Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 2nd June 2024), session twelve in our series journeying through the book of Exodus.
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).
‘The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.’
–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr[i]
”No one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, ‘The old is good enough.’”
—Jesus, Luke 5:39 (NET)
READ: EXODUS 20:22—23:33 (NLT)
MINUTIA-MÂCHÉ
It’s not the easiest section of Exodus to read, is it? And I’ve not even read all of it to you!
You probably winced. To be honest, I winced, too.
What I’ve read is the start of a section that commences at the end of Exodus 20 and runs through to the end of Exodus 23—a section referred to as ‘the Book/Scroll of the Covenant’, and is considered the oldest collection of laws in the Bible.[ii]
In the Hebrew Bible, this section (parasha) is called Mispatim, and the root of that title means ‘justice’, suggesting these were never merely laws about what should or shouldn’t be done. They’re laws intent on restoring the balance of justice.[iii]
Of course, they may not seem “just”, but … well, bear with me, we’ll get there.
Before this section, we have the Ten Words (Commandments), which are very generalised and still make sense to us today. None of us wants to be on the receiving end of murder, theft or slander.
By contrast, the laws in this collection covers a range of particular situations that a mixed bunch of people, like Israel, would encounter in their day-to-day living as ancient, nomadic, agrarian-based people.[iv] There’s laws about the treatment of slaves; about personal injury and damage to property; about sexual practice and idolatry; livestock rules; theft; social responsibility to the poor and oppressed; laws about fairness in legal proceedings; observance of the Sabbath; and commands to have regular festivals.
It’s a mixed bag of rulings that begins by talking about making altars out of unhewn stones, and closes with the command to not to boil a young goat in its mother’s milk (Ex. 23:19b), before concluding with God’s promise to go before them into the promised land.
A collection that covers all of life; every scene from altar to kitchen
Before I say anything else, this, in its self, is important.
As author Thomas Cahill noted, ‘even at their most hairsplittingly bizarre, these laws remain testimony to fact that the [ancient Israelites] were the first people to develop an integrated view of life. ’Unlike other ancient cultures, they were the first to see that ‘all of life, having come from the Author of life, was to be governed by a single outlook.’ [v]
I don’t know if Cahill is correct in saying the ancient Israelites were actually the first. But, it is true that ancient Israel saw all aspects of life—material and spiritual, intellectual and ethical, private and public—as are part of one reality, under God’s sovereignty, part of God’s one world.
Old Testament theologian, Walter Brueggemann makes the similar point that Israel’s laws ‘bring all of life, every detail of it—public and personal, cultic and economic—under the aegis of the God of the Exodus.’[vi]
Despite the immense diversity that makes up our world, they saw there was an underlying unity and pattern to it all; that we live in a world where everything is connected and influences, in some way, everything else.
This may not seem a big thing, but, without boring you for a few hours, it’s a view that underpins our modern sciences. Culturally speaking, in today’s world, we take it for granted that there is an order in the universe that can be studied and understood, that life isn’t random, that there are underlying rules governing it and guiding it. This view led us to realise fundamental laws like gravity and the laws of thermodynamics, etc. This worldview did not always exist, however, and has its roots in the Exodus people, who saw life as one because they understood God to be One (Deut. 6:4).
But more than this, and to bring it down to our level, it means that I (Tristan) do not live in one reality, while you live in a separate reality, but that we share time and space together and that my actions affect the very reality you and I share. How I drive my car matters to you, and it matters to God because it is God’s world.
For the ancient Israelite, faith in God wasn’t merely a spiritual thing—God was not exclusively concerned about my spirit. But my heart and my actions mattered, too.
All of life is seen as worship, not just what happens in a religious ceremony. God is present at the altar and when I’m behind the wheel of a vehicle.
We would still champion this view of worship, as Christians.
‘Love God and love your neighbour’, as the law would be summarised (Deut. 6:4-5; Lev. 19:18; Mk 12:28-34; Rom. 13:8-10; Gal. 5:14; Jam. 1:27). These two facets cannot and should not be untangled from one another.
Regardless of what we think about the Old Testament laws, like the ones we have read, it would be a mistake to fail to appreciate this grounding. This ground prevents ‘faith’ from being a private matter only. ‘Faith’ is always a public thing, an interrelation thing.
To put it bluntly, relationships are our acts of worship.
I’m saying this because I have to, somehow, tackle the age-old question of whether the Old Testament laws still apply to us as Christians. It’s a huge topic that should be answered through a number of approaches and needs to be tackled more thoroughly than I will today.
But, in short, the answer to the question is …
‘no’ …
… and also ‘yes’.
I know this doesn’t help.
People try to help by dividing the Old Testament laws into four categories: Ritual and Ceremonial; Ethical and Moral; Civil and Societal laws; laws regarding Ethnic Identification (Circumcision, Dietary laws, Clothing etc.).
And so, as the argument goes: because I am not Jewish, I can ignore the Ethnic Identity clauses; because of Christ’s sacrifice, I can ignore the ritual and ceremonial; and because I live in the 21st Century, I can ignore the civil and social rulings. So I’m left with the moral only (even then, there’s a lot of debate).
You can make an argument for those divisions. They can be helpful. The problem, though, is that such categories will not make sense of everything. The Old Testament laws are not split into neat boxes; it’s mashed together, again, because life is seen as a whole thing not a set of compartments. As such, not everything in the Old Testament laws easily falls into any one category.
A law about clothing and farming can be about more than clothing and farming.
For example, where would you put ‘Do not wear clothes of wool and linen woven together’ (Deut. 22:11)? Is it just a clothing law, a matter of ethnic identification? If so, can I ignore it?
What about, ‘Do not plough with an ox and a donkey yoked together’? I don’t own an ox. I have no intention to, either. And I don’t plan on owning an ox and a donkey at the same time (it costs enough to feed the kids!). I also have no desire to plough a field. I don’t have a field! If I did, in my context, I would use a machine to do the job. So can I ignore this, too?
The simple answer to both is, ‘yes’, I suppose.
Thing is, both of these laws occur side by side, entwined, braided together, so to speak, because they’re making a point. If you weave wool and linen together, the stronger material will rip the weaker material apart. If you yoke a donkey to an ox, by the end of the working day, the ox will be fine, but the donkey will be in pieces because it can’t keep up with an ox.[vii] It would be like yoking a Chihuahua to a Great Dane and sending them out on a run.
So there’s more going on here than fashion and husbandry. Rather, there’s a principle about justice; about cultivating life; making sure the strong doesn’t rip apart what is weak; protecting what is vulnerable from being exploited; about how we practically love one another.
Should I ignore this? No.
Again, even at their most bizarre, these ancient laws express the central idea that God is interested in everything, and that everything can become a means of communicating something of God’s heart; a heart we see fully revealed in Jesus Christ, God made flesh. These laws are not about legalism—although, they can and have wrongly been treated that way. Rather, they were a way for Israel to present the God of the Exodus to the world around them.
Of course, an example about linen and wool, and oxen and donkeys, makes some sense. But what about the passage we’ve read? What does it communicate about the heart of God, especially when it rightly makes us wince? What do we do with these laws?
Do we, unthinkingly, go back to the black and white of the text, purchase some slaves and beat them when we wish? Absolutely not (and I’ll explain why), but that would not be Christ-like.
Or, can we ignore them, cut them out? Also no. Because we would then miss how God is at work within this particular culture, pointing them towards the humanity fully revealed in Jesus Christ. A lesson that is still relevant for us today.
I want to be helpful. But, how do I begin?
Well …
A FISH OUT OF WATER
Have you ever tried to tell a goldfish that it’s nose is wet?
You probably weren’t expecting that. But, if you did attempt it—assuming you can talk ‘fish’, and that they have noses (?)—they would have no idea what you mean by ‘wet’. A fish has never lived out of its watery environment. It takes water for granted, it was born and raised in water. It’s just normal.
The same is true of you and me when it comes to culture. Much of what we accept as normal is because we were born into it and experience it every day.
Actually, even that’s not quite true, either. Because none of us are really ‘born into’ a culture; we come out of it, in the same way a leaf comes out of a tree. We are products of our culture. From the moment we are born, we are saturated by our family’s culture, our neighbourhood’s culture, our country’s culture. All of us live and grow, like fish in water, in a culture that invisibly informs and enmeshes us.
To give an example; when I was a child, I didn’t think I had an accent. My family, school friends, and relatives in Liverpool didn’t, either. They all sounded like I did. But as for my Dad’s side of the family, who lived in Manchester, they did have accents. And it’s only in meeting what’s different, that you notice, after a time, that you have an accent, too.
But even then, although my relatives in Manchester may have spoken differently than me (we spoke proper), they still lived like me because they lived in the part of the world I lived in. Our concerns were their concerns. Our ways were their ways.
The more I aged, the more I travelled, the more I saw, the more I tasted, the more aware I became not just of different ways of speaking, but different ways of living.
It is true that the people who are most aware of culture are those who have lived in different parts of the world, where the contrast between who they are and who they are living with becomes more vivid. But, for the rest us, who have always lived near each other, it’s harder to detect, and we are alike in our values and behaviour—more than we care to admit.
Not only is our culture hard to see, but we like what’s familiar, the ways we are used to doing and thinking about things. Cultural habits take a long time to change—generations of change, in fact. And novelty is deeply threatening, especially when we have built our lives and our identity around the old ways of doing and thinking about things.
Change doesn’t come easy. But slow, gradual. To use a phrase that is used to describe ancient Israel, but really describes humanity as a whole, we are a ‘stiff-necked people’ (Ex. 33:3, 5)[viii] We resist turning and facing in another direction.
It’s not only a wilful thing, in that we don’t want to. Though sometimes, this can be the case. But like anyone who has ever had physio therapy on a bone or a muscle that has been damaged, it’s a capacity thing as well. We are just not used to thinking or behaving differently; not used to moving in a different direction. We require a large learning curve. Getting us to turn takes sensitivity to our stiff necks. Try and turn our heads too quick, with force, and more damage ensues.
Too much change too quickly, and we can’t cope. Like an elastic band rushes back to its original shape after being stretched, we tense up, and retreat to what is familiar, comfortable.
As Jesus said, describing our stubbornness, ‘nobody who drinks the old wine wants the new. “I prefer the old”, they say.’ (Lk. 5:39).
Or, to put it as I have heard it expressed many times, ‘I’ll just stick with what I know’
A LIGHT IN THE DARK
The people of Israel have a culture. They do not live in a vacuum. They are not some brand new creation that has just come fresh out of the packet.
They have come out of Egypt as a leaf comes out of tree branch. Egypt has soaked into them. Even before this, their ancestors lived in the Ancient Near East for generations. They are soaked in their culture, and have emerged from this culture. These people of the Exodus have ways of doing things and thinking about things. Their necks have gotten used to being in a certain position.
‘At a broad cultural level, Israel lived with the same everyday issues of life and the many causes of disruption and disputes’ that would have been common where they lived both geographically and historically, as many commentators note.[ix] And, because of this, many of the laws we encounter in this passage are very similar to other ancient law codes that pre-date this story.[x]
To put it more clearly, laws like this already existed—hundreds of them.
This is not to say that the Israelites copied. Rather, they had already grown up in this thinking and inherited many of these ways of thinking and doing from the cultures they emerged from—such as Egypt and even as far back as Ur where Abraham came from. So there’s a lot that echoes the wider culture they lived in, a lot of contact, a lot of overlap.
The art of it, and also part of the difficulty, is seeing how they differ.
For example, the famous, ‘eye for an eye, bruise for a bruise’ law (known in the Latin as lex talionis), mentioned in Ex. 21:24-25, is not new and nor is it unique to the Old Testament. It already existed.[xi]
To correct a misconception with this law, even in its older setting, this law was never about revenge per se. Nowadays, we wrongly think the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ law was about encouraging violent retaliation, when actually, it was intended for the opposite reason—it restricted and limited the vengeance to being proportional, it did not promote it.
Even in our culture, where we retaliate harder than we have received, we could still learn something from this very old law.
But back to my point…
Again, this rule already existed culturally; Israel had grown up with it. But, how Exodus uses this law is different.
In the Code of Hammurabi from Old Babylonia, for example, this law only applied if you were the same social class. To put it in today’s terms, if you were upper-class and you blinded another upper-class person, an eye for an eye applied. However, if you blinded a person of a lower status, you could just give them a few quid, and your status would give you immunity.
We still have this problem today!
In Exodus, though, everyone’s eyeballs are treated equally. No one gets immunity. Social ranking doesn’t come into it. The eye of a servant is as important as the eye of a master.
Please understand, this doesn’t make an ‘eye for an eye’ the ideal rule for life. It isn’t. In a world where this is adhered to, everyone ends up blind. Plus, this is not the ideal we are called to (I’ll come back to this). But in Exodus, this cultural norm was tweaked towards being more just. People with lower status had greater rights.
More than this, if read closely, Exodus never rigidly applies the law of ‘eye for an eye, bruise for bruise’, either.
In Ex. 21:18-19, before this rule is quoted, if a fight breaks out, and one person injures another, regardless of social class, then they are to cover the medical costs and the costs of living for the injured party (even if it’s lifelong).
In Ex. 21:26-27, after this rule is quoted, if a master blinded his servant, he couldn’t just pay a few quid, he was required to let his servant go free.
The literary structure of this entire passage is much to reflect on: The older, pre-existing rule, that has already been tweaked, has also been surrounded by laws that circumvent you actually invoking it.
So Exodus doesn’t promote payback (vengeance), at all. It takes a law that was originally about restricting revenge and takes it further than the surrounding culture, and instead promotes the ideal of putting things right, of doing justice—of promoting a better quality of life instead of just maiming someone else.
That law about beating a servant, just mentioned, is also interesting. In the ancient culture around Israel, you could treat a servant/slave in whatever way you liked—beat them or kill them. Not so in Exodus. A master could be punished for killing his servant, and if he was inhumane towards them, he was called to let them go.[xii] It implies that servants and slaves have basic human rights, a legal standing over and against their master. And this, in its day and age, was revolutionary.
Can you see the difference?
It doesn’t make these rulings the ideal. They’re not. But what I want you to see is that, within the dark culture that Israel emerged from, it was like someone had started turning the lights up. These laws are not the best, but they were better.
As someone else said, there is lots that makes us wince in these laws, but it is also true that these laws represent ‘an overall softening—a humanizing—of the common law of the ancient Middle East.’[xiii]
We don’t see a softening on the importance of life, in itself. In fact, the value of all human life is increased. What we see is a softening on the pre-existing ideologies and prejudices that viewed and treated some lives more valuably and more humanely than other. These Exodus laws regulated and restricted existing practice.
It should go without saying, but all of this is born out Israel’s own experience in Egypt, where they were exploited and dehumanised. The law draws directly on that experience a number of times as it calls Israel to not exploit the widow or the orphan, to not take advantage of the needy, and to not oppress the foreigner (Ex. 22:21-22; 23:9).
Some of these laws are unique to Israel: like not charging interest (Ex. 22:25-27), for example. Also, the law about not oppressing the foreigner who lived among you is unique to Israel. No other ancient law at the time reflected any such concern for resident foreigners. In contrast, this mandate was so important to Israel’s laws that, as Christopher J. Wright notes, ‘Israel has around twenty to thirty laws for the benefit of foreigners alone—more than on any other single topic.’[xiv]
But, despite a scattering of unique laws, here, most of the laws are a revision to an existing cultural norm.
Another case of this, is the prohibition on kidnapping people and selling them into slavery (Ex. 21:16). Human trafficking, in Exodus, is completely forbidden (whereas, in previous cultural norms, only kidnapping children was outlawed)[xv]
Even the slavery laws show revision: You were not permitted to keep a slave forever (regardless of how great a debt they owed to you, or how they came to be in bondage). There’s lots of debate about what this form of slavery was.[xvi] But regardless of its form, after six years, echoing the language of God in Exodus, you were to let them go.[xvii]
In every case, in all the laws in this section, there is a step away from their current culture and a step towards something better.[xviii]
DIVINE NUDGES
So what we see, if I was to put it another way, is God nudging his people out of their culture, from death to life, dark to light, from the grave to the cradle.
It’s what some scholars, like William Webb, have called a ‘redemptive-movement’.[xix] God meets people where they are, culturally and historically, and slowly and incrementally turns them around to face towards and take a step towards a higher ideal.
This does not mean these laws are the ideal, or that God’s “happy” with the state of things, or that God is “endorsing” and “supporting” institutions like slavery. God is not. It’s a revelation about our ‘stiff necks’.
Jesus made the same point when he spoke to the people of his time about the Law of Moses; ‘Because of your hardness of heart, Moses permitted such and such’ (Matt. 19:8). The same could be said of every time Jesus says, ‘You have heard Moses say… but I say… ’ (Matt 5:21, 27, 31, 33, 38, 43)
Again, the people of Israel—like all of us—are not fresh out of the packet. We come out of our cultures like leaves from a branch, and God meets us where we are and has to work, prune, and sculpt with the material at hand.
The late, George Bernard Shaw once gave the best, fool-proof, advice on sculpting an elephant. First, he advised, you find a huge block of marble. Second, you chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.
That’s what God is doing, chipping away at humanity. And he doesn’t stop in Exodus. Yes, there’s a step in Exodus away from its surrounding culture, but when we get to the book of Deuteronomy, for example, there are more steps, more shifts that follow—a movement we witness within the Bible itself.
So in Exodus, a male slave leaves, but his wife and kids have to stay, and the laws for male slaves are different to female slaves (see, Ex. 21:7). Which isn’t ideal at all, even if it may be better than elsewhere at the time. But later, in Deuteronomy 15:12-17, that law of being released applies to men and women equally.
In addition, when a male or female slave is set free, Deuteronomy gets even more radical. Their former master must not send them away empty handed. At the master’s own cost, they are to give their ex-slaves food for the short-term and animals for the long-term. The master is not merely to give them their freedom, but they are to receive a means of living to make sure they avoid a life of poverty that could force them back into indentured servitude.
So there’s a further redemptive-movement. And if I take these shifts, and consider them alongside the laws of Jubilee and Redemption (Lev. 25); and the tithing and gleaning laws that were to provide a welfare state, of sorts, for the vulnerable; along with the prohibitions against human trafficking (Ex. 21:16; Deut. 24:7)… then, taken together, the Law subverts the whole practice of slavery.
It doesn’t uphold the system at all; it dismantles it.
Exodus consistently reveals a God who is in radical solidarity with the powerless (a people-orientated God, not a thing-orientated God), and as such, it follows that this is the God whose image we were made to reflect.
God is the God who says ‘let my people go’, the God who is working to pry open our coveting, exploiting and forceful grip.
As African theologian, Kenneth N Ngwa points out, God’s call on Israel to come out of Egypt is more than a change in address; ‘The appropriate response to this reality is ultimately not to switch residential zip codes but to change governing ideology… To shift location from Egypt to Canaan, without changing the underlying social, political, and ideological determinants of marginalization, is to transfer the problem rather than resolve it.’ [xx]
The overall idea is that God is working to create a renewed humanity, one that isn’t a mirror image of Pharaoh’s Egypt, where human life is completely exploitable, but one that resembles the God who rescues people from the ‘house of slavery’ (Ex. 20:2), and which doesn’t worship, serve, and reflect any other type of “god” or idol.
Again and again, there are improvements, steps that follow after Exodus to make this happen. Again, this doesn’t mean these laws are the ideal. They are not the final destination.[xxi] And also, as we follow the story, we hear in the voices of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos, to name a few, of how the people of Israel failed to follow these steps.
But the steps are there, the shifts are there, all the same. And if we realise this, we can trace the course, the trajectory that those steps are taking us toward. As more and more of what doesn’t resemble an elephant is chipped away, we get a better sense of the final image.
And I am going to suggest, that if we want to see what that final image is, then it is Jesus Christ, the image of God, the One who expresses God’s glory exactly (Heb. 1:1-3; Col. 1:15; Jn. 1:18; 14:9). That God’s desire, and what God is working out, is to shape us into the humanity we see displayed in God the Son. Christ-likeness is the goal (Rom. 8:29; 2 Cor. 3:18)
A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
I hope that makes some sense?
But to come back to the original question: What do we do with these texts?
Well, there are two wrong extremes:
One wrong extreme is to stay with the isolated words, and grasp tightly to them without seeing the movement of those words against their own culture. Doing this led people to proclaim that the Bible supported the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, which is doesn’t.
It’s easy to pluck a verse out of cultural and historical context and make it do what you want.
So the danger is, if I stop here, I end up actually going against the direction God is leading us is in.
The other wrong extreme is to cut it out, throw it away, or simply ignore it. But if we do this, we no longer have the means to discern the steps God has taken humanity on. And, as odd as it may seem to some of us, we end up facilitating those who want to do harm in the name of the Bible.
For example, at the height of the transatlantic slave trade, there was a thing known as the ‘Slave Holder’s Bible’. It removed 90% of the Old Testament and 50% of the New. Part of that 90% was a huge chunk of Exodus; the first nineteen chapters (the whole rescue story; the talk of God being in solidarity with the suffering; how God is against the slavery of Egypt…), along with a chunk of these laws (especially the prohibition against kidnapping people).
The slave trade was a keen promoter and practitioner of the ‘cut it out’ approach, because that approach helped support the barbaric practice of chattel slavery.
Both approaches fail. So what are we to do?
It may seem, when we come to texts like these, that we are stuck between a rock and a hard place; blind obedience or avoidance. Neither is appropriate. But they are not the only choice. Instead, we travel with the text, we see the movement of the Spirit of God in the text, the unfolding drama of the narrative, and we go forward, towards Christ-likeness, seeking and asking, in the power of the Spirit, how we walk humbly with God, do justice, and love mercy. Seeking, as Paul advised, not to conform to our culture, but to be transformed by God (Rom. 12:2).
We are not stuck between a rock and a hard place, but, like the laws in the Book of the Covenant, we live between unhewn stones and goat’s milk.
At the start of the passage, the Israelites are instructed not to raise iron over the stones they use to make an altar. As one Jewish commentator notes, iron is for swords, which shorten the lives of people, while an altar is about cultivating life.[xxii]
Boiling a goat in its mother’s milk, carries the same message. That milk was supposed to nurture the young goat, not bring about its destruction.
As bookends to this whole passage, like the front and back covers of a novel, setting the tone of the contents, both laws carry the principle of not causing the means of life to be an agent of death.
In the same way, when you read the Old Testament, especially the laws, don’t use it as an agent of death. The spirit of these words is to be heard and to lead us to love God and our neighbour. They are not there to lead us to be exploitive, oppressive, or dehumanising. It’s intent, via a step at a time, is to lead us to life—the life that has come, and can be seen, in the person, death and resurrection of Jesus.
He is the standard.
He is the One we fix our gaze upon.
He is the Author and Finisher of our faith.
(PS. As closing thought: We can often read these passages and judge Moses and ancient Israel. But the call upon us is to judge ourselves. G. K. Chesterton apparently once remarked, ‘it takes a live fish to swim against the current. A dead fish travels with it.’ Israel, in its cultural setting, showed itself to be a live fish. They may not have gotten all the way upstream, but they still went against the flow. What about us?)
‘Out of Egypt I called my Son’
– Hosea 11:1
‘So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God’
– Paul, 1 Cor 10:31
ENDNOTES:
[i] Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution. Speech given at the National Cathedral, Washington D.C., March 31, 1968.
King’s famous quote is an echo of a quote from the American Unitarian preacher, Theodore Parker (1810-1860), who sought to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. Parker’s full quote is: ‘I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice. [Ten Sermons on Religion (1853) ‘Justice and the conscience’]
[ii] The term comes from its own use in Exodus, as the scroll that Moses reads to the people within the covenant ceremony described in Exodus 24 (esp’ verse 7). As Christopher Wright points out, ‘[Moses] public reading would also have referred to the Ten Commandments, which were known as the “ten words.” Very likely, the expression “all the Lord’s words and laws” (24:3) refers to the combination of the Decalogue (“words”) and the various instructions of chapters 21—23 (“laws”) [Christopher J. H. Wright, The Story of God Bible Commentary: Exodus (Zondervan Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2021), p. 385]
[iii] The ‘law codes’ in the Scriptures, similar to other societies around them, followed two styles. One style is known as ‘apodictic’, which takes a command structure of ‘You shall or You shall not do this or that’. The other style is known as ‘casuistic’; ‘if someone does X, then do Y’. Although apodictic laws did exist beyond Israel, they occur more frequently in Israel’s laws than other contemporary law codes. But casuistic laws were the more common form of law in both Israel’s laws and the societies around them. It has been suggested that apodictic laws generally pertain to the cultic/ritual aspects of Israelite life, whilst casuistic laws dealt with the non-cultic aspects.
[iv] I say ‘mixed bunch of people’ because, as mentioned in the first session on this series, the people who left Egypt via the Passover, were an ‘ethnic salad’ of people—they were not all Israelites, but also included Egyptians, along with other Semitic and non-Semitic people who dwelt in Egypt at the time (Ex. 12:38). [‘ethnic salad’ is from Ralph K. Hawkins, Discovering Exodus (SPCK, London, 2021), p. 63]
[v] Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the way Everyone Thinks and Feels (Lion Hudson plc, Oxford, England, 1998), p. 156
[vi] Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Augsburg Fortress, MN, USA, 1997), p. 186
[vii] The same can be said about the prohibition on sowing two kinds of crops together. This isn’t about gardening, but farming in an ancient environment. Sowing two different kinds of crops could mean they grow at different rates, meaning harvesting one could damage the other. As with what will follow, I think the ancient cultural context needs to be considered on this law. I.e., I don’t believe this to be a universal law for all time and contexts. But its universal principle remains the same as the clothing and husbandry rule: Justice.
[viii] The phrase ‘stiff-necked’ is often translated ‘stubborn’
[ix] Christopher J. H. Wright, The Story of God Bible Commentary: Exodus (Zondervan Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2021), p. 386
[x] Law codes such as: Ur-Nammu (2100-2050 BC); Lipit-Ishtar (1934-1924 BC), Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC), and Hittite Laws (1650-1100 BC), for example.
[xi] In the Code of Hammurabi , see laws labelled CH 196-201.
[xii] A later law would be more radical; In Deut. 23:15-16, provision was made for a slave to leave an abusive master, to run away and take up freedom and refuge in whatever city, town or village of their choosing.
[xiii] Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the way Everyone Thinks and Feels (Lion Hudson plc, Oxford, England, 1998), p. 154
[xiv] Christopher J. H. Wright, The Story of God Bible Commentary: Exodus (Zondervan Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2021), p. 433 (along with footnote 2 on the same page)
[xv] See CH 14 of the Code of Hammurabi, for example.
[xvi] As many commentators note, this would not be like the chattel slavery of the transatlantic slave trade, where people were stolen from their land, denied their humanity, traded like commodities and enslaved as property. Instead, from the wider context and scriptural references, this was possibly debt-based slavery, were someone enters the service of another to clear a debt owed—a servitude common in the ancient Near East. Though common, however, this doesn’t mean it should be seen as a ‘good’ or humane thing, and even in such “common” practices, grotesque abuse could and did occur.
[xvii] It worth stating that Exodus does not actually condone having a slave. It’s not saying you can buy a Hebrew slave or beat your slave; it’s saying ‘if’ this happens. Exodus accepts, for want of a better word, that slavery is a part of the social fabric of Ancient Near Eastern life. But this is not the same as saying that it was happy with that, as we’ll see.
[xviii] If I had to recommend one book, Christopher J. H. Wright’s commentary, The Story of God Bible Commentary: Exodus , provides the best section of this topic of cultural contact and where the contrasts are. I’ve referred to the book several times in this series and, in all the Exodus commentaries I own, it’s by far the most thorough and accessible.
[xix] William J. Webb, Slaves, Women and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 2001). As Webb mentions in his book, a ‘redemptive-movement’ hermeneutic is ‘hardly [a] completely new concept. Aspects of a redemptive-movement hermeneutic are found in other standard approaches to Scripture. For instance, an “analogy of faith” approach considers that all biblical texts must be in dialogue of sorts in order to formulate a synthetic understanding of truth; one must never read a text in isolation from the rest of Scripture. A “canonical” approach, a “progress of revelation” approach, a “progressive dispensational” approach and a moderate “covenant” approach—all of these approaches see revelatory movement and development between epochs in salvation history. Various “christological” and “eschatological/telos” approaches see these two centers in theology as foundational for rooting our application of the biblical text in a forward-looking manner. Also, a “grammatical-historical” approach tries to understand a biblical text in the greater context of its socio-historical setting; this is not unlike a redemptive-movement approach, which attempts to discover the underlying spirit of the text by hearing it within its broader social context. Aside from these standard approaches to Scripture, the roots of a redemptive-movement understanding of Scripture can historically be seen in every issue throughout church history (and Judaism) that is comparable to slavery. Whether the labels for the approach are the same of different, debates about slavery, polygamy, monarchy, etc. have always had one side of the church appealing to a redemptive-movement hermeneutic (call it what you like) and the other side appealing to a static hermeneutic. [sic]’ (Webb, p. 35, footnote 4).
[xx] Kenneth N Ngwa, Let My People Live: An African Reading of Exodus
[xxi] This doesn’t mean that the Old Testament is affirming relativism, either. God’s ideals were already in place at creation, but God accommodated (for want of a far better word) himself to human hard-heartedness and fallen social structures. And ultimately, his ideals were once again shown forth in the Incarnation.
[xxii] Rashi of Exodus 20:22:4
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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