Ahhhhh!!!!!!!The Problems
“So many gods, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
While just the art of being kind
Is all the sad world needs.”
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Uncle George, the black sheep of my father’s family because of his divorce(s), saved my butt.
Several weeks before entering the Maryknoll College Seminary in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, where I was to study Latin – a course abandoned by the faculty ‘round about my third week in seminary – and Philosophy, because it was then a Canon Law requirement before Theology, I interviewed soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon. Interesting interview and I got a nationwide byline in the Catholic press. (I had been working my way through law school as reporter, but that’s another story.)
My first week with Maryknoll corresponded with the Democratic Convention and the concurrent riots in Chicago.
Over three or four years, seminary changed me.
From: The Outstanding Freshman Air Force ROTC cadet who, as a junior and despite his best efforts to gain weight eating tons of bananas and drinking gallons of water, was denied a commission because I was so skinny my fraternity nickname was “Shoestring” and I could hide behind a pencil.
To: Someone who participated in Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, prayer services and teach-ins. At that time, Roman Catholic priests, monks and Sisters – all often in their full and distinctive habits - and seminarians were at the forefront of Civil Rights and anti-War in Vietnam demonstrations, frequently joining with Protestant religious and seminarians, including the future Father Roger Tobin.
My father was less than pleased.
That’s when Uncle George stepped in. A former reporter and editor for The Washington Post and then employed by one of the nation’s leading military contractors, he had an insight my father didn’t. In summary, he wrote to me about – we now presume – a great (or great great) grandfather on my father’s side: When Protestants in the coal mining area of Pennsylvania attempted to force Catholic parents to send their children to public schools where they would be “educated” with the Protestant/King James Version of the Bible, he led the opposition: “If someone has to go to prison for the right of Catholics to educate their children according to their Faith, let it be me.”
It’s possible Uncle George fabricated (made up) (embellished the history of) that distant relative.
But I wish he were around today and living in Louisiana, where Governor Jeff Landry signed legislation in June mandating the display of “the Ten Commandments” in every one of the state’s public classrooms – kindergarten through college. In the wee small hours of the morning a few days later, one presidential candidate took to social media to declare, “I love the Ten Commandments in public schools, private schools, and many other places, for that matter. – How can we, as a nation go wrong??? This may be, in fact, the first major step in the revival of religion, which is desperately needed, in our country.” [EDITOR’S NOTE: We couldn’t bring ourselves to reproduce the all-caps version or include the tag line on that text.]
Ahhhh! The problems!
Landry asserted, “If you want to respect the rule of law, you've got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”
Wrong!
He ignores history!
Here’s the truth no one is speaking: The version of the Ten Commandments legislators and religio-politicos want posted in schools and public places has nothing to do with Jewish Sacred Scriptures and was part of a publicity stunt created for the 1956 move “The Ten Commandments.”
In 1954, the Fraternal Order of Eagles, founded in Seattle in1898, distributed 10,000 Ten Commandment plaques - with the version proposed by the governor - to organizations and groups across the nation and in 1961 donated a monolith with the same version to stand outside the Texas State Capitol. The FOE also partnered with producer Cecile B. DeMille to promote the 1956 “The Ten Commandments” starring Charlton Heston. “[I]t’s a text that was crafted by secular political actors in the 1950s for their own ends,” according to Princeton University historian and author of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America Kevin M. Kruse
He ignores history!
Ur-Nammu (reigning from 2047-2030 BCE) founded the Third Dynasty of Ur – the so-called Ur III Period (2047-1750 BCE) – in Sumer, southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq).
In forty paragraphs that state both crimes and punishments, the Code of Ur Nammu outlines the will of the gods. For example:
“If a man committed a kidnapping, he is to be imprisoned and pay fifteen shekels of silver…
“If a man proceeded by force, and deflowered the virgin slave-woman of another man, that man must pay five shekels of silver…
“If a man appeared as a witness, and was shown to be a perjurer, he must pay fifteen shekels of silver…
“If a man knocked out the eye of another man, he shall weigh out half a mina of silver….”
(The Code of Urukagina from the 24th Century BCE is actually older than Ur Nammu’s; however, it is known only through partial references to it in other documents and the actual text has not been found.)
More detailed than that of Ur-Nammu, the cuneiform Code of Lipit-Ishtar (reign 1934-1924 BCE) is the second oldest extant body of law and more detailed than that of Ur-Nammu. It contains a prologue justifying its legal authority – to “establish justice in the land, eradicate the cry for justice [...] [and] forcefully restrain crime and violence," civil and penal laws and a concluding epilogue.
Among its provisions:
“If adjacent to the house of a man the bare ground of another man has been neglected and the owner of the house has said to the owner of the bare ground, ‘Because your ground has been neglected someone may break into my house: strengthen your house,’ and this agreement has been confirmed by him, the owner of the bare ground shall restore to the owner of the house any of his property that is lost…
“If a slave-girl or slave of a man has fled into the heart of the city and it has been confirmed that he (or she) dwelt in the house of (another) man for one month, he shall give slave for slave…
“If he has no slave, he shall pay fifteen shekels of silver…
“If a man's slave has compensated his slave-ship to his master and it is confirmed (that he has compensated his master two-fold), that slave shall be freed….”
Proclaimed by the Babylonia king who reigned from 1792-1750 BCE, the Code of Hammurabi was a collection of 282 rules, establishing standards for commercial interactions and setting fines and punishments to meet the requirements of justice. Carved into a single, four-ton slab of diorite, a durable but incredibly difficult stone for carving, it covers a seven-foot stele with chiseled cuneiform script. Written in an if-then form, the Code provides some of the earliest examples of the “lex talionis” – laws of retribution, sometimes referred to as “an eye for an eye.”
The stele of Hammurabi - broken into three pieces – was discovered by the French mining engineer Jacques de Morgan during an archaeological expedition to Persia in 1901.
The Laws of the central Mesopotamian city of Eshnunna date to the reign of Dadusa (1800 - 1779 BCE) and remnants of the stele on which they were carved survived the ransacking of the Iraq Museum in 2003. Elements of the law, e.g. what happens when an ox gores a man, reflect the Code of Hammurabi and the Moses Code of Exodus.
Moses, who in Jewish tradition was born on 7 Adar in the year 2368 from Creation (circa 1400 BCE), was actually a newcomer to the world of law givers. And, unlike Ur-Nammu and Hammurabi for whom there is archaeological evidence to help determine when their codes were written, it is almost impossible to estimate the origins of his Commandments.
While Jewish tradition places the origin of the Commandments around 1450 BCE, scholars propose a date between the 16th and 13th centuries BCE because of their association with the Sinai Covenant between Yahweh and Israel. Others argue that the Commandments were produced after the writings of Amos (c. 750 BCE) and Hosea (Eighth Century BCE).
But his historical mistake (inaccuracy?) isn’t the governor’s only problem.
How about which version of Sacred Scripture will be used: New International Version, New Revised Standard Version, Revised Standard Version, English Standard Version, New Living Translation, Christian Standard Version, New American Standard Version?
There are more than 660 English-language versions of the Bible available today. The governor can choose The Holy Bible: Stockcar Racing edition Or the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops New American Bible edition. Or the New Jewish Publication Society’s translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, an outstanding work of scholarship that does not include the New Testament or the books of the Apocrypha. And let’s not forget ye goode ole King James Bible for all those kindergarteners and fourth graders so fond of reading Shakespearean-style English from 1611.
Then there is the question for which the Louisiana governor and legislature will surely find an answer: Which version of the Ten Commandments – Exodus 20:2-17, Deuteronomy 5:6-21 or the “Ritual Decalogue” of Exodus 34:11-26?
Two lists – Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 – are close enough that we can give a pass to either or both. Exodus 34:10-26, however, begins and ends with confusion: After Moses, in a fit of pique, destroyed the original stone tablets, “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Cut two tablets of stone like the former ones, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets, which you broke.’” (Exodus 34:10)
Cool!
But…
“The Lord said to Moses: Write these words in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel. He was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant the ten commandments.” (Exodus 34: 27-28)
Okay! Which is it? Did God write the words or did Moses?
And some basic math. Depending on the faith tradition, there’s actually more than ten commandments. The Jewish (Talmudic), Anglican, Reformed Christian, Orthodox Christian, Roman Catholic, and Luteran traditions accept “I am the Lord you God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall not have other gods before me” as one Commandment. Roman Catholics and Lutherans consider the prohibition against making false gods, bowing down in worship to them, and the reminder that God is a ”jealous God… showing love to the thousandth generation” as part of the First Commandment; the other groups cited above count it Number 2.
As a result, while the various faith groups manage to settle on ten commandments, they do so in “cut-and-paste” fashion – “You do your thing; we’ll do ours.”
And, perhaps, therein lies the problem: The governor and legislator of Louisiana have determined “Our thing must be everyone’s thing – from kindergarten through university.”
It’s been decades since I enjoyed the barbequed shrimp at New Orlean’s Pascal’s Manale. It was so good that both times I licked my fingers in public – just to be sure I didn’t miss the last drop of sauce. (I’m told that both of my parents also licked their fingers because the sauce is that good. Hard to imagine Mrs. Flynn licking her fingers in public, but I can. That’s how good the sauce was.)
If that (perhaps mythical) great relative of Uncle George’s report were still alive, I’d buy him dinner at Pascal’s Manale in the hope that he’d get his Irish up and raise some good ole Irish Catholic hell over Louisiana’s newest exercise in religious bigotry.