The Seriousness of Oaths: Leadership Lessons from Numbers

“When a man makes a vow to the Lord or takes an oath to obligate himself by a pledge, he must not break his word but must do everything he said.”
Numbers 30:2 (NIV)

I sat in a meeting. It was a big team and there was a definite buzz in the room. As the meeting began the team leader began to speak about his vision for the team and our task. That’s when it got weird. The team leader’s stated vision wasn’t just a BHAG (big, hairy, audacious, goal), it was more of a pipe-dream on steroids. And it wasn’t delivered as something to reach for as a team but more of a divinely authoritative statement about what was definitely going to happen. It was a form of oath of what the team leader was going to do, what the outcome would be, and our participation in his Powerball prognostication.

It was rash. It was silly. It was foolish. It didn’t take long for the team to implode. The team leader’s pipe-dream remained just that.

I commonly hear people use the phrase, “I swear to God.” It’s casually thrown out in our culture, but the concept of a divine oath is as old as humanity itself and throughout history oaths have carried very serious cultural and societal weight in ways we can’t imagine today. To make an oath was spiritually binding and carried with it the threat of divine retribution. In medieval times, a noble made an oath on the bones of St. Cuthbert and then broke his oath. Writers took great pleasure in sharing the terrible things that befell the noble as a result. In ancient Assyria, a treaty between parties was ritually sealed with the saying “May your seed be like this sheep’s entrails if you betray this oath.” And yes, a sheep was slaughtered as part of the ritual for visual impact of the seriousness of keeping one’s word.

Throughout history, if you said, “I swear to God” it would have been taken as a very serious statement for which you would be culturally held accountable by society. If you broke that oath, there would be the expectation that God would curse you and perhaps the community would take care of punishing you themselves in order to avoid the divine retribution having a ripple effect on them.

In today’s chapter, God reminds the Hebrew people through Moses that oaths were serious and binding. However, God also goes on to create a system of annulment for rash words and oaths. A modern reader might have difficulty getting past the ancient historical context of the annulment’s gender power dynamics, but for the Hebrews in Moses’ day God’s addendum to the law as a radical act of mercy for families and households. It provided a gracious “out” for rash words spoken in anger or foolish pipe dreams spoken out of hubris.

This seriousness about oaths and the ancient cultural preoccupation with the system by which oaths were made, kept, policed, and punished was Jesus’ motivation for saying,

“Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath,but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.’ But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all:either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’;anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

In the quiet this morning, I find my mind wandering back into that room with the team and our team leader’s Powerball prognostication of pipe-dream glory. I learned an important lesson about leadership that day. There is a difference between an achievable stretch goal and a pipe-dream. There’s a difference between a BHAG and wishful thinking. As a leader, I want to provide an inspiring vision that motivates a team to rise to the occasion. Providing a flight of fantasy, like a rashly made oath, is only setting myself and the team up for a tragic fall.