GEN981 … the Torah is the first attempt of our ancestors to define what it means to walk in the ways of God, a God whose paths are, as Abraham already discerns, “what is just and right” [this verse]. This produces a robust wrestling with God and with the law whenever a law appears to be immoral, motivated by the conviction that a moral God could not plausibly be understood to desire what is patently immoral. Historically, this has led to narrowing a number of laws (such as the death penalty, the stubborn and rebellious son of Deuteronomy 21: 18-21, the illegitimate child of Deuteronomy 23:3 [The Rabbis make the evidentiary procedures necessary to convict someone of a capital offence so rigorous that they themselves admit that a court that decrees such a sentence once in seven years is “a blood court” (M. Makkot 1:10). They narrow the eligibility for qualifying as a “stubborn and rebellious son” so much that they ultimately maintain that there never was or will be such a person (B. Sanhedrin 71a).  The Rabbis narrow the definition of an illegitimate child (a mamzer) as much as possible, such that the product of a married man having sexual relations with an unmarried woman is not one, and neither is a child born out of wedlock to two unmarried people. Further, in practice, the rabbis do everything in their power to free a person from this category, including retroactively invalidating conversions and first marriages, so that they rarely if ever apply; imposing restrictions on other laws so that they become so onerous that nobody would want to take advantage of them (for example, slavery); “Because he is happy with you’ (Deuteronomy 15:16); he must be with   [that is, equal to] you in food and drink, such that you should not eat white bread and he black bread, you [should not] drink old wine and he new wine, you [should not] sleep on a feather bed and he on straw.   Therefore, it was said, “He who buys a Hebrew slave is like one who buys a master for himself’” Sifra, Behar 7:3; B. Kiddushin 20a, 22a; B. Arakhin 30b. The quoted version follows the reading in B. Kiddushin 20a expanding other laws (for example, applying the ban against putting a stumbling block in front of a blind person in Leviticus 19:14 to prohibit deceiving those who are intellectually or morally bind as well; Sifra on Leviticus 19:14 (that one may not mislead people in giving advice); B. Pesahim 22b (that one may not offer wine to a Nazarite, who has foresworn wine); B. Bava Mezia 75b (that one may not lend money in the absence of witnesses lest that encourage the borrower to claim that the loan was never made) reinterpreting others (such as an “eye for an eye” to mean not retribution but compensation); M. Bava Kamma 8:1, and the Talmud on that Mishnah. Even if the Torah is interpreted literally, it represents a moral advance from Hammurabi’s code, according to which a person of a lower class who punches out the eye of a person of a higher class is put to death.   In contrast, the Torah was saying only an eye for an eye, not death for an eye, and it removes all class considerations. The Rabbis, writing some 1,200 years after the Exodus law code was probably formulated, take this one step further by reinterpreting this to mean – through 10 separate proofs! – not retribution at all but rather monetary compensation and adding others (like the entire institution of the ketubbah, the marriage contract, to increase the protection of women in marriage).   M. Ketubbot 4:7-12   All of these rabbinic modulations of the law stem from their strong conviction that God would not want the law to allow, much less require, immoral things. DORFFLGP 138-9