Aging & Wisdom Quote by Paul Ricoeur

Ricoeur’s “not unimportant” is the philosopher’s version of a raised eyebrow: a small understatement that smuggles in a large claim about how authority is manufactured in texts. He’s not making a pious point about Moses; he’s making a narrative point about legislation. Law, in the Old Testament, doesn’t arrive as abstract code or bureaucratic memo. It is staged. It is voiced. It is timed.

Placing legal material “in the mouth of Moses” does two things at once. It personalizes command into address - law as speech, not mere inscription - and it anchors obligation in a mediator whose legitimacy is already secured by story. Moses isn’t just a transmitter; he is a character the reader has been trained to trust (and sometimes mistrust), which makes the legal corpus feel less like an external imposition and more like a continuation of a relationship.

The “narrative framework of the sojourn at Sinai” is the deeper move. Sinai is not a neutral setting; it’s a pressure chamber where a people-in-the-making negotiates identity, fear, rebellion, and dependence. By embedding statutes inside that episode, the text frames law as covenantal drama: commands are not simply rules for social order, but the terms of belonging after liberation. The subtext is that meaning in sacred legislation is inseparable from its literary placement. Ricoeur, a master of hermeneutics, is quietly reminding us that interpretation can’t treat these laws like detachable policy. Their force comes from the story that surrounds them - the mountain, the waiting, the volatility - and from the decision to let law arrive as narrated speech, with all the moral and psychological weight that entails.