SPEAKER_00 0:17

You're listening to the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast, it's fast on free daily deep dive Bible, and right now we're talking about Galatians.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Hello, my name is Matt Whitman. I'm the host of the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And today I just threw on my favorite ascot and pulled up in my reading chair in my office and read a whole bunch of ancient codes of law. I had my teeny tiny little spectacles on because the translations are in super tiny fonts and super old books that are in places where you wouldn't even know where to buy them. It's very sophisticated and very pretentious, but it's just what people like me do from time to time. It felt gross, actually.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

Felt real weird to spend all day poking around at super ancient codes of law. I don't think that's something that normal people would want to do for fun. And there were a few moments in there was like, I'm one cigar and maybe one little swirly thing of whiskey or scotch away from being the most pretentious person on the planet right now, as I sit here and read these ancient documents. But I wasn't doing it for me. I was doing it for us. Because we've been talking about the most famous ancient legal code in the whole world ever for the last week. That's the Old Testament law, the law of God, the law that Paul is bringing up here in Galatians chapter 3, a whole bunch. And last week we spent a ton of time on Galatians 3.10, where Paul says this about the law. Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law. And that just seems very, very harsh. And like there's not a lot of room, not a lot of margin for error there. And so I got to thinking after last week's conversation. Well, what's the tone of the other great ancient codes of law? How into it are the people who wrote it? And do they have little clauses right at the end, like little closing thoughts where it's like this is permanent and forever? If you don't do every single thing in this famous ancient code of law, then may you be cursed forever? Or are they a little more lenient in places? So I went and got the other two most famous ancient codes of law, Hammurabi's Code and the Twelve Tables of Roman law, and I went and poked around at those. And it really was pretty interesting seeing what was in there. So let's start by comparing the Old Testament law with Hammurabi's code. You remember this one from school? Hammurabi was a king in the like the early Babylonian Empire. Whenever we talk about Babylon, right? We always think of Nebuchadnezzar and the guys who were in charge right before Cyrus the Great conquered them. And then the whole Persian era of the Bible happens after that. So we're talking about like you know the 500s BC is what we really picture with Babylon. But there was an earlier version of Babylon that was very powerful as well that goes back to more like the time of Abraham. And then in the 1700s BC, there was this king named Hammurabi, and he wrote down this whole code of laws. I don't remember exactly how many were in there, but it's basically 300 laws. One of the things that I noticed is, man, for all the making fun of the Old Testament law that you see around the internet for seemingly really weird and foreign-sounding laws that admittedly, you know, could raise an eyebrow or make a middle school boy in a locker room chuckle a little bit. For all of the hand wringing and giggling over that stuff, there's a lot of goofy stuff in the beloved Hammurabi's code as well. And Hammurabi is super well regarded for this code of law, by the way. I think there's a relief sculpture or something of Hammurabi at like the U.S. Capitol or the Supreme Court or something like that. I mean, he is celebrated as a forebearer of law, and he should be. I mean, it's a really good code of law for whatever it was, almost 4,000 years ago. And most of what Hammurabi wrote down here is what you would expect. This is laws to make the country work, to protect the weak from being oppressed by the powerful. It really does a lot of the same stuff as the Old Testament law, and there's even one really noticeable turn of a phrase that is present both in Hammurabi's code and in the Old Testament law, and that's that eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth thing. Probably Hammurabi didn't invent that either. It's probably just a phrase that it existed in the ancient Near East going back to time immemorial. But it kind of tells you that the concerns in old school Babylon for how to have a country or kingdom or civilization in the Iron Age were very similar to the concerns several hundred miles to the west out to where Moses and the Israelites were. So it's a bunch of stuff like don't steal from other people, and you can't kidnap other people's kids. That's on there. I think that's a very good rule. If you have a lease on a property, you can't sell it until the lease is up. Interesting. Not everybody does it that way, but I thought that was a very practical rule that you find in here as well. Let's just pick a couple more random ones. Hey, this way. If he hires an ass for threshing, the hire is 20 ka of corn. You see how some of these are just going to be totally irrelevant? Like that doesn't take into account inflation or anything or the advances in technology. It's a short-sighted law that kind of assumes that things will always be the way they were the day the law was written. So that kind of stuff is in here and seems a little trite and a little funny as well. Here's one that's pretty practical. If a man breaks another man's bone, his bone shall be broken. Okie dokie. This one's a bit harsher, but man, there were really serious values in the ancient world about not disrespecting your parents. I mean, heck, this is in the Ten Commandments as well. I mean, not this specific law I'm about to read you, the one I'm about to read you is shocking. But the principle of honoring your mother and father is in the Ten Commandments as well. If a son strike his father. What do you think the penalty is? What's your guess? Right now, what's your guess? Okay, here it is. His hands shall be hewn off. Dang, don't hit your dad. Some of these are really goofy from Hammurabi's code as well. This one seems like the bit from that super old Monty Python and the Holy Grail movie where they're trying to figure out who's a witch and a duck and if she floats. If anyone bring an accusation against a man and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river, his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river prove that the accused is not guilty and he escape unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death.

unknown 6:46

Dang.

SPEAKER_02 6:48

I do not want to be involved in any sort of trial by can you swim in a river? You should probably just figure out before you do that whether the person you're accusing is good at swimming or not. So some of this Hammurabi's code stuff from the 1700s BC seems timeless. Some of it seems maybe a little bit locked in the moment, but the principles stand. Some of it seems pretty goofy and far out. Some of it seems pretty immoral, like all the stuff about what you do to slaves and how they are owned and bought and sold and traded, and what happens if they run away, or if you harbor one, or if one walks one step outside of the city gate. I mean, that seems pretty dated, pretty antithetical to the values we have now. But there you have it. Hammurabi's code. Still, when you get to the end of Hammurabi's code, though, there's no giant sweeping statement about a gigantic curse or pox on the household of anybody who gets any one detail of this wrong. Some of these laws are weightier, some of these laws are not as big a deal, and the punishments aren't that big a deal. And in general, what it looks like Hammurabi is going for here is a functional, noble society where the powerful can't just willy-nilly oppress the weak. And you're going to want to try to obey these laws, especially the handful of them that have real harsh penalties. Okay, fast forward a little more than a thousand years to the end of the era of the kings of Rome and the beginning of the Roman Republic. So we're talking about laws that came into place in like the 400s or 500s BC. There's these ancient 12 tables of Roman law. I'm not going to read you a whole bunch of them. I mean, they sound a lot like American law, frankly, and American law is largely derived from Roman law, so I suppose that makes sense. But ultimately, if you go through the 12 tables real carefully, what you discover is a lot like Hammurabi's code. Some of the laws are just laughable, ridiculous. Some of them imagine that times will never change and they're just very short-sighted laws. Some of them have draconian punishments for the littlest things. Several of them betray the crazy ancient attitudes they had about women and slaves and kids and all the kind of stuff that you would expect. But in the end, there isn't some big giant statement about if you don't obey every law in the Twelve Tables, you're cursed across the board. Rather, you know, there are little punishments here and there, and there's some that you'd really want to avoid, and others are like, ah, if you got it wrong, it's not that big a deal. And the last line of the twelve tables specifically says, whatever the people hath last ordained, this shall be law. The end. So you can change it. So it's kind of like the American Constitution. I mean it's the supreme law of the land, but you're allowed to change it. It's a difficult process to amend it. And I think it was Jefferson, one of the architects of all of those founding documents of my country, who said something to the effect of, you know, law needs to be flexible because the earth belongs to the living. Maybe I'm attributing that to totally the wrong person, but it seems like the principle applies. Here's the point. One, I just wanted you to imagine me in that ascot with that cigar in the room, reading these ancient documents with spectacles on, and maybe imagine that I'm just super smart and important for a minute. Hopefully that was fun for all of us. The second reason I wanted to bring it up was to contrast these other two very famous ancient codes of law with the Old Testament. They all have laws that seem irrelevant to us now because of the world has changed. They all have laws that account for practices that we don't do anymore. They all have laws that probably we should still have now that would make us more moral and better if we abided by them. They all have laws that demonstrate that whoever wrote the law is trying to have an ordered society where things are noble and there is justice and order and not chaos. All of that they have in common. But the two secular ones, there's, I don't know, a lot more leeway, I guess, if you will. There's a little more room to get things wrong, just pay the price for it or whatever. But the Old Testament law isn't like that. Remember, Deuteronomy 27, 26 is being quoted by Paul here. It's the last thing that it's the last line, it's the closing line of the Old Testament law. And it says, cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law. It is way more hardcore than these other two sets of laws. And the other two sets of laws are pretty hardcore. I mean, stuff's getting chopped off in those a lot. But this one, if you get anything wrong, it's like you're guilty of all of it. If you violate anything in the law, the weight of the whole law is now upon you. And Hammurabi is not willing to take that stand. The people who wrote up the twelve tables of Roman law, they're not willing to go that far either. But those other two ancient codes of law, those secular codes of law, they're not primarily theological in nature. They're not dealing with the question of God's chosen people and the one God who created the universe, and they're not dealing with the question of how to have or whether it's possible to have, right standing before God, perfection and holiness that matches that of God. But that extra layer is there in the Old Testament law. And no one, look, I mean, no one could uphold perfectly the twelve tables of Roman law. I mean, I guess I haven't gone through each one to be like, well, actually, could you get all of these? It's a much shorter code of laws, so if you could get any of them, maybe you could get the twelve tables, because it's the shortest. But it'd be hard to keep that up because it's just a lot of words and it's a lot of law. It would be harder to keep up the nearly 300 laws of Hammurabi's code, but the way the Old Testament law is written, and especially the way Jesus interprets it in the Sermon on the Mount at the beginning of the book of Matthew, no way. So the hardest of these three super famous ancient laws to uphold is the Old Testament law of God. Also, the harshest of the three laws in terms of penalty and height of expectations is the hardest one to uphold. Highest standard of the three? Old Testament law. Biggest curse for not upholding it perfectly? Old Testament law. Dang, it's a great law. It reveals the character of God, the holiness of God, but it is really, really demanding, even when compared with the other next two most famous expressions of ancient law, that being Hammurabi's Code and the Twelve Tables. I thought that was kind of instructive in further setting up the conundrum here that Paul is leading us into. And the next verse that Paul is going to say is just the most logical conclusion ever, and we'll unpack it more tomorrow. He says in Galatians 3.11, okay, clearly no one is justified before God by the law. That is even more evident to me after looking at competing laws from a similar time frame in the ancient world. Paul could not be more right, and his observation could not be more obvious. No one is going to be justified by that law. Go read it for yourself if you need to. And if you do go read it, make sure you bring a little swirly glass of scotch, and probably a cigar, and tiny little spectacles, and an ascot, so everybody will know how super smart you are. I'm Matt, this is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.