The concept of divine revelation of law distinguishes Israelite religion from all of the other religions of the ancient Near East. According to this concept, Yahweh publicly reveals his will to Israel in the form of cultic, civil, and ethical law, obedience to which becomes the condition for the nation's proper relationship to God and possession of the promised land of Canaan. The most dramatic account of this legal revelation occurs when God, from the top of Mount Sinai, proclaims the Ten Commandments to the nation of Israel gathered at the base of the mountain, trembling in fear of the thunderous divine voice (Exod 19–20). But it is not the Ten Commandments alone that the Hebrew Bible ascribes to divine revelation. By means of a redactional tour de force, the entire legal corpus of the Pentateuch, in effect all biblical law, is either attributed directly to God or indirectly to him through Moses, his prophetic intermediary.

THE LEGACY OF CUNEIFORM LAW

Despite the claim by Israelite authors for the divine origin of the legal collections, the archaeological remains of the ancient Near East preclude any notion of lex ex nihilo. The Near East bequeathed to ancient Israel a prestigious literary genre, the legal collection, that originated in the scribal schools (the e d u b a) of late-third-millennium Sumer and then spread up the Fertile Crescent through Babylon and Assyria into Anatolia and the Hittite Empire.