NOTES for Deu 13:1-18

Even today people appear within the Christian community who try to turn us away from the faith. Advertisements on television and in newspapers offer us the services of “Orthodox” fortune-tellers, healers, and other “believing” miracle workers. The Old Testament commandment offers a simple solution: death for the apostate.

But how can this be reconciled with the commandments to love our enemies, forgive, and not condemn? When we condemn others, we ourselves may be condemned for unfaithfulness—and who is without sin? Only one way remains, the simplest and at the same time the most difficult: learn to separate a person from his sin; love the person and do not condemn him, but hate and condemn unfaithfulness, apostasy, and temptation. And, of course, stand firm in the faith ourselves (1 Cor. 16:13).

The legislation of the Book of Deuteronomy prescribes one punishment for apostasy: execution. Apostasy here includes both participation in pagan cults and preaching any gods other than Yahweh, whether ordinary preaching or prophetic preaching. No one at the time doubted the existence of pagan prophets, but to follow them meant betraying Yahweh and Yahwism. Why, then, does the legislation we find in the Book of Deuteronomy turn out to be so harsh toward apostates? The Book of Exodus, for example, allows in this case what is called by the Hebrew word "herem," which literally means "ban" or "taboo." The matter here could involve either expulsion or exclusion from the community, as was commonly done in subsequent centuries, right up to the present day.

The severity of the Book of Deuteronomy could be explained by concrete historical conditions: it was written when the threat of paganism was very great. In that era the authorities of the Northern Kingdom, where the first, early version of the Book of Deuteronomy appeared, officially supported syncretism, and sometimes paganism as such, from which syncretism was in essence not very far. Supporters of pure Yahwism were persecuted, which only contributed to the radicalization of their views. There was, however, something else as well, something not reducible to the book's historical context alone. It was connected with the awareness of the absolute value of the relationship that binds the human person to God.

Gradually an understanding was taking shape in the Yahwist community that life without communion with God is worth nothing, that relationship with God is more important and more valuable than life as such. This was not about some religious idea, but about an experience that visibly confirmed to everyone who had lived through it that full life is possible precisely and only in the context of communion with God, those relationships between a person and God outside of which there is, if not instant death, then a slow dying, a loss of strength and of life itself. Relationship with God therefore came to be valued above life as such: it was life's condition and its meaning. The religiosity so vividly expressed in the Book of Deuteronomy extended these ideas to the whole people as one spiritual whole. And if someone became responsible for breaking that unity, he had to die, because his life lost meaning and significance for God and for people. Measuring a person's spiritual life by a religious standard was, of course, a tribute to history, to the place and time where and when the book was written. But the system of priorities standing behind this legislation fully corresponds to the Decalogue and to the Torah as a whole.