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

Updated by: 
Michal Drori Elmalem
Research notes: 
MDE/Νot Checked/05/08/2015
Reference type: 
Book section
Author(s): 
Hayes, Christine E.
year: 
2015
Full title: 

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

Journal / Book Title || Series Title: 
What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives
Place of Publication: 
New Jersey
Publisher: 
Princeton and Oxford : Princeton University Press
Pages: 
94-139
Work type: 
Essay/Monograph
Abstract: 

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.

Label: 
17/08/2015
Record number: 
100 792