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5 March. Deuteronomy chapters 17-20
There are laws in these passages governing the structures of civil society that would be needed as the nomadic tribes became settled communities: kings, a legal system and private property. Each of them makes provisions for fairness that even today are not honoured everywhere. Rulers still often amass vast armies (represented here by Egyptian horses, the arms trade of the time), or large amounts of personal wealth, or trophy wives; justice is tainted by corruption, vigilante mobs or the evidence of false witnesses; and boundaries are not merely disputed but transgressed, as in Ukraine and Palestine to name but two.
Along with these laws for a fair society are the repeated warnings not to turn to the practices of pagan peoples, whether in idolatry, divination (seeking spiritual guidance through occult practices) or child sacrifice. For it is in worshipping false gods that we become desensitised to the calling of the true God to a life of peace; in divination that we overlook the connection between personal fulfilment and the needs of others; and in child abuse – the worst crime of all in current thinking – that we lose all sense of human worth.
It’s easy to condemn the Old Testament for being barbaric in the way that God told his chosen people to inflict violence on their ‘enemies’, but we also need to recognise that in the more positive commandments there is much practical wisdom that needs to be re-stated for our own society if we are to live as God intended.