Correct: that particular sentence was pronounced directly by G-d. The human judges had placed him in holding until Moses could clarify his fate. The same was also true of the blasphemer in Leviticus.
That does not indicate that the ordinary human courts of the Israelites, which after settling the land of Israel did not exactly have the direct line to G-d that they did in the Pentateuch era, were any more eager to execute than the attitude described by the Talmud.
The one in Leviticus 24 expressly states that it is a pattern for others to follow, presuably when the Lord isn’t personally intervening.
Emphasis mine.
The plain reading of this is that the Lord expects the Israelites to introduce judicial execution as a general rule for certain offences, even when Moses isn’t around to personally hear God’s express command.
I certainly know the theory is that Moses was, orally, given a whole corpus of supplementary knowledge (later written in the Talmud) that essentially undermines this plain reading, but is appears to me that, objectively, it is more likely that if such hesitations existed at the time the OT was redacted, they would at least be referenced in the text, no?
Naturally enough, few pre-monarchical records of criminal proceedings exist, either in the OT or outside of it.
Yet, the Rabbis of the Talmud DID point to where in the text these “undermining” technicalities were referenced. That’s been my point - the Talmud is big on Scriptural textual analysis, not on new, humanistic, extra-scriptural thinking.
That you see that analysis as a post-hoc “polite fiction” to incorporate modern humanistic sensibilities into the Jewish religion is unsupported by any evidence. Yes, there are few judicial proceedings recorded in pre-Talmudic (i.e., historical books of Prophets and Writings) literature, but what there are a) do not contain any capital punishment cases, that it should indicate those courts would have been more bloodthirsty, and b) are considered authoritative precedent in their fields by the Talmud.
My point is that the Rabbis of the Talmud were experts at disguising “new” thinking as simple textual analysis - and where that did not work, there was always the “oral tradition” of ‘equal validity’ to the text to rely on.
I realize I can never convince a practising religious Jew of this, but I think that anyone not a part of that tradition, when reading the biblical texts and then reading the actual law as stated by the Rabbis, would find that the one varied quite considerably in from both the spirit and the letter of the other - and nowhere is this more obvious, than in the matter of capital punishment.
My evidence is the text itself, which expressly states that ‘you shall put a murderer to death’ and ‘you shall make this your rule’. Again, if it had been the intention of the writers that a different rule should apply when merely human authorities were all that could be relied on, they might have mentioned that fact.
That the laws should change in light of changing social circumstances ought to come as no surprise - after all, the OT contains a complete code for a religion centred around a temple complex complete with a priesthood, none of which has existed for a couple of millenia.
Really already been answered, but I was thinking that a good analogy would be between the writings of the early founding fathers and their thoughts on democracy and how things are today. And that’s a mere couple hundred years. The gap between the tradition that spawned the OT and the movement that sparked the NT was a lot longer. Just like our society, theirs was a living, evolving society and culture, and a lot changed in that time.
Sort of cuts the the heart of whether God supposedly DID write the thing, unless God also evolves and changes/grows along with the society and culture worshiping him/her/it.
Actually, this was sort of proposed in Olaf Stapelton’s SF classic Star Maker - pretty well the best of what could be termed ‘theological science fiction’, an admittedly small category!
Somewhat stale thread, but everybody missed the obvious answer for why the angry, asshole god of the OT because the much more reasonable god of the New:
