Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
Is Judaism Legalistic? Misunderstanding the Law of Moses
In my upcoming course "Finding Moses" I'll be discussing the final four books of the Pentateuch (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) (for more information, see: Finding Moses – Online Course Covering the Historicity of the Pentateuch - Bart D. Ehrman - New Testament Scholar, Speaker, and Consultant (bartehrman.com). Apart from the opening chapters of Exodus, these books are not well known to most Christians, even those on fairly good terms with the New Testament. I've known many a reader who was determined to read the entire Bible from beginning to end, but who quit early into Leviticus. In part that's because these books are both hard to understand and difficult to see as interesting when not explained. A huge chunk of them is made up of the laws given to Moses (almost the entire second half of Exodus, all of Leviticus, a good chunk of Numbers, and most of Deuteronomy). How can reading a bunch of antiquated laws be interesting? Of course, many (MANY!) Christians just love to cherry pick these laws in order to [...]