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Sure, but what kind of things do they agree to do in those covenants?
The entirety of the Mosaic law found in the Torah? Are you trying to make some kind of point with this question or do you somehow not know that?
And you see no connection whatsoever between the Mosaic law and any sense of morality?
No, I don't think a law against eating pork has any bearing on morality.
I get what you mean now and I reject the implications.
Moses, like all great thinkers, was both original and true. In that, what he said that was true wasn't original and what he said that was original wasn't true.
I prefer Zoroaster. I think laws against kicking pregnant dogs make much more sense morally, than laws against eating shrimp.
That you disagree with the moral vision presented does not imply that the whole thing, at its time, in the perspective of the people involved, had nothing to do with morality.
Did you read anything I said or the Torah itself? I have no doubt they thought it meant morality. Morality meant following the covenant they made with a god. Moses wrote it down for them. That was their morality. I just reject it's truth, not that they thought it was morality.
Did you read anything you said? You said:
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It is easy to explain.
Leave current world where food comes from well stocked supermarket refrigerators open 24/7/365.
Leave even world of your peasant ancestors living, I presume, in lands with temperate wet climates where pigs roamed in the forests and fed themselves for most of the year and had to be fed only during winter.
Enter dry and treeless world of Near East. In this world, pigs had to be fed for all year, with food that could otherwise feed people. In this world, pigs were not necessity, but luxury for the rich. People who try to explain pig ban in desert religions as health measure are wrong, it is explicit populist, pro-social measure.
You are certainly aware that the Bible is one of the most extremist and revolutionary books ever written, book that rejects all structures of oppression in its time and place, book whose vision of better world is world of anarcho-syndicalist peasant communes without (or with strictly limited) monarchy, without feudalism, without landlordism, without usury and loan sharking, without standing army and permanent slavery(OFC excepting Gentiles). See biblical commandments that do not make sense to you in this light, and they will fit.
Do you have a single source to back that up?
Biblical Jubilee year
In ancient Near East, periodical debt forgiveness was common(people were then not so advanced as to pull themselves by their bootstraps from hereditary debt slavery), but biblical system pushed it further, into land redistribution every 50 years.
Remember, equal land division was always in agricultural societies the most extremely extremist demand of the most hardcore rebels.
As late as 1793, sooo radical French revolutionaires decreed death penalty for anyone who would dare to propose "agrarian law".
Here it was the law and the norm, explicitly designed to stop accumulation of land by few families, stop emergence of large hereditary landowners and resulting feudal system.
Add ban on lending on interest (what, in peasant village conditions, meant extortionary loan sharking, not investment in productive enterprises) and limiting slavery (for Hebrews only OFC) to seven years.
Yes, there is no evidence that the biblical economic system was ever actually implemented, but was well thought off. Bible writers were well aware about conditions in their world (all powerful kings, crushing taxation, omnipresent serfdom and slavery, few oligarchs and plantation owners owning most land), didn't like it and tried hard to find way to avoid it.
It is significant, and it is even more significant than not even the most Old Testament loving Christians who brought back biblical punishments and biblical genocides, never ever thought about putting this system into practice.
That’s like saying ‘the only voice of caution coming from Vladimir Lenin’. Marat was already endorsing the execution of his fellow revolutionaries for not being radical enough, he just understandably didn’t want it done to him.
Btw, I like your comments, but in half of them it's hard to tell what your position is because there’s so much sarcasm. As in “See biblical commandments that do not make sense to you in this light, and they will fit. “ This seems like aggressive overfitting to me, but I'm going to guess 'not sarcasm'.
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And what are those of us billions who number the people who are not the sons of Judah? What does the law of this universal and great god say of us?
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