As it’s well-known from the popular biblical stories, Yahweh, the God of the Bible, emerges on the world scene during the times of the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt. He makes quite a grand entrance as he subdues the imperial masters by bringing on ten different plagues upon them and liberates the Israelites from under the yoke of the Egyptian Empire. He even parts the Red Sea to make roads for the escape of the oppressed masses.
Yahweh brings them out into the wilderness, where he starts teaching them his ways. He hands them his commandments through his agent Moses, the collection of which is now called the Mosaic Law. It’s in these teachings and commandments we find the true nature of Yahweh, and what he personally deems as a just and fair society.
Although there are hundreds of such commandments, let us consider some of Yahweh’s flagship teachings to trace the themes of his thought process
on how a model society should function.
- The Manna Principle
- The Sabbath Rest
- The Sabbath Year Release
- The Jubilee Year Liberty
Even before Yahweh gives them all his commandments, he starts to test and discipline them in the wilderness in order to make them unlearn the ways of their earlier Empire-controlled life back in Egypt and undergo reform so as to follow the new directives under which a Yahweh-controlled community is expected to operate.
Centuries later, looking back in hindsight, the Deuteronomist would write about those events as below –
Remember the long way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments… Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child so the LORD your God disciplines you.
Deuteronomy 8:2,5.
The Hebrew word ‘nasah’ rendered as ‘testing’ in the aforementioned verse means either ‘to test’ or ‘to try’. One could gather from the varied experiences of the Israelites in the wilderness that many of those incidents were indeed trials – trials of principles that Yahweh holds paramount for his people to follow.
Read Next: The Manna Principle
