This is a naive read of Israelite society and law. As soon as the Law-Covenant was promulgated, we find the books of Moses showing that Law applied, elaborated, and the setting of precedent. The idea that the people of God were simply governed by a set of 613 rules and regulations for over a thousand years is just... wrong.Compare this to American law. Endless laws, oftentimes unclear, ambiguous, intrusive, expensive, partial, sometimes excessive, and penalties attached to most of them. There's no end to the felonies you can commit. Haven't even touched state laws.
Back in 1982,Criminal law itself was 23,000 pages, expanded 51 sections, and included 3,000 crimes. That's not including civil law.
Fast forward 38 years later, and ask if it is better.
In Israel, you knew what you would get for what, and why. No difficulty in knowing your duty.
The Law-Covenant is analogous to the Constitution. Upon that foundation rested a whole body of law, some of which developed into the Pharisee's religious tradition; but along with their pedantry went the inevitable growth of a national legal corpus. It is incomprehensible---especially once the monarchy was instituted, but surely even before that--that the system of judges functioned for 400yrs as each one of them "winged it" on his/her own.
Once there was a central institution of justice under the king, the demand for consistency of law over his whole realm, and over many generations (in Judah under a succession of relatively peaceful transfer of administrations covering 500yrs) would have forced the scribes to codify countless laws. Hopefully, there was also some effort at reduction and streamlining, crafting of legal perfections, even as the number of laws inevitably mounted up.
I appreciate Bayou Huguenot pointing out several times here on the PB that water-rights legislation had to have been a well-known body of law for Israel, just as it had to be in practically any ANE society. And the Law-Covenant does not once address this indispensable matter. It is not possible to conceive of Israelite society functioning without such rules, unless we think they did nothing but feud over ownership and access for a thousand years.
So, the proliferation of laws is an issue for ANY state to deal with. There should be periodic reviews of the laws of any land, and the rectifying of the code for the sake of justice. And not having fixed that in the USA for too long, and the metastasizing of administrative laws and penalties along with the criminal-law bloat--these are great problems which really do face the citizens today.
But they aren't solved by some mythical reversion to a "biblical law" standard. If the USA were pared back to the Constitution all alone, possibly society would cease to function. Thankfully, the States also have bodies of law that already function over several parts of the citizenry, so a breakdown is not so likely on that supposition.
Law is a function of power and authority. Who makes the rules? A corrupt people produces corrupt legislators, judges, and executives. Those corrupt people seek greater extensions of their power (and exemptions for their own interests) by imposing increasing constraints upon the liberties of people who were once free to do or not do, as they had the lawful opportunity. And no opportunities were "owed" to anyone.
But that opening closes, once opportunity is something the state--or more accurately its managers in the name of the whole People--doles out, to friends and to bribes, etc. And that is a problem that ancient Israel had, and that every nation has. Because of sin, not specifically because of a particular Constitution or lack thereof.