I have a growing concern about the possibility of reconciling the view of ethics found in the Jewish Scriptures with the one found in the Christian Scriptures (I’m talking about the Old and New Testaments for those of you who don’t have any Jewish friends). I’ll illustrate my point through a specific example. I just finished 2 Samuel, and chapter 24 is hard to digest. As summary, suffice it to say that David took a census of Israel, apparently to stoke his ego, and so he started to feel guilty (v .10). God told him that there would have to be a penalty, and essentially, David was given a choice: either God would punish David, or God would punish the Israelites. David decided that God should take out his wrath on the Israelites, and so over three days, God killed 70,000 Israelites (v. 15).
Evangelicals love talking about the Bathsheba stuff, but what about this? If a modern-day Christian leader condemned 70,000 to death to spare himself three months of uncomfortable living (v. 13), would we not call him the worst person ever? There are two answers I commonly hear from conservatives, and they are both insufficient:
1) “Well, God is variously harsh and then merciful in the Jewish and then the Christian Scriptures, so really there is no ethical difference between the testaments.” I hear Acts 5 about Annanias and Saphira trotted out as an example. Here are two people condemned to death because of something that seems to most of us like a “little white lie.” True, that’s a pretty harsh penalty from our perspective. But in that case, and everywhere else in the Christian Scriptures as far as I can tell, person A is punished for the ‘crimes’ of person A. But in the case of David cited above (and many other cases in the Jewish Scriptures), person A does the crime, and persons B, C, D, E, etc, do the time. That is a drastic ethical difference.
2) “Well, all people deserve hell, so really anything is justified.” Besides the fact that this sounds like something Dick Cheney would say, I regard it as insufficient for essentially the same reason as I reject the first justification. Usually, when we think about ethics, a person is given a punishment that is relevant to his or her crime. But why did those 70,000 people having sinful natures make them liable for a mistake made by David?
Does anyone have some good insight or some helpful references that speak to this issue?
