The Lost World of the Torah: Law as Covenant and Wisdom in Ancient Context. By John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton

Introduction 1 

Part 1: Methodology 

Proposition 1: The Old Testament Is an Ancient Document 9 

Proposition 2: The Way We Interpret the Torah Today Is Influenced by the Way We Think Law and Legislation Work 18

Part 2: Function of Ancient Near Eastern Legal Collections

Proposition 3: Legal Collections in the Ancient World Are Not Legislation 25

Proposition 4: Ancient Near Eastern Legal Collections Teach Wisdom 32

Proposition 5: The Torah Is Similar to Ancient Near Eastern Legal Collections and Therefore Also Teaches Wisdom, Not Legislation 37

Proposition 6: The Israelite Covenant Effectively Functions as an Ancient Near Eastern Suzerainty Treaty 46

Proposition 7: Holiness Is a Status, Not an Objective 54

Part 3: Ritual and Torah

Proposition 8: Ancient Near Eastern Ritual Served to Meet the Needs of the Gods 65

Proposition 9: Ancient Israelite Ritual Serves to Maintain Covenant Order Because Yahweh Has No Needs 70

Part 4: Context of the Torah

Proposition 10: The Torah Is Similar to Ancient Near Eastern Legal Collections Because It Is Embedded in the Same Cultural Context, Not Because It Is Dependent on Them 83

Proposition 11: The Differences Between the Torah and the Ancient Near Eastern Legal Collections Are Found Not in Legislation but in the Order Founded in the Covenant 89

Excursus: Observations About Composition 94

Proposition 12: Torah Is Situated in Context of the Ancient World 99

Proposition 13: Torah Is Situated in the Context of the Covenant 104

Proposition 14: Torah Is Situated in the Context of Israelite Theology Regarding Yahweh’s Presence Residing Among Them 112

Part 5: Ongoing Significance of the Torah

Proposition 15: Discussions of Law in the New Testament Do Not Tell Us Anything About Old Testament Torah in Context 121

Proposition 16: The Torah Should Not Be Divided into Categories to Separate Out What Is Relevant 133

Proposition 17: Torah Was Never Intended to Provide Salvation 154

Proposition 18: Divine Instruction Can Be Understood as a Metaphor of Health Rather Than a Metaphor of Law 161

Proposition 19: We Cannot Gain Moral Knowledge or Build a System of Ethics Based on Reading the Torah in Context and Deriving Principles from It 167

Proposition 20: Torah Cannot Provide Prooftexts for Solving Issues Today 183

Proposition 21: The Ancient Israelites Would Not Have Understood the Torah as Providing Divine Moral Instruction 191

Proposition 22: A Divine Command Theory of Ethics Does Not Require that the Torah Is Moral Instruction 200

Proposition 23: Taking the Torah Seriously Means Understanding What It Was Written to Say, Not Converting It into Moral Law

Introduction

In English we use the expression “law and order.” This sort of construction is known as a hendiadys—two nouns joined by and expressing a single idea (cf. “assault and battery”). In this expression, order is the objective and law is the means of achieving it. Law is not the only way to achieve order; others would include ethics and customs of etiquette (“little ethics”). Society is regulated by mores and taboos that dictate what constitutes orderly (or disorderly) conduct. Such regulations can be formal or informal, enforced by outside agency or by social pressure, oral or written, explicit or implicit. They can be normative throughout society or subject to differences of opinion (for example, based on conflicting ideas between generations). Order is generally associated with a particular understanding of what constitutes the common good. Law is not limited to what is perceived as moral behavior. For example, traffic laws, though essential for order, are not moral in nature. At the same time, perceptions of foundational morality are often embodied in law, but not always. In fact, some people would agree that some laws should be judged immoral and therefore should be resisted (e.g., racial segregation laws). The objective of law is order, and moral behavior is often one aspect of order. In modern Western societies, law is formal, written (codified), and enforced by agencies and institutions (police, judiciary). Such an approach to legislation is referred to as “statutory law.” Given how deeply entrenched this idea of law is, it is instinctive for us to imagine that law in other societies functions in the same way. That is one of the major presuppositions that will be challenged in the following chapters. In conjunction with assumptions about how law works, people have assumptions about how the Bible works—how it should be interpreted. In our modern world, our handling of what we call the “biblical law” teeters between heated controversy and utter neglect. Controversies arise when Old Testament laws seem either odd beyond comprehension (not eating lobster) or morally reprehensible (executing children). Neglect results when we consider the law obsolete, no longer carrying any normative power (tassels on clothing, sacrifices). Even readers who do attempt to make use of the Old Testament “law” often find it either irrelevant or so confusing that they throw up their hands in despair, frustrated at its perceived impenetrability. Despite the extremes of vitriol and dismissiveness, people—sometimes the same people who are controversial or dismissive—continue to propose moral principles from these laws and garner prooftexts to resolve the issues that arise in society by offering the “biblical view.” As a result, both Christians and skeptics regularly abuse the Old Testament Law as it is misrepresented and misunderstood, and its true message too often lies either fallow or trampled underfoot. If we seek to be faithful interpreters we need to be readers who read the text in an informed and careful manner, who are consistent in the methods that we use, who refuse to manipulate the text to our own ends, and who respect the autonomy under which divine authority operates. 1 We must interpret in light of a sound understanding of the language and literature of the text, including how the genre works. We must be committed to seeking what the original communicators intended to say—no more, no less. We dare not incorporate ideas into the text that were not in their purview. Beyond these acts of interpretation, we must commit to being responsive to the text. Differences of opinion may well exist as to what that response ought to be, but traditionally many have agreed that in its most general sense it involves being the sort of people who represent God well in the world (whatever that entails) as we participate in his plans and purposes. As faithful interpreters of Law—more accurately, Torah—we must therefore seek understanding of how the genre works, what the paragraphs of legal sayings meant in their context, and what significance (if any) they should have for people today seeking to order their lives and society in faithful submission to God’s word. The most important interpretive question is not, “what is this statement telling me to do in order to represent God properly?” The question we should ask first is, “why is this in here?”—because that will help us address the literary task. It is the first objective of this book to provide information about the Torah that will help readers to become more aware of how this biblical literature functioned in its context—that is, why this literature was presented in this particular way, and why what it says in this form was important enough to be regarded as Scripture. We have to start in the ancient world and recognize the nature of this sort of literature in the ancient world. Then, based on that contextualization, we need to penetrate the Hebrew text to understand how the Torah was meant to function for the ancient Israelites. Only then will we be in a position to inquire what the authoritative significance of the Torah is for us. Paul tells Timothy that “all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17). Many readers think that this passage tells us what the significance of the Torah is without the need for a genre study. However, Paul is here affirming what Timothy’s upbringing has already taught him—that teaching, rebuking, and so on were in fact what Jews of Timothy’s day thought the Hebrew Bible (what Paul means by the word Scripture) was useful for. The point in this passage— the answer to the question “why is this in here” for 2 Timothy 3:16-17— is to contrast that use with the innovations of deceivers (1 Tim 3:13) for the listed functions, not with other potential uses of the Old Testament. Scripture includes the Torah, but we should not think that Paul is offering a menu of the precise functions of Torah (or Old Testament). Rather than asking how the Torah teaches, rebukes, corrects, trains in righteousness, and equips God’s people for every good work, we should ask what it means that the Torah “is God-breathed” (inspired). People using the Old Testament and the Torah today want to believe that they can address the significant issues of culture in “biblical” ways and, specifically, with “biblical” answers and positions. In our society today, as diverse and pluralistic as it is, we are faced with a multitude of issues, including abortion, stem cell research, genetic engineering, climate change, land exploitation, species extinction, capital punishment, immigration policies, creation care, sustainability, euthanasia, and, perhaps most pervasively, questions concerning rights and identity (gender, sexuality, ethnic, racial, etc.). We want the Bible to give us answers, but whatever answers might be embedded there, or whether there are any answers at all, can only be determined by having an informed understanding of the biblical text and by using a consistent methodology to arrive at our interpretation. We are going to suggest that finding what we can consider “biblical” answers to these social issues is not as straightforward as it seems because, contrary to what many interpreters imagine, the Bible is not a compilation of propositional revelation—a collection of facts expressing divine affirmations. Though that is a popular view, we will contend, in contrast, that Scripture is not a body of information containing propositions that are always valid in all places and times. 2 Instead, we will find much greater need to resist the thinking that there is a divinely inspired silver bullet to resolve the complicated questions we face. At the core of this book is the understanding that the ancient world was more interested in order than in legislation per se, and authorities were not inclined to make what we call laws (though decrees are commonplace) to regulate everyday life in society. Instead of relying on legislation (a formal body of written law enacted by an authority), order was achieved through the wisdom of those who governed society. This understanding will dramatically affect our interpretation of the text, consideration of the interrelationships of the various biblical collections, and discernment of the significance of the Torah for today. We have too often looked to the Torah to construct legislation as if the Torah were intended to be legislation. If, as we contend, it was never intended as legislation, then that is the wrong approach. If the focus of the Torah is order and wisdom, then it will provide for us an understanding of order and wisdom at least in an Israelite context. 3 We will then have to determine the relevance that has for us today. At the start, then, we need to lay out the terminology that is used in the Old Testament and the way that it will be used in this book. First, the word Torah has a variety of uses. Even in the Old Testament, and throughout the history of Judaism, Torah has been used to describe the first five books of the Old Testament, also referred to as the Pentateuch. Some assumed such a designation in references to the “book of the Torah” in writings as early as Joshua 1:8; 8:31, 34; and 2 Kings 14:6. We will not be using the word in that general way. Second, Torah is a technical term in the legal literature. It describes what is given at Sinai, what regulates the purity system in Leviticus, what was delivered through Moses, and what the Israelites were expected to live by. It is only one of the technical terms used to describe legal sayings. We will use Torah generally for the entire category of legal sayings, though its usage is not limited to legal contexts (for example, Torah is also used in connection to proverbial sayings where it refers to the “instruction” given by parents to children). The approach of this book follows the same format as used in the previous Lost World books. Through a series of propositions, each serving as a chapter, we will build a case point by point as we address the important issues for consideration. The supporting evidence offered in each chapter will build to the final chapters, where suggestions will be made for approaching the practical issues of today using an informed understanding of the Torah and applying a consistent hermeneutic. Readers should not expect that the result of this study will be firm answers to all the controversial questions. Rather, we will conclude with a clearer understanding of how the Torah’s message can be used today.

PART 1 METHODOLOGY

Proposition 1: The Old Testament Is an Ancient Document

Any readers who have already been introduced to the Lost World series will recognize this as one of the first propositions in each of the books. The fact that the Old Testament is an ancient document means that we cannot read it as if it were a modern Western document. Its words are laden with cultural content that its audience intrinsically understood but is often opaque to a modern reader. For instance, let’s use a reverse example: imagine someone from another culture (whether contemporary with us or from ancient times) encountering an American who referred to “flying ‘Old Glory.’” Even some Americans (depending on age and geographical location) may not be aware that Old Glory refers to the American flag. But let’s pursue the inquiry further. In an ancient culture they would have no concept of a flag as a symbol of a country so knowledge of cultural symbolism is necessary. Second, only knowledge of semantic range would inform a reader that flying a flag is not like flying an airplane but refers to displaying it prominently. Third, they might then wonder why one would fly a flag, and our reply may have to do with patriotism, a cultural value. Patriotism would be a foreign concept in many ancient cultures since they would not have necessarily felt compelled to express loyalty to a nation-state (though they might understand the importance of loyalty to a king). Discussion about that would then open up an interesting conversation about whether national entities have value and what that value might be. Finally, we would discover that national values of today may differ considerably from national values in another culture (where their values would be cultural values rather than national values). This is simply an arbitrary example of how language is full of cultural meaning. Just as someone from an ancient culture would have difficulty understanding our ideas (even if the words were properly translated for them), we also find ourselves struggling to understand all the cultural ideas that are carried in words from ancient texts. Translation of cultural ideas is difficult for many reasons. One of the most important is that often a target language does not have the words that would represent all the ideas and nuances present in the words of the source language. But beyond the obstacles presented by inadequate vocabulary, we encounter ideas communicated from within and with reference to an unfamiliar cultural framework. We are inclined to interpret texts from the perspective of our own cultural network without accounting for the cultural framework native to the text we are reading. A useful metaphor for describing this phenomenon of diverse cultural settings is that of cultural rivers. 1 In our modern world, the cultural river is easily identified. Among its American (and often global) currents are various fundamentals such as rights, freedom, capitalism, democracy, individualism, social networking, globalism, market economy, consumerism, scientific naturalism, an expanding universe, empiricism, and natural laws, just to name a few. Some may well wish to float in these currents while others may struggle to swim upstream against at least some of them, but those in our modern world inevitably are located in its waters. Regardless of our diverse ways of thinking, we are all in the cultural river and its currents are familiar to us. In the ancient world, a very different cultural river flowed through all the neighboring cultures: Egyptians, Phoenicians, Assyrians—and Israelites. Despite important variations between cultures and across the centuries, certain elements remained largely static. Continual course adjustments have little effect on the most persistent currents. People from various times and cultures may indeed face some similar challenges common to humanity, but few of the currents common to the ancient cultures are found in our modern cultural river. In the ancient cultural river we would find currents such as community identity, the comprehensive and ubiquitous control of the gods, the role of kingship, divination, the centrality of the temple, the mediatory role of images, the effectual and essential role of sacrifice, and the reality of the spirit world and magic. The Israelites sometimes floated on the currents of that cultural river without resistance, and we would be neither surprised nor critical. At other times, however, the revelation of God encouraged them to struggle out of the current into the shallows, or even to swim furiously upstream. Whatever the extent of the Israelites’ interactions with the cultural river, it is important to remember that they were situated in the ancient cultural river, not immersed in the currents of our modern cultural river. It is this “embeddedness” that we seek to understand so that we may be faithful interpreters of the biblical text. God communicated within the context of their cultural river. God’s message, God’s purposes, and God’s authority were all vested in Israelite communicators for Israelite audiences, and the message took shape according to the internal logic within their language and culture. We cannot be assured of authoritative communication through any other source, and we must therefore find the message of God as communicated through those intermediaries in their ancient cultural river.

This means that if we are to interpret Scripture so as to receive the full impact of God’s authoritative message, and build the foundation for sound theology, we have to begin by setting aside the presuppositions of our cultural river, with all our modern issues and perspectives, in order to engage the cultural river of the ancient communicators. The communicators that we encounter in the Old Testament are not aware of our cultural river, including all its societal aspects; they neither address our cultural river nor anticipate it. 2 We cannot therefore assume that any of the constants or currents of our cultural river are addressed specifically in Scripture. This does not mean, however, that the Old Testament becomes irrelevant to us. How then should we proceed in order to decipher the relevance that the biblical text has for us? Our first step involves good translation of the language, but that is only the beginning. If we have any hope of understanding texts that are resident in another cultural river, we need the service of a “cultural broker.”3 Thinking back to the example used above concerning flying Old Glory, we found that understanding was not accomplished by simply translating the words. The role of cultural broker is played by someone who is sufficiently knowledgeable in both the source culture and the target culture to identify what hurdles might be encountered in trying to understand and then give explanation in terms that will make sense. As another example, consider the relatively recent practice of celebrating “pie day.” At the level of translation, it sounds like an opportunity to celebrate by eating some pie, and it is, but why celebrate on March 14? For that a cultural broker is necessary. In our culture we can use a numerical notation for dates, and in America March 14 would be 3/14. A mathematical technicality is associated with these numbers when we replace the slanted line with a decimal point: 3.14, thus representing a rounded number that expresses a mathematical constant of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (a detail widely known but not universally or innately even in our culture). But still that is not enough information to make the connection. A cultural broker would next have to explain that mathematicians have agreed to represent this constant by the Greek letter pi, which happens to be a homonym to the English word pie, a delectable pastry. We therefore discover that the connection also makes use of wordplay. Modern Bible readers need cultural brokers who can move beyond the translation of the ancient legal sayings of the Torah (e.g., Deut 22:11: “Do not wear clothes of wool and linen woven together”) to offer an explanation of the thinking behind those sayings (why would wearing such clothes of mixed materials have been a problem in the ancient world?). A cultural broker helps build bridges between people of different cultural backgrounds in order to facilitate communication. The resulting negotiation could involve spoken words, terminology, or texts. A cultural broker must understand the values and beliefs of both cultures and be willing and able to bridge the given cultures’ belief systems. This interpretive approach works on the primary assumption that various cultures do not simply have different words for the same basic ideas; they have fundamentally different ideas that they use their words to convey, and those words often have only a superficial similarity to the words another culture might use. Torah is part of the ancient text we know as the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. That Bible is written for us (i.e., we are supposed to benefit from its divine message and expect that it will help us to confront the currents in our cultural river by transforming us), but it is not written to us (not in our language or in the context of our culture). The message transcends culture, but it is given in a form that is fully immersed in the ancient cultural river of Israel. This means that if we are to interpret Scripture so as to receive the full impact of God’s authoritative message, we have to set our cultural river aside and try to understand the cultural river of the ancient people to whom the text was addressed. The Bible was written to the people of ancient Israel in the language of ancient Israel; therefore, its message operates according to the logic of ancient Israel. 4 We can begin to understand the claims of the text as an ancient document first of all by paying close attention to what the text says and doesn’t say. It is too easy to make assumptions that are intrusive based on our own culture, cognitive environment, traditions, or questions. It takes a degree of discipline as readers who are outsiders not to assume our modern perspectives and impose them on the text. Often we do not even know we are doing it because our own context is so intrinsic to our thinking and the ancient world is an unknown. The best path to recognizing the distinctions between ancient and modern thinking is to begin paying attention to the ancient world and at the same time imposing methodological constraints to minimize the impact of anachronistic intuition. This is accomplished by immersion in the literature of the ancient world. This would by no means supersede Scripture, but it can be a tool for understanding Scripture. 5 We have to suppress our intuition because we are naturally inclined to read the biblical text intuitively. When we do so, we unconsciously impose our own cultural ideas on the text. We cannot help but do so—no reading is culturally neutral. Since reading instinctively inherently imposes modern cultural thinking on the text, we conclude that such reading is at least potentially unreliable. Some may object that if we read it in light of the ancient world, we are imposing that world on the text. We cannot impose that world on the text because the text is situated in that world. No one would ever object to using the Hebrew language to understand the biblical text by claiming that the interpreter was imposing Hebrew on the text. We cannot impose Hebrew on the biblical text—it is written in Hebrew. In the same way, we cannot impose the ancient world on the biblical text since the ancient world is its native context. The authority of the text is found when we read it for what it is—no more, no less. For those who pride themselves on interpreting the text “literally,” we can only say that a person cannot read the text more literally than to read it as the original author intended for it to be read. That is our goal, and being faithful interpreters of God’s Word allows for nothing less. It takes work, and well it should. It is worth the effort. Some would claim that such an approach takes the Bible out of the hands of the ordinary reader and might even suggest that it runs contrary to the objectives of the Reformation—that every ploughman might be able to read the Bible and understand it. We need to realize, however, that the ploughman’s gain is to be able to read the Bible in his own language. The Reformers never expected that every ploughman would achieve autonomous expertise as exegete or theologian. When the Reformers insisted on the clarity of Scripture for any reader, they were contrasting the surface reading of Scripture (well informed linguistically, literally, theologically), in which anyone could engage, with a mystical or esoteric interpretation of the text available only to the initiated. Perspicuity does not override the need to acquire the arcane and esoteric skill of cultural brokerage any more than it overrides the need to acquire the arcane and esoteric skill of learning to read (whether Hebrew or Greek or one’s own native language). The Reformers did acknowledge a need to translate the Bible, and cultural brokerage is part of the translation process. 6 We should not imagine that the Reformers would have refused to use any newly discovered texts from the ancient world. The Reformers themselves were bringing something new to the interpretation of Scripture that none of their precursors for fifteen hundred years had had—the knowledge of the Hebrew language. The fact that those before them did not have access to Hebrew did not deter them from using it for new insights. We should always use whatever tools are available to us whether others had them or not. The Reformers certainly did not believe that all of Scripture and every aspect of Scripture were accessible and could be penetrated by any layperson regardless of training. If the Reformers had believed that, they surely would not have felt compelled to write hundreds of volumes of commentary and theology. Anyone who is literate can read that someone named David took a census (2 Samuel 24), but not everyone can read about David’s census and know why he would have thought of doing such a thing, or why he thought that doing it would be a good idea, or why it turned out not to be. Scholars have a role in the body of Christ just like everyone else does. One cannot object that it is somehow elitist for scholars to think they have a contribution to make that not just anyone can make. Not everyone is an eye, an ear, or a hand. Everyone else is gifted to do what they do, and academics are no exception—and no one should begrudge that. No person alone is the whole body of Christ; we all depend on the gifts of others. If the Bible needs to be translated—an important emphasis of the Reformation still acknowledged today— then somebody needs to translate it. Cultural brokerage, like lexical semantics, is part of the translation process and is a necessary function of a competent translator. As we recognize the biblical text as inherently related to an ancient culture, we also realize that it communicates with goals that reflect the culture of the communicators and their audience. Communication is an act that intends to accomplish something—command, instruct, promise, threaten, bless, exhort, and so on. Furthermore, it is not intended to be an isolated act; rather, there is an expectation of some sort of response—obedience, learning, gratitude, caution, and so on. This understanding of how communication works is referred to as “speech-act theory.” Speech-acts are launched by certain words (spoken or written). Interpretation requires careful investigation of all three aspects of each speech-act—the words, the intentions, and the desired response. Such investigation would consider linguistic aspects such as grammar, syntax, and word meanings as well as literary elements such as rhetorical devices, literary structuring, and genre. When we apply these ideas to Torah (as we will in the following chapters), we can see that people who read the sayings as intended to provide legislation (an intended act) would understand the expected response to be obedience or even the structuring of a society. We will propose a different intention of the communicative act of Torah, based on the ancient genre, that will suggest a response of comprehending and making subsequent use of that understanding in a meaningful way. But to get to that point we must first investigate how we think about law today and how that may differ from how they thought in the ancient world.

Proposition 2: The Way We Interpret the Torah Today Is Influenced by the Way We Think Law and Legislation Work

How do we think about law today? How have other people in other times and cultures thought about law? How did the Israelites think about law? Was it the same as others in the ancient world? How are the documents of the Torah related to these concepts of law? We must address issues such as these if we are to read the Torah well—that is, read it the way that it was read in its cultural time and context. To approach the issue we must ask questions about what people consider the source of law, where they believe it to be found, and how it is applied to society. For the purposes of this book, it will be enough for us to differentiate between written documents that are descriptive and those that are prescriptive. Prescriptive documents expect obedience or conformity as a response; descriptive documents expect comprehension as a response. We will use the term legislation1 to refer to the idea of legal formulations that are prescriptive and therefore create a system of law and an obligation for those under that system. LeFebvre identifies the significant distinction between a prescriptive, legislative use of legal sayings and a descriptive function that is nonlegislative. 2 We will use terms such as legal sayings to refer to instruction that is largely descriptive of ideas that are current in what are generally cultures where cases are judged based on traditional wisdom. In this usage, legislation and instruction are two distinct speech-acts that in turn carry differing expected responses. Now armed with these categories we can consider how we think about law and legislation today and how that may differ from the ancient world. In relatively recent history (post-Reformation), a major change took place in how people thought about law. 3 People grew to think of law as codified legislation that is coercive in nature. The documents of this legislation were considered prescriptive in nature and imposed an obligation on people. Consequently, today we think of law as reflected in a legal code. Furthermore, we tend to be so confident in this way of thinking that we do not remember or realize that it was not always this way or even that there could be other ways of thinking. In contrast, prior to a couple of centuries ago (and still not uncommon in non-Western cultures), law was more flexible. Society was regulated by customs and norms that had taken shape beyond memory. Judges, who were those considered wise in the traditions of the culture rather than those who were specially educated, made their rulings based on their insight and wisdom. Any documents pertaining to law in those cultures were not codified legislation; that is, they were not  prescriptive documents establishing law. Instead they described rulings (whether through actual verdicts or hypothetical examples)— reporting decisions. This distinction is critical for us to recognize because how we think about law and legislation in our own cultural river will determine our presuppositions about and perspectives on the biblical texts and those from the ancient Near Eastern (ANE) world that contain legal information. LeFebvre contends (and we agree) that the ANE is a “non-legislative society” rather than a “legislative society.”4 In such a case, the legal structure is not based on written documents. Written documents serve an entirely different function.

When the stele of Hammurabi was discovered at the very beginning of the twentieth century, it was immediately dubbed the Code of Hammurabi based on twentieth-century assumptions about the nature of law. Researchers assumed that it contained the law of the land for Babylon and that it was prescriptive, codified legislation. As we will discuss in proposition three, that perception gradually changed (though the label has resisted revision), but it is an important indication of what had been going on for some time in biblical interpretation, and here we arrive at what is the pivotal issue in this book. 

As perspectives about law shifted over the last couple of centuries, we began to interpret the Torah in light of those new perspectives. 5

Specifically, we began to treat the Torah as if it were prescriptive, codified legislation, though that concept did not exist in the ancient world. As commonly happens, interpreters were inclined to read the biblical text through the filter of their own cultural river—their own cultural context. As a result of such reading, people began thinking that the Torah dictated the law of the land to Israel. And since it was considered divine revelation, it was therefore construed as God’s ideal guide to society and morality. And if it is God’s guide to the ideal shape of society and morality, then all people everywhere are obligated to apply it; one must merely determine how to deal with idiosyncrasies and anomalies in order to apply it to today. This chain of logic all begins with the false assumption that the Torah represents revelation of the prescriptive, codified legislation given by God. Because people think this way, they try to apply the Torah as God’s revelation to offer “biblical” positions on everything from larger questions of law and morality to specific questions that arise from the issues of our day. If, however, the Torah was never intended to be revelation of prescriptive, codified legislation, then we have to clear the table and start from the beginning to understand what it is and how it works. What are the alternatives? If the intended function is not legislation (and therefore the expected response is not obedience), what are the intended function and the expected response? What is the revelation of the Torah intended to achieve? What sort of speech-act is it? What is its revelation? In other words: why does it exist in Scripture? These are the topics we will now address.

PART 2. FUNCTION OF ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN LEGAL COLLECTIONS

Proposition 3: Legal Collections in the Ancient World Are Not Legislation 

Abundant documentation attests to the legal principles and practices of the ancient Near East (ANE). 1 In this critical step toward an understanding of Torah, we are ready to consider just what sorts of documents we have and what they tell us. Once we come to understand the culture of the ANE in general, we can look at biblical material to assess similarities and differences and investigate what can be learned that will help us better understand the Torah. Though we expect to find at least some differences, the similarities will show us that in the realm of legal thinking the Israelites were much closer to the thinking that existed in the ancient world than they are to the way we think today. They were fully immersed in their ancient cultural river, and the currents there were far different from what we find today. We are therefore  again reminded that we cannot rely on just reading the Old Testament intuitively. Our reading instincts have been deeply affected by our own culture and the history that brought us to this present time. We begin then by summarizing the legal materials that are available from the ancient world. We will set aside administrative texts and letters that discuss legal issues, ritual instructions, legal reform decrees, records of legal transactions (personal and public), and contracts, though all of these provide nuances to our general understanding. The most important documents for our investigation are collections of legal sayings and court documents, which attest to procedures and rulings. Of these two categories of texts, the former is the most important because these texts are most like what we find in the Torah, not only in content but, more importantly, in genre. 

Ancient Near Eastern Collections of Legal Sayings

The earliest collection dates to the end of the third millennium BC, but the more significant collections are primarily from the second millennium BC. The most well-known, most extensive, and the first to be found, in 1901 in excavations at Susa, is the stele that preserves 282 legal sayings embedded in a royal inscription of Hammurabi (ca. 1750 BC), hundreds of years prior to Moses. Hammurabi was a Babylonian king contemporary with Israel’s patriarchs. Collections from earlier times were subsequently discovered, and the total document count is now at seven (see table 3.1). In two of the collections the list of sayings is accompanied by prologue and epilogue, a feature that offers some insight into literary use, which is one of the most important aspects of analysis. The question to be resolved concerns the purpose and function of these collections. 

When first discovered, the texts were referred to as “law codes,” a label that reflected a presupposition derived from our cultural river and correlating assumption about the nature of law and in part from previous decisions about the nature of the biblical “law codes.” This view was believed to be supported by the relief that is found at the top of the stele containing the so-called Code of Hammurabi, which contains a picture of Shamash, god of justice, seated on a throne and extending a rod and ring to Hammurabi, who stands opposite him in a deferential pose. Early interpreters thought this represented the god giving the law to Hammurabi just as Yahweh gave the law to Moses. On further analysis, it became clear that the god Shamash was not delivering the material to Hammurabi, but the other way around. As more information about Shamash was discovered, it was learned that the rod and ring were neither the laws themselves being revealed nor even the authority to make laws. Instead, they were recognized as Shamash’s symbols of authority, and he was displaying them, not giving them to Hammurabi. 2 The relief depicts the investiture of Hammurabi as the just king by the authority of Shamash. Coupled with the revised interpretation of the relief, a variety of observations over time began to suggest alternative interpretations of these ANE legal collections. When scholars began to notice that there were major gaps in the content of the law (i.e., areas that were not covered that would nevertheless have been essential for a legal code; see further below), suggestions began to be made that these collections did not constitute a law “code” (i.e., formal prescriptive legislation). Rather, it was alternatively suggested, this was a collection of model verdicts. This viewpoint fit well with the literary context of the Hammurabi collection and the interpretation of the relief. The collection of legal sayings was then reinterpreted as Hammurabi’s demonstration that he was executing justice in his kingdom—a role that the gods had appointed him to carry out and for which they held him accountable. Given this interpretation, it became less fitting to interpret the document as codified, prescriptive legislation, but adjustments in thinking continued to occur. Scholars began to suspect that these collections were the result of the scholarly creativity of the scribes rather than solely the work of legislators ruling on cases brought before them. Certainly many of the cases could have represented actual verdicts in actual cases, but there are apparent cases to the contrary. 3 If the legal sayings were not preserved as model verdicts, then what were they? Why were they recorded? We will turn attention to that question in the next chapter, but before doing that, it is important to discuss the question of the coverage of the legal collections.

 Coverage of the Legal Collections

One of the characteristics of the kind of prescriptive codified legislation we use today is that it has to be somewhat comprehensive in the range of topics it covers. If a society is going to be governed by law, the law must address every aspect of society. The extent to which it is selective is the extent to which it loses its effectiveness. Of course, no code can exhaustively cover every possible permutation, eventuality, and scenario. Our solution to that dilemma is to make full use of precedent to classify legal situations to align with rulings of the past. In this way, virtual comprehensiveness can be achieved. Still, every category of law and every aspect of life must be addressed. It is a gargantuan task and creates a complicated bureaucracy. In contrast, it has been clear to everyone who has studied the ANE legal collections that they do not even try to be comprehensive; many important aspects of life and society are left unaddressed. Hammurabi covers the most area and includes paragraphs concerning both civil and criminal matters (marriage/family, inheritance, property, slaves, debt, taxes/wages, murder, adultery, rape, theft, sexual deviation, false witness, assault, and liability). The others fail to cover several or even many of these categories. 4 We might notice some categories that are not represented in any collection and many more where coverage  within the category is spotty (e.g., organization of justice, fiscal policy, and animal husbandry). 5 The conclusion can only be that these documents could not possibly serve as codified legislation to regulate every aspect of society. Finally, we can glean further information from considering evidence offered by the court documents. 

Court Documents

It has been abundantly clear to scholars studying the many thousand existing court documents that the judiciary in the ancient world did not decide cases on the basis of a formal, written, normative legal code as is done today. In all the documents that we possess, no reference is made to any resource that is consulted in order to determine the judge’s ruling. For all the popularity of Hammurabi’s collection, it is never cited in a court document as providing the basis for the judge’s decision. 6 In our world judges make decisions based on precedents of legal rulings that have withstood scrutiny and based on legislation that has been enacted by a country’s legislative body. Rulings have to be documented and supported by evidence from the written records. In contrast, judges in the ancient world did not issue their verdicts by making reference to documents that had been produced for that purpose. Instead, they depended on custom and wisdom. When those were inadequate, divine oracles would be sought (note Moses’ procedure in Ex 18). 7 When we think of laws, we imagine a normative list of rules with accompanying consequences for breaking them. When a person goes to court, the lawyers, judge, and jury try to determine if the rule has  actually been broken and to what extent the consequences should be applied. This system relies heavily on logical precision (both in the writing of the rules themselves and in the presentation of evidence) and precedent. We very specifically do not want the judge (or the jury) to apply their intuition about what they think constitutes “wrongness” and about what they feel should happen to this specific individual, so we force them to work within a series of methodological constraints (for example, juries are commanded to consider only evidence that the court has formally admitted and are deliberately isolated from any additional influence). People in the ancient world, however, did want the judge to apply his intuition about wrongness to the cases he judged and to consider each on its own merits. Our modern case law describes precedent that sets limits on what kinds of rulings the lawyers and the judges are allowed to make. Ancient legal wisdom instead tried to instruct the judge on what rightness and wrongness looked like so he (and it was usually a man) would be able to produce rightness and eliminate wrongness with his verdicts. We will develop this idea in the next chapter as we discuss the idea that these texts teach wisdom. The texts do not teach what the law is; they provide a model for right and wrong so that the judges will know it when they see it.

Proposition 4: Ancient Near Eastern Legal Collections Teach Wisdom

The most important breakthrough for understanding the ancient collections of legal sayings developed when scholars began to note the similarity between those lists and the lists that were becoming increasingly familiar in the literature from the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Some of the most extensive documents from the ancient Near East (ANE) comprised lists that often, like the lists of legal sayings, used an “if ... then” formulation (known as casuistic, i.e., case-by-case). Whether following this type of formulation or not, the use of lists was commonplace in literary circles: 

• Lists of medical symptoms along with their diagnoses or remedies (whether herbal or magical) 

• Lists of omens: observations along with what they portended and what should be the response 

• Lists of proverbial sayings 

• Lists of lexical equivalents (whether bilingual or treating synonyms)

The common ground among these lists has led to what is now a broad consensus regarding how they function. These lists are not intended to be comprehensive; rather, they are what we can call “aspective.” That is, they offer a wide variety of aspects pertaining to the topic of the list. This accumulation of aspects serves to produce a sense of understanding of the field as a whole. In a word, the accumulated aspects provide wisdom. The medical lists combine to provide wisdom for the care providers of the day so that they will become familiar with symptoms and recommended treatment. The omen lists provide wisdom for the divination experts that would be applied to the day-to-day decisions they had to make as they advised the king. The proverbial sayings are listed to give wisdom for preserving order in society. The lexical lists provide wisdom for the scribes who have to deal with texts every day. In the same way, the lists of legal sayings provide wisdom for judges who have to decide on cases in their towns. These lists showcase the wisdom of the king to discern what justice will look like. They are not the laws of the land, they are not legislative decrees, and they do not constitute a prescriptive code enforced in society. The king has not promulgated these as laws. He has had them compiled to convey his wisdom because, as the king designated by the gods, his responsibility is to maintain order on behalf of the gods. Wisdom is the ability to perceive order and establish it. In raw form the lists are pedagogical. When embedded between prologue and epilogue as in Hammurabi’s stele, they serve as an accountability report to the gods. Consequently, these lists of legal sayings do not tell us what laws were in force in society, much like proverbs do not tell us how everyone lived their lives in society. Both sorts of corpus are illustrations compiled to communicate the wisdom that will lead to order and justice. Scholars who were engaged on behalf of the king sought not to define law but to offer guidance for discerning wise justice so that order might be maintained in society.

Some of the illustrations may indeed have been drawn from actual verdicts, but that is unimportant. Likewise, this instruction in wisdom should be recognized as having a very different intention from legislation. Whereas legislation has the expected response of obedience, instruction in wisdom has the expected response of comprehension and application. A couple of examples will be helpful. In any introductory art appreciation course, the question will be asked, What is art? Ensuing discussion will address a number of issues that may include media and taste. In the end, wisdom pertaining to the nature of art will be achieved as examples are given that circumscribe the broad and unwieldy concept of art. The circle of what can be called art is now populated by many dots, each representing examples of something that is art. The result is neither comprehensive nor normative in any way. It is intended to convey an idea that is of necessity abstract. In the same way, the ancient legal sayings circumscribe the abstract idea of order and justice. Despite the abstract nature of the subject, art students are nonetheless supposed to gain some ability to know art when they see it. Likewise, pupils of the legal literature are expected to gain some ability to know justice when they see it. This intuitive recognition is what we mean by wisdom. As a second example, consider the way that students do math problems for homework. By solving the posed problems, the students should begin to understand the concepts involved. The individual problem is of little significance in the grand scheme and may be quite artificial or even unrealistic. But the problems provide ways to practice good math and to help students achieve an informed wisdom about math, thus enabling them to use math in life and to think mathematically. If the problem involves two trains leaving from different stations and going toward each other at different speeds, the student may be asked to determine when and where they will pass each other. The students need not be interested in train schedules; such details are immaterial. They are acquiring wisdom for life, not wisdom for operating a railway. At the same time, though, math problems are not comprehensive; we do not expect math problems to provide examples for every facet of life, or even every facet that entails thinking mathematically. These analogies of art and math help to illustrate the aspective approach, which provides examples to offer wisdom to circumscribe an abstract way of thinking. Based on this consensus, we can now revisit some of the observations made in the last chapter. The relief at the top of the stele of Hammurabi depicts the king standing before the god Shamash, the deity responsible for order and justice. Hammurabi is accountable to the gods in general and Shamash in particular to be a wise king as he establishes and maintains justice in the land. This practice of wisdom is the basis for his continued investiture (remember the symbols of investiture held by Shamash, signifying his right to designate Hammurabi as king). In the prologue and epilogue, Hammurabi recounts how he has been favored by the gods and installed by them and how he has maintained justice by means of the wisdom they have granted him. The 282 legal sayings are provided as evidence of his judicial wisdom—representing at times verdicts that have actually been handed down and at other times what the verdict would be if such a case were to come before the king. All are there to give evidence of his wisdom. All people (as well as the gods) should consider the stele as proof that Hammurabi is indeed a wise king. Judges would learn wisdom from this list, and people would be convinced that the king has been working tirelessly on their behalf to provide order for them. The list is not comprehensive because it is intended to circumscribe, not legislate. It provides illustrations of justice and order. As judges and magistrates absorb what it communicates, they will be better able to recognize wrongness and rightness and make decisions appropriately. Since the list is not intended to regulate or legislate, there is no need for it to be comprehensive. The items in the list provide descriptive instruction, not prescriptive legislation. 1 This also explains why we find no reference to sources of law in the court documents. The list of legal sayings is not the source of law; the sayings are a resource for informing the wisdom of the judges. The court documents instead demonstrate the ways that decision were made on a more ad hoc basis, based on the judges’ insight and wisdom regarding the customs and traditions of their society. The tradition of list wisdom, the evidence from the documents concerning legal sayings, and the evidence of the operation of the courts all combine to form a picture of how law was perceived and practiced in the ancient world. We find that it is far different from the understanding and practice of law today. Rather than focusing on words that define our cultural river, words like code, legislation, prescription, coercion, obedience, and obligation, we must focus on words that define their cultural river, words like wisdom, illustration, circumscription, description, instruction, comprehension, and assimilation of ideas. In the ancient world, order was perceived as more than law-abiding obedience; it was achieved through wisdom exercised at the society level as well as the personal level. Our next step is to evaluate the Torah in light of what we have learned about the ancient cultural river.

Proposition 5: The Torah Is Similar to Ancient Near Eastern Legal Collections and Therefore Also Teaches Wisdom, Not Legislation

On the basis of the preceding discussion of the cultural river of the ancient world, it is now clear that we cannot simply assume that legal collections are legislative in nature. It would therefore have to be demonstrated that Israel’s legal lists were legislative, and the burden of proof would lie on those who wanted to take that position. In point of fact, however, three observations will argue strongly against understanding the Torah as constituting a legislative code. Furthermore, what we have learned from the ancient Near Eastern (ANE) lists will serve us well in accounting for and understanding what we encounter in the biblical text. 

Torah as Aspective Legal Wisdom 

First, as is true for the ANE legal collections, the Torah, even with all collections combined, is nowhere near being comprehensive. For example, it contains little to nothing about marriage, divorce, inheritance, or adoption. If this is not transparent enough from basic observation, it is demonstrated convincingly from the history of interpretation. Those who attempted to employ it prescriptively had to do considerable extrapolation in order to produce a code that could be used as normative. We can already see this inclination in the way that Jewish interpreters in the Second Temple period began extrapolating lines from the Torah to provide regulations for particular situations that the Torah itself did not anticipate or address. This impulse is richly worked out in the Mishnah. 1 Second, as we found with regard to the ANE, the Torah, though clearly recognized as a document (“book of Moses”), is not relied on as the legal, normative basis for judicial decisions. 2 So, for example, David reacts to Nathan’s parable with, “As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this must die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity” (2 Sam 12:5-6). Exodus 22:1 can be cited as attesting to the custom that theft of a sheep should be repaid fourfold, but there is no indication that David had researched the law in order to arrive at his decision, nor did he substantiate it based on a legal text. 3 Texts that contain legal sayings may at times have been read aloud as exhortation to the people (as in Deut 31:10-13; Ezra 8), consulted by judges, or studied by kings who sought to be wise (Deut 17:18-20). 4 The Torah was intended to give the king wisdom for doing his job. 5 The Torah (like the legal lists in the ANE) embodies wisdom; it does not establish legislation. Third, we must recognize that the legal collections in the Torah are embedded literarily at several levels. Most importantly, the legal sayings are presented in the context of a covenant between Yahweh and Israel, in which case they serve as stipulations to that covenant agreement (developed further in propositions 6 and 13). Covenant (or treaty) stipulations serve a very different function from laws, whether either is represented literarily or not. Stipulations are agreed upon by both parties and generally enforced by the gods, not by judiciary institutions. Furthermore, however, the legal lists in the Pentateuch are also couched literarily in narrative or in speeches (such as Moses’ sermons in Deuteronomy), as well as in what eventually became canonical books, each using the Torah to accomplish its own individual literary objectives. That means that none of these are in a literary context of legislation; they have been adopted for secondary (or even tertiary) use. These arguments all support the idea that the Torah is similar to its ANE counterparts and therefore not legislative. However, some scholars claim that the Torah is distinct from other ANE legal collections and that the distinction specifically consists of the Torah being intended for use as legislation, though other documents were not. We will discuss the similarities and differences in the next two chapters, but before we proceed, we need to examine the evidence of the Hebrew terminology.

Terminology 

The term Torah is universally acknowledged to refer to instruction. 6 In fact, there is no Hebrew word for “law” (= legislation), and now it can be seen that the reason for this is that the ancient societies were not legislative societies. There is nothing like codified, prescriptive legislation in their experience. Other words that are most frequently used to describe certain types of legal sayings (along with the most common English translation used in the NIV) include: 

• mišpāṭîm—“laws/judgments”—verdicts given in legal contexts • ḥuqqîm—“decrees”—dictates delivered by a formal authority (e.g., king) 

• dǝbārîm—“words”—insights, advice, exhortations, or admonitions that should guide one’s thinking 

• miṣwôt—“commandments”—charges or mandates coming from those with recognized status (e.g., parents or elders) 

• ʿēdût—“statutes”—used of legal sayings primarily in Psalms, not in the Pentateuch 

• piqqûdîm—“precepts”—sayings that establish order; used only in Psalms 

These terms and a few others are used interchangeably in poetic literature such as the Psalms. All of them, as well as a few others, are used throughout Psalm 119. None of them refer to codified legislation. Torah is most frequently used as a term that encompasses all of them. In this book we will not make an attempt to differentiate them from one another (though that can be done profitably). The term Torah itself is used for the Pentateuch as a whole, for the legal corpus as a whole, and as a catchall term for the various types of legal sayings. By etymology, it is constructed from the root that refers to instruction (yrh). 7 Throughout the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the narrative literature, and even the Psalms, it is almost always used to refer to the legal/ cultic revelation delivered by Yahweh through Moses in association with the covenant at Sinai. It is never used to refer to decrees made by kings, priests, or judges. 8 Walter Kaiser identifies the root of the problem in how the term tôrâ has been rendered in translation—in each case reflecting more the cultural ideas of the translators than the cultural ideas of the ancient world. As examples he cites the decision to render tôrâ by Greek nomos in the Septuagint and the New Testament, by loi in French, and by Gesetz in German. He laments that these are all based on presuppositions concerning the nature of the material found in the Torah. He concludes that “tôrâ is much more than mere law. Even the word itself does not indicate static requirements that govern the whole of human experience.”9 Instead he identifies it as “directional teaching or guidance for walking on the path of life.”10 Perhaps the main piece of evidence that leads readers to think that Torah is legislation is the repeated exhortation, or even injunction, to “obey.” This warrants closer attention to the Hebrew terminology used in the Old Testament. Hebrew words that are translated “obey” in major translations are verbs from the roots šmʿ (usually accompanied by a preposition) and šmr. The combination appears notably in one of the founding statements of the covenant: Now if you obey me fully [listen (šmʿ) to my voice] and keep [šmr] my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. (Ex 19:5) Šmʿ means to “hear” or to “listen” (cf. Deut 6:4, “Hear, O Israel”). Beginning Hebrew students are often told that the combination of the root šmʿ + the preposition b- (“listen to”) means “to obey.” Note, however, that this combination almost always takes the noun “voice” (qol) as the object of the preposition (as in Ex 19:5), and it never has tôrâ or any of its synonyms as the object of the preposition. Obeying the voice of the Lord is always a good idea, but it should not be equated to obeying laws. On a few occasions the root occurs with another preposition (such as ʾel or ʿal) and is translated “obey” (e.g., Deut 11:27; 12:28, with “commands” or “regulations” as the object of the preposition ʾel [referring to the stipulations of the covenant], or 2 Kings 22:13 with “words of this book [= the document found by Hilkiah and Josiah]” as the object of the preposition ʿal). In all these cases, the fact that the content of such documents is circulated by reading aloud gives sense to the idea that the people on the receiving end should hear, but also heed, what is being said. An exhortation to heed is not solely the purview of legislation that must be obeyed. In Wisdom literature, particularly the book of Proverbs, the one being instructed is repeatedly enjoined to heed the wisdom that is being conveyed. 11 This proverbial wisdom is specifically not legislation. The response that we often term “obedience” pertains more specifically to aligning one’s will with that of Yahweh by taking the role of a servant who is loyal. 12 This sort of response has very little to do with obeying a codified, prescriptive legislation. The second verb, šmr, means to “guard, keep, or observe.” Again, we find that translating such a verb as “obey” is contentious and works on the assumption that legislation is involved. Proverbial literature shows the flaw in that assumption as the student is repeatedly called upon to šmr as a response to the Wisdom instruction being given (e.g., Prov 2:20; 4:21)—clearly not a matter of obedience. Particularly of interest on this count are the few examples in Proverbs where the direct object of the verb is tôrâ or miṣwôt (“commandments”).

Take hold of my words with all your heart; keep [šmr] my commands [miṣwôt], and you will live. (Prov 4:4) 

Keep [šmr] my commands [miṣwôt] and you will live; guard my teachings as the apple of your eye. (Prov 7:2) 

Whoever keeps [šmr] commandments [miṣwâ] keeps their life, but whoever shows contempt for their ways will die. (Prov 19:16) 

Those who forsake instruction [tôrâ] praise the wicked, but those who heed [šmr] it resist them. (Prov 28:4) 

Where there is no revelation, people cast off restraint; but blessed is the one who heeds [šmr] wisdom’s instruction [tôrâ]. (Prov 29:18)

 

 These especially need to be evaluated to understand whether they refer to legislation that the Israelites needed to obey. They occur in Wisdom literature, and wisdom as a genre (like Torah) is closely associated with order. A wise person perceives what brings order, pursues that sort of life, and puts it into practice. A wise person will seek to preserve order wherever it is found and will promote it in society and in life. Such wisdom recognizes that order is important in relationships and can be undermined by careless speech or bad choices. Wisdom, then, includes prudence, but is not limited to prudence. The result of failing to heed wisdom by not keeping the Torah, as indicated in the verses cited above, is death. Death is sometimes the fate of a lawbreaker (capital crimes), but here death is the fate of anyone who fails to heed wisdom. That is because fools who undermine order or fail to embrace it face the inevitable prospect of death. This is particularly the case with covenant violations. Torah presents the way of wisdom and life (Deut 30) in the ordered world of the covenant. We can therefore see that the issues that Scripture addresses have to do with wisdom and covenant fidelity, not with legislation and its rules that must be obeyed. Wise living cannot be legislated. It is a matter of applying principles of wisdom, not of following rules. If God did not give rules, as we have suggested, there are no rules to follow. If God did not provide legislation, there are no laws to obey. Consequently, we may conclude that translating either of these words as “obey” reflects a cultural river violation—it assumes that an idea from our culture dominated Israel’s perspectives and literature. Order in society was the goal, and it was achieved through wisdom, which had its foundation in the fear of the Lord. Any individual’s contribution to that order was not dependent on a set of rules and did not require that rules had been provided. Wisdom literature, like Torah, gave insights into how order was perceived, pursued, promoted, preserved, procured, and practiced. Israel’s judiciary system, like that throughout the ANE, was based on the wisdom of the judges, not on legislation. It involved a dynamic integration of custom, divine revelation (including oracles), and intuition, rather than static codes. 13 The legal collections found in the Torah and other legal collections embody that wisdom by providing an aspective mosaic of sayings that manifested the sponsor’s wisdom, instructed the judges, and helped the people to understand order in society. 14 The people are to “heed” this wisdom and “preserve” it. In this view, the expected response to the Torah is far different from a response to legislation. Legislation carries a sense of “you ought”; instruction carries a sense of “you will know.”15 Consequently, we will propose that Torah in biblical usage is an expression of wisdom, not of legislation. It refers to a collection of examples that combine to form a description of the desired established order. We will be using the term to refer to the corpus of legal sayings found throughout the Pentateuch and will seek to demonstrate that these sayings embody standards of wisdom for the ordering of society within the covenant relationship that Yahweh had with Israel.

Proposition 6: The Israelite Covenant Effectively Functions as an Ancient Near Eastern Suzerainty Treaty 

In the covenant we find three principal genres. We have already discussed legal wisdom, and we will eventually turn our attention to ritual instruction. But now we examine the second: suzerainty treaty. Properly understood, the three genres together provide an understanding of how the covenant relationship works. The suzerainvassal relationship is well attested in the treaties from the ancient Near East (ANE). A majority of the exemplars come from the Hittite literature in the middle of the second millennium and the NeoAssyrian literature from the middle of the first millennium. Scattered exemplars spread through the intervening millennium. 1 It has long been recognized that the covenant between Yahweh and Israel is expressed in a literary form that was used in these international treaties in the ancient world. The behavior of the vassal determined what steps were to be taken by the sovereign to enforce order, and the way that the sovereign treated his vassals, the suzerain-vassal relationship, established the sovereign’s reputation. Consequently, to understand the Torah, we must understand the nature of the suzerainty relationship and the role that Torah plays in it. Similarly to the legal texts, ANE treaty stipulations are aspective, not comprehensive, and their intention is instruction, not legislation. Rather than instruct judges in wisdom to properly administer justice, however, the treaty stipulations are intended to instruct the regent and his administrative underlings in the wisdom to properly serve as loyal vassals. These documents serve to delineate relationships (the role of the vassal, the role of the suzerain) and preserve order in the relationship between the parties. Treaty stipulations in the ancient world highlight the behavior expected of each party with relationship to the other. As we saw in the legal wisdom texts, here also we encounter very general statements that would resist comprehensive description, such as “violence will not flourish here.”2 Such content leads to the conclusion that, as we noted with the legal sayings, these stipulations are not a comprehensive list of everything that is expected of the vassal (i.e., if it is not on this list, you are free of obligation), but a representative list. The detailed, specific expectations should be considered real, but they are not exhaustive. These observations lead us to inquire after the overall objective of the treaty stipulations. Importantly, stipulations were not received as revelation from the suzerain; the vassals knew what the suzerain expected of them and would not have read a treaty document in order to gain this information. What was expected was loyalty and a positive reflection on the sovereign’s reputation, generally achieved by maintaining a peaceful, well-ordered state as well as an overall posture of submission.

The vassal kings would have had this same understanding and would also have known what was expected of them as rulers. Rebellion was not an offense that could occur by accident; the rebels would know what they were doing, and the sovereign would have invoked generalizations in the treaty documents to demonstrate that their reactions were just. In this sense we might compare the treaty stipulations with the end-user license agreement that accompanies most software purchases. Few people ever read these documents, but we know what they say (agreements not to pirate the software, releasing the company from liability, etc.). And we know more or less intuitively what the proper use of the product entails. The license can be invoked in a lawsuit against pirates— that is its purpose—but we do not have to read the document to know that we are not supposed to steal the product. Likewise, treaty documents could be invoked in a lawsuit against rebels—the ANE often considered war to be a form of legal action3 —but the vassals did not have to read the document to know what constituted rebellion. What the suzerain wants from the vassal is faithfulness, and he (almost always male) has both general and specific ideas concerning what that entails (see further discussion in proposition 13). Once we recognize the presence of a stock treaty format in the Old Testament, the literary role of Israel’s legal sayings can be identified: they comprise the stipulations of the covenant agreement. That is, the lists of legal collections familiar in the ancient world have been reused in a second genre, covenant/treaty, where they serve as stipulations. This important observation gives us further information by which to understand how to interpret the sayings (as treaty stipulation, not legislation). Most importantly, it indicates that though Yahweh is Israel’s God, the covenant features him as Israel’s suzerain king. Taking a vassal serves to enhance the reputation of the suzerain. The treaty is not primarily about the stipulations. A treaty relationship has not been formed so that the suzerain can bless the vassal with stipulations. Instead, the existence of a treaty serves to communicate the greatness of the suzerain. In an act of granting royal favor he has adopted the vassal into his family (politically speaking), and the existence and condition of the vassal reflect on his power and competence as king. All of the king’s royal panoply and accoutrements ultimately serve this function, not only his territories and his vassals but also his administration, his monuments and building projects, his courtiers, his largesse in all of its permutations, his treasury, his palace, his wives and concubines, his weapons, the reliefs depicting his achievements, his images, and so much more. When the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon, what impressed her was the vast display of Solomon’s sovereignty. Vassals serve to demonstrate the power and competence of the king; the more powerful and more prosperous the vassal, the greater the king who rules over them. The suzerain does not support the vassals for the sake of the vassals; he supports them because the condition of the vassals reflects back on him. The kings of the ancient world desired to label the things that were theirs. Bricks were stamped with their names, their images were placed in conquered territories, and their treaties were inscribed and displayed prominently. A vassal was a showpiece of the suzerain’s grandeur. This labeling was a way to place one’s name on something, just as Yahweh placed his name on Israel. For a suzerain to extend his name to a vassal was construed as an act of favor. Both in international treaties and in the Torah, this was described as the suzerain’s love for his vassal. It has long been established that this love was not sentimental, emotional, or psychological. 4 Instead, it showed that the suzerain had expressed gracious preference for the vassal by extending his identity to this vassal.

In all of this the stipulations served a fairly minor role. They stood as the means by which to circumscribe the shape that loyalty and faithfulness would take and what would constitute rebellion. In the end, loyalty was expected in every way since that was the vassal’s expression of gratitude for having been so favored by the suzerain. Rebellion was, in theory, unthinkable and would be harshly punished. The suzerain was worthy of all praise and honor and was to be recognized for the greatness of his name. Importance was not found in what the vassal did or did not do, but in the identity of the suzerain. A vassal could be taken by coercion (as for example, when conquered in battle, or as an alternative to conquest), but some vassals patriated themselves voluntarily, usually in exchange for military support against their own enemies. Being a vassal carried benefits, but it also came at a price. For our purposes, the most significant cost of being a vassal was the need to pay tribute. In exchange for military protection (or nonaggression), the suzerain would demand a yearly payment of various resources. Importantly, the purpose of tribute was not (primarily) to secure a revenue stream; vassal states were not a financial investment (as, for example, European colonies were). Much of the tribute became what we might refer to as “fixed assets” in the treasury of the temple or palace. The amount of tribute kings received was part of the demonstration of their power and greatness and was boasted of in their inscriptions. Heavy tribute was levied primarily to depress the economy of a conquered enemy in order to limit the vassal’s resources for rebellion. Paying the tribute, in turn, was one of the primary ways by which the vassal demonstrated loyalty. Withholding tribute constituted rebellion, and the suzerain would react against this, not because the ruler needed the money but because the ability to subdue a rebellious vassal (or not) contributed to the reputation of the king. Kings did not exist in a symbiotic relationship with their vassals whereby they supported each other through mutual need. Both vassal and sovereign benefited from the relationship in their own way (protection and reputation, respectively), but in terms of dependence the relationship was entirely one-sided. All of what has been described thus far about suzerainty treaties is resident in the concept of Yahweh making a covenant with Israel. Just as the king was not listing stipulations to legislate the society of his vassals or to implement a moral system, neither was Yahweh imposing morality or social ideals on Israel through the stipulations of the Torah. We have already demonstrated in the previous chapters that the legal sayings in the ANE and the Torah are not legislation, but wisdom. Here we have moved another step as these wisdom sayings have been incorporated into a covenant as stipulations, which likewise never served the purpose of legislating the society of the vassal. When the suzerain imposed stipulations on the vassal, he was not asserting law. He was extending his identity (as a glorious and powerful king) to, and especially through, the vassal. The kings of the ancient world did not impose law; they gave wisdom as they forged their identity. 5 Yahweh was the source of the Torah, but since neither the treaty stipulations nor the legal wisdom can be construed as law, being the source of Torah does not make Yahweh the source of law. Yahweh was the suzerain who formed a covenant relationship with Israel, and so extended his identity to them: “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God” (Ex 6:7 and repeated often). Yahweh, like the suzerains taking vassals in the ancient world, was acting to establish his reputation, not to give something to his vassals. He was not acting out of need and was not simply taking the role of patron or benefactor. He is the Great King. Yahweh’s suzerain-vassal relationship with Israel is established in (especially) Deuteronomy but is emphasized most strongly in the response to Israel’s covenant infidelity, which is persistently referred to as rebellion (e.g., Ezek 2:3) rather than as crime or moral detraction.

Vassals serve to enhance the king’s reputation. If the vassals are loyal, the king will demonstrate his power and competence by granting them prosperity and protection from enemies. If the vassals are rebellious, the king will demonstrate that same power and competence by putting down the rebellion with brutal efficiency. The response depends on the vassal, and the same is true with regard to Israel: “Just as it pleased the Lord to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you” (Deut 28:63). What pleases Yahweh is not the granting of blessing to Israel per se; what pleases Yahweh is using Israel as a means to establish his reputation. If blessing the Israelites will enhance Yahweh’s reputation, Yahweh will do that; if destroying them will enhance his reputation, he will do that instead. The emphasis on Yahweh’s reputation (and not the well-being of Israel) is stated explicitly in the context of exile and restoration in Ezekiel 36:22-24: “It is not for your sake, people of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone.... Then the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Sovereign Lord, when I am proved holy through you before their eyes.” This is consistent with the action of a suzerain who wishes to establish a reputation for himself through the treatment of his vassals. Both legal wisdom texts and treaties serve to establish or enhance the reputation of the king who produced them. In the case of the legal wisdom, the text establishes wisdom and justice and thereby serves to demonstrate that the king is wise and just. In the case of treaties, the document establishes the parameters of a relationship that will demonstrate the power and competence of the sovereign based on the treatment of his vassals. The use of both genres together indicates strongly that the overall purpose of Israel’s covenant is for Yahweh to establish a reputation; this is what we mean when we say that Yahweh uses the covenant to reveal himself. The purpose is not to give anything to Israel (i.e., law, moral or social enlightenment, blessings), nor is it to receive anything from Israel (i.e., worship, service, moral performance). The Israelites accept vassal status of their own volition (Ex 24:1-8), but once they do so, they become a medium through which Yahweh will establish his reputation one way or another, regardless of what Israel does or does not do. Whether or not Israel benefits or suffers from the arrangement is up to them: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live” (Deut 30:19). This in turn indicates that when we turn to apply the message of Israel’s covenant documents to ourselves, we should think in terms of trying to understand the reputation that Yahweh intended to establish for himself. We should not think in terms of something that Yahweh wants to give to us (law) or something that he expects to receive from us (moral performance). This idea will be explored further in chapters that follow. However, Yahweh is not only Israel’s suzerain; he is also patron deity for the people. Deities in the ancient world did not impose laws any more than kings did,6 and they did not necessarily have reputations per se, but each did have an identity that was projected in a particular way. Yahweh’s self-revelation through Israel’s covenant includes establishing how he is perceived as a deity, in addition to establishing how he is perceived as a king. This is done by means of a third genre within the covenant documents, namely, ritual literature, as well as by the holy status that is conferred to Israel. This we will examine over the next chapters.

Proposition 7: Holiness Is a Status, Not an Objective 

Basing their understanding primarily on Leviticus 19–21, many readers assume that by keeping the law Israel would thereby become holy. Many people today additionally think that holiness is another word for piety or for morality (generally both) and that therefore the law was intended to tell the Israelites what they ought to do in order to be pious or moral. Many today likewise think that we are to pursue holiness (the same piety and morality) by obeying the same rules in order to achieve holiness. This is mistaken and misses the point. 1 Holiness, as we will see, is connected to the objective of the Torah, but the Torah (as we have established) does not consist of rules to be obeyed. Therefore, its objective is not achieved by obeying rules. We have already laid the foundation for this concept, so we can now flesh out the idea and follow it to its logical conclusions. It is common for people to believe that holiness is something that godly people should aspire to achieve as they attempt to imitate God. This concept is routinely drawn from Leviticus 19:2, “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.”2 Careful attention to grammar, however, will show that God’s people are not called to “be holy”—the verbal form is indicative, not imperative (“you will be holy”). 3 God declares his people holy by election decree. It is a status that he gives, and it cannot be gained or lost by the Israelites’ own efforts or failures. Holiness is the word that identifies elements of what we can call the constellation that collectively defines divine identity. 4 Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) divine personalities were circumscribed by lists of attributes or attendant objects or minions that collectively served to establish their identities. These distinguished between different aspects of the same deity (e.g., Ishtar of Arbela vs. Ishtar of Nineveh) and between different members of the pantheon, which in turn designated their realm of patronage and function within the cosmic bureaucracy and indicated the ways in which their worshipers ought to relate to them.Constellation refers to all the elements that compose this list: 

Most major gods are identified with an anthropomorphically conceived divine person, a statue, a number, a semi-precious stone, a mineral, an animal, an emblem, a star, constellation or other celestial entity and various characteristic qualities. Ištar in particular is simultaneously identified as a divine person who dwells in heaven, yet is localized in various terrestrial temples (most prominently Arbela and Nineveh), the planet Venus, the number 15, the semi-precious stone lapis-lazuli, and the mineral lead, and understood as the embodiment of such qualities as love and war. Each of these interconnected divine networks composed of many distinct elements may be viewed as a divine constellation, in which the various elements are connected to a more or less unified entity and share in its identity. In other words, each major god consists of a constellation of aspects, which may act and be treated (semi-)independently. Most divine constellations consist of several connected deified aspects, with an anthropomorphic core that is always deified and other occasionally deified elements like heavenly bodies, abstract qualities, and metals. 5 

The elements of the constellation were sometimes considered to be divine in their own right and sometimes not, depending on context and the intimacy of their association with the deity. 6 In Hebrew, one of the uses of the term qdš (“holy”) is to designate the referent as part of Yahweh’s constellation. 

• As a term used in reference to Yahweh to describe the full constellation of all that is associated with him, holiness includes objects (the ark), places (Mount Sinai, the temple), time (the Sabbath), land (a field or city devoted to God), and communities (the nation of Israel). 

• Labeling something “holy” identifies it as one of the spheres of patronage that collectively define the god’s identity:7 “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God” (Ex 6:7).

• When a thing becomes holy, whether that thing is the abstract community of Israel or an object like the ark or the sanctuary, it means that whatever that thing is or does in some way identifies something about what God is or does. 

• Holiness is a status given by Yahweh to Israel that makes the nation a part of his identity by virtue of his making a covenant with them. Israel’s holy status means that Yahweh has defined himself as “the God of Israel.” By making the covenant with them and giving them this status, he has brought them into his constellation. 

• Holiness is a status that is conferred; it cannot be earned, acquired, or lost by behavior. 

• It is the community of Israel that is holy more than each individual. 8 Only priests and perhaps prophets as individuals are holy. 

• Holiness is not defined by imitating God; rather, God makes the people holy by identifying himself through his people. 

• For the nation of Israel to be holy means that Yahweh will identify— that is, reveal—himself through his interaction with them. 

When Yahweh makes the covenant with the Israelites and declares them to be his holy people—that is, declares himself to be their God and thereby declares that his identity will be reflected by and through them—their status changes. But what does this mean for them? What significance will this new status have for their behavior? How will this status create a different situation for them practically speaking? 

Most modern interpreters assume that holiness correlates to a specific moral character. Specifically, it is assumed to refer to the moral character of God, which people, through obedience to the law, are supposed to imitate. It would be easy for us, then, to assume that reflecting Yahweh’s identity entails cultivating a particular moral character (by means of obeying the law), which will thereby reflect Yahweh’s moral character. However, this is not what the text is talking about. First, we recall that the stipulations of the Torah are not rules to be obeyed; they are descriptive. The objective of reading them is knowing, not doing or being. Second, we also recall that holiness is a status that is conferred, not earned; Israel is equally holy whether the nation keeps the covenant or not. Holy status is not an objective to strive for. A third consideration comes from the ancient context. In the ANE, people did not aspire to imitate the gods, and the gods did not expect their worshipers to imitate them. Humans were humans and gods were gods; they had different functions and different natures and were evaluated by different standards. The gods were inscrutable and unaccountable to human moral standards, and their motives and actions were mysterious and incomprehensible to humans. Israel would have conceived of Yahweh in the same way; nothing in the Israelites’ literature provided them with any resource for thinking differently about their God. Because of Yahweh’s role as their king, the Israelites (or at least their leaders) would have aspired to emulate God’s wisdom and justice, just as a vassal regent would aspire to emulate the wisdom and justice of the king, However, such emulation is not what holiness, which occurs primarily in the context of ritual literature, refers to. Ruling the vassal state with wisdom and justice is the means by which to retain Yahweh’s favor and blessing; it is not the means by which Israel will achieve holiness. Holiness is always descriptive of deity, even when the referent of the adjective is something else (i.e., Israel).Holiness does not describe a property of Israel; it describes a property of Yahweh. In the ancient world, identifying an element as part of a divine constellation does not say anything about the element; it says something about the deity to whose constellation the element belongs. Saying that (for example) Ares is the god of war does not tell us anything about war; it tells us something about Ares.

An example might be helpful. People in our society also form a kind of identity constellation that sets us apart as unique individuals distinct from all others. The elements of these constellations include such things as our jobs, our hobbies, our political or religious views, where we live, what college we attend, which sports teams we support, and what brands of products we choose to buy and display. If you were to choose to buy Nike shoes—that is, to declare that Nike shoes are part of your personal constellation—the action says nothing about Nike. Rather, it says something about you: “I am the kind of person who would choose to wear this brand of shoe.” It is your way of associating yourself with the image that Nike has projected of itself through its advertising, which in turn dictates the way that people perceive the brand and, by extension, consumers of the brand. Similarly, when Yahweh brings the nation of Israel into his constellation by declaring it holy, he declares himself to all observers to be the kind of God who would be patron to a nation like Israel. Of course, if a company rebrands itself and alters its image to something that its consumers no longer wish to endorse, the consumers can stop buying their products. Yahweh, in contrast, has no intention of abandoning Israel; one of the qualities he wishes to project through his relationship with his people is faithfulness, expressed by the Hebrew terms ʾahab (love) and ḥesed (loyalty, kindness). At the same time, he does not want to be characterized by indulgence; rather, his character is expressed in commitment to order, wisdom, and justice. If Israel characterizes itself by order, wisdom, and justice, God will be pleased with the way the nation reflects on him and will give them blessing and prosperity so that everyone can see that he is pleased. On the other hand, if Israel characterizes itself by disorder and injustice (as they often did), Yahweh will demonstrate his own commitment to wisdom, order, and justice by inflicting judgment on them so that everyone can see that he is angry. As a consequence of God’s judgment, Israel can be perceived as a nation whose God is unable to protect it from the enemy armies who conquer his people and destroy his temple. This is demonstrated in the words of Sennacherib, king of Assyria, in 2 Kings 18:32-35: 

Do not listen to Hezekiah, for he is misleading you when he says, “The Lord will deliver us.” Has the god of any nation ever delivered his land from the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena and Ivvah? Have they rescued Samaria from my hand? Who of all the gods of these countries has been able to save his land from me? How then can the Lord deliver Jerusalem from my hand? 

Yahweh responds to this taunt by demonstrating his power: “That night the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eightyfive thousand in the Assyrian camp” (2 Kings 19:35). After the Babylonian exile, a similar accusation is leveled against Yahweh in Ezekiel 36:18-23, to which he responds with the promise to restore his people to the land: 

I poured out my wrath on them because they had shed blood in the land and because they had defiled it with their idols. I dispersed them among the nations, and they were scattered through the countries; I judged them according to their conduct and their actions. And wherever they went among the nations they profaned my holy name, for it was said of them, “These are the Lord’s people, and yet they had to leave his land.” I had concern for my holy name, which the people of Israel profaned among the nations where they had gone. Therefore say to the Israelites, “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: It is not for your sake, people of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name.... Then the nations will know that I am the Lord.” 

Note that Yahweh’s concern is for his holy name (that is, his reputation), not for Israel’s moral or social condition. Note also that the restoration is specifically for the sake of Yahweh’s reputation and is not prompted by a desire to give anything to Israel. Because Yahweh is Israel’s God, Israel’s condition reflects on him, and Yahweh does not wish to be seen as a defeated God of a ruined and dispossessed people. All of Yahweh’s interactions with Israel serve to establish his reputation, one way or another. This is once again what we mean when we say that Yahweh uses Israel to reveal himself. Yahweh establishes and projects his identity and reputation before both Israel and the surrounding nations. All these observers belong to the cultural river of the ANE. Consequently, Yahweh establishes himself according to the principles of faithfulness, wisdom, order, and justice, as the ancient world understood those ideas, because those happen to be the highest values of the ancient world. The ancient understanding of order, justice, and faithfulness is circumscribed in the legal wisdom and treaty documents of the Torah. However, we should not assume that Yahweh wishes to stamp an endorsement on these conceptions for all time, as if all people in all places and all times who serve Yahweh would be expected to reproduce the cultural values of the ANE. Likewise, we should not assume that we can substitute our own definitions for those words and claim that this is what Yahweh supports instead. It further does not mean that we can assume that Yahweh endorses whatever the highest values of any given society happen to be. In our case, this would be such things as freedom, equality, self-expression, and general human flourishing. Instead, we should understand Yahweh’s self-revelation not in terms of absolutes or universals but rather in terms of contrast. Faithfulness, order, and justice were not qualities that were normally associated with ANE gods (though they desired that sort of behavior from their worshipers). Yahweh has effectively told the Israelites that he is a different kind of God than their culture would lead them to expect of a deity. Because the purpose of Yahweh’s self-revelation was not to enable the creation of theology textbooks, the details of Yahweh’s character remain elusive. Israel was supposed to learn, and we can learn as well, that Israel’s God cares about the human world, takes responsibility for his creatures, is concerned for their well-being, and is not merely interested in exploiting them to gain some benefit for himself. Israel was a means to an end for revelation, but the people also gained benefits in the form of God’s blessing, favor, and (especially) presence, which were highly desired in the ancient world. Unlike their neighbors, the Israelites knew what they had to do to retain their God’s favor; they had no reason to fear retribution for random or unknown offenses. For Christians, this understanding helps us make sense of the incarnation, knowing that it is this God that is incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth and not an ANE god, a Roman god, or an abstract philosophical god. In contrast, most people most of the time do not have these assurances about their gods, especially not in the ANE, where the gods did not reveal their expectations and saw humanity only as a means to an end for serving themselves. We will examine ancient divinehuman relations in the next chapter.

PART 3: RITUAL AND TORAH

Proposition 8 Ancient Near Eastern Ritual Served to Meet the Needs of the Gods 

As we have seen, one of the highest priorities in the ancient world was to maintain order in the cosmos and in society. The legal collections addressed this by conveying wisdom to serve as the basis for justice, a prime necessity for maintaining order. Another important component for maintaining a stable society and equilibrium in the cosmos was ritual. Ritual is not addressed in the legal collections such as Hammurabi’s stele, but many other documents provide ample insight into ritual life in the ancient Near East (ANE). Ritual is defined in a variety of ways. Most experts agree on certain characterizations; that is, it involves ceremonial, customary routines of performance reflecting religious belief 1 about what is effective for the intended result and metaphysical notions about the nature of the object of the practices. Rituals are laden with symbolism (sometimes arcane, esoteric, opaque, and even forgotten) and provide a means whereby participants can play a role in maintaining order in the cosmos and stability in their community. As an example of wording, Gorman indicates that ritual “refers to a complex performance of symbolic acts, characterized by its formality, order, and sequences, which tends to take place in specific situations, and has as one of its central goals the regulation of the social order.”2 Evidence is ample and there is a wide consensus among scholars that in the ANE the cultic ritual system was designed to meet the needs of the gods. 3 The premise was that initially the gods had created the cosmos for themselves and to fulfill their desires. They were quite content without people and had no plans to include such creatures. Nevertheless, the gods had needs for food, housing, and clothing just as humans do. Eventually the gods tired of all the labor required to ensure their survival and provide the accustomed amenities that would make their existence pleasurable. Various stories circulated about how the problem finally came to a tipping point, but the upshot was that the gods decided to create people as servants to supply their needs. For this system to work, however, it could not be just a one-way street. If people were going to meet the gods’ needs successfully, effectively, and continually, the gods would have to ensure that the people had enough rain to grow food, that the crops would grow and the animals were fertile, and that the people were protected from invasion or other sorts of disaster. Dead or destitute people could not provide for the gods. The status quo, then, was a codependence built from mutual need. The gods required food, housing, and clothing, and in order to provide those amenities reliably, people needed protection and provision. We refer to this as the Great Symbiosis because it represents the symbiotic relationship that framed the life, religious thinking, rituals, and theology of the ancient world. The gods had needs, and they wanted to be pampered in every way by the people who worshiped them. The main focus of this symbiotic relationship was the temple, the palace of a particular god, in which the god resided and from which he or she ruled, represented by his or her image, which occupied the sacred center, mediating worship, presence, and revelation. Such temples were considered the control center of the cosmos, and from there the god maintained order, sustained by the rituals of the people. The ritual practices were overseen by the priests, who were considered the ritual specialists. They instructed the people in the standards and principles by which the needs of the gods were met. The temple complex was considered sacred space because the god dwelled there. Requirements for purity were exacting because the people did not want the gods to feel offended in any way though, unfortunately, it was not always clear how the gods’ favor could be sustained or what might offend them. The priests communicated the meticulous requirements of the gods, but there were no guarantees. The knowledge of the priests derived from training in traditional ways of thinking, not from revelation (although the gods could convey their desires through oracles or omens). They operated on the presumption that the gods were like people, only more demanding. Logically, serving a god would begin with what one would provide for the highest-ranking human and then increase exponentially. The cost for failure would be the anger of the god, resulting in all sorts of potential disaster. An angry god required appeasement to avert disorder or abandonment to the influence of demons and enemies.

In the Great Symbiosis, then, rituals provided the means by which order could be maintained. This equation was the basis of the religious system. We might well inquire, then, what role did justice, law, or morality play? The gods had no concern for the common good of humanity—only for their own good. Justice, legal governance, and what we might label moral behavior are important for order to be maintained in human society, but order was important to the gods only because it ensured the receipt of their prerogatives. In this system, humans did not have a religious obligation to be moral or just; they had a religious obligation to care for the gods, who would go to great lengths to secure their stream of revenue. Kings were established by the gods to preserve order in the human world so that humans could safely and productively carry out the duties of pampering the gods. As should now be evident, legal texts and ritual texts occupied overlapping conceptual territory. Both were strategies to ensure order and the favor of the gods. Just as the legal texts provided examples of what the wisdom of the ages would recognize as successful strategies for human justice, so the instructions for ritual performance presented all the wisdom that the priests could muster for strategies that would keep the gods satisfied. If the legal wisdom was not followed, society collapsed under the weight of injustice, resulting in anarchy and neglect of the gods. If the ritual wisdom was not followed, angry gods would turn away from the people, causing them to suffer all sorts of consequences (illness, drought, famine, invasion, etc.). Just as the judges were responsible for applying the acquired wisdom to decide cases, the priests were responsible for applying the acquired ritual wisdom for assuring that the gods were appeased. We also find overlap in the actual practice of law and ritual. For example, in the absence of the forensic means available today, judges often had little evidence beyond hearsay or conflicting testimonies. Consequently, they relied much more on parties in a trial to swear on oath that their testimony was true. Breaking an oath sworn in the name of a god not only made a person vulnerable to reprisal if the testimony was false; it also disrupted the viability of the judicial system and therefore undermined order in society. Rituals would also come into play occasionally in the use of trial by ordeal: a person’s innocence or guilt was established by subjection to a life-threatening ordeal (e.g., thrown in the river) to see if the gods would save them. In summary, divine favor was always the objective. Both justice and ritual were time-honored means for gaining that favor, and wisdom was at the foundation of both sets of practices. As we now turn to Israelite practice, we will see that the Israelites also viewed legal wisdom and ritual wisdom as overlapping concepts associated with order—so much so that, unlike in the ANE documents, both areas were integrated into the covenant’s stipulations.

Proposition 9 Ancient Israelite Ritual Serves to Maintain Covenant Order Because Yahweh Has No Needs 

Ritual in the ancient world operated in conjunction with the institutions of social order in order to please the gods by meeting their needs and thereby ensuring their favor and consequent stability and prosperity in the human world. We are now in a position to evaluate the Israelite ritual system in comparison with what we find in the rest of the ancient world. The actual shape of the rituals shows very little variation. The regular routine of sacrifices follows many of the same paths that we can trace in the rest of the ancient world. Even the designations of many of the sacrifices are the same, as we can see when we compare, for example, Israel to the society living in Ugarit in the mid-second millennium BC. To be sure, there are some notable differences. The most outstanding distinction is in the blood-manipulation rituals in Israel. The Israelite sacrifices that featured blood manipulation, primarily those commonly designated the sin offerings and guilt offerings, have no parallel in the ritual systems so far attested in the ancient world. The blood of these animals was used to accomplish kipper (contributing to the ritual of Yom Kippur). The term kipper has traditionally been translated as “atonement,” but that is misleading. More recently scholars have used terms like “expiation” (Milgrom) or “clearing” (Hundley). By virtue of the death of the animal, the blood accomplished the ritual role of a detergent to expunge anything that would desecrate the sanctuary (whether unacceptable behavior or ritual uncleanness). Although the use of blood manipulation constitutes an important distinction in the Israelite ritual system, it only serves as a minor aspect of the most significant difference between Israel and the ancient Near East (ANE): in Israel, the Great Symbiosis is gone. Yahweh has no needs—for food, clothing, or housing. He still requires rituals (and more or less the same sorts of rituals), but they have been repurposed. He still has a temple as his palatial residence, where he sits enthroned and from where he controls the cosmos, but no image of him occupies the sacred center. He is ultimately interested in maintaining order, but he is not interested in simply being pampered. Everything looks much the same from outside observance, but make no mistake—everything is different. In the Great Symbiosis of the ANE, the sacrifices and other rituals maintained the sort of relationship that was perceived to exist between humans and the gods—in that case, the relationship of mutual need. In Israel, in place of the Great Symbiosis we find that the relationship has been redefined (by the covenant) as the relationship of suzerain to vassal, in which humans display God’s glory and enhance his reputation rather than providing for his needs. In Israelite theology, Yahweh, unlike the gods of the rest of the ancient world, has no needs. The gods of the ANE created the cosmos (and eventually people) for themselves; Yahweh created for the sake of the creation, not to provide people to meet his needs. He is taking care of them, but not for the same reason that drove the Great Symbiosis. Many responses that Israel might make to Yahweh are appropriate (e.g., praise, glory, worship, order), but he does not need them, and he did not enter into the covenant relationship to get them. Likewise Yahweh has not initiated this relationship in order to give something to Israel (e.g., blessing, enlightenment, happiness, prosperity, salvation, or morality). Yahweh is proclaiming his reputation as suzerain of Israel, his vassals. Quid pro quo is abolished. The partnership that Yahweh set up with Israel is embodied in the covenant, in which he is the sovereign and Israel is his vassal serving on his behalf. These ritual exercises in Israel, though they often looked very similar to those of their neighbors, maintained a totally different sort of status quo. The offerings represented the tribute paid from the vassal to the sovereign, demonstrating loyalty and submission. 

“When you offer blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong? When you sacrifice lame or diseased animals, is that not wrong? Try offering them to your governor! Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you?” says the Lord Almighty.... “For I am a great king,” says the Lord Almighty, “and my name is to be feared among the nations.” (Mal 1:8, 14) 

Most of the offerings are not responses to offenses. The burnt offerings often accompanied petitions, and the sin and guilt offerings, which are related to offenses, provided for the ongoing maintenance of purity for the temple. These offerings did not appease the wrath of the offended deity by bribing him with food. The sin and guilt offerings cleared away the defilement of sins or impurities as they occurred among the people day by day. Nevertheless, it was inevitable that some defiling acts would go unnoticed or unaddressed. The Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) was designed to remove any residual defilement, serving, in effect, as a reset button—returning sacred space to its “default settings.” The focus of the sacrificial system, therefore, was on engaging in relationship with Yahweh as their king (e.g., thank offerings, vow offerings, free will offerings), bringing gifts when petitions were being presented (burnt offerings), and recognizing the importance of providing the appropriate environment for a holy God. By doing so they were maintaining an orderly and functioning cult system, which included proper respect for the purity of divine space. We might ask, however, why the ANE cult system was appropriated at all. Some of the common rituals (i.e., the practice of sacrificing outside the central sanctuary) were abolished in Israel. If the Great Symbiosis is gone, why did they bother with ritual at all? First, as noted above, the sacrifices served the role of tribute. In order for the suzerain-vassal relationship to be properly expressed, the vassals needed to be able to demonstrate their loyalty and submission. Because Yahweh is a deity, the tribute took the established form of the means by which to present gifts to a deity, i.e., ritual sacrifice. More importantly, however, a properly functioning cultic and ritual system was a symbol of a properly ordered and functioning society. Because the purpose was revelation, Israelite society needed to be a more or less ideal embodiment of social order by the standards of the ancient world. A society that lacked a cult system would not have been seen as functioning properly. As an example, in our modern Western cultural river an important element of a properly functioning state is democracy. If a society does not appoint its leaders by means of elections, we automatically assume that that society is defective and that its government is not functioning properly, whether or not that is the case. In the ancient world, a society without a cult system would have been perceived in much the same way that we perceive a society without elections—backwards and dysfunctional. Because Yahweh does not wish to establish himself as the God of a backwards and dysfunctional nation, he establishes a cult system but repurposes it to reflect his suzerain-vassal relationship with Israel, as opposed to the mutual codependence of the Great Symbiosis. Like all suzerain-vassal relationships, Israel gained benefits as well as obligations. One of the benefits, as discussed in proposition six, was military support against enemies, as would also be expected of a human emperor. However, because Yahweh is also a deity, the benefits of his suzerainty also included the benefits of divine favor—prosperity and fertility—but most importantly the presence of the god dwelling among them. Israel’s views on divine presence were very much like those of the ancient world. The god sat enthroned in the temple, and consequently the order established through creation was maintained, the forces threatening that order were held at bay, and the viability of the human community was maintained. 1 As the center of order and power in the cosmos and the seat of divine presence, the existence of the temple in the human community brought the hope and potential of great benefits such as fertility to the fields, prosperity, health, peace, and justice. We get a glimpse of this in the Gudea Cylinders in the speech of the god Ningirsu responding to the building of a temple for him: 

Faithful shepherd Gudea, When you bring your hand to bear for me I will cry out to heaven for rain. From heaven let abundance come to you, Let the people receive abundance with you, With the founding of my temple Let abundance come! The great fields will lift up their hands to you, The canal will stretch out its neck to you.... Sumer will pour out abundant oil because of you, Will weigh out abundant wool because of you. 2 

The temple can therefore be understood as the economic center of the cosmos, which John Lundquist refers to as “the central, organizing, unifying institution in ancient Near Eastern society.”3 J. N. Postgate refers to it as “a bond holding the community together, a source of wealth and goods.”4 The same ideology and the same hope are reflected in Israel’s thinking as expressed in the covenant blessings (Lev 26:3-13; Deut 28:3-14) and in Solomon’s prayer dedicating the temple (1 Kings 8). Given this understanding, it would be a mistake to think that the sacrificial system was all about sin. As already noted, most of the sacrifices are not responses to offenses. That would be indication enough, but we now turn attention to the sacrifices that are responses to offense: the so-called sin offerings and guilt offerings. 5 These sacrifices feature blood rituals prominently (whereas blood is rarely used outside of them), with the logic being that life is in the blood (Lev 17:11). Blood rituals are uncommon in the rest of the ancient world. Animals are offered to other deities, but blood manipulation is not generally involved. 6 In Israelite practice, the Torah establishes these two sacrifices as responses when some impurity encroaches on the sanctuary (sin offering) or when something that belongs to the sanctuary is appropriated for personal use (guilt offering). The sin offering is required when violation of the Torah has taken place unintentionally. Intentional sin had no ritual response. It was understood that an unintentional offense involving ritual impurity or violation of behavioral expectations in society had a desecrating impact on the sanctuary. To give a stark physical metaphor, imagine the defilement of feces splattered on the wall of the temple. The sacrilegious defilement had to be addressed. Blood was designated as the ritual detergent to expunge the results of the offense and restore sanctity in the sanctuary and order for the community. Given this understanding, we can see that these rituals were not designed to take away the sin of the person. They were designed to restore equilibrium to the place of God’s presence. The “clearing” antiseptic role of the blood accomplishes kipper.Kipper rarely has a person or sin as its object. The verb’s direct object is typically the part of the sanctuary (e.g., the veil, the ark, the horns of the altar) being expunged from desecration. A form of this verb is used in the familiar Day of Atonement (yom kippur), at which time any offenses that have built up over the year (not having been dealt with by sacrifice) can be eliminated (driven into the wilderness) so that equilibrium can be reestablished (reset to default settings). The result of kipper being accomplished by the sin and guilt offerings is that the person can be forgiven—that is, he or she will not have to be cut off from the community. If a person is not forgiven or not cut off from the community, the person’s continuing presence in the community will continue to contaminate the sanctuary, resulting eventually in the withdrawal of the divine presence and favor. But the contamination remains on the sanctuary, not on the person, so there is no suggestion of kipper cleansing an individual of sin. On the basis of this information, we can see that the translation “atonement” is quite unfortunate and misleading if we associate it with what Christ accomplished on the cross regarding our sin. 7 Instead kipper refers to what was accomplished on behalf of the sanctuary by the Israelites’ ritual use of blood. If the sacrifices of Israel do not take away sin, and in fact never seek to do so, they have nothing to do with salvation (from sins; see further discussion in proposition fifteen). Furthermore, they are not simply an anticipation of what Christ would do—they do not do anything like what Christ would do. 8 Sacrifices are not just a placeholder until Jesus comes to do his work. They have a significance all their own in the theology of the Old Testament and in the role of the Torah, an important role. 9 Since the rituals are integral to Torah, we should not artificially distinguish them from the so-called moral aspects of Torah. Rituals serve as a response to cultic contaminants. This can include moral offenses since sin is a cultic contaminant, but moral offenses in particular are not emphasized. Nonmoral contaminants, such as menstruation and other bodily discharges, required the same offerings (sin offerings) as offenses we would call sins (see Lev 15:15, 30). The rituals, like other aspects of the Torah, provide for order to preserve the favor of Yahweh as he dwells among them. We therefore review the now common litany of this book: the purpose of the Torah (including the rituals) is not legislation, not moral instruction, not to form an ideal society (see proposition sixteen), not universally applicable, not incumbent on those outside the covenant, and not connected to salvation. The priests were charged with responsibility for maintaining the sanctity of Yahweh’s sanctuary, and that involved helping the community to maintain ritual purity. This meant that they had to be ritual experts and instruct the people in all the aspects of Torah so that the community could remain in good standing in the covenant and honor the God who had made them holy. We often think of priests as those who performed sacrifices—and that was certainly among their responsibilities—but to posit that as the main description of their identity is reductionistic. They offered the sacrifices because they knew what the rituals required in terms of quality of the offering, ritual status of those bringing the offering, proper procedures for the offering, and maintaining their own ritual purity to make sure that their mediation would be guarded. They were guardians of sacred space. Instruction in all aspects of Torah observance and performance of rituals were both important aspects of their position but should not be considered the whole of their responsibility. As an illustration, we might consider those who protect the life of the ruler of a country (for the United States, consider the Secret Service agents who guard the president). It would be a mistake to say that their main role is to make sure that the leader does not get assassinated. Certainly that is one of their tasks, it but represents only a small part. They have the job of making sure that nothing interferes with the leader carrying out his or her role. Security for the leader results in stability for the people and order for the community’s covenant relationship. In conclusion, the rituals associated with the Torah maintained an appropriate relationship between Israel and her sovereign—the one who has made a covenant with them. The rituals (mediated by the priests) allowed them to express their worship to Yahweh and to remediate any threat to the sanctity of Yahweh’s presence, of which they were hosts. It would be easy to think of the sacrificial rites as constituting commands that must be obeyed (and thereby sounding like legislation), and it is true that the priests were required to adhere precisely to the sacrificial instructions, but these instructions were not commands per se—they described a procedure that had to be executed properly if the people wanted to receive a desired result (like the procedures essential to the successful use of an ATM). Nevertheless, these stood as Yahweh’s communication of what was acceptable to him, how they could prevent angering (or disgusting) him, and how they could safely come into his presence. Impurity had its consequences, just like touching a hot stove does; there are properties that cannot be safely ignored. These were not commands that told them what they ought to do as replacement for what they naturally would want to do (coercive law); they represented, instead, Yahweh’s active communication with them of what was essential to their relationship. This can be contrasted to the ancient world at large where gods did not inform people of what was considered essential, yet held them accountable anyway. In our modern way of thinking, which values individualism and freedom, we might be inclined to consider divine expectations and accountability negatively; we label it legalism and consider it oppressive. We might prefer being free from divine expectations. This is what appeals to us about the New Testament indicating that we are free from the law, though we apply “freedom from the law” well beyond its original intention. In Israel such freedom could result only in anarchy, as was evident in the Judges period when “all the people did what was right in their own eyes” (Judg 21:25 NRSV); that was not good and it did not bring order. The Israelites welcomed the guidance and instruction that Yahweh gave them and counted it a blessing and an act of grace.

PART 4: CONTEXT OF THE TORAH

Proposition 10: The Torah Is Similar to Ancient Near Eastern Legal Collections Because It Is Embedded in the Same Cultural Context, Not Because It Is Dependent on Them 

In proposition one, we introduced the metaphor of the cultural river as a way of understanding that our own world is very different from the ancient world. Rather than reading the Old Testament as if it is embedded in our contemporary world, we need to read it as embedded in the ancient world, in which the humans communicating God’s revelation did not anticipate our culture or any other throughout the history of cultures. This cultural embeddedness gives the Torah inevitable similarities with what we find in the rest of the ancient Near East (ANE), but now we are ready to address the question of whether the Old Testament’s embeddedness in the ancient world makes it indebted to particular pieces of literature from the ancient world. Furthermore, does either its embeddedness or any discovered indebtedness undermine its identity as God’s revelation?

When we engage in comparative studies between Israel and the ANE, we should not assume that any similarities that we might find between their texts suggest literary indebtedness—that is, that Israelite scribes were copying or translating existing documents from say, Babylon, by making minor, cosmetic modifications. We need not deny that such adaptation may have occasionally taken place,1 but often the evidence simply does not substantiate so close a relationship. For borrowing to be determined, one must demonstrate near identical words, phrases, and ideas at multiple places, and also propose how the Israelites would have had access to the other piece of literature (which requires discussion of geographical and chronological proximity). The burden of proof for indebtedness (i.e., literary dependence) is very stringent and cannot be established simply by observing that two texts describe similar ideas in similar ways. For example, today it would not be uncommon to hear someone voice the philosophy “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Most people who might say that have not read those words in the work of Epicurus and don’t know that they came from him. Instead, the saying has diffused into our cultural river, but we get it by being embedded in the river, not by borrowing it from the literature. In a similar fashion, comparison of the Old Testament literature in general and the Torah in particular with ANE documents often produces similarities that can be explained by the fact that Israel was simply embedded in the ancient world. Therefore, Israelite writers were inclined to think like the people around them and have a rough familiarity with the traditions of the surrounding culture (perhaps more by oral diffusion than by literary access). 2 The traditions of any culture (oral or literary) flow into the broader cultural river and from there can be drawn on in subtle and untraceable ways by others who are immersed in that same cultural river. More important, however, is the question of how people react to the currents (ideas) that flow in their cultural river. They may float comfortably along on those currents, or they may fiercely resist them. We can observe ways in which Israel’s Torah contains features that we can also recognize in the ancient cultural river. The question is not, What have they borrowed?, but rather, How does Israel’s Torah represent the revelation of God? The Torah may adopt some aspects of the cultural river (e.g., the idea that divine presence is something to be desired) and may resist others (e.g., the idea that humans are supposed to provide for the needs of the gods), but our interest is in how the Torah uses these aspects. It is in the interaction with the ideas that we will find the revelation of God that makes Torah Scripture. In other words, the potential source of the information (e.g., from this or that piece of ANE) matters much less than the use the author has chosen to make of it. In the table 10.1, Comparison of Similar Legal Sayings in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, we examine some of the similarities between the legal sayings of the Torah and those from the ANE. We provide this so that the readers will see the nature of the similarities. 3 These will bolster our contention that the legal sayings of the Torah share genre characteristics with the legal sayings of the ANE.

  

SEXUAL RELATIONS IN CITY OR COUNTRYSIDE

Torah (NIV). Deuteronomy 22:23-27. If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you. But if out in the country a man happens to meet a young woman pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die. Do nothing to the woman; she has committed no sin deserving death. This case is like that of someone who attacks and murders a neighbor, for the man found the young woman out in the country, and though the betrothed woman screamed, there was no one to rescue her. 

ANEa. Hittite 197. If a man seizes a woman in the mountains (and rapes her), it is the man’s offense, but if he seizes her in her house, it is the woman’s offense: the woman shall die. If the woman’s husband discovers them in the act, he may kill them without committing a crime

GORING OX 

Torah (NIV). Exodus 21:28-29: If a bull gores a man or woman to death, the bull is to be stoned to death, and its meat must not be eaten. But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible. If, however, the bull has had the habit of goring and the owner has been warned but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or woman, the bull is to be stoned and its owner also is to be put to death. 

ANEa If. an ox is a gorer and the ward authorities so notify its owner, but he fails to keep his ox in check and it gores a man and thus causes his death, the owner of the ox shall weigh and deliver 40 shekels of silver. 

Hammurabi 251: If a man’s ox is a known gorer and the authorities of his city quarter notify him that it is a known gorer, but he does not blunt its horns or control his ox, and that ox gores to death a member of the awilu-class, he (the owner) shall give 30 shekels of silver. 

WOMAN INTERVENING IN FIGHT BETWEEN MEN 

Torah (NIV) Deuteronomy 25:11-12: If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity. 

ANEa Assyrian A-8: If a woman should crush a man’s testicle during a quarrel, they shall cut off one of her fingers. 

FIRST WIFE RIGHTS WHEN MAN TAKES SECOND WIFE 

Torah (NIV) Exodus 21:10-11: If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights. If he does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any payment of money. 

ANEa Hammurabi 148-149: If a man marries a woman and later la’bum-disease seizes her and he decides to marry another woman, he will not divorce the wife whom la’bum-disease seized; she shall reside in quarters he constructs and he shall continue to support her as long as she lives. If that woman should not agree to reside in her husband’s house, he shall restore to her her dowry that she brought from her father’s house, and she shall depart.

LOST ANIMAL 

Torah (NIV) Deuteronomy 22:1-3: If you see your fellow Israelite’s ox or sheep straying, do not ignore it but be sure to take it back to its owner. If they do not live near you or if you do not know who owns it, take it home with you and keep it until they come looking for it. Then give it back. Do the same if you find their donkey or cloak or anything else they have lost. Do not ignore it. 

ANEa Hittite 71: If anyone finds an ox, a horse, or a mule, he shall drive it to the king’s gate. If he finds it in the country, they shall present it to the elders. The finder shall harness it (i.e., use it while it is in his custody). When its owner finds it, he shall take it according to the law, but he shall not have the finder arrested as a thief. But if the finder does not present it to the elders, he shall be considered a thief. 

BESTIALITY 

Torah (NIV) Leviticus 18:23: Do not have sexual relations with an animal and defile yourself with it. A woman must not present herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it; that is a perversion. 

ANEa Hittite 187-188: If a man has sexual relations with a cow, it is unpermitted sexual pairing: he will be put to death. They shall conduct him to the king’s court. Whether the king orders him killed or spares his life, he shall not appear before the king (lest he defile the royal person). [188 gives similar instruction if the object is a sheep.] 

SORCERY/WITCHCRAFT 

Torah (NIV) Exodus 22:18: Do not allow a sorceress to live. 

ANEa Assyrian A-47: If either a man or a woman should be discovered practicing witchcraft, and should they prove the charges against them and find them guilty, they shall kill the practitioner of witchcraft. 

WANDERING LIVESTOCK 

Torah (NIV) Exodus 22:5: If anyone grazes their livestock in a field or vineyard and lets them stray and they graze in someone else’s field, the offender must make restitution from the best of their own field or vineyard. 

ANEa Hammurabi 57: If a shepherd does not make an agreement with the owner of a field to graze sheep and goats, and without the permission of the owner of the field grazes sheep and goats on the field, the owner of the field shall harvest his field and the shepherd who grazed sheep and goats on the field without the permission of the owner of the field shall give in addition 6,000 silas of grain per 18 ikus (of field) to the owner of the field. 

MOVING BOUNDARY MARKERS 

Torah (NIV) Deuteronomy 19:14: Do not move your neighbor’s boundary stone set up by your predecessors in the inheritance you receive in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess. 

Deuteronomy 27:17: Cursed is anyone who moves their neighbor’s boundary stone. 

ANEa Assyrian B-8: If a man shall incorporate a large border area of his comrade’s (property into his own) and they prove the charges against him and find him guilty, he shall give a field “triple” that which he had incorporated; they shall cut off one of his fingers; they shall strike him 100 blows with rods; he shall perform the king’s service one full month.

It should be no surprise that legal wisdom would find common ground across cultures and that God’s people would reflect some of the same sort of understanding about order in society that has been common to human beings throughout time and history. It is not the content of the legal wisdom that stands as God’s unique revelation— everyone in all cultures knew, for example, that murder was disruptive to order in society. Some might suggest that Yahweh upgraded Israel’s perspectives about murder, and we could not rule out such enlightened innovations, but at the same time, we need not feel obliged to find such upgrades to validate Torah’s revelatory status. In fact, as the examples in table 10.1 demonstrate, it would be difficult to do so consistently. The content of Torah’s legal wisdom is embedded in the culture and contains ideas that more or less reflect what everyone already knew. This does not jeopardize the Torah’s status as revelation once we recognize that the revelation in the Torah is not found in the contents of the law. If the Torah is not revealing law, it does not have to offer a distinctive viewpoint of the nuts and bolts of law. We need to explore why the Israelites believed that they had experienced something unique at Sinai.

Proposition 11: The Differences Between the Torah and the Ancient Near Eastern Legal Collections Are Found Not in Legislation but in the Order Founded in the Covenant

The Israelites were like the other people in the ancient Near East (ANE) in many ways. For our purposes, we should note that they largely agreed about what brought order in society, and both groups had literary legal collections that gathered illustrations of wisdom for executing justice in society. Those superficial (though pervasive) similarities pale in comparison to the perspectives that distinguished the Israelites’ thinking from those around them. They attributed these differentiating perspectives to the revelation of Yahweh, their God. 

Differences Between Torah and ANE Legal Collections 

Source. We recall that in the stele of Hammurabi the king is reporting to the god Shamash, not receiving from him. It should not be denied that the king was believed to receive wisdom from the gods, but the application of that wisdom to the task of ruling justly was the responsibility of the king. The king’s perception of order and the wisdom that established it were therefore reflected in the collections of legal sayings. In contrast, Israel did not view a human authority (i.e., Moses) as the source for the Torah. 1 

Scope. The theology of the Old Testament considers Yahweh to be the center and source of order and wisdom for both the cosmos and the human world. When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they had understood it as a wisdom tree (Gen 3:5), and by taking its fruit they were “becoming like God” in that they attempted to make themselves the center of order and wisdom. They were subsequently sent out to establish order for themselves (see proposition fourteen). In the ANE, it likewise fell to humans to establish order in the human world because the gods were only concerned with themselves. Outside of Israel, human efforts in this regard—specifically the establishment of cities and civilization—were considered to be more or less successful. The Old Testament is more pessimistic about the ability of humans to order their own world and instead portrays a divinely administered order (through the covenant) as essential. The Torah, which has its source in Yahweh, is concerned with the establishment of order in human society. This is different from the rest of the ANE. Yahweh, as ruling king, issues decrees from Sinai that serve as the basis for order in the human realm of Israel. 2 This is an important difference, but we should also realize that Yahweh has acted as Israel’s king in offering the Torah so, as in the ANE, these decrees come from the king, albeit the divine one. The source is significant, but the main factors differentiating Israel from the rest of the ANE are the aspects of holiness and covenant. 

Holiness and covenant. We introduced our core understanding of holiness in proposition seven. We are now ready to pick up that thread in analysis of the difference between the legal sayings in Israel and in the ANE. Yahweh entered into a covenant relationship with Israel. It began with Abram when God established a relationship with him (Gen 12) and then ratified a covenant with his family (Gen 15). That covenant got extended to Israel, the family of Abraham, in Exodus 6:6-7 (see further Ex 19:5-6), and also to the descendants of Abraham and Isaac in Deuteronomy 2:2-23. This sort of act between a god and a people group is not attested in the ANE, where gods generally restrict themselves to making sponsorship agreements with kings. 3 Land grants are also normally made by kings, not gods, although in Judges 11:24 Jephthah claims that the god Chemosh has given the Amorites their land (just as Yahweh gave land to Israel), which indicates that this is something that ANE gods could do. However, when God made the covenant with Israel at Sinai, he co-identified himself with them and them with him: “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God” (Ex 6:7). Yahweh becomes the “God of Israel” (Ex 5:1). This coidentification expands the identity of Yahweh (since it is new) just as it expands the identity of Israel. 4 As a result of this co-identification, Israel is made holy because Yahweh is holy. The holy status was not conferred on any of the other nations who participate in the Abrahamic blessings of land and nation. As we have indicated, this statement does not refer to holiness as something that Israel should strive to achieve; it is the status that Yahweh has given them. He, by definition, is holy (holy essentially means “divine”), and since he is identifying them with him, they are holy (part of his divine constellation). This status cannot be gained or lost by anything that they do, though they may or may not reflect that status appropriately. 5 The Torah, then, far from being legislation, has as its objective to define the nature of the order that defines the people who in turn give some definition to the identity of Yahweh. The wisdom of the Torah instructs its primary audience—the kings and priests and their subordinate administrators—on the nature of the order they should be upholding if they want to reflect Yahweh’s identity properly and thereby retain his favor in the form of the covenant blessings. Nothing in the ANE equates to this conception of holiness—that is, ANE gods are not concerned with the integrity of their identity as reflected through the objects of their patronage. The identity of the god of war is defined by the phenomenon of war (just as the identity of Yahweh is defined by the character of the nation of Israel), but the god of war does not instruct the people in war so that the conduct of war will reflect his identity. Further, the patron gods of nations, cities, or other human demographics do not identify themselves with their people as intimately as Yahweh identifies with Israel. 6 The revelation element that distinguishes Sinai as unique is connected not to legal content or to genre but to the covenant context and the way that the covenant granted the Israelites a status (i.e., as being holy) whereby their community served to define Yahweh’s identity. He is their suzerain and king, and he defines what order should look like just as the kings of the ANE did. The Torah therefore is not focused simply on maintaining order in the cosmos and society by executing justice; it is designed to define the covenant order so that it will reflect the identity that Yahweh wishes to establish for himself. Given this understanding, it is no surprise that the wisdom contained in the Torah not only instructs judges in wisdom for executing justice; it instructs all of Israel in wisdom for maintaining order in all spheres of life. 7 Given this understanding, we can reiterate that we should not think of the Torah as giving Israel an upgraded sense of law or an improved legislation. That is not the lens by which we should understand its revelation or its distinction from the ancient world. This is true, first of all, because we have seen that neither Torah nor the ANE collections are legislation or have direct connection to the practice of law, which itself operated very differently in the ancient world than it does today.

Second, Torah is not trying to improve on ancient law, and the Israelites are not arguing against the premise or practice of law in the ANE. While we may identify places in which the Torah seems more sensible to us than what we find in, say, Hammurabi, in other places we may find it less “enlightened.” That is not the point. The Torah is not polemical; it is foundational to the Israelite order located in the covenant. No one else is supposed to define order by the covenant; no one else has one (more about this in proposition thirteen). The revelation of the Torah is not a revised law; it is covenant order. This leads us to inquire preliminarily, what would keeping the Torah look like? As we have been saying, the Torah is not intended to be a normative set of rules to be obeyed; it is a list of illustrations that collectively circumscribe the nature of the covenant order, which can guide the Israelites as they seek to be the people of Yahweh, in vassal relationship with him by virtue of the covenant. The Israelites will (ideally, in theory) live according to the covenant order as their community serves to define the identity of Yahweh because they are his holy people. If they do not live according to the covenant order, Yahweh will define his identity by withdrawing his presence and favor and by punishing them, just as a responsible suzerain would punish rebellious vassals. Whichever treatment Israel prefers, Yahweh’s identity and reputation will be established either way. 

Excursus: Observations About Composition 

In this book we will not be investigating the composition of the Pentateuch or discussing the various source-theory schemes. 8 In this brief excursus, however, it is important to unpack the significance that our assessment of Torah as wisdom has for understanding what we have in the Pentateuch.

When previously the Torah was considered normative legislation, it was worrisome to those who took the Bible seriously to find that there were legal sayings scattered through the Torah that appeared to stand in contradiction to one another. 9 This was even more the case for those who are inclined to characterize the Bible as “inerrant” or “infallible.” How could it be inerrant if two different books had differences of opinions on the same legal case? Some interpreters who were not as concerned about the Bible being monolithic used such cases to propose either that different sources from different times indeed stood in contradiction to one another or that the Torah represented an artificial compilation from different sociological periods of Israel’s national life. 10 We may not find reason to deny sources or stages, but our reconstructions in either case depend heavily on speculation, and we need not resort to such hypotheses. Once we adopt the view that Torah is wisdom rather than legislation, we are no longer compelled to reconcile apparent contradictions. Wisdom provides much greater latitude for such variations. Consider the following from Proverbs 26:4-5: 

Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes. Which couplet is right? Both of them. 

Which one is wisdom? Both of them. Which one should a person do? If they are wise, they will have the discernment to know. Both embody valid principles. It doesn’t matter that they offer conflicting advice.

This example can serve as a paradigm for thinking about Torah. We need not worry that different responses to a fool might have been considered wise in different contexts, and the same is true of Torah. 11 

Such cases attest to the fact that in ancient Israel, the law’s divinity was not perceived as entailing its fixity or absolute nature. Terms of the divine law were modified, revised, updated, and interpreted in the course of their transmission.... The postbiblical claim that Yahweh’s revealed divine law is fixed and immutable is not consistent with the Pentateuchal evidence. For the biblical writers and redactors, the flexibility, evolution, and even self-contradiction of divine law do not appear to have impinged upon its authoritative or divine status. 12 

Such examples in the Torah need not be taken as the evidence of pluralistic voices or contradicting opinions and should not become the most important tools for determining the composition of the Pentateuch. We have to remember that the primary transmission of traditions (whether narrative, legal, or wisdom) was oral. Documents served very restricted functions. 13 The admixture of oral and textual traditions greatly complicates our ability to unravel the process of composition. Nothing existed in the ancient world comparable to the books and authors of today. It was a world of scribes and documents whenever written records were made—which was not done regularly and was not essential. The authority of a document was not in its author but in the authority that stood behind it. 14 In this way, Moses could theoretically be the authority behind the Torah without having actually written any of it with his own hand. At the same time, there is no good reason to deny him a role in the written tradition.

What we do know is that the tradition is tightly connected to Yahweh whenever it was finally written down in the form that we have. That could have been a lengthy process that combined oral and textual phases. In a hearing-dominant culture in which oral tradition often carried more authority than written tradition, it would not be expected that text would precede speech. In other words, in the history of compilation and composition, a “book” would be more likely to be the last step rather than the first step. For that book eventually to be attributed to Moses would mean only that he had long been identified as the authority figure at the fountainhead of the tradition. That would be sufficient to justify its being attributed to him. Furthermore, the Torah’s authority as Scripture is not based on whether any or all of the written documents can be attributed to Moses at any level. 

Conclusion 

In summary, we have discussed the nature of the legal sayings in the Pentateuch and have found them similar to those found throughout the ANE. Our comparative study has revealed significant overlap in genre and in content. In the course of the study, we have proposed, in keeping with the consensus that exists among scholars of the ANE, that the collections of legal sayings are not legislative but focus on wisdom for preserving justice and order in society. This results in a considerably different perspective from what a modern reader’s intuition would be about such texts. At the same time, we have identified the most significant differences in the connection to holiness and covenant. In the Old Testament the similar genre and content known from the ancient world have been repurposed—used in a new way with a new function. Yahweh is not just communicating to Israel standards for justice but is delivering standards by which his people can reflect their holy status. The wisdom embedded in the Torah will enable them to maintain covenant order.

As a final note, we might ask, if it is not legislation, then what is the significance of not adding to it or subtracting from it (Deut 4:2; 12:32)? Statements such as this do not refer to an eternally static situation in which legal perfection has been achieved. Such admonitions are found in the legal literature of the ANE (epilogue of Hammurabi) as well but also in other sorts of literature (such as the Erra Epic or treaties). Significantly, however, in the Old Testament they are also found in relation to prophetic oracles (Jer 26:2) and even Wisdom literature (Prov 30:5-6). 15 It is therefore evident that such warnings are not specific to legal documents and do not refer to a complete and unchangeable legislation. Instead, the warnings are addressed to scribes as a way to secure the integrity of the text—whatever sort of text it is. 16 It has to do with textual tampering, not with legislative innovation. 17 Even as the Torah differs from the ANE literature, however, it is still fully embedded in the cultural river of the ancient world. Thus even the innovations it introduces still have to be understood within the context of the ancient world. We will examine the cultural “situatedness” of the Torah in the next few chapters.

Proposition 12: Torah Is Situated in the Context of the Ancient World

 Over the next chapters, we will address and define the “situatedness” of the Torah as it is embedded in a number of important contexts. By situatedness we mean that the Torah cannot be read as though it fell out of the sky. The Torah is written to a people of the ancient Near Eastern (ANE) world within the language and logic of the cognitive environment. Thus we say that it is situated in its ANE cultural context. But the Torah was also given to Israel as part of Israel’s covenant with Yahweh; thus it is situated within the terms of the Israelite covenant. Finally, that covenant operates within a very specific conception of the nature of divinity and the relationship between God, people, and land. Thus the covenant is situated within the Israelite theology concerning sacred space—Yahweh living among them. These three defining features will be addressed in this and the next three chapters. The main goal is for us as modern readers to recognize that the Torah has a context and to understand the various ways in which that context influences what the words and phrases of the Torah mean—because the meaning of language is determined by context. 

The statement that the Torah is situated in the ancient world could easily be perceived as a truism—a simple factoid. But when we make such a statement, we are referring to more than just the chronological place of the literature. To say that the Torah is situated in the ancient world is another way of recognizing that its communication and conversations are embedded in the ancient world. Consequently, every aspect of it must be interpreted within that ancient context; extrapolation outside of that context is hazardous. That does not mean that we cannot extrapolate, only that it has to be done very carefully with full knowledge of what we are dealing with (genre) and how extrapolation can take place effectively (methodology and hermeneutics). One cannot seek to extrapolate it on the assumption that it is legislation or a moral system. It is neither a question, then, about the unchanging law of an unchanging God nor a presumption that morality is relative. If the Torah is neither a law code nor a moral system (more discussion in proposition twenty-one), then its lessons cannot be learned from following those pathways. When people try to sort out which parts of the Old Testament “law” are still relevant and which parts are not, they are really trying to determine which sayings are culturally relative and which are not. When we read statements like “don’t murder,” we naturally assume that they are not culturally relative but universal. Such a thinking process reflects a basic assumption that the sayings are law—a concept that we have already suggested is misguided. We therefore have to start our evaluation process from the beginning. If the Torah gives illustrations of ways that order can be maintained in the society of ancient Israel—covenant order defined by preserving the sanctity of sacred space as God’s holy people—it is all culturally relative. How could it be otherwise? Only the Israelites were in a covenant relationship with Yahweh; only the Israelites experienced Yahweh’s presence dwelling among them in his tabernacle or temple. We must therefore conclude that the Torah, as an instrument to give definition to this covenant relationship, is fully situated in ancient culture, fully situated in the covenant relationship, and fully situated in temple ideology

Modern Bible readers are inclined to regard the Torah as universal because they have assumed that it is God’s law, that it is to be equated with a moral system, that it reflects God’s (unchanging) ideal, and that it is in the Bible—God’s revelation to all his people. What compels us to conclude that it is fully situated and relative? We can address this by turning the question around: What compels us to believe that it is not culturally situated? To begin with, then, we note that, in the Christian world, virtually no one treats the entire Torah as universally applicable so we cannot say that it is universal just because it is in the Bible. Christians are not typically concerned with whether one wears cloth mixed of linen and wool or how to avoid cooking a kid in its mother’s milk. If it is acknowledged that parts of the Torah are not universally applicable, we learn that universality is not the nature of Torah. If universality is not the nature of Torah, then any sense we might have that some of it is universal results from the fact that our understanding of order is similar to theirs in certain cases. Consequently, we are not treating the Torah as something that carries authority over us; we are simply using our own good sense and logic to identify those aspects that we already are inclined to agree with. In contrast, upon investigation, we will find that the internal logic of the Torah is ancient and the conditions it advocates are ancient, rather than ideal. Some passages address economic concerns like loans and debts (Ex 22:25-27; Deut 23:19-20). The economy that they reflect is an agropastoral economy, not a service economy operating within a capitalistic market system. The Torah is based on ideas of class and status that differ from ours and was devised to provide for economic recovery for farmers when drought or crop failure threatened survival (see further discussion in proposition sixteen). These ancient cultures were characterized by community identity, and that affected every aspect of order within society. People found their identity in the role and status that they had in the community and in whether they brought honor or shame to their community. 1 This conception of identity is reflected in practices such as arranged marriages where marriage was not based on feelings of love but reflected the commitment of two families to one another for the benefit of the community (see further discussion in proposition sixteen). Likewise, when identity is located in the community (especially within the family/clan), the values of independence, autonomy, and democracy are absent and undesirable. All members of the community place a higher value on the community than on themselves and seek to submit to the authorities in the community rather than demanding their rights or seeking an equal voice. 2 One could object that the characteristics we have described are not patently ancient; they are just not what we experience in our modern Western (American and European) culture. It could be argued that one might find such features in many Asian or African cultures today. True enough—but that still indicates that these features are culturally relative. In such cultures, the highest order is not individual human happiness. Instead, the highest value is order in society. Consequently, the focus of the legal sayings is order, not happiness. So, for example, lay members of the Israelite community do not wear clothes of mixed wool and linen (Deut 22:11); priests wear garments that contain that mix. Order is maintained in the community when the status and the status markers are recognized and respected. In a similar way we consider it unlawful for someone who is not a policeman to wear the uniform of a policeman.

The final issue, and for this chapter the most important, concerns the question of how Torah functions as God’s revelation. It is appropriate to consider it God’s revelation. But the most significant question is, revelation of what? It is certainly correct that anything God reveals is of enduring value and should be considered to have universal relevance. Nevertheless, before we get there we have to consider what it is that God is revealing. In the previous chapters we have already presented the case that the Torah contains illustrations of wisdom delivered in the context of ancient Israel’s situation, which in turn describes the nature of God’s covenant with Israel through which God reveals himself (as opposed to revealing an ideal society or revealing his moral expectations for humanity). The revelation of what the covenant is and what it tells us about how God chooses to work in the world provides a context for us today in understanding the New Covenant found in the New Testament. We will develop this further in subsequent chapters. In conclusion, we return to the metaphor of the cultural river. God communicated in the Hebrew language to the Israelite culture, not in every language or in a common language into a culturally neutral environment (neither of which exists or has ever existed). Meaning derives from context—that is, language and culture. Just as Hebrew words are not universally meaningful, the cultural and logical context of the Bible is not universally relevant. Since the Old Testament message communicates in a language and a culture, it is necessarily situated in that language and culture. The belief that it is God’s revelation does not change that. As we have said before, it is written for us, but not to us. Like the rest of the Old Testament, then, Torah is situated in the ancient world—in the language and culture of the ancient Israelites. We have to take that into account when we seek to translate its meaning to discern the enduring value that it has by virtue of being God’s revelation.

Proposition 13 Torah Is Situated in the Context of the Covenant 

Stipulations in ancient treaties establish obligation on those who are the participants in the agreement (see proposition six), but it is important to develop a nuanced understanding of the nature of this obligation. It goes without saying that those who are not participants are not under obligation. Furthermore, we note that the obligation established by stipulations is of a different sort from that established by legislation. First and foremost, a general distinction can be made in that stipulations are a matter of mutual agreement whereas legislation is imposed by virtue of one’s membership in a community. 1 As George Mendenhall, one of the early pioneers of the comparison, pointed out, covenants and treaties create a relationship and an identified community whereas law presupposes a social order and seeks to maintain it. 2 To clarify this distinction, we could think about the US Constitution, which is essentially a treaty between the people and the government. It describes how the people will be governed but does not contain legislation. When we read the stipulations in treaties from the ancient Near East (ANE), we find outlined a sort of obligation that differs from the obligation imposed by law. As we saw in proposition six, the topics discussed in stipulations pertain to the corporate body (city or country, and their representation by the king), as would be expected, and offer details concerning expected behavior by the vassal toward the suzerain. 3 Some of the categories and obligations that can be found among the stipulations include both general expectations and specific details of what the vassal’s duties are: 

General 

• Acknowledgment of suzerain as only master4 

• Loving the suzerain as you love yourselves5 

• Faithfulness to suzerain by not making alliances against him, joining revolts against him, or cursing him 

• Recognition that unfaithfulness will result in forfeiture of land6 

• Acknowledgment of allegiance or submission • Suzerain’s promised protection to vassal 

• Not coveting land or inhabitants of other allied vassals7

• Not speaking evilly against the suzerain and punishing those who do8 

• Respectful treatment and display of the image (or stele) of the suzerain (in Naram-Sin’s treaty with Elam, “Everyone shall fear this deposit by Naram-Sin”)9 

Provision of specific details 

• Water management and rights 

• Establishment of boundaries 

• Provision of troops for battle: supplies and garrisons 

• Duty to report sedition and any who are in violation 

• Extradition of rebels or fugitives 

• Punitive treatment of offenders 

• Payment of tribute 

• Trade and tariff restrictions or requirements 

• Behavior of citizens in relation to the other party 

• Debts and lawsuits between the citizens of the two parties 

• Restitution for theft • Division of spoils in joint military operations 

• Treatment of envoys 

Some observations can help us apply information learned from these stipulations to the interpretation of the Torah. First, we can see that many of the specific stipulations do not find easy parallels in the biblical material since they pertain to political relationships between communities. At the same time, the stipulations in the  general category are transparently similar to the concerns that are expressed in the Torah. 10 Second, we can note that at times the stipulations of treaties take on the same sorts of form and content that we find in the legal collections. As an example, consider this interesting case from the twentyfourth-century treaty between Ebla and Abarsal, stipulations 37-41:11 

37Who steals in the sheepfold, who steals in the city gate area, who steals in the walled settlements, shall die. 38In the house of an Abarsalite an Eblaite may stay over: and the house owner will get up for him. 39If he robs the house, he shall replace stolen goods; if the Eblaite kills an Abarsalite 50 rams as penalty he shall pay. 40Whoever lies with a [married?] woman, he shall pay a fine of a bundle of multicolored garments and 3 oxen. 41If it was an unmarried girl, a girl he respects, then he shall confirm his proposal. And this guest will marry her. 

We can see then that the legal collections and the treaty stipulations share some stock phrasing and have overlapping content. We might even surmise that formulations from the legal collections could be reused in treaty stipulations, though that would be difficult to substantiate. On the basis of the observations of the last chapter, we are now prepared to reconsider the nature of the Torah. Like the treaty stipulations, covenant stipulations address how Israel should relate to Yahweh. Just as the treaty stipulations provided examples of faithfulness to the suzerain, the covenant stipulations address faithfulness to Yahweh. Like the treaty stipulations, the covenant stipulations give definition to order in the relationship between Yahweh and his people, that is, how Israel is to be faithful to Yahweh and respect the suzerainty of Yahweh.

These stipulations provide examples of loyalty and faithfulness. In that way they overlap not only with the legal collections but with the Wisdom literature. Note that in Israel, the “fear of the Lord” that is the beginning of wisdom refers to loyal submission to the will of the suzerain. Though the stipulations include detailed particulars, in the end they are aspective, just like legal collections, but with different focus: 

• Legal collections of the ANE give examples of what justice in society looks like. 

• Treaties of the ANE give examples of what faithfulness to a suzerain looks like. 

• Ritual instructions (e.g., Hittite instructions to priests12) give examples of what purity in sacred space looks like.

We can now see that the Torah, situated in the covenant, includes all three of these focus elements (justice, purity, and faithfulness), but more than all of them as it gives examples of the order that will define Yahweh’s identity (= holiness). The attribute of holiness (the status conferred on Israel) is the underlying reason why justice, faithfulness, and purity are necessary. Upon the ratification of the covenant, Israel receives its holy status. Holiness is therefore not the stipulation of the covenant and not simply an amalgam of conditions such as justice, purity, or faithfulness. All these genres pertain to maintaining order in various respects and are aspective. In the treaty stipulations, general statements show that there are more obligations than the examples specify; for example: 

• totally devote your heart to the suzerain 

• commit no wrongdoing

 • do not commit offense or violence 

• do nothing against the suzerain 

• do nothing bad 

• do not sin in any way 

• do not neglect to support the suzerain 

• do not set in your mind an unfavorable thought 

• do not do anything that is not good 

These are open-ended and cannot be defined in any exhaustive way, but they still address what is expected. In conclusion then, we had previously noted that the Torah’s legal collections offered wisdom, using an aspective approach, to circumscribe and thereby to understand the nature of the order that was expected to pervade in Israel, particularly in relationship to justice. Since the characteristics of Israel give public definition to the characteristics of God (they have been identified as holy as he is holy when chosen as his people), Israel must manifest justice according to the values of the ancient world in order to reflect God properly and thereby retain his favor. Treaty stipulations do not offer wisdom per se, though the wise person will give heed, but they are also aspective treatments of faithfulness. That is, because the characteristics of Israel give public definition to the characteristics of God (holiness), the Israelites must manifest loyal service to their sovereign (God) according to the values of the ancient world in order to reflect God/sovereign properly and thereby retain his favor. Although the stipulations are not wisdom lists, wisdom lists can play a role in stipulations, and we believe that is true of Torah. The Torah therefore reflects a combination of both of these wellknown genres from the ancient world, and from that we conclude that the Torah is aspective, not comprehensive, and that it calls for Israel to be characterized by faithfulness and justice. But, as we have noted, this obligation, as defined in the Torah, falls to Israel and Israel alone, as Yahweh’s covenant partner. The Torah is situated in the covenant relationship and cannot be extrapolated as binding on anyone else— no one else was designated as holy. The Torah stands as Yahweh’s revelation of the role that he has for Israel, his covenant people, in his plans and purposes for the world and for history. The Torah communicates to Israel, by means of familiar literary genres, how to play that major role. That role is not offered to everyone, but it represents the great enterprise that Yahweh has undertaken, which we will learn more about in the next chapter.

Proposition 14: Torah Is Situated in the Context of Israelite Theology Regarding Yahweh’s Presence Residing Among Them

Just as Torah is situated in the ancient world (not the modern one) and in the covenant with Israel (not universal), it also must be understood in its contingent relationship to the presence of Yahweh dwelling in the midst of Israel. To understand this concept, we must begin with a discussion of the temple ideology of divine presence in the ancient Near East (ANE). The temples in the ANE were the palatial residences of the deities. There the gods rested, and from there they ruled. The temple provided housing for the god just as sacrifices provided food—all serving what we have called the Great Symbiosis. In the temple the god was pampered, but the temple was also viewed as the hub of cosmic control. The people desired to have the temple with its resident god in their midst because they could then serve him and thereby gain his favor. Having the favor of a god could bring safety and prosperity. To maintain the presence and favor of the deity, his needs would have to be met consistently and even lavishly. 1 Since, as we have discussed, Israel gave no credence to the Great Symbiosis and Yahweh had no needs, the temple ideology in Israel, despite considerable overlap, differed from that in the ANE in a number of important ways. The ideological aspects of presence, rule, and favor remained, though the ways to retain them differed. In the Old Testament, God’s residence among people is a common recurring theme that is addressed in various texts in a variety of ways. Bible readers first encounter this theme in Genesis 1:1–2:4, though we often fail to recognize it because we are no longer aware of what is involved in divine rest, or we are distracted by questions of science. In our interpretation, the seven days of creation are primarily concerned with God ordering the cosmos to serve as the domain over which he will rule when he takes up his residence and rest in Eden (which is effectively a cosmic temple). In the ANE, the world outside of the divine realm was divided broadly into two areas: the human realm, where order was established and maintained, and the liminal realm, where it was not. The liminal realm existed on the periphery of creation and was home to dangerous animals; harsh and inedible plants; hostile terrain such as deserts, mountains, or the sea; and unworldly entities such as demons, wandering spirits, or monstrous demihuman barbarians. The ordered world was protected and sustained by the gods as they took their rest in their temples; rest here refers to active residence and rule, not passive relaxation. The gods do not rest in a bed or on a couch; they rest on the throne. In Genesis, the seven days of creation describe the establishment of the ordered world. The process is completed on the seventh day when Yahweh enters into his rest. 2 When Adam and Eve choose to take wisdom (the “knowledge of good and evil,” Gen 2:17) for themselves, they simultaneously become like God (Gen 3:22) and thereby inherit the responsibility to establish and sustain order. Consequently, they are sent out into the liminal world and charged with setting it in order themselves, which they attempt to do by establishing cities and civilization, the structures that were thought to establish order in the human world throughout the ANE. Genesis 4–11 records that these attempts were unsuccessful; cities and civilization do not, in fact, lead to an ordered condition. The remainder of Genesis provides the setup for Israel’s proposed alternative, which is an order established by God through the instrument of the covenant. The covenant is not a return to Eden (which is neither anticipated nor desired in the Old Testament), but it does represent a kind of order that is sustained by the gods (Yahweh) rather than by humans through human efforts. This divine-centered order is finally established in Exodus with the ratification of the covenant and the construction of the tabernacle, where God takes up his rest among the people (Ex 40:34). To develop this concept in connection with Torah, we must begin with an understanding of the centrality of God’s presence in the book of Exodus, where it stands as the theme around which the rhetorical strategy of the book is shaped. Yahweh appears to have been long absent as the book opens and then gradually manifests his presence (burning bush, plagues, pillar of cloud/fire, tent of meeting, Mount Sinai). At the climax, God descends to take up residence in the newly constructed tabernacle. This establishment of God’s presence among his people is a recurring theme in the Old Testament, and indeed throughout the entire Bible (e.g., “I will put my dwelling place among you,” Lev 26:11). Divine presence in the ANE, and also in Israel, is a sign that order is being maintained and the world is functioning properly. The covenant defines a formal relationship that will serve as a mechanism for establishing a divinely centered order where Yahweh will be king and provider to his people. This covenant eventually (by the end of Exodus) leads to the establishment of his terrestrial presence—his rest/residence among them. He lives in the midst of his people and, as their suzerain, establishes order for them through his presence and his rule. The tabernacle provides an initial place for God’s presence to dwell and is eventually replaced by the temple. These sanctuaries, from which Yahweh rules, serve as the palace of the Great King but also as the place where his presence dwells among his people to bring order. The Torah is given so that Israel might learn from the wisdom of the king (Yahweh) how to retain his favor and presence, enhancing his reputation through the order they establish proclaiming his rule and honoring his name. If they fail to do so, they may jeopardize their lives, they may be driven from the land (once they take residence there), or he might abandon them. Yahweh furthermore has a land for his people. It is his land, but he grants them tenancy. Leviticus 25:23 makes this fact clear: “The land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.” Thomas Mann expresses it succinctly: “As an alien, Israel does not possess the land as an inalienable right.”3 Yahweh indicates his possession by the frequent claim that he has “put his Name there” (e.g., Deut 12:5, 11, 21). When a king places his name in a land (literally, by engraving it on a victory stele), it indicates his lordship over a vassal state to which he has laid claim. 4 Because the land belongs to Yahweh, Israel’s residence in Yahweh’s land is conditional on their fidelity to their vassal treaty, as was normal for vassal relationships throughout the ancient world.

By faithfulness to the sovereign, Israel will retain God’s presence and the associated benefits of divinely established order, in contrast to the symbiosis of the rest of the ancient world. The theme of divine presence continues to appear as the prophets speak both of the future dwelling of God among the Israelites (Is 2; Mic 4) and of pending abandonment and punishment at the hands of the Babylonians (Ezek 10). The hope oracles of the prophets, on the other hand, look forward to a time when God will restore his people and dwell among them again (Ezek 40–48). The Torah has no role apart from the sanctuary—the place of Yahweh’s presence from which he rules over his people as he dwells among them in a covenant relationship. The Torah is therefore contingent on the tabernacle/temple—the establishment of God’s presence among the Israelites. The Torah is given so that God’s covenant people Israel can order their lives and society in a way that will retain Yahweh’s favor and his presence residing among them. It is designed to provide examples of covenant order and to help Israel understand how they can bring honor, rather than shame, to the name (that is, the reputation) of Yahweh because they have been identified with him by being designated as holy. 5 As they are faithful to the covenant by heeding the wisdom of the Torah, they will preserve God’s presence among them. Failure to establish covenant order will result in Yahweh’s departure, to their great loss. Furthermore, this failure will expose them to harm, not only from enemies that Yahweh would send to discipline them but from Yahweh himself, who fulfills the responsibilities of a suzerain against rebellious vassals. This contingency of the Torah on the presence of God provides significant perspective on how we think about Torah. Just as Torah cannot be mechanically extrapolated beyond its ancient context, and cannot be adopted outside of its covenant context, Torah cannot be removed from its context of the manifest presence of God in his terrestrial residence (tabernacle/temple). The Torah is precisely about establishing order in accordance with ancient ways of thinking, within the covenant relationship, for a people living in proximity to the manifest presence of Yahweh. Whatever its relevance for today (and it is relevant as revelation), that relevance must be derived in careful recognition of its situatedness. We will discuss this relevance further in proposition nineteen

PART 5: ONGOING SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TORAH

Proposition 15: Discussions of Law in the New Testament Do Not Tell Us Anything About Old Testament Torah in Context

The history of interpretation of the Torah has consistently recognized an important and transparent reality: we cannot adopt all of Torah as regulations for Christian living. With no temple, no sacrificial system, and no society the shape of ancient Israel (which included, for example, polygamous solutions to certain problems), direct application is simply not possible. Yet, if all Scripture is inspired and useful for instruction, what are we to do with this “problem child” that even New Testament authors at times seemed to dismiss? The problem is that most Christians throughout history who have written about the Torah are really writing about law in the New Testament. They do so under the assumption that there must be continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament in how to think about law. In fact, however, we would contend that there is not. By suggesting this, we are not proposing that the testaments stand in contradiction to one another, only that they have different perspectives and are addressing different issues. They are both operating from their own cultural rivers, and the Greco-Roman cultural river is notably different from that of the ancient Near East (even though they are more similar to each other than either is to ours). To study Torah in the Old Testament cultural river, we cannot use the New Testament as a source of information. 

Law and Gospel 

It is not our intention to investigate the New Testament use of law (nomos) and what Paul thought about the moral law of God or what Jesus taught about his connection to the Law/Torah. 1 All those discussions take place against the backdrop of what the Law had become during the Hellenistic period leading up to the New Testament. Having said that, the discussions about the New Testament understanding of Torah can highlight some of the important issues to be considered. The conversation often takes place under the rubric of “law and gospel,” though that putative dichotomy may itself be misleading because it assumes that law and gospel are somehow doing the same or similar things. Paul occasionally addresses what the law does or does not do in contrast with the gospel, but that is strictly a New Testament issue. A prior dichotomy should be considered between Old Testament ideas of law and New Testament ideas, independent of questions concerning the gospel and salvation. Even the New Testament authors make this clear as, for example, the author of Hebrews indicates that the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin (Heb 10:4). The sacrifices that included blood rituals in the Old Testament maintained purity of the temple compound and allowed the offenders to remain in good standing in the covenant community (see proposition eight); it did not take away their sin (more about this in proposition seventeen).

New Testament authors have their own significant issues to deal with, which are derived from their cognitive environment and the theological controversies of their day. They are making no attempt to reconstruct the theological and cultural issues of an Old Testament context though they obviously draw information for their discourse from the Old Testament as they understood it in their time. Most discussions of the Torah today, filtered through the New Testament, want to examine either the issue of salvation or the issue of moral absolutes for the church or for humanity in general—New Testament questions. This is no surprise, but it does not give us a contextual reading of the Torah. The Old Testament Torah is not trying to define the nature of righteousness or justification. Righteousness (by ancient Near Eastern standards) would be one result of Israel’s adherence to Torah—but this is not the absolute righteousness (implicitly, by divine standards) provided by Christ, and not a righteousness concerned with salvation. Furthermore, it is certainly not a righteousness that conforms to our modern cultural river’s definitions of values (modern standards). To understand the Torah in the context of the Old Testament we have to stop thinking in New Testament theological categories. 2 

As we have previously discussed in proposition five, we cannot speak of keeping the whole Torah any more than we can speak of keeping the whole book of Proverbs. Both offer wisdom insights. New Testament authors and scholars talk about the hypothetical but unrealistic idea of keeping the law in its entirety to achieve righteousness or salvation, and generally note that it simply cannot be done. This is not to say that the Second Temple community did not try to keep the law in its entirety—the exposition of the Mishnah indicates that they did—but in doing so they were forced to embellish the material substantially. Even then, the righteousness and salvation that they hoped to achieve were forgiveness for the infidelity of their ancestors and restoration of God’s favor to Israel, not moral or social perfection or an impeccable status before God. But this approach to the question already misunderstands Old Testament Torah. While the New Testament insists (on theological grounds) that even perfect Torah observance would not restore God’s favor, there are also practical reasons why “keeping the law in its entirety” cannot be done. In previous chapters we have proposed that the Torah, like the comparable ancient Near Eastern (ANE) documents, is aspective. If that is the case, it does not represent an entirety—there is no entirety. It was never more than selected illustrations for the larger calling to reflect order. Even if one successfully adhered to all the stipulations of the Torah, one could not claim to have fulfilled the expectations of Torah because even though they are stipulations, they are not intended to be comprehensive. It is not a checklist to be marked off—the law is “kept” by order being reflected in every aspect of life. The goal of the Torah is order, not legislation or salvation. Sometimes order is even sustained by violating the stipulations, as Jesus frequently demonstrates concerning the Sabbath. Likewise, even “obeying” the commandments of the Torah did not result in the rich young ruler in Luke 18:18-23 embodying the covenant order. The Torah is a guide to what order looks like, not a checklist that can be followed to attain it. 

Changes in the Hellenistic Period 

It was only when Torah was adopted as legislation in the Hellenistic period that a community discussed the idea of keeping all the law as if it were legislative and comprehensive. As we have seen in our previous discussion, in both Mesopotamia and Israel, the only form of divine law is found in the decrees issued by the gods that maintain order in the cosmos. In contrast, the Greek concept was that law emanated from the gods in the sense that the divine realm was the source of rationality and reason, which in turn served as the foundation for an understanding of natural law. In their view, this law is universal and unchanging, and resulted from general revelation. 3 The model seen in the ANE fits the Torah data better. If that is the case, Torah can be considered neither divine legislation nor a manifestation of the inherent functioning of the world. This is important to recognize if we are interested in reading the text in accordance with its genre and context. Torah in its Old Testament context differs from Greek conceptions of the world order in that Torah is not based on the concept of natural law woven into the fabric of the cosmos. Torah differs from what we find in Hellenized Israel in that it is not legislation that has its source in divine, special revelation. Torah arises in the context of the culture of the ANE, and similarly is not law but instead represents an impressionistic description of the shape of the world order as desired by the gods. At the same time, Torah differs from the primary culture of the ANE in that it derives from a suzerainty relationship (covenant), not from a symbiotic relationship of mutual need. It is evident in the writings of Paul that viewpoints about the Old Testament Torah shifted dramatically over the time that passed between the testaments. That is expected because culture has changed and Paul has to deal with issues as they exist in his cultural river. 

The New Testament Understanding of Torah 

Many people who object to the idea of the Bible’s cultural embeddedness argue that the practice of saying different things to different cultures undermines the idea that a single God inspired the Bible. This objection is misguided because it assumes an overly simplistic understanding of how the Bible communicates. If it were the case that the Bible communicated by presenting a series of relatively simple, universally true factual propositions about life, the universe, and everything, then it would perhaps be legitimate to claim that a single speaking voice would require all those propositions to be more or less homogeneous in meaning. Many people in fact do believe that the Bible communicates in this way although that conception itself is deeply flawed. Effective communication does not consist of broadcasting a single message over and over like a parrot; rather, it involves a dynamic interaction with the intended audience to ensure their comprehension. One of the most basic elements of successful interaction is speaking in the audience’s own language; thus, the communication in the New Testament changes from Hebrew to Greek. Speakers, however, cannot assign any meanings they want to words if they expect to communicate effectively. Instead, they have to use words according to the meanings that the audience expects them to have. Communicating new ideas does not involve assigning new meanings to words; it involves combining existing ideas (using existing words) in new ways. Thus, even if speakers want to convey the same new idea in two different contexts/languages, they will have to use different existing ideas in order to communicate. An example might be helpful. In optics, the colors of lights can be changed by placing colored filters in front of them. If you have a yellow light and wish to change its color to white, you have to put a blue filter in front of it. On the other hand, if you have a purple light and wish to change its color to white, you have to put a green filter in front of it. Now, some people might argue that, in order to get the same color light, you should always use the same color filter, but that misunderstands how light works. The result you get is derived from an interaction between the element you choose to use (the filter) and the elements that you had to work with originally (the colored light). In the same way, saying that you must always use words with the same meaning in order to convey the same message misunderstands how language works. The message you convey is derived from a combination of the elements you choose to use (the words and phrases) and the elements you had to work with originally (the meanings those words are given by the intended audience in their cultural context). Of course, that assumes that every message in the Bible is intended to say more or less the same thing. If the Bible were God’s revelation on life, the universe, and everything—which we could argue does not change—then perhaps that would be the case. However, we have argued that the Bible is God’s revelation of himself. We could argue that God does not change either, but God is also complex;4 new revelation might be intended to reveal new aspects of God, as opposed to reiterating the same aspects. The divine personality is in fact so diverse that later theologians had to break it apart into three distinct personae (Greek prosopon; English “person”). If God reveals something new about himself, we would not expect it to simply duplicate the information that came before. Further, we have argued specifically that the Bible reveals God’s purposes, that is, what God is doing. God is not a machine doing only one thing over and over, and a single individual can do two different things without becoming two different people. To return to the metaphor of the lights, if you have a red light and want to make it yellow, you put a green filter in front of it. If you have a blue light and want to make it purple, you put a red filter in front of it. The fact that you wanted two different colors of lights—and of course used different filters to get them—does not therefore mean that there is more than one person (you) applying the filters. In this conception, God would begin by establishing and sustaining the world order; then, while still doing that, would do something new by establishing and sustaining the Israelite covenant; and then, while still doing both of those things, would do something else new by establishing and sustaining the New Covenant. The point is that the “unity of Scripture” does not mean that it says the same thing in the same way all the time. Instead, it means that all of Scripture describes the same God (as opposed to several different gods; see for example Marcion’s thought) and that all of it describes that God accurately. That is, it is not a mix of true theological fact and flawed human speculation. That in turn means that in order to gain full understanding of who that God is and what he is doing, we have to pay attention to all of Scripture in accordance to the particular way each part conveys its message. We cannot alter and distort parts of it in order to make its statements superficially homogeneous and thereby expect to come to any real understanding about God. When we look at the two testaments, then, we should understand that different issues may drive the respective discussions. The cultural river of the Greco-Roman period differs significantly from that of the ANE. The Old Testament, including the Torah, is embedded in the ancient cultural river. By the time we get to the New Testament, influences from the Persian cultural river and the Hellenistic one have led to the Greco-Roman period in which the New Testament is embedded. Just as we do not expect the Old Testament to anticipate the issues in our cultural river, we do not expect it to anticipate the perspectives of the Greco-Roman period. Furthermore, the New Testament writers were not trying to engage the ancient cultural river; they were dealing with their own. This is indeed what we find in the treatment of Torah (and New Testament nomos) as the writers address their respective cognitive environments. We can take both testaments seriously, but at the same time, we must recognize each for what it is. The New Testament does not instruct us on how we ought to interpret the Old Testament, though the New Testament authors have much to say about the significance of the Old Testament (as they understood it in their time) for the issues they address. In order to take the New Testament seriously, we need to understand what it does say in its own cultural and literary context. In previous chapters we have already presented a view of the Torah and its role in the Old Testament and suggested that moral formation was not its literary-theological objective. A next step is to explore whether Paul presents the law (nomos) as it was understood in his time as having the function of providing moral formation. Although Paul at times shows a general interest in moral behavior in the churches, we would contend that he does not view the Torah as providing the foundation for that. A number of passages could be cited, but by all accounts one of the most important references is Galatians 3:24, where Paul refers to the law as paidagōgos (NIV: “guardian”). 5 Modern scholars agree that the Greek term is not to be understood according to its traditional translation as a “tutor” that would lead people to Christ; rather, it should be understood as something more like “custodian” or “babysitter.”6 The role in Greek culture for the person so designated has been recognized as not primarily educational but one in which the appointed individual supervises mundane aspects of life like a nanny or au pair. Although in Greek culture the “pedagogues” were sometimes rather crude or harsh, their job was to protect and to guide through the daily routines of life. They did not have educational objectives, suggesting that Paul did not see the pedagogue as providing training in moral law. Instead, like the Torah, the pedagogue ensured that the subject remained safe and participated in the routines that were appropriate to the subject’s status and identity. It would not matter if Paul emphasized a different function for the Torah than could be found in an Old Testament context, but this one (possibly incidentally) seems remarkably close to the role of Torah in the life of Israel. Consequently, even though Jesus and Paul were willing to engage in moral instruction, they did not identify the Old Testament Torah as having that role.

Furthermore, we contend that neither Paul nor even Jesus provides hermeneutical models from which we can infer a methodology that can then be applied consistently to arrive at the authoritative message of Old Testament texts that we are interpreting. The New Testament authors use the methods of their day, but their use of them does not validate them. 7 This is the same stance that we take on numerous other issues. 

• The New Testament use of Hellenistic traditions and literature does not validate those literatures (e.g., Paul quoting Stoic philosophers in Acts 17:28; Peter referencing 1 Enoch in 2 Pet 2:4). 

• The New Testament author’s choice to quote from one version (say, the Septuagint) rather than another version (say, what would become the Masoretic tradition) does not validate a textcritical decision. 

• The New Testament author’s interpretation of a passage in the Old Testament does not attempt to offer an analysis of the Old Testament author’s intention or the exegetical meaning of the Old Testament context (e.g., Jn 10:34 treatment of Ps 82:6; Zech 13:7 in Mt 26:31). 

• The New Testament author’s identification of fulfillment does not show us the original message of the prophet (e.g., Hos 11:1 in Mt 2:15). 

• The New Testament author’s views of Christ in the Old Testament cannot be used as license for us to find Christ wherever we want (e.g., in the wrestling angel in Gen 32; Arius found him in Prov 8 and used that as a basis for the idea that Jesus was only adopted as the Son of God). 

The reason that we cannot imitate the methods of the New Testament authors in these areas is because there are insufficient controls to assure the results. In the end, this is because the interpretations of the New Testament authors do not derive from hermeneutics. This is something that we need to unpack. The authority of Paul’s statements is derived not from his hermeneutics but from his apostolic inspiration. Today, we are obligated to use hermeneutical principles to validate our interpretations because we are not inspired. Paul’s authority derived from his apostolic status, but in our case whatever authority we have derives from the integrity of our method. Sound hermeneutical principles are essential to place necessary restrictions on us as interpreters because we do not have authority. If we were all inspired, we would not need hermeneutics. What makes the New Testament authors different from us is that they are inspired; we are not. Consequently, we should never conclude that we could reproduce their methodology; the authority of their message is vouchsafed from their inspiration no matter how sound their methodology may or may not be. That is to say, we cannot confidently transfer their methods and be assured of guaranteed results. When we try to derive methodological principles and apply them to texts on our own, we have no means of validating whether we have made legitimate use of the method in our extension of the principle. Without controls, there can be no authority. 8 The history of interpretation is filled with examples of interpreters and methods that have ranged out of control and resulted in fanciful and destructive readings. Therefore, just because Paul or Jesus derived a principle from the Torah and extended it to a related situation, we are not therefore justified in attempting to do the same since we do not possess the authority they had. Our accountability is to the authors of Scripture since they were the instruments for conveying God’s revelation. This means that we are accountable to an Old Testament author’s intention in context. We are also accountable to a New Testament author’s intention in context. When the New Testament authors are interpreting the Old Testament, we accept the authority of that interpretation, but we cannot repeat the way that they derived it any more than we can repeat how the Old Testament authors got their messages. We validate those messages because we have accepted their authority, not because we can legitimate their method. The biblical text never points to a method of interpretation and then instructs us to go and do likewise. So, for example, on the road to Emmaus, Jesus “explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself ” (Lk 24:27). Luke does not say that he told them how to do the same thing or exhorted them to do so. In this sense, we could say that the text does not offer us hermeneutical principles any more than it offers us cosmic geography. Likewise, regarding ethical principles, we can observe the principles employed, but that does not mean that they are universal principles. We will discuss this further in proposition nineteen.

Proposition 21: The Ancient Israelites Would Not Have Understood the Torah as Providing Divine Moral Instruction

If the Torah cannot be divided so as to isolate a moral segment (see proposition sixteen), we must either conclude that its entire focus is moral in nature, which very few interpreters consider seriously, or that in the literary function of the Torah as a whole, morality is simply not its focus. We will maintain the latter and, as is our general procedure, will begin by getting a sense of the ancient Near Eastern (ANE) cultural river. We will begin with an examination of how ancient people thought about norms of behavior and whether those ideas have a divine foundation in the ANE. We will then be able to compare that to what we find in the Old Testament. This will help us to think about morality in an Old Testament context instead of letting the New Testament, Christian theology, or modern philosophical ideas drive the discussion. 

The Ancient Near Eastern Cultural River 

Every culture has specific standards of acceptable behavior as well as some general conception of what people ought or ought not to do, no matter how much various cultures may disagree and regardless of how they have arrived at their understanding. To attempt to grasp the ways people thought in the ANE, we begin by assessing the ancient perception of what we call “morality” in light of kingship. This is not an intuitive association for moderns, but it represents well the ANE cultural river that was grounded in community identity. Morality in the ANE, to the extent that the idea existed, is communal in nature rather than individual. The king was the link between heaven and earth and established order in society. That order would result in content gods and people. Beate Pongratz-Leisten makes the observation that “any violation of the normative value system that occurs between individuals was considered to affect the entire collective and the divine world.”1 This corporate mentality is utterly foreign to those of us accustomed to a highly individualistic way of thinking. In the ANE, a well-ordered society, rather than a moral system of behavior, was the hallmark of civilized life. Despite having over a million cuneiform texts from which to work, we see little to suggest that morality as we think of it was a religious or even cultural virtue. 2 This is sufficient to warn us that we cannot simply assume that people in the ancient world thought about morality in the same ways that we do today.

At the same time, we can observe that they took the need for proper behavior seriously. This is evident from a variety of texts, one of the most important being the Shurpu incantations: 

He us[ed] an untrue balance, (but) [did not us]e [the true balance], he took money that was not due to him, (but) [did not ta]ke mo[ney due to him], he disinherited the legitimated son (and) [did not est]ablish (in his rights) the le[gitimate] son, he set up an untrue boundary, (but) did not set up the [tr]ue bound[ary], he removed mark, frontier, and boundary. He entered his neighbor’s house, had intercourse with his neighbor’s wife, shed his neighbor’s blood, put on [var.: took away] his neighbor’s clothes, (and) did not clothe a young man when he was naked. He ousted a well-to-do young man from his family, scattered a gathered clan. His mouth is straight, (but) his heart is untrue, (when) his mouth (says) “yes,” his heart (says) “no,” altogether he spoke untrue word. He who is ... , shakes and trembles (of rage), destroys, expels, drives to flight, accuses and convicts, spreads gossip, wrongs, robs and incites to rob, sets his hand to evil. His mouth is ... lying, his lips confused and violent, who knows improper things, has learned unseemly things, who has taken his stand with wickedness, transgressed the borderline of right, committed things that are not proper, set his hand to sorcery and witchcraft. Because of the evil taboo he has eaten, because of the many transgressions he committed, because of the assembly he divided, because of the tightly united company he dispersed, because of all the contempt for the god and goddess, because he promised in heart and by mouth but did not give, omitted the name of his god in his incense offering, made the purifications, (then) complained and withheld (it), ... , saved something (for the gods, but) ate it. After he behaved arrogantly, he started to pray, disarranged the altar that had been prepared, made his god and his goddess angry with himself, standing up in the assembly, said inadequate words. He trampled in bloodshed, he used to follow wherever blood was shed, he a[te] what was taboo in his city, he betrayed the affairs of his city, he gave his city a bad reputation. 3 

The Shurpu incantation series was used as a remedy for misfortune that was considered the result of evil forces (human or demonic) at work. It was intended to provide an extensive list of possible offenses that might just happen to address an offense of which the gods actually considered the sufferer guilty (one could only guess). An offended god would be inclined to neglect a person, leaving that one vulnerable to evil forces. The ritual connected to these incantations was conducted by two specialized personnel: a priest and an incantation expert. The line items address activities that were viewed as potentially offensive to the gods. Both its incompleteness regarding moral categories and its inclusion of many behaviors that are not moral in nature indicate that morality is not its focus. The gods expected what we might call moral behavior only secondarily as part of a system of order or disorder (see proposition seven). Even a casual reader of this list will notice that, not unlike the Torah, it includes offenses against individuals, against the community, and against the gods. It is self-evident that they are not exclusively in the area that we would classify as ethical or moral. 4 

The important question, then, is not whether any of the listed behaviors can be construed as in the moral/ethical realm but whether the literature can be interpreted as intentionally addressing anything akin to what we call moral law. Moral law is generally considered a way to talk about rules people ought to obey (either in general5 or by means of a specific list). Some believe that it derives from God, or perhaps from the character of God (divine law) while others believe it reflects a common sense of right behavior that is inherent in people or even more broadly in the operations of the world (natural law). 6 Some blend the two together. 7 These are the categories that result from ways of thinking that are anachronistic to the Torah. We cannot trust this later classification system to shed light on the ancient world. 

The way of thinking that we have described in the ANE does not consider law to be divine. 8 The people of the ANE believed that the aspects of their society that comprised law (e.g., justice, wisdom) were woven into the fabric of the cosmos, but not by the gods. They are expressed by the Sumerian term me, roughly translated “control attributes.” Though these laws did not have their origins in the gods, they were thought to be administered by the gods through decrees. 9 In the ANE there was no special revelation (outside of the very limited answers to oracular questions in the divinatory practice of extispicy), and the gods did not legislate their will for society. The control attributes ranged across the boundaries of cosmos and society (as what we call natural law also does), and they could be perceived by gods, kings, and people (so, loosely corresponding to what we would call natural or general revelation). There is a coercive will of the king that is expressed in decrees, to be sure, but not in a formal body of legislation. 

When we turn to Israel, however, Yahweh is positioned as the king, and like the kings in Mesopotamia he establishes order. Nevertheless, everyone in the ancient world understood that order was not maintained by following a rigid set of rules. Yahweh’s combined role of God and King does not serve to equate his decrees (for order in the human world or loyalty of a vassal) with cosmic control attributes applicable to all people everywhere and apprehensible through general revelation as natural law. We should not conflate divine and royal functions simply because they are being performed by the same person. 

In conclusion, we can now return to the claim made in the proposition. The designation “moral” would not be a fitting description since the Torah includes so much that cannot be associated with morality. 10 Literarily, then, the Torah must be considered to have a focus that is not moral in nature (though we undoubtedly could find material that overlaps with people’s moral sensibilities). It includes divine instruction (as per the association with Wisdom previously established), and moral instruction would be appropriately involved, but no systematic or universal moral system is found there. 

Israelites being faithful to Torah would mean maintaining a particular state of order in all aspects of their society. It would be characterized by what we call “moral behavior” suitable to their ancient world, their covenant relationship with God, and their responsibilities as hosts to the presence of God. But Torah only conveys that morality incidentally and partially. So, Torah is “divine”—it has a divine source. Torah is instruction—in the very nature of the word and in the Wisdom orientation of the material. But Torah cannot be considered moral because that is too restrictive a term to describe how it functions. Instead, the Torah is instruction, and the expected response is comprehension of the nature of the order it describes (“you will know”) rather than a response of obedience to the specific rules it reportedly dictates (“you ought”).

New Testament View of Torah as Divine Instruction 

Based on the evidence we have presented concerning the Old Testament perspective, neither the Torah nor any segment of it should be considered moral law since (1) the Torah cannot be segmented if it is read in the context of either testament, (2) morality is not its focus, and (3) it is not legislative. It was not moral law for the Israelites and therefore cannot stand as moral law for us today (if we find the text’s authority in its authors’ intentions). Taking the Torah seriously in its Old Testament context eliminates the idea that we should read it as a moral treatise. As has been proposed in previous chapters (see propositions four and five), the Torah in its Old Testament context should be viewed as instruction for maintaining God’s favor by reflecting his desired reputation through the order of the nation of Israel, not legislation or rules for morality. However, we have also argued that the New Testament understands the Torah differently from the way the Old Testament does (see proposition fifteen). Therefore, it is theoretically possible that the Torah, as the Second Temple period understood it11 (as opposed to the form that appears in the Old Testament), is being established by the New Testament as a basis for divine moral law going forward. This is worth some examination. 

To begin the discussion, let’s return to the story of Jesus and the rich young ruler. Jesus indicated that, in this case, for the young man to fulfill what Torah asked of him he should sell all that he had and give the proceeds to the poor. It has not been in the practice of the church to believe that Jesus was saying that all who want to take the Torah seriously should feel obliged to go and sell all that they have and give to the poor. That was an application to this young man’s case. Such an idea is not explicitly stated in the Torah (either in the Hebrew Bible or in the Second Temple extrapolations from it), and though Jesus expressed it, it has not been picked up as a moral principle that all should follow. We therefore see that there is precedent for recognizing a relative aspect to the Torah and its application. 

As we examine the remainder of Jesus’ use of Torah, we find that he takes it seriously, that he draws application from it, and that he bases some of his teaching on it (notably the Sermon on the Mount, which literarily recapitulates Moses giving the Torah to Israel). Nevertheless, he does not attempt to build a moral system on it or derive a moral system from it. In the teaching of Jesus, Torah is to be fulfilled, not established as legislation. By that, Jesus means that he, as Israel’s king (Messiah), fills the role of the faithful regent to the divine sovereign as Israel’s previous kings did not. Because the regent is faithful and his people likewise follow him in faithful execution of order (now as the concept is understood in the Greco-Roman world, not according to the ANE anymore, as illustrated especially throughout the Epistles), God’s favor is restored to the regent and his people, who are now represented by the church, the true remnant of Israel. 

When Paul wants to encourage morality, he does not do so from the Torah. Instead, he builds a case from logic—both philosophical and theological (see Rom 2). Paul’s approach to the question reflects the common way of thinking in the Greco-Roman world. The New Testament authors in general encourage Christians to be paragons of Greco-Roman order (explicitly in Titus 2:10). The early Christian apologists relied heavily on this idea as they argued that the Christians were exemplary citizens unjustly persecuted, and the book of Acts consistently represents Paul as a law-abiding Roman citizen in contrast to his unruly and pernicious accusers. But the specific behaviors that are advocated are all drawn from Greco-Roman cultural expectations, not from the details of the Torah. The objective of the New Testament instructions is the same as that of the Torah—preserve the ideal of order in one’s own time—but it does indicate that even the New Testament authors did not see the Torah as the basis by which to define what ideal order in their time should consist of. Based on these observations, we would contend that the Torah in particular, and perhaps even the entire Bible in general, does not have the literarytheological purpose or function of revealing a moral system. As indicated above, the Old Testament does not use Torah that way, and we seek in vain for the New Testament to do so.