Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [59]
7. “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
Not even in the White House. Adultery ain’t what it used to be. In an era when the private lives of public people are displayed on the evening news and at the supermarket checkout, it is definitely time to rethink adultery. In 1997, a young woman pilot was kicked out of the U.S. Air Force for having an affair and then lying about it. That’s actually two broken commandments: adultery and false witness. Pretty soon, the Pentagon was issuing more Scarlet Letters than Purple Hearts. A couple of generals got into trouble over their old affairs and a potential candidate for the highest-ranking post in the American military was forced to withdraw from consideration because of an affair he had thirteen years earlier. These stories were all a prelude to the “Clinton Follies,” a series of scandals that left the American people shrugging their shoulders at the thought of their president being unfaithful to his wife.
Viewed against this upheaval in social attitudes, this is a commandment that first must be viewed through ancient eyes. Adultery in ancient Israel was not exactly the crime we think of today. Ancient Israel was a polygamous society, so this commandment was primarily directed at women. Although it applied to a man who committed adultery with a married woman, adultery was viewed as a crime against the husband and it demanded the death penalty.
Jesus complicated things for Christians with this one because he said that just looking at a woman the wrong way was the moral equivalent of adultery. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says everyone who looks at a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery.
When President Jimmy Carter once told an interviewer from Playboy magazine, of all places, that he’d committed adultery many times “in his heart,” Carter had Jesus’ admonition in mind and was expressing the highly moralistic view that conceiving the sin is as bad as doing it. While the modern take on adultery is considerably more forgiving, it is still somewhat schizophrenic. We think it’s wrong but don’t stone adulterers in the town square any longer. Most Americans—and even more Europeans—seem to shrug off adultery. Poor Hester Prynne, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century heroine. She was just ahead of her time. Adultery certainly isn’t The Scarlet Letter any longer.
8. “Thou shalt not steal.”
This one is pretty straightforward, although Jewish commentators note that the eighth commandment referred to kidnapping as well as the simple theft of goods—and kidnapping was a death-penalty offense. Rabbi Telushkin also points out that the law code specified penalties for crimes such as stealing, and compensation to the victim was mandated. A thief was required to repay double the value of what was stolen; servitude was required if the thief could not pay the fine.
Again with this commandment there are some moral imperatives to weigh: Would you steal food to feed a starving child? Would it be wrong to steal military secrets relating to the creation of destructive weapons from an enemy to defend your nation?
9. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”
Although it is now thought of as an injunction against lying in general, this commandment originally referred to telling the truth in a legal dispute, reinforcing the sacredness of testimony in court already noted in the third commandment.
Even if taken in the widest sense of “lying,” the false-witness commandment still has some gray areas. Certainly the people who