The Bible contains some radical ideas that are staggering: Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. Pray for those who abuse you. Be a leader by being a servant. Humility is a virtue. Wash your hands and wash your food. Don’t eat everything: eat “clean” animals. Bury human waste outside the camp. Love your neighbors and be a Good Samaritan. Treat women equally. There are no ‘races,’ because “there is neither Jew nor Greek” Galatians 3:28. All human life is sacred, from helpless infants to helpless elderly.
The Bible also contains radical ideas that may not seem radical because we have grown used to them. Two of these are in the fifth chapter of Numbers. The first says that if a man is found to be a thief, he must return what he has stolen. That’s common sense, right?
But the Bible adds more: he must “add to it the fifth part thereof, and give it unto him against whom he hath trespassed” Numbers 5:7.
That is, if a man is caught stealing, he must not only return the stolen goods, but he must pay the victim an additional 20 percent.
This additional payment is known as restitution.
Many jurisdictions follow this example today, providing for all kinds of restitution, and in all different amounts. In Texas, for example, our civil law provides that if a company takes advantage of a consumer, the consumer can file suit against the defrauding party and may claim treble or TRIPLE damages. That would be a restitution of 200 percent. In common practice, most defendants cure the problem and rush to settle, thus avoiding such a harsh penalty.
Numbers five contains a second idea that is interesting, but has not proven workable in modern U.S. law. If a man in ancient Israel found himself so obsessed with jealousy that he was convinced his wife had been unfaithful to him, he could present her to the priest, explain his suspicions, and the priest would speak to her and give her a drink to consume, charging her that if she has been unfaithful, the drink will make her ill, but if she has not been unfaithful, the drink will have no effect.
“This is the law of jealousies, when a wife goeth aside to another instead of her husband, and is defiled, or when the spirit of jealousy cometh upon him and he be jealous over his wife” Numbers 5:29-30.
In a world of domestic violence, where jealous men from O.J. to Othello obsess over the faithfulness of their wives, a “law of jealousies” such as that of Numbers 5 could be useful. But it is no longer an option.
The Lord no longer operates as He once did. Even if we had a priest to perform the ritual, God would not be in it and, like the Salem witch trials, this ritual would no doubt devolve into something horrible in which the women always suffered, guilty or not.
Nevertheless, in ancient Israel, it must have been an amazing tool for addressing an unusual, but very real problem: rather than jealous men becoming murderers, there was a process whereby the matter could be handled in a court of law. Today, we use tools such as private investigators and ultimately a legal divorce if necessary. (Rather than taking the law into your own hands, it is always better to ‘take them to court.’)
And while God bluntly announces, “I HATE DIVORCE” (Malachi 2:16), it is always preferable to murder.
God, thank you for the wisdom of your revolutionary word. There are so many amazing ideas in the Bible. Some are so radical like “love your enemies.” But some are so simple we don’t realize they were once so valuable and novel, such as the law of restitution and “the law of jealousies.” Show us the wisdom and the answers in Your word. Give us the wisdom to appreciate even divorce as a potentially life-saving choice for a relationship destroyed by jealousy and hate.
AΩ.
Household Words: 