ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #46 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> It seems odd that we have this very exciting passage in Chapters 19 to 20 followed by this long tedious listing of all of these little laws that God gives his people. It's almost like a Reader's Digest condensed book version of the book of Leviticus. Why are all of these rules here? >> David, this block of material is something that we usually call the Book of the Covenant. It's a technical name for Chapters 21 to 23. And it contains important legal or legislative material. And these laws are in the form that they are in because they correspond to legal material in the ancient near east, generally speaking. If we look at the legal codes from the cultures around Israel, we find that there are two types of legal material in the ancient world. And the commentaries usually refer to these by the technical terms. They will call them apodictic law and casuistic law. So we probably ought to be familiar with these terms. Apodictic law is a sort of absolute prescription. It's easiest to understand it by giving an example. An example of an apodictic law would be Exodus 20:13, "You shall not kill." Period. That's an apodictic statement. It's an absolute statement. Casuistic law is different. It's what we might today call case law expressed in an "if then" kind of formula. So let's take a look at another one from Exodus 21:12 where we read " Whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death." We could read this like this: If someone strikes a man so that he dies, then he shall be put to death. You see that's different in form from "You shall not kill." In this case, we get a condition, a case. And we also get associated with it the punishment. In this case, "He shall be put to death," is not in the apodictic statement in the Ten Commandments. In fact, in Exodus 12 this goes on and spells out even some other conditions. The whole thing says, "Whosoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death. But if he did not lie and wait for him but God let him fall into his hand, then I will appoint a place to which he may flee. But if he willfully attacks another to kill him by cunning, you shall take him from my altar that he may die." So here we actually get a fairly complex little legal statement that says we're not just -- you know, there's -- the death penalty is prescribed for killing. But rather makes a distinction between what we would today call manslaughter and murder. That we get a different penalty for manslaughter than we get for murder. So this is case law. It's casuistic law. And as you can see from the examples that I picked in this section that we have the Book of the Covenant, we have both. The Ten Commandments are primarily apodictic law. The rest of the Book of the Covenant is primarily casuistic law. In a sense, the casuistic law is an expansion of the basic principles given in the apodictic law of the Ten Commandments. Well, as you might expect, historical critical scholars almost universally believe that this block of material that we call the Book of the Covenant has been artificially placed at this point because it's a block of legal material that's plopped down in the middle of a broader narrative. That's a position that we would reject. And today, in fact, we can cite examples from other ancient near eastern literature to back up our view that this approach of inserting, you know, blocks of material within narratives, whether it's poetry, as in the case of Exodus 15, or legal material, as it is here in the case of the Book of the Covenant, it's actually a pretty common literary technique in the ancient world. It's really nothing unusual as the early historical critics thought that it was. Well, to back that up, let's take a closer look at the structure of this section from Chapter 19 through Chapter 23. In Chapter 19 we get the preparation for the encounter with God. The people gather at Mount Sinai. Moses goes up and God preps him. And then Moses goes back down and he communicates to the people the things that God has told him. In Chapter 20 we get the Ten Commandments, the apodictic law that serves as sort of the distilled teaching or the summary of the law. And then in Chapters 21 to 23, we have the Book of the Covenant, the expansion of the principles in the Ten Commandments with case statements that give more specific examples about how the apodictic law should be applied in the lives of the people of God. And then we come to the end of this material in Chapter 4 where we get the covenant finally formalized. And back in Chapter 19 they prepared for the covenant. They laid the foundation for it. And then they heard all that God had to teach them in Chapters 20 to 23. And now in Chapter 24, we conclude the unity by formalizing the covenant. From this we can see that we have here a block of material that is kind of a package that deals with the making of the covenant as a whole. This is more obvious in Hebrew than it is in English because we get several elements that bracket this account. Remember we talked about bracketing earlier in the course when we had the phrase "I am Yahweh" that occurs a couple of times in Exodus 6 Verses 6 to 8. Well, here we have bracketing occurring over the course of several chapters, in Chapter 19 and Chapter 24 where those two chapters bracket the material in between. And some of the elements that help to establish this bracketing are a strong emphasis on Yahweh's presence, a theophanic revelation of Yahweh taking place in each case. And also Israel's repeated oath to do everything that Yahweh commands. These aren't the only things. But it's enough I think to establish that there's a clear connection between Chapter 19 and Chapter 24. That together these stand at the beginning and at the end of this block of material. So despite the fact that critical scholars often want to break up this material into different sources, we have a pretty strong argument and pretty clear evidence that we have a coherent literary unit here. A package, if you will. But that's not all that we have. There's even more evidence to back up our position from what we call the Hittite Suzerainty Treaty Form. Well, what in the world is a Hittite Suzerainty Treaty? Well, you remember who the Hittites were. They were the people who live up in what today is modern Turkey who were important in the ancient world but don't come into the biblical story all that often. The Hittites had a legal form for making treaties. And they actually had more than one form. They had one form when a treaty or a contract we might say was being made between people who were equals, two people of equal standing. Perhaps between two kings both of whom were very powerful, for example, or two noblemen who were making a contract or an agreement with one another. But there's a separate literary form in Hittite literature when you have a lord or a high king, making a treaty with a lower king or a less powerful king. In this form, the high king, who is called the suzerain, the high king basically dictates the terms to the vassal or the lower king. And it's this form of the Suzerainty Treaty that we have really shaping the material here from Exodus 19 to Exodus 24. Here is the basic structure of a Hittite Suzerainty Treaty. Although, there are some variations. The basic structure goes like this: It begins with a preamble. It then continues with a historical prologue usually describing how this treaty came about. The preamble often introduces the parties. Then that's followed by the stipulations. What are the conditions? And in this case the conditions are dictated by the higher king or the suzerain. And then there are provisions for the ratification of the treaty. How will this treaty be ratified? You know, what will you do to make this contract final? You know, sort of "How do we sign and get it notarized?" as it were. Finally, we often but not always get a provision that talks about how the treaty will be deposited sort of in a public archive. You typically -- typically there are two of these. You know, the sort of treaty gets put in the official archive of both kings. And often this is accompanied by a public reading of the treaty. And the king taking a public oath that he will abide by the treaty. Finally or next to last I -- technically I suppose I should say, it's the last big part -- though, there are a set of consequences -- what will happen if the treaty is broken? We tend to call these blessings and curses. Although, that's a little bit of a theological term. They are really more like what are the consequences of keeping this treaty or breaking this treaty? In other words, if you keep the treaty, I will, you know, perhaps protect you from your enemies. If you break the treaty, then I will become your enemy or you'll have to pay a fine or something like that. And the last part are the witnesses. You know, typically who are the other tings or -- kings or noblemen or whoever who'll be witnesses to this treaty? So how does this Hittite Suzerainty Treaty relate to Exodus Chapters 19 to 24? Most scholars, conservative and liberal, would agree that most, if not all, of the elements of the Hittite Suzerainty Treaty can be found in these chapters. Although, scholars will sometimes debate about the details of which piece, you know, is where. Let's see how this fits. The preamble. Some people believe the preamble is represented by the first half of Exodus 20 Verse 2, 20 Verse 2A. Other people think Chapter 19 Verses 4 and 5 make a better preamble. I think I belong to that latter group. But one or the other of those makes a good preamble. The historical prologue is pretty clearly Exodus 20 Verse 2B where Yahweh says, "I brought you out of the land of Egypt." The stipulations are the major part here from the beginning of the Ten Commandments through the end of Chapter 23 where we get the Ten Commandments and the covenant code. Those are all the stipulations of the treaty. The ratification comes from the making of the covenant in Chapter 24 Verses 1 to 8. There is probably no provision for deposit and reading and oath here in these chapters. Although, later in the book of Exodus, there is a provision for the deposit because Moses takes the Ten Commandments, the tablets, and he puts them in the ark of the covenant. And so while it doesn't occur here in this section, it does occur in the broader context of the book of Exodus. Finally, Chapter 23 Verses 20 to 33 contain the blessings and curses or the consequences of keeping or breaking the covenant. And the witnesses correspond to the elders going up on the mountain and eating this meal in the presence of God in Chapter 24 Verses 9 to 11. So this Hittite Suzerainty Treaty structure or pattern fits reasonably well with this material in Chapters 19 to 24. And the fact that it does so helps to bolster our argument that this material isn't from a variety of sources but actually represents a literary unity. It's a good basis for our countering the critical argument that this text should be regarded as a compilation from different sources. So I hope you can see in this case why it's valuable that scholars study the context, the cultural context. And how they can use that information in understanding the biblical witness, even more fully than we would understand it just by reading it on the surface. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***