Signs, Symbols and Biblical Law
Biblical law is a complex, signifying legal system. Contrary to modern prejudiced readings, biblical law is neither crude nor outdated. Instead, it is a sophisticated signifier of legal norms that operates with subtlety and complexity.
The Signs of Sin invites modern readers to see the Bible’s legal traditions as living reflections on the nature of sin, responsibility, and relational repair.
My book The Signs of Sin: Seriousness of Offence in Biblical Law explores how the Hebrew Bible understands wrongdoing and communicates the seriousness of different kinds of offences. Rather than treating biblical laws as a flat list of commands and prohibitions, the book shows how the biblical legal tradition uses a rich network of narrative, symbolism, and cultural cues to express what counts as serious sin, and less serious sin, and why. Its central contribution is to show that biblical law communicates meaning not only through explicit rules but also through signs, patterns, metaphors, and literary strategies that help readers grasp the moral weight of various actions.
The book demonstrates throughout that biblical legal texts cannot be read technically, or semantically, like modern law. Instead, they must be read as part of a network of meaningmaking signs that communicate through images, narratives, and shared cultural knowledge. This means that to understand biblical law properly we need to read it in what can be called semiotic terms, because semiotics is the study of signs and how they generate meaning. The book provides a series worked examples of what this looks like and the difference it makes. The book challenges and contributes to biblical studies by arguing that:
- The biblical laws communicate through underlying pictures, not just words
Biblical laws evoke typical situations, social stereotypes, and narrative patterns familiar to their audience. Meaning is carried by shared images rather than by semantic wording. For example, the “stubborn and rebellious son” of Deuteronomy is not a technical definition, but a narrative image shaped by Israel’s behaviour towards God in the wilderness and so has overtones of apostasy. The law’s force comes from that collective image, not from a semantic definition of what it means to be “stubborn” or “rebellious”.
- The biblical laws are paradigm cases, not exhaustive rules
Instead of functioning like modern statutes (“if X, then Y in every instance”), biblical laws present illustrative, memorable and educative examples. In this way they function as signs pointing to broader values and expectations. This means approaching the written laws in terms of their narrative encapsulation of values rather than as an attempt to legislate in a modern, semantic manner. This provides judges with wider scope to administer justice on behalf of the people according to how closely the real case resembles the paradigm. This in turn links law to wisdom: both require discernment, not mechanical rule-following.
- The biblical laws depend on shared social knowledge
Biblical legal texts assume that the audience knows the cultural context, stories, and assumptions behind them. Legal meaning is social, not purely semantic. To put it another way, the individual biblical laws assume the social knowledge that is presented, or advocated, in the Hebrew Bible as wisdom (which is not to be simply equated with what scholars nowadays call wisdom literature.)
- Narrative and law form a unified system of meaning
Law in the Hebrew Bible draws on and interacts with stories, including the Creation narrative, the Exodus and the wilderness wanderings. These stories become interpretive keys that shape how particular laws are understood and applied. Law is therefore part of a wider symbolic world. Instead of separating legal texts from storytelling, The Signs of Sin shows how the biblical writers used both to build a coherent moral vision.
To sum up:
- biblical law is a sign-system, not a modern legal code
- meaning comes from images, narrative patterns, and shared cultural wisdom
- laws function as paradigms that require discernment
- law and wisdom are intertwined because both rely on contextual, socially embedded meaning
It is therefore wrong to assume that biblical law is always limited to a literal interpretation; on the contrary, it often requires a nuanced understanding of how it operates, that is, as a relational, narrative, and wisdombased system of meaning.
At the heart of The Signs of Sin is the idea that biblical law reflects a relational worldview.
Wrongdoing is measured not merely by external harm but by how deeply it damages relationships – with God, within the community, and between individuals.
It demonstrates that the Bible distinguishes between offences in subtle, textured ways that modern readers can easily overlook. For example, biblical law treats crimes involving bloodshed, sexual transgression, and idolatry with particular gravity because they disrupt core covenantal relationships on which biblical Israel’s social and theological identity depends.
As part of this, The Signs of Sin explores how the Bible uses symbolism and ritual to convey seriousness. Purification rites, sacrificial procedures, and symbolic actions are not arbitrary religious practices. Instead, they communicate the depth of moral disorder that certain sins create. Another distinctive contribution is its examination of how social structures reflect moral seriousness. Penalties, community involvement, and ritual procedures all serve as indicators regarding which offences strike at the heart of covenant life. Rather than reading such penalties as purely retributive, The Signs of Sin shows that they express moral meaning and promote restoration.
Severity, in this framework, is less about punishment and more about registering and communicating the scale of the relational damage.
Overall, The Signs of Sin presents biblical law as a sophisticated moral system that uses stories and symbols to teach the seriousness of wrongdoing.
My most thorough-going application of semiotics to biblical law is Why Was Moses Banned from the Promised Land? A Radical Retelling of the Rebellions of Moses (Num. 20:2-13 and Exod. 2:11-15).
Scholars have long struggled to understand both Moses’ exact offence in striking the rock and why his behaviour merited such severe punishment. The article applies A.J. Greimas’ structuralist semiotics, specifically Bernard Jackson’s reformulated narrative schema of Contract → Performance → Recognition, to analyse the text systematically. In doing so I am not, of course, saying that semiotics is needed to understand this part of the Bible. I am however using semiotics as a methodological tool so that we can see more clearly the story that the text has been telling all along. This is all necessary especially when our misreadings of the text have resulted in the emphasis being (wrongly) placed elsewhere. My main argument is that, unlike the similar water miracle in Exodus 17:1-6, where Moses obediently follows God’s commands, Numbers 20:2-13 presents Moses as rebelling against God. In Numbers 20, Moses acts as an autonomous rather than heteronomous subject. The article identifies multiple dimensions of Moses’ rebellion:
- Verbal: Moses asks: “shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” (20:10), claiming to be Israel’s deliverer rather than God’s agent.
- Physical: Moses “raises his hand” against God and strikes the rock twice with his rod, publicly rejecting his role as God’s instrument.
- Symbolic: Moses misuses the rod (which is a symbol of divine authority) against God’s intentions.
Moses’ punishment is thus proportionate. His offence parallels Israel’s rebellion in Numbers 14 which attracts the same penalty, namely, death in the desert and exclusion from the Promised Land. I also argue that there are striking correspondences between Exodus 2:11-15 (where a younger Moses kills an Egyptian) and Numbers 20:2-13. I propose that these texts form a narrative bracket showing Moses rebelling against authority figures (Pharaoh, then God) at both the beginning and the end of his adult life, as recorded in the Bible. This reading of the text gives due weight to the penalty experienced by Moses. His actions did not constitute mere technical disobedience but a deliberate, public resignation from his divine calling.
I also apply (with Michael Naughton) a semiotic approach to the trials of Jesus in Semiotics, Miscarriages of Justice and the Trials of Jesus. This book chapter, in Wisdom and Understanding: Studies in Jewish Law in honour of Bernard S. Jackson, explores how semiotic theory (the study of meaning-making through signs) illuminates both modern miscarriages of justice and the trials of Jesus. Drawing on Bernard Jackson’s interdisciplinary work, we argue that criminal justice processes depend heavily on narrative construction and sense-making that can lead to wrongful convictions. This arises because meaning is constructed through competing narratives in criminal trials. Juries do not simply evaluate evidence objectively but assess the plausibility and coherence of stories presented by prosecution and defence. Frequently, the prosecution has a narrative advantage stemming from stereotypical crime scripts that seem intuitively “true.” The article then identifies key factors contributing to wrongful convictions: (1) marginalised defendants who are easier to “scapegoat”; (2) moral panics creating “suspect communities”; (3) weak evidence combination where multiple unreliable pieces create an overwhelming case; (4) evidence creation where authorities construct crimes where none occurred; (5) expert witness fallibility where a forensic “priesthood” makes questionable statistical claims and (6) system legitimacy assumptions where procedural compliance masks substantive injustice.
Looking closely at the trials of Jesus described in the New Testament discloses similar patterns. (1) Just as innocent people who become victims of a false allegation can attract the false charge in the first place, so Jesus’ performance of “signs and wonders”, taken in combination with His teachings attracted the stigma of being labelled a false prophet and a false teacher and so made Him the target of false allegations. (2) Just as miscarriages of justice can be triggered by a climate of fear or by moral panics linked to high profile events, so Jesus’ raising of Lazarus from the dead triggered a gathering of the Sanhedrin that sought to justify, per moral panics, the most extreme measures. (3) The miscarriage of justice against Jesus was initiated by a maliciously-brought prosecution, as can still be the case today. (4) Just as issues, charges and evidence that are individually weak in themselves can be combined to provide weight against the accused in cases of innocent persons, so a number of individually unsustainable charges were gathered against Jesus, including; false prophecy, leading the disciples astray, false teaching, destruction of the Temple and blasphemy. (5) Finally, just as evidence can be ‘created’ in the modern process of case-construction so charge-construction was adapted for different audiences, in Jesus’ trials, with internal Jewish religious disputes for a Jewish audience becoming Roman sedition for a Roman audience.
Another important aspect of meaning-making is how biblical legal texts are arranged. The Bible makes frequent use of the chiasm (or chiasmus); a literary device in which words, grammatical structures or concepts are repeated in reverse order, often to highlight a central idea. Worked examples of this can be found in Exegesis or Eisegesis: Does chiastic analysis help us to understand Leviticus 20? in the book Chiasmus: The State of the Art. Here I address the perennial challenge in chiastic studies: distinguishing legitimate textual analysis from imposed interpretive frameworks. Using Leviticus 20 as a test case, I argue that rigorous chiastic analysis can illuminate biblical texts when grounded in objective textual features. Although Leviticus 20 is an unusually large chiasm, its structure is determined by who administers punishment, whether God or humanity. This creates a clear chiastic pattern based on concrete textual data rather than subjective interpretation. The article critiques Jacob Milgrom’s proposed chiastic analysis of Leviticus 20 as being too abstract. Instead, it proposes three criteria for validating chiastic analysis: gathering in all the textual data; achieving simplicity; and illuminating related texts. According to my own chiastic analysis, Leviticus 20 is chiastically arranged for multiple purposes: (1) to emphasise the divine-human partnership in doing justice, (2) to highlight family and community responsibility; (3) to draw attention to the relational consequences of sexual offences and (4) to connect to the Decalogue and the Covenant Code. In this way, literary presentation emphasises substantive content. In particular, it presents sexual ethics not purely in terms of individual moral choices but as community-affecting behaviours that impact extended family networks.
In The Medium and the Message: Necromancy and the Literary Context of Leviticus 20 I explore why necromancy appears in Leviticus 20 alongside the seemingly unrelated offences of cursing parents and various sexual violations. In fact, the inclusion of necromancy is integral to the chapter’s sophisticated literary structure and is not a random addition. The book chapter, in Text, Time and Temple: Literary, Historical and Ritual Studies in Leviticus, argues that Leviticus 20 follows the Decalogue pattern of idolatry, honouring parents and adultery and that necromancy connects to each of these elements. Firstly, necromancy connects to idolatry because Molech worship and necromancy form a narrative sequence. Child sacrifice to the underworld deity Molech may have been performed to acquire necromantic powers, establishing the practitioner as a rival priest to God’s priesthood. Secondly, necromancy connects to the Decalogue command to honour parents.
Consulting dead ancestors through necromancy represents improper generational relating
Consulting dead ancestors through necromancy represents improper generational relating and so contrasts with the command to honour living elders. Thirdly, necromancy connects to sexual offences because the Hebrew terms (‘ōb and yidd’ōnî) likely mean “[spirit of] the ancestor, the one who knows”. This seems to envisage ancestral spirits penetrating the practitioner’s body and thus a form of spirit possession. From this perspective, Leviticus 20 ends with the ultimate sexual boundary violation – intercourse between living and dead – completing the series of binary oppositions that structure the sexual offences described throughout the chapter. Necromancy thus appears at both the beginning and the end of the chapter because it synthesises the chapter’s main concerns for true worship of God, intergenerational relationships and appropriate sexual behaviour. Rather than being displaced or supplementary, as many have claimed, necromancy serves as the chapter’s pièce de resistance; the ultimate case that summarises and concludes the entire discussion.