Jack Black Is Right About the Bible  You can stone your wife or sell your daughter into slavery. >> Well, we ignore those verses. >> Well then, friend, it seems to me you pick and choose. >> This is just this is classic Satan. >> All right, let's see it. >> He'll take the word of God because he knows the word of God well and he'll twist the word of God. observing that the Mosaic law has a bunch of different prescriptions of stoning and also allows a man to sell his daughter into slavery is not twisting anything. But as we're going to see in this video, this content creator twists what's in the Bible in order to authorize and justify the dogmas that he imposes upon the Bible in order to get it to say what he needs it to say. And so then you get really confused. You're like, "Wait, am I following a moral God?" >> Every person who is ostensibly following the God of the Bible is following a God of their own making. So the question is, are you making a moral God? >> Is the Bible really true? Can I really trust the Bible if it says that we're called to stone our wives and and sell our daughter in slavery? >> The question is not, can you trust the Bible? The question is, can you trust the interpretive tradition that you're imposing upon the Bible as a unifying framework? This wasn't just like, "Hey, stone your wife." It wasn't gender- based. >> This is false. There were absolutely stoning laws that were genderbased. So, for instance, in Deuteronomy 22, if a man married a woman and somehow discovered that she was not a virgin, all the men of the city were supposed to stone her. And there is absolutely no such reciprocal law prohibiting a man from engaging in premarital sex because men were not prohibited from engaging in premarital sex. Because their ideas about human sexuality and the propriety of sexual intercourse were not based on some universal notion of purity. They were based on property rights. Because when a man married a woman, he was purchasing her procreative capacities and sexual availability. Those were commodities that were bought and sold and the woman went along with them. And when you purchased a woman's sexual availability and procreative capacities, you expected both to be in pristine shiny new condition. And if they were not, well, that's a violation of that social contract. So that is why women were prohibited from engaging in any and all premarital sex. They were a commodity to be bought and sold. No such expectation was imposed upon men who were absolutely not prohibited from engaging in premarital sex in and of itself. Now there could be inappropriate premarital sex depending on the social status of the partner, but premarital sex in and of itself is nowhere prohibited on the part of men. anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. So, it is entirely false to say that the Bible never prescribes stoning in a gender-based way. It absolutely does. >> This was a law that if you committed adultery, yeah, you got stoned. This was old covenant. This was the the the civic law of the the nation state of Israel. >> So, there are two different methods of picking and choosing going on in this clip. The reference to old covenant and the reference to civic laws of the nation state of Israel. The old covenant kind of picking and choosing has to do with the identification of these laws as part of the Mosaic law which Christ came to fulfill, meaning you're no longer under those laws. And there are absolutely a lot of passages in the New Testament that say that. However, there are also passages that deny that. The Gospel of Matthew, for instance, insists that the Mosaic law will continue in effect until the heavens and the earth pass away. In fact, Jesus then goes on to say, "Your righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees." And then he goes on to say, "You have heard that Moses said X. Well, I say why." And Jesus ratchets up the severity of the law. The Gospel of Matthew envisions following Jesus by keeping all of the Mosaic law. Now, if you don't like that, you're going to reinterpret that away. That's part of the picking and choosing. You are picking which part of the New Testament is going to overrule which other part of the New Testament. It is the process of negotiating with the text because the texts are not univocal. Even the New Testament itself is not univocal. If you want to extract a single unified and consistent principle from the Bible, you have absolutely no choice but to make a decision regarding which passages are going to be centered and given priority and then which passages are going to be subordinated to those centered passages, reinterpreted, marginalized, or just outright ignored. So when you say, "Oh, that's old covenant." You have picked and chosen. You have chosen Paul and you have subordinated Matthew to Paul rather than the picking and choosing that would go the other way around. Those who say, "Well, followers of Jesus are required to still keep the law of Moses." That would be picking Matthew and then subordinating Paul and other authors to Matthew. And you can't say, "Well, majority rules." That's also picking and choosing. You can't say, "Well, I'm going to follow what Jesus said." Nope. Jesus in Matthew is quite clear about the law continuing in effect. Jesus in other gospels is a little less clear, but seems to suggest that the law no longer continues in effect for followers of Jesus. So, you have no choice but to pick and choose. Now, that was the old covenant picking and choosing. Then, we have this civic law picking and choosing. And this is something that is nowhere in the Bible at all. And this is the division of the Jewish law into either two or three categories so that we could pick and choose which categories are going to be left behind and which categories are going to continue in effect. Initially it was a bipartite division into moral and ceremonial law and we decided the moral law stays the ceremonial law goes. And while there are some fuzzy notions of a distinction between these kinds of laws in some parts of the New Testament and in the Hebrew Bible, they are nowhere near consistent across the New Testament or the Hebrew Bible. And what belongs in either of those two categories is also nowhere prescribed in the Bible. And the people who assert that bipartite division today make different choices about what's going to go in one and what's going to go in the other. But civic law is the third designation, the tripartite division that was made centuries later closer to Aquinus. And the idea with the civic law is that everything that goes into that pot just expired when the people of Israel were no longer an actual state. And so we don't have to worry about those at all. So these are all postbiblical ways of trying to negotiate with the text to identify the laws we want to keep versus the laws we want to shed. So that is also picking and choosing. But that picking and choosing has nothing to do with what's actually in the Bible. That picking and choosing is entirely post-biblical and arbitrary. And then when he's talking about he's talking about Exodus 21 where you can sell your daughter into slavery. That's not true. >> It's absolutely true. That's wasn't slavery. Uh, this was absolutely slavery. Here's the text of Exodus 2:7. When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. Now, as a slave renders the Hebrew phrase la. And amma is a specific kind of enslaved girl, specifically a sex slave. This is like concubinage. This was a person who was absolutely not free and who was entirely subject to the sexual will of her master. This is a slave pure and simple. >> And it gave her rights. If she didn't want to be with the man, she could leave. >> So, two issues here. One, the fact that the text of the covenant code in Exodus 21 gives rights to an enslaved person in absolutely no way, shape, or form whatsoever makes that enslavement any less enslavement. Pretty much all civilizations that practice enslavement had certain restrictions imposed upon slave masters or certain rights granted to enslaved folks. Even in the pre-Ivil War American South, there were rights that were granted to enslave folks, at least on paper. And keep in mind, when it comes to biblical slavery, all we have is what is on paper. So, we can look at the law code of Louisiana from 1825. And it says quite explicitly there that a master is not allowed to beat his enslaved person to death or even maim him. That is a right granted to an enslaved person at the very peak of pre-Ivil War American Southern slavery. So the notion that to grant an enslaved person rights somehow magically makes enslavement no longer enslavement is laughably false. And even more laughably false is the notion that the covenant code in Exodus 21 allows a girl sold into sex slavery to just leave if she doesn't like her master. That's absolutely false. Here is the entirety of the covenant code's treatment of the question of sex slavery. Starting in verse 7, when a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. And this is a reference to the fact that uh a debt slave, an Israelite who has been sold into debt slavery or sold himself into debt slavery goes free in the seventh year. When it comes to female slaves, that is not the case. At least not in the covenant code. In Deuteronomy 15, it is the case that both male and female Israelite debt slaves go free in the seventh year. Another indication of the multivocality of the biblical text. and in this case the legislation of the Hebrew Bible. But we go on, if she does not please her master, who designated her for himself as a concubine, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people since he has dealt unfairly with her. Couple things to note here. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, which means he can sell her to other Israelites. what he's not allowed to do is sell her out of the country. Um, and the redeem part doesn't mean he just gives her her clothes and says, "You're free to go." The redeem part means he can sell her to someone else, either back to the person who originally sold her or someone else. It's not giving her back to the person who originally sold her. Redeem means to buy back. there has to be another exchange of money. So here it's if the man doesn't like her, he can sell her again as long as it is not to foreign people. But let's continue. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as a daughter. So all this is saying is if he buys a sex slave that's to be given to his son as a concubine or a wife, then he must treat her as if she is a legitimate wife, a first wife. Verse 10, if he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife. If he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out without debt, without payment of money. So there is one condition in which she is allowed to just walk free and that is the condition that she has been purchased as a concubine or a wife and then the man marries a second wife and then diminishes her food, clothing or marital rights. In that case, she has a claim to make against her master and she can walk out free without anybody having to pay for her. So there is a condition under which she walks free. That condition is not that she just does not like the guy who purchased her. That is laughably incorrect. >> All this is is going back to the garden where where Satan looked at the man and woman says, "You can't trust God." First, Satan has absolutely nothing to do with the Garden of Eden because Satan was not the name of an individuated malevolent figure until after the Hebrew Bible was complete. At best, Satan is an office within the divine council that could be occupied by anybody in certain parts of the Hebrew Bible. And guess what? Satan is never anywhere in the Hebrew Bible identified in the Garden of Eden. But also, guess what? The serpent in the Garden of Eden was right. As even the text of Genesis 3 makes explicit because the serpent tells Eve, "You will not die, but you will become like one of the gods." That's Genesis 3:5. Now, Adam and Eve, do not die according to the threat of Genesis 21:17. Whether you want to characterize that as a lie or God changing their mind or whatever, what God threatens in Genesis 21:17 simply does not happen. The serpent was right. You shall not die. And then in verse 22, God acknowledges that the other thing the serpent said would happen happened. They have become like one of us, like one of the gods. The two things the serpent said would happen happened. the thing God said would happen didn't happen. If the text of Genesis 2 and 3 has absolutely anything to say about what happened in the Garden of Eden, the serpent was right. Did God really say you shouldn't eat the apple? That wasn't the serpent's question. Now, who's twisting things? So, it is important for you to understand the word of God deeply. You don't understand what even the word of God means in the Bible because it never refers to the Bible. It never refers to the scriptures as scriptures. It refers to God's message and to Jesus. And that message is the message, not the medium. When you understand the phrase word of God to refer to the texts of the Bible, you misunderstand it to be referring to the medium rather than the message. So one, you have misidentified what the word of God is. Two, you don't know the first thing about the word of God. If we accept that it refers to the Bible, you are woefully inadequately informed about the biblical text. What you are informed about is an interpretive tradition and a negotiating tactic. You're familiar with how we have imposed unifying frameworks on the text in order to get the text to say what we want them to say. And so you refer to the end result, the outcome of that process of negotiation with which you are acquainted as if it were the Bible itself. And it's not. You are confusing the Bible for your interpretive tradition regarding the Bible. You need to get remedially educated about the Bible itself rather than just the interpretive tradition that allows you to make the Bible say what you need it to say. I send a free daily devotional every single morning. Click the link in my No, I'm good. And the fit for this video I think says Romans go, Jack Black Is Right About the Bible, YouTube, 01ked4w0z25s646g3e93n4p5x4.