Informed, accessible textbook on law collections in the Pentateuch In this book William Morrow surveys four major law collections in Exodus-Deuteronomy and shows how they each enabled the people of Israel to create and sustain a community of faith. Treating biblical law as dynamic systems of thought facilitating ancient Israel's efforts at self-definition, Morrow describes four different social contexts that gave rise to biblical law: (1) Israel at the holy mountain (the Ten Commandments); (2) Israel in the village assembly (Exodus 20:22-23:19); (3) Israel in the courts of the Lord (priestly and holiness rules in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers); and (4) Israel in the city (Deuteronomy). Including forthright discussion of such controversial subjects as slavery, revenge, gender inequality, religious intolerance, and contradictions between bodies of biblical law, Morrow's study will help students and other serious readers make sense out of texts in the Pentateuch that are often seen as obscure.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.

As with archaeology, traditio-historical research of Old Testament literature proceeds backwards from the received text, travelling through the earlier stages of compositions to the probable origins. The canonical structure of the Hebrew Bible has therefore been taken as the point of departure in the traditio-historical study of the Nathan Narrative in 2 Samuel 7:1-17. By progressing backwards from the Canonical Prophets, the stages in the composition of the Joshua-Kings corpus, and of 2 Samuel 7:1-17, have been recovered through the application of redactio-critical and literary critical methods. A pre-history of the Narrative has also been retraced in the traditions that were preserved in the oral stages, in the typical forms and settings of transmission. Notwithstanding the valuable insights that have accrued from Martin Noth's hypothesis of a "Deuteronomistic History," both the hypothesis itself and analyses deriving from it have failed to account satisfactorily for the place of 2 Samuel 7:1-17 in the Joshua-Kings composition. That failure is due to a methodological flaw of taking a non-canonical configuration--namely the Deuteronomy-Kings corpus--as the point of departure and the interpretative key. This study tries to remedy that flaw.