Mothers have this thing about their sons.
It’s natural, it’s powerful and it’s often entirely irrational.
Take, for instance, the mother of the
Palestinian terrorist who killed an Israeli teen asleep in her own bed. Mom
says her son was “a hero” who made her “proud”.
Okay, that’s a little extreme. But the
mother of the Bataclan bomber who inadvertently self-detonated told reporters
her son never meant to hurt anyone and may have been “stressed”.
Seems like a theme to me. And if mothers will
defend sons who have inarguably committed atrocities, they far more often find
themselves excusing comparatively minor misbehavior, usually in hope that their
boy was just sowing his wild oats and will eventually come around.
Basically, if you can get your own mother
to publicly denounce you, there’s a fairly reasonable chance you are one bad,
bad dude.
That’s one reason I can’t get too worked up about the provision in the Torah that the mother and father of a rebellious son should denounce him in front of the elders of their city and have him stoned to death.
Lots of people are, though. Xpngs says, “It
shows that us non christians aren’t the crazy ones”. Cave Dweller says, “It
shocks me what Christians will try to explain away and defend!” Partly Cloudy
says, “It’s never acceptable. [The Bible] is a horrible and disgusting book”.
Meh, not so much.
The Horrible and Disgusting Book Says …
Here’s the actual passage in question:
“If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.”
Okay, so we’re not talking about a severe case of
the terrible twos here, or even a bad episode of teenage acting out. The
passage concerns a son (i) old enough to drink wine or beer and able to
acquire them on his own or against the restraints of his parents; (ii) physically
strong enough to take whatever quantities of food he pleases by intimidation or
force, or he could not be a glutton; (iii) given to doing these things unrepentantly
and characteristically, as opposed to making a slip here and there; (iv) still
inexplicably living under his parents’ roof and draining their resources, or else
they could hardly be held responsible for disciplining him; and (v) genuinely evil in character.
In short, not a kid having a tough time
growing up, but an overgrown reprobate who rejected the imposition of all
God-given authority and all the norms of the society in which he had been raised. Loosed into the world with nothing but his own appetites
driving him and no fear of being held accountable for his actions, what would
that have meant for Israelite society? Someone else’s daughter raped, someone
else’s business robbed. If such a son could not summon a single ounce of
respect for the father and mother who raised him and continued to provide for
him, how could society expect to manage him?
Three Levels of Safety Net
Still, there are some pretty awful parents
in the world. What if his mom or dad happened to be completely nuts? What about
false accusations or overzealous religious loonies? Well, there were three levels
of safety net on the law of the rebellious son to ensure it was not mistakenly
or inappropriately enforced:
The first level was the elders of the city. The parents had no
authority to initiate a stoning or to gather their neighbours like a lynch mob
to help them. They had to take their case to the elders and give their
testimony, where it would be considered against established facts known to what
would have been a tight-knit community: Were the parents credible? Was the
father known to be a bully or household tyrant? Was the mother reputed to be a
hateful, dishonest harpy? Was there independent confirmation available as to
the extent of the son’s dissolution and rebellion, or did testimonies conflict?
Was there any reason known to the elders why leniency should be considered?
Any charge that might result in death would
be considered very, very carefully indeed, because killing an innocent man would bring judgment on those who orchestrated it. It was this that made the prayer of the Lord Jesus for those who carried out his execution necessary; imagine the wrath of the Father unleashed otherwise!
The second level was the young man himself. Israelite law consistently allowed accused parties
to testify on their own behalf under oath. No action was taken in the service of justice without carefully
weighing all available evidence. If a rebellious son was stoned by the
community, it was not because he had no opportunity to make his case, but
because his own words gave the elders reason to believe his parents’ account.
Was his behavior chronic and unrepentant? Had the accused been sufficiently
warned? His testimony as to these matters would either contradict or confirm that
of his parents.
But the biggest safety net on this provision
of the law was always the rebel’s mom.
Israelite law required the testimony of at least two persons to establish every
matter, and this was no exception. It is both “his father and his mother” that
were required to speak against the accused. One would not do. The testimony must be confirmed, and confirmed convincingly. It was impossible
to execute a son without his mother’s buy-in.
How wicked would a son have to be for his
own mother to serve him up on a platter? Such an action goes against every
grain of maternal instinct in recorded human history.
The Next Level
Interestingly, Anne Batler claims this law
was never enforced. Of course we have no way to know whether she’s right, but certainly I cannot
think of a biblical example. I hope it never had to be. How many stubborn, rebellious
sons simply left home to wreak their havoc elsewhere, knowing they were
flirting with disaster? We’re not told.
But laws do not exist simply to be
enforced; they exist so they don’t have
to be. The point of the statute was not to decimate the male population of
Israel, but to make such a thing unnecessary through deterrence. In order for parental authority to reach the heart of a reprobate, there needed
to be a “next level” at which his conduct could be adjudicated. If such a
threat was effective even once and the rebel reconsidered his actions in view
of the potential penalty, then the law served its purpose.
We live in an age of God’s grace. Christians
are not pushing for the stoning of their children (or anyone else’s), even those
who may be outright abusive. Jewish civil law does not apply in our Western
societies, and there is no biblical reason it should be forced on a people who
are indisputably not capable of keeping it. After all, God’s earthly people
couldn’t keep it either.
That doesn’t make the law “silly”, “horrible”, “crazy” or “disgusting”. It just means godliness requires something a whole lot more transformative than good law.
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