Introduction
In our previous look at the development of what became known as the “Law of Moses” we postulated that it began as not much more than the moral Decalogue of the “Moses Scroll” (MS) that, we’re told, was spoken to Moses at Moab, and gradually, over time, grew into what we know today as the Bible’s Pentateuch – its first five books.
Now the question we’ll ask is: “What was ‘the Law of Moses’ to Jesus?” In other words, when Jesus thought that phrase or was asked some question about it, what “law” was called to His mind? You may think that a strange question. After all, didn’t we just establish that to Israel at the turn of the millennium, the “Law of Moses” was considered to be the entire Pentateuch? Why would Jesus see it any differently?
I think the case can be made that Jesus saw it completely differently than the Pentateuch, not least because (if you’re a Christian like me) He authored the original. As Christians, we should at least presume that at the very least, the identity known as Christ was intimately familiar with the thoughts and actions of the identity said to have given Moses His Law at Moab.
We’ll see if we can find the “data” in the Biblical texts in which Jesus quotes from, or makes reference to this Law that can shed light on this question.
Out of Scope
The traditional debate when discussing Jesus and the Law revolves around how Jesus saw Himself vis-à-vis the Law. The Gospels seem quite clear that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Law (Mt 5:17, Lk 23:37) – the realization, if you will, of the purpose of the Law (and the Prophets). The core of the debate is the fate of the law now that Jesus had fulfilled it, centered on Mt 5:17-18:
17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.“
This is not our question or debate here. I think it is plain that the goal of the original Mosaic Law was to produce people who demonstrated the moral character and desires of the heart that no one did, until Jesus. In this sense, the Law defined the goal, and Jesus represented its attainment. It is in this sense that Jesus “fulfilled” the Law, and effectively offered the ability to fulfill it through His indwelt Spirit to all who trusted Him for their lives. Despite centuries of debate re: the continuing effectivity of the Law after Christ, it seems quite clear that Jesus claimed that, following His death and resurrection, He was the only way to the Father; that is, into God’s Kingdom, the precinct in which God is King, and Christ-followers are His subjects and its citizens.
Similarly, we’re not interested in debating Jesus’ perceived verbal extensions to the law (e.g. “love your enemies”) or constraints on the Law (e.g. “the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath”) in terms of their conformity with or dismissal of the Torah. That’s for the theologians.
Review
We don’t have any “data” that would indicate that any part of the Bible (as we now have it) was authored any earlier than the 8th century BC[i]. Whatever records of the formative years of Israel that may have once existed – perhaps including an escape from slavery in Egypt, the leadership of the Moses figure and his key role in mediating between Israel’s God (YHWH) and themselves, their entry into Canaan, the period of the Judges and the beginning of the United Monarchy, are now lost.
But their memory appears woven into our (largely) 8th-5th century Hebrew Bibles. Scholars believe that the vast majority of the Hebrew Bible texts were written in the 6th and 5th centuries (i.e. the Deuteronomic History, most of the prophets and most of the wisdom literature) in response to the Babylonian exile, and is thought to have been integrated and compiled into a single narrative by Ezra. The latest material (e.g. Daniel, possibly some of Chronicles) was added in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC.
According to these late authors of the Pentateuch, the ancient figure of Moses, in addition to being the agent through whom Israel found itself as a nation in the land of Canaan, was given a set of rules by God to be obeyed by them in their new home. These authors go on to say (again, we don’t have contemporaneous records of these events) that prior to Israel entering Canaan, God told Moses to write down these instructions in a book/scroll, which he did, and it is reported to have moved with Israel into the land.
I believe we have evidence of the veracity of this story in the form of the “Moses Scroll”.
Jesus’ References/Allusions to the Law of Moses
The key determinant of which version of the Law Jesus alludes to will be the presence or absence of terms like “sacrifice”, “offering”, “festival” or “feast” linking it to the Levitical Torah; created as a kind of reform and establishing the Temple cult to prevent the people’s infidelity, rampant in the earlier, pre-exilic generations.
When we look through Jesus’ words to find a reference to the word sacrifice, we find two occurrences (three total instances) but all have to do with the same event.
Jesus has called Matthew, a tax collector, and in the evening Jesus is having dinner with Matthew, his tax-collector friends, and some “sinners”. The Pharisees get wind of this and confront His disciples (Mt 9:11-13):
11 And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13 Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Here (and also in Mt 12:7), Jesus is not only not using the Law to defend the sacrifices offered at the Temple, He’s doing just the opposite, citing Hosea 6:6 to remind the Pharisees how God really feels about the sacrificial Temple system they’d constructed.
The exchange prompting this later Hosea reference, however, does have another mention of the Law (Mt 12:3-6):
3 He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: 4 how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? 5 Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? 6 I tell you, something greater than the temple is here.“
Here, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for criticizing His disciples for plucking grain from plants in a field as they passed by on a Sabbath. In v5 He refers to the Levitical Law – the Pentateuch (Leviticus) — in which the work of the Priests on a Sabbath is prescribed. By the letter of their own law, Jesus says, the Priests’ work profanes the Sabbath, as defined in the “Mosaic” Commandments. And then He alludes to Himself as “greater than the temple”. Of course, any law regarding priests is a product of the Levitical Torah and so a reference to the Pentateuch, as is His reference to “the temple“.
Similarly, Jesus only mentions the word “offering” twice in the context of the offerings prescribed in the Pentateuch (but this case may possibly be a “free will” offering). Jesus and His disciples observe a destitute woman – a widow – giving apparently the last of her money to the temple offering box:
42 And a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which make a penny. 43 And he called his disciples to him and said to them, “Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. 44 For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
Once again, Jesus isn’t approving of the Pentateuch’s prescriptions for various offerings of grain, oil, or tithes/gifts of money. He is praising the woman’s faith – her heart toward her God. In my reading of the Gospels, I can’t find Jesus supporting the sacrificial system anywhere.
Jesus’ Interpretation of the Law of Moses
The passage in Mark 12:28-34 reveals a couple of things about Jesus’ interpretation of Moses’ Law. Here’s the text.
28 And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” 29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
32 And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other besides him. 33 And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” 34 And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And after that no one dared to ask him any more questions.
The first thing to notice is that technically at least, the Shema that Jesus identifies as the “most important” is not a ‘commandment’ (technically, an “instruction” or just “word”) of the ten. Of course, it is contained in the MS, recited in the words of Moses, resulting in it carrying over into our Deuteronomy 6:4-5 text. Remember, our hypothesis here is that the MS – the “Moses Scroll” — was the precursor to our canonical Deuteronomy. So in the sense that it appears in the original Law of Moses, Jesus could be forgiven for identifying it as a “commandment”; it is, in fact, “commanding” our love of God.
Secondly, He gives as the second most important command a text we similarly don’t find either in the canonical Decalogues, or the MS per se. It does appear obscurely in our Lev 19:18b. And I suppose one could, therefore, claim: “See! That proves that Jesus saw the entire Pentateuch” (including here Leviticus) “as the authoritative ‘Law of Moses!’”.
I dealt with this subject in a prior piece[ii], including a number of Jesus’ references to OT texts, which you are welcome and encouraged to review. My claim is that Jesus was well aware of the blessing associated with the MS’ tenth commandment:
“Blessed is the man who loves his neighbor”
and used it as the nucleus of His response.
Then, in v33, the scribe, in response to Jesus’ answer, volunteers that love of God and love of neighbor as yourself: “is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” Hearing the scribe’s response, Jesus affirms that with such an answer, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” Jesus here is implicitly endorsing love-of-neighbor over temple sacrifices and offerings (and thus the Levitical Torah), the kind spelled out in excruciating detail in the Pentateuch, and seems to be claiming that those who understand this fact show that they are “not far” from His Kingdom.
This is key. Had the young ruler’s response (i.e. the downplaying of burnt offerings and sacrifices) been in some way objectionable to Jesus, His response would have been different, less affirming. Since it wasn’t, we have to assume that sacrifices were, at the very least, less significant to He and His Father, if not, quite possibly, totally insignificant (Hosea 6:6).
We have an indirect interpretation by Jesus of Moses’ Law in Matthew 23 – the “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees” chapter. Here’s the opening text.
23:1 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 2 “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, 3 so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. 4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. 5 They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, 6 and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues 7 and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others. 8 But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers.
This verse points us to a much longer subject that we will get to in a bit. Here, I’m interested in verses 2-3, Jesus’ apparent rejection of not the words, but the actions of the Temple’s scribes and Pharisees. But is that what He’s saying?
You may or may not be aware of a Hebrew version of the book of Matthew called Shem Tob’s Gospel of Matthew. The tradition is that Matthew, a Jew, initially wrote his gospel in Hebrew before its translation to Greek (like all the other NT texts.) Shem Tob’s version (14th century AD) is supposed to be a replica of Matthew’s original Hebrew, or very close to it. What is particularly interesting about it for our purposes here is the English translation of its verses 2 & 3, which read:
“Upon the seat of Moses the Pharisees and Sages sit, and now, all which HE” (Moses) “will say unto you keep and do; but THEIR ordinances and deeds do not do, because THEY say and do not.”
If this translation accurately reflects Matthew’s original text[iii], and thus Jesus’ actual meaning, it is clear that He is admonishing His hearers to be obedient to Moses’ words, rather than the rules (“ordinances”) and deeds of the scribes and Pharisees. What are those? Hang on. Here He seems to be distinguishing between the words and rules of Moses, and those of the Temple leaders at that time, and plainly labeling those leaders hypocrites.
Here Jesus is instructing his disciples to ‘do all that “he”’ (Moses) ‘tells you to do, but don’t do as they’ (speaking of the Pharisaic scribes [Sofers]) ‘do’, which much later got written into either the Mishpat (Torah-based law) or something called the Takkanot, new laws decided by scholars of the law. Notice in the remainder of this passage Jesus is criticizing the priests’ additional laws placed on the people by characterizing them as “heavy burdens, hard to bear”.
If this translation is correct and original, then it seems unmistakable that Jesus here is imploring His hearers to pull back the layers of the Temple’s rules until they get back to the original laws given to Moses. This implies that despite the entire Pentateuch being identified at that time as the Law of Moses, there still remained some cultural memory or awareness of Moses’ original words compared to those that scribes had subsequently layered over them. Somehow, the Decalogue, and its moral imperatives, maintained its preeminent standing, certainly with Jesus, but also with the common man.
This passage highlights the issue of men creating rules, and calling it the Law of Moses. How bad was it[iv]?
In what follows (click on this text) we’ll shed some light on Jewish practices surrounding the creation of their Halakah – as it bears on our question as to what Jesus (and other 1st century Jews) perceived as the “Law of Moses”. But, you can just continue on without this digression if you’d prefer.
After Babylon, Jews committed to live in adherence to the Law of Moses. The leaders (Sofers) constructed a set of laws to prevent their followers from ever violating the laws of Moses (latter a Rabbinic practice called Asu syag la Torah – “Fencing the Torah”) . They came up with conflicting rules, disagreeing with each other (e.g. you can’t come within 4 cubits of a leper vs 100 cubits). A couple of hundreds of years later (rabbinic period), they decided that they didn’t disagree — they simply conveyed the laws that Moses didn’t have the time to write down, and that were only transmitted orally. The result was the (2nd-3rd century) Mishna, containing the laws of the Sofers — the aurally transmitted laws — finally written down. How do you resolve 4 vs 100? They said that if it was a windy day, it was 100. Otherwise, it was 4, apparently believing that the disease was transmitted by the wind. The Gamora was produced to document this reconciliation.
What about new laws governing, say, how to put on your shoes that hadn’t been addressed in any previous law? Finding nothing in the Biblical text to inform them, the Pharisaic scholars were charged with the task of deciding on and formulating the rules governing, e.g., how to put on your shoes. The result, eventually, was the Takkanot.
The way they communicated these new laws as they were produced is that someone would be chosen to take the “seat of Moses“ in the synagogue to announce the new law. This seems to be the basis of Jesus’ condemnation in Matthew 23:1-8, above.
The troubling thing about this practice is that it belies a mindset that essentially considered the Law of Moses as secondary to their Oral Torah. Pharisaic, and later Rabbinic, Judaism enshrined the Oral Law concept of Halakha LeMoshe MiSinai: “A law given to Moses at Sinai (Hebrew: הלכה למשה מסיני”) that included, crucially, non-biblical oral laws supposedly given to Moses by God along with the biblical texts.
Levinson[v] points out that many Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) cultures modified their societal laws over time to adapt to new cultural circumstances. But most made it clear that they were being modified from what had preceded them. Not so Israel. The scribes responsible for “the Law” in exilic and post-exilic Israel adapted the previous law text to subtly transition to a meaning perhaps completely opposite of the original. Levinson calls this textual adaptation and development a “rhetoric of concealment”. And, pointing out this technique was not limited to the Pharisaical movement, he notes the example of Ezekiel 18 (1-4) disputing the ancient proverb of transgenerational justice.
He notes that the other distinctive of Israel’s formulation of its law is their assignment of its origin and authority to God. This is unique in the ANE where kings, or in some cases, respected scribes were the parties identified as responsible for the creation of a law. One can see the obvious potential for mischief using this model. But it is most probable that this model wasn’t believed to be disingenuous or self-serving by the scribes, but rather simply the result of their sincere belief that the results of their law-making deliberations were simply those communicated to them by God, certainly not from their own personal or political motivations.
How would anyone dispute an assertion that a proposed new law was one God spoke to Moses but that he didn’t have time to write down, and had now revealed to the scribes and Pharisees? How do you build a stable legal system, let alone a monotheistic religion, with an open-ended premise like that? Obviously, the Jews found a way.
It seems from this discussion that the germ of this thinking characteristic of rabbinic Judaism had its origins at least in the second Temple Pharisaic movement, if not earlier. The Pharisees were the purveyors and formulators of the Oral Torah in late, second Temple Jerusalem. They were the consummate legalists of their time. Their archenemies in their endeavor were the Sadducees, who argued for the exclusivity of the scriptural text as the law. Jesus surely knew this character of the Pharisees and would condemn it, as we will see.
Another somewhat indirect passage that gives us insight into Jesus’ opinion of the laws that had been added over the years (particularly since the exile) to the “Law of Moses we find in Mt 15:
Mt 15:5 But you say, ‘If anyone tells his father or his mother, “What you would have gained from me is given to God,” 6 he need not honor his father.’ So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God. 7 You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said:
8 “‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
9 in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”
(Mark 7:8 8 You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”)
First we get His criticism of the leaders’ outright corruption of Moses’ original Law; “Honor your Father and your Mother thereby lengthening your days. I am Elohim your Elohim.” The practice seems to have been that sons would withhold support from their (presumably aging and so more dependent) parents, claiming that they instead “gave to God” in the form of a Temple offering. This apparently was a practice endorsed by the Temple leaders, as Jesus calls it “your tradition”.
This line of criticism culminates with Jesus quoting Isaiah (29:13): “in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” Clearly the Temple leaders are being called out, once again, for law (of Moses) making.
It is worth taking a moment to take a different look at this Halakhic approach to Torah taken by second Temple and later Jews. Schwartz[vi] points out that in their tradition scholarly Jews (typically Pharisees in this period) thought that they were uncovering in the Oral Torah truth (and divine truth at that) applicable to all generations. And this to the degree that they found no need to learn from any other sources. Knowledge derived from other than the written and Oral Torahs was unimportant. Schwartz, in pointing out the transcendent character of the Torah to its traditional students, says this:
“In Judaism, the Pentateuch (and, to some extent, the whole of Scripture) came to be viewed as the eternal foundation on which all normative teaching — legal, ethical, ritual, philosophical — must ultimately be based, whether explicitly contained therein or not. The underlying assumption that enabled Judaism to consider the teachings of all generations to be the intended meaning of the Torah is that, being a transcript of divine speech, it is omni significant: all truth is contained in it, and each and every word, indeed every letter and every grammatical and stylistic peculiarity, bears independent and inexhaustible meaning. Though the precise manner and degree to which Jewish tradition has maximized or minimized the potentially limitless content of the Torah has varied over the centuries, it has always assumed a fundamental difference between the Torah, which it conceived as divine verbalization, and all other literature, which is simply the written record of human speech. The Torah, therefore, was studied in traditional Judaism both as a source text, with the aim of apprehending the precise connection between it and the extant rabbinic tradition, and as a living text, with the aim of deriving from it teachings of present significance. The Torah was not an object of research but rather a tool for edification. There existed no difference between the confessional and the historical; the historical significance of the Torah was confined to its narratives, the historicity of which was not questioned but was not held to be their sole, or even primary, significance.”
In so many words, traditional Torah interpreters/developers (i.e. historical, but perhaps today’s Orthodox Jews as well) saw themselves as engaged in uncovering additional truth to inform their society, if not society in general, how to live from the only divine (whether written or oral) speech we have[vii].
Back to Jesus and the Law.
A telling passage (also from Mt 23) is v23-34:
23 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. 24 You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!
Jesus here is identifying a kind of hierarchy of laws[viii] (i.e. “the weightier matters of the law”). He’s criticizing the Pharisees for majoring in minor things. Here Jesus says that the principles we see articulated in the Decalogue – “justice (‘you shall not steal’) and mercy (on the sabbath ‘you shall also cease, you and your animal and all that is yours’) and faithfulness (‘honor your father and your mother’)” trump priest-prescribed, rote procedures. It sounds as if Jesus thinks of the violation of the Levitical Torah as, comparatively, “a gnat”, whereas a violation of the Decalogue represents “a Camel” in gravity.
One more instance of Jesus’ understanding of the Law of Moses. In Luke 18 He’s asked by the Rich Young Ruler “what do I have to do to have eternal life?”
18 And a ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 19 And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 20 You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother.’”
Here Jesus lists some of the Decalogue commands from Moses – nothing, of course, from the Levitical Torah. And interestingly, He notes to the ruler “You know the commandments”. From this, we should conclude that everyone in Jesus’ hearing knew “the commandments”. So Moses’ Law wasn’t obscured by all of the Levitical and Oral Torah of the Pharisees after all.
Recognition of the Pentateuch as the Commonly-Understood “Law”.
Jesus certainly wasn’t oblivious to the development of the Pentateuch post-exile, nor did He endeavor to correct those who characterized it as “the Law”. For example, we have His teaching on divorce (an element of Deuteronomy’s Law Code — Dt 24:1-3) in response to Pharisaical questioning (Mt 19:3-8):
3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” 8 He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.”
The Pharisees ask: “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” Jesus answers “No”. So they ask: “Why did Moses…give a certificate of divorce”…(referring to Dt. 24:1-3)? To which Jesus answered, in so many words, “Because your hearts are bad.” Then He says: “but from the beginning, it was not so.”
This is a puzzling statement. If by “beginning” He means Eden, it doesn’t seem that Adam and Eve’s hearts were particularly exemplary (or “soft”). Or, is He perhaps alluding to the point in time not when hearts weren’t “hard”, but rather when the Law was changed by the Law Code being added to Moses’ scroll from Moab (on its way to becoming Deuteronomy)? The scroll we have contains no instruction on divorce – not even a mention of the word.
It seems Jesus is saying “from the beginning until Deut 24:1-3 was adopted after your exile, there was no necessity for instruction on divorce. It was the chaos caused by the peoples’ philandering within their tribes and with foreigners and the destructive forces of exile that forced you to create that law (and ascribe it to Moses).”
So to me, it is at least plausible that He’s referring to this later change to the law as the point where rules of divorce entered “the law”.
Conclusions
Jesus appears to have understood that the “Law of Moses” was the original Decalogue and instructions (e.g. the Shema) from Moses’ original scroll said to have been written by him in response to God’s instruction at Moab. Of course, He understood that the popular understanding of what was encompassed under the umbrella term “Law of Moses” in His time included the complete post-exilic Pentateuch – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
But by Jesus’ day, the party of the Pharisees was in full flower in formulating and promulgating the laws of the “Oral Torah”, whose credibility was an invention having to do with God communicating these laws to Moses, but, for some reason, Moses just not writing them down. This established the sham divine pedigree of the so-called Oral Law. Jesus demeaned it and its destructive influence on the people (“heavy burdens”), excoriating its scribes and Pharisees this way (Mt 24:4-8):
4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. 5 They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, 6 and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues 7 and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others. 8 But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers.
Jesus, unsurprisingly, understood the source of the original Law of Moses, its subsequent additions resulting in the Pentateuch (principally through the addition of the Levitical Torah of the “P” source), and its ongoing expansion via the Oral Law. His references to substantive questions always invoked the original Mosaic Law, while acknowledging the existence and common acceptance of these more modern (post-exilic; late second Temple[ix]) enhancements, and demonstrated His overwhelming priority of people’s needs over written rules in determining appropriate behavior[x].
And, importantly, our study has found that the common people understood these distinctions as well. I think this is encouraging. People even in Jesus’ day understood the commands of God. To the end, they had the freedom to endeavor to obey them, or not.
Next up; Paul’s view of the “Law of Moses”.
[i] Despite what our AI “bots” may say. 😉
[ii] “Jesus and the Moses Scroll”
[iii] It is interesting that the Shem Tob Hebrew contains the Deuteronomic idiom “keep and do”, an abbreviated version of “Listen, Learn, Keep, Do”.
[iv] It is understood that the entire foundation of Judaism following the destruction was the study of the Torah and other scriptures and debating what was meant in which situations, and occasionally, at least, coming to an agreement on an extended interpretation. That’s not the problem we have in view here. Our problem is that there was in the Oral Law tradition the presumption that newly-“discovered” rules (rules agreed by discussion among knowledgeable rabbinic leaders) were in fact those once told to Moses by God but never written down by him.
[v] Levinson, Bernard M., “Strategies for the Reinterpretation of Normative Texts Within the Hebrew Bible”, International Journal of Legal Discourse, De Gruyter, 2008
[vi] Schwartz, Baruch J, “The Pentateuch as Scripture and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism”, Jewish Concepts of Scripture, NYU Press, 2012
[vii] It should be noted that this is the intellectual position taken by Jewish scholarship before their challenge from the text-critical movement of the 19th and 20th centuries. After this challenge, Torah was still God’s divinely presented words; just not Moses’, nor would it any longer support their earlier focus on harmonizing disparate teachings of the Pentateuch into an integrated whole, as if it had been all divinely channeled through the one man, Moses.
[viii] Loader, William, “Jesus and the Law” (“Loader”), Brill eBooks, 2011
[ix] I’ve noted elsewhere that God wanted this Pentateuchal material in the Hebrew Bible for His own reasons: principally that of demonstrating to all the utter futility of cultural/religious liturgy adherence apart from having the right heart.
[x] Loader, pp 2748
