Q&A: Religious Values and Ancient Morality
Religious Values and Ancient Morality
Question
When there are commandments in the Torah that conflict with what is commonly considered moral nowadays, you argue that these are religious values, and that they are a separate value system from moral values. There are many commandments in the Torah that are not moral by today’s standards, but fit very closely with the morality of the time of the Torah: for example, that a rapist must marry the woman he raped, that only a woman is punished for adultery if she is married (when the partner is not married), and many other chauvinistic commandments found throughout the Torah. Does it really seem reasonable to you that such commandments have religious value, when it is obvious that these are simply things that fit the morality of the time when the Torah was written? In your opinion, is there some wondrous cosmic correspondence between religious values that “bring about repairs in the heavens” or something like that, and things that just happened to be considered reasonable and acceptable in the ancient world at the time the Torah was written?
Answer
There are also commandments in the Torah that do not fit the morality that prevailed then. So it is clear that you cannot identify Jewish law with morality, and consequently you also cannot identify that way the commandments that seem similar to you.
Discussion on Answer
Yes.
Does it seem reasonable to you that purely by chance many commandments of Jewish law correspond to moral commandments, even though these are independent categories?
Kadag,
Most of the Torah’s commandments that have any connection to morality actually run contrary to the morality that was accepted then. So even if we accept the claim that the Torah takes into account the situation prevailing at the time it was given, it certainly does not determine the commandments according to it.
To Kadag:
"that only a woman is punished for adultery if she is married (if the partner is not married)"
The punishment for adultery is death both for the woman and for the man who had intercourse with her.
I didn’t mean to claim that Jewish law can be identified with morality. There are things that can be understood as non-moral values, say sacrifices or things like that. But does it really seem reasonable to you that purely by chance some of these religious values are also laws that fit the morality of the time of the Torah? That is, that purely by chance there is some accidental overlap between norms that were practiced in the ancient world and things that bring about repairs in the upper worlds?