The Bible’s Own Lawgiver Admitted the Law Was Not Always Good

There are verses people argue about.

Then there are verses people spend two thousand years trying to get away from.

Ezekiel 20:25–26 is one of them.

Do not start with a commentary.

Do not start with theology.

Do not start with somebody explaining what God must have meant.

Read what the text says.

“I gave them statutes that were not good and laws through which they could not live.”

Then:

“I defiled them through their gifts…”

Then the text connects that defilement with the offering of the firstborn and says the purpose was horror and recognition of YHWH.

Read it again.

I gave.

Not good.

Could not live.

I defiled them.

That is not Diesel putting words into the Bible.

That is Ezekiel.

And once you put those words on the table, the entire claim that every Mosaic statute must represent the eternally perfect moral will of God starts bleeding immediately.

THE TEXT KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT IT IS DOING

Ezekiel 20 does not accidentally use the wrong verb.

Earlier in the chapter, verse 11 has YHWH say that he gave Israel statutes and ordinances by which a person could live.

Then verse 25 repeats the same law-giving structure and reverses it.

Earlier:

I gave statutes → live by them.

Later:

I gave statutes not good → could not live by them.

The Hebrew structure is deliberate. Our textual audit found the same verb for giving, the same divine subject, and a direct reversal of the chapter’s life formula.

This is not:

“The Israelites invented some bad customs.”

Not in the Hebrew sentence.

The speaker says:

I GAVE THEM.

Then verse 26 gets worse.

I defiled them.

And the text gives purpose.

Not merely:

“I watched them become defiled.”

Not:

“I unfortunately permitted something I hated.”

The verse presents the episode as punitive divine action.

You can build a theological explanation afterward.

But you do not get to erase the grammar first.

THEN JEREMIAH WALKS INTO THE COURTROOM

This is where the Bible begins arguing with itself.

Jeremiah talks about the burning of children at Topheth.

And his God says:

I did not command it.

Then:

it did not enter my mind.

Jeremiah says it in chapter 7.

Again in chapter 19.

Again in chapter 32.

Three times.

Jeremiah 7:31:

They burned sons and daughters, something God did not command and that did not enter his mind.

Jeremiah 19:5:

Same denial.

Jeremiah 32:35:

Same denial again.

Now go back to Ezekiel.

Ezekiel says:

I gave statutes that were not good.

I defiled them through their gifts.

And connects it with the firstborn.

Jeremiah says:

I never commanded this.

Now stop pretending the problem was invented by atheists.

The disagreement is sitting inside the prophetic tradition itself.

Our Ezekiel audit called this exactly what it is: an internal contradiction/tension in the archive, with Jeremiah rejecting the substance of the move Ezekiel makes.

One prophet protects God by saying:

I never commanded that.

The other explains the nightmare by saying:

I gave them bad statutes as punishment.

Those are not the same theology.

AND EZEKIEL DOES IT AGAIN

If Ezekiel 20 were alone, somebody could call it a freak verse.

It is not alone.

Ezekiel 14:9 says that if a prophet is deceived, YHWH himself can say:

I, YHWH, have deceived that prophet.

Then he destroys him.

Our source audit flagged the structural resemblance immediately: deceptive/corrupting agency followed by judgment appears in the same prophetic book.

That matters.

Because now Ezekiel is not giving us one accidental theological sentence.

He is willing to describe God as using morally troubling agency judicially.

Deception.

Inferior law.

Defilement.

Then punishment.

You may explain that as judgment.

Fine.

It is still judgment through acts later theology desperately wants separated from the character of a perfectly truthful and perfectly good Father.

And that is where the development begins to show.

CENTURIES LATER JESUS GETS ASKED ABOUT MOSES

Now jump forward.

Divorce.

The Pharisees ask Jesus about Mosaic law.

Mark 10 is the harder version.

Jesus says:

“For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment.”

Who wrote it?

Moses.

Why?

Because of hardness of heart.

Do not run past that.

Jesus does not say:

“This commandment expresses the perfect primordial condition.”

He does the opposite.

He immediately goes back behind Moses.

Back behind Deuteronomy.

Back to creation.

From the beginning.

Male and female.

One flesh.

What God joined.

In other words:

later law is not automatically the original order.

Human hardness enters the story.

Then legislation enters in response to the hardness.

Our comparison table caught the structural parallel:

Ezekiel:

rebellion → deficient statutes

Mark:

hardness → commandment

Matthew:

hardness → permission

And the higher standard is located earlier—in the good law for Ezekiel, in creation for Jesus.

That is not me saying Mark quoted Ezekiel.

He didn’t.

The point is much more important:

the tradition itself had learned to distinguish between primordial divine order and legislation occasioned by human failure.

MATTHEW MAKES THE MOVE EVEN EASIER TO SEE

Matthew takes Mark’s formulation:

Moses wrote this commandment because of hardness

and changes it to:

Moses permitted divorce because of hardness of heart.

Then Matthew explicitly adds:

“from the beginning it was not so.”

Our source comparison records the Greek contrast clearly: Mark has Moses write a commandment; Matthew has Moses permit the action.

The later Gospel has made the distinction painfully clear.

Moses allowed something.

The beginning says something higher.

So when somebody tells me:

“If it is in Mosaic law, then it must be the perfect eternal moral will of Jesus’ Father,”

Jesus’ own tradition says:

No.

At least one provision existed because of human hardness.

That fact alone destroys the shortcut.

PAUL GOES FARTHER BACK FROM THE LAW

Paul writes before the Gospels.

Galatians 3 asks:

Why the law?

His answer:

It was added because of transgressions.

Added.

Not primordial.

Not the first thing.

Added because something went wrong.

And Paul says it was put in place through angels by a mediator.

Do not distort Paul.

He is not saying evil angels wrote an evil Torah.

He is not.

The angels are intermediaries.

But that is still the point.

The promise is primary.

The law is later.

Transgression explains its arrival.

Angels mediate it.

A human mediator stands in between.

That is a completely different theological emphasis from a flat reading in which God directly hands down an eternal perfect legal system whose every provision transparently expresses his highest will.

Paul has hierarchy.

Promise.

Then law.

Transgression.

Then mediation.

And eventually the promised seed.

The law has a place.

But it does not have the place later absolutist theology sometimes gives it.

ACTS AND HEBREWS KEEP THE ANGELS

Acts 7 says Israel received the law through angelic ordering.

Hebrews 2 speaks of the earlier message as spoken through angels.

Again:

do not call the angels devils.

That is not what these texts say.

The point is mediation.

By the first Christian century, the legal tradition can be narrated through layers:

God.

Angels.

Mediator.

Moses.

Israel.

And Paul explicitly connects the law’s addition with transgression.

Our project originally called every instance “reassignment.”

That was too crude.

The cleaner finding is stronger:

the tradition develops multiple ways of creating distance between the highest divine ideal and secondary/problematic legislation.

Sometimes by denying God commanded it.

Sometimes by calling it punitive law.

Sometimes by putting Moses in the foreground.

Sometimes by calling it accommodation to hardness.

Sometimes by routing its delivery through angels.

Different mechanisms.

Same problem:

How do you preserve the goodness of God when the inherited law does not look like the highest good?

JEREMIAH ALREADY KNEW THE PROBLEM

And here is why nobody gets to blame Jesus for inventing this.

Jeremiah 7:22 goes even farther.

He says that when God brought Israel from Egypt, he did not speak to them or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices; what he commanded was obedience.

Read the tension.

The Torah contains extensive sacrificial legislation.

Jeremiah can preach:

that was not what I commanded when I brought you out.

Ezekiel can preach:

I gave them statutes that were not good.

Mark’s Jesus can say:

Moses wrote a commandment because of hardness.

Paul can say:

the law was added because of transgressions.

This is not one outsider attacking Torah.

This is the tradition fighting with its own inheritance.

THE DEFENSE ACTUALLY CONCEDES THE CASE

Now comes the rescue:

“God did not approve of the bad thing. He accommodated sinful humanity.”

Good.

Then we agree on the point that matters.

Not every enacted law equals the highest moral ideal.

Call it accommodation.

Call it concession.

Call it judicial abandonment.

Call it punitive legislation.

Use whichever theological vocabulary you want.

Once you admit that a statute can exist because humanity is corrupt rather than because the statute itself represents the perfect original order, the simplistic equation is dead:

LAW = PERFECT DIVINE WILL

No.

The biblical writers themselves refuse that equation.

That is exactly why serious attempts to interpret Ezekiel 20 appeal to judicial abandonment or concession. Our research notes that one major scholarly proposal identifies the “not good” statutes as a secondary body of legislation given in response to rebellion.

You can rescue God.

But the price of the rescue is admitting:

the law is layered.

NOW BRING BACK ASHA

This article does not need to claim:

“Jesus learned Mark 10 from a Magus.”

There is no evidence for that.

In fact, Second Temple Judaism already had its own creation-priority arguments. The Damascus Document uses “male and female he created them” in a marital dispute before the Gospels. Our source audit explicitly identifies that as the strongest local Jewish control.

Fine.

Keep it.

It makes the article better.

Because the point here is not transmission.

The point is comparison.

Jesus’ reasoning privileges:

the beginning

over

a later accommodation to human hardness.

And that is formally comparable to a religious system built around Aša:

the true order,

the right order,

the order against which deviation is judged.

Not:

“Mark copied Aša.”

No.

Something more damaging:

When Jesus needs to identify the highest moral standard, he goes behind later legislation to the original order.

And the oldest religious architecture in our larger case already makes right order itself central to the divine side.

EZEKIEL’S GOD GIVES BAD LAW

Do not soften the title.

The text says:

statutes that were not good.

You can explain why.

You cannot make “not good” mean “perfectly good.”

The text says:

could not live by them.

You can explain the judicial mechanism.

You cannot make “could not live” equal “life-giving.”

The text says:

I defiled them.

You can interpret the causation.

You cannot pretend the first-person verb is not there.

Then Jeremiah says:

I did not command it.

Then Jesus says:

Moses wrote the commandment because of hard hearts.

Then Matthew says:

Moses permitted it; from the beginning it was not so.

Then Paul says:

the law was added because of transgressions and mediated through angels.

This is what development looks like.

Not one book.

Not one theology.

Not one flat voice descending untouched from heaven.

A tradition arguing with itself about law, agency, goodness, punishment, and what God actually wanted from the beginning.

AND THAT MATTERS FOR JESUS’ FATHER

Because later somebody is going to say:

“Jesus’ Father must have exactly the same moral profile as every act and statute attributed to YHWH anywhere in the earlier record.”

No.

The Gospel tradition itself will not allow that move.

Jesus distinguishes.

Beginning from concession.

Original order from hardness-conditioned law.

The highest good from regulation of a fallen condition.

And once you admit that distinction, the Father must be profiled by what Jesus actually says the Father is like—

not by blindly dumping every earlier attribution into the same bucket.

That is why John 8 matters next.

Because there Jesus gives another test.

Not law.

Paternity.

Not inherited claim.

Truth.

Not “who do you say your God is?”

Who actually resembles the Father?

And once again the dividing line is the same one that has haunted this entire investigation:

TRUTH

versus

THE LIE.

DIESEL’S CHARGE

Ezekiel left the confession sitting in plain sight:

I gave them statutes that were not good.

Jeremiah protested:

I never commanded that.

Jesus explained:

Moses wrote it because your hearts were hard.

Matthew sharpened the separation:

from the beginning it was not so.

Paul pushed the law later in the timeline:

added because of transgressions.

And put intermediaries between the law and its recipients.

So stop telling me the biblical doctrine of law never changed.

I can read.

The texts changed the explanation themselves.

They changed who stands closest to the problematic law.

They changed why the law exists.

They changed whether God commanded it at all.

They changed whether it expresses the beginning.

And then Christianity inherited the result and called the entire process one seamless revelation.

No.

The seams are still there.

I can see them.

Ezekiel gave us the seam in one sentence.

I GAVE THEM STATUTES THAT WERE NOT GOOD.

And once you have read that sentence—

you never get to pretend the lawgiver problem was invented by Diesel again.