Hey, this is John at the Bible Project. If you've ever tried to read through the Bible, you won't get far into the story when you'll come across a bunch of Israel's ancient law code.

Thou shall do this, not do that.

Some of these we know well like the Ten Commandments.

Don't steal, no murder.

But other laws get really narrow and specific and sometimes strange.

And there's a whole lot of them.

Yeah, it's a lot.

It's a significant portion of the first

main section of the Bible,

enough that it makes most people not want to read through the Bible

if they start on page one.

And some of these laws, frankly, seem barbaric to modern standards.

They paint a picture of a culture you and I actually wouldn't want to live

in. And so it's easy to read the laws and then have a problem with it.

If I view the Bible as a law code dropped from heaven stating the divine will, then I have problems with that.

If I view this as customary common law and that God is revealing himself to Israel calling them to a higher standard of justice,

but as he finds them as an ancient near-eastern culture and work a revolution from within and moral revolutions are

slow and they happen on on a worldview level not just by rewriting the laws.

Okay so the laws in the Bible were given to a specific culture in their time in human history for them.

Why do I need to read it?

What kind of value can I get out of reading the law?

The laws are an embodiment of a set of ideals.

...