Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2005-2006
Session #1

Scripture Forum
Session #1
Chizuk Amuno Congregation
October 21, 2005

Texts:
     Exodus 22:21-27
     Luke 3:7-14

Introduction to the first session by Dr. Randi Rashkover:

• The topic of this session of the Scripture Forum is economics. Economics was chosen as the focus of this textual study because an exposure of the economic order is revelatory for our understanding of the moral, theological, and social orders in the text.
• The economies present in the texts to be studied have largely been forgotten in the contemporary traditions, with moral, political, and social reper-cussions. We need to come to terms with the economies in the texts in order to make sense
  of their political and moral diagrams.
• In terms of pastoral concerns, moreover, muscling up our familiarity with the economic orders present in these texts can have real congregational value, especially now that questions of poverty, debt release, and the global market have become especially significant.
• It will be useful for all of us to increase our literacy on these economic issues, while at the same time avoiding the tendency to conceptualize them, spiritualize them, moralize them, etc.
• There are no rules, but it is best to try always to put the text first. The point of reading Exodus, chapters 19 through 22, beforehand was to put the text we will study in its narrative context.

The first text: Exodus 22:21-27 (NRSV translation)

You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children orphans. 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. If you take your neighbor's cloak in pawn, you shall restore it before the sun goes down; for it may be your neighbor's only clothing to use as cover; in what else shall that person sleep? And if your neighbor cries out to me, I will listen, for I am compas-sionate.

The discussion begins:

• Question: Who is the neighbor in v. 27? There are a number of different categories at play in the text thus far -- "resident alien," "widow and orphan," and "the poor among you," -- and it's interesting to consider which of them is correlative to the neighbor. There is a refrain of crying out to God in verses 23 and 27, so it's worth asking if there is a correlation between the resident alien, widow, and orphan who cry out in v. 23 and the neighbor who cries out in v. 27.
• Remark: In terms of categories, beginning in chap-ter 19, there are numerous references, first to "the people," and then to "my people." It's almost as if "my people" are not equated with those gathered at Sinai, but are equated with the
  poor among those gathered at Sinai.
• Response: The text "you shall not wrong my peo-ple" seems counterintuitive. Technically, "you" and "my" should actually refer to the same people.
• Question: The text seems to have a cadence of commandment: "you shall not," "if you do, then I." What kind of a text is this?
• Response: You may be asking about the economy of the text. Is this a conditional text -- "if-then"?
• Response: That's how it starts, but that's not how it ends.
• Remark: Right at the beginning of the text, the reasoning is based in the personal experience of the people: "You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." By the end of the text the emphasis has shifted to the experience of the other: "If your neighbor cries out to me, I will listen, for I am compassionate." So there's a progression: First the commandment is grounded in your own experience, but you want to get to a point where it doesn't have to be grounded in your experience but in your compassion for someone else.
• Remark: The economy I see in the text is that people cry out and God listens, which echoes the very beginning of Exodus. Right before God calls Moses in the burning bush, God says that He has heard the cry, the groaning, and the mourning of the people, and He will respond. The commands in Ex. 22:21-27 are a reminder of where the people have come from: God responded to them when they cried out, and God will respond now to the cries of those who are wronged among the people.



• Question: Looking at the wider context of Exodus 19 - 22, I note that in chapter 21 especially there is a lot of case law. What is to be done in each case is decided by humans. Why now suddenly do we switch to a law or prohibition that will be dealt with by God? With respect to this text, in Bava Metsia 31b the rabbis tend to assign God's role to the beit din, the religious court.
• Response: From a biblicist's perspective, we generally look at this text as covenant formula; and while the earlier laws that you're referring to in the beginning of the section might belong to the human realm in the way that they're formed, we understand them as terms of the general covenant between the Israelites and God. These are all things that the Israelites have to do as part of the covenant. When we compare the format and style of this passage with various diplomatic treaties from throughout the Ancient Near East, this text lines up with them. Similar elements include a historical prologue; a senior and a junior party; stipulations or terms, which would be the law codes; a series of blessings and curses; and an oath and witnesses or some sort of ratification ceremony. We also differentiate according to the format of the writing: "If this happens, then that happens," we call "casuistic"; "Thou shalt not do this" we call "apodictic." As a general rule, the other law codes that we have from the Ancient Near East tend to be mostly casuistic in form. They're not completely lacking the apodictic, but, generally speaking, there is more of the former.
• Rabbinic response: Earlier in the text, you have "if the ox does this, this is how you will dispose of it." Here you have "if you don't do this, I will do it." So you still have two casuistic parallels. What we have in this text may be different material from what is in chapter 21, but the redactor who put
  all this together was operating according to some kind of logic.
• Biblicist's response: I'm not saying it's different material.
• Rabbinic response: In the earlier case you have what clearly seems to be case law. In this in-stance, is it case law when it's no longer a case but the appeal goes directly to God?
• Biblicist's response: We have no examples from anywhere in the Ancient Near East of them citing any law code, biblical or otherwise; no examples of it.



• Remark: In the first "you shall not," which refers
  to the oppression of the resident alien, there is a reason given [i.e., "you were aliens in the land of Egypt"]. Why? It may not be self-evident that you shouldn't wrong a resident alien. But the next "you shall not" doesn't have any reason given. Why not? Because it is self-evident. No justification is needed for not abusing widows and orphans.
• Response: One could say that the justification [for not abusing widows and orphans] relies on the earlier justification. There is some similarity be-tween wronging a resident alien and wronging a widow or orphan, so the justification given for the one suffices for the other as well.
• Question from a Christian participant: Is there a linguistic tie, and a connection, between the language in v. 23 -- "if you afflict them" -- and the language of the affliction of the Israelites in Egypt? The same question could be asked of the statement, "they will cry out to me."
• Remark: It is interesting that the text moves from a reason to a threat: Don't oppress because you were oppressed; don't abuse because if you do, I will get you [v. 24: "I will kill you; your wives shall become widows and your children orphans"].
• Question: Are verses 21 and 22 really related? That is, could the clause "for you were aliens in the land of Egypt" be cut and pasted into the text after the word "orphan" in v. 22?
• Response: One could argue that the clause could be pasted into the text all the way down, since there are no further justifications offered.
• Remark: The text says in v. 24 that "your wives shall become widows and your children orphans."
• Response: So there is an instrumentalist reason: You need to do this not because of something that transpired in the past but because of the consequence of what will happen to you.
• Response: And because of who you're supposed to be in the world. "Aliens in the land of Egypt" seems too specific to be put at the end of all these com-mands.
• Response: The word in the text translated as "resident alien" is ger, "stranger," a person who is not part of ami, "my people." Justifications are not needed when you're dealing with "my people" [in the rest of the text]. But a justification is needed for applying Israelite law to a person who is not part of the covenant.
• Reaction: Except the text says "any widow." Is "any widow" any widow within the community, or
  is it any widow? If it is the latter, then there is already a movement beyond the community of Israel and the ger.
• Response: There is a condition placed on the widow and orphan. It is not just any widow and orphan, but the widow and orphan who cry out to God. If I'm a Buddhist widow and I don't cry out to the God who is the Compassionate One, will the God who is the Compassionate One hear my cry and respond? The widow and orphan must cry out to the Compassionate One who liberated the people from Egypt.
• Response: Having studied the lament tradition in the Hebrew Bible, I could make a case for saying that the structure of the deliverance narrative, wherever it's found in the Hebrew Bible, has in it "if you cry out" or "because you have cried out." We don't know if God will respond if we are silent, but the text teaches that when someone cries out, God will respond. So I would want to say that the cry of affliction is in some way constitutive to the action of deliverance. Whenever a text or a story is structured around a deliverance narrative, you have this cadence: You were in distress, you cried out, the LORD heard, the LORD acted, you were delivered, therefore you shall . . ." The structure of the narrative that the Tanakh uses over and over again to talk about being rescued or delivered really presses the issue of agency and what is considered deliverance. What sits under the um-brella called "deliverance"? Is it just the agency of God's action; or is the cry of the widow, the cry of the poor, the cry of the oppressed constitutive to the deliverance narrative and, therefore, to the deliverance experience?
• Response: The agency of the cry is contextualized by the legislative responsibility of the people. It may be the case that the cry is a moment of agency that motors divine deliverance, but that is contextualized within the responsibility that the people themselves have for actually being the agency of, not deliverance per se, but of justice. So the cry of the widow and orphan is a penul-timate moment of agency but not a primary one.
  It is necessary but not sufficient.
• Remark: We have here a compelling case for
  the necessity of the community to be just: We shouldn't be having people cry out. The goal here is that God should nap because no one's crying out. Would the redemption of the world mean that there is an uninterrupted divine sleep because God has worked God's self out of a job?
• Response: We shouldn't go to either extreme in this text. That is, we should not look at the text as a dichotomy between the community's being singularly responsible during the divine sleep and God's being singularly redemptive. It is also inter-esting to consider the relationship between law and prayer in this text. There are certain things that can be accomplished through our legislative actions: We have the legislative ability not to abuse a widow and orphan, to lend money, to care for the poor, etc. But in the event that we do not do these things, the prayer life of the widow, the orphan, and the poor may provide another avenue of restorative justice.
• Response: There's an important subtlety in here, too. It's not "if the widow and orphan cry out," but "if the widow and orphan cry out to me [i.e., to God]." This is preceded by the Decalogue -- "I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods." By calling out to God, the widow, the orphan, and the poor are essentially doing their part of the covenant. It's important to look at covenants as being absolutely conditional because they are contracts.
• Reaction: In Ex. 19:4, it says: "[You have seen] how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to Myself." It wasn't because of anything the Israelites did per se; God brought them out of Egypt out of unconditional love. That complicates the contractual model. I'm also curious about the question raised concerning any widow or orphan. This is any widow or orphan who cries out to God -- perhaps a Noahide, or perhaps a ger who stands in the Noahide covenant, a ger who functions with a theological assumption.
• Question: Aren't you laying the Noahide covenant on this text?
• Response: No, I'm just asking about the category of ger and the relationship between widow, or-phan, and ger.
• Objection: I understand Noahide as a rabbinic category of covenant, but I'm not sure I understand it as a scriptural category of covenant.
• Response: All I'm trying to decipher is if the wid-ows and orphans are those who pray to God or not. And if they do pray to God, does that mean that they're among the people or not?
• Remark: It seems possible from this text to say that any widow can recognize that the God of Israel is the God to cry to in affliction -- a recognition that is not a function of being part
  of the covenanted people -- and that the text is already pushing something that will open up much later. If any widow could cry out to the LORD, that says something pretty extraordinary about what the text is doing.
• Objection: What point would there be in including that in legal responsibilities within the covenant between God and God's people? Why would God put in something about some widow in the Amazon who cries out to Him, and why would an ancient Hebrew care? I read the text as a progression from those outside to those inside: The foreigners are those outside. Widows and orphans are not out-side -- they're in the community -- but they aren't full members of the community. I'll argue that there are separate categories of foreigner, widow, orphan, and "my people," given the potential differences in organization. The text is circling in on responsibilities to those outside and then to those inside the community.
• Response: I think that's right, but I don't want to lose the question you raised. Is the text in fact saying that if there is a widow in the Amazon who cries out, there is some link between her crying out and a member of the covenant community? If she is crying out to God, then the economy and social fabric is broken.

Note: There was immediate opposition to this notion from several Jewish participants all at once.

• Question: Okay, you don't think so. Why not?
• Response: If the women of the Amazon are abused by a member of the tribe of Israel, then there is a case. But if they are abused by someone who is not an Israelite, there is no case.
• Response: That's a great reading. I'm only arguing that there is another possible reading, and that the text is already pressing the community beyond itself. That's the issue I want to press.
• Question from a Christian participant: Is there not a truth to the God who exceeds any particular manifestation or understanding? God seems to be working toward something that is beyond any particular historical thing.
• Question from a another Christian participant: For whom does God care in this text, only for the peo-ple Israel?
• Response from a Jewish participant: In this text, yes. And I think that when we talk about a stran-ger, we should go back to the covenant that God formed with Abraham in Genesis 17. Abraham had to circumcise not only his family but also his serv-ants and anybody who was living within his midst.
• Response: I understand that a strict reading of the text may require us to say that within the framework of this text, God is speaking to Israel. But what is God implying in this text when God is speaking to Israel? Does God hear the cry of peo-ple outside of Israel who recognize the God of Israel as the God to cry out to? And if that is the case, then does Israel have a responsibility beyond itself to the cry of the widow in the Amazon.
• Response: If we look beyond this passage, if we read to the end of Isaiah, then certainly God has
  a responsibility to non-Israelites within the frame-work of this particular passage.
• Objection: I'm not asking about God's respon-sibility, but the responsibility of Israel.
• Remark: Verse 23 narrows the populace of those who will hurt widows and orphans: "If you abuse them . . ." "You" represents a member of the people Israel.
• Response: So the "you" cannot abuse the widow in the Amazon, except in a global economy.
• Another response: What you are doing and how you are living affects the widow in the Amazon. What you are doing and how you are living op-presses her.
• Reaction: Then if she cries out, you're in trouble.
• Response: It doesn't matter. I think what the text is saying is that you need to be compassionate because of who you are and how God has worked in the past. If your wife is widowed and your children orphaned, how would you want them to be treated? You would want them treated with compassion, so you should treat other widows
  and orphans with compassion.
• Question: Is it possible for my community here in Baltimore to have an effect on the widow in the Amazon so that she cries out? I think this text opens up that question. Are you talking about justice only within the community Israel? Does
  the community Israel have a responsibility beyond itself? And if it does, do I have to physically beat the widow in the Amazon, or can the way I act in my own house have a deleterious effect on her? If you are responsible for the pain of that widow and she cries out to God, you are in deep doo-doo.
• Question: How deep?
• Startled response: Are we supposed to measure suffering?
• Response in question form from a Jewish participant: If I take away something from the widow or the orphan here in my community personally, do I have a greater responsibility than I do if I affect the widow and the orphan in the Amazon indirectly?
• Response from a Christian participant: That is a great question. We may have different answers.
• Question from another Christian participant: How would your hermeneutic be applied to verses 18 through 20? [You shall not permit a female sorcerer to live. Whoever lies with an animal shall be put to death. Whoever sacrifices to any god, other than the LORD alone, shall be devoted to destruction.] Does your hermeneutic say that you're supposed to not only not allow sorceresses to live in the community, but you have a responsibility to hunt them down every-where they exist, even as far as the Amazon,
  and kill them off? The same with anybody who
  has sexual relations with an animal and anybody anywhere who sacrifices to any god other than the Lord? That person must be destroyed -- anybody, anywhere, anytime; male, female; widow, orphan; Amazonian or not? That's the application of your hermeneutic. If your respon-sibility to widows and orphans extends globally, then it also extends globally to these others. If you apply your hermeneutic, you get what seems to be an absurd result, which makes me question your interpretation of this passage.
• Response: Why is it an absurd result? Shouldn't I go after human rights abuses in other countries?
• Response: I agree we should, but here's my point. Hermeneutically we have to make interpretation separate from application. Interpretation has to do with what God was specifically saying at this time to these specific people. Then we inquire about the principles behind God's commands, namely, that God cares about mercy, justice, and right worship, and God doesn't like idolatry.
• Response: And God also gets annoyed. And God listens.
• Response: Yes, but God has constituted this community, which is His community, as a nation-state, and these commands tell this nation-state how to deal with all these particular issues. The application outside of the context of a nation-state would be different. You and your congrega-tion don't have to worry about disputes over oxen, but you do have to talk about the principles of dealing honestly in business, about the principles of having your heart beat like God's and then act-ing with mercy toward those in the community and toward anyone with whom you come in contact. As you said, in a global economy, the things you do do affect people in Thailand and the Amazon and anywhere else. But I would argue that you have to take the intermediate steps you left out if you're going to be responsible in your use of this text. Otherwise, if you use a naïve hermeneutic, you end up with abuses, and you end up lacking credibility because you haven't filled in all the gaps and shown thereby that you've built your struc-ture on a solid foundation.
• Response: You're absolutely right, but your point doesn't undermine my argument. It undermines the fact that I didn't take forty minutes to get from "a" to "q," but I think I could get you from "a" to "q" credibly, and that's my point.
• Most of us would agree on "a" and "q," but then we spent forty minutes arguing that you didn't get us from "a" to "q" in a way with which we would be comfortable.



• A Jewish participant backs the conversation up a bit: The point was made that if one does not cry out to God, God will not act. God didn't save the Israelites in the exodus because He identified with their suffering. Their crying out reminded Him of the covenant and a promise He had made. The noise of the suffering moved Him to remember what He had promised. So whatever moves you're going to make in terms of the text, it's going to be only for those who cry out to the God of Israel. If the woman in the Amazon is screaming bloody murder but she's not crying out to the God of Israel, this text doesn't apply.
• Response: That's right.
• Objection: Except that if we're looking at the programmatic statement in Ex. 2:23 -- "The Israelites groaned under their slavery and cried out" -- we find that they just cried out. Period.
  It is definitely that crying out that reminds God
  of the covenant, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they cried out to God. [Scribal note: The next sentence in Ex. 2:23 reads: "Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God."]
• A seconding of the objection: If we go a chapter later, we can understand even better that they weren't necessarily crying out to God, because when God calls on Moses from the bush and tells him to go to the Israelites, Moses says, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?" [Ex. 3:13]
  Note: This remark is followed by a great deal of inaudible mumbled objections and references to biblical criticism and Deuteronomy, but there is no complete and/or coherent objection expressed at this point in the conversation.
• An attempt to get back on track: Let's go back to the text. We've not only circumscribed who the widows are by virtue of who hurts them but also by who the widows themselves actually are: They must be folks who are crying out to the LORD. That more narrowly defines who they are in this text.
• Question: Have we asked ourselves who these widows, orphans, and strangers are, and why they need protecting? If we're going to talk about the audience, we should talk about what the audience knows and what the audience understands. Who does the audience understand "widows, orphans, and strangers" to be?
• Three Jewish responses:
• That's essentially code for marginalized people.
• They're people who can't hold land.
• It's code for people who don't have a male Israelite to represent them.
• Remark: It is worthwhile asking who the widow and orphan are and then discerning what the relation-ship is between the widow and orphan and the poor. If, arguably, the widow and the orphan are legislatively those folks who don't have protection economically from husbands, then we have, to a certain extent, already anticipated the economic question of poverty in the social question of the widows and orphans. That is, are we dealing with the issue of poverty in vv. 22-23 long before we get to v. 25, where we're dealing specifically with the issue of poverty?
• Question: Does the resident alien have protection?
• Response: They have protections, but one of the things that I'm trying to get at in defining widows, orphans, and resident aliens is the issue of prop-erty. When we talk about a society where land is passed down through the tribes from one genera-tion to the next, a resident alien is not going to have property. So, resident aliens have legal protections, but they don't own property, and that's going to limit their status within the com-munity.
• Question from a Christian participant: The same holds true for widows and orphans, right?
• Response: Yes, which is why there are laws like Levirate marriage in the Bible and also throughout the Ancient Near East.
• Reaction: Which tells us this is an economic text from the get-go.
  Note: The mumbling of objections begins again.
• Remark from a Jewish participant: An orphan can own property.
• Response: An orphan can own property, but I think that we're talking about orphans who haven't reached the age of maturity. So these are orphans who will be in the custody of someone else who will watch over their property.
  Note: This response was followed by questions about whether the word "orphan" in the text could be defined that precisely and whether a "resident alien" was actually a resident. It was suggested that "resident" might be something read into the term that isn't actually a part of it, and that "stranger" is a better translation. Moreover, the reference to "stranger" in this particular text need not necessarily be to an "other" who actually lived among the Israelite people. This person might sim-ply be someone who was passing through from Syria to Egypt.
• Remark from a Christian participant: All this is addressed to a people who don't have land yet.
  In the narrative context, these are people who've just escaped from Egyptian slavery. There is no residence. There is no property. It strikes me as a curious thing to give "Don't harm the alien" as a law to a people who don't have a land, who are on the run. Who is the stranger among them? This is the band that left Egypt; they've been wandering, following God. Are the resident aliens the ones who currently reside in the land that's been promised to the Israelites?
• Response from a Christian participant: No, but they did have non-Hebrews with them at the time. There were some folks who joined up with them as they left Egypt. The whole principle of this is that they are going to a land. The context in which this is given is: This is the legislation that will be effec-tive upon entering the land.
• Question: So, the idea is that before they actually invest in ownership and property, they needed to understand that these were the rules that would apply.
• Objection from a Jewish participant: Exodus does not assume that people are wandering in the wil-derness. Clearly they are in the land. Otherwise, this makes no sense.
• Question: So this is not at Sinai?
• Response: No, this is not at Sinai.
• Objection from a Christian participant: It is in the narrative.
• Response: I know it's at Sinai in the text.
• Response from another Jewish participant: It's remembered as happening at Sinai, but these laws are promulgated when the people are in the land. The legislation is written for that situation, but it's placed by the author back to the Sinai event.
• Response from the original questioner: It's an in-teresting by-product to set this in the context of Sinai to give it authority, but you're setting it in a context that is not real to the laws.
• Remark made by another Christian participant: The other side of it is that the people hoped in the ful-fillment of the promise, so in the narrative context it's being spoken of as if the promise were a real-ity, which is how we are to understand the promises that God gives us.



• Question: I think we've just begun to broach the question of economics in the text, so I'm wonder-ing if anyone has any comments about what would have been the initial centerpiece of the text, namely, verse 25.
• Question: What is the relationship in v. 25 be-tween "you" and "my"? ["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 inter-est from them."] Is the "you" part of "my"? That is, "If you, Israelite, lend money to my Israelite people"?
• Response: I think that the laws that come before -- e.g., "you shall have no other gods" -- suggest that this is addressed to Israelites.
• Follow-up question: So this text says, "If you (Israelite) lend money to my (Israelite) people, to the (Israelite) poor among you, you shall not deal with them (Israelite people) as a creditor"?
• Response: Yes. It sounds funny in English, but in Hebrew it flows very smoothly.
• Remark: The "you" is not emphasized in the He-brew because the pronoun is not used. The meaning of the pronoun is carried by the verb.
  The emphasis is not on "you," but on lending money.
• Response: I wasn't so much trying to figure out where the emphasis is but to whom all the pro-nouns refer to be sure that verse 25 is an internal community restriction.



• Remark: I like verse 26: "If you take your neigh-bor's cloak, you shall restore it." It's not saying, "Don't take your neighbor's cloak."
• Response: This is in the context of collateral, of credit. It not like borrowing the neighbor's cloak. The neighbor to whom I'm lending something gives me the cloak as collateral.
• Response: But I have to give it back to him before nightfall because it may be his only covering.
• Question from a Christian participant: Is that understood more broadly in the tradition, or is it applied very specifically to the coat that some-body wears? Could it be understood the same way if you take your neighbor's cow as collateral and the cow is his only source of milk?
• Response from a Jewish participant: Somebody who has a cow is not poor.
• Response from another Jewish participant: The rabbis do a number of twists and turns on this.
• Question from another Christian participant: If I take your cloak as collateral and I have to give it back for the evening, how do you pay back the loan? If I have to give it back, how could it be collateral? What, then, do I hold against you?
• Response: Technically, the neighbor has to give it back to the lender in the morning. Its status as collateral can be restored the next day.
• Remark: Its status as something that's necessary for survival overrides the status of its being col-lateral.
• Question: But then the neighbor gives it back in the morning and the lender still holds it?
• Response: There is nothing in the text that tells us otherwise. There's nothing that says the cloak should never be collateral again.
• Question from another Christian participant: Why would you ever lend money to the poor? There's nothing that says you should take care of the poor. There's nothing a creditor or someone acting like a creditor is going to get out of it. There's no interest, and you have to bother with going and getting the cloak back every morning. That sounds like a hassle.
• Response: There may come a day that the poor man somehow gets a little something and has an extra coat.
• Response: My point is that the text doesn't say that God wants people to lend money to the poor. It just says tells you the way to deal with the poor if you do lend money to them. It sets down guidelines, but there doesn't appear to be any reason to lend money to the poor.
• Response: It's just presupposed that that is some-thing one ought to do, even though it makes little sense.
• Response: I don't know if it is presupposed.
• Remark: This is like Jesus' response to the Phari-sees on the issue of divorce: "I mustn't command you that you should get a divorce, but in the event that there is a divorce, this is how it needs to be conducted in order for it to be just." The Exodus text presupposes a situation where people are inclined to lend money even to poor people, and are taking the coat off their back as collat-eral. The text says, "If you going to do this, you can't do it that way."
• Response: What I'm asking is, does this create a disincentive for even bothering with lending to the poor in the first place?
• Response from a Jewish participant: There are laws in Leviticus concerning caring for the needs of the poor. I'm wondering if there's an earlier text that legislates concern for the poor. I don't want to read forward to Leviticus to justify it, but I want to say that there are laws concerning lend-ing to the poor.
• Remark: The question about the disincentive be-cause it's such a hassle has serious implications for the social fabric of the community. You're not going to make any money, and the whole thing is
  a pain in the neck.
• Response: One hopes that you would be driven to just give the person what he needs.
• Response from a Jewish participant: That is an assumption based on our own twenty-first-century convenience. What the text seems to me to say is that you can't be in a professional money-lender position with the neighbor, but if you happen to lend to him -- and you may be only one economic step above him -- it's okay to take collateral. There's a difference between his discomfort and a life-threatening situation. If he's working in the hot sun without his cloak, he may be uncomfortable, he may get sunburned. But on a cold night in the Negev, he may die without his cloak. The idea is not necessarily lending as we know it; nor is the relationship necessarily one in which the lender must go a distance to get or give back the cloak. It could be a very simple operation between neighbors. We don't really have enough evidence to know. It's hard to read back into this text except to say that lending money seems to be permissible under certain circumstances. Unlike loads of other things that may have been going on, lending money is not proscribed.
• Response from another Jewish participant: I know this doesn't work in context because this com-mand is in a series of specific laws, but I tend to read this text generally. I read it like this: You should not oppress marginalized people in your society. In fact, you should have extra sensitivity to them because you yourself were oppressed at one time. And don't think that because a person is marginalized he can't cry out to me. In fact, he can, and I will hear his cry.
• Response: I do think it is a reasonable question in this particular context to ask what the viability of lending money to the poor is. The text definitely tells you one thing that you shouldn't do with respect to the poor: You shouldn't exact interest from them.
• Remark: Verse 26 does not explicitly say that the neighbor is poor. We're presupposing that he is poor because he only has one coat. Verse 25 talks about the poor; verse 26 mentions the neighbor. We don't necessarily want to make the leap and say that the people in v. 26 are the people in v. 25.
• Response: They could be the same people, and the lender could be one of the poor as well.
• A Jewish participant points the conversation in a different direction: I would really like to go on to the Luke text with the following suggestion. It's very hard to read sacred texts when you know
  the end. You read the end into the beginning. That might not be what we were doing. We
  were looking at the text as a text, almost self-contained; but not necessarily. When someone asks if the text allows for a certain possibility, that's a different kind of question. I'm not saying it's not a legitimate question, but it's a question you can only ask when you're finished with the text. That question is irrelevant to an understand-ing of the text as the text is. Could it apply to a widow in the Amazon? I mean, give me a break!
• Response: You're absolutely right, but I am very conscious that part of what we're doing in the Scripture Forum is not simply reading the text within the confines of the verses of the text.
  Most of the people around this table are religious professionals, many in congregations, who are going to ask that next question. Built into the Scripture Forum has always been the understand-ing that we're never going to exhaust the text.
• Response: I agree, but we have to separate the two moves. What we have been doing is mixing up the moves, and it's hard to deal with the text that way. Let's do the text and then do the moves.
• Reaction from another participant: We made her move a move in the text. We did find it there.
• Response: That's the danger. It's so easy.
• Response: Your point is well taken; we shouldn't mix, but I'm not sure why not.
• Response: I'll give you an example why you shouldn't mix: From my perspective, if you're
  going to read the Hebrew Bible in light of the
  New Testament, that's why I think you shouldn't mix. Judaism and Christianity are both a midrash on the Old Testament. We're not arguing mid-rashim now; we're talking about a Hebrew text.
• Response: What we should do at some point, then, is say: "Okay, we've squeezed as much as we want from the text. Now, you Jews and you Christians, what do you want to make of this?"
• Response: It's a different question. We could do that. But that's not textual study.
• Question: Is saying the text is not at Sinai moving beyond the text?
• Response: I'd have to say yes.
• Imposition of a soft ground rule: We should be mindful of the theoretical questions. Let's try to engage the text, and when you feel somebody is reading in a way that you think is imposing that kind of after-gloss on the text, just call the per-son on it at that particular time.
• Remark before moving on to the text from Luke: Thank you, by the way, for not including v. 28: "Don't curse the leader of your country."
• Response: I didn't want to distract us. And God forbid the text should say, "If you do and he cries out ..."
• Reminder: But it has to be to the God of Israel.

The second text: Luke 3:7-14 (NRSV translation)

John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." And the crowds asked him, "What then should we do?" In reply he said to them, "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise." Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, "Teacher, what should we do?" He said to them, "Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you." Soldiers also asked him, "And we, what should we do?" He said to them, "Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages."

The discussion continues:

• Remark: The first thing I note about this text is that it's in Luke. If you read the similar situation
  in Matthew, it doesn't have this ethical teaching about money at all because Matthew's concern
  is not the same as Luke's. So it's important to understand that in the context of this Gospel, attention will be paid in a different way to these issues than will be the case in similar situations in the other Gospels.
• Remark: If I'm not mistaken, Luke is also more universal in his message.
• Response: This is all outside the text. That point is fair in the sense that you can say that there's an economic concern here that doesn't appear to be in the analogue text in Matthew. One other thing that's fair is to compare the text in Luke with the text in Exodus. But to say that Luke is more uni-versal is a thematic point that we haven't yet discerned.
• Remark: It's interesting to consider the stratifica-tion in this text. The profiling of people seems to have less to do with the notion of to whom one is responsible (e.g., the widow, the orphan, the poor) and more to do with who is responsible. There's a differentiation among those who are
  the descendants of Abraham, those who are tax collectors, and those who are soldiers. That is, different groups appear in this social context,
  and each group seems to be delegated different responsibilities. In comparing tax collectors with soldiers, there seem to be two different sets of expectations for these folks.
  Note: This last statement was followed by pro-tests all around the table.
• Explanation: The tax collectors are told not to exploit the people by collecting more than the prescribed amount. The soldiers are told to be satisfied with what they're getting paid.
• Response: By implication the tax collectors are told the same thing.
• Another response: I think the tax collectors ex-torted money by collecting more than they were supposed to collect. The soldiers extorted money by threats or false accusation. Both methods of extorting money are challenged in the text.
• Remark: If it's true that the basic principle of vv. 12-14 is, in effect, be satisfied with your wages, then it's worth comparing that to the injunctions that whoever has two coats must share with someone who has none, and whoever has food must do likewise. Is there a more strenuous moral standard in sharing what you have than there is in being satisfied with your wages?
• Question/remark: Don't tax collectors at this period in history earn their salary from a per-centage of what they collect? (Yes.) So it's
  not a salary. Soldiers are paid a salary from
  the government.
• Question: The tax collectors and soldiers would be part of the crowd, so wouldn't v. 8ff. be applicable to them as well?
• Response: That's a good question. Is everybody in here "the crowd" and some of them are singled out?
• Remark: Could I just add that these are people who also cried out, as it were: They came to be baptized.
• Remark: The question of who the crowd is in v. 7 we should be able to deduce from v. 8: These are people who are saying, "We have Abraham as our ancestor."
• Remark from a Jewish participant: When John asks, "Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" he's assuming that they're there out of fear. The people are coming because they're afraid, and that's why they want to be baptized.
• Question from another Jewish participant: Why would you be baptized if you are a descendant of Abraham? Is your status as part of the seed of Abraham not sufficient?
• Remark from a Christian participant: If this text is read against an apocalyptic background, then the wrath to come is imminent.
• Picking up the earlier thread: My point is that what the text is saying -- "We have Abraham as our an-cestor" -- identifies the crowd.
• Response: I don't know that it does, because it sounds like John is saying, "Abraham, Shmabra-ham. God can raise up children of Abraham out of stones."
  [Scribal note: Commentaries like to point out that there is in Hebrew a play on words in this saying. The question the scribe cannot answer is, is there the same play on words in Aramaic, the language that John was presumably speaking?]
• Remark: Being a descendant of Abraham applies to the initial group; but later, in v. 12, it says that even tax collectors came. That would be a dif-ferent group, and the soldiers would also be a different group.
• Remark: I was just trying to ask a question about who John is addressing. Initially, John is addressing those who say "We have Abraham as our ances-tor."
• Response: That's the crowd, then. The initial identification is "the crowds that came out to be baptized by him." If John identifies them as a "brood of vipers," and "those who claim to be sons of Abraham," maybe that's because the majority of them were. Those are two separate categories.
• Remark: Everything up to v. 12 appears to be intended for those who are descendants of Abraham. The real break in the text comes in v. 12. "Even tax collectors came to be baptized" seems to mark a new identification.
• Response: Or it says that tax collectors were part of the original group. That is, a bunch of people came to be baptized, even tax collectors.
  Scribal note: At this juncture it was pointed out that people may have been making too much of the word "even" in the translation in order to separate the tax collectors from the preceding group. One participant mentioned that the Greek text uses the particle "de," (as is also the case in v. 11 following the participle "answered"). It was not mentioned, however, that the Greek text in v.12 (but not in v. 11) has the conjunction "kai" following "de." "Kai" may be translated as "also," "even," or "and." The presence of the conjunction strengthens the argument that tax collectors are separate from the preceding group to a greater extent than the presence of the particle weakens it.
• Remark: The crowds ask the question, "What should we do?" The tax collectors then ask the same question. If the tax collectors were included in the crowd, then John had already answered their question and they would not have needed to ask it again.
  The discussion then moved to the question of whether or not the tax collectors were children of Abraham; that is, were they Jews. This notion caused a number of people to begin talking at the same time.
• Question: Are we saying that the tax collectors were not Jews?
• Question: Are we saying that John's ministry was to gentiles and to Jews?
• Response: We don't know that they were or were not Jews, but the point is that whoever they were, they saw themselves as not being part of that first group.
• Response: Alternatively, they could have seen themselves as part of the group, but because of their profession found it difficult to live by that particular standard, that is, the standard of sharing clothing and food with people who had nothing.
• Remark: The tax collectors are asking if there is another standard for them, professionally.
• Remark: It's important to note that it's one thing to tell folks to be satisfied with their wages, and another thing to tell them that they have to share what they have with others. There is a higher expectation in sharing your coat than there is in just being satisfied with your wages.
• Objection: Unless you make an assumption that John assumes that one coat is sufficient, and that's all you should need to have. In other words, be satisfied with your single coat.
• Response: Maybe. That's a good question.
• Remark: John, after all, had one coat.
• Remark: The coat is like a wage.
• Response: Well, the coat is property.
• Remark made by a Christian participant: One
  of the other things Luke does is to undermine authorities. Tax collectors and soldiers are re-
  lated in the sense that they work for the same authority, and John seems to be saying to them, "You serve the authority, but you should no longer serve the authority the way the authority asks you to serve." Tax collectors and soldiers were behaving according to accepted practices. John is exhorting them to understand that there was a radical new way of approaching who they were and the way in which the authority above them governed who they were.
• Remark from another Christian participant: Luke is kind of bouncing off Isaiah 40:1-5, which is in the context of God's people being taken care of in the midst of their oppression, and it's also an expan-sion of the eschatological kingdom. Luke is saying that all people -- not just Abraham's children but also the tax collectors, who have sold out to the Romans, and even Roman soldiers, agents of the oppressor -- all people are now flocking to God's anointed spokesman, His voice in the wilderness.
• Remark from a Jewish participant: I see this as Luke being very practical: If you have two coats, you have to share one. But if you just have one, you don't have to share it. And he could tell the tax collectors to get a new profession, but he doesn't. He says, "Keep your job but just do it a little differently." And he says the same thing to the soldiers. I don't think John is a Hebrew prophet in the sense that a Hebrew prophet would say, "Stop tax collecting. It's a sinful occupation."
• Response: He's not overthrowing the authority.
• Remark from a Christian participant: I think there's an intention in the way Luke's narrative continues, because John needs to be subservient to Jesus. Jesus' message is going to be more radical than John's. If Luke had John telling people to quit their jobs and rebel against Caesar, then John would be eclipsing Jesus' message. John can't do that.
• Response: If it's the standard practice of the day for tax collectors to gouge and somebody tells them not to gouge, that's already radical. It might be more radical to tell them they shouldn't even be in that business. Against the backdrop of the wrath that is to come, what John is telling them
  is doable. John is asking them to think about who they are and to do something painful, but not something unimaginable.
• Remark: In that context it's interesting to ask what the purpose of the instruction actually is.
  Is it to care for people who are part of the social order, or is it to make these folks worthy or re-pentance? Is John giving them instructions so that when the wrath comes, they will be worthy of the ordeal -- a formational ethics? Or is this an ethics that contributes to the social order?
• Response: Within the text there is no need to have an ethic of responsibility because the judgment is at hand. The issue is to prepare oneself for what is coming, and coming soon, because the opportunity to be just and right-
  eous and moral is already gone.
• Response: Using the image of Venn diagrams, the big box that all the little circles are in is "you brood of vipers." That's the universal. Apocalypse is right around the corner. John is telling the children of Abraham that they are not exceptional in any way because God can make stones into children of Abraham. Economics is a way that we measure exceptionalism: If you have money or two coats, you're more exceptional than someone who does not have money or two coats. John is telling these people not to see themselves as exceptional and not to try to make themselves exceptional, be-cause if they do, it won't do them any good; and because of the kind of people they are, any such effort may be an insult to themselves and to their relationship to God. They're all vipers, and they're all going to be caught up in the apocalypse.

The final remarks spoke to the imagery of the ax lying at the root of the trees. It was pointed out that that image is abused by Christians. The ax is simply lying there, as if someone were intending to take the tree down, perhaps after a break for lunch.

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