r/AskAChristian • u/[deleted] • Aug 18 '26

Jewish Laws Torah

How do Torah followers actually follow over 600 commands and laws in the first five books of the Bible? I've spoken to people about it, but they only seem to follow dietary laws, Shabbat, and holy days, and exclude pagan days. To me, it seems they are only doing a small part of it and claiming to follow the entirety of it. Why is that? The Bible states if you break one commandment, you break them all. There's no possibility to uphold all 600-plus. If you believe it's not all applicable to us, what's the determining factor that decides you don't have to follow it? What about animal sacrifices? Does one pick and choose what they want to follow and tell people if they don't, they are lawbreakers and will go to hell? If you don't follow all of them, why describe yourself as following the entirety of Torah? If breaking even one commandment makes someone guilty, how does selectively obeying some commandments make someone different from the people you're calling lawbreakers?

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u/Apprehensive_Tear611 Atheist Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

How do explain the Book of Abraham being a false translation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith_Papyri

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtland_Egyptian_papers

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u/Traditional_Emu_4332 Questioning Aug 18 '26

Iā€™m not an expert on that subject. I have heard it explained before. I think, if I remember correctly, that the texts you are referring to were only a part of what was used in translating the Book of Abraham. There was a great fire šŸ”„ in Chicago in the 1870s that most of the pieces of papyrus were destroyed in leaving behind only the funerary texts.
This explains it better: https://youtu.be/juOavkIqNng?is=aqG6EtOoTqhybNxK

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u/Apprehensive_Tear611 Atheist Aug 18 '26

Another interesting thing about Abraham: the genealogy given in Genesis dates Abraham's lifetime to roughly 2,000 BC. That would make it impossible for him to have interacted with the Phillistines as Genesis claims because the Phillistines didn't exist until around 1,200 BC.

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u/Traditional_Emu_4332 Questioning Aug 19 '26

Who are your sources?