ThomisticCajunAggie wrote:
I have. I agree the genealogies in Numbers and the books of Chronicles are tedious. Numbers, though, is a far more interesting book than Leviticus.
I don't agree with that, the strictly ceremonial laws in Leviticus are pretty boring, but there is a lot more than that in there are a lot of law governing things like war, slavery, marriage and other moral issues, and when you do the study of it, you come to see that, by the standards of their time, the laws of Moses were extremely progressive and defied the moral standards of their time.
An excellent example of this are the laws describing the treatment of female prisoners taken during war. According to the moral standards of Israel's neighbors, there was nothing wrong with murdering a woman's entire family and gang-raping her over and over until she was dead. But this is not allowed under the law of Moses. Instead, you are supposed to give her 30 days to mourn the loss of her family, shave her head completely a sign of mourning, and then marry her, and once you marry her, you are not allowed to divorce her ever and if you abuse or mistreat her, you have to set her free to return her hometown if she wishes to.
I've seen many internet atheists (who aren't exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer) complain about how this practice is 'barbaric', and maybe by the standards of our time, it is, but it was a dramatic moral improvement over the standards of the time and was incredibly sensitive and compassionate. And I don't think modern people understand the significance of shaving her head, which would not only be a sign of her mourning but would also make her significantly less attractive, and perhaps make one have second thoughts about whether he really wanted to marry her. And forbidding divorce means that once a man marries a female captive, he becomes responsible for her forever, he can't just use her for sex for a couple months and then toss her aside, leaving her with no means of support leaving her homeless and possibly starving, and may have to turn to prostitution to survive.
And you don't realize just how progressive these ideas were unless you read Leviticus in depth and several commentaries on it