This volume offers a synchronic, literary reading of the final form of the laws of Exodus 20.22-23.19 (commonly, though inaccurately labelled "The Book of the Covenant"), in contrast with primarily source- and form-critical approaches commonly utilized in the past. The work seeks to demonstrate that this literary unit is much more coherent, more integrated into its narrative context, less in need of the positing of corruptions, secondary insertions, rearrangements or the like than has usually been recognized. The approach instead seeks to find authorial purpose in each case where scholars have often posited scribal misadventure, "seams" between sources, disorder, contradiction, or corruption.
