February Reflections & Corrections - Year 7
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Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap. Welcome to February's bonus episode. We're aiming to do an episode like this at the end of each month, offering some reflections and some corrections. Let's start with reflections, looking back at all we've covered so far.

The Bible is one unified story. It's the story of a family, and it all starts in Genesis. God set out to build a relationship with this family, but things went terribly wrong when they fractured the relationship through sin. But their sin didn't surprise God. He already had a plan in place to restore this relationship even before it was broken, and He continues working out that plan immediately, undeterred and unhindered by their rebellion.

He sets apart a man named Abraham to be the patriarch of the family, and he gives this family a name, the Israelites. They're a bunch of busted people who lie, cheat, and steal. God blesses them despite their sin, but it still has its consequences. One of the long storylines of consequence is of the 400 years they spent enslaved in Egypt. That all started because one brother, Joseph, was a bit of a show-off, so his older brothers were jealous and sold him into slavery.

But God responded to their sin with rescue. He sent a murderer named Moses to demonstrate his power to the Egyptian Pharaoh, who was not impressed. Eventually, after 10 rounds of power displays that culminate in the death of the firstborn of all of Egypt, Pharaoh agrees to let the Israelite slaves go.

They flee to the desert led by God and his servant Moses. God gives them the basic rules of how to have a stable society since they're new to all of that and have only ever known slavery under a cruel dictator. They've never seen good leadership demonstrated. They're a bunch of uncivilized, ungrateful people who don't really know God or Moses, and they're not keen on obeying either of them. And we haven't gotten to this yet, but I've hinted at it. Their rebellion lands them a 40-year sentence in the desert wilderness.

But they're not alone. In the midst of their sin and stubbornness and foolishness, God knows that what their hearts need is Him. So He sets up camp among them in the desert and gives them the basic rules of how to interact with a holy God when you're a busted sinner. He sets up a team of people to help mediate this relationship, making sure everything goes as He commands it—the Levites. There are a lot of details involved in all of it, but it just goes to show the great lengths God will go to in order to bridge the gap created by fallen humanity's sin—

And this isn't even close to being the greatest length he will go to. This is setting us up for the greatest sacrifice of all, the once and final sacrifice of Christ on the cross, which is the only way any human can be restored to God for all time. We'll continue with this family as we keep reading in Numbers, and soon they'll get to the land God has promised to give this family. Good things are ahead, even though we'll hit some rough patches along the way. Stay tuned.

Now let's talk about February's corrections, things I've done wrong or things I just wish I'd done differently. First, I want to apologize for not delving into the slavery conversation at greater length. I had it written into the script once, but since I'd already touched on it briefly on day 30, I edited it out from other days when the reading covered it for fear of taking up too much time or being too repetitive. But it's an important conversation, both theologically and emotionally, and it's an especially confusing one, so I wish I had spent more time on it.

I want to cover a few basic things here, and then we'll also be linking you to a short video in the show notes. It's a two-minute message from Mike Johnny, who is on DGroup's prayer and advisory board, and I think you'll find it really helpful. As we talked about on Day 30, what we think of when we hear the word slaves is entirely different from what was meant by the word slaves in Israelite culture. In fact, I've heard Caucasians say things like, "'The Bible doesn't ever say slavery was so bad, so what's the big deal?'

And I've heard African Americans wisely offer correction that no, the slavery discussed in scripture was not anything like the Atlantic slave trade. What America and Great Britain have put people through is inhumane and wicked. But what was happening in this ancient Jewish culture was actually helpful to society at large and to individual humans as well. The two scenarios are not comparable.

For the sake of clarity here, I will refer to the Atlantic slave trade as slavery and the ancient Jewish slave agreements as debtorship, because that's what this was, people aiming to pay off debt. So let's talk a little bit about their society and what God was doing in it. When God sets out these rules to begin with, he's not telling them how to have a perfect society. These aren't ideal scenarios he's setting out.

He's giving just enough of a basis for them to be established as a functional society, then he continues giving them direction over time. Not only do most organized societies work this way, building a constitution of sorts and adding some amendments and laws over time, but God does this with us individually too. He gives us new and bigger steps of obedience along the way, refining us as he conforms us to his image.

If he told us everything we ever needed to do and know right after we first met him, we'd probably be like, no, thank you. This is too much for me. This is overwhelming. He gives us baby steps.

The Israelites just met him, and he's got to build their society from the ground up. So he starts with the major things that will just keep peace. And as we've seen, they could barely even handle those. He builds out these laws more over time, unpacking specific applications anytime their society is struggling in a particular area and needs things explained further. This is called progressive revelation, and it happens throughout Scripture. And in the New Testament, we see Jesus digging in a little deeper on a lot of the commandments as well.

So be patient with Scripture as it tells us the story. Resist the urge to make judgment calls on God and His actions based on one day's reading. Write down your questions, research them, pray about them, wrestle with them. But while we're all still learning, let's try our best to give God the benefit of the doubt. Be patient with Him as He's being patient with them. When we see the word slavery in Exodus 21, we may want God to outright abolish it on the spot.

If we look carefully, we see that he does abolish what we think of as slavery. Exodus 21, 16 says, God orders death for anyone who takes a slave against his will and for anyone who buys that slave. In chapter 20, the chapter right before this, when he lays out the Ten Commandments, one of them is, you shall not steal. And this certainly applied to stealing humans as well.

Not long after this, in Leviticus 19:18, he says, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." He's developing their culture bit by bit, doubling down on laws they seem to really struggle with as he sees them struggling, and then driving those laws to the heart, from "do not steal" to "love." So, if God has abolished the slave trade, then what does all this slavery talk about in Scripture?

This is what we're calling debtorship for the sake of clarity in this conversation. Scripture calls it slavery, but we have to use a different word because that word is throwing us off. When it comes to scripture, we have to adjust our meaning of the word slave to fit the context of what it meant in that society. Here's another example. Just like the word game is something different in the 1800s, we have to adjust our understanding based on when the term was being used. We can't overlay our modern experience of slavery on this culture.

Because slavery meant something entirely different back then, and these debtorship agreements were formative to their culture, not destructive. It was a way to pay off actual debt. It was a voluntary agreement, and it was for a prearranged period of time, and never for more than seven years, unless the debtor decided on his own that he wanted to stay with his master. If he did, they would pierce his ear as a mark of agreement between the two of them.

This kind of debtor agreement was not forced labor. It was intended to help the poor get out of poverty. So it was even viewed as generous. Not only that, but God calls the masters to treat them with care. He forbids them from beating the debtors, and he commands that they be treated with respect. As we've seen repeatedly, God is attentive to the poor, the have-nots, the outcasts. If you look carefully through the lens of this culture's language instead of our own lens, you'll see that care and concern showing up here too.

I hope that's helpful. Another thing I wish I'd unpacked with a little more detail was from our conversation on day 37. Here's what I said there. While God never denies that other gods exist, and in fact, he seems to indicate that they do exist, he continues to point out that Israel's loyalty must be to him. He is the one true God.

We're going to cover this topic a bit more in one of our March episodes, but for now, we're going to link you to two helpful resources in the show notes that explain this in great detail. They're really helpful, and I think you'll enjoy them even if this wasn't a point of confusion for you.

Finally, on day 44, we read Leviticus 1-4, which dealt a lot with offerings and sacrifices. Leviticus 2-13 says, In that day's episode, I said, God says that no offerings can be made without salt, and He calls it the salt of your covenant with God. Salt implies preservation, so bringing salt with these offerings is a way of remembering and preserving the covenant with God.

Most of the Jewish commentaries I consulted did say this salt offering was commanded across all the offerings, but it's not entirely clear in the text. So I just wanted to put an asterisk by that and say it's possible or likely that no offerings can be made without salt, but it's also possible that might only apply to the grain offering. So I wanted to add some level of uncertainty to my statement there since neither I nor the people who wrote the Hebrew commentaries were there to see exactly how this unfolded.

As of the date of this recording, which is February 20th, these are all the applicable corrections. Any mistakes I make between now and the end of the month will appear in the March Reflections and Corrections episode. Okay, that's all for our February RNC bonus episode. I'm so grateful I get to read through Scripture with you this year. I'm learning so much. I'm getting to make new notes in my Bible and mark through some old notes that I've since learned are wrong. I love it. I never want to stop learning who He is because He's where the joy is.

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