GPLindsey

I've looked over some apologetics sources and there is one area of interest to me that I haven't seen addressed. When you ask your average Christian what sin is, they would say it is going against God's laws. What laws? The 10 Commandments and the other laws God passed down to Moses. But the problem is, those laws weren't passed down to Moses until some 2,500 years after the Creation. Yet there are many instances of God bringing down his wrath on the "wicked" before that time, with the Flood, Babel, and Sodom and Gomorrah being obvious examples. Further, God just gave the Law to the tribes of Israel. He didn't communicate it to the Canaanites or the other peoples the Israelites cleared out of Palestine. But the Israelites were given Card Blanche to ruthlessly wipe out their neighbors because they were "wicked" and sinful.

What is the moral justification for punishing people for breaking laws that did not exist yet, or of which they were never informed? The most obvious rebuttal might be that all humans were given a moral conscience by God which should have guided their actions--violate that moral conscience, and God is justified in punishing you. But if our moral consciences were sufficient to guide our actions, what need was their for God to then articulate a set of Laws? If humans needed both a moral conscience and the Laws, then it was not morally justified to punish the wicked for sinfulness, as they did not have a clear enough idea of what sin was yet! Common fairness dictates that you have to make a reasonable effort to tell people what the Law is before you start punishing people for breaking it.

I weep when I think of all those people who perished in the Flood because they were eating ham sandwiches, without knowing that, a thousand years later, God would give Moses a Law that says pigs are "unclean". Has anyone ever come across an apologetics argument re: the moral justification for punishing the wicked who never received the benefit of the Law? Or am I wrong, and is this not a particularly strong criticism to level at the Bible?

Joan of Bark

It is a legitimate issue you raise, GP, but I'm sure Judaic apologetics can find some far-fetched explanation for yet another of the many contradictions that plague the scriptures.

Huon

How do you know that these laws did not exist yet ?
How do you know that the punished people were not informed ?

It is possible (and easy) to invent some law(s) which was/were known by the punished people, and were passed on later to the Jews...

God is a good teacher, he knows that he has to repeat the lesson many times...

spin

Natural justice?

mickw

You raise a good point; I've not heard it ever mentioned before.

Kind of like that poor devil who was caught picking up sticks on the Sabbath- - they tell him afterwards that the punishment is death.

Nice.

GPLindsey

I assume you are playing the Devil's Advocate, but in response, the Bible does not assert that the laws already existed yet or that the punished people were informed. The Bible says God chose the Jewish people and gave them the laws; the Bible also says it would a grievous sin to add to or detract from the message of the Bible. It is indeed easy to invent a whole elaborate history of God giving laws to different peoples all over the place, but you would just be pulling it out of thin air AND violating Scripture by adding to the Bible story. Also, unless I KNOW they don't exist, that means they have to exist??? What evidence is there that they existed already?

Finally, if God were a good teacher, he would NOT have to repeat a lesson many times! He'd get the message through the first time!

John Kesler

The O.T. indicates that at least some of God's law existed before it was codified at Sinai. See for example Genesis 26:4-5:

Another example is the Sabbath. The Israelites were told to collect twice the normal amount of manna on Friday so that the Sabbath could be properly observed. This story occurs in Exodus 16--before the ten commandments are given.

gregor

It's surely worth drowing a couple of hundred thousand kids because some adults gathered sticks on a Saturday.

Yeah, and the better explanation is that there were laws before the exodus. That's a so much better explanation than the explanation that the pentateuch was written in 500 BCE.

Zeichman

There were dietary restrictions given in Eden and to Noah.

A cause could plausably be made from that.

spin

When was Genesis 26 written? And how do you know?

When did the sabbath stop being the 15th day, the shappattu, the day of the full moon? Hos 2:11 lists (as does Isa 1:13) the feast days as new moons, sabbaths, and assemblies. The order is important, sabbaths are not first, as would be expected in this list, being the most frequent (cf. 2 Chr 31:3), but appear after new moons, as one would expect for full moons. In Babylon the shappattu was the 15th day of a lunar month, ie full moon. This notion of the sabbath matches the feast days in both Hosea and Isaiah, as does the order in Ps 81:3 (new moon, full moon, feast, with full moon in the place of the sabbath). So when did the sabbath become the seventh day and not the 15th??


spin