What Is Biblical Law?

Biblical law is the body of commandments God gave to Israel through Moses, recorded in Genesis through Deuteronomy and known as the Torah. Jewish tradition counts 613 commandments covering worship, ethics, justice, diet, sexuality, agriculture, and the calendar. Christians have debated for two thousand years which of them still apply.

1 John 2:6 1 John 2:6 says to walk as Yeshua (Jesus) walked; therefore, I believe we should follow Torah like the Messiah and all the original Christians did.
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Why Would God Care About This?

Why on earth does God care about whether or not we rest on the Sabbath or eat unclean animals? Is it that big of a deal? What do these things really have to do with being a Christian?

There are several things that are important to God. He even wrote them down when He delivered the Israelites from Egypt. And everyone who desired to follow God (including Gentiles) had to agree to honor Him in the way He desires to be honored. God doesn't change. If ignoring His commandments was offensive to Him in the past, it is offensive to Him today. Yeshua said that not one jot or tittle will pass from the Torah until heaven and earth pass away and all is accomplished. (Note: that hasn't happened yet.) The Feast of Sukkot, for example, is so important to God that He will mandate that all the nations celebrate it after Yeshua's Second Coming (Zechariah 14:16–19). So yes, this is a big deal to God.

At the end of the day, God expresses His will to us through His Word. Do we truly believe that? Because to say, "This commandment is irrelevant," is to say, "God's will for my life in this area isn't important to me." God is the one who makes the rules, not us. And if we desire to follow Him, that includes following His rules. Christian theologian R.C. Sproul puts it best: "When there's something in the Word of God that I don't like, the problem is not with the Word of God, it's with me."

Aside from honoring God, there are a lot of practical benefits to keeping Torah. For instance, God knows that we all need a day of rest. It's a no-brainer. We weren't created to work constantly without a break. The Sabbath blesses us with physical rest. It takes us back to creation (Exodus 20:11) and revives our hope for the Messianic Kingdom to come.

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The Three-Part Division Problem

Ask most Christians why they keep some commandments and not others and you'll get a version of the same answer: the moral law still applies, the civil and ceremonial laws don't.

It is a tidy system. It is also a later invention, and the Torah itself shows no awareness of it.

The tripartite division and where it breaks down Three columns labeled moral, civil, and ceremonial, each with example commandments. Beneath them, four commandments are shown spanning more than one column, illustrating that the categories overlap: the Sabbath, love of neighbor, honest weights and measures, and the prohibition on mixing fabrics. MORAL CIVIL CEREMONIAL Do not murder Do not steal Do not commit adultery Honor your parents Courts and witnesses Property restitution Cities of refuge Release of debts Sacrifices Priestly garments Purity washings Festival offerings But a great many commandments refuse to sit in one column: The Sabbath moral rest · civil labor law · ceremonial sign Love your neighbor as yourself Leviticus 19 — sits among purity and agricultural laws Honest weights and measures moral or civil? Do not mix wool and linen ceremonial — but priests wore it
The threefold division is a useful teaching shorthand, but it is imposed on the text rather than drawn from it. Leviticus 19 moves between sexual ethics, harvest practice, honest scales, and fabric blends without signaling any change of category.

The threefold division appears in Christian theology many centuries after the Torah was written. Scripture never labels a commandment moral, civil, or ceremonial, and never instructs anyone to sort them.

Consider Leviticus 19. Within a single chapter it addresses idolatry, the Sabbath, leaving harvest gleanings for the poor, theft, honest wages, deafness and blindness, favoritism in court, gossip, revenge, crossbreeding livestock, mixed fabrics, sexual ethics, tattoos, honest weights, and loving the foreigner as yourself. The famous command to love your neighbor sits in the middle of that list, with no boundary marker on either side.

Something has to explain why one commandment persists and another expires. Pronomian theology's objection is not that Christians make distinctions — some distinction is unavoidable, since no one is offering sacrifices. The objection is that the tripartite scheme looks like it comes from Scripture when it does not, and it tends to sort commandments by which ones feel familiar.

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Which Commandments Apply to Whom

Here is the distinction the Torah does make, and it is more useful than the one most Christians inherited. The commandments have different audiences. Not every commandment was ever addressed to every person.

This reframes the usual objection. "You can't keep the whole Torah" is true in a trivial sense — nobody ever could. A woman was never obligated to keep the commandments given to priests. A Jew in Babylon could not keep the agricultural laws tied to the land. A commandment being inapplicable to you is not the same as a commandment being abolished.

Sacrifices are the clearest case. There is no temple and no functioning Levitical priesthood, so those commandments cannot be performed. That is a fact about circumstances, not a statement that God withdrew them.

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Does Keeping the Law Save You?

No. This is the question underneath most objections to biblical law, and the answer has never been in dispute among those who affirm the Torah's ongoing authority.

Salvation comes by grace, through faith in Yeshua the Messiah. It was never otherwise — not in the New Testament, and not in the Old. Abraham was counted righteous through faith centuries before Sinai. Israel was brought out of Egypt first and given the commandments afterward. The order matters: rescue, then instruction. Never instruction as the price of rescue.

What the commandments do is define what faithfulness looks like once you belong to God. They tell you what sin is. They describe the shape of a life lived in covenant. Confusing that role with the mechanism of salvation is the actual error the New Testament warns against — and it is an error whether you commit it by keeping the commandments to earn favor, or by assuming anyone who keeps them must be trying to.

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The Commandments People Ask About

In practice, a handful of commandments account for nearly every question.

The Sabbath

The seventh day, Friday evening to Saturday evening. The commandment most Christians have a considered position on, and the one where the moral/ceremonial split does the most work.

Sabbath resources

The food laws

Clean and unclean animals, from Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 — usually the second question after the Sabbath, and the one where Mark 7 and Acts 10 get cited fastest. The wider argument is that God gave the Torah to Israel for a designated period that ended at the cross. Following that logic, some Christian leaders have urged the church to "unhitch" from the Old Testament entirely — which is where the old heretic Marcion ended up.

Dietary law resources

The appointed times

Passover, Unleavened Bread, Firstfruits, Shavuot, Yom Teruah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot — the feasts of Leviticus 23, plus the question of when a biblical day begins.

Calendar resources

Dress and appearance

If you were involved in a church youth group during the nineties, you likely remember a trendy wristband that kids used to wear as a symbol of their faith. On these wristbands was the acronym WWJD, which stood for, "What Would Jesus Do?" These wristbands were meant to serve as a physical reminder to live honorable lives for Jesus — Yeshua — the Messiah.

We see a biblical version of this very same idea. God's people are to wear tzitzit "throughout their generations" as a reminder that they are to live set-apart lives in accordance with God's commandments (Numbers 15:38–39). Like those WWJD wristbands we wore in the nineties, tzitzit remind us that we are representing the God of Israel and the Messiah Yeshua, and we ought to act accordingly. And many people might be surprised to learn that Yeshua wore tzitzit Himself (Matthew 9:20).

Practice resources

The Hard Passages

Any honest treatment of biblical law has to deal with the commandments that trouble modern readers rather than route around them. Slavery. Ritual purity laws that appear to disadvantage women. Polygamy. Capital punishment. These are the passages most often used to argue that the Torah is a primitive document Christians have rightly outgrown.

The pronomian answer is not that these passages are easy. It is that they are routinely read without the ancient Near Eastern context that makes their actual force visible — and that a regulation is not an endorsement.

Slavery

God introduced himself to Israel at Mount Sinai as the one who "brought [them] out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (Exodus 20:2). He revealed himself as the liberator of slaves. He wanted to be recognized, first and foremost, as a God who wants his people to be free.

This theme is carried into the New Testament: Yeshua said that God's end-time activity, which includes freeing the oppressed, was inaugurated in his own ministry (Luke 4:16–21). He is the Son who frees the sinner from their slavery (John 8:34–36). With that in mind, it's no secret that the Bible has laws regulating a form of slavery. How do we make sense of these laws in light of the Bible's overall theme of freedom? If God is all about setting captives free, why didn't he simply abolish slavery in the Torah?

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Purity laws and women

Some feminists cite the Torah's ritual purity legislation, such as laws concerning menstrual impurity (Leviticus 15:19–24) and childbirth (Leviticus 12), as evidence of sexism in the Bible. It's argued that the Bible regards women as generally unclean and offensive to God because of their physiology.

How might we address this objection? First, it's important to note that the Torah's ritual purity legislation addresses issues that are not only specific to women but also issues specific to men (e.g., Leviticus 15:16). Thus, it's wrong to assert that the Torah singles out women as "unclean." Second, ritual impurity in the Torah does not equate to sinfulness. Ritual impurity is merely a temporary ceremonial status that bars a person from participating in sacred space and activities, such as the tabernacle/temple services in ancient Israel. It is not a sin to be ritually impure. While there are purity issues specific to women, there are also purity issues specific to men. Both men and women become ritually impure in various ways. There is no sexism.

But what about the purification period for the birth of a girl being twice as long than for the birth of a boy (Leviticus 12:2–5)? Does this suggest that girls are more "ritually impure" than boys? Not at all. Consider that the mother brings the same purification offering "whether for a son or for a daughter" (Leviticus 12:6). The Torah intentionally places both son and daughter on the same level; the same offering is required for both of them. Thus, critics overstate their case when they cite this legislation as an example of female inferiority or sexism.

When all of the relevant data are considered, the feminist objections on the basis of the ritual purity laws in the Torah are severely underwhelming.

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Polygamy

The Torah regulates plural marriage without commanding it. Whether it also prohibits it turns on a contested reading of Leviticus 18:18.

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Sexual ethics

Two questions get run together here and are worth separating: what Leviticus 18:22 says, and whether it still binds. On the first, the scholar Roy Gane describes the verse's language as devastatingly untechnical — leaving no room for ambiguity. One need not like the verse to acknowledge what it states.

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Capital punishment and justice

The Torah's penalties are frequently described as barbaric. They were, in their own setting, frequently restrictive — capping penalties that neighboring codes left open.

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How to Actually Study the Torah

The most durable method is also the oldest: read it on a cycle, a portion each week, alongside the synagogue readings that have run for two millennia. The whole Torah in a year, every year, with the same passages coming around again in a different season of your life.

This is a better starting point than topical study, because it forces you through the commandments you would not have chosen to look up.

Study resources

Common Questions About Biblical Law

How many commandments are in the Torah?

Jewish tradition counts 613 — 248 positive and 365 negative. The number comes from rabbinic enumeration rather than from Scripture itself, and different authorities arrive at slightly different lists. It is a useful figure, not a biblical one.

Isn't the moral, civil, and ceremonial division biblical?

No. The threefold division developed in later Christian theology. Scripture never labels a commandment as belonging to one of these categories, and Leviticus 19 moves between them freely within a single chapter. Some distinction is unavoidable — nobody is offering sacrifices — but this particular scheme is imposed on the text rather than drawn from it.

Do I have to keep all 613 commandments?

Nobody ever did, or could. Many commandments were addressed to specific groups — priests, farmers in the land, judges, kings — and others require a standing temple. A commandment that does not apply to your situation is not thereby abolished; it simply was not addressed to you.

What about the sacrifices?

They cannot be performed without a temple and a functioning Levitical priesthood. Affirming the Torah's ongoing authority does not mean claiming every commandment is currently performable.

Doesn't keeping the law mean rejecting grace?

No. Salvation is by grace through faith, and always has been — Abraham was counted righteous long before Sinai, and Israel was rescued from Egypt before receiving any commandments. Obedience is the response to salvation, not its price.

What is the difference between Torah, the Law of Moses, and the Old Testament?

Torah usually means the first five books, Genesis through Deuteronomy, and by extension the commandments they contain. "Law of Moses" generally refers to the same body of material. The Old Testament is the whole Hebrew Bible, including the Prophets and the Writings, which are not Torah in the narrow sense.

How do I know which commandments still apply to me?

Start with the audience. Ask who a given commandment was addressed to, whether it depends on the temple or the land, and whether the New Testament addresses it directly. That is a slower method than sorting by category, but it follows distinctions the text itself makes.

Books on Biblical Law

Published by Pronomian Publishing unless noted.

An Introduction to Pronomianism: Essays on One Torah Theology in Modern Christianity

Edited by Dr. Benjamin Szumskyj and David Wilber (McFarland, 2026). The academic treatment of the position underlying this page.

Cover of How I Love Your Law How I Love Your Law: Meditations on the Weekly Torah Portions

A year through the Torah, portion by portion — the companion to the study method above.

Cover of Why Then the Law Why Then the Law

If the commandments were never the means of salvation, what were they for? Paul's own question, worked through.

Pocket Guides on the key passages

One book per text, for the specific objection in front of you.

Browse the full Pocket Guide series · See all books by David Wilber

Where to Start

Biblical law is a large subject and the temptation is to start with the hardest question you have. Start narrower.

  1. Read Leviticus 19 in one sitting. It is the clearest single demonstration that the Torah does not sort itself into moral, civil, and ceremonial categories.
  2. Settle the salvation question first. What is the Gospel? — every other question about the law gets distorted if this one is unresolved.
  3. Understand the framework. What is pronomian theology?
  4. Take up the objection that troubles you most from the hard passages above. For most people it is slavery or the purity laws.
  5. Then start reading on a cycle. The weekly Torah portion — a portion a week, the whole Torah in a year.

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