If you had to sum up the ethical imperatives of the Torah in a single phrase, you might well pick the injunction from last week’s sidrah, “Justice, justice, you shall pursue”.

The Hebrew Bible’s concern for justice makes it a revolutionary document for Jeremiah Unterman, a scholar at Jerusalem’s Herzl Institute. But that is not how others always see it; a tendency has grown up in academic circles, he argues, to downplay the ideas of the Bible as, at best, no better than those of other ancient Near Eastern civilisations.

In this book, he sets out to show why that dismissive attitude is wrong. Contrasting the treatment of the poor or the stranger in other sources — such as Hittite, Egyptian or Mesopotamian — he makes a case for the innovative nature of the Bible; the Torah, for example, was “the first text to legislate food supplies for the poor”. The command for servants to rest on Shabbat represented the “first universal labour law”.  

Drawing on scholarly material, Unterman distils it in a way that makes it easy for a general reader.  Whereas the Creation and Flood stories of other literatures depict human beings as the playthings of capricious gods, the Torah presents a moral universe where mankind must emulate God who desires the welfare of His creatures and take responsibility for the stewardship of the earth.

Emphasising the “revolutionary” advance made by the Prophets, he contends  that whereas the Torah does not differentiate between ritual and ethical law, the Prophets established the primacy of ethics over ritual. “Ritual is secondary to ethics and dependent on moral behaviour for its validity.”

While the Torah projected national catastrophe as mainly the outcome of idolatory, the Prophets focused on ethical backsliding as the principal threat to the nation. As Proverbs proclaimed, “To do what is right and just is more desired by the Lord than sacrifice.”