Reading Daphne Barak-Erez’s marvelously thought-provoking book, Biblical Judgments, I was reminded many times of the Northrop Frye quotation with which John Barton a few years ago opened his magnum opus, A History of the Bible (2019). Frye said of the Bible that it was a “huge, sprawling, tactless book sitting there inscrutably in the middle of our cultural heritage.” It refuses to be ignored, yet it bewilders, offering up its secrets only in the most mystifying of glimpses.

Barak-Erez knows her Bible extremely well and demonstrates how the Hebrew Bible—aka the Old Testament—reflects and refracts our impressions of law. A former dean and professor of Tel Aviv University law school, Barak-Erez has served as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel since 2012. Biblical Judgments brings a lifetime of immersion in the law to the Jewish Scriptures. The reverse is equally true: it brings a lifetime of immersion in the Jewish Scriptures to questions, problems, and puzzles of modern law. The resulting work, running to nearly 400 pages, contains wisdom, learning, and insight on every page. Any reader seeking fresh light on the Old Testament and—likewise—any reader seeking fresh light on the dilemmas of modern law will find much to reflect on in Barak-Erez’s densely packed book.

Yet Barak-Erez does not preach. Indeed, she barely even judges. Rather, she treats her readers with the utmost respect, leaving us to reach our own conclusions as to what we should make of the episodes she puts before us. The style is Talmudic. She offers a long series of loosely connected vignettes in 127 chapters, the longest of which is only five pages. Each chapter takes a single verse from the Hebrew Bible, or a single story or a single theme, or sometimes a set of stories that reflect on a single theme. The purpose, in every case, is to encourage us simultaneously to reflect on what the Bible might tell us about modern law and on how the problems and trials of modern law are portrayed in the Bible. This is, then, as Barak-Erez states in her preface, a work of law and literature. It is not a religious book: you do not have to be Jewish or Christian to profit from it, any more than you have to be Elizabethan to profit from a work reflecting thoughtfully on Shakespeare and the law.

Now, a meal comprising 127 courses isn’t a feast. It’s indigestible. And this book, like the Talmud, is not designed to be read in a single sitting. It is a book for sipping, for dipping into, for returning to. You cannot read very much of it before pausing, not least because you will constantly be interrupting your reading to go back to the source—the Bible itself—from which Barak-Erez draws. She knows her Bible so well she sees things in it which, when she tells you about them, you want to go and look at for yourself. The book has no argument, no thesis. It isn’t there to do the thinking for you: it’s there to provide you with the food to enable you to think for yourself.

The 127 chapters of Biblical Judgments are divided into six broad themes, each comprising one part of the book. We start with “law and government,” with questions constitutional, with considerations relating to rulership and politics. We then move to “judges and judging” to judicial independence to the laws of evidence and to the conduct of trials. Thirdly, we come to “human rights and social justice” to slavery and freedom to equality and empowerment. There follows the longest part of the book, on “criminal law,” which includes treatment of sentencing and punishment as well as of offences and defences. The final parts of the book are concerned, respectively, with “private law” (contract, tort, and property) and with “family law and inheritance.”

There is a great deal of law in the Bible, and far from all of it is contained in the Torah. Of course, Biblical Judgments includes many reflections on individual laws as they are set down, particularly in the later chapters of Exodus and in Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. But the books of Jewish history—Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings—are mined and referred to every bit as often as are the books of Moses. The prophets and the books of other writings are amply represented, too. There is no table of Biblical references, but my sense is that the books of Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, and Kings are perhaps the most frequently referred to, although some of the smaller books—Esther, for example—also make frequent appearances in Barak-Erez’s footnotes. She knows the whole of her Bible and she ranges across it all.

Some Biblical stories feature multiple times in the book, because they can be seen to illustrate more than one legal theme. Four recur perhaps more often than any others—the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the judgment of Solomon, the Tower of Babel, and the story of Ahab and Jezebel. The destruction of the cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, is related in Genesis 18 and is referred to again numerous times in both the Old and New Testaments, including in Deuteronomy 29, Isaiah 1, Ezekiel 16, Matthew 10, Luke 17, and Romans 9. We do not know exactly what wickedness had occurred to attract God’s vengeance. One theory is that it was a refusal to share, a refusal to offer hospitality to strangers. Barak-Erez uses the story to illustrate two themes—that unthinking moral homogeneity may lead to a tyranny of the majority, and that it is critical, in the law of due process, to find out exactly what has happened before casting judgment: “I will go down now,” says God, ”and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me” (Genesis 18:21). God has heard terrible things about Sodom and Gomorrah, but he goes to investigate, to make sure that what he has heard is true, before imposing his punishment.

The judgment of Solomon is so revered as to be mythical. Yet what he ordered was cruel in the extreme (that a child be cut in two so as to reveal his true mother, as she would plead for mercy). The story, told in 1 Kings 3, reflects, in Barak-Erez’s hands, not only the fairness and unfairness of judicial process but also the importance to justice of blind impartiality. She invites us to consider, in the light of Solomon’s wisdom, which is more important: a just outcome (as was achieved) or a fair process? The difference between justice (when there is a trial) and the injustice of vengeance, vigilantism, and lynching (when punishment is meted out without a trial) is also illustrated in other well-known Biblical stories, including that of Joseph’s treatment at the hands of his brothers (Genesis 37).

The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) is one of the Bible’s first references to free speech. After the Flood, mankind comes together to build a tower so high it will reach unto heaven. Because all men and women speak the same language, they feel no restraints on their actions—they come to believe they can do anything they imagine. God puts a stop to it: “Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand” one another (Genesis 11:7). The people are scattered, and neither the tower nor the city over which it would have stood are completed.

Barak-Erez interprets this story not only in the light of the Bible’s conflicting messages about free speech but also, more prosaically perhaps, as a warning about planning law. Even the grandest should not build monuments to themselves without considering and taking into account the rights and interests of others. Free speech is one of the many fundamental questions of law and justice in respect of which the Bible gives conflicting—and unclear—messages. Whilst those prophets who spoke up against certain decisions of kings are venerated in the books of Samuel and Kings, a contrary note is sounded not only in the story of the Tower of Babel (where speech is “confounded”) but also in the Book of Psalms: “keep thy tongue from evil,” says Psalm 34:13, echoing the law of “guarding one’s tongue” found in Leviticus 19:16. Barak-Erez can offer no clear way out: ”reading the Bible uncovers constant tension between texts that support freedom of speech and texts that prioritise other conflicting values,” she concedes.

The story of Ahab, Jezebel, and Naboth’s vineyard Barak-Erez uses to illustrate several different matters: the importance of judicial independence (and what goes wrong without it), the potential of public interest standing, and the limits of criminal liability. As the story is told in 1 Kings 21, King Ahab wanted to buy Naboth’s vineyard, but the latter declined to sell it to him. Ahab’s queen—Jezebel—arranged a show trial at the end of which Naboth would be stoned to death. Once he was out of the way, Ahab was free to take possession of the vineyard. Elijah appeared, warning Ahab of the grave consequences of these actions. When Ahab repented, God showed mercy on him but vowed to “bring evil” upon Ahab’s sons (1 Kings 21:29). That Ahab stood by while his queen usurped their authority in order to eliminate Naboth is precisely the travesty of justice that occurs when the rule of law gives way to the force of power. Elijah, the prophet, plays the role of representing the public interest—he speaks to Ahab not in his own interests but in those of the public at large. And we are left to reflect on when, if ever, the sins of the father may be visited on the son.

As these stories show, there is a great deal of law in the Bible, but there is also a disconcerting amount of lawlessness and of what, today, we would consider to be rough justice (if we would consider it justice at all). The following are among the many examples Barak-Erez invites us to reflect upon. In 1 Samuel 14, Saul’s son, Jonathan, is condemned for breaking a rule he could have known nothing about, for it had never been promulgated in public. He was saved only because the crowd would not tolerate a war hero being so unjustly treated. There are some horrific examples of rape in the Bible (Genesis 34, Judges 19, and 2 Samuel 13) as well as murder (Genesis 4 among many) and even human sacrifice (Judges 11).

There are also severe punishments: “You shall not allow a witch to live,” provides Exodus 22:18, the punishment being death by stoning (Leviticus 20:27). And there is the infamous rule: “an eye for an eye” (Exodus 21:24 and Leviticus 24:20), which Barak-Erez ingeniously presents less as a mandate for revenge and more as a command to act proportionately. It is an eye for an eye, she points out, not two eyes.

Nonetheless, echoes of law reverberate throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, and they do so in all sorts of ways. That the formal account of Jewish law (which commences at Exodus 20) starts with the general—the Ten Commandments—and proceeds to the particular is redolent of the way modern law works (where we start with the Constitution and work our way towards more particular statutes). When Deuteronomy 4 suggests that legal meaning may evolve through interpretation, even when the commandments and statutes of the law cannot be formally amended, we are introduced to one of the most fundamental attributes not only of Biblical but of modern law. Law may be chiseled on tablets of stone yet, nonetheless, its meaning and application evolve. Even the greatest laws require interpretation.

Fundamental precepts of justice are also to be found in the Hebrew Scriptures. The New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan is well known (Luke 10). Less familiar, perhaps, is its Old Testament precursor: the Jewish instruction not to “stand against the blood of thy neighbour” (Leviticus 19:16), which Barak-Erez interprets as being an obligation not to be a bystander. Her reading of the Bible is strong on this point: we have social duties to assist and feed the needy, she says, concluding that Nozickian libertarianism is ”fundamentally at odds with the Biblical worldview.” Leviticus commands that “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18). This, Barak-Erez notes, is the basis of the modern law of negligence and, indeed, the verse was relied upon explicitly by Lord Atkin in the leading English case of Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562, when the neighbour principle became the basis of the law of negligence in the common law. As Lord Atkin put it: “The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law, you must not injure your neighbour.”

Barak-Erez is perhaps at her most profound when reflecting on the legal problems and puzzles that the Bible invites us to think about, without necessarily resolving for us.

When should we valorise democracy—and follow the crowd—and when should we act more cautiously, taking care to heed not only the majority view but also minority opinions? In Exodus 23 (with Moses), in Numbers 13 (with the twelve spies), and in 1 Kings 18 (with Elijah) this question arises—and there is no uniform answer. As Barak-Erez notes: “The Bible has a complex relationship with the enduring question of how to balance the principle of majority rule and the vital need to place limits upon it.”

A related question is when should we follow the leader and when should we oppose him? Rebels who criticised Moses were swallowed whole, destroyed by fire, or afflicted with leprosy (Numbers 12 and 16). But the book of Esther paints a different picture, portraying unthinking consensus as ugly and pluralism as healthy; likewise, the prophets who stood up to kings—Elijah and King Ahab (as we have seen), and also Samuel and King Saul, and Nathan and King David. Such episodes show us, in Barak-Erez’s judgment, the importance of speaking truth to power, the value of the separation of powers, and that even the best rulers need reliable advisors to consult with.

Related again is the big jurisprudential question of why we obey the law. In particular: why are certain matters crimes? The Bible offers at least two answers. Some matters are criminal because they are morally wrong (Cain murdering Abel, for example). But many more are offences simply because God has so decreed (the command not to eat the forbidden fruit, for example, or the dietary requirements of the rules of Kosher). Likewise, some rules are of universal application, whereas others are for particular tribes (or nations) only (Exodus 21).

Finally, there is the matter of what the Bible suggests to us about the duty to obey the law. This may be a general duty: but it is not an absolute one. Abraham’s binding of Isaac is one example (Genesis 22) and Saul’s (disobeyed) orders to kill the priests is another (1 Samuel 22). For Barak-Erez, these and other similar stories should be interpreted as Scripture sending “the clarion message that one must not perform inhumane acts in the name of obeying the law.”

In the main, however, Biblical Judgments eschews clarion calls. It celebrates not the clarity of the legal lessons the Bible bequeaths to us, but the obligations the Bible imposes on us to think, to listen and, in the end, to judge for ourselves. The Bible, much like the law itself, has always needed learned interpreters to help us navigate our way through the mazes of its myriad meanings. Barak-Erez is one such guide and her book is full of wisdom—and wisdom, as we are told, is worth more than gold (Proverbs 16:16).