Leviticus 24

For those of you who find Leviticus (and my ramblings on it) soporific, chapter 24 finally offers another story for your reading pleasure--and again, it's not a particularly pleasant one. A hapa son of an Israelite and an Egyptian curses God's name, which entitles him to a lovely stoning. God's name here is referred to as "the Name" (verses 11 and 16), an effect that lends His moniker a sense of nigh-inscrutable holiness.

Nowadays, people use God's name in vain all the time, so much so that it crops up kids' movies. Most people, however, do so mindlessly because it's become a phrase you just say to express surprise, horror, disgust, disappointment, elation, boredom--well, just about anything, really. I'm not going to cast aspersions on anyone who does this, but it does sadly reveal how God has become less relevant to Western culture.

In fact, colorful language in general is no longer as frowned upon as it once was. Remember when those movie previews appropriate for "all audiences" actually were appropriate for all audiences? Now, some of those trailers include violence, sexuality, and just about every curse word except the three biggies (starting with "f," "s," and "c"). In the movie Kick-Ass (whose title alone contains a slightly naughty word), a preteen girl drops an f-bomb and a c-bomb almost right out of the gate; while it's dramatically appropriate (and hilarious) in the context of the film, it wasn't too long ago when filmmakers wouldn't dare to write a character like that. On the other hand, more than three f-bombs in a movie automatically warrant an R-rating, which makes no sense to me. Is any expletive really beyond the boundaries of PG-13? And I personally think that a movie rated R just because it has salty language (like The King's Speech or Ed Wood) is much more innocuous than an R-rated film with brutal violence or explicit sex.

What a mess. Remember the good old (or bad old) days when teachers admonished you for using "stupid" because it was a bad word?

I know I've written something like this before in my discussion of the Ten Commandments, but I try not to swear myself, at least not out loud. In elementary school, swearing was the most awful thing in the world, and I cringed whenever I heard a bad word in a movie or TV show. My classmates didn't really swear either, but as soon as I got to 6th grade, the floodgates opened and everyone started talking like they were in a Quentin Tarantino movie. (In terms of swear words, not the wittiness of the repartee.) I admit that curse words don't bother me, unless they're uttered in the presence of very young children. However, I strive to avoid them myself to keep discourse as civil as possible.

I might be a bad judge of how offensive profanity is because I mostly hear it in movies, and I'm not affronted by most R-rated movies. (Unless they're just bad movies.) But in real life, heartlessly lambasting or belittling someone is just cruel, and obscene language can augment that animus. Why, then, should we lambast or belittle God by blaspheming His name? (Or Name.)

But enough about blasphemy; the real standout of this chapter is, of course, the food. Verse 5 specifies that the loaves of bread used for offering should be two-tenths of an ephah--which is about 7 pounds. Given that the average loaf of bread weighs about one pound, these are some seriously gargantuan loaves we're talking about here--and a dozen of them, no less.