Hi, Umbreon0.
You mean the Second Temple.
I say, yes, definitely, certainly, absolutely: study Oral Law. For several reasons.
1. Because it contains a lot of early Jewish traditions that were kept by the church.
2. Because by understanding those traditions, you can better understand things in the New Testament.
3. It gives you ancient interpretations of scripture.
4. Tells us a lot more about the ancient culture and times than we can find in something like the bible.
5. All of this opens up new avenues of thought and investigation that, hopefully, help us as gentiles to better understand the ancient world and those who are Jewish.
6. it's fun!
If you want to understand Paul, for instance, you HAVE to read the Oral Law. A lot of what Paul thinks and says is based on or has links to Oral Law. As a pharisee of pharisees, that shouldn't surprise us. Even things Yeshua said and did were based on Oral Law.
One of the potential problems with the Oral Law, however, is that a lot of what it says is also very late. You have early traditions and ideas side-by-side with late ideas and traditions. Regardless of whether later traditions are right or wrong, they may not represent what people actually thought or did in the time of Yeshua or before. They may be later developments.
The way Christians should think about the Oral Law is, I think, the same way they should think about the Old Testament. The Old Testament is not monolithic. What I mean by that is: the Old Testament was not written so that all its parts agree with each other and simply lay out a map or answer book for us. The Old Testament is a DIALOGUE. It is a record of the STRUGGLE of Israelite religious thought and action over time. It contains many voices, which have different ideas and interpretations of things.
For example, in the book of Ezra-Nehemiah, we learn that when Jews first returned to Jerusalem in order to rebuild and restart their lives, there was a important issue about holiness and religious identity. What should the Israelites who married gentilesand, thus, could pollute their ways with the worship of other godsdo with their spouses? Should their gentile spouses be considered part of Israel? Or should they divorce those people and send them away so that they can follow YHWH without compromise? Well, the answer Ezra-Nehemiah gives us is that the Law sanctions divorce so that the people can remain holy and follow only YHWH. But that's not the only answer to the question. You also have Malachi, which was written during that same time. And Malachi thinks God hates divorce and that no one should divorce their spouse even if they are not part of the believing communityeven if that spouse worships someone other than YHWH. So the Old Testament gives us two different answers to the same problem. Which one is correct? The Old Testament doesn't tell us. This MULTIPLICITY invites the people of God to enter into the conversation and enter into the experience of trying to figure out, in real life, what it means to be the people of God. The Oral Law is exactly the same. It is part of that conversation. It is part of that experience. Just like the Old Testament, it does not give us an answerit gives us many answers, some of which may be right or may not be right.
The thing that makes us as Christians different, however, is that we have Yeshua. Yeshua is the fundamental governing experience of our lives. Neither the Old Testament nor the Oral Law has that same fundamental governing experience. So we're never going to approach the Old Testament or the Oral Law exactly the same way as those who don't know Yeshua. We have a good idea about what Yeshua thought about divorce. Yeshua agreed with Malachi and disagreed with Ezra-Nehemiah. So suddenly we have our answer to the problem. Not from the Old Testament. Not from the Oral Lawfrom Yeshua.
