Christians are not required to keep the Old Testament food laws, feasts and sabbath days as the mark of belonging to God’s people. The New Testament calls those observances a shadow whose substance is Christ. The moral commands of the law still speak. That answer only becomes useful when you can show how you reached it, and that takes some prerequisite knowledge about how the law is built.
This guide supplies that knowledge in order. First it explains the kinds of commands the law contains. Then it gives you passages to sort for yourself. Then it uses a real challenge, the Hebrew Israelite claim that true Israelites keep the law, to practice testing a whole system for consistency. You can work through it alone in two or three sittings. A group can cover it in two meetings, with the reading exercise done between them.
The guide draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and Pastor Tyran Laws, a pastor on the south side of Chicago and co-author of The Round Table, a short book on the belief systems drawing young Black adults away from the church.
The prerequisite most readers are missing
Most people come to this question holding one picture: the law is a single block. You either keep all of it or you have abandoned it. The Hebrew Israelite challenge depends on that picture. So does the Christian who shrugs and says the Old Testament no longer applies.
Laws argues that the picture is wrong, and that the law itself shows it is wrong. His starting point is a reading habit. Before asking what a passage means for us, he says, we should ask “what did it mean for them before we ask? What does it mean for us?” Applied to the law, that question reveals that the commands were given for different purposes, and that their purpose shapes how long and where they apply.
Commands written for a circumstance
Many laws are case rulings: if this happens, then do that. Laws’s example is a ruling about an ox that falls into a pit dug by a neighbor (the kind of case found in Exodus 21:33-36). A rule like that limits itself, he says, “because what happens if I don’t have an ox?” His conclusion: “some of the laws were never intended to be followed for all times.” Nobody breaks the ox law by not owning an ox. The command applies when its circumstance exists.
Commands tied to the temple
A second group depends on the sacrificial system. Laws places the food laws here. In his words, “the food laws were connected to the temple.” He explains the logic this way: “what’s good for sacrifice is what’s good for consumption.” The categories of clean and unclean that governed the altar also governed the table.
The consequence follows directly. When the temple fell, the system those laws belonged to could not be kept as written by anyone. Laws observes that no Jewish community today offers bulls and lambs. A command that requires an altar cannot be obeyed without one.
Commands bound to no circumstance
A third group does not depend on oxen or altars. Laws describes them as laws “that they’re not in any way tied to a particular circumstance.” Lisa Fields gave examples: commands about sexuality, lying, gossip and murder. As she put it, “those are disconnected from temple or tabernacle.” They stood before there was a sanctuary and do not need one.
A fourth layer: custom that hardened into law
Laws adds a point many Christians have never heard. Jewish tradition itself did not weigh every rule equally: “not all of the Old Testament from a Jewish perspective held the same way either.” Alongside commandments and case rulings, he describes practices that began as custom, “social customs that have acquired the force of a law.” So when someone insists on “the law,” it is fair to ask which layer they mean.
That is the scaffolding. Laws’s summary of the goal is modest: “we just need to have a better understanding of how the Old Testament is constructed.” The categories are a tool for reading, not a trick for discarding.
Exercise one: sort the law yourself
Before trusting anyone’s categories, including Laws’s, test them on the text. Read the four passages below slowly. For each command you find, write one of three labels beside it: circumstance, temple or no circumstance. Add a question mark if you are unsure. The question marks matter as much as the labels.
- Exodus 21:28-36, rulings about oxen that gore or fall into pits.
- Leviticus 11, the clean and unclean animals.
- Leviticus 17:1-9, where animals are to be brought and offered.
- Leviticus 19, a chapter that mixes many kinds of command in a short space.
Groups can split the passages among pairs and then compare. A facilitator should resist correcting labels at this stage. Ask each pair to give the reason for one label, from the wording of the command itself.
Then read the New Testament passages that speak to the same material. In Mark 7:14-23, Jesus teaches that what enters a person from outside cannot defile him, because it “entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats” (Mark 7:19). In older English “meats” means foods in general, and many modern translations render the last phrase as Mark’s comment that Jesus declared all foods clean. Paul writes: “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ” (Colossians 2:16-17). Acts 10 records Peter’s vision of unclean animals and its meaning for welcoming Gentiles.
Ask whether those passages confirm your labels, complicate them, or reach their conclusion by a different route.
Where the sorting gets hard
Leviticus 19 is the honest test. In one chapter you will find the command to love your neighbor as yourself (19:18), commands against stealing and lying (19:11), and, a verse later, a ban on mixing kinds of cattle, seed and fabric (19:19). The chapter does not print category labels. A reader has to decide, and the decision is an act of interpretation.
The sabbath is harder still. It appears in the Ten Commandments and reaches back to the creation account, long before any temple. Yet Paul lists sabbath days with food and festivals as a shadow in Colossians 2:16-17. A temple-based explanation alone does not settle it. Christians have answered in different ways: some keep a weekly day of rest and worship as the abiding form of the command, some see the sabbath fulfilled in the rest Christ gives, and some continue to observe the seventh day as an act of conscience.
This is where you should know that faithful Christians describe the law’s relationship to the new covenant in more than one way. Many use the historic division into moral, civil and ceremonial law, which is close to Laws’s approach. Others hold that the whole Mosaic covenant is fulfilled in Christ, and that what binds believers now is the moral teaching Jesus and the apostles carry forward. Others stress more continuity between the covenants. Each reading takes Scripture seriously, and this guide does not ask you to pick one.
What they share is the point that matters for the challenge. None of them makes the food laws the door into God’s people. Jude 3 teaches that salvation is by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, not earned by our works; obedience is the fruit of that grace, not its price. Lisa Fields put the gospel version briefly: “Jesus came because we couldn’t keep the law.”
The misconception on the other side
Once people learn that some laws lapsed, a predictable error follows: the Old Testament stops mattering at all. Laws warns that “we have to be careful with two extremes.” One ignores the new covenant Christ brought in. The other repeats the mistake of Marcion, an early teacher who wanted Christians to throw the Old Testament away.
Laws’s corrective is plain: “we need to value the Old Testament. We just need to be able to contextualize it.” Jesus said, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matthew 5:17). Paul said, “Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good” (Romans 7:12). Sorting the law is a way of honoring it, because it treats each command as having a real purpose.
Exercise two: test the system, not just your own answer
Now apply what you have learned to the challenge itself. The Hebrew Israelite claim usually rests on Deuteronomy 28:68, a verse about being brought back to Egypt in ships and sold as slaves. Laws calls it “that is the bedrock scripture” for the movement, and he names his first objection as method: “the whole problem with this is that it’s all about loose parallels.” His second is the text: “first of all, it doesn’t say America. It says Egypt.”
The paired article covers Deuteronomy 28 in depth. Here the goal is a skill Laws considers one of the most useful in these conversations. A system that claims the law must keep its own standard. Laws’s criticism of the movement is that “you’re not even holding onto the integrity of the very framework that you’re lifting up.” Lisa Fields described the move as “putting the burden of proof back on them.”
Work through these steps on paper:
- State the claim as fairly as you can, in one sentence its holder would accept.
- Name the standard the claim sets. Here it is keeping the law as the sign of true Israel.
- Using your labels from exercise one, list commands that no one can currently keep as written, such as temple sacrifice.
- Ask what the claim must say about those commands. Whatever answer it gives, it has started sorting the law too.
- Read Deuteronomy 28 in full and ask whether verse 68 sits among the blessings or the curses, and what follows for the claim if it is a curse.
Facilitators should guard the tone here. Lisa Fields asked how to engage people in this movement without turning them into a caricature, “because some of them do have legitimate claims.” The point of the test is clarity, not a win. A friend raising this challenge may hold only part of it.
Questions for discussion
- Which of your labels from exercise one did you change after reading Mark 7 and Colossians 2? What made you change it?
- Where in Leviticus 19 did you hesitate? What would you need to know to decide?
- Laws’s temple explanation fits the food laws well. How well does it fit the sabbath? What other reasoning might a Christian offer?
- Someone says the moral and ceremonial categories are a convenience Christians invented. Using only the wording of specific commands, how would you respond, and where does that response run out?
- Why might the single-block picture of the law appeal both to a Hebrew Israelite teacher and to a Christian who ignores the Old Testament?
- What is the difference between showing that someone’s system is inconsistent and showing that your own view is true? When is each move appropriate?
- Restate the strongest version of the claim that real Israelites keep the law. What part of it do you find hardest to answer?
A practice for the week
Choose one Old Testament command you have never thought about. Leviticus 19, Deuteronomy 14 and Deuteronomy 22 are good places to look. Write it out by hand. Then answer four questions in a few sentences each. What situation does the command assume? Does it depend on the temple, the land or a particular social arrangement? Does the New Testament take it up anywhere, and if so how? What does it reveal about the character of God that remains true whether or not the command applies to you?
The last question is the one that keeps sorting from becoming dismissal. Even a lapsed command was given by the same God for a reason. If you are meeting with a group, bring your command and your answers, and let someone else try to label it before you share yours.
The person who can do this with one command can do it with the next, and is no longer at the mercy of whoever quotes a verse with the most confidence.