Inventing God's Law

David Wright offers a boldly revisionist account of the origin of the so-called Covenant Collection of the Torah (Exodus 20:23-23:19). He argues that this body of law depends mainly on the Laws of Hammurabi and to some extent on other cuneiform law collections, that it is chiefly the work of a single author, and that it may have had a politically ideological purpose, somewhat similar to that of the Laws of Hammurabi.