John Walton’s “Lost World of the Torah” (Part 3): Not a Divine Rule Book; Rather Reflecting God’s Character Within the ANE Culture

In John Walton’s most recent book, The Lost World of the Torah, he attempts to correct a number of misconceptions people today, both Christians and non-Christians alike, have of the Torah. Or more properly speaking, he attempts to teach what the Torah actually was understood to be within its original, ancient Near Eastern (ANE) context. In my first two posts about the book, I emphasized what I felt were Walton’s four most important points:

1. The ANE was an entirely different cultural river than 21^st century America—meaning, they simply viewed things differently than we do today.

2. To ancient Israel, the Torah was not seen as codified case law, but rather as instruction in wisdom.

3. What was unique about the Torah was that it seen as the stipulations within the Suzerain-Vassal covenant treaty that YHWH (a deity) entered into with Israel (a people). 

4. The holiness of Israel was a status of their being identified with YHWH within the covenant; it was not a description of their moral integrity.

These four points play an important role in understanding just what the Torah was and how it functioned within ancient Israelite society. For it needs to be stressed again that we pretty much interpret the Torah wrongly. It doesn’t matter if you are a Christian or a hard-core atheist—the standard misconception is that God took Israel, said, “Here are a bunch of moral rules you, and everyone throughout time for that matter, have to obey—because if you don’t I’m going to burn you in hell for forever!”

Atheists thus point to certain verses in the Torah, and say things like, “See? God is a homicidal monster! Just picking up sticks and raking leaves on Sunday will get you stoned to death!” In turn, Christians say something like, “Oh, there really are two different kinds of laws in the Torah—some are cultural and only apply to Israel back then, but then others are meant for everyone for all time.” And when asked how one can determine the difference, the answer (for all practical purposes) is this: “Well, the ones that seem weird to us or that we don’t want to do—those are the ones we’ll say are cultural.”

Needless to say, I’m not really impressed with either approach to the Torah. Both still approach the Torah with the underlying assumption that it is really just a divinely-dictate moral rule book that is to be imposed upon humanity.

Walton, though, is telling us that is not the case. The Torah is to essentially be seen as the founding document—the constitution, if you will—of the nation of ancient Israel. Its aim is to establish the basic parameters of justice and governance. Of course, moral values are involved in that, but the point is that the Torah shouldn’t be seen as a mere rule book from on high.

The Great Symbiosis and YHWH’s Justice and Order

Along with this is something else that Walton points out that is important to realize—it involves a fundamental difference between ancient Israelite society and the other cultures of the ancient Near East (ANE). In the other ANE societies, there was something known as the Great Symbiosis that defined their relationship with the gods they worshipped.

Basically, it looked like this: the gods didn’t really care about the community; the entire temple system in the ANE was there for human beings to provide for the needs of the gods. The gods weren’t “moral,” and they certainly didn’t require their worshippers to be moral. All the gods wanted was their required sacrifices—as long as they got that, let the human beings do whatever they want. Therefore, in the ANE cultures, the justice system was set up by the rulers in order to ensure an orderly society that could maintain its religious obligation to care for the gods.

By contrast, as Walton points out, “…in Israel, the Great Symbiosis is gone. Yahweh has no needs—for food, clothing, or housing. He still requires rituals (and more or less the same sorts of rituals), but they have been repurposed. …In Israel, in place of the Great Symbiosis we find that the relationship has been redefined (by the covenant) as the relationship of suzerain to vassal, in which humans display God’s glory and enhance his reputation rather than providing for his needs” (71).

What that means is this: Although the religious and priestly rituals elaborated in the Torah for ancient Israel looked similar to those of other ANE cultures, the entire purpose of it all was vastly different: (A) They weren’t providing for YHWH’s needs, but were rather emphasizing His covenant and promises to work through them as His people to eventually bring blessing to all nations (as expressed in the Abrahamic covenant); and (B) YHWH Himself was the one who established justice and order within Israel because He was intimately concerned with justice among His people. Therefore, the justice and order He established in the Torah, within the context of the covenant, had the purpose of reflecting what kind of God He was.

Or to put it another way: the Torah wasn’t about dictating universal rules for all time that one had to obey in order to avoid hell. The Torah was about illustrating what YHWH’s character was, in light of the realities of the ANE culture. The Torah wasn’t about setting down the rules to establish some sort of perfectly moral society. The Torah was about reflecting God’s image within the obviously imperfect culture of the ANE.

The Cultural Realities of Israel and the ANE

The upshot of all this is that although the Torah obviously contains legal material (call them “rules” if you want)—and although that obviously carries with it moral implications—the aim of it all is to promote the love of God and the love of neighbor. And what we see in the Torah is what the love of God and the love of neighbor would look like within the culture of the ANE, complete with all its ancient traditions and institutions that seem so foreign and odd to us.

The problem is that we in the modern world read the Torah and, not surprisingly, pass moral judgment on the Torah because we have this idolatrous notion that the Torah is a divinely-dictated moral rule book for all time, but then find things in the Torah that are at odds with out 21^st century modern sensibilities. We never stop to consider that the Torah is working within the context of many of the traditions and institutions that were common place for that time. Therefore, the Torah isn’t trying to give “God’s recipe” for a perfectly moral society. It is illustrating what reflecting God’s character looks like given those ancient realities, however imperfect and morally questionable they may be.

Given all this, Walton goes through a laundry list of examples that highlight just how different cultural and societal institutions of the ANE are from our own. Among other things, he addresses: Marriage, Slavery, Economy, Political Systems, Social Status/Patriarchy, International Relations, Crime and Punishment, Sexual Ethics, Relationships with Foreigners, and Community Relationships. Walton’s point is thus pretty simple: Societies in the ANE did things differently than we do things in 21^st America, and those differences should affect how we read and understand the Torah. Allow me to just tease out a few of the examples Walton gives.

Marriage/Slavery/Incarceration

Perhaps the two most common condemnations of the Bible are that it supposedly treats women as commodities (i.e. as seen in the “bride price” in marriage), and it endorses slavery. In terms of marriage, Walton points out that marriage in the ANE wasn’t a matter of two people “falling in love” and choosing to get married all on their own. Marriages were seen more in terms of a community merger. In addition, families often worked as a unit to grow their own food and raise their own flocks. Therefore, when a man and a woman were married, the family of the woman was losing a laborer. The “bride pride” wasn’t so much seen as a “purchase” of a woman as it was seen as compensation for the family who was going to obviously be short handed as they tried to live off the land. Our modern culture, though, is obviously quite different, so we tend to see this practice in a very different light, from our own cultural perspective and declare that it is immoral to buy and sell women in marriage like that. But people in the ANE didn’t see it that way.

Similarly, especially given the United States’ horrible history of pre-Civil War slavery, we read “slave” in the Torah and immediately think of the horrendous race-based institution in our own country’s history. But the fact is, given the different culture of the ANE, the institution of slavery was considerably different. If a family had a bad harvest, they were going to be on the verge of starvation. And so, debt-slavery was a way for those who suffered through bad seasons could recover. In addition, indentured servanthood was a way to pay off debts—it was quite different than slavery in America.

And let’s take one more example: incarceration and prison. Walton explains, “Locking people away for months and years at the expense of the state as a form of post-trial punishment (our idea of prison) is unattested in the ancient world. More frequently, prisons incarcerated debtors or political rivals, not criminals. This gives a very different meaning to the word prisoners in the ancient world” (147). In other words, if you were guilty of murder, there was capital punishment. Now, some people look at that and deem it immoral—is it? I can flip things around and ask is it really humane and moral to lock a person up in prison for 50 years with hosts of other murderers and criminals at taxpayer expense?

Here’s the Point…

We in 21^st century America are not living in the ANE—we live in an entirely different culture and time. Therefore, it would be foolish to try to blindly “obey the rules” of the Torah, as if we were 8^th century BC Israelites. If we tried to do that, we’d be making the very mistake Paul was accusing the Judaizers of in his letters to the Romans and the Galatians: treating the Torah as if it was a list of rules we have to obey that will make us moral and righteous is a misuse and misunderstanding of the Torah. To treat it as a moral rule book is to, in fact, turn it into an idol.

The fact is, there is no perfect, utopian economic or political system. No matter what it is, no matter how well-intentioned one might be, there will always be people who find a way to corrupt the system, take advantage of it, and abuse others within it. Therefore, it is simply wrong to think the Torah is trying to outline “God’s perfect moral system.” We shouldn’t look to the Torah as if it is trying to dictate or prescribe such a thing.

That’s not to say the Torah is irrelevant to us now. Sure, we are not ancient Israelites, but if we understand what the Torah is, we should realize that, far from trying to dictate a perfect moral system, the Torah was illustrating for the Israelites at that time what reflecting God’s character looks like within the cultural and political systems of the ANE at that time. And that should serve to teach us today that we need to seek how we can reflect God’s character within our modern cultural and political systems.

Now, although I don’t agree with absolutely everything Walton puts forth in his book, his overall points of emphases are very good and thought-provoking. For me, what it all comes down to is this: The Torah doesn’t seek to impose rule-keeping and it doesn’t seek to dictate some sort of perfectly moral society. Rather, the Torah seeks to point people to the character of God. Therefore, the lesson we can learn from it, even today, is that, regardless of the society or culture we happen to live in, regardless of its political or judicial system, we are to try seek to reflect God’s character the best we can, given those cultural realities—and that comes down to loving God and loving our neighbor. And that can only be done through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit.