Axe Heads and Parapets: Legal Edge Cases?

How relevant to the modern reader are the flying axe head of Deuteronomy 19:5 and the roof parapet of Deuteronomy 22:8? Indeed, how relevant were they to the daily lives of Israelites thirty-five hundred years ago?

Suppose that accidental falls from rooftops were exceedingly uncommon in ancient Israel, or that almost no one was ever struck dead by his companion's unexpectedly unattached axe head. If that's what we conclude, then we have to ask ourselves the real reasons these laws were written down. We might conclude that their primary relevance is found in typological categories that play out through the rest of the Pentateuch, or that foregrounding the unlikely case encourages reflection on principles that underlie the particulars ( both of these suggestions have been made in the ongoing Theopolis discussion of Deuteronomy).

But we must not jump to conclusions. Are we certain that these were uncommon and even unlikely calamities in ancient Israel?

Before we evaluate the likelihood of deadly flying axe heads or plunges from the roof, we should consider what sorts of scenarios would be ideal for establishing case law. Axe heads and roof parapets are meant to stand in, respectively, for accidental manslaughter without witnesses and preventable accidental deaths on one's own property. In the nature of the case, neither category of death is statistically frequent, so no single scenario within a category will account for many actual deaths. We're off on the wrong foot if we look for situations that occur frequently.

Instead of frequency, a scenario should have these three qualities: it should be recognizable , plausible , and representative . In other words, what's wanted is a paradigm case, a typical scenario (what is typical is characteristic of a class, but not necessarily frequent). In America, I suppose a hunting accident might stand in well for the case of accidental manslaughter without witnesses. A toddler drowning in an unfenced, uncovered pool might serve for preventable accidental death on one's own property. Neither case accounts for a high proportion of deaths in America, but they are typical in the sense outlined above: they are recognizable, plausible, and representative.

So what about flying axe heads and parapets? I work with a translation team made up of Jarai people, a tribal group living in northeast Cambodia. I asked them recently, "Have you ever known anyone to be struck by a flying axe head?" One of them answered by relating how a flying axe head had struck him some years before, when he accompanied his brother-in-law to cut wood in the forest. The axe head flew off the handle and struck him in the hand, which he happened to be holding in front of his stomach. If his hand hadn't taken the hit, he might have been seriously injured. Among the Jarai, every family frequently uses an axe to cut wood for their cooking fires. Because of traditional axe construction, everyone's axe head comes loose from time to time.

What about falling from a house? Jarai don't have flat roofs, but they build their houses on stilts, so their main level is probably about the height of an ancient Hebrew roof. When my family first moved to the town where we live, I was visiting a nearby village where I heard about a man's recent death. "How did he die?" I asked. The reply: "He fell off his house." Apparently the man was drunk and he fell from a landing.

A couple of years later, I was looking for property to build a house in a village, and I was shown an abandoned house site, where nothing but the pillars of a house were left. The house had been moved, literally board by board, to another site, after the family's toddler fell to her death through an unfinished wall. (Catastrophic, accidental deaths leave a curse on the house where they occur, which is why the house was dismantled and moved.)

A member of my translation team reported that his own toddler daughter once fell from his house, again through an unfinished wall: he was watching her, then set her down for a moment and looked away, and the next thing he knew, she was gone. By God’s grace, she landed just right and survived unharmed. She's now grown up and has children of her own.

If you live in the modern West, you probably don't know anyone who's been struck by a flying axe head or fallen from a house in the course of daily life (roofing and chimney-repair accidents don't count)—nor do you know anyone else who knows such a person. But where I live, in a tribal part of Cambodia, I'd wager that nearly everyone either knows of such a case personally or has heard tell of one. Certainly no one would think of such cases as unlikely.

What, then, about the case law in Deuteronomy?

The children of Israel at the time of their settlement in Canaan had a material culture that's much more like the Jarai tribal culture in rural Cambodia than what I grew up with in suburban South Carolina. Falling from a flat roof in ancient Cana would have seemed as likely then as falling from a house on stilts does now in modern rural Cambodia. Flying axe heads were a danger every Israelite father taught his son to be alert to, just as I've taught my son how to use our locally assembled hatchet in a way that minimizes the risk of the head flying off and hitting him or a friend.

So what does that mean for our interpretation of these laws? I'll start with the typology of the flying axe head. We might ask: is something more apt for typological interpretation if it's typical , or atypical ? The most fundamental typologies—say, the rock that gives refuge, the recurring battle between woman and snake, the lost son who comes home again—these are all familiar, as recognizable in the world around us as they are in the world of Scripture. If the flying axe head is a type, it's a familiar one. That which can fell a tree can fell a man, too, and the death of the innocent bystander casts a shadow on the innocence of his companion.

Or consider the parapet. Is it only unlikely scenarios that encourage reflection on other, similar cases? Surely the representative case is the best starting point, and this is exactly the method of the Mosaic law. A parapet that prevents a fall is actually preventing harm in the real world. We can easily see that mandatory hard-hat areas on a construction site serve the same function, as do home wifi networks that use OpenDNS to prevent household members from stumbling into pornography.

The world of the Bible is strange to us, but perhaps not always strange enough. At times, we're helped by seeing that world through the eyes of primitive cultures, not because they are better than ours, but because they are older, and in some ways closer to the biblical cultures. As John Frame has observed, the Bible is part of the world, and the better we know the world—in all its strangeness and variety—the better we know the Bible.

But, of course, it's not enough to see the Bible through the eyes of other people and other cultures; we must see ourselves and our own cultures through the Bible's eyes. As Raymond Van Leeuwen has written, "The Bible creates a world of meaning, and we need to enter it and make ourselves at home in its strangeness, all the better to understand our world, which is insufficiently strange to us."

Joshua Jensen is a Bible translator and teacher in northeast Cambodia, where he lives with his wife, Amy, and their seven children (in a house with a railing around the front and back porches).