Reflecting on Deuteronomy 24 14-21, Ephesians 6 5-9, and 1 Timothy 6 17-19

This week we’re studying three texts, Deuteronomy 24:14-21, Ephesians 6:5-9, and 1 Timothy 6:17-19. All of them have to do with the regulation of relationships between the rich and the poor, the served and the servants, the haves and the have-nots. The “social teaching of the Christian church” these texts are inviting us to reflect on is, in honor of the lessons of 100 or so years ago, “the Christian spirit in industry.”

How that description might even possibly relate to these texts, that emanate from a historically pre-industrial socio-political and economic situation with a thoroughly different mode of production than the industrial capitalist one, could be a reflection in itself. [So says the former sociology major in me.]

Assuming sociology isn’t our main concern when it comes to these texts, we are probably going to want to think about what ought to be our own attitude towards work and income and wealth, in light of these texts. And what ought to be our own disposition towards using the resources we have, and acquire, and the purposes towards which we use them? And why?

In particular, perhaps, how do those of us who employ others embody Christian commitments and principles in our behavior as employers? Or, perhaps, fail to do that? And, why do we make the choices we make, and practice the practices we practice? And do we sense any call to change what we’re doing, and if so how, and for what reason?

Some notes on Deuteronomy 24:14-21 are here and some notes on Ephesians and 1 Timothy are here. Here are a couple of additional questions we might want to think about or to discuss in class:

What does the presence of instructions like this in the Bible tell us, about human beings, and about God?

How much can we use these instructions, or texts like these, as a guide to the way “a Christian society” ought to be organized? Why?

What do they seem to be telling us about how a good society ought to be organized? What makes us say that?

[more personal, perhaps] What do we see as our responsibility when it comes to the organization of society? How much influence should Christians be exerting, or trying to exert, on society, and towards what ends? Why do we say this, and how do these texts influence our thoughts on this matter?

[more theoretical, but also practical] How “political” would we say these texts are? Why would we say that?

Image: “Conversation on a village street,” Odoardo Borrani, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Studying Ephesians 6 5-9 and 1 Timothy 6 17-19

This week we’re studying three texts, two of which are Ephesians 6:5-9 and 1 Timothy 6:17-19. These are two brief excerpts from Pauline instructions, to the church at Ephesus, and to their young pastor, Timothy. [Some notes on the other text, Deuteronomy 24:14-21, are here.] Here are a few notes on these verses:

Ephesians 6:5-9 – BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

The letter to the Ephesians is one of the Pauline letters whose authorship is often disputed, due to the different style of the letter’s prose from that of the undisputed letters. The most noticeable feature is the long sentences that crop up in Ephesians. But there’s some difference in vocabulary, too, and arguably some difference in the theological concepts included. Not so much, however, that Ephesians doesn’t fit comfortably into the Pauline collection.

In any case, the larger text is a letter, addressed to an early Christian church in Asia Minor, which begins with praise of God and an eloquent prayer for the congregation, and then moves on to discussion of their unity in Christ, and instruction in the new life they are to lead as Christians – in particular, as gentiles who have renounced pagan ways. That brings us to the famous household code, and then to the instruction to “put on the whole armor of God” – along with an inventory of that armor – which closes out the letter.

The instruction in our text – “slaves, obey your lords in the flesh with fear and trembling” – would be something we wouldn’t know was in the Bible if all we knew were the lectionary. Whether the fact that yes, it is in there is something we’d really like to forget or not might be an open question, but either way, Bible Content Examinees, be warned.

CLOSER READING

The longer instruction to slaves / servants (vv5-8) is neatly structured rhetorically, setting up a parallelism between the way they should serve their according to the flesh lords and the way they should serve Christ. In both cases, the author urges them not to please men in appearance only, but substantively, and ultimately with an eye to do the will of God and to please the Lord (i.e., Christ).

The word translated “heart” in v6, in the instruction to servants/slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, is the Greek psyche, from which we get our word “psychology.” It refers not so much to a physical organ, but to the whole inner person.

V8 then goes on to remind the servants of what they know (here, the eidō kind of knowing, arguably, leaning to the kind of knowing based on observation): that there will be a reward for whoever does anything good. Whether the doer of good is slave or free.

Then there’s a verse of instruction to lords or “masters,” to reciprocate (“the same do with respect to them, i.e., the slaves/servants), and specifically giving up threatening. That wouldn’t need to be said if it weren’t happening. This probably reminds us that it’s hard to start acting like a Christian in real life. The lords are reminded to know something, too: they themselves have a lord, the same one their servants have, in heaven, and partiality is not in his repertoire. So their high social status on earth will have no bearing on their status before Christ.

1 Timothy 6:17-19 – BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

The pastoral letter to Timothy is also, we think, written into the Ephesian context, and is less disputed as to its authorship than the letter to the Ephesian congregation. The instructions to Timothy range from theological to practical, and include instructions for the congregation as a whole, and various categories of members thereof, that will need to be given by Timothy, as well as instructions for Timothy about how to conduct himself as a minister of Christ. The instructions Timothy is to give to “those who in the present age are rich” are among the last.

These verses show up in the lectionary, perhaps reflecting the consciousness that most contemporary western Christians fit the description of “those who in the present age are rich.”

CLOSER READING

Timothy is to command or perhaps warn the rich not to be high-minded – presumably something like arrogant – and not to have hope on riches, which are uncertain. The word translated “uncertain” has an interesting etymology, coming from the kind of uncertainty we experience when we can’t make out exactly what we’re seeing. Which might remind us that the uncertainty of riches is not only that they can be mighty impermanent, but also that we might not be able to see all that clearly whether they are a good thing or not, or are as good a thing as they look to be to our warped senses.

The rich [implicitly, as well as the poor] are to set hope on God, who provides all richly unto enjoyment. Then, the rich are to do good, to be rich in good/lovely work, to be generous in distributing things, ready to share – a word we tend to associate with community or fellowship, but which here reminds us that it includes the practical kind of sharing of food and clothes as well as time and conversation – treasuring up for themselves a good/beautiful foundation in the future. So that they may take hold of the real life. The word that describes life here is related, by having the same root, to the word for “being” that gives us our English word “ontology.” That is, there is the life that really IS, that has the substance of life. That’s the life to get.

The number of times the word or root for riches shows up in these three verses is remarkable, and the message is clear: real riches are not what we think they are; they are from God, and they are seen in, and gained by, what is done to provide for the well-being of others.

All in all, we’re seeing in these two short texts a set of instructions being given to people who are – at this moment in history – in the minority of their community, living in a world characterized by social arrangements that have not been shaped by hundreds and thousands of years of Christian consciousness. The slavery and the extreme inequality of the ancient world are facts of life. How are these new Christians going to live, as Christians, in a world like that? Answer: as generously as possible – whether as the victims of the injustice of the world, or as those who have benefited from it, and are in a position to ameliorate some of its consequences.

Some questions on these texts are here.

Image: “Casa de Convalescència, arrambador ceràmic” Enfo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Studying Deuteronomy 24 14-21

This week we’re studying three texts, one of which is Deuteronomy 24:14-21. This text is a portion of the “Deuteronomic code,” one of the three legal codes we find in the Torah/Pentateuch, that deals specifically with matters of economic justice. Or, alternatively, with provision for the treatment of the stranger (a non-Israelite living in the community), the orphan (literally, the “fatherless”), and the widow. Here are a few notes on these verses:

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

We’re dealing here with legal material, and on the whole, it seems, with what lots of scholars would call “apodictic” law: flat-out commands or rules, expressed as absolutes. This is in contrast to “casuistic” or “case law,” which we also run into in the Bible, rules that are framed as “what to do in case thus-and-so happens.” Although, having said that, some of the verses (especially v19) seem to have that “case law” form. And some of the other verses (especially 15, 18, the last part of 19, and 22) seem to be there as encouragement rather than regulation, to give a motivating rationale for the rulings.

Back to the scholars, they would tell us that this material is probably from around the 8th-6th centuries BCE, so in the late monarchical period. We are probably supposed to be thinking of an agrarian society, and one that clearly has – or could have – some significant inequality. This earlier legal material would – so the story goes – have been incorporated into the book of Deuteronomy some time early in the post-exilic period, when the Deuteronomic narrative, including its unique interpretive slant on Israelite history, was edited together and began to acquire the status of sacred text.

Why that might be important for us as readers today is that we think the book of Deuteronomy incorporates a particular perspective, something like “this is how we should have been living the whole time, and if we’d only done it, instead of not doing it, our history would have been so much different. [i.e., better]” In light of that, it’s particularly interesting and significant that Deuteronomy is so emphatically concerned with matters of justice, in the sense of care for the vulnerable. Our text really reflects that concern.

We would never know this material was in the Bible if all we knew were the lectionary. Nor would we know it was in the Bible if all we knew were the scriptures my Sunday school teachers thought it was vital for us kids to memorize, and my pastor thought it was important to preach on, at the church in which I grew up. Thus, I will never forget the impact it made on me to be given this text to read in Hebrew in seminary. Namely, “Holy Cow, this is IN. THE. BIBLE. Why didn’t anyone ever talk about THIS ??” So, Bible Content Examinees, really, be warned.

CLOSER READING

The subject of all the commands in vv14-15 and 17-22 is a masculine singular you. By implication this you has land to manage and use, as several of the instructions deal specifically with harvesting, and as the “poor and needy laborers” [literally hired servants] would often, if not necessarily, have been hired to do what we’d call “farm work.”

Most of the verbs in the text are instructions to this you, who is being told what to do and not do.

In v14, literally, not to oppress the hired-servant (a single word, and not the same as “servant”), and then v15 specifies what’s meant here by “oppression,” namely “letting the sun go down on him” before you “give him his hire”. The translators do us the favor of smoothing that out, taking some of the force of the “oppression” out in the process.

V14 makes explicit that it’s a hired servant of your brothers or of your stranger who lives in your land in your gates. One rule for everyone, when it comes to not oppressing people and instead paying them their wages right away.

In v15, the poor worker sets his life [his nefesh, sometimes translated “soul”] on those wages; Rashi reads it as “risks his life,” by doing some risky work, like “he climbed up a ramp or suspended himself from a tree”. [My dad once told me that when he was a boy, picking fruit in the peach orchards, he once saw someone fall out of a tree and die, so this isn’t all that far-fetched.]

You wants to prevent the hired-worker from crying out to YHWH; who, implicitly, will hear; but in any event, to you it would be sin/guilt.

V16, which prohibits fathers being put to death “upon their sons” and vice versa, strikes us as having snuck in to these verses about money and economic well-being. It can apparently be taken in a couple of ways. Christian commentators universally seem to read it as fathers are not to be put to death for the crimes of their sons and vice versa, which is explicitly stated in the final cause. The rabbis add to this reading that parents are not to be put to death upon the testimony of their sons, and vice versa. [Since if all this meant was “not for the crimes of,” this verse wouldn’t have needed that first clause, eh?]

V17 literally reads you will not stretch out justice against the stranger and the fatherless, which presumably does mean you shall not deprive such a one of justice, and which gives us an image of something like the interminable Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case at the center of Bleak House, and of the horrors of never having a final verdict rendered in one’s favor.

Not taking a widow’s garment in pledge seems to prohibit leaving the poor woman naked, or even shivering in the cold. Care as much for her as You do for the security for a loan, and just give her the money already. Rashi does point out, however, that if she actually defaults on the loan, then you can take the garment.

V18 is another reminder of the reason for these commands: you were a servant in Egypt. YHWH ransomed you. On one hand, God is telling You to empathize with the poor and needy. On the other, God is telling You to act more like YHWH than like Pharaoh. The this God commands You to do is this davar, in Hebrew “this word” and equally “this thing.” Davar is the word that gives the book of Deuteronomy its Hebrew name, Devarim, Words.

Vv 19-20 tell You that when You harvest your harvest you will not return to pick up a forgotten sheaf of grain – a condition that has the ring of some actual case to it. Instead, you will consider it to belong to the stranger, fatherless, and widow.

The consequence is that YHWH will bless the work of your hands.

Similarly in v20, when it comes to beating olive trees to gather their fruit, and similarly in v21, when it comes to gathering grapes in your vineyard, you will not go over the boughs or glean after you to get every last piece of fruit. They are for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.

We should probably notice that these categories of people – stranger, fatherless, widow – would have had a particularly precarious relationship to land, the vital productive resource of this ancient world. Hence their need for special protections in law. At least, in the law given to the society by God, according to the way the Bible tells the story.

We can also note that there is some reference to the HOLY ONE of Israel after each of the command clauses (v15b, v18, v19b, v22) – emphasizing the relationship of the landed to the God of redemption and of blessing, whose land it is (Leviticus 25:23).

Some questions on these texts are here.

Image: “Torah scrolls in the Reconstructionist Synagogue of Montreal,” Genevieve2, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

You can choose to move through #academia with clarity instead of shame. You can choose to make #meaning instead of content. You can choose to become yourself, fully and without apology.

https://survivorliteracy.com/2026/05/12/glass-ceiling-records-bts-relational-v-transactional-5/

Hands as the Language of Thought: Correcting a Kant Attribution

There is a line about hands that travels well. It reads cleanly, carries an air of philosophical dignity, and arrives in print wearing the name of Immanuel Kant. “The hand is the visible part of the brain,” runs the most common English form, or, in an older rendering, “the hand is the outer brain of man.” The phrase appears in publishing copy, in teaching materials, on Goodreads quotation pages, in popular psychology, in surgical textbooks, in neurology lectures, and in essays on sign language and gesture. It has the shape of something Kant should have said. The difficulty is that no reliable evidence supports treating it as a verified Kant statement.

This is a small instance in the larger pathology of quotation culture, where an author’s prestige is borrowed to underwrite a sentence he never wrote. The case of the hand, though, carries particular weight, because the sentence is invoked precisely where philosophical authority is wanted, in discussions of embodiment, cognition, touch, manual skill, and the expressive life of the hand. Writers reach for Kant when they want to seal the argument. If the seal is counterfeit, the argument has to stand on its own, and the discipline has to notice the forgery.

What Kant Actually Wrote About Hands

Kant wrote about hands more than once, and he wrote about them carefully. In 1768, in his short essay Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume, he uses the human hand as his signature example of incongruent counterparts, two objects that share all internal geometric properties and still cannot be superimposed on one another. A right hand and a left hand have identical measurements, identical topology, identical internal relations, and still they will not coincide. The example exposes something about absolute space that relational accounts cannot accommodate. The hand, in this essay, functions as a philosophical instrument, a test case for the metaphysics of orientation.

Thirty years later, in the Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht of 1798, Kant returns to the hand through a different doorway. There he treats the sense of touch, seated in the fingertips and their nerve endings, as the sense that allows the human being to work out the three-dimensional shape of a solid body through direct contact. Kant goes so far as to say that without this organ-sense no concept of corporeal shape could be formed at all. Touch, in the Anthropology, carries a cognitive load that vision alone cannot sustain.

These are recognizable Kant passages, and they are philosophically rich. They give the hand a significant role in his thinking about space, orientation, embodiment, and the conditions under which objects become objects for us. What they do not give us is the famous sentence now repeated in his name.

The Authority Behind the Attribution

The trail of the attribution leads to a specific book published in 1925 by David Katz. A biographical note earns its place here, because Katz’s authority is what carried the Kant line forward for a century, and the weight of that authority bears directly on how the legend survived.

Katz was born in Kassel on 1 October 1884 into a Jewish family, and he studied at Göttingen from 1902 under Georg Elias Müller, whose institute was among the leading centers of experimental psychology in Europe. He took his doctorate at Göttingen in 1906 with a dissertation on the psychology of temporal comparison, and he served as Müller’s assistant from 1907 to 1919, with his volunteer service in the First World War interrupting that work from 1914 to 1918. His 1911 habilitation on color perception, later published as Die Erscheinungsweisen der Farben, was examined by Müller and by Edmund Husserl. That second reviewer matters here, because it places Katz directly inside the phenomenological tradition at its source, with Husserl himself certifying the 1911 work. After the First World War, Katz spent a short stretch at the Technical University of Hannover on the psychology of prosthetic limbs for wounded veterans, a subject that bears on the concerns of the 1925 book more than has generally been noticed.

From 1919 until 1933, Katz held the chair of psychology and education at Rostock, and in 1933 the Nazi regime stripped him of that position. He moved first to Manchester, where he worked in T. H. Pear’s laboratory on tactile and gustatory perception, then briefly in London, and in 1937 he took the first Swedish chair of psychology at Stockholm University, the Eneroth chair, becoming a Swedish citizen the same year. He presided over the Thirteenth International Congress of Psychology in Stockholm in 1951 and died there on 2 February 1953. The figure whose 1925 sentence about Kant and the hand has been circulating, unchecked, for a century was a serious psychologist with phenomenological credentials certified by Husserl and a research record that runs from color to touch to prosthetics to Gestalt. That is the weight the undocumented attribution has been carrying.

Where the Quotation Actually Comes From

In Der Aufbau der Tastwelt, or The World of Touch, Katz writes that Kant once called the hand das äußere Gehirn des Menschen, the outer brain of man. That passage is where most modern quotation chains terminate when traced backward with any rigor. The English variant “the visible part of the brain” appears to be a loose later translation of the Katz-transmitted German phrase, carrying the same undocumented attribution into new languages without retrieving a new source.

Two features of the Katz passage matter. First, Katz supplies no citation to any Kant text. He provides no volume, no essay, no letter, no lecture transcript. He states the attribution as received wisdom and moves on. Second, the footnote that sits at precisely that point in the Katz text does not lead the reader to Kant at all. It leads to Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel-laureate playwright, whose prose passage on the hand Katz quotes in an exalted, almost liturgical register. The Kant attribution and the Hauptmann citation share a footnote, and the Kant portion of that pairing goes undocumented.

That is the entire basis, so far as the scholarship can currently establish, for the modern circulation of the line as a Kant quotation. A single undocumented attribution in a 1925 monograph on touch, carrying all the authority of a Husserl-certified Göttingen psychologist with a major research record, absorbed into the secondary literature, and repeated without verification for a century.

Why the Quotation Travels So Well

The sentence survives because it sounds like Kant. The compression is Kantian in style. Sensation, cognition, and anatomy bind together in a single gesture. The cadence matches the tone of the Anthropology passage on touch closely enough that a reader who encounters both in the same afternoon will remember them as a single thought. The line also carries the epigrammatic finish that quotation culture demands.

The phrase travels because it pays an intellectual tax that many writers want paid. When someone argues that the hand is a thinking organ, or that manual skill shapes cognition, or that touch is constitutive of our grasp of the world, Kant’s name closes the argument faster than a paragraph of evidence. The quotation does the work of a citation without requiring a citation to exist.

There is a further, less obvious reason for the sentence’s stubborn life. It has a ready home in at least four disciplines that want it to be Kantian. Philosophers of embodied cognition cite it against Cartesian disembodiment. Hand surgeons and occupational therapists lean on the line to dignify their practice. Neurology textbooks reach for it in their introductions to motor cortex maps. Teachers of signed languages sometimes mobilize a version of it in arguments that signed languages are languages of the hand as the mind’s direct instrument. Each of these fields has a stake in keeping the line in circulation, and none of them has a native incentive to audit its provenance.

The Scholarly Correction

A careful study of the hand in Kant, published in a Hungarian philosophical journal at Eszterházy Károly University, observes that the hand never becomes an explicit, thematic center of Kant’s philosophy in the way that later phenomenology would make it. Merleau-Ponty takes up the hand as a chiasmic site of touching and being touched. Heidegger develops handedness, Zuhandenheit, as a defining feature of the being of equipment. Husserl analyzes the double sensation of one hand touching the other. These are explicit philosophical theses about the hand. The hand, in Kant, plays a different role from the thematic centrality later phenomenology will give it. It appears as an example, a test case, and a sense-organ of decisive cognitive importance, which is already a great deal, though it falls short of the hand-centered metaphysics the misattributed quotation implies.

The quotation legend, though small, distorts philosophy. It suggests that Kant produced a compressed aphorism on the hand as the extension of the mind. What the actual texts show is something else: a careful argument about incongruent counterparts in 1768, and a careful account of touch as shape-sense in 1798. The misattributed sentence flattens both arguments into a Hallmark version of themselves, and then hangs the name Kant on the flattened version.

The Responsible Formula

Writers who want Kantian authority without philological error have a narrow path open to them. The 1768 essay on incongruent counterparts grounds the claim that Kant treated the hand as a philosophically significant object. The Anthropology of 1798 grounds the claim that Kant treated touch, seated in the fingertips, as cognitively constitutive of our concept of bodily shape. Writers who wish to credit Kant with the aphorism about the outer brain can honestly describe it as a twentieth-century attribution traceable at least to David Katz in 1925, for which no secure primary Kant passage has yet been established. The formula runs longer than the elegant false quotation, and it will not fit on a poster, though it has the advantage of being accurate.

The broader point reaches past Kant. Quotation legends grow because the citation economy rewards speed and punishes verification. A writer who takes the time to trace a line to its actual source pays a cost in word count, in footnotes, and in the appearance of pedantry. A writer who accepts the received attribution on trust pays no such cost, and the received attribution grows stronger with every unverified repetition. Over a century, a footnote in a book on touch becomes a Kant quotation in a surgical textbook, and the discipline stops noticing.

Hands, Thought, and Signed Languages

One further reason to care about this correction comes from the linguistics of American Sign Language and the other signed languages of the world. The proposition that the hand is the mind’s instrument is no idle metaphor in Deaf communities or among sign linguists. The hand is the articulatory site of natural human languages with their own phonology, morphology, and syntax, documented since William Stokoe’s 1960 Sign Language Structure opened the field of sign linguistics. Signed languages are languages of the hand in a literal, structural sense, and the evidence for that structural status is empirical and extensive.

When the falsely attributed Kant line is imported into defenses of signed language, or into gestural theories of cognition, it smuggles in a spurious authority and obscures the actual argument. The work has what it needs already, which is the record of the languages themselves and the descriptive and theoretical work of the linguists who study them. Kant’s signature adds nothing to that record. A fake Kant quotation weakens the record by mortgaging the argument to a line that will not survive a footnote check. Signed languages deserve better citation hygiene than quotation culture has given them.

Conclusion

The hand has a real place in Kant’s philosophy. It is the example that cracks open absolute space in 1768. It becomes the organ of touch that makes three-dimensional shape thinkable in 1798. Those two passages are worth reading and worth quoting in Kant’s name. The third sentence, the famous one about the hand as the visible or outer part of the brain, is a twentieth-century attribution that has outrun its evidence. Responsible writing can name it for what it is, a Katz-transmitted attribution from 1925 with no verified Kant source behind it. The legend will keep moving, because legends do, though it does not have to move through our pages unchallenged. A sentence about hands deserves to be held in the hand and checked.

The Self

https://ridiculousbharath.wordpress.com/2026/05/12/the-self/