Mosaic Law
More than ten words about reading and drafting the law
This post is about reading the law. Reading, after all, is essential to our project: to create a lasting digital framework for law. This is the next stage in the transition from oral to written legal tradition. Like the transition to writing, our project is motivated, at least in part, by the hope of making law more accurate, more immutable, more accessible to each reader and less subject to losses over time.
The story of Moses receiving the tablets on Mount Sinai captures some of this hope. A written law should make the rules clear; maybe people will disagree with the law, but at least they will know what it is. And yet, the story of the tablets is itself full of ambiguity. It underscores the limits of writing, or any technology, to fix the inherent ambiguities in the law.
The story of the tablets, commonly known as the “ten commandments” is actually retold three times in the bible: Exodus Chapter 20, Exodus Chapter 34 and Deuteronomy Chapter 5. (Here, I’m referring only to the Torah, or five books of Moses, itself a compilation of earlier texts.)
The idea of the ten commandments comes from a blend of these stories. Each story has a different listing of laws, and the list in Exodus 34 is dramatically different from the other two (e.g. “[O]f all thy cattle thou shalt sanctify the males, the firstlings of ox and sheep.”) That account is the only one of the three that mentions the number ten, but the laws set out there are not easily grouped into ten. First, comes the list of laws, and then:
“[T]he LORD said unto Moses: ‘Write thou these words[:] for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel.’…And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten words.” (Exodus 34:27-28)”
Indeed, there are ten Hebrew words in the phrase in bold above. In this version of the story, the number ten does not seem to refer to ten commandments at all, but a ten-word formula that Moses was instructed to write down to “seal” the covenant.
It is worth reading (or rereading) this, and the other two versions, to see the essential discrepancies in stories that are so central to biblical laws: discrepancies about the content and number of the laws, the nature of the “covenant” and others. Aren’t these the kinds of anomalies that are supposed to be resolved by compilation (or in the case of U.S. Federal law, codification)? What hope is there for our project, if the law itself is going to continue to be ambiguous?
And that is, I think, a healthy starting point for thinking about structuring law. No written tablets or sophisticated ontologies or XML or other technology can clarify what are core ambiguities in the text itself. We are stuck with those, because of the nature of society and the nature of law.
And I, for one, don’t want to be ruled by laws that are so ironclad that there is no room for human interpretation. The goal of legislative technology— or at least my goal — is not to create such a mechanized dystopia. It is instead to give lawmakers a set of tools to write law more clearly (if they so choose), and to give the public tools to read the law as it was written, including any ambiguities inherent in the text.
As I have written elsewhere, we have a unique opportunity now, in the United States and worldwide, to clean up and organize our laws. To make them more accessible and transparent. But that opportunity has to be balanced with the need to maintain flexibility, ambiguity, and perhaps even contradiction in the law itself.
