Principles

I have often heard zealous persons say that Scripture does not indicate retirement.  It surely does.  The priest could begin his service to the Tabernacle at 25 years of age.  He retired at 50 years of age.  He continued personal ministry to the congregation as he felt he might contribute, in the locale in which he lived, and later in the synagogues when that ministry was introduced to the tribes of Israel.  It was actually semi-retirement, but not under the stringency of schedule and dislocation that the Tabernacle assignment required.  All men of Israel, likely with the exemption of Levites, were conscripts for the military at 20 years of age – to serve when needed.  They were mustered out at 60 years of age to release from duty.  Out of these obligations it was likely given that a male was presumed worth fifty pieces of silver whereas a woman was set at thirty.  This did not indicate that women were lesser in the mind of God, but that the high rate of death from war duty left women and children in need.  The tribe providing for the family would give the larger sum beneficiary to women precisely because of the nature of the economy and life.  The care of widows was important to Israel – and to New Testament obligations.  It was the insurance policy of the time.  The largest single call on the tribes was in providing for the survivors of the civil strife that nearly wiped out the Tribe of Benjamin.  It may have been carried through in the same awareness as that of Lincoln when he noted to the country that the deaths of soldiers in the American Civil War meant that the widow and children needed to be cared for in a society arranged as it was in context – a biblical injunction.  The failure of the care of widows and orphans by a society and nature that took away husbands became a major evidence of the failure of Israel to keep godly faith.  (Note Ezekiel 22:7; Isaiah 9:17; Zechariah. 7:10)  The tendency of moderns to interpret this or that practice in various eras of history in current terms is one of the largest errors and barriers related to the search for truth.  God supports the care of persons – whether done by this source or another.  He begins with the expectations placed upon the family.  If the family fails for some reason, he wants the need met through some other channel.  Get it done in an orderly way.

We have asked the question on this date earlier in our quartered years of this series: What is the worth of a person?  God makes the worth greater than the world.  The world makes it in pieces of silver.  Current courts make it in millions of dollars.  If you are going the secular way, God says, and in a desert for forty years then you can’t give less than this amount.   Warfare, a near constant for many periods of history, took the lives of men in astonishing numbers.  In 1723, Count Karl Fleming, according to Robert Asprey, described Berlin, as a border fortress where everyone, soldiers and civilians, spoke only of military matters.  Cut into history at nearly any point and there is cruel warfare that mongrelized men (soldiers) in particular and much of the society generally.  Citizens sought peaceful frontiers to escape, but ran out of them in the settlement of the Americas.  We now wonder about cruel money frontiers.

The care of widows for ancients was an enormous obligation, even addressed by Jesus and related also to orphaned children.  This may account for the common experience of multiple wives so to give women some security in a community not geared to the concepts of a peaceful society.  To evaluate the life of a man more highly, offered some assistance to his widow(s) and children.  Not enough, the church gave the people some care of widows, and the fatherless. (Acts 6:1)  Lincoln caught the meaning, and noted it in one of his famous speeches.  In the world past the women did take high risk in childbirth that has abated a bit.   Infant death was common, and the advancements of the decades since the middle of the nineteenth century have been the largest contributor to the general longevity statistics.  The journals of the Puritan women of New England offer perception.  In one story I read, the mother bore eight infant males until she bore one that lived.  She had sons all named John because she wanted a son named John.  At last she had one who lived.  We note that improved medicine and better home physical environment changed the context of society, and its needs.  Generational changes seldom indicate change in principles and understanding.