More Common Sense

Today's reading covers a wide variety of laws and aspects of living, and several jumped out at me, and I'll develop this theme much further with my comments on Sunday. Here are the sections in particular:

Leviticus 19:5-7--proper eating of sacrifices

Leviticus 19:23-25--eating from newly planted fruit trees

Leviticus 19:35-36--using honest standards

I'm going to be right on two of my comments and could be out to lunch on the third, but that's a risk I'm willing to take. In the first case, sacrifices were to be eaten either the day of or day after the sacrifice, and not eaten the third day. Considering they were sacrificing animals, what happens when dead flesh is left around unrefrigerated in a high-heat environment? Add to that no one fully understood the process of decay until well into the 19th Century. In this particular instance, what may seem as inviolate law was also a source of hygiene and protection. 

I could be wrong on the next one, but is it safe or advisable to eat the first crops of fruit? I'm not even close to being an agronomist, so I wonder if a similar level of protection is added here, using the law to prevent the Israelites from potential disease from eating immature fruit. I could be confusing this with eating unripened fruit, in which case, I apologize in advance to you three readers.

The last comment on honest standards is an issue that has bedeviled societies since the beginning of time, but it wasn't effectively quantified until 1776 by Scottish philosopher Adam Smith in "The Wealth of Nations." Using honest standards  reduces price inflation and the consequent currency devaluation. How this worked in the past was quite simple--a unit of anything was given a value, either intrinsic (it was actually worth it) or fiat (it was SAID to be worth it). Let's go with a bushel of wheat. How do we know what a bushel is? As a society, we have standard measures to which we all agree. 

Suppose someone attempts to pass off bushels of wheat that only contain 99% of the correct and accepted value? "It's only 1%, it won't matter much. Who can tell anyway?" What happens is a runaway train that is enormously difficult to stop. The currency (the bushel) is devalued, so more of the currency (say, 101% of a bushel) will be required, since the devalued asset will be considered the new norm. This happens so fast--Weimar Republic Germany after World War I had this type of hyperinflation, which set the stage for the events that led to World War II.

Didn't see a commentary on macroeconomics and agronomy coming when you started, did you? Notice how many times it is written "I am the Lord," in this section. The people of Israel knew NONE of what I just wrote, and wouldn't have been able to understand it had it been explained. "I am the Lord" was God's way of saying "Trust me--I got you covered." And he still does to this day.

Scott