Leviticus 24

PURITY IN OIL AND SHOWBREAD.

HOLINESS OF THE DIVINE NAME, AND SACREDNESS OF HUMAN LIFE.

Two important elements of the tabernacle ritual remain to be described the oil for light and the showbread. Then follows a bit of sad history, like the bit found in chapter 10 a detail of a flagrant act of sin and its dreadful punishment. A brief recapitulation of the lex talionis closes the chapter.

CONCLUDING NOTE. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.

Is the divine requirement of life for life still in force? Jesus Christ did not repeal the law of Moses, or any part of it, as a civil regulation, while he condemned the prevalent perversion of its principles to the purposes of private selfishness, licentiousness, malice, and revenge. He rebuked the bad morality of the Pharisees, which they saw fit to propound in the words of Moses, but contrary to his spirit. It is important to observe that in this law of like for like, containing under a mutable form the changeless principles of even-handed justice, the specification of “life for life,” as it stands in Mosaism, always stands first. See Leviticus 24:17-20; Exodus 21:23-25; Deuteronomy 19:21. Why, then, if our Lord meant to abrogate the law, did he not begin with its principal and leading title? Because it could hardly be perverted to the purposes of private revenge, hedged in as it was by all the cautious limitations of the Mosaic code. Jesus declares that he who shall say to his brother “Thou fool!” shall be in dagger of the fire of gehenna, that is, of being burnt in the valley of Hinnom the most awful punishment which a Jew could imagine.

St. Paul did not understand that the law of capital punishment was repealed when he declared that the magistrate held not the sword in vain, but was a terror to evil-doers. What Christ, the legislator greater than Moses, has not repealed, modern sentimentalism will never permanently overthrow; though it is unquestionable that there is a strong tendency at present towards an indiscriminate philanthropy, and a religion divested of those stern features which the representations of the New Testament imply as certainly as do the more express declarations of the Old. The fact that the opposition to the death penalty for murder universally allies itself with the rejection of the eternal punishment of all who obey not Christ, is an argument of no small weight in favour of its present binding force, since errors, like truths, grow in clusters.