Strange reason to discriminate
Deuteronomy 23:1 He who is emasculated by crushing or mutilation shall not enter the assembly of the LORD.
PERSONAL COMMENTARY
We've seen that God has issues with the physically challenged and excludes them from any priestly duties. However, now we get to those who cannot even be a part of the congregaton.
I know many of you may believe that this criteria is very strange. Also, please note that God does care about the state of our physical being NOT just the heart (as we're sometimes led to believe).
1 comment:
I'll bet there's a lot more to it than what we read...
For example, how and why did the person's balls in question get crushed or mutilated in the first place?
Although I can only speculate, I imagine such a condition to be resultant from (pagan?) activities that did not align with the customs, traditions, and doctrines of the day.
In the ASV that same verse from Deut 23 reads;
"He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord."
While we could interpret this to mean having a vasectomy or a sex change operation in today's light, could it be that, barring an accident, the person in question chose to have something like this done to himself?
If so, then I imagine the individual was outcast because of the evident act against their natural state of being, a state of being that supposedly reflected the natural state of their inner soul, and a state of being bestowed upon them by God.
And while there is no such reason to bar people from the church today, because of the grace and forgiveness bestowed upon us by our Lord Jesus Christ perhaps, in the days before Christ, members of humankind had no such grace or forgiveness.
And if one acted against the natural state of being bestowed upon them by God, then such an act would also be going against God rather than for Him.
It would be as if the pot itself altered what the Potter created, thinking itself to be more wise and knowing than the Potter.
And so maybe the individual was barred from communing with the church because he was a blasphemer of God, something which the Jews did not take lightly in those days, and something which many churches do not take lightly even today.
So I imagine it to be a case where an individual believed themselves to be better than God, and so they were tossed out as being a blasphemer of God, with the altered or missing body parts being the physical evidence of their blasphemy.
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