Thread by @JoelBaden

#Exodus 22:6-14

Laws about evidence and testimony

The ostensible topics here have to do with what happens when you have something belonging to your neighbor in your possession, and something bad happens to it. Which is fine and all. But that’s not the really interesting part.

The basic setup is that a thief steals your neighbor’s stuff from your house. Now if the thief is caught, he pays double like normal (see 21:3). Easy. But if he’s not caught, now it’s just your word that it was stolen by someone else - rather than by you, you dirty rat.

And this is where it gets interesting. The owner doesn’t know what happened to his stuff - it was with you. You can’t prove it was stolen: the thief got away. The owner has every right to claim compensation from you, but it wasn’t your fault; you weren’t negligent.

How to decide such a case? By definition there were no witnesses, so there is no possible appeal to the usual evidence brought before judges. The only recourse is to have it decided by a higher power, with a higher level of insight than the mere human.

Second scenario: two people both lay equal claim to an item, both saying “it’s mine.” How can anyone know? It’s just one person’s word against another. Solomon would cut the thing in half, but Solomon was just making a point about how impossible it is to discern the truth here.

Same problem, same solution: they come and state their case “before God,” and whoever is deemed to be lying pays the other one double - because that’s the penalty for stealing, and claiming someone else’s stuff as your own is like trying to steal from them.

Third scenario: something unfortunate happens to the domestic animal you’re watching for your neighbor, and now you have a dead animal on your hands. Wasn’t your fault - or was it? Maybe you did something to the animal, you sicko. How do you prove your innocence?

Same problem, same (okay, similar) solution: You take an oath before God that it wasn’t your fault. You know that oaths are a big deal: you lie in an oath before God and he’s going to go all Ezekiel 25:17 on you. (More a film reference than a biblical one, to be honest.)

A couple of subcategories here: if the animal is gone, you gotta pay for it. Animals aren’t like a piece of jewelry a thief could sneak in and stuff into his pocket and run off with. An animal gets stolen, you were probably negligent about protecting it. Try harder next time.

But if it a wild animal came in and mangled it, then you don’t need to worry about paying - actually, it’s not even really part of this discussion, because you have the evidence of the mangled body, and clearly you didn’t do that. Unless...are you a werewolf?

What all of these laws have in common is the question of how a judicial decision is to be made in the absence of human witnesses, the main form of evidence available. And the common answer is that the case goes before God in one way or another.

This is, of course, precisely the system attributed to Jethro’s intervention in Exodus 18. Judges - local and tribal elders - hear most cases, but Moses, as the one person at the time with a channel to the deity, hears the hard ones and acts as oracle for the divine decision.

“Before God” in these laws means you take it from the elders sitting in judgment in the town gates to the local sanctuary, where the decision from God is communicated via oracular process, inevitably, given the context, involving priests.

How the oracular process worked is left unstated. Maybe they cast lots, or flipped a coin, or consulted the Urim and Thummim (which is to say, cast lots). Moses obviously just went and asked, but that’s not necessarily how it was done after him.

The sanctuary was the point of access to the deity, and the deity was understood to be the court of last appeal. There is a recognized limit to human knowledge and judgment. (We won’t worry about whether oracles were really just another form of human judgment, you cynic.)

Point is, these laws speak to both the narrative of Exodus 18, where the judicial system underpinning them is said to have been established, and the laws in the Decalogue regarding both oaths and false witness. And they’re wonderfully revealing of how judgment worked back then.