This chapter introduces the biblical law collections or codes: the Ten Commandments, the Covenant Collection, the Priestly Collection, the Holiness Collection, and the Deuteronomic Collection. It examines whether they come from a particular source, whether they should be considered mainly legal or literary works, and whether later collections sought to revise or reinterpret earlier ones.

This chapter looks at the interpretations of biblical law produced by early Christian writers and how they sought to distinguish themselves from what they saw as a Jewish approach to the Hebrew Bible and to biblical law in particular.

This chapter describes the law collections from the region such as the Laws of Hammurabi and the other types of extant legal documents such as contracts and trial records. It also explains how this evidence helps us understand the historical context of biblical law and how comparative analysis contributes to its study.

This chapter explains the legal metaphors used in the poems and prayers in the Psalms and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. It shows how these metaphors reflect an understanding of God and his relations to humanity that is grounded in a legal, even litigious, perspective. It shows how and why individuals would appeal to the divine court in their quest for justice.

This chapter examines the texts surviving from Qumran and the surrounding area and how their tradents understood the nature of biblical law. It will identify and describe the interpretive strategies reflected in the scrolls for both harmonization and creative reuse of biblical law.

This chapter explores how biblical law is treated in the gospels, in Paul, and in other New Testament texts. It shows how recent scholarship has demonstrated that Jesus and Paul treat the law in more positive fashion than they are usually given credit for.

This chapter examines laws governing witnesses at trial and their testimony as well as other rules related to legal procedure. It also looks at how these topics figure in a number of psalms and in prophetic literature, since the relationship of individuals and even entire nations to Yahweh is often depicted in legal terms.

This chapter describes the legal topics treated in the biblical collections – topics that legal historians would use in their work. They include personal status, family law, property, contract, and harms.

This chapter considers the ritual laws in the latter part of Exodus and throughout much of Leviticus and Numbers, which cover sacrificial activities, consecration of and rules for priests, permitted/forbidden foods, matters of purity, religious festivals, types of sins, the handling and disposal of blood, and vows and donations to the cult of Yahweh.

This chapter looks at potential sources that can account for the provisions in the biblical law collections such as previous legal collections, practical legal documents (e.g., contracts), and fictional court cases. Some biblical laws may have originated as stand-alone fictional court cases, akin to the Mesopotamian legal-pedagogical genre of model cases.