I recently posted a very short video on Facebook that attempts to explain in very broad terms why the Torah includes grossly immoral laws and commandments, such as genocide and capital punishment for a variety of victimless crimes. I devote an entire chapter of Come Now Let Us Reason Together to this subject, but I will say a few additional words here.
One way to approach this question is to ask an analogous one regarding empirical knowledge. In other words, while an omniscient God had Moses’s undivided attention on Mt. Sinai, why did he not disclose to him the germ theory of disease, the phenomenon of electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and so on? While this question is asked infrequently, it is worth pondering. It seems that the only plausible answer is that God wanted humanity to discover these things for ourselves. But why?
I believe the answer is found in one of Judaism’s most basic axioms; that is, the notion of tikkun olam or “repairing the world.” The central idea is that we were created by the Almighty for the purpose of healing the world both spiritually and materially. Clearly, scientific knowledge is a key aspect of this mission, and thus our responsibility. Samuel Luzzatto (1800-1865), a highly influential Italian scholar, philosopher, and defender of tradition, had something like this in mind when he wrote: “the cosmology of Moses is not and ought not to be a tractate of physics . . . for it would have been incomprehensible to mankind during many generations and would have been more harmful than beneficial to their religious and moral education.”
Accordingly, I think we have arrived at an innocent explanation for God’s immoral commandments. He gave a late Bronze Age people laws that they could understand, while entrusting to us the development of an ever-higher level of moral consciousness. However, God did not simply leave weak and sinful humans to our own devices for accomplishing this daunting task, but provided us with the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) as a road map.