Food in the Bible: Exodus 23:14-19

Exodus 23:14-19 Three times in the year you shall hold a festival for me. You shall observe the festival of unleavened bread; as I commanded you, you shall eat unleavened bread for seven days at the appointed time in the month of Abib, for in it you came out of Egypt.

No one shall appear before me empty-handed.

16 You shall observe the festival of harvest, of the first fruits of your labour, of what you sow in the field. You shall observe the festival of ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in from the field the fruit of your labour. ¹⁷Three times in the year all your males shall appear before the Lord God.

18 You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with anything leavened, or let the fat of my festival remain until the morning.

19 The choicest of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God.

You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.

Setting aside the weirdo who made sure to cook a baby goat in the milk from its own mother for a second, let’s consider the appointed festivals. This passage appoints three main festivals that the Israelites should celebrate. The feast of unleavened bread, or Passover, commemorated their liberation from slavery in Egypt. This was a springtime feast. The feast of first fruits celebrates the first of the harvest, around August sometime I would guess. The feast of ingathering would then be some time in October when the growing season ended.

I could look up more information on these festivals and their meaning in Jewish ritual religion, but you can use Google as well as I can. What I’m more interested in is how in tune to nature and agriculture the rhythms of these festivals are. They occur at natural times when you would celebrate the first harvest, the end of the growing season and the first planting. If those are already good occasions to celebrate (and they are) why not include God in them? It’s easy for us to miss how close to the land, natural rhythms and agriculture the readers and writers of the Bible were because our lives are so far removed from that connection.

It is often mentioned that the first fruits and sacrifices were to be the best of the harvest and best of the livestock. I’ve often heard this used to say that we shouldn’t hold anything back from God, but give our very best. What we seem to miss is a more agrarian reading. What does it mean for a farmer to give a lamb without blemish or choicest fruits? Since the discovery of evolutionary biology, we know that this is a crazy sacrifice. This means giving up the very best genetics in your herd or crop. Farmers have practiced breeding and seed-saving for centuries and they know how important it is to select the best genetics to save.

By asking for the “choicest first fruits,” God is not trying to keep the farmer down. Instead God reminds us that we are not the authors and creators of those choicest genes. We can trust the Creator of those genetics to continue to provide. Just as in the Sabbath commands, we are reminded that it does not all depend on us.

Food in the Bible: Exodus 23:10-13

Exodus 23:10-13 For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; ¹¹but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard.

12 For six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest, so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your home-born slave and the resident alien may be refreshed. ¹³Be attentive to all that I have said to you. Do not invoke the names of other gods; do not let them be heard on your lips.

This is the commandment for the Sabbatical Year. It is followed by a list of the annual festivals to be observed and then a promise that if the Israelites followed the commandments that YHWH would conquer Canaan for them, the Promised Land. It’s important to recognize that this covenant is conditional, “But if you listen attentively to his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes” (Ex 23:22). So the giving of the land to the Israelites is contingent on them following particular agricultural practices.

I don’t know what the agricultural practices of their neighbors in the Ancient Near East were (Philistines, Egyptians, Assyrians or Babylonians). It would be interesting to study that and compare it to the biblical commands. We do know that the recommendation to let fields lie fallow for one year out of seven is better for the land than the intensive production schedules of industrial agriculture today.

As I mentioned in my sermon, the Sabbath commands often combine the ecological and the economic. Let the land lie fallow (good agricultural practice) so that the poor will be taken care of (just economic practice). We have done everything we can to create a division between the economic and the ecological. No matter how hard we try, it appears that this is impossible. Since economics is the way that we order our lives together, it follows that it must involve the ecological. Our lives cannot be ordered together without affecting and connecting to the earth. If we choose to order our lives in such a way that we ignore the ecological, it follows that there will be consequences in both the economic and ecological realm. And that seems to be the case today.

I included the last verse of this passage on purpose, because this is another area that we tried to make into a separate sphere of life. The last verse connects the ecological and economic to idolatry. Augustine talked about the right ordering of love. The problem was not that material things were evil. The problem was that we put them in the place of God. All love properly ordered finds its ultimate place in love for God. Idolatry is not about choosing the wrong religion or worshipping too many gods (though that might be part of it). Ultimately idolatry is about misplacing our allegiances and putting things out of order.

So this command, which tells the Israelites how they need to rightly order their agricultural practices and their social relationships, puts both things under the umbrella of rightly ordering their allegiances. I often hear people say that you should, “Put God first.” This notion puts God somehow in a category that is abstracted and detached from the reality of the world we live in. Here we see that putting God first clearly involves ecological and economic action and right relationships. God does not simply appear at the top of our checklist. Our allegiance to God orders the way we eat, the way we shop, the way we talk, the way we answer the phone, the way we do our job, the way we live our lives and the way treat others.

Food in the Bible: Exodus 23:4-5

Exodus 23:4-5 When you come upon your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you shall bring it back. When you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden and you would hold back from setting it free, you must help set it free.

Don’t let anyone tell you there’s no grace in the Old Testament. There’s plenty of violence, but you also have passages like this that echo Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount to “love your enemies.” This fleshes out Jesus’ abstract statement to love our enemies. This tells us what it actually looks like to love our enemies. For many of us, loving our enemies is an internal thing dealing with our own feelings and thoughts. Exodus clearly tells us that loving our enemies looks more like action than thought or feelings. Loving our enemies is something concrete and difficult. It is easy to love my enemies in my head, without having to deal with them in real life.

It is interesting in this passage that nothing is stated about loving the enemy directly. The writer acknowledges that there is a tendency to hurt people indirectly, through their possessions, reputation, livelihood, etc. I’ve known some very passive aggressive people who do everything to maintain appearances in public, but do everything they can to sabotage other people behind the scenes. This is the situation here. You come upon your enemy’s ox or donkey. No one is around. No one is looking. You could break a leg and pretend you found it that way. Get back at your enemy and pay no consequences. This isn’t how the people of God are called to live with others, including enemies.

Think about this in terms of modern day protests against corporations that are destroying habitats, or agribusiness companies that are devastating the fertility of our land. These protests sometimes look like this passage. What if you “found” the pesticide implement or fertilizer spreader of a large farmer in the middle of the night with no one looking? Should you sabotage it? Isn’t it for the greater good? You’ve no doubt heard many stories of environmentalists protesting something by sabotaging equipment or “spiking trees.” These are dangerous and unbiblical methods for bringing about the kingdom. The kingdom looks like enemy love, not sabotage.

The biblical model, exemplified most in the life and death of Jesus, is that our means should always be congruent with our ends. You cannot achieve change through the kinds of methods that undermine your ultimate goal. There are certainly gray areas that are difficult to navigate. Nonetheless we must pursue sustainability with integrity. We should do what we can to help conventional farmers, not hurt them. We should speak out against corruption and abuses of power, but we should be careful that we don’t become like them as we stand against injustice.

Food in the Bible: Exodus 22

There is a lot of material in this passage, but I would like to look overall at the connections between the disparate topics. Here is a sampling of the variety of commands in this chapter.

When someone steals an ox or a sheep and slaughters it or sells it, the thief shall pay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep. The thief shall make restitution, but if unable to do so, shall be sold for the theft. (22:1)

When a man seduces a virgin who is not engaged to be married, and lies with her, he shall give the bride-price for her and make her his wife. (22:16)

If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, you shall not deal with them as a creditor; you shall not exact interest from them. (22:25)

This chapter combines rules about agriculture, sex and economics, three things we usually don’t talk about in the same sentence. For us these are distinct areas of life that we keep very separate. In the world of the Ancient Near East these things were understood to be inextricably linked, bound together.

Wendell Berry has also made the connection between our misuse and misunderstanding of sexuality and our similar misuse of the land.

Sexual love is the force that in our bodily life connects us most intimately to the Creation, to the fertility of the world, to farming and the care of animals. It brings us into the dance that holds the community together and joins it to its place (Sex, Economy, Community and Freedom, 133).

There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth. Between our relation to our own sexuality and our relation to the reproductivity of the earth, for instance, the resemblance is plain and strong and apparently inescapable. By some connection that we do not recognize, the willingness to exploit one becomes the willingness to exploit the other. The conditions and the means of exploitation are likewise similar (Unsettling of America, 120).

(both quotes taken from Scripture, Culture and And Agriculture)

In other words, sexuality is not something separate and apart from the natural world. Rightly understood it is part of the continuing creation. Our relationship to each other is connected to our understanding of our connection to creation. If our view of others makes it possible for us to exploit them sexually or view them as objects, we will naturally objectify creation as something to be used and exploited. This passage also makes the connection between abuse of sex, abuse of the land and abuse of the poor. As said above, a willingness to exploit the land is connected to a willingness to exploit people. These things are inextricably linked.

Each of these areas involve breaches in relationships. The first area is a breach in relationship between neighbors and the animals and fields that constitute their livelihood and survival. The second area is a breach in appropriate sexual relationships in which one party is being exploited by another. The last are is a breach between those who have opportunity and means of sustenance and those who live on the margins of society. It is easy to see in the Ancient Near East how these areas overlap and interrelate. Social constructs gave women, aliens and the poor precarious positions in society. Their fate rested in the hands of others. These social constructs were connected to the agrarian “land-as-life” culture.

It is difficult for us in the modern world to see that these areas continue to be interrelated. There is no other way for us to survive than to live off the land. We have outsourced this task to foreign lands and foreign people in our own land. Therefore our relationship to the poor and to the land continues to be interconnected. We have most succeeded in divorcing sexuality from a “land-as-life” worldview.

Pornography, as one example, commodifies sexuality and turns it into a pleasure-producing product with no emotional or relational attachments. The lie is that pornography is not exploitative and does not hurt anyone. I think Berry delineates the way that misuse of sexuality creates the possibility for exploitation by objectifying others. It is not enough to simply be against exploitative forms of sexuality. In order to deal with the damaged relationship that this produces we must regain a positive understanding of sexuality that incorporates it into a holistic understanding of creation.

Food in the Bible: Exodus 21:28-36

Exodus 21:28-36 When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall not be liable. If the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not restrained it, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death. If a ransom is imposed on the owner, then the owner shall pay whatever is imposed for the redemption of the victim’s life. If it gores a boy or a girl, the owner shall be dealt with according to this same rule. If the ox gores a male or female slave, the owner shall pay to the slave-owner thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.

If someone leaves a pit open, or digs a pit and does not cover it, and an ox or a donkey falls into it, the owner of the pit shall make restitution, giving money to its owner, but keeping the dead animal.

If someone’s ox hurts the ox of another, so that it dies, then they shall sell the live ox and divide the price of it; and the dead animal they shall also divide. But if it was known that the ox was accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has not restrained it, the owner shall restore ox for ox, but keep the dead animal.

These laws are easy for us to skim over and ignore as irrelevant rules for a bygone era that has no bearing on our modern lives whatsoever. Let me try to convince you otherwise.

Notice first the assumptions about the culture in which these laws would apply. People would be familiar enough with their neighbor’s ox to testify whether or not it had a history of goring and violence. People are intimately familiar with their neighbors, their animals and the land. This is very different than the world most westerners, particular urbanites, experience. Many people see more concrete than trees, actively avoid getting to know their neighbors and only see occasional animals. How would our lives and relationships to people, animals and the land be different if we had this kind of intimacy? The Bible assumes this kind of relationship. Perhaps we need to recover some of that in order to begin understanding the relevance of these laws.

It’s also important to remember that this economy is very different from our own. Cows are currency. Oxen provide horsepower for plowing and working a field, transportation of goods, and eventually meat. Damaging, killing or stealing someone’s ox would be like sabotaging an industrial farmer’s combine or tractor. The work could not get done and would be completely overwhelming. These are serious stakes.

The difference between the ox and a tractor should be clear. The ox is a sustainable part of agriculture. They tread lightly on the soil, not causing devastating compaction and erosion. They don’t require off-farm inputs of petroleum. They don’t need ongoing maintenance and repair. They also produce resources for the farm in manure for fertilizer and eventually meat for the family or village. Our imaginations are captured by industrial notions of efficiency. When laid out this way, ox and horsepower may be slower, but in the end it is more efficient, better for the soil, produces higher yield long-term and does not divorce us from the land and animals the way machinery does.

The key to this passage seems to me that being rightly related to the land makes us rightly related to our neighbor. Inevitably there will be conflict and problems, but here we see that the solutions are much easier when we are connected to our neighbors and the land.