What Did the “Law of Moses” Mean to – the Israelites?

Introduction

In this series we’re interested in answering the question: “What did the term ‘Law of Moses’” mean to various Biblical characters.  The hope is that if we can build a picture of the meaning of that phrase to people in the Bible then we will be able to better understand their contexts, and the state of the text mentioned. Here we’re interested in what the Law of Moses meant to rank-and-file Israelites at various points in their history.

The problem is that the content of the “Law of Moses” changed over time[i] (as we will see).  For people earlier in the narrative it meant something different than for people later in the narrative.  And, for the common man it meant something different than for the priests and religious leaders.

In order, therefore, to understand what this phrase meant to “Israelites”, we have to understand the history of its usage and development throughout the pre-monarchic, monarchic/pre-exilic, exilic, and post-exilic time periods.  This means we have to understand the essence of when the Hebrew Bible was actually written.  That is our first task.

Premise

Before diving in, however, I think I should explain the thesis I will attempt to if not prove, then surely to demonstrate as plausible w/r/t the evolution of the “Law of Moses”.  The key points of this thesis are as follows:

  1. In the beginning of Israel’s history, there was a prophet through whom God conveyed His simple, but profound, moral rules for living to His adopted Israelites. Wherever the Israelites came from, whether Egyptian servitude, or regions closer to Canaan, they were exposed to YHWH, the God they adopted as their own[ii].  No “history” of this event was written at the time.  But the words of Moses’ scroll may very well have survived, as did the (oral) cultural history of these formative events.
  2. Our prophet, Moses, wrote down these rules for living on a scroll, and commissioned the early Israelites to preserve them and ensure that they and their future generations observed them, and that they be recited to Israel regularly (i.e. every seven years). (I believe that scroll or a copy of it was found and in-hand in the 1880’s[iii], was analyzed and transcribed by scholars[iv], but is now missing.)  The Israelites’ cultural history prominently portrayed their God as in covenant with them – that they were going to be the realization of a promise to their ancient father figure – Abram – that Abram would be the father of a multitude of descendants, and that his descendants would in some way be a blessing to the “nations”.
  3. Pre-monarchic Israel essentially ignored those rules (i.e. there is no record of them ever being followed in either the pre-monarchic or monarchic periods). That Israel did not follow its instructions is emphasized in the narratives set in the pre-monarchic period (i.e. “everyone did what was right in his own eyes”).  However, there are references within the narratives of these periods of the ‘book/law of Moses’ being remembered, primarily by Israel’s kings[v].
  4. Scholars generally agree that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) wasn’t written before the 8th century BC (the 700’s)[vi]. They agree much of the Pentateuch material was written from the 7th to 5th centuries BC, along with much of the rest of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible).  Exceptions to this timing include the much earlier “Song of Deborah” and “Song of Miriam”, and the much later books such as Daniel and Chronicles.  Some content in (First) Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea (among others) are also as early as the 8th century BC. 
  5. Deuteronomy was largely written in the exilic and post-exilic periods (6th – 5th century BC, though some would place it earlier). It and its authors almost uniquely preserve the cultural memory of the original scroll of Moses.
  6. The Exile completely transformed Israel’s perception of itself as a people, and their perception of their God as devoted to them. This cataclysm, with its desecration and destruction of their Temple and the holy city of Jerusalem, caused its anguished scribes, in what must have been a soul-wrenching introspection, to formulate and write out their “story” (not a history, per se) leading up to this cataclysm, their interaction with their God, their perpetual rebellion against and dismissal of that God, His ultimate judgment for their apostasy – the destruction of Judah, their exile out of their land to Babylon, and their codification of rules by which, if adhered to by the people, they believed would prevent any future occurrences of this apostasy and catastrophic judgment – the various forms of “law codes” found in the Pentateuch. The hope was that these religious reforms would provide for their God to once again live among them as their God and protector.
  7. These exilic and post-exilic writings were later redacted into a single set of five books of the Pentateuch/Torah by, in all likelihood, the prophet/priest Ezra in the 5th– 4th centuries BC (late Persian period), the heart of the 2nd Temple period.  As these books gained popularity among the people, they began to be referenced as the “Torah of Moses”, or just Torah.  Moses’ authorship was assumed as it had been implicitly established by the Sinai narrative of Exodus, and the Pentateuchal texts themselves revolved around the picture of Moses with Israel at Sinai and in the wilderness.  Who else would write it?
  8. As a completely separate matter, religious authorities began to find that the rules contained in this (expanded) Torah weren’t adequate to unambiguously tell the people how to live or handle all the situations they found themselves in. So began the process of agreeing on answers to these unanswered questions, and the ongoing process, right up to the final destruction of Israel in the 2nd century AD, of creating the “Oral Torah” as their anthology. This process may well have had its origins among the priests while in Babylon critically examining previous versions of “the Law” and evaluating how it could be extended to prevent the previous apostasy (e.g. central, exclusively priest-administered sacrifice at only one location, not by the people wherever they were).  It was from this base of the Oral Torah that Rabbinic Judaism was created and thrived following the final destruction.

The History of the Bible

The first point we should deal with here is that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, is not an eyewitness account of the creation of the earth and its creatures, nor an eyewitness account of the Fathers (Adam down through Jacob and Joseph), nor is it the work of Moses – at least not most of it.  For many, this information is a stumbling block and one that contradicts their life-long beliefs.  Sadly, those people have been misled due to their lack of probably any exposure to information (“data”) that in many cases conclusively demonstrates something quite different, and/or their assumption that their tradition, or their leader’s teaching, is based on facts.  Unfortunately, it is not.

To see where the Pentateuch (and large portions of the Tanakh) came from, we’ll work backward from what we know, to the area of scholarly analysis and consensus associated with the exilic period (6th-5th centuries BC), and finally to a bit of speculation.

The first accepted allusion to the complete books of the Hebrew Bible appears in the pseudepigraphal 2 Esdras 14:44-48 (though how Ezra’s count – 24 and 70 books — equates to the 35 of the canonical Hebrew Bible[vii] isn’t clear).  2 Esdras is thought to have been produced in roughly 90-100 AD[viii].

Traveling back in time, the next solid reference we get to the physical books of the Pentateuch is in Ben Sira[ix], dated to roughly 200 BC[x].  In it, the author mentions by name not just the books of the Pentateuch but virtually all of the books of the Tanakh[xi].

Going back further, while we don’t have explicit mentions of book names, we do know that the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek (thought to be in Alexandria, under Ptolemy II) between 282 and 246 BC.  This may be the last historical mention of the collection of the books of the Hebrew Bible.  But references to the Law/Book/Scroll (of Moses) continue throughout the Tanakh.

References to the Law/Book/Scroll of Moses

One of the last times this book is mentioned is in Nehemiah 8 where Ezra (a mid-5th century priest and scribe) is reported to have brought “the Book of the Law of Moses that the LORD had commanded Israel” to the square in Jerusalem and read “the Law” “ from early morning to midday.”  The problem, as we are exploring here, is that we don’t know what the content of this “Law” was in the 5th century BC.  But, we do know approximately how long it was, as it took Ezra 3-4 hours to read aloud – maybe 24,300 to 31,200 words.  Today’s Deuteronomy is around 30,000 words.  The entire Pentateuch is around 162,870 words.  This is important.

Apparently to the author of post-exilic Nehemiah, the “book of the Law of Moses” was differentiated from the five books that would become known as the Torah of Moses, or just Torah.  We know this simply based on the length of text of each.  One detail to note is that this edition of the “book of the Law of Moses” in all probability contained the Deuteronomic Law Code (chs. 12-26), which scholars believe was a later insertion into a previously existing scroll traditionally associated with Moses (e.g. mostly in his first-person voice)[xii]).  As an example of what the scroll may have been before this insertion, we have the “Moses Scroll”(MS) iii.  Its length is some 3,400 wordsiv – about 25 minutes of reading time.

The other piece of physical evidence we find is in Jos 8:32 where Joshua writes the Law of Moses on twelve stones, commemorating the covenant under which Canaan was being given to them.  Each stone would then have inscribed some 13,570 words if the Law of Moses then was our Pentateuch today.  That’s a lot of inscribing, and inscribing time[xiii].  However, if it were something like the “Moses Scroll”, that task would have been quite manageable, at some 283 words per stone.  The only other allusion to the Law’s physical composition is in Dt 17:18, speaking of future Kings of Israel:

18 “And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests.

To me, this statement argues for a shorter Law, something that would fit on one scroll, not something voluminous that would require scores of scrolls (as would the Pentateuch).  (The word here rendered “book” is 5612. סֵפֶר sēp̱er, סִפְרָה sip̱rāh — sefer, the word for scroll.  And it is singular.  BTW, this is the same [singular] noun that is used to reference the thing that Moses wrote in Dt 31:24,26  — a scroll.

In addition, though kings were undoubtedly literate, they were not scribes used to writing long volumes of text (they had scribes to do that!).  But it would seem plausible that a new king could write an entire scroll (certainly 3,400 words, but likely even the 30,000 of today’s Deuteronomy) in a single day’s writing.

Other Biblical Allusions to Moses’ Law

There are literally dozens of other references to the law/book of “the covenant” of Moses, or YHWH (or just “the law”) throughout the Pentateuch, but more importantly the entire Tanakh.  One of the most significant (and hotly debated) is 2 Ki 22:8 which says that “the book of the Law of Moses” was found in the Temple by Hilkiah, the priest, and Shaphan “read it”.  We’re not told how long it took him to read it.  But the narrative implies it was certainly less than a day (or 20+ hours for the entire Pentateuch) as the next thing Shaphan does is take it to King Josiah and, there, reads it to him.  Both readings seemingly occurred on the same day.  Later Josiah reads this ”Book” (Scroll) “of the Covenant” to all the assembled elders and people of Judah and Jerusalem – 2 Ki 23:1-3.

What is the pedigree of this story?  2 Kings is part of the Deuteronomic History (Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings).  This history was doubtless compiled over many years most of which, scholars believe, was exilic or post-exilic (6th-5th centuries BC).  If they’re right, then this story is looking back (and fondly, we should note) perhaps a hundred or more years to the reign of Josiah.  Of course, there is a possibility, if not an outright likelihood, that the story itself was documented at the time (625 BC), only later to be included in the Deuteronomic History. (If you had been Josiah’s secretary Shaphan wouldn’t you have recorded this event in the annals of the King, particularly given Josiah’s crusade to reform Judah’s religious practices, at least along the lines of his great-grandfather Hezekiah, if not all the way back to the essence of Moses’ moral law?)

The following is a more-or-less chronological listing of references to this law within historical narratives throughout the Tanakh.  What we’re interested in assessing is whether in any of these citations it seems apparent that the book/law being referenced is other than the moral Decalogue (and its associated material, e.g. the Shema) of Moses:

Dt 28:61 61 Every sickness also and every affliction that is not recorded in the book of this law, the LORD will bring upon you, until you are destroyed.

Jos 8:31 31 just as Moses the servant of the LORD had commanded the people of Israel, as it is written in the Book of the Law of Moses, “an altar of uncut stones, upon which no man has wielded an iron tool.” And they offered on it burnt offerings to the LORD and sacrificed peace offerings.  (Mt Ebal)

  • There is nothing in the MS about building an altar across the Jordan. It’s likely Moses and his Book are being invoked to legitimize building an altar.

Jos 23:6 6 Therefore, be very strong to keep and to do all that is written in the Book of the Law of Moses, turning aside from it neither to the right hand nor to the left,

  • There is nothing in the MS about the context here which is: not mixing with the inhabitants of the Land or mentioning the names of their gods, or swearing by them, or bowing down to them (other than the first commandment). This is actually as much a post-exilic issue on the Jews’ return from Babylon as it was a Canaanite issue on their entry to the land.  Not turning “to the right hand nor to the left” is a Deuteronomic idiom, which we should expect from the author of the Deuteronomic History.

Jos 24:26 And Joshua wrote these words in the Book of the Law of God. And he took a large stone and set it up there under the terebinth that was by the sanctuary of the LORD.

  • This is the first (and I believe only) passage where it is stated that the book is modified — here by Joshua himself. In this case, it had to do with recording a commitment the people had made at Shechem to adhere to Moses’ law.

1 Kings 2:3 and keep the charge of the LORD your God, walking in his ways and keeping his statutes, his commandments, his rules, and his testimonies, as it is written in the Law of Moses, that you may prosper in all that you do and wherever you turn, (David)

2 Kings 14:6 But he did not put to death the children of the murderers, according to what is written in the Book of the Law of Moses, where the LORD commanded, “Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. But each one shall die for his own sin.”

  • This is a reference to the Law Code within Deuteronomy, Dt 24:16, which is thought to be a later addition. At this point, the Law of Moses is something more than his Decalogue and admonitions to be faithful to YHWH.  Chronologically, then, all later references to the Law or “Book of Moses” must be to the modified scroll of Moses.  It’s telling that they kept the title for the addended scroll, asserting Moses’ authorship and claiming his authority on what it was modified to contain.

2 Kings 23:25 Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the LORD with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the Law of Moses, nor did any like him arise after him.

2 Chr 8:13 13 as the duty of each day required, offering according to the commandment of Moses for the Sabbaths, the new moons, and the three annual feasts—the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Booths.

  • It is truly telling that in the MS there is no reference to any “new moons” or feasts. Not even Passover.  (Note: It seems even Passover had a hard time getting established.  See 2 Chr 30:5). Certainly by the 5th to 3rd centuries (the assumed dating of Chronicles) the creation of a religion having the authority of Moses had significantly progressed.

2 Chr 25:4 But he did not put their children to death, according to what is written in the Law, in the Book of Moses, where the LORD commanded, “Fathers shall not die because of their children, nor children die because of their fathers, but each one shall die for his own sin.”

  • See 2 Ki 14:6 note, above.

2 Chr 30:16 They took their accustomed posts according to the Law of Moses the man of God. The priests threw the blood that they received from the hand of the Levites.

  • The MS says nothing about the post of Levites or Priests.

2 Chr 35:12 And they set aside the burnt offerings that they might distribute them according to the groupings of the fathers’ houses of the lay people, to offer to the LORD, as it is written in the Book of Moses. And so they did with the bulls.

  • Again, there is no mention of sacrifices in the MS. Only when Deuteronomy’s Law Code is inserted within it are sacrifices mentioned.

With Ezra/Nehemiah, we’re securely within the Persian or perhaps even Greek periods.

Nehemiah 8:1 And all the people gathered as one man into the square before the Water Gate. And they told Ezra the scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses that the LORD had commanded Israel.

  • See earlier discussion.

Nehemiah 8:8 They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense so that the people understood the reading.

  • Notice here it’s not Moses’ Law – it’s God’s. Perhaps upping the ante on its authority?

Nehemiah 8:14 And they found it written in the Law that the LORD had commanded by Moses that the people of Israel should dwell in booths during the feast of the seventh month,

  • Again, nothing in the MS makes any mention of any feasts. The feast of Booths (Sukkot) is a Deuteronomic Law Code addition (in addition to Lev 23:33-44).  This post-exilic narrative assumes the modified Deuteronomy, and likely the entire Pentateuch as “the Law”.

Nehemiah 8:18 And day by day, from the first day to the last day, he read from the Book of the Law of God. They kept the feast seven days, and on the eighth day there was a solemn assembly, according to the rule.

  • I don’t believe that we can learn anything about the state of the law from this statement regarding the length of time required to read it.  This makes it sound like for each day of this seven-day Feast of Booths, a portion of what then constituted the Law was read to the people.

Nehemiah 10:28 “The rest of the people, the priests, the Levites, the gatekeepers, the singers, the temple servants, and all who have separated themselves from the peoples of the lands to the Law of God, their wives, their sons, their daughters, all who have knowledge and understanding, [possibly not a reference to the document, though it uses the same title.]

  • This is quite interesting in that it reveals the effect of the Levitical Torah and its prescriptions for Temple operation, and refers to that priestly material as “the Law of God”.

Nehemia 13:1 On that day they read from the Book of Moses in the hearing of the people. And in it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God,

  • The MS contains no prohibition against Ammonites or Moabites joining the Israelite assembly. It contains no prohibition against anyone.  This is a reference to the Law Code of Dt 23:3.

Ezra 3:2 Then arose Jeshua the son of Jozadak, with his fellow priests, and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel with his kinsmen, and they built the altar of the God of Israel, to offer burnt offerings on it, as it is written in the Law of Moses the man of God.

  • Again, the MS says nothing about altars or offerings on them. By the time of the writing of Ezra-Nehemiah we seem to be well into the era of the Pentateuch as Law of Moses (late Persian, early Greek period).

Ezra 6:18 And they set the priests in their divisions and the Levites in their divisions, for the service of God at Jerusalem, as it is written in the Book of Moses.

  • Once again, this is clearly a reference to the “P” source prescriptions, largely in Leviticus, at this point (probably 3rd -2nd century BC) subsumed under the title “Book of Moses”.

Ezra 7:6 this Ezra went up from Babylonia. He was a scribe skilled in the Law of Moses that the LORD, the God of Israel, had given, and the king granted him all that he asked, for the hand of the LORD his God was on him.

Da 9:11 All Israel has transgressed your law and turned aside, refusing to obey your voice. And the curse and oath that are written in the Law of Moses the servant of God have been poured out upon us, because we have sinned against him.

  • Certainly, the MS contained curses for disobedience. But so does the canonical Deuteronomy (27), a version of which is no doubt in mind here.  The book of Daniel scholars believe is likely a 2nd century BC work.

Da 9:13 As it is written in the Law of Moses, all this calamity has come upon us; yet we have not entreated the favor of the LORD our God, turning from our iniquities and gaining insight by your truth.

  • The MS nowhere states that disobedience would result in corporate curses, even in its curses for disobeying its commands. But that was the experience of those who were exiled wholesale to Babylon.

Other Allusions – the Place of the Book of Moses in Israel’s Literary History

I have prepared the following table from a previous piece[xiv] in which we look at the evidence for even the existence of the “Book of Moses” before its discovery in Hilkiah’s Temple in 625 BC.  Here it can help us develop a sense of the overarching importance of what was called Moses’ law at least within the memory of Monarchic Israel.  Click the link: Tracing the Book of Moses.

At the very least, we can see that the exilic and post-exilic authors, either through passed-down oral tradition, or perhaps some preserved scrolls chronicling their time, attributed an awareness of, if not a devotion to, something they called the “the Book of the Law of Moses”.

Of course, there were historical scrolls that had been kept by Kings and later religious leaders documenting significant events occurring within their reigns or administrations.  However, such records were never identified in the Bible (as in surrounding Ancient Near East polities) as “libraries”.  This distinction likely means that these scrolls were less comprehensive, and perhaps less well-ordered than those of their surrounding nations.

From the time of Jehoiada on (with its reference to burnt offerings), the Chronicler and the Deuteronomist (Dt 24:16) seem to be projecting at the very least a “law-code” version of the Book of Moses back into their history, certainly not the purity of the Decalogue and its blessings and curses, or the MS from which (I, among others, claim) they came.

Making Changes to the Word of God

Something Western Christians have a hard time getting used to, as well as, no doubt, the Orthodox Jews, is the idea that over time, priests and scribes modified – changed and added to – that corpus of scripture they called the Torah; the Pentateuch.  As we noted above, all that change (as regards the Pentateuch) essentially settled down in the late 1st millennium with the final redaction into an integrated set of five books (likely by Ezra[xv]) – the almost-canonical Pentateuch (very minor changes may have occurred in the 1st centuries both before Christ and after).

However, such was the imperative of Jews who, having had their entire existence thrown into chaos and turmoil, were compelled to explain not only what had happened to them, but why.

Nevertheless, apparently, over time Israelites began to equate the books of the Pentateuch with the authorship of Moses.  Whenever that happened, the “Law of Moses” morphed from something like the scroll that it took Ezra “from early morning until midday” to read to Israel, to the five books that would require over 20 hours to read at the same rate.  In any event, the legend had been created that Moses “wrote” the Pentateuch, including all of its priestly rules and procedures.

It is also during this period that the sense of the Law began to emerge as not just Israel’s law, but the transcendent law and truth of the cosmos[xvi].  This is quite ironic since if anything, this perception began to relegate Moses’ role to something of the status of just a messenger, rather than Israel’s mediator with God, and father of the true Law.

It is in this context that we can, perhaps for the first time, begin to glimpse the genius of the Pentateuchal authors. Out of a core moral law posed in stark contrast with the experience of destruction and exile, they nearly seamlessly constructed not only one of the greatest pieces of literature in history, in Genesis (to which some append Exodus), but a cultural history that (despite God’s judgment of them through destruction and exile) featured as preeminent their God, His righteousness, His covenant adoption of and love of them, and His judgment for their disobedience. 

What reforms were needed to prevent such a future catastrophe?  To them, the answer was a meticulous legal framework whose operation by the Temple Cult, personal ritual purity and sacrificial requirements, schedule of feasts, and other celebrations would have the effect of keeping their God, YHWH, nearly continuously in their minds as there was essentially no action they could take without consulting the laws of the Temple system.

Did these authors seek to deceive Israel as to the source and authority of their material?  I actually don’t think so.  I believe that the author(s) of Leviticus, for example, truly believed that (as in the Oral Torah tradition we’ll get into below) these were God’s authentic instructions to Moses, but he just didn’t write them down, for whatever reason.  In other words, they thought, apparently sincerely, that they were inspired in their writing by God.  And, perhaps they were.

However, they also started something that seems to have become something of a cultural imperative among second-temple religious scribes, and that is a kind of continuous refinement and extension of whatever they understood the Torah of scripture to prescribe.  It is important to understand that they probably truly thought of themselves in this role as simply conveying and writing down instructions from God.  We have no evidence to suggest that their work was disingenuous or merely self-serving, though certainly Jeremiah (8:8) called out their practice as corruption.

When we begin to examine extra-biblical Jewish history in the late second Temple period[xvii],[xviii],[xix], it seems clear that (at least in broad brush) the Pharisees were the purveyors and redactors of this dynamic “Oral Law”, while the Sadducees would have none of it.  They were the period’s “fundamentalists”, committed to following the written (by then) Torah alone.

This tradition came to light for moderns with the Jewish literature of the late second Temple period – the early first millennium, and the advent of Rabbinic Judaism that exposed for many non-Jews a heretofore hidden practice based on the premise that God had spoken instructions to Moses that were not written down by him at the time.

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 given to Moses by God as well as the biblical texts.  The idea is that these oral laws were transmitted from Moses down through the generations of religious leaders, and later rabbis, to their present time.  If this concept originated earlier than the advent of Rabbinism, then what the “Mosaic Law” consisted of in, say, post-exilic Judaism is quite open-ended.  Who knows what the Priests in the 2nd century BC claimed was the “Law of Moses”?  Not only that but according to this Wiki reference, those who claimed oral Torah are unchallengeable:

“In those oral teachings delivered by Moses unto Israel at Sinai, the rabbis have said that their underlying motives cannot be properly divulged through study, nor is it permissible to raise an objection against them by way of one of the hermeneutical principles applied in study, as they are always peremptory edicts, precluding or not admitting of debate or question.[8]” This tradition is the basis of the Oral Torah, later written down in the Mishna/Talmud.

When did this concept originate?  The Wiki page on Oral Torah has this to say:  “It is hypothesized that, sometime prior to the Babylonian exile of 586–530 BCE, in applying the Mosaic code to daily life and Temple worship, “a multitude of usages arising out of practical necessity or convenience or experience became part of the routine of observance of the code, and, in the course of time, shared the sanctity and authority which were inherent in the divinely inspired code itself.”[5]  So, this tradition of Oral additions to whatever then was the Torah likely had a history at least as long as the Second Temple Period.  (This hour-long video is instructive in documenting the transition from simple faith in God and His moral and ethical instructions, to the rabbinic free-for-all that we find in post-Temple Judaism.)

Such practices experienced exponential growth from the time of Ezra to the Romans’ destruction of the Second Temple due to the changing social and religious conditions experienced by the inhabitants of Judea.[5

Finally, let’s pause for a moment and review the question: “How do we know that the Pentateuch that we now have isn’t the original ‘Law of Moses’?  I think we’ve already seen the answer and it is the statement in Ne 8:3 that it took Ezra “from early morning until midday” to read Moses’ scroll to those assembled in Jerusalem. To recite the entire Pentateuch, as previously mentioned, would require more than 20 hours, not a portion of one morning.

Conclusions

Where does all of this leave us?  What did the common man in Israel believe was the “Law of Moses” at any given point in time?

First of all, we have absolutely no contemporaneous information on the content of Moses’ Law/Book/Scroll prior to David’s narrative.  All of the historical development found in the Pentateuch we have seen was recorded from the 8th to the 5th century BC, some 600 years or more after the reported Exodus of Israel from Egypt via Moses’ leadership.

Second, we have concluded that the Pentateuch and much of the Tanakh were a response to the catastrophe of Israel’s destruction and exile.  The authors of those scriptures were interested in explaining why those chosen of YHWH ended up without a country and in a kind of benign servitude to a foreign state.  To their credit, they returned to the beginning of their cultural history to point out that the people were apostate and rebellious (e.g. “stiff-necked”) from the very beginning of their relationship with their God.  And, that even their religious leaders were similarly unrighteous (to put it mildly), as well as many of their kings.  It has the feel of a brutally honest report card, certainly not some wholesale invention.  There would be little reason to be so consistently derogatory of one’s people if it didn’t preserve the essence of the truth.

So here’s the speculation part.  I speculate that the “Law of Moses” wasn’t more than what we find in the MS until possibly the 7th or 6th century BC.  I speculate (based on some of the data we’ve looked at here) that it was in this period that Deuteronomy’s Law Code (chs 12-26) was added to Moses’ scroll, possibly as a recognition of the apostasy of Israel that had caused their own destruction/exile, and that the combination became what was at that time, and for a period afterward, identified as the “Law of Moses”.

Further development of the Pentateuchal materials in the 7th – 5th centuries BC were, to the extent they were made known publicly (e.g. read in synagogues in Babylon, perhaps?), identified with Moses as their author, if for no other reason than for them to inherit Moses’ revered pedigree and authority.  I think it is highly likely that exiles in synagogues in Babylon would have heard these scrolls read and identified as the words of their prophet, Moses, as they all related to Moses’ Exodus narrative.

This promulgation of particularly the Priestly material (Leviticus, etc.) had the practical objective of informing the exiles what their responsibilities would be should they, as Ezekiel and others were promising, return to their land, and rebuild their Temple.  After all, 50 years after the exile, none of the Jews in Babylon (other than former Temple priests) had any idea how the Temple operated or what their responsibilities were in maintaining their status as suitable to live with God through their ritual “hygiene”, and their required sacrifices and offerings made at that Temple.  The surviving priests already knew all of this stuff.  They didn’t need a “how-to” manual for themselves.  They could teach new priests by apprenticeship.  But the people were a different story.

And, as we saw, sometime in the late Persian or early Greek periods, the “Law of Moses” had become understood to be the entire Pentateuch.  And, as it was said to be “Moses’ law”, he was believed to be its author, a misunderstanding that is perhaps the most common understanding to this day.

Next

Next, we’ll take a look at what Jesus thought of as “The Book/Law of Moses”.

[i] Ramond, Sophie, “The Growth of the Scriptural Corpus by Successive Rewritings: The Case of the So-called ‘Historical Psalms’”, Instituut catholique de Paris, Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, n° 4, 2015, pp. 427-449.

[ii] You might be interested in a little background on the emergence of YHWH in “Where Did YHWH ‘Come From’?”

[iii] You can read part of that scroll’s story in “Moses’s Real Words?”

[iv] You can read the transcribed text of the “Moses Scroll” in “Shapira Scroll Translations”

[v] See occurrences of ancient references to the Book/Law of Moses by clicking “Tracing the Book of Moses”..

[vi] Grabbe, Lester L, “The Last Days of Judah and the Roots of the Pentateuch: What Does History Tell Us?, The Fall of Jerusalem and the Rise of Torah, (hereafter “Grabbe”) 2016 Mohr Siebeck Tübingen, p19-46 (p38)

[vii] Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy ; Nevi’im : Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephiniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi; Ketuvim: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs/Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles

[viii] Of course, we also have Flavious Josephus and his convoluted recounting of the books of the Tanakh in the Antiquities of the Jews, also appearing in roughly the same time period – 90-100 AD.

[ix] Ska, Jean Louis, “From History Writing to Library Building: The End of History and the Birth of the Book”, The Pentateuch as Torah, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lakes, Indiana, 2007

[x] Ben Sira, “Praise of the Fathers”, (Sir 44-50)

[xi] From Anchor the Wisdom of Ben Sira: “In his exposition of wisdom motifs, Ben Sira cites or alludes to the Torah or Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), Joshua, 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings, 1-2 Chronicles, Nehemiah, Psalms, Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Haggai, and Malachi. He mentions in passing the Judges (46:11-12), the Twelve Minor Prophets as a group (49:10), the Psalms as compositions of David (47:9), and Proverbs as the work of Solomon (47:14-17), but he does not refer at all to Ruth, Ezra, Tobit, Judith, Esther, Daniel,or Baruch. Thus Ben Sira occupies a position between the OT on the one hand and intertestamental literature on the other.”

[xii] In “Mose’s Real Words?” I point out that the insertion of chs 12-26 is a classic cut-and-paste redaction.

[xiii] By contrast, if at that time the Law of Moses was the text of the Moses Scroll (or close to it), it was only 3,450 words long so that each stone would contain about 288 words.  The entire exercise (at 10 words/minute) would have taken 5 hr. 45 min.  At 20 words/minute, just over two hours and a half, and so on.

[xiv] “Wrestling With the Origins of the Pentateuch”

[xv] Grabbe (p40)

[xvi] Wenstrom, Bill, “The Mosaic Law”, Huntsville, Alabama, 2010

[xvii] Josephus, Flavious, “Antiquities of the Jews”

[xviii] Nodet, Etienne, “Josephus and the Pentateuch”, JSJ 28 (1997), 154-194

[xix] Kamesar, Adam, “The Literary Genres of the Pentateuch as Seen from the Greek Perspective: The Testimony of Philo of Alexandria”, Studia Philonica Annual 9 (1997)