The purpose of biblical law is to enable us to love God and to love our neighbour. This is an agenda not only for improved interpersonal contact but also for institutions. In biblical law, love for God, and love for neighbour influences the design of our financial and lending relationships, our political relationships, our conditions of employment, our impact upon the environment, among many other interconnected areas. Biblical law thus informs the whole of politics and public administration. Its goal is to develop a worldview that is shaped at every point by an understanding of what it means to live a life of love as persons made in the image of God. This, in turn, informs our understanding and aspirations regarding the sort of world in which human beings can live well.

God, Justice and Society seeks to provide a wide-ranging modern treatment of biblical law, combining rigorous legal analysis with theological and literary interpretation. In this way it challenges both legal positivism and exclusively devotional readings of the Bible. It sees the Hebrew Bible as a living text that simultaneously forms part of a theological vision and a reflection on the very nature of law, justice, and society.

The book bridges disciplines that are often siloed and refuses to separate law from theology. This is because the study of biblical law has often suffered when dominated either by lawyers who neglect its religious dimension or by theologians who ignore its legal reasoning. Of necessity, then, God, Justice and Society requires a truly interdisciplinary and not a merely comparative methodology. As such it aims to integrate legal philosophy, theology, biblical studies, ancient Near Eastern studies, semiotics, and literary theory. At the same time, its approach is not eclectic. Instead, God, Justice and Society is built around a unifying thesis, namely, that biblical law constructs a relational worldview.

God, Justice and Society sees biblical law as an internally coherent and living normative system, with the Scriptures themselves seen primarily as a complex whole in which stories, poetry, and commands interweave. The legal collections do not comprise a static, modern code; instead, each normative genre participates in a wider moral dialogue within the Scriptures. God, Justice and Society defines biblical law as an integration of instructional genres in the Bible – including legal collections, proverbs, poetry and narrative – which together express a vision of a society ultimately accountable to God. This intertextual method distinguishes this book from traditional commentaries which tend to isolate the biblical laws from their literary contexts. As such it has the potential to revitalise the field of biblical jurisprudence.

God, Justice and Society also presents biblical law as a window into biblical anthropology. Biblical law assumes that human beings are relational and accountable both to God and to one another. On this account, law is not a mere instrument of social control but a medium through which divine justice is enacted in human life. Sabbatical and jubilee laws, which provide for debt release, rest, and land renewal, express an alternative social imagination centred on freedom, stewardship, and interdependence; all of which can, and must, be connected with modern debates about social welfare, environmental ethics, and economic justice. Biblical law is relevant to contemporary legal theory not because it can be simply transplanted into modern systems, but because it offers models of how law can embody moral vision. Modern legal positivism, detached as it often is from transcendent moral sources, has lost sight of law’s ability to express this solidarity, along with divine accountability. 

Legal meaning arises not only from written statutes but from the interaction between law, symbol, and story. Just as modern legal culture constructs norms through formal precedent and social meaning, biblical law generates a symbolic universe where obedience and justice shape identity. In this integrative vision, law becomes a moral pedagogy, teaching the community to see justice as covenantal faithfulness rather than mere transactional compliance. This in turn challenges modern ideas of law that see legality as neutral or amoral. By framing biblical law as a multifunctional discourse – ethical, social, and liturgical – God, Justice and Society aims to recover its intellectual vitality and relevance for contemporary legal studies. Far from being an exercise in antiquarianism God, Justice and Society aims to model “public theology through law”, in which biblical categories illuminate and challenge current issues including social justice, environmental responsibility, and human rights.

God, Justice and Society makes several intersecting moves simultaneously. It makes relationships, not rules, the central organising feature of biblical law and integrates legal reasoning with narrative reasoning. The result is that what we can call “biblical law” is embedded across different biblical genres. It is a holistic moral pedagogy, not a modern “stand-alone” statute book. Moreover, it is because biblical law comprises an integrated legal pedagogy which aims to shape character and social imagination that it can be a means of moral formation and not just social control. This is all part of what it means to think about law in the purpose of God.

God, Justice and Society was the subject of a symposium held in Cambridge in 2011, some of the proceedings of which were subsequently published in Political Theology