IN not a few cases, there are to be found pronouncements of the prophets, rendered, "Thus saith the Lord," when it is shockingly to be seen that something in the Law is being dismantled, abrogated.Most immediately coming to mind is Isaiah 1:11 . . .
"To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats."
And lest any should allow themselves to be beguiled by some furious parsing of the text into supposing this is not addressed to his own people, let his own people observe the very first verse of this mighty, prophetic shout, to wit, "The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah" -- then one need only turn the ear to hear how this shout of Isaiah is really, like radiation yet pulsing from the Big Bang) a distant echo from David, in Psalm 50:12 . . .
[12] If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof.
[13] Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?
[14] Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High:
[15] And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.
It is indeed the men of Judah, the Daughter of Zion being addressed by Isaiah, as they are--in their error--compared by the mighty prophet of God to the long gone sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah . . .
[9] Except the LORD of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.
[10] Hear the word of the LORD, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah.
[11] To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats.
[12] When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?
[13] Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.
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Now! What are Jews to make of this? It is as if the whole towering edifice of the sacerdotal liturgy for sacrificial ritual is here torn down by this Prophet (with his ancient rebel chief, David) and beaten to bits, right along with the entire broad rampart of the Sabbath law, in its every block of hard, unyielding stone--the very rocks that, being broken, had been thrown at the heads of some of these prophets, and at those who thrilled to hear their words.
What then? Which is to be taken for the word of the Lord? The Law of sacrifices or the Word of the prophet? And what good, what sense can there be in having these prophetic pronouncements on the books, if they are not to be judged as ruling so far as how Torah is to be read?
Isaiah asks, "Who hath required this at your hand?" Therein stands a mighty question. It is a question that must have gone forth to shake the very walls of the Temple, and set those priests to trembling, because it is really asking, Whose hands are those which have been writing in your Torah, adding things to change and corrupt it? Are they original, authentic-- of Moses? Or did some laws come only from pen of lust and ink of sin from a priestly bottle of black greed, conceit and tyranny, as Samuel was heard to lament?
Isaiah and David say, That is not Torah, it is corruption. Hear our words, and by simple subtraction, know what the Torah IS, as it really was, in the beginning.
There are biblical scholars who discern a presence of more than one text in the Pentateuch (Torah) the first five books of the Old Testament--as they detect a presence of three different and distinct hands (scribal traditions) at work in the 'authorship' of these texts. But there is one author, say the religious, he is God, and him you will recognize from the original text, as from no other.
All I know as I read and meditate, is how I am seeing an original "unhewn stone" of scripture upon which much was later being laded. This became most apparent in a comparison of, as I recall, three succeeding expositions of the Sabbath Law. There was a first, in Exodus, then a more expanded one, also in Exodus, and a third (as I seem to recall) in Deuteronomy--although that may have been in either Leviticus or Numbers. One way or the other, the striking thing is this . . .
In the first exposition of the Sabbath Law, it is made VERY PLAIN, it is stated very simply that in essence, the sabbath is--as one unrecognized prophet of Judah put it--"made for man, not man for the sabbath." God would demand of man that he should give himself, and his workers, his servants rest. What perfectly wonderful sense this made for a nation of people freshly come out of slavery. What else would God have had to say to his children as they stood before him about the flanks of Horeb at Sinai?
What else indeed! But as time progressed, and as priests and scribes got busy, man was made slave to the Sabbath, as by their own priests and scribes the children of Israel were put once again into bondage to be marched right back to slavery in Egypt. Man turned God's purpose around and made the sabbath about God, and not about Man.
But it was not really about God at all. Had it been about God in truth, it would have been about God making it NOT about himself, but about his children, to give them rest. It was not about God taking his children prisoner on the Sabbath! Not about God putting his people through every manner of run around to make every human need, to eat, to get up and walk around, to adjust a thermostat or start a fire an absurdly complicated task that in the end comes to the enormous hypocrisy of making the institution of the Sabbath slave, i.e. of the "Shabbos Goy" an absurd necessity which absolutely contradicts the very law of Sabbath, in its most basic meaning, purpose and essence which is to give REST to all one's servants, right down to the slaves. It is the ridiculous spectacle of slaves making slaves of others to violate the original intent which was to free a slave to a day of rest.
God's most beautiful gift was thus despised! Idolatry. That's all it is. It is idolatry in the worst, most subtle, hardest to discern form, where the nature of God is distorted into the image of a tyrant, and a vain one at that, who demands to be worshiped day and night (only for show of the vain worshiper), raised up like some Goliath and clothed in raiment of gold-plated temples, when nothing by him is more despised.
Make unto me an altar of unhewn stone! He said. And lift no tool upon it.
