Today’s Posting Is Brought To You By The Number Five, Wal-Mart, And Smith & Wesson

Yesterday I wasted too many hours trying to understand a passage of Scripture that has nothing to do with me.

Sometimes I get on one of these kicks, chasing intellectual rabbits instead of paying attention to work or my own clear-cut duties.

While chasing rabbits is fun, neither the kingdom of God on earth nor my own happiness depends on my understanding everything mentioned in the Bible.

I refer to the book of Numbers, Chapter 5, verses 11-32, in which a jealous husband could take his suspected wife to the Tabernacle where the priest would write a terrible curse on a parchment.

He’d wash the ink off the page, mix the inky water with dirt off the floor, have the accused woman drink it, and if she were guilty her belly would swell and her thigh rot. But, if she were innocent, nothing would happen.

Is this really in the Bible?

Sounds like a voodoo ritual to me.

While the law allowed for this ritual, there is no record in the Bible of anybody actually doing it.

Commentators say this ritual was instituted to protect women from abuse by jealous husbands. In other places, the law stipulated that an proven adulterous couple could be stoned to death, both the male and the female.

In the New Testament, when a woman caught in the act of adultery was brought before Jesus and the crowd wanted to stone her, He said, “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone” and the once indignant crowd melted away without anybody throwing anything. And Jesus told the woman, “Go and sin no more”.

Numbers Five makes no sense to me.

It sounds like some sort of magic charm.

It just doesn’t fit the overall tone of Scripture.

And my Bible study tools aren’t any help at all; they just leave me more confused.

I’d happened to read Numbers Five in the course of my normal morning Bible reading yesterday. When I read that strange passage, it sparked a memory of what I’d read in this newspaper article from Sunday’s paper:

A News Services article in the “World Briefs” section on page A-8 in the March 1^st Florida Times-Union reports:

Chechnya: President Defends Women’s Deaths

GROZNY—The bull-necked president of Chechnya emerged from afternoon prayers at the mosque and explained why seven young women who had been shot in the head deserved to die.

Ramzan Kadyrov said the women, whose bodies were found dumped by the roadside, had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives in honor killings.

He is carrying out a campaign to impose Islamic values and strengthen the traditional customs of predominantly Muslim Chechnya, to blunt the appeal of hardline Islamic separatist and shore up his power.

Then, last night’s tv news reported this news item from right here in Florida:

HOMESTEAD, FLA. - Police are investigating after a woman was injured during a shooting at a Wal-mart super center in Homestead, police said.

Homestead police said the incident happened at the garden center section of the store at 33501 S. Dixie Highway. Police said the victim was an employee at the store and the suspected shooter was her boyfriend.

Police said the man shot the woman several times and she was transported to Jackson Memorial Hospital by air rescue.

Google news says a similar shooting incident involving an estranged couple happened Monday at another Wal-Mart in Arizona.

My impression is that in modern times, all too many workplace shootings involve estranged couples when the jealous one takes a gun to settle volatile emotional matters.

In the light of what’s happening today in Muslim lands, in Wal-Marts, and in workplaces all over, maybe the Mosaic Law’s provision to settle domestic tensions with a washed-away curse and dirt off the tabernacle floor—maybe that odd ritual makes more sense than I first thought.