Mishpatim – Torah with Joseph

Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.

Shalom, my name is Joseph Shulam, and together with Brad TV, we are doing the weekly portions of the Torah that are read in every synagogue. Last week’s portion ended with the giving of the Law of Moses, the Torah, in Hebrew, at Mount Sinai, a very dramatic event, an amazing event that has not repeated itself in history since then, where hundreds of thousands of people, on one occasion, nestled around Mount Sinai in the Sinai Desert, heard the voice of God speak audibly from the mountain, and God spoke out what we call the 10 Commandments, and the 10 Commandments are actually not the whole law.

They are the essence of the Law of Moses. They are the most important foundational issues that should govern every enlightened society on the face of the earth. I have to tell you this story. In 2008, I was invited for the first time by the Chinese government of the Hubei province in China to visit their government and their province. And they were interested in me. I found out why on the first day that I arrived there.

I arrived, the Vice-President of Hubei province invited me, and I asked her why did she invite me, and she asked me a question in return. She said, “Do you teach the Bible with politics?” I said, “No, I only teach the Bible.” She said, “We invited you because we heard some of your teaching, and somebody recommended you, and said, ‘Joseph does not delve in politics.’”

Mixing Politics With the Bible

She said, “We are tired of Western teachers and missionaries that come to China, and then speak against China and against our government system. Do you speak against our government system?” “No.” She said, “We want you to teach in our seminaries.” So I asked her, “Have you read the Bible?” She said, “Yes, I have.” I asked her, “What do you think about the Bible?” She said, “I love the Bible, because the Bible is the first Communist book in the history of mankind.” I said, “Yeah? I’d never heard that before.

She said, “Yes, it is, because the Bible is the first place that says if you don’t work you don’t eat.” And she said like this, “If it wasn’t for the Bible, there would be no Magna Carta and no Communism.” So I was surprised that she read the Bible and that she liked it, and that she felt that the Bible is very important, even for the Communist government of China, and that she even knew about the Magna Carta.

New Testament Has Many Laws

So, yes, the laws of the Bible, not only the Old Testament, not only the Law of Moses, but all the laws of the Bible, and Christian would be surprised how many laws we have given to us by Our Lord, by Yeshua himself, and by the apostles themselves. The New Testament does not abhor law, it is not a book of lawlessness. It is a book of law, and every good and righteous law has been built into it, also, grace, because without grace, there cannot be a righteous law.

So we read, we talked about the giving of the Law in Chapter 20 of the Book of Exodus, and just one bit of information that I might have forgotten, I don’t remember if I spoke it last week or not, is taken from Chapter 20, verse 18, and that is the basis of what happens on Mount Zion. In Jerusalem, on the Day of Pentecost, when the apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit, and they went out in the streets of Jerusalem on the feast day and spoke the good news, the gospel.

This is the basis of what we read about in Acts 2.

Okay, the translation of the New King James is a little bit weak, I don’t know why, but here is a translation of the Hebrew, literally. “And all the people saw the voices,” not thunderings, the voices, “and the torches, and the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain was smoking, and the people were trembling and stood afar off. And they told to Moses, ‘You talk to us, and we will hear you, and let not God talk to us, lest we die.’”

Acts 2 Is Fulfillment of Isaiah’s Promise

Now, they were filled with fear. When you read Acts 2, what happens on the Day of Pentecost is actually the fulfillment of Isaiah 2 that talks about, “out of Zion shall come forth the Torah and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” And what is happening in Acts 2 is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s promise, and it is based on the paradigm of what happened when God gave the Law, the 10 Commandments, from Mount Sinai, in front of all the people, and all of them heard.

And you see, God spoke, the one God spoke, and they heard many voices. That’s the Hebrew. And they had torches of fire, and they heard the trumpet, and the mountain smoked and shook, and the people were afraid. That’s exactly a repeat of what happened. What happened on Pentecost is a repeat of what happened on Mount Sinai.

And now I’m entering into Chapter 21 of Exodus, into the portion that is called, in Hebrew, Mishpatim, which is translated in English as “judgments,” or it could be judgments, or laws, that God now is going to elaborate, give the details of how to keep the 10 Commandments.

There Were Much Older Law Codes

Now, there’s a little bit of background. This happens around the 12th, 13th century B.C. We have codes of law that are at least 1,000 years older than the Law of Moses, the Law of God given to us by Moses, and we have some that are more than 2,800 years older than this event in the 12th to 13th century B.C. Ur-Nammu is one of the oldest ones, and it is from the third millennium, or close to the third millennium B.C., and Hammurabi is from the beginning of, like, 1800, 1900 B.C., a few hundred years before Moses. All these laws deal with the reality of their times.

One of the reality of their times was the fact that there was slavery. But if you compare this portion, the portion of Mishpatim, of Judgments, that starts in Chapter 21, verse 1, with these ancient laws that come from Mesopotamia and from Babylon, or even Egyptian laws, that are older than the Law of Moses, you will see the huge difference.

Early Laws Deal With Slavery

Yes, the Torah deals with slavery, and slavery was common in the world, and I am sorry to say, those people who are dreaming today, in the 21st century, that there is no slavery in the world, there is all kinds of slavery in the world, and still slavery in Africa, of Africans enslaving other Africans. Yes, that exists, even until this very day. And there is the white slavery of human trafficking for prostitution and for sex workers from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, from Africa to Europe, from Africa to South Africa, and it’s still going on around the world.

But the administration and the laws that govern slavery in the ancient world are so far above in the Torah than in all our neighborhoods of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and even further out than Mesopotamia and Egypt on the map of the world. I’m not going to get into it, because of time, maybe in another forum, I would get into it and elaborate on it much more, but one of the things that you find out is that there is a difference between a local slave, I would say a Hebrew slave, and a non-Hebrew slave, but the difference is, both the Hebrew slave and the non-Hebrew slave have it so much better than in the laws of Hammurabi, and in the laws of Ur-Nammu, and in the other codexes of laws from the Middle East, and from Egypt, and from the ancient world.

Yes, we all don’t want slavery of any kind, and as disciples of Yeshua, we are not slaves, not even slaves of God. We are servants, out of our free will, out of our choosing God, and we have laws that govern our relationship with the Almighty God. We are not a lawless faith.

Yes, we’re saved by grace, by God’s grace, and out of God’s love for us as human beings, but if you read the New Testament, both the gospels and the letters, and all the way to the Book of Revelation, you’ll find out that our faith has rules and regulations, laws that govern our lives, from how we deal with our families, and how we deal with God Himself, our obligations to our society, our need to take care of our widows, and orphans, and old people. We are governed by God’s rules, and if we’re not governed by God’s rules, we are a lawless faith and a lawless society, and that doesn’t stand the test of the scriptures. It doesn’t stand the test in the letters of Jacob, of James, it doesn’t stand the test with the words of Yeshua Himself.

The wise man is not the one who hears the gospel and believes it, the wise man, who built his house on the rock, is the man who hears the gospel and does it, and keeps the commandments of the gospels, and of Yeshua, and of the letter of the Apostles, and, of course, that reflect the laws, the 10 Commandments that Yeshua repeats several times, the New Testament repeats several times, and Yeshua repeats them when a young lawyer comes to Him and says, “What must I do to be saved?” Yeshua says, “Keep the Commandments.” He doesn’t say, “Don’t keep the Commandments, go to church, give money, shut up, and rely on grace.”

That’s not what Yeshua says. He says, “Keep the commandments,” and he says, “I keep the commandments,” but He shows us it’s not enough. You have to go beyond the Commandments. And if you’re wealthy, you have to sell, if that’s what’s keeping you out of heaven, you have to sell your property, give it to the poor, and inherit heaven. One of the things in this codex of laws that is in our portion of the week has to do with the laws of tort, damages, and in these laws of damages, we have the case in which two people are fighting, and a pregnant woman just passes by, and accidentally, they hit her, and she loses the baby, and now they have to compensate her.

Legal Law of Torts in Bible

And it is in this context that the phrase appears the first time in the Law of Moses, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. And Christians seem to condemn the law without understanding what is written here. The law never said that if there is an accident, or even on purpose, you take somebody’s eye out, that you have a right, the father, the mother, the relatives of the person whose eye has been damaged, have a right to go and take the eye of the person who damaged you. There’s no such thing, there’s no such teaching in the Law of Moses, not here, and not in Leviticus, in the two places that it appears. It has to do with the law, the legal law of torts, of damages. And what the Torah says, here in our portion, is that you have to pay the value of the eye with money, with what the eye is worth.

You have no right to go and pluck out the guy’s eye that hit you, even if he hit you on purpose, but he has to pay the value of the eye. In other words, if somebody put out your eye, you don’t have a right to go and shoot him in the head. It’s not proportional. The Torah is dealing with justice, with what is right to do, and is instructing us what is right to do.

Let me read to you the text from Chapter 21 of Exodus, verse 22.

It sounds like an eye for an eye means that you go and take out the eye, a burn for a burn, it means that if you got burned, you go and burn the other guy.

That’s what it sounds like if you don’t pay attention and read continuously.

The Torah Is Righteous

Here is a very interesting situation. If you have a servant, say a slave, okay, and you damage the slave on a small thing, like you knock out his tooth, you didn’t take care of your servant properly, you didn’t protect him properly, you endangered his health, you knocked out one of his teeth, then that buys that servant freedom. Because he’s a servant, he gets more, proportionally, than a free person, because he was under your care. The Torah is righteous, God is righteous, and He didn’t give unrighteous laws to His children, and this attitude needs to be stressed more and more, for Christians, because they are brothers.

The negative attitude that the church has inherited from the church fathers in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th century, is not biblical. The Bible that Yeshua and the apostles had is this Bible, what we call the Old Testament. They didn’t have another testament, they didn’t have another set of rules. They had this Bible with these rules, and it is obligatory for us, as disciples of Jesus, who believed the Bible not from Matthew to Revelation, but from Genesis to Revelation, to study these things, to analyze them, to teach them, to encourage our brothers and sisters to follow them as they are interpreted in light of our world, our culture, our 21st-century technology.

These are laws which God has a right to change, and He did change them. God realized that there are problems of time and place. While they were still in the wilderness, with the five daughters of Zelophehad. Poor Mr. Zelophehad, he only had daughters, five of them, he didn’t have any boys, and so there was the issue of inheritance that came into the picture, and the daughters came to Moses, complained, and Moses said, “Let me consult with the Boss, with God.” And God said to Moses, “You know what? These girls are right. Let’s change the law and allow women to inherit, girls to inherit from their father. Hallelujah.” Wow, that was very early, in, like, in the 12th, 13th century B.C. folks.

God Was Innovative With Israel

Nowhere in the world was there such a thing. The Torah is given by God, the principles are given by God, and the rules are given by God, but they’re not given to us like dummies, they’re given to us to read them, to study them, to interpret them, and to apply them in light of our modern world, in light of our technological world, in light of the iPhones, and iPads, and computers, and AI that our generation has introduced to the world, to humanity. So yes, our portion deals with these laws.

I suggest that you read it, keep reading it, ‘cause there are very important rules in here that have to do with our life, that Yeshua refers to, and encourages us not to ignore the Word of God. So may God bless you. Please read these portions of the Torah, starting in Chapter 21, verse 1, and continue to Chapter 24 of the Book of Exodus. May God bless all of you, and keep reading. Shalom from Jerusalem.