Scooping and Copping

Number 10 of 17 in the *Twilight Zone* series:

by Farrell Till

The Twilight Zone, where the children of Israel lived and worshiped their god Yahweh, was indeed a strange place. Perhaps the only thing stranger than this god was the legal system that he imposed on his "chosen people." On our last journey, we learned that Yahweh abhorred anything that was blemished, and so he had ordered all people with physical handicaps to distance themselves from the tabernacle altar, lest they profane Yahweh's holy sanctuary with their presence. Even blemished animals, especially those with crushed testicles, would profane Yahweh's altar if they were offered as sacrifices.

Apparently it was easy to "profane" Yahweh in those days. In Deuteronomy 23:12-13, the chosen ones were told that they should "have a place outside the camp" where they could "go," and that they should take with them a "paddle" so that when they "sit down abroad," they could "dig with it and turn and cover that which comes from [them]." Well, that makes sense. With three million people wandering across the Sinai on their trek to the promised land, human waste would certainly have posed a serious sanitation problem. What better way to dispose of it than to require each person to carry a pooper-scooper?

But wait a minute. Just when we are about ready to commend the wisdom of Yahweh for revealing to his children the need to maintain sanitation in their camp, we read on in the text and find that the welfare of his people wasn't really the reason for this commandment. No, not at all. The chosen ones were to dig with their paddles and bury their excrement, because "Yahweh your God walks in the midst of your camp, to deliver you and give your enemies over to you; therefore your camp shall be holy, that he may see no unclean thing among you, and turn away from you" (v:14). So that was the real reason for this law. If Yahweh should have stepped in anything while he was walking about in the midst of the Israelite camp, it might have disgusted him so much that he would have turned away from his chosen ones. After all, if Yahweh couldn't abide crushed testicles, we can imagine how offensive he would have found an unburied pile of excrement. Perhaps this Yahwistic aversion explains why when the "fulness of time" came for Yahweh to send his only begotten son to redeem the world, he chose just to "overshadow" Mary (Luke 1:35) and then assume the role of absentee father, which, of course, left all of the diaper changing to Mary.

At any rate, Yahweh was very sensitive about matters that pertained to bodily functions. As already noted, we have seen that he just couldn't tolerate crushed testicles, and so this could be the reason for a peculiar law in Deuteronomy 25: "If two men fight together, and the wife of one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of the one attacking him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the genitals, then you shall cut off her hand; your eyes shall not pity her" (vs:11-12). Today, if a woman's husband should be attacked, she would probably know that a swift way to rescue him would be to administer a quick, hard blow between the attacker's legs, but that's today. Back in the Twilight Zone of biblical times, a woman dared not do this unless she wanted to run the risk of being known the rest of her life as Lefty.

For some reason, Yahweh said nothing about the opposite situation in which two women would be fighting, and the husband of one should grab the crotch of his wife's attacker. One can only conclude that Yahweh, in his inscrutable wisdom, considered copping a feel to be a much worse offense for women than men. Why is anyone's guess, but it could be that this law had something to do with Yahweh's abhorrence of crushed testicles.  A woman who grabbed a man's genitals could very likely damage merchandise that was precious to Yahweh, but the risk of damage wouldn't have been so great if a man grabbed a woman's genitals. Certainly, there would have been no testicles to crush, and this seemed to be the thing Yahweh was especially sensitive about.

Like many other commandments of Yahweh, this one raises more questions than it answers. What, for example, were Yahweh's chosen ones supposed to do if two men were fighting and no wife intervened, yet one of the men grabbed the other's genitals? Would this have cost the man his hand? If not, why not? Wouldn't damage to the genitals be the primary concern of a god who couldn't abide crushed testicles, so why would he care about the gender of the hand that had done the damage? We have no answers to these questions, because we read nothing in Yahweh's holy word about what was to be done to men who damaged the genitals of other men. It just seemed that Yahweh had a low threshold of tolerance for women who were impudent enough to dare risk damaging male genitalia.  It makes one wonder if maybe this Yahweh was merely a god that men had created  complete with male concerns and biases.

Nah! Why, in the Twilight Zone, even the mere thought would have been blasphemy. These are questions whose answers will just have to wait until the sweet by-and-by.