I can remember very vividly many adults telling me that rules are for my own good. I can remember just as vividly thinking they were insane, and that I'd never say anything like that when I became an adult. Now I'm a teacher, and I have to deal with rules on a daily basis; not just as a enforcer, but also as a person who obeys them.

As a thinking adult, I'm sure you understand the thought behind rules. They are usually placed to protect individuals. There are the rogue leaders who make rules to protect their own selfish interest, but by in large, rules are designed for protection from a myriad of consequences.

In my first year of teaching, I sought out the most experienced and most fun teacher and asked for her rules to copy for that year. They worked well, but not as well as in her class. I found that the best rules only work when the experience is behind the enforcer as well. Disappointed as I was, I vowed to discover the secret behind rules and employ what ever I discovered in my own classroom. What I found was equally disappointing: the best of rules come from and work for experienced people. Also, enforcement is equally important as good rules.

One day, I was discussing with my wife the rules of the Old Testament and how they seemed so strange to us. Extremely stringent rules about food, cleanliness as well as behavior permeated the book of Leviticus. God seemed to be off on his rules. People today did not need such specific rules, cleanliness was a part of our culture as well as behavior.

Then I read a book on Leviticus and found that most of the laws of the Old Testament were based on scientific reasoning. The foods the Jews were not to eat were the most dangerous, especially with the poor cooking methods used at the time. The laws for cleanliness were more than a thousand years ahead of modern science and understanding of diseases. God basically outlined safety measures that could be taken from a modern day biology book.

I was then struck by the irony of the argument that the bible is not of God. Humans did not know about medicine and health as we do today, even the atheists will agree to that. How could an obscure, tiny group of separatists understand so much about health that they could write a book centuries before anyone else? The odds against that are too large to measure.

I know many people who feel the bible is outdated, unreliable history and full of mythology and not facts. Gentiles often thought the Jews were silly to follow such a long and specific list of guidelines. No one understood why the rules were as they were, not even the Jews. Time, however, proved God correct as science grew and began to discover the secrets behind this mysterious book, Leviticus.

The bible also made scientific claims that people either didn't pay attention to or did not believe. David claimed in a psalm that God hung the Earth in nothing. For the longest time, people believed that verse to be symbolic and not literal. They thought the world was flat, but the bible mentions it being a sphere. Deep-sea fountains were mentioned in Job and it has been only in the last 50 years that scientists have been able to dive deep enough to see these fountains.

How can a book, thousands of years, old be so scientifically correct long before science proved it? Only the creator of this world could know so much about it before anyone else. If it proves nothing else, these facts prove that the Jews understood more than the average person in their day. Is it not possible, then, that they knew about the one true God as well?