SOURCE: "The Pentateuch as Torah: The Way as Part of the Goal" in The "Torah": Theology and Social History of Old Testament Law, translated by Allan W. Mahnke, Fortress Press, 1996, pp. 329-67.

In the following essay, Crusemann explores the social and political context in which the Pentateuch was produced in an effort to understand the development of the Judeo-Christian Torah. According to him, the Pentateuch unifies the strictures of a monotheistic religion with regulations of justice set against the background of Persian law.

There came a voice of revelation saying,
 "These and those are words of the living
   God."
 Babylonian Talmud, Erubin 13b1

The Pentateuch as a Product of the Persian Period

Literary Presuppositions and Conceptual Self-designation

The historical juxtaposition of the legal corpora in the Pentateuch are parts of one law of Moses. Codes criticizing previous laws, which they sought to replace, were combined with those laws...