" Treating all this great collection of texts merely as the expendable container for independent universal principles we can express more simply and tidily denies the character of the Bible as God has given it to us, and might even seem to render Bible reading a waste of time. Regarding the biblical texts about Israel as providing us with a paradigm preserves their historical particularity and forces us to observe all the non-reducible hard edges, all the jarring tensions and all the awkward corners of earthy reality within them. "

― Christopher J.H. Wright , Old Testament Ethics for the People of God