COMMENTARY: Thou Shalt Not Make the Bible an Idol, a Club or a Hammer

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The Jewish people will celebrate the two-day festival of Shavuot, “The Birthday of the Bible,” with special synagogue services beginning on the evening of Sunday, June 12. Shavuot, Hebrew for “Weeks,” comes 50 days, seven weeks and a day after the start of Passover. Shavuot commemorates Moses receiving the […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The Jewish people will celebrate the two-day festival of Shavuot, “The Birthday of the Bible,” with special synagogue services beginning on the evening of Sunday, June 12. Shavuot, Hebrew for “Weeks,” comes 50 days, seven weeks and a day after the start of Passover.

Shavuot commemorates Moses receiving the Bible on Mount Sinai and the Israelites committing themselves “to do and to hear” the Torah’s teachings. Shavuot also marks the spring harvest in Israel. Reading the Book of Ruth and eating dairy foods are reminders of Shavuot’s agricultural roots.


The Church absorbed Shavuot into its liturgy with “Pentecost,” Greek for 50 days, when, Christians believe, the apostles in Jerusalem received the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem after Jesus’ death.

But this year Shavuot reminds me of something else. Sadly, the Bible, sacred to more than a billion people, has become an idol.

The Bible an idol? It must be a contradiction in terms. But in a bitter irony, that is exactly what has happened. The Bible, which warns against creating and worshipping idols, has itself become just that for many people who call themselves religious.

Everyone has heard rabbis, pastors and priests declare: “The Bible says … ” or “If only the world followed all the words of the Bible … ” or “We must do just as the Bible says. …”

But those facile phrases give listeners the false impression the Bible is a single unified volume, its meaning and wisdom forever frozen in time; one dimensional and not open to study, debate and questioning. This is especially true when religious leaders who should know better repeatedly cite biblical passages that call for capital punishment if certain commandments are not strictly obeyed.

Unfortunately, such harsh preaching frequently goes unexamined and people assume it represents traditional “biblical principles.” It does not.

For many centuries, much of Jewish and Christian teaching has provided interpretations that mitigate extreme language and the requirement to carry out harsh penalties, including death.


The case of the “rebellious son” is an example of how religiously faithful interpreters retained a capital punishment text while calling for mercy and compassion. It is a method applied throughout Scripture.

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 seems cruel:

If a man has a wayward and defiant son, who does not heed his father or mother and does not obey them even after they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the public place of his community. They shall say to the elders of his town, “This son of ours is disloyal and defiant; he does not heed us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Thereupon the men of his town shall stone him to death.

Despite the call for capital punishment, there is no record of a rebellious or defiant son ever being executed. The Jewish tradition teaches that it never happened and never will happen.

A rebellious son must be at least 13 years old, but not more than 13 and six months in age. Once that narrow time window is gone, the son is then defined a “man,” a different legal category than a “son.”

Parents can overlook their son’s “offense” and withdraw their complaint. But if they persist, a three-judge court must adjudicate whether the son is in fact disloyal and defiant.

The entire teaching of the rabbis in the Talmud was aimed at the abolition of capital punishment whether for a rebellious son, an adulteress, a homosexual or any other persons the Bible teaches is liable for execution. Rabbinic Judaism reduced the possibility of the death penalty ever being used.


Ultimately, Scriptures provide moral education, religious history and spiritual inspiration. The biblical text, teaching in this case to honor one’s parents and that fathers and mothers must both share in a child’s upbringing, remains immutable. But its meaning is subject to interpretation.

The Bible is not a club to bludgeon people into submission. It is a living document that commands reverence and demands analysis from its readers.

“The Catechism of the Catholic Church,” published in 1994 with the imprimatur of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, makes a similar point: “ … To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words … the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at the time, and the modes of feeling, speaking, and narrating then current.”

MO/JL END RNS

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for a a file photo of Rudin.

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!