Your assignment for this week was the following verses Deuteronomy
17:4, 17:9, 19:18.
Jewish law avoids the excuse “ignorance of the law” by having the two or three witnesses perform community policing. They stop the criminal, warn him that what he is doing is a crime, make him either go away, or say “I don’t care what the law is” and attempt to complete the crime. Then what?
Jewish law avoids the excuse “ignorance of the law” by having the two or three witnesses perform community policing. They stop the criminal, warn him that what he is doing is a crime, make him either go away, or say “I don’t care what the law is” and attempt to complete the crime. Then what?
Deuteronomy 17:4: and
it is told to you, you shall listen and investigate well and if it’s true, the
matter is real, this abomination was done in Israel…
Deuteronomy 17:9: You shall go to the priests, the
Levites, and the judge that shall be in those days and investigate and they
shall tell you the word of the judgment..
Deuteronomy 19:18: The judges shall investigate
carefully…
Every crime has to be tried before judges. I’ll talk about the makeup of a court later
but for now, obviously there have to be judges, and it is their responsibility
to get to the truth of a case.
Now I want you to notice that Deuteronomy 19:18 is next
after a verse we already looked at, I think, verse 17, which says “The two men
who have the quarrel shall stand before the Lord before the priests and the
judges that shall be in those days.”
How do you know two men have a quarrel? Because they were fighting. So battery and attempted battery have to come
before judges to award damages. Under the
principle “you shall have one law,” that also means the case of the pregnant
woman, and the case of the woman who grabs the man’s nasty place.
One of the urban legends about Torah is that the verses in
Deuteronomy and Numbers in this lesson and the last one did not exist before
about 630 BCE. The Bible has information
that disagrees, see Samuel II, 14:6-7. When
Yoav, David’s nephew, had had enough of David and Avshalom sulking after
Avshalom had Amnon his half-brother murdered, Yoav sent a woman to David to
complain that her community wanted to put her surviving son to death after he
killed her other son. Her complaint
hinges on the phrase “nobody got between them to stop it.” Since nobody stood up and did their job as
witnesses, they had no right to condemn the surviving son to death.
This is a concept called “due process”. It is in the American constitution in
Amendments 5 and 14. There’s more to it
than that, however, and that’s where investigation comes in.
The requirement for investigation includes Exodus 23:1
where it says “you shall not raise empty rumors.” Investigation rules help prevent judging a
case based on rumor, and I’ll discuss them next. You have no assignment because this information is in Mishnah and Gemara.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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