Last week, Brian Mattson wrote a great response to an argument by Peter Enns. In his new book, The Bible Tells Me So, Enns argues that Exodus 12:8-9 and Deuteronomy 16:5-7 flatly contradict one another. One says boil the Passover lamb and the other says don’t boil it.
In his article, Mattson compellingly shows that Enns’ argument doesn’t hold water. If you consider the Hebrew, Exodus says don’t boil and Deuteronomy says cook it. There isn’t a contradiction and Enns a Hebrew scholar ought to know this.
I’m not a Hebrew scholar by any means. I got a solid D in my Elementary Hebrew class and I’m postponing taking Hebrew Syntax and Exegesis until the very end—hoping that Christ returns before having to take it. I’m terrible at Hebrew. But even so I wouldn’t have been convinced by the argument of Enns for one simple reason…
The Hebrew people weren’t idiots
If there really was a contradiction between Exodus 12 and Deuteronomy 16 don’t you think the Hebrew people would have noticed it? Especially on something as important as the Passover.
We are talking about the people that at various seasons went to such great lengths to observe God’s law that they’d strain out gnats. And so somehow we are supposed to believe they missed this glaring contradiction in their Hebrew Bibles. Nobody, apparently, ever asked the question, “Wait, are we supposed to boil the thing or not boil it?”
It seems to me that we only listen to these supposed contradictions because of a combination of ethnocentrism and chronological snobbery. We assume that we are more intelligent people living in a more intelligent age and so we can dismiss the thousands of years of other people that looked over these texts. We, in all our superiority, have been able to find the contradictions that these silly Jews weren’t able to see.
I am not intending this to be a definitive argument. After all, I would level a similar charge of contradiction against other religious works. But I would hope that I wouldn’t do so from the assumption that they are idiots that never realized their religious book has a glaring contradiction.
