To put it another way, the convention of how you interpret a law is more important that the written content of the law, and so the relevant question is if the Israelites saw “lo tirtzoch” as absolutely opposed to killing or not. (I would imagine not, as there were several crimes which mandated the community collectively kill the person who committed the crime!)
First, I saw the culture and spirit of the drafters of such a law to be self-serving / relativist / hypocritical, and so thought the convention was the embodiment of that. Your claim that the convention didn’t fit with the culture suggested to me that you thought the Israelites saw the law as unchanging and unbendable.
Second, the comment that claimed what we consider moral was irrelevant struck me as evidence for the previous suggestion, that there is a moral standard set at one time and not changing, rather than us modeling the Israelites’ exmaple by bending the definitions to suit our purposes.
It’s plausible we agree except are using different definitions for things like culture and spirit, but also plausible we don’t agree on key ideas here.
I thought that was about what I said.
I got the opposite impression from two sources:
First, I saw the culture and spirit of the drafters of such a law to be self-serving / relativist / hypocritical, and so thought the convention was the embodiment of that. Your claim that the convention didn’t fit with the culture suggested to me that you thought the Israelites saw the law as unchanging and unbendable.
Second, the comment that claimed what we consider moral was irrelevant struck me as evidence for the previous suggestion, that there is a moral standard set at one time and not changing, rather than us modeling the Israelites’ exmaple by bending the definitions to suit our purposes.
It’s plausible we agree except are using different definitions for things like culture and spirit, but also plausible we don’t agree on key ideas here.