The Torah Unabridged

Biblical law rarely stays inside its own wording. William A. Tooman follows the laws on intermarriage from Exodus to Ezra-Nehemiah, tracing how later biblical writers stretched earlier rules to cover people and circumstances the original texts never named. Reading the Hebrew closely and in historical sequence, he shows the techniques they used to appropriate, expand and rework older legal ideas, and argues that the movement ran one way only: towards ever tighter restriction of marriage between Israelites or Jews and gentiles.

A closing chapter sets out the logical and exegetical moves behind this process and the assumptions about scripture that drove it. Compact and tightly argued, it is a scholarly monograph for biblical specialists and historians of law, and for anyone curious about how interpretation began inside the Bible itself.