Torah from Heaven

The revelation at Mount Sinai was not just a religious event. It was a political event of a unique kind. It was the birth of a nation. Throughout Genesis, the heirs of Abraham had been an extended family. At the beginning of Exodus we hear them for the first time described as an am, a “people.” Pharaoh says, “Look, the people of the children of Israel are too many and powerful for us” (Ex. 1:9).

What made them a people were many things. There was kinship: they were all descendants of Jacob. There was culture: they were shepherds which made them suspect to the Egyptians. There was history: they were newcomers to the land; their origins lay elsewhere. Above all, there was shared suffering. Isaiah Berlin noted that it is usually a sense of an injustice done to one’s people that is the crucible in which nations are formed. Israel became a people in Egypt, bound by brit goral, a covenant of shared fate.

At Sinai, however, they became an eda, a body politic. God invited them to become a “kingdom of priests… and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6) – the first mission statement of the Jewish people, perhaps the first of any nation anywhere. The covenant they agreed to then became their written constitution as citizens in the republic of faith under the sovereignty of God.

It is the last phrase that is crucial here: “under the sovereignty of God.” It is sometimes thought that the Ten Commandments were a moral revolution in humankind. This is not so in the sense usually understood. It did not take divine revelation to tell humans that they must not murder, or rob, or give false testimony in court. Humans have always known this. Cain was punished by God for killing his brother Abel, but God had not yet commanded, “Do not murder.” Every rational moral rule has been binding on humans since they first appeared on earth, said Rabbeinu Nissim (DerashotHaRan 1). It is not here that the originality of Sinai lies.

It lies in something deeper. The Torah is a sustained critique of the abuse of power. It is a response to and a reaction against the world’s first empires, those of Akkad under Sargon (c.2334 to 2279 BCE, see Gen. 10:8–10) and Egypt under the pharaohs, where whole populations could be enslaved to further the self-aggrandizing projects ordered by rulers to ensure their earthly and heavenly immortality.

In the ancient world, politics and religion were inseparably inter- twined. The head of state was also head of the religion and regarded as semi-divine. Power was projected in the form of monumental build- ings, ziggurats, pyramids, palaces, temples and royal tombs. Akkadian kings were identified with the god of their city-state. The pharaohs were regarded as deities in their lifetime and worshiped after their death. In Babylon, the king was the earthly equivalent of the god Marduk who had established order by his victory over Tiamat, the goddess of chaos. Among the Hittites, the king was High Priest and on his death joined the gods. Isaiah speaks caustically about an Assyrian ruler who imagines that “I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God…. I will make myself like the Most High” (Is. 14:13–14).

What underwrote such cultures was cosmological myth. There was hierarchy in the heavens – the sun ruled the sky. There was hierarchy in the forest – the lion ruled the beasts. So there was hierarchy in society. Some were born to rule, others to be ruled. That alone is how order is sustained. The Torah is a protest against this entire view of the human condition, on two grounds: first, it turns some people into gods; second, it turns others, the majority, into slaves. The Torah’s first and most decisive statement on the subject appears in its opening chapter when it says that God created human beings in His image and likeness (Gen. 1:26–27). All humans, not just rulers, carry within them the image of God, but no human is a god. At best, we – and everyone else – are in His image. There is and must be an absolute boundary between heaven and earth, God and humankind. That, above all, applies to power.

The idea that one human being should exercise power over others is a profound insult to the human condition. This was the sin of Nimrod, instigator of the Tower of Babel according to the Midrash. This is how John Milton describes him in Paradise Lost:

O execrable Son so to aspire

Above his Brethren, to himself assuming

Authoritie usurpt, from God not giv'n:

He gave us onely over Beast, Fish, Fowl

Dominion absolute; that right we hold

By his donation; but Man over men

He made not Lord; such title to himself

Reserving, human left from human free.

Paradise Lost, Book XII, lines 64–71

No human has the right to rule over others against their will. That is what the judge and military hero Gideon meant when the people asked him to become their king. He replied, “I will not rule over you nor will my son rule over you. God will rule over you” (Judges 8:23).

That is what Sinai was about. What the people agreed to was that God alone would be their king, legislator, law-giver. This is the principle known in the rabbinic literature as kabbalat ol malkhut shamayim, “acceptance of the yoke of the kingship of heaven.” According to the sages, it is what we are doing when we say the first paragraph of the Shema. It is an oath of allegiance to God: “Listen, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” Or as we say in the prayer Avinu Malkeinu, “We have no king but You.” The Israelites became “one nation under God.”

This is the core meaning of the idea of Torah min hashamayim, “Torah from heaven.” Later, under the impact of Second Temple sectarianism, then of Christianity and Islam, all of which challenged the Jewish understanding of Scripture, it came to mean much else besides, but its basic meaning is simply this: all law – Torah – comes from God. He is Israel’s sole law-giver.

This is what Moses meant when he said: “See: I have taught you rules and laws as the Lord my God has commanded me…. What great nation has decrees and laws as perfect as all this Torah that I am setting before you today?” (Deut. 4:5–8). It is what the psalmist means when he says: “He has declared His word to Jacob, His statutes and laws to Israel. He has done this for no other nation; such laws they do not know” (Ps. 147:19–20). Other nations had their gods to whom they prayed, but only Israel had God, not a human being, as their head of state and sole legislative authority. Only when kingship is in heaven can there be equality of dignity on earth.

To be sure, in practical terms, this principle came under strain. For several centuries after their entry into the land, Israel was led, temporarily at times of war, by charismatic leaders known as judges, but the book of Judges ends on a negative note. The nation was sliding into social and moral decline. The people came to Samuel, asking him to appoint a king. Reluctantly and at God’s bidding, he did so.

Monarchy gave rise to two radically different schools of thought within Judaism. Some saw it as an ideal, especially in the person of David, and later after the experience of exile, in the idea of the Messiah, a Davidic king who would restore Israel’s glory and usher in an era of peace (Maimonides, Laws of Kings ch. 11). Others were deeply critical of it, precisely because in principle Israel should have no other king but God. In the midrashic work Deuteronomy Rabba (5:8–11), as well as the medieval commentaries of Ibn Ezra, Rabbeinu Bachya and Abarbanel, monarchy was seen as a concession to human weakness and the people’s wish to be “like all the nations around” (Deut. 17:14). The book of Samuel records God as saying, when the people first asked for a king, “It is Me they have rejected as their King” (I Sam. 8:7).

On either view, however, monarchy as portrayed in Tanach was unique in the ancient world. First, the king had no legislative power. He could institute temporary measures in response to the needs of the time, but not make permanently binding law. Second, the king had no special status in the religious sphere. He was not even a priest, let alone chief intermediary with God. Henri Frankfort, in Kingship and the Gods, noted that “the relationship between the Hebrew monarch and his people was as nearly secular as possible in a society wherein religion is a living force.” Michael Walzer noted that even in the biblical account of David, the almost-ideal king, “there is no hint of the conventional magnifications of monarchy: no mysteries of state, no divine descent, no royal magic, no healing touch.” Third, kings could be criticized, by the prophets and by the biblical text itself. There is no parallel for any of this in the ancient world.

Israel was not the only ancient nation to have laws. They all did. Some became famous, for instance the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu and the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. But these were edicts of the king. Justice was a common value in the ancient Near East, but the idea that this was the domain of the gods would have struck people as absurd. The gods were capricious, quarrelsome, and did not like human beings at all. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, “Like flies to the wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

In Judaism, law comes from God alone. Torah min hashamayim: law is made in heaven. Kings, priests, prophets and sages were empowered to interpret the law and in some cases make enactments to safeguard it, but not to make it or annul it. All earthly authority is subject to the law: this is the basic principle of human equality and the foundation of a free society. That is what happened at Sinai. Accepting the covenant, the Jewish people became a nation under the direct sovereignty of God, with no other legislative authority. All law, to be valid, must be traceable back to Sinai and the voice of God. There was nothing like this before and – as we saw in the quotation from Rousseau – it survived all vicissitudes of Jewish history.

At Sinai God gave the people the gift of law, and it became their constitution of liberty.