שבע מצוות בני נח: אבני הבניין של התפיסה התלמודית במגילות, בספריית הכת ובמעשי השליחים

The article traces the building blocks of the rabbinic concept of Noahide laws as they appear in Jubilees, the Temple Scroll and the Genesis Apocryphon: the commandments given to Noah or by him to his sons; the motif of blaming the sons of Noah for violating the commandments; and the rejection of the sons of Noah and the election of Israel, including its eschatological dimensions. The article also presents the precedents of legal discrimination against non-Jews in the context of the ban against theft and murder. These various elements were later incorporated into a well-developed rabbinic conceptual framework of the Noahide laws. However, it is only in the rabbinic corpus, and especially in the Babylonian Talmud, that the Noahide laws are framed in terms of a binary model of distinction between Jews and Gentiles. The elements, motifs and conventions that later constituted the rabbinic concept are found in the earlier corpora in different contexts and settings. For example, the laws given to Noah or his sons are seen as part of a continuous chain of covenants rather than as a different legal system for non-Jews. Blaming the sons of Noah appears in the ideological context of the election of the Qumran sect rather than of the election of Israel as a whole. Finally, the halakhic context of the Noahide laws in rabbinic literature is an important development. It reflects a generic shift towards the development of distinct legal systems for Jews and non-Jews. It is also suggested that Acts 15 may be seen as the earliest legal concretization of the laws, leading from Second Temple and sectarian origins to the later rabbinic framework.