But if we adopt the conventional practice of translating “lo tirtzoch” as “don’t murder”, and further adopt the conventional practice of not labeling killings we’re morally OK with as “murder”
That doesn’t sound like a convention that the quite fits with culture or spirit of the holy law in question or of the culture which would create such a law.
That doesn’t sound like a convention that the quite fits with culture or spirit of the holy law in question or of the culture which would create such a law.
Huh? The Israelites were for killing people during wartime, and the various cultures that interpreted that law all bent it to exclude the deaths they wanted to cause.
Huh? The Israelites were for killing people during wartime, and the various cultures that interpreted that law all bent it to exclude the deaths they wanted to cause.
Oh, of course you take into account what the Israelites considered murder, and whatever meaning they would have embedded into whatever word it was that is translated into murder or kill. But what we cannot reasonably do is plug in our moral values around killing. Being as we are a culture of immoral infidels by the standards of the law in question! (Gentiles too come to think of it.) What we consider moral killings is damn near irrelevant.
But what we cannot reasonably do is plug in our moral values around killing.
It’s not clear to me what you mean here. I took TheOtherDave to be interpreting “lo tirtzoch” as “socially disapproved killing is socially disapproved,” which is vacuous on purpose. That is, a culture that would create such a law is a culture of homo hypocritus.
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!)
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.
(nods) As noted elsewhere, you’re of course right. I was being snarky in the general direction of my Yeshiva upbringing, at the expense of accuracy. Bad Dave. No biscuit.
That doesn’t sound like a convention that the quite fits with culture or spirit of the holy law in question or of the culture which would create such a law.
Huh? The Israelites were for killing people during wartime, and the various cultures that interpreted that law all bent it to exclude the deaths they wanted to cause.
Oh, of course you take into account what the Israelites considered murder, and whatever meaning they would have embedded into whatever word it was that is translated into murder or kill. But what we cannot reasonably do is plug in our moral values around killing. Being as we are a culture of immoral infidels by the standards of the law in question! (Gentiles too come to think of it.) What we consider moral killings is damn near irrelevant.
It’s not clear to me what you mean here. I took TheOtherDave to be interpreting “lo tirtzoch” as “socially disapproved killing is socially disapproved,” which is vacuous on purpose. That is, a culture that would create such a law is a culture of homo hypocritus.
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!)
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.
(nods) As noted elsewhere, you’re of course right. I was being snarky in the general direction of my Yeshiva upbringing, at the expense of accuracy. Bad Dave. No biscuit.