Establishing Halakhah Chapter 17 of this parashah talks about the details surrounding official, legal matters. Of particular interest is the subject dealt with in verses 8-13. To be sure, the sages of old understood this to be talking about the matter of halakhah and the authority of what is known in rabbinical circles as “Oral Torah”. And just what is Oral Torah and why do we Christians need to know? I shall explain why below, but first, a treatment of what has come to be known as Oral Torah in Judaic circles must come first. Oral Torah: “Torah sh’be’al peh” Although the Written Torah seems to be precise in its description of legal codes and commandments, it would be impossible to write down every conceivable human behavior and ascertain whether or not the Torah allowed each one. Concerning the prohibition of work on the Sabbath, for example, we notice that nowhere in the Torah is there a definition of what constitutes labor (Heb: melachah) on the Sabbath and what does not. Amos (8:5) and Jeremiah (17:21-24) mention keeping the Sabbath in concrete terms—forbidding trading and bearing a burden—but it is impossible to enumerate all the probable behaviors and circumstances and give judgment as to whether or not they violate the Sabbath. This became more of a problem as time went on and the historical and cultural circumstances changed in later periods. The violation of the Sabbath is a very serious offense for Jewish people everywhere (a capital offence in ancient times), but the absence of a precise definition of working on the Sabbath in the Pentateuch has been a persistent problem. Unless people have a clear definition of what constitutes labor on the Sabbath, they cannot objectively observe it. Even for contemporary pious Christians, this is a serious problem. Like Amos and Jeremiah, the believing community had their own understanding about the Sabbath, and that became the tradition of the community. Since the time of Ezra in the post-exilic period, many experts on the Law (scribes, Sofrim) were interpreting the Torah in and for their covenant community, and the community regarded their words as having the same binding authority as the Written Torah. The traditional interpretations of the Torah by the experts on the Torah as well as those of the Chazal (Our Rabbis of Blessed Memory), particularly after the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, became the “Torah sh’be’al peh” (Torah from the mouth), also known as unwritten or Oral Torah. The Oral Torah gained equal footing and took on the same kind of binding authority as the Written Torah. The function of the Oral Torah is to "make a fence for the Law" (Avot 1.1). The Written Torah is to be protected by keeping and observing the tradition (Oral Torah). Consequently, Judaism has been able “keep” the Written Torah merely by observing the Oral Torah. By obeying the tradition in concrete terms (no business on the Sabbath, for instance), they could observe the commandment about the Sabbath.