Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 24-25.

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As I was reading in this passage where it talks about the punishment for assaulting and injuring someone (“eye for eye, tooth for tooth”) I noticed that it said “You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the Lord your God.”  Now my first thought, and probably yours, was “the penalty is the same for a foreigner living among you as it is for a native.”  And that is true, but there is another side to this.  The penalty for injuring a foreigner living among them was the same as for injuring a native.  So, we have two sides to this.  You could not inflict a heavier penalty against a foreigner living among you, who did not have people who would stand up for him and protect him from excessive punishment, AND you were subject to the same punishment for injuring that person who did not have people to demand justice for him.  This harkens back to Leviticus 19:15, where it says not to be partial to the poor or defer to the great (rich and powerful) in court, which I wrote about the other day.  The same principle applies here.  The law is the same for everyone.

Then later in today’s passage, while talking about the rules for the year of jubilee, it talks about not taking advantage of the poor among us.  It says that we should help those who have become poor and cannot maintain themselves.  We should not seek to profit from them, but lend them money without interest, and sell them necessities without taking a profit.  Along with that are some complicated rules for slavery which seem to carry on the theme of treating those who are part of the people of God well and caring for them.  We are to remember that they too are servants of God, not of us.  We must be careful not to treat them ruthlessly.  In his letters, Paul can be interpreted as extending the rules for God’s people to all people, since we desire that they accept Christ and thus become adopted into God’s family.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.