I was just looking through the Old Testament and noticed an interesting juxtaposition of two laws quite near to one another. I just wanted to verify that my reading is correct.
Lev 19
33 " 'When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. 34 The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.
Lev 20
1 The LORD said to Moses, 2 "Say to the Israelites: 'Any Israelite or any alien living in Israel who gives [a] any of his children to Molech must be put to death. The people of the community are to stone him. 3 I will set my face against that man and I will cut him off from his people; for by giving his children to Molech, he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name.
Now chapter 19 seems to say that you should let foreigners do their own thing. Chapter 20 seems to say that if those foreigners pass on their god to their children, then they have to be executed–which is a pretty big backpedalling on the previous injunction. Certainly if the argument is that you don’t want to do things you wouldn’t have wanted Egypt to have done to the people, then arguing that passing on the religion = death doesn’t fly.
My interpretation to solve this is that “giving his children” would mean letting them serve as priests as to Molech, as opposed to simply passing on the religion. So is that what chapter 20 means? You can live peacefully among the Israelites as a foreigner, so long as you don’t have religious leaders?
I’m not absolutely sure, but I think ‘giving children to Molech’ means sacrificing them, but in any case, I don’t see an explicit conflict between these two verses - the first one is talking about how you treat immigrants, the second is talking about how you treat offenders.
Pretty close. Keep in mind that Freedom of Religion is a pretty modern concept. The non-Jews among the Israelites were not required to convert and be totally Jewish, but certain minimal standards were required, and the most important of them was to abandon idolatry. They didn’t have to worship as Jews would, but idolatry was totally abhorred.
(I could go into a whole discussion of how that section might actually be talking about converts, or the different categories of converts in Judaism, or what “alien” and “mistreat” mean in these contexts, but I think that the above is sufficiently simple and direct.)
Another point is that “equal protection of the law” is also a very modern concept. In many ancient societies (no cite handy, sorry), foreigners were considered outside the law, or outside much of the law. The Torah repeats a legal requirement several times, including at the end of Lev. 24: There shall be one law, for citizen and foreigner alike.
I did look up the Molech article on Wikipedia before posting, but I didn’t see the lines, ‘references to Moloch use mlk only in the context of “passing children through fire lmlk”, whatever is meant by lmlk, whether it means “to Moloch” or means something else. It has traditionally been understood to mean burning children alive to the god Moloch.’
I see no conflict. The alien must be treated as one of your own native-born. If an alien or native-born sacrifices to Molech, the punishment is the same in either case.
