Deuteronomy

It’s October 31—the day my Presbyterian friends call Reformation Day, but pretty much everybody else calls Halloween. Some
Christians think it’s OK to celebrate Halloween, and others don’t. I’m not going to enter that discussion in this post, but I do want to use the occasion to do a little biblical investigation.

In our culture Halloween is typically associated with fear—haunted houses, goblins, and so on. I suppose an outside observer would find it odd that we humans like to be scared, as long as we know it’s safe—and for some, even because we know it’s not safe.

More seriously, I see a lot of fear in the world around me, fear that seems to come from every direction. In politics, fear of the other guy winning. In health, fear of this or that environmental concern. In parenting, fear of this or that factor hurting my child. Any number of my newsfeed friends comment on a post with a single word: “Scary!”

I’d like to lay out a theology of fear from a single biblical book.

Deuteronomy is at the heart of Scripture. It’s the climax of the Constitution that God himself drew up for his chosen nation. Scholars have noticed that it’s in a specific legal form common in its day, called a “suzerainty covenant.” It establishes a relationship between an emperor and his people, laying out the terms of the relationship—and this covenant is unusually gracious to the conquered people. It puts the lie to the nonsense about the “angry God of the Old Testament.”

And it talks a lot about fear. This very common Hebrew word appears 39 times in 32 chapters in the book—31 times as a verb, 6 times as an adjective, and twice as a noun. And its usage pattern is very interesting.

Did you know that the book says both that we should fear, and that we shouldn’t?

The difference is in the objects.

Here’s what God’s people shouldn’t fear—

The
wilderness (Dt 1.19; 8.15)
The
Canaanites, with whom they’re about to do battle (Dt 1.21, 29; 3.22; 7.18; 20.1,
3; 31.6), specifically
- The
  king of Bashan (Dt 3.2)
- Occupying
  the land (Dt 31.8)

So there’s no need for us to be afraid of our circumstances, or the people who stand in opposition to us.

Hmm. That’s pretty much everything that we fear, isn’t it?

Don’t be afraid.

Not about politics, not about health, not about the environment, not about people.

Let me anticipate an objection. I’m not suggesting that these things aren’t significant, or that they aren’t important. A nation’s political leadership can make life miserable (Pr 28.15), and disease is so devastating that Jesus was moved to heal it (Mk 1.41), and God has given us responsibility to care for creation (Gn 1.28), and sin causes unimaginable grief to God himself.

But we shouldn’t be afraid. We have a heavenly Father, and he is working his plan, and he cares for us (Lk 12.22-32).

God even told his people that the very people they were afraid of were going to be afraid of them (Dt 2.4, 25; 11.25; 28.10). How about that.

But perhaps surprisingly, we’re not supposed to be fearless.

Here’s what God’s people should fear—

There’s only one entry on that list. But Deuteronomy emphasizes this fact far more than the fact that we shouldn’t fear anything else. It gives us lots of information about fearing God—

How should we fear him?

All our days (Dt 4.10; 6.2; 14.23)
Intergenerationally (Dt 4.10; 6.2; 31.13)
By
- keeping his commandments (Dt 5.5, 29; 6.2, 24;
  8.6; 10.12; 13.4, 11; 17.13, 19; 19.20; 21.21; 28.58; 31.12)
- worshipping him (Dt 6.13)
- swearing by his name (Dt 6.13; 10.20)
- loving him (Dt 10.12)
- serving him (Dt 10.12, 20; 13.4)
- clinging to him (Dt 10.20; 13.4)

Why should we fear him?

Because he is “fearsome” (Dt 7.21; 10.17) and
does “awesome” things (Dt 10.21; 28.58)
Because it results in
- Things being well with us (Dt 5.29; 6.24)
- Prolonged days (Dt 6.2, 24)

My natural tendency is to get all this just exactly backwards. I fear temporary and empty stuff, and I find my heart lacking in fear toward the only one who matters.

But here’s the thing.

Fearing God isn’t like fearing everything else. It’s liberating; it’s beneficial; it’s joyous. It’s what we were designed to do.

It fits.

Oh that they had such a heart as this always,
to fear me and to keep all my commandments,
that it might go well with them and with their descendants forever! (Dt 5.29)

Photo by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash

There’s no sense in my jumping into the Kavanaugh battle with a personal opinion; there are bazillions of those already, and I have no experience that gives me any special insight into legal issues.

But I do find something waaay back in the writings of Moses that may give us a little something to think about.

The legal difficulty of sexual assault is that it typically doesn’t happen in the city square, with lots of witnesses. The nature of sex as a private function means that abuses of the sexual function, like its legitimate uses, tend to happen in private. And in private, there are just two witnesses. If the sex is abusive, then the two witnesses are the perpetrator and the victim.

He said, she said.

That’s how it almost always is.

In biblical times it was the same way, of course. I note that in those days, unlike today, rape was a capital offense. I’ve heard it argued that today it shouldn’t get the death penalty because if the rapist knows that, he’ll just go ahead and kill the victim, since that would eliminate a witness without increasing his penalty. I recognize the logic, but I still would prefer to see the death penalty for rape, particularly in a day when DNA testing can make the identity of the perpetrator absolutely certain.

But back to my point. In biblical times, rape got the death penalty. But here’s the thing: elsewhere the biblical law restricted the death penalty to cases where you had at least two or three witnesses (Num 35.30; Dt 17.6).

Contradiction, no? Rape gets the death penalty, but there are never enough witnesses to actually get it carried out. The woman loses, every time.

Patriarchy.

Ah, not so fast.

There’s a special provision for allegations of sexual assault. In the midst of some broad-ranging regulations in Deuteronomy 22 (help an animal stuck in a ditch [4]; don’t kill a bird sitting on a clutch of eggs [6]; build your house so that visitors are safe [8]), there’s a point about sexual assault.

²³“If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, ²⁴then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

²⁵“But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. ²⁶But you shall do nothing to the young woman; she has committed no offense punishable by death. For this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbor, ²⁷because he met her in the open country, and though the betrothed young woman cried for help there was no one to rescue her.

Interesting.

If the attack happens near other possible witnesses, then we assume that in a nonconsensual encounter the woman would protest in ways that those nearby would hear. If she says later that it was rape, then she is judged to be lying since she didn’t scream during the assault.

Women lie sometimes too. Even about things as serious as rape. We have to take that into account.

But if the event occurs away from possible witnesses, the woman gets the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she did call for help, and there was nobody to hear her.

Now, a woman having a consensual sexual encounter in the woods might lie too. She could decide later that it was a mistake, and she could decide to get the poor guy in beaucoup trouble. That could happen.

But here, she gets the benefit of the doubt. As the only witness. In a charge that bears the death penalty.

It’s not a perfect world. God knows that. And he indicates that he expects us to do the best we can in these difficult decisions. We need to remember that women lie just as certainly as men do, for all kinds of reasons. And we also need to remember that sometimes we need to give a woman in a difficult spot the benefit of the doubt.

When do we do which? That’s a really tough call; as someone who served on a jury for a case of child sexual assault, I know exactly how difficult it is.

But if you support Kavanaugh simply because you’re a Republican, or you oppose him simply because you’re a Democrat, then you’re in no position to be heard in such a critical decision.

Which, I guess, disqualifies pretty much everybody this time around.

Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash

Dan Olinger

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On Fear

On Sexual Assault, Due Process, and Supreme Court Confirmations