Of course we don't know if anybody ever got stoned for breaking the Sabbath (I know a few people who have been stoned on the Sabbath, but that's another story), or if that is just another cautionary scare story. But it is interesting to look at what that story would mean, were it true.
The breaking of the Sabbath harms the rest of the tribe not at all; it is simply a violation of the orders of God, doubtless given solely to the tribe's religious intermediary, and passed on. The only reason the tribe would band together and brutally murder one of their own - in violation of a specific commandment of the same God - is that the religious intermediary had convinced them, doubtless through the telling of many cautionary tales, that if they suffered a Sabbath-breaker to live, God would immediately exterminate them all. So, in the palsied grip of holy terror, they dragged the man outside the camp and bashed his brains out, believing that this act would placate their deity. One wonders how the fellow's children felt about this.
That particular intermediary must have had his people whipped well and truly into shape. I'll bet he lived very well indeed; people must have been terrified of him.
But is this the sort of religion, or the sort of religious intermediary, that we want? |
