Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Leviticus 24:10, Curses
Summary
Study the text of the Bible weekly with Jeremy Rosen through a combination of traditional, critical, and personal perspectives. No knowledge of Hebrew or the Bible is necessary. You may use any Bible text you may have or you can go to sefaria.org. This week will begin with Leviticus 24:10, curses.
Jeremy Rosen
Manchester-born Jeremy Rosen was educated at Cambridge University England and Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He has practiced as an orthodox rabbi, as principal of Carmel College in the UK, and as professor at the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Antwerp, Belgium. He has written and lectured extensively in the UK and the US, where he now resides and was the rabbi of the Persian-Jewish community in Manhattan.
If you go back 2,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, you have rabbis like Rabbi Akiva, who said if ever a court of law puts somebody to death, they would be called a bloody court of law. If I were in charge, I would never put anybody to death. There were other rabbis at the time, who disagreed and said, yes, we should retain the death penalty, but we make it as difficult as possible to ever carry it out. And so as I mentioned before, you cannot, according to the Torah, carry out a death penalty if the person hasn’t been warned, if there isn’t actual evidence, you can’t use circumstantial evidence. And even so, you look for every opportunity not to, and therefore it was not practical as such, but rather more an indication of the seriousness of the crime.