In the first two essays in this series, I addressed the question of how the nations would learn about Israel’s Torah, in the second essay especially emphasizing the aesthetic aspects of Israel’s testimony. For we naturally wonder: How would people in Mesopotamia or Egypt, not to mention the rest of the world, know anything about Torah? In the first essays, I have given a partial answer. What I have not yet addressed is the righteousness of Torah. To that we turn.
I think the issue here is more subtle. Please recall two things: 1) In these essays I am speaking of how Torah was designed to work, not how Israel actually lived; 2) the primary ways that Torah would be manifest to the peoples of the ancient world — at least in the first few hundred years until the time of David and Solomon — would have been through merchants traveling through the land. It is doubtful that scribes from Mesopotamia and Egypt would be pouring over the text of Deuteronomy to discover whether or not Yahweh’s Torah was more righteous than the law codes of their nations.1
Setting aside for now the question of how they might discover the profound differences between Israel’s righteous Torah and the laws of the nations, it is worthwhile to observe the great gap between them.
First, a perusal of “The Laws of Ur-Nammu,” as we know them — which is very partial — reveals for example that if a man sleeps with the wife of another man, only the woman is punished!
“4: (222-231 = B § i ) . If the wife of a man, by employing her charms, followed after another man and he slept with her, they (i.e., the authorities) shall slay that woman, but that male (i.e., the other man) shall be set free.”2
The fact that only the woman is punished, but not the man, strikes us as unjust and we note the contrast with Biblical Torah which punishes both of them, but apparently also gives the offended husband the right to forgive his wife — which would entail the forgiveness of the offending man as well.3 In a case like this, Biblical Torah is obviously much more just, but would ancient people perceive this — which would mean, primarily ancient men?
In the Sumerian Laws we have this example: “8: If (a man) deflowered the daughter of a free citizen in the street, her father and her mother having known (that she was in the street) but the man who deflowered her denied that he knew (her to be of the free-citizen class), and, standing at the temple gate, swore an oath (to this effect, he shall be freed).”4 What is notable here is the fact that whether or not the daughter was a free citizen is a key to the law. By outstanding contrast, in Israel, there was to be one law for everyone, no distinction between social class or even race and nationality.
Exod 12:49 There shall be one law for the native and for the stranger who sojourns among you.” (Exodus 12:49)
“One law and one rule shall be for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you.” (Numbers 15:16)
How very unlike “The Edict of Ammisaduqa,” which clearly distinguishes different treatment according to whether people are Akkadian or Amorite!5
The most famous ancient law is that of Hammurabi. And no one can deny that there are indeed superficial similarities between the law of Hammurabi and the Torah of Moses. If we take the Biblical history as truth, this is actually what we would expect since all the ancient nations descended from Noah, the man who was righteous before Yahweh (Genesis 6:8-9).
But David Wright argues that Israel’s Torah came from the Laws of Hammurabi,6 in spite of the fact that it is clear — even in Wright’s exposition — that the Laws of Hammurabi presuppose distinctions in law based upon social status, fundamentally contrary to Moses.
For example, Wright points out: “Such a sequence would be similar to other actual laws in LH that portray alternatives based on gradations of social status.”7
In Israel, not only distinctions in social status, but, as I pointed out above, distinctions in nationality, too, were not relevant, or, to be exact, forbidden. This and other aspects of Israel’s Torah were far superior to the laws of other ancient societies — and, in various respects, our modern laws, too.
But again, to return to the previous question: how would anyone know?
The best answer I can imagine brings us back to the point of my previous essay: the Sabbath and the narrative associated with it.
Not many merchants traveling through Israel for 10 or 20 days will be involved in lawsuits in which they would note that Israelite judges treat them fairly — though that is indeed commanded by Torah. Rather, they will be confronted with the frustrating restrictions on their trade — Sabbath law — and wonder and ask what these Israelite people could possibly be thinking by restricting trade one day in seven! Here is where the rubber would meet the road because the foreigner, just like everyone else, would be forced to submit to the no-work Sabbath while he was in Israel. One law for everyone would be “visible” at this point.
Having been questioned by a merchant who was not in a restful mood, a godly Israelite, in response, would tell the story of the Exodus and Sinai, and at that point have the opportunity, if he understood well enough, to elaborate on the differences between Israel’s Torah and the laws of the other Ancient Near Eastern nations. All of this, of course, would be grounded in a fundamentally different understanding of the creation of the world. Contrary to the gods of the nations, Yahweh is the only God who seeks to give rest to His people!
The important point here is, I think, that a godly Israelite would be telling stories: the story of creation — total harmony versus the chaos of the pagan stories — the story of Abraham, the story of Exodus, the story of Sinai and Yahweh’s gift of the loving Torah. Testimony means story, narrative. The godly Israelite would have these stories engraved in his heart and would have instructed his children to be the same (Deuteronomy 6:4-9).
More than anything else, it would be in Israel’s stories that an ancient traveler could begin to note the differences between Israel and her neighbors. Equality before law — a Biblical mandate — was grounded in the story of creation. Innocent until proven guilty, too, though perhaps less clearly, was grounded on the creation-fall narrative. After all, Yahweh-God did not punish Adam and Eve until after a trial in which the accused had full opportunity to offer defense.
The godly Israelite from the time of Joshua to Solomon — or any other time — would have a story to tell, a testimony of the Creator and Redeemer Yahweh’s righteous Torah, unique among all the nations of the world.
We also have a story — the story of Jesus. However much atheists and other non-Christians hate Christian people, God’s church, and the Bible, it is hard for them to speak against Jesus. True, they try to reinvent Him after their own image, so that the story of Jesus becomes the story of a Jesus who is like the Buddha, preaching nothing but peace and love (which, of course, is not like the historical Buddha either, though we know little of him), or like John Lennon, with Jesus singing “Imagine” instead of preaching the Sermon on the Mount.
Still, our story is the compellingly beautiful story of the man from Nazareth. We can tell it like it is recorded in the Gospels because there has never been anyone like Him in all of world history. Whatever we are asked, our answer must be the story of Jesus. He Himself is our testimony.
Ralph Smith is pastor of Mitaka Evangelical Church.
- But I suspect ancient scribes — the intellectuals of their societies — were not lacking in curiosity. Who knows what they might have read. ↩︎
- Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relation to the Old Testament, ed. by James B. Pritchard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 524. ↩︎
- See: James B. Jordan, The Law of the Covenant: An Exposition of Exodus 21-23 (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1984), pp. 148-49. Also, Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 303-308. ↩︎
- Ibid., p. 526. ↩︎
- Ibid., p. 526-528. ↩︎
- “This study proposes a profoundly new understanding of the composition and nature of the Covenant Code (Exodus 20:23–23:19). 1 It contends that this law collection, the pinnacle of the revelation at Mount Sinai according to the story of Exodus 19–24, is directly, primarily, and throughout dependent upon the Laws of Hammurabi. The biblical text imitated the structure of this Akkadian text and drew upon its content to create the central casuistic laws of Exodus 21:2–22:19, as well as the outer sections of apodictic law in Exodus 20:23–26 (along with the introduction of 21:1) and 22:20–23:19. 2 This primary use of the Laws of Hammurabi was supplemented with the occasional use of material from other cuneiform law collections and from native Israelite-Judean sources and traditions. The time for this textual borrowing was most likely during the Neo-Assyrian period, specifically sometime between 740 and 640 BCE, when Mesopotamia exerted strong and relatively continuous political control and cultural sway over the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and a time when the Laws of Hammurabi were actively copied in Mesopotamia as a literary-canonical text.” From David P. Wright, Inventing God’s Law: How the Covenant Code of the Bible Used and Revised the Laws of Hammurabi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 3. Wright’s view is not common. ↩︎
- Ibid., pp. 143-44. Note that Wright’s attempt to defend his thesis accidentally shows that Israel’s Torah is actually unique. ↩︎