Our society, as well as many modern societies, have exhaustive law codes. Basically, if we want to regulate or prohibit something, it must be explicitly stated in separate laws. For this reason, our federal, state and local law codes have thousands and thousands of entries (as well as a relatively high instance of loopholes, or omissions in the laws that allow someone to get away with something that everyone knows is wrong.)
Ancient laws did not work that way. They were what’s called paradigmatic (think paradigms), giving models of behaviors and models of prohibitions/punishments relative to those behaviors but they made no attempt to be exhaustive. Ancient people were expected to be able to extrapolate from what the sampling of laws did say to the general behavior the laws in their totality pointed toward. For example, no Israelite would see the law for providing restitution for stealing an oxen or sheep and believe they didn’t have to provide recompense for a stolen goat. Similarly, the law that says not to attack dear old mom and dad doesn’t mean it’s ok to attack your grandma. Such arguments would have insulted the intelligence of the judges (who were wisely in place prior to the giving of the law to handle such things as these).
The nature of law in this way is why Jesus can sum up the law in the NT as being to Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength and love people as yourself and have it still be right. All the laws function this way (not intended to be exhaustive). Now, by the time all is said and done, we’ll have over 600, this is because as situations come up we start to see some more specificity. But all of those 600 laws can be rolled up into the 10 Words and those can be rolled up into those 2 that Jesus said.
Anyway, thought that was a worthwhile distinction and should help with proper context as Exodus moves into its second half, the provision from God to His people on what it looks like to live in covenant with Him.