the torah of moses: judaism in the bible 77
of private morality. Prime among such moral rulings are the extensive
teachings on charity and the treatment of the poor: ‘You shall open your
hand wide to your brother, to the needy and to the poor in the land.’
Care for others is cast in powerful but general terms by the prophets,
who urge the duty ‘to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the
homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin’. But it also involved more
formal means for wealth distribution at the margins, such as the require-
ments for the owner of a field when harvesting grain to leave for the
poor the corners of fields, loose grains dropped by the harvesters and
forgotten sheaves, as well as all grapes on the vines that grow scattered
rather than in clusters. The plot of the book of Ruth hinges on the abil-
ity of Ruth, a Moabite stranger, to glean freely day by day in the fields
belonging to Boaz, who in due course becomes her husband. The essence
of such moral injunctions is that they go beyond family and social ties
to care for anyone who is vulnerable, and the obligation to support
widows, orphans and outsiders within Israelite society is a pervasive
biblical theme: ‘You shall not deprive a foreigner resident among you or
an orphan of justice; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pledge ...
When you beat your olive trees, do not strip what is left; it shall be for
the alien, the orphan, and the widow.’ The reason for caring for the vul-
nerable lies, according to the biblical text, in the historical experience
of the Israelites: ‘Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt;
therefore I am commanding you to do this.’^10
The divine law as mediated through Moses in the Pentateuch
contained quite precise rulings for the good ordering of society. Crime
was to be punished, or the injured party compensated by appropriate
penalties, sometimes expressed in stark terms: ‘life for life, eye for eye,
tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for
wound, stripe for stripe’. Biblical law enjoined precise judicial punish-
ments for quite specific acts deemed contrary to social order, such as the
intervention of a woman in a fight between her husband and another
man by seizing the genitalia of her husband’s opponent, unauthorized
sexual intercourse with an unmarried girl, an adulterous union with a
married woman, persistent disobedience to parents, kidnapping or theft
(distinguished from burglary at night). In both expression and content
these laws show many similarities to law codes of the ancient Near East
known from cuneiform texts. But the biblical codes differ in detail both
from these earlier codes and in the various biblical versions – the codes
in Exodus and Deuteronomy are not the same, and both lack provisions