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ISRAELITE LAW AND BIBLICAL LAW
There is an important distinction to be made between Israelite Law and Biblical Law. This is a helpful distinction by the last century of scholars studying ancient law materials. In terms of ancient Israel, Israelite Law pertains to the legal systems that actually regulated people’s lives during the course of Israel’s history. We are referring to the actual laws, not that we can recover them with certainty or comprehensiveness, that served as legal controls and corrections for human behaviors.
Biblical Law, on the other hand, refers to the literature in the Bible which presents as law collections. This is not to be considered simply identical to Israelite law. As they now stand, the laws in the Hebrew Bible are literature. These law collections are part of a structured literary corpus with considerable goals… but these goals are not really judicial. They are generative, meaning they are aimed at recounting the history of Israel to speak to the present and cast a vision for the future. The law collections in the Bible are part of a national history that grounds the audience of the Bible and they recall the encounter with the divine.
Actual Israelite laws had a specific context of the real social relations existing during their respective period in Israel’s history. Biblical law is not intended to be restricted to single social periods. Instead, its law collections are presented as though it were applicable for all times and all people belonging to Israel.
To sum up, Biblical Law is LITERATURE—a composition seemingly comprising Israelite laws, but as with most literature, our task as the interpreter is to try to think about the biblical law collections with authors, editors, readers, transmitters, preservers, etc…
BIBLICAL LAW COLLECTIONS
As they stand in the Bible, law collections cover a wide variety of social and religious subjects, and they don’t always match. Even a cursory reading of the disparate collections of laws in the Bible will confound a reader looking for a unified divine law. Because of this, scholars do not suppose this legal literature was composed by a single person throughout, or that it was edited later by only a single individual or group aiming to eliminate variations. Moreover, there is unusual focus on a few situations, like being gored by an ox or a pregnant woman being struck and her unborn child being injured. If we actually sift through the laws of the Bible we start to wonder at the randomness of the laws selected over an against what common parts of life would actually need to be litigated.
What is fascinating, is that things like ox goring and fetuses injured in a fist fight have a substantial place another Near Eastern Law codes— we have to assume the biblical writers are carrying forward longstanding literary traditions squarely grounded in the larger ancient Near Eastern legal literature. The compilers of the Hebrew Bible pulled these materials into the narrative pieces of the Bible in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
GOD AND THE LAW
The common core that holds this literature together is the notion of theocratic rule over a unified people by the Israelite god, YHVH (pronounced “adonai” by observant Jews). However, these are not law codes. They are collections. They are not comprehensive. They come from various times and settings. While many of the laws have very old origination or parallels in older codes like Hammurabi, Lipit Ishtar, etc…, the literature in which we find biblical law stems from a much later period, probably from after the demise of the monarchy— during the exile after 586 B.C.E. or even later in the Persian Period, after 538 B.C.E.
This does not mean that individual laws were not used in ancient Israel, but rather, the literary context we find them in is probably much later. Biblical law, at least in part, had its source in Israelite laws, which contributed to the religious, legal, and cultural traditions that eventually became enshrined in the Hebrew Bible.
LEGAL TEXTS IN THE HEBREW BIBLE
Here is the general consensus on law collections by Bible scholars in recent history. It is drawn in part from one of the foremost scholars on Israelite Law, Douglas Knight (Law, Power, and Justice in Ancient Israel, 17-21):
Each ‘code’ was drafted in a different time, or, if at more than one time, then a discrete time for each of its sections. Small changes were made by scribes either on purpose or accident over centuries, with additions and interpretations being incorporated at various later stages.
A lot of Bible scholars believe law collections were compiled as a reaction to large political shifts, to preserve the laws that had been functioning in preceding generations rather than to establish rule of law for a current generation. Candidates would be the founding of the monarchy, the end of Assyrian domination and resurgence of nationalism, the exile and destruction of temple, the restoration of the people to the land… We might say more generally, that the editors of the Bible were writing a generative document, that is, the Bible is meant to help a specific audience understand their identity as God’s people, their obligation to worship YHVH alone, and bless the world.
The collections are all thought to be based on older legal traditions, not on new laws. Most of the laws probably circulated in oral form and were carried out by custom before ever being written down out of preservation. Scholars vary as to how well we can ‘reconstruct’ Israelite laws in actuality from biblical laws. What can be said confidently, is that a great deal of crossover exists with Biblical Law and ancient Near Eastern law codes.
Each collection is generally associated with a particular source named in the documentary hypothesis (the documentary hypothesis is the theory that surmises 4 or 5 documents are woven together by a later writer to make the Torah or first five books of the Bible). The Covenant Code is usually attributed to JE (writers named for the names they use for God, among other linguistic and stylistic markers), Deuteronomic Code is the D source (this writer wrote a history from Joshua through 2 Kings about how Israel’s failure to keep the Deuteronomic Law code resulted in her exile), the Holiness and Priestly Codes are the P source (this writer is clearly a priest and probably edited and wrote portions of the Torah latest. This writer likes binary categories, is freaked out by bodily emissions, and his law code is concerned with how cult should be practiced)…
The relation of biblical law to prophets is foundational to how we think about law collections. Karl Heinrich Graf, and then more famously Julius Wellhausen suggested that the prophets came before the law, not that the law came before the prophets—contra the biblical testimony. We generally think the law materials drawn into the Bible are post-exilic.
Most scholars assumed with this succession of legal codes, the compilers or authors of the later collections knew the earlier ones. Later editors left laws alone for the most part. This is attested for how closely the laws match ancient Near Eastern codes which precede the Hebrew Bible by centuries.
THE MAJOR LAW COLLECTIONS IN THE HEBREW BIBLE
COVENANT CODE
The Covenant Code, or “Book of the Covenant,” is found in Exodus 21.1-23.19. This is generally thought to be the oldest collection of laws in the Hebrew Bible. This is because it lines up best with much older ancient Near Eastern collections. Its laws also reflect an agricultural lifestyle more than any of the other law collections. Also there is much less concern with cultic matters. The laws are about slavery, violence, liability and restitution, social justice, marriage, the Sabbath and the Sabbatical Year, the three annual festivals, and other subjects. Many scholars assign this to the monarchy, perhaps quite early when most of Israel was rural and village life was the context.
DEUTERONOMIC CODE
The Deuteronomic Code is found in Deuteronomy 12-26, and the collection has generally been associated with with Josiah’s reform. The Deuteronomic Code treats laws about the strict centralizing of YHWH’s cult, apostasy, impurity, tithing, the Sabbatical Year, religious festivals, leadership roles of judges, officials, kings, Levitical priests, prophets, and diverse issues concerning the cities of refuge, witnesses, warfare, murder, inheritance, property, sexual matters, marriage, slavery, various ‘humanitarian’ considerations, and more. It is a sort of a mixed bag! The thing that stands out in the Deuteronomic Code that we cannot miss, is the centralization of cult and the exclusive worship of Yahweh… and how to live this out.
Many interpreters have felt that these legal traditions may be Northern Kingdom laws that were brought south to Jerusalem by fleeing northerners after Assyria sacked Samaria in 722 BCE. In any case, these are the laws put forth in King Josiah’s reform in the 620s. The Deuteronomist stream of thought continued into the exilic period and was largely responsible for the editing of Genesis through Numbers and for drafting the history which runs from Joshua through 2nd Kings. Deuteronomy including the Deuteronomic Code served as the core principle for the Deuteronomic Historian (the smarty-pants name for the guy who wrote Joshua-2 Kings).
HOLINESS CODE
The Holiness Code is located in Leviticus 17-26 (although some exclude Lev 17, 26, or other parts). The Holiness Code is named for its obsession with holiness in terms of ritual purity and an urgent call for moral and ritualistic sanctity. It is choppy in content and in Hebrew- much more than the previous two ‘codes.’ A lot of scholars think this is because it was based on smaller collections or pieces that were pulled together over time. Many of its laws may stem from the monarchic period, but its compilation—or at least the later redactional work on it—occurred in the post-exilic period.
Priests in Jerusalem were likely the ones to have produced it, probably before the writing of the Priestly Code. The Holiness Code seems to hold the belief that the Israelite people as a whole needed to be implored to do right in order for them thrive in the land. The Holiness Code focuses on cultic matters: sacrificial rules, illicit sexual practices, morality towards others, penalties for violations, qualifications for priesthood, religious festivals, blasphemy, and the Sabbatical and Jubilee Years.
PRIESTLY CODE
The rest of the laws of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers are commonly called the Priestly Code— not because they are a unified source but more because they all demonstrate a similar ideology. Basically, all these laws have to do with ritual purity and cultic practice; how to approach YHVH correctly. The Priestly Code is held widely to be post-exilic and later than the Holiness Code.
We find in the Priestly Code painstakingly long instructions regarding the tabernacle, the ark, and all the other accoutrements of the cult (Ex 25-31, 35-40), sacrifices (Lev 1-7), consecration of the priests (Lev 8-10), impurities (Lev 11-15), the Day of Atonement or “Yom Kippur” (Lev 16), votive gifts (Lev 27), and various other laws involving the cult (Num 5-6; 15; 18-19; 28-30).
Some of these sections are understood to be later additions. The disconnected nature of all these parts accounts, perhaps, for the lesser attention accorded by scholars to the Priestly Code as a whole in comparison with other codes. It seems to be more of an accretion than a source document.
THE DECALOGUE
There are actually three versions of the ten commandments, or the Decalogue, in the Bible (Exodus 20.2-17, Deut 5.6-21, and Ex 34-26). The Decalogue is the wildcard in the historical progression of legal codes. Many scholars follow the biblical tradition that the Decalogue is the first legal material in Israel’s legal litarature. They understand the Decalogue as the core of the legal principles that then became elaborated in other collections.
Some set the Decalogue later, but almost always earlier than the Deuteronomic, Holiness, and Priestly Codes since the Exodus version is often associated with the JE source. In its present form the Decalogue is not evenly structured—four short laws and the others of varying lengths, a mixture of positive and prohibitive commands, and first four religious and the latter six social in content. Interpreters from antiquity as well as modern scholars were vexed by the structure, variance, and ordering of the three Decalogue versions. What is more intriguing, is that the decalogue virtually disappears in Second Temple Jewish, Christian, and early rabbinic literature.
FOR THE MODERN READER
THE LAWS IN THE BIBLE ARE A GRAB BAG. THEY ARE ACTUALLY LIKE FIVE GRAB BAGS. They do not create a unified system; in fact, they often disagree with other individual laws. This means attempting to literally live by biblical law is not only impossible…it is really misguided (unless you are going to make millions off of a book or movie deal…I guess. :D)
It also means that trying to appropriate Biblical laws to the modern world is not going to get us very far. In fact, the Torah and the Prophets (as literary canons for Jews take-up by Christians through the greek translations of the Bible) had not been settled in form more than a hundred years before interpreters start pulling forward laws towards new meaning. Essentially, people who come after the laws were relevant have to seek the heart of these laws, and ask ethical questions out of that line of questioning.
AT THE SAME TIME, THEY ARE A GREAT WINDOW INTO ISRAEL’S SELF-UNDERSTANDING. Discrete law collections are a snapshot of how the different writers of biblical content understood Israelite identity, concepts of justice, and how materials are pulled into the narrative portions of the Bible. Each collection speaks to a different setting, whether it is rural or urban, or whether the worship of YHVH is centralized (Jerusalem in the south, Bethel and Dan in the North) or whether it takes place at local cult shrines (before Josiah’s reform in the 620s).
MANY LAWS THAT SEEM BARBARIC TO US WERE A STEP FORWARD IN THEIR TIME. As moderns, we never ask how to make a sacrifice. We are never are concerned with being ritually pure— so that we can enter into sacred space. We do not ask at one point it is important to cut off an offender’s hand or when it is appropriate to stone a child for bad behavior. Biblical laws are about issues that are by and large no longer living (there are exceptions course…you still shouldn’t murder… etc.). But here is the thing, many of these laws not only made sense in there original context, they also find parallels in other ancient collections.
When we read these law collections, we ought to ask a couple of questions. 1) What is the context that would necessitate a law like this? and 2) How was it a step forward in its time? How does it progress human understanding in understanding justice and divine care for rule of law in its time? We’ll do a podcast series on law codes sometime (more fun than it sounds because ancient laws are hilarious) and work these questions out together.