The cuneiform Laws of Hazor, from the first half of the 2^nd millennium B.C.E., suggest that biblical laws had roots in Canaanite law. This challenges, for example, the idea that the Bible’s lex talionis was borrowed from Hammurabi’s laws. While some ancient Near Eastern laws draw distinctions between social classes, Leviticus later makes clear that all human lives are equally valuable.

Cursing YHWH is more than simply expressing contempt and irreverence. In the biblical world view, it is attempted deicide, and thus is punishable by death.

Why the promiscuous daughter of a priest and Tamar, the widowed daughter-in-law of Judah, are sentenced to die by fire. The “poetic justice” of immolation.

Each week, twelve fresh loaves of bread were placed before YHWH in the Tabernacle and Temple. What do we know about the practice and its significance?

Throughout the Bible, we find that the land of Israel is blessed with grain, wine, and oil (דגן, תירוש, ויצהר). In the Torah, however, the festival of Bikkurim, “First Produce,” only celebrates the wheat harvest. In the Temple Scroll, the Essenes rewrote the biblical festival calendar to include two further bikkurim festivals to celebrate wine and oil.

A struggling ex-slave and single mother labors against all odds to raise her son and shield him from the prejudices of the surrounding community.

According to Ezra (3:4) and Nehemiah (8:14-15) the returnees celebrated the holiday of Sukkot according to the law as it “was written,” but differences between their celebrations and the prescriptions in the Torah suggest that the laws they had written were slightly different than ours. Was the Torah finalized by the time Ezra-Nehemiah was written?

The scribes who wrote the addendum to the laws of Sukkot (Leviticus 23:42-43) used inner-biblical exegesis to explain the requirement to dwell in booths as a commemoration for the miraculous booths (not clouds) that God created for the Israelites at their first stop on the way to freedom.

In a fight with an Israelite, the son of an Egyptian man curses YHWH and is stoned to death. This story, one of only two in Leviticus, highlights a larger concern regarding the need to maintain the holiness of the camp on one hand and the rights of gerim (strangers) to live among the Israelites as equals on the other.

Leviticus 21 and Ezekiel 44 regulate whom priests may marry. What rationale lies behind these laws?

The connection between the Israelite festival of Sukkot in the temple and the Ugaritic new year festival and its dwellings of branches for the gods.  

Bringing wood for the altar was an important celebration in Second Temple times. To ground this practice in the Torah, Nehemiah (10:35) describes it as a Torah law, while the Temple Scroll (11Q19) and the Reworked Pentateuch (4Q365) include it in their biblical festival calendar.

Jewish law prohibits the gelding of animals based on its interpretation of Leviticus 22:24. Is this what the Torah means? Why might the Torah have prohibited this, and how could the prohibition function in an agrarian society dependent on draft animals?

The exodus story, which is presented as the basis for many of the Torah’s rituals, is a secondary insertion in many of these contexts.

The omer or “sheaf” offering takes place ממחרת השבת, “after the Shabbat” (Leviticus 23:15). Jewish interpreters have debated the exact meaning of this phrase for two millennia, resulting in four different dates being adopted by one Jewish sect or another.

Battle, creation, enthronement, and justice

Biblical narratives describe the Israelites living in tents in the wilderness and make no mention of sukkot, “booths.” So when and where did God “settle the Israelite people in booths”(Leviticus 23:43)? The answer: Kadesh! Although Israel journeys through the wilderness for forty years, they arrive at Kadesh early on and dwell there for more than thirty-five years.

The Torah prohibits a mourning ritual called tonsuring, i.e., the pulling out or cutting of hair to express sorrow. Rabbinic interpretation understood these verses as a prohibition for men to shave their beards or temples with a razor. Ibn Ezra, however, uncharacteristically rejects the rabbinic interpretation of these verses, and Shadal, who accepts ibn Ezra's reading, goes as far as to say that he himself shaves with a razor.

Rashbam’s New Peshat