Law

English 'law' is the wrong first word for this material. The Hebrew is torah, from a root meaning to point or direct, and it means instruction or teaching. Hebrew has other words for the narrower senses: mishpat for a judgment or case ruling, choq for a statute, mitzvah for a command, edut for a testimony. Psalm 119 rings the changes on all of them. When English flattens the set into 'law', it imports a courtroom and a statute book into a text that is often closer to a father instructing a household.

The second thing to notice is where the legal material sits. It is not published as a separate volume. It is embedded in a story, and the story is load-bearing. Exodus 20 opens not with a command but with a self-identification and a rescue: 'I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.' The imperatives arrive after the indicative. This is not a general moral code addressed to humanity in the abstract; it is the stipulation section of a relationship with a people who have already been carried out of a place.

That structure is recognisable. George Mendenhall argued in Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East (1955) that the covenant material in Exodus and especially Deuteronomy follows the shape of second millennium Hittite suzerainty treaties: a preamble identifying the great king, a historical prologue recounting what he has done for the vassal, stipulations, provision for the document's deposit and public reading, witnesses, and then blessings and curses. Deuteronomy runs through that sequence closely enough that the parallel is now standard in the commentaries, though scholars continue to argue about the date of the parallel and whether later Assyrian treaty forms fit some texts better. What the parallel establishes for our purposes is genre: these are covenant documents, and the commands in them are the terms of a bond rather than a freestanding ethical system.

Finally, the scale. The rabbinic tradition counts 613 commandments in the Torah, a figure attributed to Rabbi Simlai in the Babylonian Talmud at Makkot 23b. The material comes in four main blocks: the Decalogue, the collection usually called the Book of the Covenant in Exodus 20:22 to 23:33, the Holiness Code in Leviticus 17 to 26, and the Deuteronomic laws in Deuteronomy 12 to 26. These blocks overlap and sometimes differ from one another in detail, which is itself an interpretive question worth knowing exists before someone drops it on you.

Albrecht Alt, in a 1934 study usually cited in English as The Origins of Israelite Law, distinguished two basic forms in the legal material, and the distinction has held up. It is the single most useful technical thing in this lesson.

Apodictic law is unconditional. 'You shall not murder.' 'You shall not commit adultery.' Second person, direct address, no case, no penalty attached, no conditions. It draws a boundary and leaves the enforcement unstated. The Decalogue is almost entirely apodictic, and so are the great summary commands: love the LORD your God with all your heart, love your neighbour as yourself.

Casuistic law is case law. It opens with a condition and supplies a ruling, usually with sub-cases. Exodus 21:12-14 is a clean specimen. 'Whoever strikes and kills a man must surely be put to death.' Then the sub-cases: 'If, however, he did not lie in wait, but God allowed it to happen, then I will appoint for you a place where he may flee. But if a man schemes and acts willfully against his neighbor to kill him, you must take him away from My altar to be put to death.' In three verses you have homicide, what we would call manslaughter, and premeditated murder, distinguished by intent, with different outcomes and a place of refuge for the one who did not plan it.

The practical payoff is this. Apodictic law tells you what the covenant community must be. Casuistic law tells you how judges handled the collisions that occur when people are not it. An apodictic command generalises easily across cultures because it is stated without circumstances. A casuistic ruling is welded to circumstances, and generalising it requires you to identify the principle at work in the ruling, which is a judgment call and can be done badly. That is why the same interpreter can be confident about 'you shall not steal' and uncertain about what to do with the rules for an ox that has been warned about.

One more feature, and it turns out to be distinctive. Biblical law often attaches a reason. 'You must not exploit or oppress a foreign resident, for you yourselves were foreigners in the land of Egypt' (Exodus 22:21). Berend Gemser drew attention to these motive clauses in a 1953 study, and the observation has stood: they are far more frequent in biblical law than in the Mesopotamian collections, and they are frequently theological or historical rather than practical. A law that tells you why is doing something a statute does not have to do. It is teaching.

Israel's legal material has relatives. The oldest surviving collection is credited to Ur-Nammu of Ur, around 2100 BC; then the laws of Lipit-Ishtar, the Laws of Eshnunna, the great stele of Hammurabi of Babylon from around 1750 BC with its roughly 282 provisions, and later the Hittite Laws and the Middle Assyrian Laws. Hammurabi's stele was recovered at Susa by the French expedition under Jacques de Morgan in 1901 and published by Jean-Vincent Scheil the following year, and its discovery reset the study of biblical law overnight. The standard English collection today is Martha Roth's Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor.

Work the goring ox, because both traditions have it and the comparison is exact enough to be useful. Exodus 21:28-29: 'If an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox must surely be stoned, and its meat must not be eaten. But the owner of the ox shall not be held responsible. But if the ox has a habit of goring, and its owner has been warned yet does not restrain it, and it kills a man or woman, then the ox must be stoned and its owner must also be put to death.' Hammurabi 250 to 252 handles the same two situations: an ox that gores in the street with no prior history leaves no claim, while an owner whose ox was known to be a gorer and who failed to control it pays a fixed sum, which Martha Roth's translation gives as 30 shekels of silver for a free man's death and 20 shekels if the victim was a slave. Some editions convert these to half a mina and a third of a mina, so do not be thrown if the figures look different; they are the same amounts.

So: the same case, the same distinction between first offence and negligence after warning, and two different resolutions. In Hammurabi the negligent owner writes a cheque, and the size of the cheque depends on who died. In Exodus the negligent owner is himself liable to death, which says that a human life is not the sort of thing that can be settled by a payment. Joshua Berman, in Created Equal (2008), builds a larger argument on differences of this kind, holding that biblical law embodies a comparatively egalitarian social vision against the steeply stratified world of its neighbours.

Now be honest about the limits of that contrast, because a lesson that oversells it is training students to be embarrassed later. Exodus 21:30 immediately allows a ransom in place of the owner's death, 'he may redeem his life by paying the full amount demanded of him', which softens the absolute reading. And Exodus 21:32 says that if the ox gores a manservant or maidservant, the owner pays the servant's master thirty shekels of silver and the ox is stoned. Biblical law, in this very passage, distinguishes a free person from a slave and puts a price on the latter. The difference from Hammurabi is real and it is not total, and the accurate summary is that biblical law shares the legal culture of its world and pushes against parts of it.

The deepest point of the comparison, though, is about genre, and it cuts against a common assumption. In 1960 F. R. Kraus published an essay asking what the Code of Hammurabi actually was, and pointed out that among the thousands of surviving Mesopotamian court records, verdicts do not cite the code. Jean Bottéro developed the argument, treating the collection as a work of scribal scholarship cast in the form of a list. Raymond Westbrook, who spent a career in these texts, accepted that the collections were not legislation promulgated for courts to apply and argued that they nonetheless recorded and systematised actual legal practice; a minority of scholars still defends a more directly legislative function. Michael LeFebvre extended the question to Israel in Collections, Codes, and Torah (2006), arguing that Israel's written law also functioned as covenant testimony rather than as a statute book. If that is broadly right, then reading Exodus 21 as though it were a criminal code awaiting enforcement is a genre error of exactly the kind this module is about, and the material is better read as instruction in what justice looks like, given in the form of worked cases.

Here the church is genuinely divided, and has been since the second century. Everyone agrees on the two ends. Nobody argues that Christians should resume animal sacrifice, and nobody argues that the prohibition of murder has lapsed. The whole fight is over the mechanism and over everything in between.

The threefold division. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae at I-II question 99, distinguished the moral, ceremonial and judicial precepts of the old law. Calvin uses the distinction in the Institutes, and the Westminster Confession states it formally in chapter 19: the ceremonial laws are abrogated, the judicial laws expired with the state of that people except as their general equity requires, and the moral law continues to bind. The strongest form of the case is not that the Torah labels its own categories but that the New Testament itself treats different bodies of command differently. Hebrews argues the sacrificial system to its end. Mark 7 and Acts 10 unsettle the food laws. And the Decalogue's commands reappear as binding throughout the epistles. Critics answer that the division is nowhere marked in the text, pointing to Leviticus 19, which runs from loving your neighbour in verse 18 to crossbreeding livestock and mixed cloth in verse 19 with nothing between them but 'I am the LORD' and 'You are to keep My statutes'; they add that a category labelled moral is exposed to being filled with whatever the interpreter already keeps. Philip Ross replies at book length in From the Finger of God (2010) that the division is not a grid laid over the Torah but a summary of the way the New Testament handles it, and that every rival position has to account for the same differential treatment by some means of its own.

One text sits across this whole argument, and every position has to say something about it. Deuteronomy 25:4 forbids muzzling an ox as it treads out the grain, which is agricultural case law on anybody's sorting, and Paul quotes it in 1 Corinthians 9:9-10 as bearing directly on the support of gospel workers, asking, 'Is it about oxen that God is concerned?' Defenders of the threefold division read this as the general equity of a judicial law, the abiding principle the case was protecting, which is what the Westminster formula expressly provides for. Douglas Moo reads it instead as evidence that Paul treats the Mosaic law as a single covenantal unit which has reached its goal in Christ and which he can therefore bring to bear as a whole. Both are reading the same two verses, and the disagreement is about the mechanism rather than about whether the verse applies.

Theonomy. Rousas John Rushdoony in The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) and Greg Bahnsen in Theonomy in Christian Ethics (1977) argue that the case laws, including their penalties, remain binding on civil governments unless the New Testament explicitly sets them aside. The strongest form of the argument is a challenge rather than a programme: if God's law revealed the standard of public justice for Israel, on what basis does a modern state get a different standard, and where does scripture authorise the church to decide which penalties have lapsed? Bahnsen appeals to Matthew 5:17-19 and to the unchanging character of God. Critics answer that Israel was a covenant nation under a theocratic arrangement that no modern state occupies, and that the New Testament's treatment of the civil sword in Romans 13 does not presuppose Mosaic penology. Theonomists reply that this concedes their premise, since it grants that the penalties were just when God gave them, and then still has to name the authority by which they were repealed; and they press the further question of what a state's law is to be grounded in once revelation is set aside as a source for it.

Lutheran law and gospel. Luther distinguished two uses of the law, a civil use that restrains the wicked and a theological use that convicts the conscience, and Lutheran confession holds that the law always accuses, lex semper accusat. On this reading the primary function of the Torah for a Christian is to drive you to Christ, and treating it as a programme for sanctified living confuses the two words that God speaks. The strength of the position is that it takes seriously how Paul actually argues in Romans 7 and Galatians 3, where the law's effect is to expose sin and to shut up every mouth. Critics answer that the New Testament directs believers by the law and does not only accuse them with it, pointing to Ephesians 6:2, where Paul grounds the command to honour parents by quoting the fifth commandment with its promise, and to Psalm 119's delight in the torah, which is hard to hear as an accusation. Lutherans reply that the law in such passages is doing its proper work of exposing and directing, that the new obedience is produced by the gospel rather than by the law's pressure, and that Article VI of the Formula of Concord already provides for preaching the law to the regenerate. Calvin agreed with the first two uses and added a third, the tertius usus legis, in which the law guides and stirs the believer who is already justified; the Reformed tradition has generally treated that third use as the law's chief use for a Christian, and this difference between the two traditions is old, sharp and not resolved.

New Covenant theology. Tom Wells and Fred Zaspel set this out in New Covenant Theology (2002). The nearest thing to a careful academic statement is Douglas Moo's essay in the volume published in 1993 as The Law, the Gospel, and the Modern Christian: Five Views and reissued in 1996 as Five Views on Law and Gospel. Note that his essay there is titled a modified Lutheran view and that he does not present himself as a New Covenant theologian, so read him as a near neighbour of this position rather than a spokesman for it. The claim is that the Mosaic covenant as a covenant has ended, that the law of Christ is the Christian's binding standard, and that a Mosaic command is binding for a Christian where and because it is restated or reaffirmed in the new covenant. At its strongest this is not antinomianism; it typically raises the standard, as the Sermon on the Mount does, and it gives a clean account of why nine of the ten commandments are repeated in the epistles and the sabbath command is handled differently. Critics answer that this makes the ethical continuity of scripture depend on the accident of what the apostles happened to mention, and that it struggles to explain the confidence with which the New Testament writers treat the Torah as instruction for the church. Its defenders reply that the apostles do not sample the Torah at random but restate it amply enough to govern a whole life, that treating a covenant as a unit is how the covenant itself asks to be treated, and that their account explains the different handling of the sabbath without special pleading.

Two more positions belong in an honest survey. Walter Kaiser has argued for what he calls the law as gracious guidance, holding that the moral core of the Torah abides and that the specific cases are applications of abiding principles which can be identified by asking what each case was protecting. Dispensational writers such as Wayne Strickland argue that the Mosaic law was given to Israel for a definite administration which has ended, so that the Christian's relation to it is indirect. Beyond the Protestant field, Catholic moral theology reads the Torah in the frame of natural law and divine positive law, and Messianic Jewish and Torah-observant readings argue that Jewish believers in Jesus remain obligated to the commandments in a way gentile believers are not, which is a live question in the exegesis of Acts 15 and 21.

What is settled, then, and what is not. Settled: the Torah is not the ground of anyone's acceptance with God; the sacrificial system is fulfilled and finished in Christ; the commands against murder, theft, adultery and covetousness bind Christians, which no position in this survey disputes, although they ground it differently, some in an abiding moral law, some in the law of Christ, some in apostolic restatement. Not settled: whether the Mosaic law is a divisible collection or an indivisible covenant unit; whether the case laws still speak to civil government and how; whether the third use of the law is the law's chief use for a believer or a category mistake; and by what method you decide that a given command was culture-bound. If you teach this material, teach the map. A student who can state these positions accurately and say which one their own church holds and why is in a far better place than a student who has only ever been handed one and told it is obvious.