The term “ethics” has a complicated history in Jewish tradition for two reasons. First, the term is not native to classical Jewish sources. Second, in both Christian and secular discourse ethics is often contrasted with law, suggesting that the two are distinct and separate normative frameworks. This is problematic in a Jewish framework, where ethical discussions tend to focus on the question of proper behavior in specific situations and thus fall under the broader category of halakhah. Although often translated as “Jewish law,” halakhah is better understood as a way of life, encompassing far more than the secular term “law” might suggest. Jews seek to live in accordance with the covenant established between God and the people of Israel; halakhah provides guidance about how to do this, whether the issue concerns interpersonal relationships, property law, or ritual behavior. As Chaim Saiman notes, “the rabbis use concepts forged in the regulatory framework [of halakhah] to do the work other societies assign to philosophy, political theory, theology, ethics, and even to art, drama, and literature.” As a result, many of the assumed distinctions between ethics and law do not apply easily or well to Jewish tradition.

I am the wrong person to write this essay. I should have recognized this earlier and suggested another author. I did not. Drafting what follows, I became keenly aware that exploring the ethical aspects of the Jacob narrative necessitates a deeper and probably more personal comprehension of marginalization than I have from my current experience.

Genesis 1–11 introduces not only Genesis but the Bible as a whole. With remarkable realism, these chapters present manifold challenges to ethical living. They suggest that humanity does not operate in an overwhelmingly positive moral space. Instead, human beings face a variety of challenges. Humanity is not necessarily damned to lives of immorality, but praiseworthy people are rare, and temptations are great. While creating a thirst for upright behavior, the text explains the difficulty of doing the right thing. This emphasis on moral difficulty has important resonances with both its earliest and its most recent readers.

I object to the unexamined assumption that the texts of the Hebrew Bible are suitable as a source of answers for ethical discussions of social, moral, and political questions of today. Readers with this hermeneutical supposition believe in finding rules in the biblical canon that they may enforce on modern society and church discipline. The ethical relevance of the Hebrew Bible does not reside in accepting rules, principles, or ideas that come from the text and a reconstruction of its historical contexts based on sustained critical scrutiny of the will of God in scripture. It comes from a critical discussion with the text in light of current events, such as the migrant caravan moving from Central America to the southern border of the United States in 2018. There were Christians advocating completely different political solutions and using passages of scripture to support their views, deeming it essential to their ethical stance to demonstrate a continuity between their claim and a biblical text. A critical exegesis of the Hebrew Bible, however, exacerbates rather than solves the problem because it heightens awareness of the ideological diversity within scripture and the infinite number of perspectives from which readers can interpret it. The only way that the Hebrew Bible can be regarded as straightforward and univocal in its message is if nobody bothers to read it. Even Augustine was dissatisfied with the Bible on ethical grounds, until he began conjuring allegorical interpretations to spiritualize the disturbing material away. History has shown, again and again, that turning a simple message into a political position usually provides theological justification for oppression. Is a critical reading of the biblical text relevant to deal with, comprehend, and use as a basis for action – as Christians – concerning the vicissitudes and problems that humanity faces in today’s world? How can a text produced in a world so distant from our own be essential to inform how we act and be today?

Ethics is not the main problem in the book of Jeremiah. The professor who wants to prepare for teaching a course on ethics in the prophetic books would rather begin in the book of Amos, where social matters are of the utmost importance for the religious message, a book that from the outset has very little in common with the book of Jeremiah. Or she would go to the book of Hosea, where religious and social issues are ingeniously combined. In Jeremiah, apostasy and the pursuant divine punishment are far more important matters. This does not mean that ethics is of no importance in Jeremiah, but ethics in general is a derivative from the central issue, namely, the question of theodicy in the wake of the catastrophes in 597 and 587 BCE and the Babylonian exile.

Care for the poor has been widely viewed as a defining characteristic feature of Hebrew ethics. There is a wealth of normative prescriptions across the law, the prophets, and the wisdom writings on the proper treatment of the marginalized and the vulnerable. Economic morality is not a peripheral concern in the Hebrew Scriptures. This essay considers the law’s teachings on economic life. Economic norms are found in the Decalogue (Exod 20:2–17; Deut 5:6–21), the Covenant Code (Exod 20:22–23:33), the Deuteronomic Code (Deuteronomy 12–26), and the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26). These laws are an expression of God’s moral will and articulate ideals on how Israel should live as the chosen people of God – but these laws, including the prescriptions on economic life, should not be taken as descriptions of the nation’s actual practice.

The book of Micah is both a complicated work and literarily cluttered. While the book is set in Judah during the mid-to-late eighth century BCE, much of it was composed in the exilic and postexilic periods. Any eighth-century components have been heavily redacted. For present purposes, however, the turbulent period in which Micah’s authors set their work is more important than time(s) of actual authorship. The book’s eighth-century Judean setting gives clues as to its authors’ intents as well as signaling the book’s relevance to a variety of audiences. Eighth-century Judah’s contexts of suffering conquest and subjugation – with the political, economic, and religious changes that follow – resonate with marginalized peoples across time. Furthermore, Micah’s laments, accusations, legal sentencings, and promises of hope reflect a biblical-economic ethos that recurs throughout the First Testament: the ethos of the community responsibility for the well-being of individuals. Despite its unpolished form, therefore, Micah is rich in ethical landscapes through which to explore poverty and other social justice issues, both ancient and modern.

According to a number of recent interpreters, Deuteronomy represents a humanistic vision, establishing the protection of the economically and socially marginalized as a center of Israel’s covenant. The people of Israel have a responsibility to care for the poor, widows and orphans, slaves, and foreigners who are resident in Israelite communities because of both Israel’s own story (they were foreign slaves in the land of Egypt) and the character of God (who enacts justice for widows and orphans and loves foreigners). In sharp contrast to this vision, one group does not receive protection: those who worship the gods of the nations. These people are killed without mercy – even if they are Israelite. In perhaps the most horrifying example, if a person’s sibling, child, spouse, or dear friend invites the person to worship the gods of the nations, the response must be immediate and absolute. Without pausing for an investigation or public trial, the person must initiate the execution of the offender by stoning: “your own hand shall be first against them to execute them” (13:6–11).

Few Americans are aware that someone convicted of a crime in the United States emerges from the courtroom condemned to a lifetime of discrimination. Individuals with a criminal record are required to declare their conviction to prospective employers, who are overwhelmingly averse to hiring them, and to prospective landlords, who are averse to housing them. They are prohibited from practicing a wide range of professions, many of which bear no relation whatsoever to the crime they may have committed. They are barred from public housing and limited in their recourse to food stamps and other forms of government assistance, if not outright prohibited from it. These and other forms of systemic, legalized discrimination against individuals with criminal records means that the end of a prison sentence marks not the end of punishment, but only a transition to its next stage.

On any reading of 2 Samuel 9–20, Joab’s ruse with the Tekoite woman in 14:2–21 is a pivotal scene. It portrays the moral reasoning which David adopted in order to allow Absalom to return to Jerusalem from exile in Geshur and a new development in the ethics of David’s administration. The formal character of the king’s decision as an official royal pronouncement sets it apart and makes it especially significant. Within the narrative, the account marks a turning point from which ethical thinking in David’s court never seems to recover. The characters construct a theological ethic that places a premium on the communal “togetherness” of God’s people, and the crown accepts it as justification for overlooking the bloodguilt of one of its most marginalized members. The half-life of this ethic in the ensuing narrative wreaks havoc on the kingdom, through two of its most maniacally vulnerable agents. Once bloodguilt can be overlooked for the sake of togetherness, little remains to prevent members of the community from sanctioning the bloodshed of any member perceived to threaten that togetherness. The troubles that follow after Absalom’s return are not simply due to the mere fact that a maniacal member of God’s estate was returned to run amok. Rather, they arise from the problematic ethic employed to justify his restoration. The king’s response further exacerbates the situation. Contextualization within outworking of divine judgment on the king for his own acts of oppression adds another element to the narrative’s portrayal of causality, part of 2 Sam 8:15–20:26’s critical dramatization of David’s efforts to establish “justice and righteousness for all of his people.”

Moral discussions of the so-called psalms of imprecation tend to focus on the author as the mind behind their most violent imagery, with the retributions they invoke assumed to be a product of imaginative fantasy. Debates pivot on whether this fantasy is born from justified or unjustified anger. The following discussion breaks from these assumptions altogether, arguing not only that moral reasoning underlies the so-called psalms of imprecation, but that this reasoning is deeply informed by specific patterns of act and consequence attested across ancient Near Eastern legal cultures. These patterns include talion, shame, and seat of the act. The psalter’s presentation of acts and their consequences draws on the features and logic of these patterns as they seek to compel YHWH to fulfil the retributive norms that the authors observe and therefore expect as a response to particular kinds of crime.

Thus speaks Moses at the culmination of Thomas Mann’s The Tables of the Law, written in 1943. Mann’s use of the Ten Commandments in his “antifascist manifesto” is a token of the Decalogue’s symbolic role in discourses on ethical foundations in cultures that have been influenced by Judaism and Christianity. While the quest for the origin and redactional development of the Decalogue’s two versions in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 has been the focus of much exegetical work, these genetic questions are of limited relevance for understanding the Ten Commandments’ ethical significance. I shall, therefore, concentrate here on some fundamental literary features of this text in its canonical contexts and its vast history of reception. Against this background, I shall consider the Decalogue as an icon of ethical discourse, which poses significant questions for contemporary ethical reflection.