Most people who have some ambition to read the Bible cover to cover get lost in Leviticus which is largely instructions to the people and the priests as to how to--and how not to--approach God through atoning sacrifices.
But I always get a great deal out of Leviticus--from a medical viewpoint it is fascinating and really ahead of its time; much is made in secular circles of Egyptian medicine at the time, which was a great champion of trephination and fly dung--but from a health and public safety standpoint, it is small wonder that the Hebrews survived to this day, and most of their neighbors did not; The Hittites et. al. were as superstitious as Egypt, which survives but still in an impoverished state. But Jews thrive virtually wherever they go; a source of constant irritation to all other people groups.
Hinduism may be older that Judaism; but if so it is hence considerably more modern than average. In the sense that there is a seminal democratic element in it. I was struck this time about how, if a leper touched a clay pot, it had to be not only thrown away but crushed. This smashing of clay vessels has a parallel in Hinduism, where a whole segment of society is hereditarily and permanently unclean--not just ceremonially but overall, in every possible application. The difference is that the Jews prescibed and the Hindus proscribe the "unclean."
I have on my desk a drinking vessel from India, very simple, fashioned from red clay, which represents the custom of dealing with "Harijans" or "Dalits" to this day. Street vendors have a supply of these cups--they will sell a drink to anyone, but if he sells to a Dalit, he has to, in public, smash the cup after the Untouchable finishes it--it appears that the Dalit can't even take the cup home! This amounts to a public ceremony of millenia of deliberate and repeated humiliations, to presumably keep the Dalits from getting too upity or getting any hope of advancement. (The organization is DalitNetwork.org and their project is called, "Share the Well." I think I can safely recommend it tho I haven't checked on it personally.)
There was an excellent review of the movie "Ghandi" in Commentary magazine when the movie first came out that reviewed not only little-known facts about Ghandi--he took penecillin for his infections but denied it to his wife, whom he described as a cow, and not a sacred one either. Needless to say his public image as a Messiah was not what he was like on the local level, where he was a literal terror to his own.
This article noted also that Hinduism, at best, is a religion of stasis--rather like the Southern Baptists who incepted as a protest of not only losing the war but to be a bastion against the "Advancement of Colored People," even rapid change if one uses the Hindu Timeline: which in turn inspired ML King and the NAACP. My point would be that there was always hope for change. And change has now come, full circle, with the election of Fred Luter to replace Richard Land as the leader of the denomination.(see World magazine June 16 p. 60)
My late friend Mahendra was a mathematician who also studied Hindu philosophy at Oxford but after researching his heritage more than most, elected to leave Hinduism for following Christ. (Not uncommon among the contemporary Dalits who also tend towards Buddhism too now); he said that one word sufficed to describe Hinduism and that is, "Hopeless" One cannot move in status until after death; now Mahendra was full of advantages, coming from a high caste Hindu family: his father was friends with the Ghandi family. Nonetheless, Mahendra had to flee because his uncle tried to kill him; and he was literally erased from the family tree--no one was to even acknowledge that he had ever existed. This is how very fierce Hindu fundamentalism can be. In certain areas of India where change is threatened, churches are routinely burned and fleeing Christians killed, esp in the state of Orissa. Even the government of India admits this but their efforts to quell it have been unsuccessful. All the policemen in the world can't be everywhere all the time.
One of the many things that halted my explorations of Hinduism after visiting India in the 70's--somewhat akin to American intellectuals paying homage to the worker's paradise of Father Joe Stalin and coming back with glowing reports--was that in the Hindu paradigm I was treated well because I was a medical student, which made me high caste--very embarrassing in retrospect--but now I realize that forgiveness is not needed in the caste system--"one is what one is--no use wriggling" --from which standpoint, as Mahendra noted, there is no real difference between kindness and cruelty. (Need I point out the obvious parallels to Darwinist fundamentalism?)
(It is also true that the Brits had to pass a law against burning of wives in their husband's funeral pyre--against the ferocious opposition of Hindus all over the country--and it is still practiced quietly and "voluntarily" in remote areas.)
This is something to consider when people say that all religions are the same and of equal value and lead to the "same place" --in terms of death, that's true but there the resemblance stops. Nor is, say, Nazi Kultur equally valid as most other cultures. As far as works-based religions, which are inherently political in nature, there isn't much difference either--these are "systems" but Christ is not a "system" which is why the world at its best is utterly puzzled by Jesus. Is he liberal? Conservative? To once again quote Walker Percy, "I no longer know what those words mean." In the context of an article in which he lays out his own faith in Christ.
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