"What happened to biblical law when it was transferred into the new world of late antiquity? How was it understood, and what were the reasons for this particular interpretation? Answering these questions can provide a paradigm to help explain the development of late antique Christian legal traditions and discourse in their Greco-Roman and Jewish contexts. Accompanying the rise of Christianity in the first centuries of the Common Era, Christian legal discourse and traditions began to evolve. These embryonic legal traditions combined Roman law, Greek legal traditions, biblical law, and rabbinic halakha, interweaving them with their own ethical stances. Scholars tend to study the development of Christian legal traditions, especially matrimonial law, from one of two perspectives: either in relation to Roman law, mainly focusing on Christian sources from the second century onward, or in connection to biblical and early halakhic traditions, largely concentrating on the Old and New Testaments and Qumranic sources. In this article, I seek to portray a less dichotomous and more nuanced picture of the Christian approach to biblical and Jewish legal traditions, on the one hand, and Roman and Greek legal traditions, on the other. I address the different ways in which Christians adapted a biblical legal institution by using legal concepts drawn from the Greco-Roman world, yet not directly taking part in the Greco-Roman legal discourse, and compare this phenomenon to the rabbis’ understanding and alteration of this same biblical legal institution in the Tannaitic and Amoraic literature."