Dear Elaine:
We fully believe that true Bible Scholars know that the Hebrew Bible was compiled over many years from both oral and written material, and wasn’t finally put together as a package until 400 BCE. However, as far back as the Dead Sea Scrolls, there is strong evidence that those writers also rejected sacrifice and animal slaughter as not being from God.
As I’ve mentioned many times, we need to first look at God’s unconditional love and the fact that there is not suffering or death connected with His creation or in His heavenly will. It is this perfect love that fulfills all of God’s laws, regardless of who wrote them. Everything between the Fall and heaven is about this corrupted world, with the exception of those passages encouraging us to overcome those evil ways, and we have been charged as peacemaking children of God to free creation from its present corruption.
If you approach the Bible in this way, there are no slippery slopes, for it no longer matters whether the newer writers incorporated ancient oral traditions into their writings, or wrote something new, or added things from Babylon, for it is all part of the corruption we are to work to end.
In the Love of the Lord,
Frank and Mary
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