What's Divine about Divine Law?: Early Perspectives

by Christine Hayes

Overview

In the thousand years before the rise of Islam, two radically diverse conceptions of what it means to say that a law is divine confronted one another with a force that reverberates to the present. What's Divine about Divine Law? untangles the classical and biblical roots of the Western idea of divine law and shows how early adherents to biblical tradition-Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Philo, the community at Qumran, Paul, and the talmudic rabbis-struggled to make sense of this conflicting legacy.Christine Hayes shows that for the ancient Greeks, divine law was divine by virtue of its inherent qualities of intrinsic rationality, truth, universality, and immutability, while for the biblical authors, divine law was divine because it was grounded in revelation with no presumption of rationality, conformity to truth, universality, or immutability. Hayes describes the collision of these opposing conceptions in the Hellenistic period, and details competing attempts to resolve the resulting cognitive dissonance. She shows how Second Temple and Hellenistic Jewish writers, from the author of 1 Enoch to Philo of Alexandria, were engaged in a common project of bridging the gulf between classical and biblical notions of divine law, while Paul, in his letters to the early Christian church, sought to widen it. Hayes then delves into the literature of classical rabbinic Judaism to reveal how the talmudic rabbis took a third and scandalous path, insisting on a construction of divine law intentionally at odds with the Greco-Roman and Pauline conceptions that would come to dominate the Christianized West.A stunning achievement in intellectual history, What's Divine about Divine Law? sheds critical light on an ancient debate that would shape foundational Western thought, and that continues to inform contemporary views about the nature and purpose of law and the nature and authority of Scripture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691165196
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/28/2015
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Christine Hayes is the Robert F. and Patricia R. Weis Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at Yale University. Her books include Introduction to the Bible, The Emergence of Judaism: Classical Traditions in Contemporary Perspective, and Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Abbreviations xiii

Introduction 1

What's So Divine about Divine Law? 1

Part I Two Conceptions of Divine Law 1

Parts II and III Three Responses 4

Part II Mosaic Law in the Light of Greco-Roman Discourses of Law: Ancient Jewish Responses to the End of the First Century CE 5

Part III The Rabbinic Construction of Divine Law 6

Part I Biblical and Greco-Roman Discourses of Divine Law

Introduction 12

1 Biblical Discourses of Divine Law 14

Introduction 14

Discourses of the Law 15

Discourse 1 Divine Law as an Expression of Divine Will 15

Discourse 2 Divine Law as an Expression of Divine Reason 24

Discourse 3 Divine Law and Historical Narrative 41

The Multidimensionality of Biblical Divine Law 51

2 Greco-Roman Discourses of Law 54

Discourses of Natural Law 54

Discourse 1 Natural Law and Truth-Logos and Realism 54

Discourse 2 Natural Law and Cosmopolitanism 60

Discourses of Human Positive Law 62

Discourse 3 Law and Virtue-the Inadequacy of Positive Law 62

Discourse 4 The Flexible, Unwritten, "Living Law" vs. the Inflexible, Written, "Dead Letter" 66

Discourse 5 The Opposition of Phusis and Nomos? 70

Discourse 6 Positive Law in Need of a Savior 76

Discourse 7 In Praise of Written Law-the Mark of the Free, Civilized Man 77

Additional Literary and Legal Practices: The Juxtaposition of Divine and Human Law 78

8 Divine Law as a Standard for the Evaluation of Human Law 78

9 In the Trenches-Juristic Theory vs. Juristic Practice 81

10 Magistrates and the Equitable Adjustment of Roman Civil Law 84

Conclusion 86

Part II Mosaic Law in the Light of Greco-Roman Discourses of Law to the End of the First Century CE

Introduction 92

3 Bridging the Gap: Divine Law in Hellenistic and Second Temple Jewish Sources 94

Bridging the Gap 94

The Correlation of Torah and Wisdom and the Mutual Transfer of Properties: Sirach, 1 Enoch, and Qumran 95

The Correlation of Torah and Reason and the Transfer of Properties: Aristeas, 4 Maccabees, and Philo 105

Strategies for Negotiating Universalism and Particularism 124

Esoteric vs. Exoteric Wisdom: Law's Narrative in Sirach, 1 Enoch, Qumran, and Philo 125

Conclusion 137

4 Minding the Gap: Paul 140

Paul and the Law 141

Genealogical Definition of Jewish Identity: Circumcision and the Law 141

Paul's Discourse of Ambivalence regarding the Mosiac Law 151

Conclusion 162

Part III The Rabbinic Construction of Divine Law

Introduction 166

5 The "Truth" about Torah 169

What Is Truth? 171

Measures of Authenticity 172

Measure 1 Formal Truth 173

Measure 2 Judicial Truth-Human Compromise and Divine Judgment 184

Measure 3 Ontological Truth-Realism vs. Nominalism 195

The Gaze of the Other 222

Rabbinic Self-Awareness: The Motif of Mockery 223

Conclusion 243

6 The (Ir)rationality of Torah 246

Making the Case for the Law's Irrationality 248

Response 1 Conceding and Transvaluing the Premise 253

Response 2 Disowning the Premise 262

Response 3 Denying the Premise-Rationalist Apologetics 264

Ta'amei ha-Mitzvot/Ta'amei Torah 265

Response 4 Splitting the Difference-an Acute Sense of Audience 280

Conclusion 285

7 The Flexibility of Torah 287

Legislative Mechanisms of Change-a Rhetoric of Disclosure? 288

Uprooting Torah Law 292

Uprooting Torah Law in Light of the Praetorian Edict 306

Nonlegislative Mechanisms of Change-a Rhetoric of Concealment? 309

Modification of the Law-Internal Values 309

Modification of the Law-External Values 314

Moral Critique and Phronesis 324

Conclusion 327

8 Natural Law in Rabbinic Sources? 328

Normativity before the Law 330

Law Precedes Sinai 331

Sinaitic Law Begins at Sinai 347

Accounting for Diverse Rabbinic Views on Pre-Sinai Normativity 350

The Noahide Laws 354

Are the Noahide Laws Invariable, Universal, Rational, and Embedded in Nature? 356

Conclusion 370

Writing the Next Chapters 371

Bibliography 379

Index of Primary Sources 397

General Index 406

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Christine Hayes confronts one of the most fundamental questions of the nature of law with a rare combination of conceptual depth and meticulous scholarship. Her analysis of the rabbinic understanding of divine law located in response to alternative notions developed in Greco-Roman culture is a brilliant and seminal achievement."—Moshe Halbertal, author of Maimonides: Life and Thought

"For anyone interested in the history of Western legal thought, this lucid, lively, and meticulously argued book is an indispensable text. With verve and a scholar's mastery of the sources, Hayes brilliantly tells the story of an ancient theological quarrel whose echoes can still be heard in every law school classroom today."—Anthony Kronman, Yale Law School

"This is a pathbreaking and ambitious study of a topic of crucial importance for Jewish studies in particular and legal philosophy more broadly. The scholarship is first-rate. Hayes convincingly establishes that the rabbinic discourse on divine law in late antiquity was self-consciously distinct from Greco-Roman conceptions as well as a great deal of prior Jewish literature."—Jonathan Klawans, author of Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism

"Hayes invites us to consider how the early rabbinic conception of divine law continues to echo in modern debates within Judaism. Her remarkable book should be required reading for anyone concerned about the future of Judaism and, indeed, the future of law."—Suzanne L. Stone, Yeshiva University

"This compelling and comprehensive book provides an elegant framework for differentiating between the metaphysical and philosophical givens presumed as the basis for divine law in the Bible, Greco-Roman culture, and a variety of ancient Jewish sources. Hayes articulates an extremely nuanced and periodized understanding of rabbinic law."—Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, author of Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories

Editorial Reviews

"Winner of the 2016 PROSE Award in Theology & Religious Studies, Association of American Publishers"

Winner of the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Biblical Studies, Rabbinics, and Jewish History & Culture in Antiquity, Association for Jewish Studies

Winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship (Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award), Jewish Book Council

From the Publisher