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.
