Beyond Divine Law

The Pentateuch provides several meaningful connections between legal and narrative texts which serve to articulate and lend authority to the law. Beyond the notion of divine law, biblical law is thus embedded in various contexts of meaning which also relate to its normativity. A comparison of the textual traditions of the Masoretic text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, and the Peshitta, shows that law, along with its legitimating contexts, contributed to the creation of group-specific identities and to the differentiation between different groups of agents between the late Second Temple period and late antiquity. The aim of this article is to describe, by way of example, how the normativity of the laws of the Covenant Code (Exodus 20:22–23:33) is constituted within the pentateuchal narrative, at the interfaces of narrative and legal texts, and in textual history. As a result, it will become clear that the ancient textual witnesses attest to a productive adaptation of law within different conceptions of Torah. The various textual traditions reveal shifts in concepts which were transferred to the texts during the processes of their transmission, translation, and adaptation.