It wasn’t that long ago when any given restaurant used to have a smoking and a non-smoking section. I always thought those were kinda pointless, since even in the non-smoking section, smoke would inevitably drift from the smoking section to fill up most of the room.
Regardless, when I was a kid, there was a push to ban all smoking inside restaurants—even going so far as to establish a perimeter around the front door of the restaurant so that you couldn’t smoke near the front door.
As expected, the backlash was immediate and fierce. Most accused the government of legislating morality, while the other side argued that someone else’s habit was hurting them (via secondhand smoke).
I’m not here to debate the merits of that point (although, for the record, I find myself firmly on the latter). Instead, I will point out that God’s instruction in Deuteronomy 22:8 to create a parapet around the roof of your house sounds eerily similar.
Simply put, this law states that if you build a new house, you must put a low wall (i.e., a “parapet”) around the border of the roof to protect people from walking off the side. According to Jewish tradition, this law should be about thirty inches high and strong enough that if someone leaned on it, it wouldn’t buckle.
If you bought an old house that didn’t have a parapet, you were required to add one to it for the exact same reason.
I can almost hear the cries from many today: “This is infringing on my personal property rights! Moses is just trying to protect all the people that aren’t watching where they’re going! ARGH!”
Those who argue this miss the real point: God isn’t as concerned with your house as much as He is with preventing unnecessary blood-guiltiness on the land. If someone were to fall off your house and die, the entire nation would suffer from this curse. A simple parapet resolves this issue.
Failure to put a parapet on your house would be a crime similar to what we call criminal negligence today. My laziness or inaction caused someone else to suffer, and currently, in the state of Texas, that crime carries with it a heavy sentence depending on the specific action.
That’s a huge risk to pay for such a minor construction project. Israelites, just build your parapets and be done with it.