, I told my son to be quiet as I was reading. Did I ever give him permission to raise his volume after? No. It just happened.
Just because a law is not mentioned in the Torah does not mean it should not be so. Likewise, just because something was once an ancient law does not make it so today. We’ve explained that the Talmud has given us laws, customs, and interpretations.
Hell, we live in a world where chicken isn’t pareve.
Laws evolve, change, and are re-interpreted. Consider the U.S. Constitution - things today that are not ‘Constitutional’ were fine and dandy 50 years ago.
Finally - again - I tell you that only Orthodox strictly believe that the Torah is 100 per cent given by God, and not even they will tell you to put a woman to death for adultery! No; they will just quickly grant her husband a divorce. Actually, it is mandated to divorce your wife if she cheats on you - giving further credence to the assertion that stoning was rarely practiced. (After all, why mandate you must divorce a wife who is apparently going to be put to death, anyway?)
If I understand the gist of what you’re saying than you’re saying that capital punishment was a rare occurrence back in the day. I don’t know where you get that from. Just because specific cases of capital punishment aren’t mentioned in the Tanach or the Talmud doesn’t mean it didn’t happen often. I’m not saying that it happened frequently, but from the fact that the Talmud describes alternate indirect methods of capital punishment where the prerequisites for regular capital punishment weren’t met indicates that it probably wasn’t terribly rare.
So I should just accept the first anonymous answer I get and shut up?
People have given conflicting answers; people have given answers that I requested clarification for and never got; few if any of the answers given have been accompanied by citations; and at least one answer was pretty clearly a controversial personal opinion. Heck, even your infallible posts have been disputed by people who seem to know something about the subject.
So pardon me all to hell if I keep trying to find things out.
I’d guess it was rare as Jews in the Talmudic era would have also been living - sometimes with careful steps - under other religious laws/laws of the land.
I never said it was rare 4,000 years ago - but it doesn’t makes sense that it’s really never made a point of. If adultery is/was a HUGE deal in Judaism, why not make an example or two out of people? The only capital punishment that sticks out in my head is of God’s.
Finally, if there was a law mandating that you divorce your wife who has slept with another man, then it does beg the question of why she wasn’t automatically put to death.
There’s no real way of us knowing – but that wasn’t the OP’s question.
Sociologically speaking, those were ‘good’ laws for maintaining law, order and identity amongst other tribes (and were common in the region/time anyway). But there is something called rabbinic law and we tend to follow it.
Not that I’m aware of - plus they’d be under the laws of another.
There already is a Jewish state and no such laws exist, so you don’t make any sense at all. Plus a ‘two-state solution’ does not include the exile of non-Jews from Israel.
Does that help you? I answered. :rolleyes:
There is a very famous example in the Christian gospels of Jesus saving a woman from being stoned for adultery. The passage is controversial for several reasons, but I’ve never heard anyone dispute it on the grounds that stoning for adultery was very rare in 1st century Israel.
add: Just because Judaism does not believe in actually carrying out the death penalty does not mean the grievances you listed are not against halachah.
Thank you for the cites. I found the one on the importance of life especially interesting, because it says “the unborn are not considered human life in Jewish law, thus the mother’s human life overrides.” I’ve never heard that come up when conservative Christians take concurrent strong pro-life and pro-Israel positions.
I believe that OP, despite the allusions, cites, and side example of capital punishment here, could benefit how religious Jews interpret “Mosaic” law–by which I believe he means what is written in their five books of the Hebrew Bible–and the layers of commentary and their general dates and, most importantly, how strong they bind, up to the present day.
As has been mentioned before, there is no Papacy-like body that can lay down the law or else.
I believe it would help here to read the Wiki on Jewish law
ETA: CitizenPained has given more detailed cites. Thanks
I have often heard this claim repeated, but the more one thinks about it, the more incredulous it seems. Surely a Gentile living among Jews would not enjoy immunity from Jewish law. Otherwise he could commit with impunity such crimes as selling Jewish servants into slavery (Mitzvah 191), defrauding Jewish customers (Mitzvot 181–183, 281), bearing false witness in courts (Mitzvah 241), beating his parents (Mitzvah 60), kidnapping Jews (279), and vandalizing synagogues (Mitzah 458). Is it perhaps better to formulate the claim as “Mosaic law does not apply to non-Jewish societies”?
Neither Hillel nor Shammai would ever argue that faith is optionial to Judaism. They may have argued on which element (going-though-motions observance or faith in mind without action) to keep if for some reason someone had to drop one of the two, but the argument is over which is the better path back to keeping both elements, not over whether one is essential and the other is not.
A gentile living in a Jewish kingdom would be obligated to keep to the seven Noahide laws. One of these is to establish faithful courts of justice (which would preclude an allowance for bearing false witness) and another of these is theft (which would include theft by way of fraud, vandalism, assault or kidnapping). Selling Jewish slaves would in fact not be a punishable offense for a non-Jew living under Jewish sovoreignty, although the Jews are charged with an obligation to try, through monetary redemption, to free their brethren from slavery to a non-Jew.
This reminds me of the time many years ago that a rabbi was trying to convince me to join his synagogue (at my mother’s request). When I said I didn’t believe in God, he answered, “Neither do I.” So I asked him why he was a rabbi and he answered that he felt called to help people. I didn’t join. I know my parents didn’t believe either.
No thread that begins, “Do Jews believe…” has a chance. As my wife says: “Two Jews, three opinions.”
Anyone read A.J. Jacobs’ book The Year of Living Biblically, where he tried to spend a year as the ultimate fundamentalist, following every single Biblical instruction?
Some of the rules, he had to interpret in a very minimalist way - when he stoned an adulterer of his acquaintance, it was much more like a hot stone massage than an attempt to kill.
The Orthodox Jews I know observe Talmudic law, but still rely on interpretations from rabbis. The Hassidim I know seem to rely a little more heavily on the interpretation of specific rabbis. None of them would rely on something taken directly from any part of the Old Testament without interpretation based on an analysis of the entire work. I’m not sure of the numbers, but it seems the majority of the world’s Jews are not highly religious.