Truth you can trace
Law and covenant
How the covenants and the law work, and how the traditions read them.
The Code of Hammurabi
Hammurabi was the most famous king of Babylon's first dynasty, and the law code that bears his name is the oldest near-complete collection of laws known. 25 metres high, and it now stands in the Louvre.
Exodus 21:28 · Exodus 21:24 · Exodus 22:1
Read"Eye for an eye": the talion
The line modern readers find hardest, "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" (Exodus 21:23–25; compare Leviticus 24:19–20; Deuteronomy 19:16–19), is, in the ISBE's reading, not a licence for revenge but a limit on it.
Exodus 21:24 · Leviticus 24:20 · Deuteronomy 19:21
ReadA law that protected the weak
Here the ISBE draws its sharpest contrast, and it is the ISBE's own interpretive reading, offered as such. " Its example is the runaway slave.
Deuteronomy 23:15 · Exodus 21:2 · Leviticus 25:39
ReadCovenant: an ancient treaty
" "If this root idea is 'to bind,' the covenant is that which binds together the parties" (ISBE, "Covenant, in the Old Testament," George Ricker Berry).
Exodus 19:5 · Exodus 24:7 · Joshua 24:25
ReadTo "cut" a covenant
" The verb karath "meant originally 'to cut,'" and (the ISBE explains) it points to the ratifying ceremony of cutting animals in pieces.
Genesis 15:10 · Exodus 24:8 · Jeremiah 34:18
ReadThe Ten Commandments: the covenant's terms
If a covenant has terms (the first of the four elements), the Ten Commandments are the terms of the covenant at Sinai.
Exodus 34:28 · Exodus 20:1 · Deuteronomy 5:6
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On contested questions we show every major view, attributed and cited, and pick no winner. Answers are synthesized from primary sources, truth you can trace, not opinion.