Okay, so as a disclaimer, my goal this afternoon was not to get you all to BELIEVE in the Bible but to UNDERSTAND what certain parts of this text mean. Why? Well, we are headed into a society completely different from the one we live in today. This society was governed completely by men who used their interpretations of the Bible to help them decide their cases. It is only fitting that we try and interpret the laws or rules for living contained in the Bible so that we can begin to understand why they condemned so many "witches" to jail and to the gallows.
In pairs, you all were assigned a section of the Ten Commandments, which can be found in the Exodus section of the King James version of the Bible. Form that, we created a summarized list of the rules or expectations set forth in this section of the Bible. I copied down your findings onto a chart that we'll use in future classes.
The best part of our time together had to be the intense discussions we had about the two or three pages we read in the Bible. It became obvious to me and to many of you why the Bible may not be the best source for a court to use in judgement. In our short time together it became obvious that there were many possible interpretations of the text and that depending on how the text is used, it could lead to any number of individual conclusions.
Next class, we'll learn a little bit more about the factual history of the witch trials and then we'll proceed on to The Crucible.
