ISWEARTOGOD

 

³³ `Again, you heard that it was said to the ancients: Thou shalt not swear falsely, but thou shalt pay to the Lord thine oaths; (Num. 30:1-2)

³⁴ but I -- I say to you, not to swear at all; neither by the heaven, because it is the throne of God,

³⁵ nor by the earth, because it is His footstool, nor by Jerusalem, because it is a city of a great king,

³⁶ nor by thy head mayest thou swear, because thou art not able one hair to make white or black; (Deut. 6:13)

³⁷ but let your word be, Yes, Yes, No, No, and that which is more than these is of the evil (one).

 

Few people in Western societies in our time are awed by oaths; yet in the ancient world, and in Judaism, they were taken very seriously. Taking an oath to perform something meant that if one did not perform it something serious would happen to one. In the ancient world an oath was not a guarantee of a statement: it was the statement. An oath was not allowed to contravene the Torah – that made it a prohibited oath. What is intriguing is that in both the Jewish and the Roman cultures of the first century CE there was a tendency to invoke something other, and lower, than the deities themselves. Romans began to swear  by the Emperor’s name, still considered holy; Jews on the other hand began to swear not so much by God as by things created by God: the heaven, the earth, one’s head, one’s mother. This was thought to be less risky in case of non-fulfilment, and as such was condemned in several places: to swear falsely was in any case forbidden, and to avoid swearing by the Deity was to insult God.  Yeshua’s position agrees with such condemnation, and in this form aligns itself with that of the Essenes, who refused all oaths. 

            In Yeshua’s case, he thus once again follows the pattern of completion of the Torah in the direction of inwardness: from the outward act of taking an oath he moves inward to the mind of the person swearing. And if such a person is fully committed to the New Torah, no oath he can take will increase his credibility: a simple Yes and No will say everything. 

            Interestingly, here neither Christendom nor even Christianity have followed His rule; and unlike the previous case, this departure happened almost at once. Oaths were such a part of social life and of trust that they were clearly felt to be inevitable. In British and Australian courts, even heathen Chinese were permitted to swear, by a cracked saucer: if the oath was not kept, the swearer's soul, it was thought, would crack like the saucer. Opposition to swearing also remained, however: Quakers would not swear and were permitted to make a simple affirmation in court. Today, in a demystified and often secularised society, oaths have lost much of their necessary solemnity and mystique. This, though, would seem to make Yeshua's point much more important: we need to become people whose word it would occur to no one to doubt. We need that Torah of inwardness, which is more than ever a Torah of trust.