This is a question I’ve been trying to answer for a long time. There is so much within the Old Testament “code” that I just don’t understand, so much that seems to be completely archaic and at many points strange. I really started thinking about this around the time I started getting tattoos. One of the laws in Leviticus says we are not to tattoo our bodies. The way I used to get around this was to say, “I don’t tattoo myself, I pay other people to do it.” But, that didn’t last very long. If we truly believe that all of Scripture is profitable, then we need to understand how the laws in the Old Testament apply to us today.

There are multiple different angles to go at this question. But, I think the more popular answers are simply missing the point. So, hopefully through this post I can help at least a few people consider a more realistic way to read, understand, and apply the OT laws today…

I think the first important thing to consider is that the Law was given in the midst of Israel’s story. The majority of the Old Testament is narrative, and the long lists of laws are given as a gift from God to Israel as part of the overarching story.

“The Law, therefore, is clearly part of the Pentateuchal narrative and is firmly embedded into the story of Israel’s exodus, wandering, and conquest. One’s interpretive approach to the Law should take this into account. Connecting texts to their contexts is a basic tenet of proper interpretive method. The Law is part of a story, and this story thus provides a critical context for interpreting the Law. The method for interpreting Old Testament Law should be similar to the method used in interpreting Old Testament narrative, for the Law is contextually part of the narrative.” (http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_law_hays.html)

The next important point to remember is that the Law and the land are intimately related. So, we need to understand how the land functioned for Israel. Then, It’s also relevant to consider that the New Testament speaks in many ways of the Mosaic covenant being fulfilled/obsolete, because of Jesus. Simply pulling out verses here and there can only be done arbitrarily, so it’s not helpful.

What I propose is that the laws given are “paradigmatic” for all future generations/cultures of followers of Jesus. This framework is outlined here:

1. We need to understand what a particular law meant to the original audience (context).

2. We need to attempt to discern what the specific essence or purpose was of the specific law. A great example are the specific, seemingly strange, “holiness” codes. What was the purpose? Was it simply that God is holy (different) and He wants us to be holy? Or, was the original thrust missionary in nature - that the other nations would look to God’s people to see what God Himself is like, and would thereby be compelled to worship Yahweh?

3. We need to contrast the difference between that law’s context and our own.

4. We then need to correlate the New Testament teaching with the Old Testament purpose.

5. And, finally, we need to apply the underlying intent to our own context.

In his book Old Testament Ethics for the People of God, Chris Wright adds one important caveat to this approach: that we can easily fall into extracting principles while ignoring or downplaying the role of Israel in the story. I think this is a trap we often fall into when pulling things from the Old Testament out of context in order to support something we believe (while rarely telling the stories of Israel as unique and important on their own). He says, “To regard Israel and the Old Testament as an ethical paradigm forces us to constantly go back to the hard given reality of the text of the Bible itself and imaginatively to live with Israel in their world (inhabiting the text), before returning to the equally hard given reality of our own world, to discover imaginatively how that paradigm challenges our ethical response there.” So, extracting universal principles is in the first place about understanding the whole worldview of Israel, and then it is about how that applies to our own worldview.

I think this approach takes into account the original context of the passage itself, remembers that we also have the revelation of Jesus and the New Testament, and attempts to bring God’s purpose to bear on our contemporary context. The danger in a lot of approaches toward the specific laws of the OT is that they tend to focus on only one part of this whole interaction. With the desire to simplify things, we can end up ignoring what’s really there. But, since the Law takes up a large chunk of our Bibles, then it is important and we shouldn’t ignore it.

Here is a great example of how important and relevant the Law is to our lives:

The law of the Lord is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the testimony of the Lord is sure,
making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is pure,
enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the Lord is clean,
enduring forever;
the rules of the Lord are true,
and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.
Moreover, by them is your servant warned;
in keeping them there is great reward. (Psalm 19:7-11)