Exodus 21:32:  “If the ox gores a manservant or a maidservant; he shall give unto their master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.”

 

Jewish tradition teaches something called a remez. Remez means a hint. In other words when you read a passage like Exodus 21:32 you find a hint that there must be some deeper meaning behind this passage.  The hint here is an ox goring a servant and thirty pieces of silver. Now the passage does not say goring him to death, just goring him. I mean what are the odds of a servant getting gored by an ox?  There are any number of ways a servant could be injured or killed, why does the writer specifically say goring?  Obviously, it is using the idea of a an ox goring someone as an illustration or example of a servant being wounded or killed through the negligence of the one having to pay up for the loss.

 

I mean, say hey, what if the servant got gored while trespassing or trying to steal something from the owner, maybe even trying to steal the ox itself.  Should the ox owner still be responsible to pay the thirty shekels of silver?   Why thirty and not forty or even fifty?  Isn’t there any adjustment for inflation?

 

But let me ask the ultimate question.  How many of us own an ox and even if we did what at the chances that our ox will gore someone’s servant?  In other words for a dusty old professor living in the a big city who never met an ox face to face let alone owned one and with slavery being outlawed in this country the odds are I will never have this problem of my ox goring someone’s servant.  Maybe I could say someone’s employee gets gored by my ox but even there why would I pay his boss compensation, it should really go to his family.

 

No matter how I look at this verse it is useless to me or even to you in this 21st Century.   Why even have it in the Bible, why waste up space with a useless command?   The best I can do is maybe use it to illustrate a spiritual truth like if you have a dead tree in your back yard and the wind blows it down on top of your neighbor’s garage you should compensation your neighbor for the loss to his garage because you were negligent in not removing the dead tree knowing a good wind could possibly cause the dead tree to uproot and fall on your neighbor’s garage.  Ok, that’s cool. But somehow such a lesson does not warrant such detail like an ox goring and paying a set fee of thirty shekels.

 

So I am going to do something right now that is a no no in our Western Christian thought, but before you throw rocks at me, I do ask you to think about it and decide if what I am doing is really harmful.   I am going to say that the ox goring and the thirty shekels is a remez, a hint to something deeper with a message that would apply to us all and not just to the owner of an ox and slaves.

 

First the word ox in Hebrew is shor which means ox, bull or a head of cattle.  Brown Driver Briggs, a Christian lexicon say it is wrongly or mistakenly rendered as shur meaning a wall.  In other words the dot goes above the Vav in the word shor and not in the middle of the word as in shur.  However, that was a decision made by the Masoretes seven hundred years after the birth of Christ.  Rabbi Solomon Hirsch a nineteenth century linguist and Hebrew master expresses a nice Jewish saying that Benjamin Netanyahu loves to use – “Who says?”   Just because someone with some credentials says it, that does  not make it so.  The word shur and shor both have the same root meaning or origin.  It has the idea of something that creates a barrier.  The word for gore is nagach which has a wide range of meanings. One use is to express the idea of warring against someone.  The word for servant is ‘avad which is a servant who serves out of love.  So underneath the rendering:  “if an ox gores a male/female servant”  lies a secondary rendering of: “If there is a someone creating a barrier to your (ox – shor)  such that they are warring against you (gore – nagach) such that you cannot serve God out of love (avad – servant).”

 

Hey, suddenly I am discovering something that really does apply to me in a practical way.  Recently our website came under attack, possibly from ISIS who have targeted Christian websites, shutting our site down by warring against us and keeping us from serving the God we love.  Now I am all ears, so what are we to do about it.  Well ISIS is to give us thirty shekels of silver.  That will not be near enough to pay for the damage they did and good luck trying to collect.

 

But, hey, look at that word thirty shaloshim.  Rabbi Hirsch claims that this word for thirty is closely related to the word shalom peace.  They are to give me peace.  Fat chance of that occurring.  But the number thirty is represented by the Lamed.  Hebrew does not have a numbering system like we do in English.  The Hebrew letters do double duty working not only as letters but numbers as well.  Lamed is the number thirty.  Let me read something interesting that the Jewish sages teach about Lamed.  “When the tall Lamed, the ox goad, lifts its head into sight, we ourselves may need to be goaded into movement.”  Rabbi Seidman.   The letter Lamed is also a preposition for the words to or towards.  So when ISIS shuts down our website we are to be given the thirty the Lamed, the ox goad.  In other words the very attack is to cause us to move forward.   The last remez is the word for silver which is keseph.  Another use of the word keseph is to express a yearning and desire.

 

So if my ox gores someone’s servant I will indeed pay him thirty pieces of silver.  But you know what, since that is not likely to happen but what could happen is ISIS shutting our website down well, I go with the secondary rendering of:  “If ISIS shuts our website down (ox – shor)  and wars against us (gore – nagach)  such that it hinders our service to God (avad) then we will use that attack to just encourage us to move forward even more determined (thirty – Lamed) with our yearning and desire to serve God (silver – keseph).”

 

Yeah, I can see some of you Christian traditionalist throwing salt in the air over the way I spun that verse, well go ahead.  But you know what?  Despite the attack on our website I am holding up Exodus 21:32 as my banner to move forward.   If you like my 21st Century spin on an ancient verse, then just keep reading, I’ve got more.

 

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