Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 29:4 (Dec 1986)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

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JETS 29:4 (December 1986) p. 469

Book Reviews

Old Testament Law. By Dale Patrick. Atlanta: John Knox, 1985, 288 pp., n.p. paper.

This is an ambitious book, for anyone attempting to write a comprehensive textbook on the nature, content and continuing relevance of Biblical law has taken on an enormous task. But at least Dale Patrick of Drake University and for nearly ten years chairman of the SBL group on Biblical law is well equipped to try. By and large he has succeeded in fulfilling his aims: Anyone wanting an up-to-date introduction to current critical approaches to OT law from a liberal Protestant perspective could hardly better Patrick. That is not to say that Patrick’s views would all be accepted by those who share his basic assumptions, let alone by those who approach the subject with fundamentally different presuppositions. But here is mainline critical scholarship putting its case fairly and irenically, and also, quite unusually in my experience, trying to sell the value and relevance of Biblical norms to the late-twentieth-century reader.

After an introductory chapter outlining different approaches to law, chap. 2, “How Law is Studied by Critical Scholars,” sketches both the methods and conclusions of source and form criticism and also what is known of law in other parts of the ancient orient. Here he follows standard critical positions. He does not for example question the independence of the E source or the lateness of P, opinions that have been widely debated by liberal scholars recently. He reviews Alt and Gerstenberger’s discussion of apodictic and casuistic law and suggests that their distinctions ought to be further refined. There are two categories of case law: remedial case law, which prescribes a remedy when a norm is violated, and primary case law, which sets out obligations without discussing violations. In discussing the non-Biblical collections of law, such as Hammurapi’s, he strangely describes them as codes, apparently unaware that legal historians now reject such terminology as the incompleteness of such collections shows they are not attempts at codification.

Chapter 3 discusses the Ten Commandments, reviewing the main suggestions about their date and original form before going on to give a short commentary on each one. This commentary is sane and sensible. He correctly rejects Phillips’ idea that they represent Israel’s criminal law. He does, though, follow the unfortunate view that coveting is not merely a matter of desire but of overt action. As for the date of the commandments he asserts that only the first two go back to the time of Moses, the others dating from the tenth century. But he suspects that some of them may have been reworded by the Deuteronomists.

The same pattern, discussion of critical issues followed by short...

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