Well, the first thing to realise is that these 'laws' only applied between Jews. When it came to Gentiles, you could covet, murder, commit adultery, lie, cheat, steal etc. all you liked.

These rules are rules for a group of nomadic tribes wandering an inhospitable landscape with the flocks and herds their lives depended on. They are there to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding how things are to be run, to make sure that a man passes his flocks and herds onto his own son, not that of some random stranger who may not even belong to the tribe. They are also based on an assumption that every mans' hand is raised against them, which in those days was a perfectly valid one.

The fact that these laws were not scrapped or updated when the Jews became a settled and civil society speaks to the general conservatism of that specific culture. Contrast with the Greeks, who seemed as a culture to delight in philosophical enquiry and political and social experiment. It might have something to do with polytheism as against monotheism, but I'd not go so far as to assert that thought as a truth.