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Leviticus 24

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1 Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying,

2 "Command the children of Israel, that they bring to you pure olive oil beaten for the light, to cause a lamp to burn continually.

3 Outside of the veil of the Testimony, in the Tent of Meeting, shall Aaron keep it in order from evening to morning before Yahweh continually: it shall be a statute forever throughout your generations.

4 He shall keep in order the lamps on the pure gold lampstand before Yahweh continually.

5 "You shall take fine flour, and bake twelve cakes of it: two tenth parts of an ephah shall be in one cake.

6 You shall set them in two rows, six on a row, on the pure gold table before Yahweh.

7 You shall put pure frankincense on each row, that it may be to the bread for a memorial, even an offering made by fire to Yahweh.

8 Every Sabbath day he shall set it in order before Yahweh continually. It is on the behalf of the children of Israel an everlasting covenant.

9 It shall be for Aaron and his sons; and they shall eat it in a holy place: for it is most holy to him of the offerings of Yahweh made by fire by a perpetual statute."

10 The son of an Israelite woman, whose father was an Egyptian, went out among the children of Israel; and the son of the Israelite woman and a man of Israel strove together in the camp.

11 The son of the Israelite woman blasphemed the Name, and cursed; and they brought him to Moses. His mother's Name was Shelomith, the daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan.

12 They put him in custody, until the will of Yahweh should be declared to them.

13 Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying,

14 "Bring out of the camp him who cursed; and let all who heard him lay their hands on his head, and let all the congregation stone him.

15 You shall speak to the children of Israel, saying, 'Whoever curses his God shall bear his sin.

16 He who blasphemes the name of Yahweh, he shall surely be put to death; all the congregation shall certainly stone him: the foreigner as well as the native-born, when he blasphemes the name, shall be put to death.

17 "'He who strikes any man mortally shall surely be put to death.

18 He who strikes an animal mortally shall make it good, life for life.

19 If anyone injures his neighbor; as he has done, so shall it be done to him:

20 fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; as he has injured someone, so shall it be done to him.

21 He who kills an animal shall make it good; and he who kills a man shall be put to death.

22 You shall have one kind of law, for the foreigner as well as the native-born: for I am Yahweh your God.'"

23 Moses spoke to the children of Israel; and they brought forth him who had cursed out of the camp, and stoned him with stones. The children of Israel did as Yahweh commanded Moses.

   

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Moses

  

At the inmost level, the story of Moses -- like all of the Bible -- is about the Lord and his spiritual development during his human life as Jesus. Moses's role represents establishing forms of worship and to make the people obedient. As such, his primary representation is "the Law of God," the rules God gave the people of Israel to follow in order to represent spiritual things. This can be interpreted narrowly as the Ten Commandments, more broadly as the books of Moses, or most broadly as the entire Bible. Fittingly, his spiritual meaning is complex and important, and evolves throughout the course of his life. To understand it, it helps to understand the meaning of the events in which he was involved. At a more basic level, Moses's story deals with the establishment of the third church to serve as a container of knowledge of the Lord. The first such church -- the Most Ancient Church, represented by Adam and centered on love of the Lord -- had fallen prey to human pride and was destroyed. The second -- the Ancient Church, represented by Noah and the generations that followed him -- was centered on love of the neighbor, wisdom from the Lord and knowledge of the correspondences between natural and spiritual things. It fell prey to the pride of intelligence, however -- represented by the Tower of Babel -- and at the time of Moses was in scattered pockets that were sliding into idolatry. On an external level, of course, Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt through 40 years in the wilderness to the border of the homeland God had promised them. Along the way, he established and codified their religious system, and oversaw the creation of its most holy objects. Those rules and the forms of worship they created were given as containers for deeper ideas about the Lord, deeper truth, and at some points -- especially when he was first leading his people away from Egypt, a time before the rules had been written down -- Moses takes on the deeper representation of Divine Truth itself, truth from the Lord. At other times -- especially after Mount Sinai -- he has a less exalted meaning, representing the people of Israel themselves due to his position as their leader. Through Moses the Lord established a third church, one more external than its predecessors but one that could preserve knowledge of the Lord and could, through worship that represented spiritual things, make it possible for the Bible to be written and passed to future generations.