Photo: vitvet.com
An ancient law in the Old Testament is assuming new significance in today’s increasingly secular culture. It is this: “You shall not move your neighbour’s boundary marker which the ancestors have set” (Deuteronomy 19:14). The law was important enough to bear repetition: in the series of curses brought upon Israel for covenant violation in Deuteronomy 27 we find “Cursed is the he who moves his neighbour’s boundary marker” and Proverbs 22:28 also bids the wise man “Do not move the ancient boundary which your fathers have set”.
In its original context this law had to do with land theft: the boundary marker delineated the extent of one’s land and so moving it backwards or forwards thereby affected how much land one owned. If I moved my neighbour’s boundary marker back towards him by half a mile I thereby acquired half a mile of his land. In God’s covenant with Israel wherein the land was sacred and ultimately belonged to Yahweh as His gift or loan to His people, such theft also involved a kind of sacrilege. No wonder such land theft was singled out for a divine curse.
Boundaries are important things. A world without boundaries is a world without order, a world in chaos. Boundaries determine everything in our world—things as arbitrary as which side of the road to drive on (to avoid traffic chaos and injury) to things as basic and natural as who one can marry and create family with. May a man marry anyone he desires and as many times as he wants so that he has 70 wives? May he marry his sister? His daughter? His son? An ordered world produces marital boundaries and determines who a man may marry and how many wives he may have at one time.
It is not so with animals. Animals do not need boundaries or laws; they are subject only to instinct and the harsh realities of nature red in tooth and claw. Boundaries and laws are peculiar to man (and, I suppose, to angels).
We see such boundaries being established in the first creation story of Genesis 1:1-2:3. At the beginning, before creation, there were no boundaries or limits. All was in chaos, in a state of uselessness and unproductivity—in Hebrew, tohu and bohu (often rendered “without form and void”). Or in the words of the Genesis narrator, everything was sea. (The notion of everything being sea prior to creation was present in Egyptian and Babylonian cosmologies as well.) Moreover, darkness lay over the face of the deep and the sea water so that all was useless.
But the Spirit of God, moving over the face of the sea, brought order out of the chaos. That is, God established boundaries and limits. God said, “Let there be light” and thereby created daylight, separating it from the primeval darkness, calling the daylight “day” and the darkness from which the day was separated, “night” (Genesis 1:3-5).
Then He created a boundary between some of the water and the rest of the water: He said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the waters” (verse 6). This separator pushed some of the sea water up, separating from the sea water still down here, and He called this separator “heaven” or “sky”. (We note in passing that the ancients believed that there was a heavenly ocean above the sky and it was from this ocean that the rain came and that this sky was solid—see Job 37:18—but discussion of this is for another post. For now we simply note that creation involved separation and setting a boundary.)
Then God separated some of sea water still down here so that dry land could appear, calling the dry land “earth” and calling the water “seas” (verse 9-10). Again: creation involved separation and boundaries.
These boundaries continued to be in place and it was them that kept order in the world. Thus we read in Job 38:8f how God continues to maintain the boundary between the seas and the earth so that the seas do not flood the earth and undo the original work of creation. In that passage God asks Job rhetorically, “Who enclosed the sea with doors when I made a cloud its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and placed boundaries on it and set a bolt and doors and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, but no farther and here shall your proud waves stop?’” The boundaries between the seas—both the heavenly sea and the earthly one—were necessary for the maintenance of life on earth. (We find echoes of this in the Orthodox prayer sanctifying the baptismal font and celebrating God’s power: “You have set around the sea barriers of sand”.)
We see what happens when this boundary between the waters is removed—in Genesis 7:11 we read that fountains of the great deep burst open and the windows of the sky were opened and the result was the return of pre-creation chaos, the great flood that inundated and drowned the world. Boundaries are what keep the world in life; their removal brings universal death.
Today we find almost every boundary being deliberately transgressed, repudiated, set aside, broken down, and discarded, with a consequent break down of order in the world. We can name but a few of these moved, altered, and broken boundaries: the boundary between man and woman is broken down through our legitimation of homosexuality and further destroyed in our acceptance of transgenderism. The boundary between the single and married state is transgressed through our normalization of sexual promiscuity. The boundary between human and animal life is erased when we accept that the unborn may be killed as guiltlessly as we kill kittens. The boundaries created by family are eroded when we sunder sexuality and birth-giving from child-rearing, allowing outsiders to provide sperm and womb in the creation of life within our family. The boundary between men and women and between clerical and lay is violated through the ordination of women to the sacred ministry. The boundary between truth and falsehood is discarded when we ecumenically declare that all religions are equally-valuable and equally true. We have even begun to transgress the boundary between man and machine as we flirt with trans-humanism.
What is clear is that all this moving of the ancient and divinely-set boundaries constitute the return of chaos to our world. The moving and discarding of the boundaries in western culture has been taking place slowly and incrementally over the past seventy years and so the return of chaos is also a correspondingly slow process. But the chaos is unmistakable. The failing pulse of life in the West can be gauged in many ways; here I mention only one: the rise of teen depression and teen suicide.
Teens in the West have arguably been better off than any previous generation. They do not suffer the ravages of war, famine, or grinding poverty. The Black Death has not swept our land or decimated its population. Our young people are safe, well-fed, pampered, and provided with every technological advance and comfort. Yet depression and suicide rates continue to climb. What does this mean?—that chaos is returning.
We see this transgression of boundaries illustrated in the story of the sons of God in Genesis 6:1-2. In that passage we read, “Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.”
This little vignette has stirred much controversy and resulted in gallons of spilled exegetical ink—and hours of online podcasts. Here I will only say that the “sons of God”, as in Job 38:7, are the angels and that the story narrates how some of the angels lusted after human women and took them as their wives, the result being the Nephilim, or giants as their offspring (verse 4). In other words, the sons of God violated a boundary, the line between angels and human beings, and the result was a race of unnatural offspring. The result also was the flood, for the story of the breaching of the angelic-human boundary introduces the story of the flood, in which the boundaries between the heavenly sea and the earth was also breached. One boundary-breaking produced the other.
We see that this story of the sinning sons of God is a tale of boundary violation by how it is described in Jude 6: they were “angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper habitation”. The word here rendered “habitation” is the Greek οἰκητήριον/ oiketerion, the word used in 2 Maccabees 11:2 to mean “home”. The angels’ proper home was in heaven; making a home on earth constituted a violation of the created order, a moving and discarding the boundary between angels and human beings.
Our culture here in the West is characterized by such boundary violation and removal of the distinct and separate categories created by God. In other words, our present culture is transgressive at its core. We are currently reaping the reward of such transgressions. As Christians it is imperative that we keep such boundary transgressions outside of the Church, for if we do not the chaos afflicting the world will enter the Church as well.
Every Liturgy the deacon cries out, “The doors! The doors!”—the original directive to the door-keepers to guard the doors, barring the Eucharist from invasion by hostile outsiders. The directive may now also serve to remind us to bar the Church from invasion by those who want to remove the ancient boundary markers. Those markers were set by God to create and maintain life and order. We move or discard them at our peril.
