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9 February. Leviticus chapters 24-25
Part of chapter 24 is one of those rare passages where Leviticus breaks off from giving general rules, to tell a story of certain individuals. “Shelomith daughter of Dibri” is one of the few women mentioned by name in this part of the Bible – possibly the only one apart from Moses’ sister Miriam, and strangely we are not even given the name of her son whose sin of blasphemy is at the focus of the story, nor of her Egyptian husband.
Maybe it was the influence of his foreign father behind the man’s offensive use of “The Name” (the sacred name of God which ordinary Israelites where not even supposed to pronounce) but he was the son of an Israelite mother and therefore one of the tribe – Jews still reckon the mother’s lineage more important than the father’s even now.
The sin of stoning for blasphemy seems overly harsh to modern western liberals, and yet not only was it one of the reasons behind Jesus being brought before the high priests leading up to his crucifixion, but also people are still killed for this offence in countries such as Pakistan. If God is believed to be so holy that his very name is unpronounceable, then someone who does so in the course of committing a crime (getting involved in a fight) is doubly guilty. People of faith even in a liberal culture wince when “OMG” is used in a trivial way, or the name of Jesus or Mohammed (Peace be upon him) is taken lightly.
In the following chapter (as I remarked in the post for 7th February, this relates to a late settled phase of Israel’s history) there is an interesting distinction between land and houses in the countryside which had to be returned to their original owners every fifty years – in other words could only be bought ‘leasehold’, with a sale price proportional to the length of years left on the lease – and houses in towns that after an initial year’s rental could be bought freehold by the tenant. This speaks to our society in which tenants have little security of tenure (in Britain that is, unlike other European societies) but in which the houses in country villages are bought by wealthy people retiring from the city, pushing prices out of reach of local young couples.