The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible sets out to offer ‘a comprehensive overview of the history of biblical law’. In this goal, it is only partially successful. It is, however, an important guide to the state of current debates on key questions such as: were the texts we have the equivalent of statutes for ancient Israel, exemplars for judges, or something else?; how does biblical law relate to other material in the Hebrew Bible?; and how did Jewish and early Christian communities approach this material?

The book is split into five parts, each containing between two and four essays, giving voice to 15 different authors in total. The first part, the Historical Context of Biblical Law, situates biblical law in relation to other legal material in the Ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean. In the second part, The Biblical Legal Collections, the origins of the laws, their narrative context, and their nature is considered. The third part divides biblical law into substantive law, procedural law, and ritual law. The fourth part explores the relationships between biblical law and prophecy, prayer and wisdom. The final part looks at the approaches to biblical law found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, rabbinic literature, and in early Christian teaching.

The ‘biblical law’ that is the focus of the volume is the legal material in the Ten Commandments, the Covenant Collection in Exodus, the Priestly Collection principally found in Leviticus, the Holiness Collection, and the Deuteronomic Collection (p 1). The Hebrew Bible is those texts which Christians refer to as the Old Testament (excluding the Deuterocanonical texts which were written in Greek).

The authors in the volume focus on identifying the large areas of ongoing scholarly disagreement. The debates begin with what ancient societies understood about law and how law functions (Wells, p 7; Démare-Lamont, p 15; Krüger, p 220–222; Kazen, p 262), there is then the question of the relationship between the five different Collections of biblical law (Wells, pp 56–61), the problem of whether biblical law was intended to be enforced, generated from records of decisions in specific legal cases (Milstein, pp 76–77), developed for the purpose of legal education among the scribes, or a literary creation – ‘more like a scribal work of art’ (Wells, pp 61–63). When it comes to how ancient communities interpreted biblical law, there are arguments about whether ‘legal differences among Jewish sects were synchronic or represent a shift over time’ (Harrington, p 256). The question of dating is just an example of the intensity and scope of the debates which surround biblical law: ‘The origin and history of this literature is vigorously contested. If a majority of scholars agree on anything, it may be that the order in which each collection appears in the Bible is not necessarily the order in which they appeared in history’ (Wells, pp 58–59). The Documentary Hypothesis, which assigned blocks of material to J, E, P, D ‘no longer holds sway over the field as it once did’ (Wells, p 59), but we are still confronted by a composite work whose sources are opaque.

Chavel offers a way forward, drawn from Hayim Nahman Bialik, who wrote that ‘Law is the coalescence … of narrative lore; narrative lore is the smelting of law’ (p 95). The laws have to be interpreted in the light of the narrative material in the Pentateuch, and the narrative material in the light of the laws. Yhwh inverts the standard lists in Ancient Near East law codes, which deal with the sold and the enslaved last if at all. Biblical law is marked by the repeated warnings that ‘mistreatment of the vulnerable – the unrooted (gēr), the unhusbanded (‘almānā), and the un-fathered (yātôm)’ will lead to Israel becoming ‘an un-nation’ (p 107).

The book contains a number of illuminating discussions about particular texts in the Collections. These include: the implications of debt-slavery (Démare-Lamont, p 29; Wells, p 66; Jacobs, pp 122–124), how the seemingly harsh penalties might have been mitigated in practice (Jacobs, p 118, pp 131–133), and how a trial (rîb) would have proceeded (Czander, pp 142–151).

Biblical law influenced other literature in the Hebrew Bible. Prophecy can take the form of legal speeches, sometimes for the prosecution against God or Israel, and sometimes for the defence (Czander, pp 152–157; Achenbach, pp 181–200). Achenbach shows how the prophets build on biblical law to argue for ‘a universal order of law and justice for the preservation of humanity and creation’, under the sovereignty of the one God, Yhwh (p 199). Prayer is presented throughout the Hebrew Bible as ‘a legal occasion … when human channels fail, those in need can turn to the divine courtroom as a forum of last resort’ (Holtz, p 202). Krüger suggests that while law did not play a significant role in the wisdom traditions of the Hebrew Bible, there was a greater emphasis on it in the wisdom writings added to the Septuagint (p 220). As predominantly Gentile Christian communities began to emerge, ‘early Christian moral instruction continues to depend heavily on the Torah, either in form or content or both’ (p 281), but ‘By the fourth century, the position that Christians were not bound by biblical law was firmly established’ (Gregerman, p 316).

The Cambridge Companion to Law in the Hebrew Bible is not an introductory text. The chapters assume a high degree of familiarity with the debates in the field as well as related disciplines such as New Testament studies. The most natural target audience for the book are readers who studied questions about biblical law during their undergraduate theological studies and who now, many years later, want to discover the latest thinking on the perennial questions about the Pentateuch’s composition, its status as law, and its use in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. For lawyers, who come to the text with different questions, the writings of Bernard S Jackson (Studies in the Semiotics of Biblical Law, 2000), Jonathan Burnside (God, Justice, and Society, 2010), and Christopher J H Wright (Old Testament Ethics for the People of God, 2004) are likely to be more accessible.