Early Judaism- A Comprehensive Overview

The Laws of the Pentateuch

Of all the writings that made up Israel’s Scripture, it was probably the laws

of the Pentateuch that played the most important role in restored Judea.

These laws covered all manner of different things: civil and criminal law,

Temple procedure, ethical behavior, ritual purity and impurity, proper

diet, and so forth. Nowadays, a country’s laws do not play a very active part

in most people’s lives — certainly not in their religious lives. Someone who

breaks the law may have to pay a fine or even go to prison, but this in itself

has no particular spiritual dimension. Likewise, someone who upholds the

law may be proud to be a good citizen, but nothing more. In restored

Judea, by contrast, the laws of the Pentateuch were held to come from God,

and this automatically gave them a wholly new significance. To break a law

ordained by God was not merely to commit a crime; it was to commit a

sin. Likewise, observing the laws and doing what they said was not merely

good citizenship but a form of divine service, a way of actively seeking to

do God’s will. This view of things may have existed in preexilic times, but it

became particularly prominent after the return from exile.

Perhaps it was the very course of recent events that made Second Tem-

ple Jews so concerned with biblical law. Many of them must have asked

themselves why their homeland had been conquered by the Babylonians,

and why the Babylonian Empire had in turn collapsed shortly thereafter.

Some, no doubt, gave to these questions a purely practical answer: the

Babylonian army was simply stronger than that of little Judah, so it won;

similarly, once the Medes and the Persians had combined forces, they eas-

ily overcame the Babylonians and took over their whole empire. But the

Bible contains a different, more theological explanation: GodallowedHis

people to be conquered as a punishment for their failure to keep His laws,

the great covenant He had concluded with their ancestors. “Surely this

came upon Judah at the command of the Lord” (2 Kings 24:3). By the

same token, lest anyone think it was by any merit of the Babylonians that

Judah had been overcome, He subsequently dispatched the Persian army

to reduce them to ruin. So now, returned to their ancient homeland, the

Judeans (or at least some of them) set out to draw the obvious theological

conclusion and avoid repeating their ancestors’ mistake. This time they

would scrupulously obey all of God’s commandments; this time, everyone

would be an expert in the application of divine law, so that there would be

no mistakes (Jer. 31:31-34).

There was probably another, more practical side to the importance at-

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james l. kugel

EERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:03:59 PM