The Ethics of the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

Several of the narratives contained in the Hebrew Bible raise profound ethical questions, and moral issues frequently recur in the sayings of the wise and in various passages in the Psalms. Consequently, the Bible seemed staunchly to resist any attempt to subject it to a tidy, systematic treatment, and some scholars were forced to concede that the writing of an ‘ethics of the Hebrew Bible’ was an impractical, if not impossible, task. In this brief survey, the author outlines some of the pertinent issues relating to the subject of the ethics of the Hebrew Bible. Much research remains to be done in this important field of biblical study, and it is to be hoped that the renewed interest shown by biblical scholars in this area during the last twenty years will continue into the foreseeable future.