Holiness Code - Comparison With Other Biblical Law Codes

Comparison With Other Biblical Law Codes

Most critical scholars and religious commentaries regard the Holiness Code as bearing strong resemblance, in several places, to the writing of Ezekiel. Ezekiel dwells repeatedly on offences which the Holiness code condemns, and spends little time concerned with those outside it (e.g. Leviticus 18:8-17 in comparison with Ezekiel 22:10-11), and several extensive lists of such parallels exist. There is also a great similarity between Ezekiel's writing and the hortatory elements, particularly the conclusion, of the Holiness Code. These strong similarities have led many critical scholars to question whether Ezekiel was the author of the code, or at least the collector, and it remains an open question whether the Holiness Code influenced Ezekiel, or Ezekiel influenced the Holiness Code.

The Holiness Code has a similarity of structure with both the Covenant Code and the Deuteronomic Code. Like these, it opens with a law regulating ceremonies at the altar, lists a series of disparate laws, and then closes with a set of promises for obeying the law, and curses for failing to do so. While some of the laws appear more developed than Deuteronomy, for example, the law concerning weights and measures is more detailed, the majority show less development, and the implication of multiple sanctuaries implied by the Holiness Code's laws, concerning altar ceremonies, is usually understood to imply a date prior to the banning of sanctuaries outside the temple at Jerusalem. A similar comparison with the Covenant Code implies that the date of the Holiness Code is between that of the Covenant Code, and that of the Deuteronomic Code, highly suitable for the position it finds itself within the Torah.

Although it is superficially plausible for the Holiness Code to be an updated version of the Covenant Code, and the Deuteronomic Code a later version still, the quite different manner in which the individual laws are presented, as well as the manner in which they are ordered, has led to a large majority of scholars concluding that while the structure of the code is copied, indicating that the writer of each code knew the code of its predecessor, the laws themselves were collected together independently on each occasion. Nevertheless, it is similarly acknowledged by the majority of critical scholars, that these three codes represent a gradual development of the underlying laws, as would be expected for a period of some 200–400 years.

Note: according to the entry for the Deuteronomic Code, the Deuteronomic Code was an embellishment of the Covenant Code.

In the documentary hypothesis, the priestly source is a work which, after its initial edition, suffered under the hand of several later, less skilled, editors, who each variously inserted documents, added additional laws, or expanded on the laws already present. Thus the original narrative, and the legal code within it, became surrounded by an extensive body of legal, and ritual, elements, as well as numerical, genealogical, and geographic, data. The underlying narrative, in the hypothesis, is based on JE, which already possessed a legal code, namely the Covenant Code and Ritual Decalogue. The majority of critical scholars thus support the position that, while the Ritual Decalogue was replaced by the Ethical Decalogue, the Holiness Code was chosen, or designed, to replace the Covenant Code.