I've been heavy into Abraham Heschels' The Prophets lately. I always seem to come back to the Hebrew Prophets. I tend to shun Daniel as the book has been accosted by a type of Christianity that scares me. I lean more toward the late dating of the book and would tend to agree with Jewish tradition that views him as part of the Ketuvim. I suppose it can go either way if a pole must be chosen and it depends whether you give weight to the modern understanding or if you give more weight to the Bible as God's word.
Somewhere in the middle are folks like me. I used to straddle the fence on things. Now it is a conscious and well-informed choice.
I accept the Bible as God's Word revealed to (or through) man but I don't believe that he spoke King James English (or Hebrew or Aramaic for that matter). I believe the 'proof' of the Bible is its affect on those who find their faith in it (which, of course, opens up another can of worms because most certainly there are those who "faith" caused them to use it to justify all kinds of heinous acts).
Yet I also find the historical approach to the Bible to be beneficial in grounding it and, thus, to bringing us closer to a realistic truth rather than one steeped in mythologizing and tradition.
There's a paradox here because for the longest time a verse like this would have reinforced why I was not a Christian and why I did not care to read the Bible. I fought long and hard against it. So when I "gave in" and became a Christian I did so only after realizing I did not have to leave my brain at the door and that (and this one has been more slow and painful to realize) I do not need to have all the answers to have faith.
Faith is not blind stupidity. Accepting what someone tells you without thinking it through yourself or running scared from a challenge to what you hold to be true is blind stupidity. Faith is certitude that comes with time and experience.
The reason I bring this up is that I was reading Ezekiel 20:25:
"I also gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live..." (NASB)
If there was ever a moment in Scripture that gives pause, this is it. In plain English, it sounds as if God set them up to fail. No need to even ponder the glee with which Christians throughout history have used this in light of Jewish law.
But me, being the good skeptic, figured this is a translation thing and does not mean what we think it means in plain English. So the digging began.
This is not a new issue. This has troubled the faithful for as long as the Bible has been around.
Here are some alternatives (I claim no expertise on the subject, I'm only presenting alternatives, the work of which was done by others so proper sourcing is given):
1)
"Ezekiel refers to the Deuteronomic code as “not good laws” and “rules by which they could not live,” because, on the one hand, they degraded the pristine Priestly standards and, on the other, they were interwoven with predictions of human disobedience and inevitable divine judgment."
(Scott Walker Hahn and John Sietze Bergsma as found in JBL 123/2 (2004) 201–218)
In other words, the documentary hypothesis provides a historically grounded alternative.
2) Hyam Maccoby (author of The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity) quotes Meir Loeb Malbim and adds:
"(For they said that)" in front of verse 25.
This is viewed as God being sarcastic. (Source)
By the way, there's nothing wrong with immersing yourself in books written against your faith. It's amazing what you may actually learn about your faith and you may just find it strengthened not in a reactive way but because many times such polemic draws things out of Scripture you might otherwise miss. If you're looking for justification for such an approach, Paul says to investigate everything and hang on to that which is good.
3) An article by Skip Moen, quoting Daniel Block, states that the word use in verse 25 is a masculine variation of the normally used feminine, thus adding a nuance that is lost in translation. The end result is this:
"He uses a verbal strategy to jump from the beneficial intention of Torah to the disastrous consequences of Torah rejection. In other words, as it turns out the huqqot [feminine] God gave have become huqqim [masculine] in the lives of the people. The people have turned what gives life into something that produces death."
4) Another option is that this verse admits to the human element in the Torah. Christians tend to love this one. However, there's a catch. If this is true, this also gives Muslim justification for their beliefs that the Bible is corrupt.
So there are options people and it's a minefield! A Biblical literalist (especially the King James only variety) would roll their eyes on this one (or chuck a big King James bible at your head).
A hardcore hater uses it to justify disregarding the Bible as nothing but a human document filled with inconsistencies and irrelevance (but of course they too tend to rely on a "literal" interpretation and thus share common ground with the King James only Christian).
I tend toward the more "quantum" view of Scripture and hold this in a state between several alternatives. I have no idea which rendering is actually correct but having the options actually leaves me more open-minded, provided I can move foward with the 'trust' element without having the ability to give a logical discourse on the matter. Some day I will understand it or maybe I won't but either way I trust that the lack of understanding is mine.
Personally, I like having options because it leads to dialogue and dialogue leads to interaction and interaction is what leads us toward love.
Dogmatism and debate, without an openness to learning and a willingness to admit we don't know (without losing faith), is what leads to death.
This self-deprecation is actually at the root of all religious traditions and this "quantum" view is actually more Daoist than it is Christian. Christians tend toward absolutes; Daoists tend to realize that our knowledge is limited which, paradoxically, should also be a Christian thing - it's called humility.
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