ABSTRACT
This chapter reconstructs the Iron Age origins of biblical law as a combination of casuistic law at lay courts in villages and towns and apodictic law in extended families and clans. It follows the redactions of small collections of legal sentences in the context of wisdom schools, where these collections were used for legal training purposes and later taken over by priests, who used these collections for formulating a social law to prevent a social chiasm of the preexilic society by theologizing of originally profane law in the Book of Covenant and its revision in Deut 12–26. This chapter then follows the reception of preexilic legal material in the Decalogue and Holiness code.
