Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 22:1 (NA 1971)
Article: Legal Forms In The Book Of The Covenant
Author: G. J. Wenham

TynBul 22:1 (1971) p. 95

Legal Forms In The Book Of The Covenant*

G. J. Wenham

*I would like to thank Mr A. R. Millard and Mr N. J. A. Williams for their helpful comments on this paper, which was read at a meeting of the Tyndale Fellowship in Cambridge, July 1970.

In recent years there have been several studies on Old Testament law. In accordance with accepted principles of form criticism it is quite usual to argue from the form of the laws to their original Sitz im Leben. The first work along these lines was the essay of Albrecht Alt ‘Die Ursprünge des israelitischen Rechts’, first published in 1934 but still regarded as worth translating into English in 1966. In this article Alt drew attention to the distinction between casuistic and apodictic law in the Pentateuch. He argued that Old Testament case law, ‘If a man does x, then . . .’, was borrowed from pre-existing Canaanite law.1 But he argued that in the apodictic law, ‘Thou shalt not . . .’, we have an original creation of Israel, which originated in festivals of covenant renewal.2 His argument rested largely on the fact that other Near Eastern legal collections consist almost entirely of case law. Since Alt could not find parallels to apodictic law, he concluded it must be peculiar to Israel.

However, Alt’s views have been challenged from various points of view. On the one hand, his classification has been questioned, especially his definition of apodictic law.3 On the other hand, parallels to apodictic law have been pointed out in extrabiblical collections of law,4 inscriptional curses,5

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treaties6 and wisdom literature.7 It has therefore been argued that Alt was misguided in supposing apodictic legal formulations were a specifically Israelite creation providing a unique insight into Hebrew legal thinking. The new evidence has undoubtedly reopened the question of the origins of Israelite law. But before an answer can be found, it is necessary to reexamine Alt’s classification of the Old Testament material. His division of material into apodictic and casuistic law is based on a combination of stylistic markers and content. Case law ‘is invariably introduced by an objective conditional clause beginning “If . . .”. Throughout, all those who are concerned in the case under discussion are spoken of in the third p...