Bible Study · Five Books, One Covenant

The Law Of Moses: What It Was And What It Was For

Genesis to Deuteronomy, a covenant shaped like an ancient treaty, a later count of 613, and a council in Jerusalem that settled who it binds.

By Apostle Johnny Ova · Sound of Heaven · 9 Min Read

The Short Answer

Instruction For A Freed People

Straight Answer

The law of Moses is the Torah, the instruction God gave Israel through Moses across Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. At its center is the covenant made at Sinai, the terms of a relationship between God and one nation.

It was holy and good, and it did its job. It guarded Israel until Christ, and it ended as a covenant in the covenant transition that closed in AD 70. Christians are bound to Christ, not to Sinai.

We cover what happened to it in how Jesus fulfilled the law and which Old Testament laws still apply. This study asks what it was.

The Shape Of It

Five Books, One Story

Genesis

The Story Before The Statutes

Almost no commands. Paul notes the law came 430 years after the promise to Abraham (Galatians 3:17). Grace came first.

Exodus 19 to 24

Sinai

Israel is rescued before a single command is given. The covenant is read, the people agree, and Moses seals it with blood (Exodus 24:7 to 8).

Leviticus and Numbers

A Camp Around A Tent

Priesthood, sacrifice and purity, all built around God dwelling among His people.

Deuteronomy

Said Again To The Children

Moses restates the covenant to the wilderness generation and has the book placed beside the ark (Deuteronomy 31:26).

2 Kings 22

Lost And Found

Under Josiah the book of the law turns up during temple repairs, and hearing it read sparks a reform.

AD 70

The Altar Goes Quiet

Rome destroys the temple. Priesthood and sacrifice stop inside the generation Jesus named.

So the law of Moses is not a rulebook with a story stapled to the front. It is a story with a covenant in the middle of it. Genesis belongs to the Torah because the Torah is the whole account of how God made a family into a nation and bound Himself to it.

HebrewTorahתּוֹרָהInstruction

The root

Strong's traces it to yarah, to teach. The picture is somebody pointing out which road to take.

The range

Brown-Driver-Briggs gives direction, instruction, law. It can mean one ruling, a whole code, or a mother's teaching in Proverbs 1:8 (see the lexicon entry).

As a name

By Jesus' day it names the five books. Luke 24:44 speaks of the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.

The Greek translators rendered torah as nomos, law. Not wrong, but narrower. Instruction includes law, and also story, song, warning and promise.

The Form

Shaped Like An Ancient Treaty

In 1954 the scholar George Mendenhall pointed out that Sinai follows the outline of treaties great kings of the ancient Near East, the Hittites among them, made with smaller kingdoms that owed them loyalty.

Preamble

The great king names himself. Exodus 20:2 opens: I am the LORD your God.

Historical prologue

The king recalls what he has done. Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Rescue before demand.

Stipulations

The terms of loyalty. The ten words, the case laws of Exodus 21 to 23, and the long restatement in Deuteronomy 12 to 26.

Deposit and reading

Treaties were stored in a temple and read in public. Moses has the book kept beside the ark and read every seventh year at Booths (Deuteronomy 31:10 to 13).

Witnesses

Pagan treaties called on gods. Deuteronomy 30:19 calls heaven and earth.

Blessings and curses

What follows loyalty and what follows betrayal, set out at length in Deuteronomy 28.

A treaty is not a moral philosophy. It is the terms of a relationship between a particular king and a particular people. The law of Moses was addressed to Israel, and it says so in its opening line: the God who brought you out of Egypt.

Do not push the parallel too far. J. A. Thompson, surveying the evidence in the Tyndale Bulletin, noted that “the constancy of pattern did not lead to a uniformity of detail.” Scholars still argue whether Deuteronomy looks more like older Hittite treaties or later Assyrian ones. The parallel is a scholarly observation, not a proof. It does show God speaking to Israel in a form their world understood.

Takeaway

Sinai reads like a treaty between a great king and a people he had just rescued. Relationship first, terms second, and the terms written for one nation.

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Ways People Divide It

613 Laws And Three Buckets

Ask how many laws are in the law of Moses and you will usually hear 613. The number is real, but it is not in the Bible. It comes from later Jewish tradition.

The Talmud (Makkot 23b) records Rabbi Simlai teaching that 613 commandments were given to Moses, 365 negative ones matching the days of the solar year and 248 positive ones, which the rabbis tied to the limbs of the body. Later scholars, Maimonides in the twelfth century most famously, drew up full lists, and those lists do not agree in every detail. OU Torah has a traditional explanation of the count.

Christians built their own division: moral, ceremonial and civil. Thomas Aquinas worked it out in the thirteenth century and the Reformers carried it forward. It is a later Christian framework.

What The Chart Gets Right

The law holds different kinds of material. A command about idols and a command about mildew on a wall are not doing the same job, and the chart explains why no church asks you to bring a lamb.

Where It Strains

Moses never labels anything. Love your neighbor (Leviticus 19:18) sits one verse from a ban on mixed fabrics. Paul says taking on circumcision obligates you to keep the whole law (Galatians 5:3).

Neither the 613 nor the three buckets come from the text. Both are later study tools. Neither can tell you which parts of Sinai still bind you, because the New Testament never answers that question by sorting. It answers it with a person.

Where does the number 613 come from?

Moses counts them in Deuteronomy 31

A rabbinic teaching recorded in the Talmud

Paul's list in Galatians 5

Makkot 23b attributes the count to Rabbi Simlai: 365 negative commands and 248 positive. It is later Jewish tradition, and the scholars who listed all 613 did not produce identical lists.

The Good Law

What The Law Was For

Some Christians talk about the law of Moses as if it were a mistake God had to clean up. Paul will not let you say that.

“So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.”

Romans 7:12

The trouble in Romans 7 is never the law. It is what sin does with a good command. So what was it for?

It Formed A People

Exodus 19:6 calls Israel a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. The law gave former slaves a shared life: courts, rest days, care for the widow and the foreigner.

It Named Sin

Through the law comes knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20). It drew lines where people could see them, which is a mercy even when it stings.

It Guarded Until Christ

Galatians 3:24 calls the law our guardian until Christ came, and Paul's word is precise.

It Pointed Past Itself

Hebrews 10:1 calls the law a shadow of the good things to come. Priest, sacrifice and tent were outlines of a reality still on its way.

Greek · Galatians 3:24PaidagogosπαιδαγωγόςGuardian

The job

Thayer describes trustworthy slaves charged with supervising the life and morals of boys. Strong's calls him a servant whose office was to take the children to school.

Not the teacher

He was not the teacher, and his role ended when the boy came of age.

Paul's point

Galatians 3:25: now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. Good, and temporary by design.

Takeaway

The law of Moses was good, and it was a guardian. You honor a guardian by thanking him, not by staying under him for the rest of your life.

The Question Settled

Acts 15 And The Yoke

Within twenty years of the resurrection the church hit the question head on. Believers from the Pharisee party said Gentile converts must be circumcised and ordered to keep the law of Moses (Acts 15:5). The apostles and elders met in Jerusalem to decide.

“Now, therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?”

Acts 15:10

That is Peter, a Jew raised under Sinai. James gave the ruling: do not trouble the Gentiles who turn to God, and ask them to avoid a short list of things that would make shared tables between Jewish and Gentile believers impossible (Acts 15:19 to 20). Circumcision, the entry rite of the whole system, was not required.

The council did not sort the law and hand Gentiles the moral third. It gave them Christ, the Spirit, and four practical requests for the sake of fellowship.

Where We Stand, Plainly

Here is the Sound of Heaven position. The law of Moses was God's covenant with Israel, holy and good, and it was never meant to be permanent. Jesus fulfilled it, and it ended as a covenant in the covenant transition that ran from the cross to the fall of the temple in AD 70 (see Matthew 24 explained). Christians are not under Sinai in any part. We are bound to Christ, and we walk through what that means in the law of Christ.

The strongest case on the other side says the moral law reflects God's character and cannot expire. His character does not expire. But the obligation now comes through Christ, not the tablets, and love asks more than Sinai did.

We also read the law through Jesus, because He read it that way. On divorce He said, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). Some of what Moses allowed was a concession, not the full picture of the Father. Jesus is that picture.

This cuts both ways. Not under the law is not permission to be careless, and using the old commands as a stick is wrong too. Legalism lands hardest on new believers and people whose lives are already complicated (Galatians 5:12).

Where This Lands

The Guardian Walked Us To Jesus

The law of Moses is not an embarrassment and it is not your master. It is the instruction God gave a people He had already rescued, holy and good.

It was always going somewhere. It sketched a priest, a sacrifice and a dwelling place that none of its own parts could supply. Then Jesus came, and the guardian's walk ended at the door.

So read Leviticus and Deuteronomy. You will learn what God cared about and see the outline of Christ. Read them as the apostles did, as people who belong to Him.

The Whole Thing In One Line

The law of Moses is the Torah, centered on a treaty-shaped covenant with Israel at Sinai, counted and sorted only by later tradition, holy and good as a guardian until Christ, and settled at Acts 15 as not binding on those who belong to Jesus.

Still Sorting Out What Binds You?

Whether you were raised on rules or you are opening Leviticus for the first time, send us your questions. Someone at Sound of Heaven will walk through it with you.

Questions People Ask

Questions About The Law Of Moses

What is the law of Moses?

The law of Moses is the instruction God gave Israel through Moses, recorded in the five books from Genesis to Deuteronomy, also called the Torah. Its center is the covenant made at Sinai: the Ten Commandments, the case laws, the priesthood, the sacrifices, the festivals and the purity rules. It was written to one nation God had just rescued from Egypt. Jesus fulfilled it, and believers now live under Christ rather than Sinai.

How many laws are in the law of Moses?

The traditional number is 613, but the count is not in the Bible. It comes from the Talmud (Makkot 23b), where Rabbi Simlai teaches that 613 commandments were given to Moses, 365 negative and 248 positive. Later Jewish scholars, especially Maimonides in the twelfth century, compiled full lists, and those lists do not match in every detail. It is a summary from later tradition.

Are Christians under the law of Moses?

No. The Sinai covenant was made with Israel, and Jesus fulfilled it. In Acts 15 the apostles ruled that Gentile believers were not to be placed under the law of Moses, and Peter called it a yoke nobody had been able to bear. The old covenant ended in the covenant transition that closed with the fall of the temple in AD 70. Christians are bound to Christ, and love asks more than the law did.

Is the law of Moses the same as the Ten Commandments?

No, the Ten Commandments are part of it. They sit at the heart of the Sinai covenant in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. The law of Moses is much larger: the case laws of Exodus 21 to 23, the sacrifices and priesthood of Leviticus, the camp rules of Numbers, and the restated covenant of Deuteronomy. The ten were the core terms, and the rest applied them to the life of the nation.

Why did God give the law of Moses?

To form a people, to name sin, and to guard Israel until Christ came. Exodus 19 calls Israel a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Romans 3:20 says knowledge of sin comes through the law. Galatians 3:24 calls it a guardian, the household servant who watched over a child until he came of age. Paul calls it holy and righteous and good. It was good, and it was temporary.