In this volume Christine Hayes explores the origins of a dilemma that has disturbed Western thought for two thousand years: both the Hebrew Scriptures and the classics of ancient Greek thought make use of the idea of divine law, but these two bodies of thought use the idea differently, in fact incompatibly, and Western civilization, initially in its Christian form but eventually in Jewish thought as well, inherited both versions. The two notions have since uncomfortably coexisted, throughout the Middle Ages and into our own time, and the cognitive dissonance thus produced continues to bedevil both religious communities today.
The book is divided into three parts, embracing a total of eight chapters. Part 1 lays out the discourses on divine law to be found in the Bible (chapter 1) and in Greco-Roman thought (chapter 2). In the Bible one can identify three strands of thought: “Divine Law as an Expression of Divine Will,” “Divine Law as an Expression of Divine Reason,” and “Divine Law and Historical Narrative,” that is, divine law as the historical product of Israel's national experience. These vary in their implications. The first has the law rest on the sheer coercive authority of God, while the second presumes that any thinking person would see the wisdom of the law and voluntarily seek to live according to its requirements. As for the third, the Bible itself implies narratives that situate the law in a variety of historical scenarios: these involve both the origins of Israel (the patriarchs, the Sinai covenant) and the end of time (the law restored or the law replaced?).
Chapter 2 identifies seven different Greco-Roman conceptions of law, some concerning “natural law” and some addressing the positive law of human communities, and then examines three different arenas in which these types of discourse were brought to bear on one another. All these themes are traced through nearly a millennium of classical thought, but space does not allow a detailed presentation here. None of these conceptions allowed for the key biblical idea that a deity might simply decree a set of rules.
In part 2, Hayes examines Hellenistic- and Roman-era attempts to overcome the dissonance that arose when Jewish thinkers began to work with both biblical and Hellenic conceptions of divine law. Chapter 3 surveys attempts to “bridge the gap” and merge these conceptions into a single coherent perspective. Some identified the Torah with universal divine wisdom (Ben Sira, 1 Enoch, the Qumran texts) others with reason tout court (Aristeas, 4 Maccabees, Philo). Such identifications raised further questions that more recent centuries have labeled the issue of “particularism versus universalism,” and Hayes surveys ancient attempts to negotiate that thicket as well.
In a brief chapter 4, Hayes offers an ingenious interpretation of the complexities of Paul's thinking in light of her presentation thus far. In her view the apostle's ultimate goal was to preserve an unbridgeable gap between the Torah and Greek conceptions of law. He was led to this determination because (and this seems to be the heart of her innovation here) Paul stood in a line traceable to Ezra rejecting the possibility that one not born of the seed of Israel could join the covenant nation. Thus Paul's converts could not become followers of the Torah: the Torah was simply not for them and did not want (so to speak) their adherence. They needed something else, which God had now provided. To induce gentile Christians to follow the Torah was thus for Paul an incoherent and a futile position. For Jews the Torah remained the way to holiness, except that Christian faith would enable them to follow its demands without the difficulty and resistance that fleshly life entails. Gentiles could worship Israel's God another way.
Part 3, on the ancient rabbinic role in this ongoing conversation, occupies fully half the book, but again space compels brevity. Chapter 5 examines the rabbis' conception of the relationship between divine law and truth, and the author reaches the striking conclusion that the rabbis knew perfectly well that this relationship could be uncertain—Halakhah did not always conform to the strict demands (din) of the Torah; the need for compromise, peace, and mercy sometimes required departure from the apparent implications of the evidence; legal fictions might require abandoning the quest to have the law conform to “mind-independent ontological reality” (243). Similar ideas could be found in Greco-Roman discussions of human positive law, but the rabbis were talking this way about divine law (author's emphasis); this was in sharp contrast to both classical thinking and the Jewish discussions surveyed in chapter 3, and the rabbis knew it.
The remaining chapters proceed along similar lines. Chapter 6 explores “The (Ir)rationality of the Torah.” Here too the rabbis display awareness of the Greco-Roman (especially Stoic) conviction that divine law must stand in conformity with reason and yet they demur; they recognize that parts of Torah law can be criticized as arbitrary and irrational, and decline to rebut such criticism (286). Chapter 7 affirms the flexibility of divine law. In the Torah itself the divine legislator sometimes changes the rule, and the rabbis accordingly dissent from the Greco-Roman insistence that true divine law must be eternal and unchanging. (To be sure Scripture sometimes shares this insistence.) Chapter 8 looks for possible appearances of a natural-law concept in early rabbinic texts and does not come up with much. Of course the Middle Ages saw the rise of widespread tendencies among Jewish philosophers to modify many of these early notions.
This book is a tour de force of erudite and subtle exposition. It opens a new path for examining diverse styles of halakhic thinking that persist to our own day and contributes to our understanding of the intellectual environment in which the early rabbis developed their ideas.
To be sure, two features of the work caused this reader concern. Professor Hayes knows that rabbinic literature speaks with many voices and rarely says only one thing on any given topic, but in order to build her case she often has to identify a voice or viewpoint on the issue under discussion that she can label dominant. In the nature of the situation the reader has to trust the author's judgment that this identification was correct. I would have appreciated a little more discussion of the method behind this procedure. What is required when one says “the rabbis predominantly thought …” on some matter when it is clear that some rabbis thought otherwise? Subjective judgment is unavoidable here, but can it be controlled, and if so how?
And finally, the intellectual thread that runs through the entire book is the distinction, essential to legal theory, between realist and nominalist conceptions of law, where the former expects that law should conform to some “mind-independent ontological reality” (that is, some kind of truth), while the latter sees the law as operating by its own lights and rules, in principle answerable to no other enterprise or area of thought. This distinction is fundamental to the book, as various modes of thinking are identified with one or the other approach to the underlying topic. Unfortunately, this reliance on a matter of high abstraction sometimes seemed to produce forced readings of specific source texts, especially when it came to the complexities of certain rabbinic discussions. Any reliance on high abstraction can have this result when the discussion gets concrete, but it ran the risk here of weakening readers' confidence in the overall project.
These concerns notwithstanding, it should be repeated in closing that Professor Hayes has given us a stunning scholarly achievement. Several fields of historical inquiry will long be in her debt.
