Why not? Was it just maliciously adding insult to injury, or what?
A Bronze Age religion based on superstition, an angry warrior God and ritual purity had a thing about deformed folks. This isn’t really surprising.
Because priests are dedicated to the Lord, and it was disrespectful to dedicate something maimed or second class to the Lord. Likewise you couldn’t sacrifice a deformed lamb to the Lord - He deserves the best you got, not what you just want to get rid of anyway.
It may also be a reaction against castrated priests, as occurred in some other religions.
Regards,
Shodan
Because the temple is officers only?
Besides how could missing privates come to the temple anyway? and…
Oh…
A theory I’ve heard is that castration was a rite practiced by members or priests of other religions at the time. We have historical evidence of it being practiced as a religious rite in other times and places, so that’s not as implausible as it might sound to us. The idea behind this theory is, it’s something that idol worshipers did, and they didn’t want them in the temple.
That, and the fact that ritual purity was a very important thing to the priestly cult. Lots of otherwise inexplicable stuff in Leviticus and Dueteronomy is explained by that.
Maybe, though the same chapter also bans bastards and various undesirable ethnic groups. Deuteronomy in general is pretty rough on anyone with any sort of “defect” and pretty fixated on sexual matters, so I suspect its just an extension of those themes.
Also, I’m not sure “Congregation of the Lord” means either the priesthood, as Shodan suggests or the Temple, as the OP suggests. The Congregation is a name for the tent where the holy tabernacle is kept, but searching the KJV “Congregation of the Lord” seems to just mean the Israeli community in general.
Which is kind of rough. Bastards and people that hurt their nads get kicked out of the community in general.
I wouldn’t use the KJB as an authoritative source for the Tanakh. Just sayin’
I wonder how the castrati were fit into the prohibition in order to sing in churches. I know they were forbidden to take holy orders after their singing careers. (Not true in Byzantium: they did not have castrato choirs but they did have lots of eunuchs and some became high ranking churchmen.)
Fair enough. But I get the same results with the English Standard Version. It uses “Assembly of the Lord” and that phrase is used in the same way as KJV uses “Congregation of the Lord”. Assembly of the Lord seems to be an Israeli in good standing, like a “communicant” in the Catholic Church. So the ban seems to be on participation in the religious life of the community in general, not just becoming a priest or entering the temple.
Its pretty clear the Catholic Church didn’t obey that part of Deuteronomy. It also excludes Bastards (and Egyptians, though their grandkids are OK), while the Church didn’t have any problem with communicating bastards.
I imagine they just took those passages as requirements to be a member of the ancient Israeli community, not a general statement about any Judeo-Christian religious community.
Looking around, the term seems variously interpreted as meaning “the ruling counsel of the Hebrew people” (a meaning of “congregation” similar to the Catholic “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”) or “all of the Hebrew people”.
The former makes more sense - there are, for example, famous Jewish converts from the Moabites (another group along with crushed nads and bastards not eligible for the congregation), which would make no sense if Moabites were excluded “from the people”, but would be perfectly possible if they were excluded from “the ruling council”.
Similarly, excluding those with crushed nads or the illegitimate from the governing counsel would be nasty, but a lot less nasty than booting them into exile.
Probably for the same reason that an ancient Hebrew man, swearing an oath to another, would “put his hand under his thigh,” i.e., swear on his testicles. Because fatherhood and the power of fatherhood was sacred.
Damn! Not only does it hurt like a sumbitch that I dropped this anvil on my nuts, and probably messed up my sex life for a good long time, but now I can’t go to temple this week! Man, oh, man! When it rains, it pours!
I never told the Rabbi about my vasectomy…
It might’ve prevented a lotta problems down the road, if the RCC had gone Origen’s way . . .
Also, “bastard” doesn’t mean the same thing in Hebrew (and in Judaism) as it does elsewhere. Illegitimate children aren’t bastards. Illegitimate children one or both of whose parents were married to someone other than the other parent are bastards - meaning that they have to be the product of adultery, not just unmarried sex.
Oh, well, then it’s just another word for “Jew.”
:d&r:
Well, it’s more that a child is halachacly a bastard if their parents are unable to legally marry…if he’s the product of incest or if the mother is married to someone else (the father being married to somebody else was ok, because Judaism used to allow polygamy).