…war against them. That is what Samuel told Saul to do, a command he failed fully to fulfil. Does this command still apply today? The unequivocal answer given by Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch is ‘No’.[5] Maimonides ruled that the command to destroy the Amalekites only applied if they refused to make peace and accept the seven Noahide laws. He further stated that…
…free. Honouring parents acknowledges our human createdness. It tells us that not everything that matters is the result of our choice, chief of which is the fact that we exist at all. Other people’s choices matter, not just our own. “Thou shall not murder” restates the central principle of the universal Noahide Covenant that murder is not just a crime…
…and faiths finding their own relationship with God within the shared frame of the Noahide laws. These laws constitute, as it were, the depth grammar of the human experience of the Divine: of what it is to see the world as God’s work, and humanity as God’s image. God is God of all humanity, but between Babel and the end…
…all in God’s image, formed in His likeness. We share a covenant of human solidarity (the Noahide covenant). We are fellow citizens of the world God made and entrusted to our care. As Redeemer, however, God is particular. Whatever His relationship to other nations (and He has a relationship with other nations: so Amos and Isaiah insist), Jews know Him…
…Bereishit and their culmination in the Noahide covenant, the covenant God makes with all humankind. But its great concerns are with the life we construct together and the terms on which we do so: justice, compassion, human dignity, peace, the limited and proper conduct of war, care for the dependent, welfare for the poor, concern for the long term viability…
…“set apart” (this is the meaning of Bilaam’s famous phrase, “the people that dwells alone, not reckoned among the nations”). It mediates between God and the world. Its special laws of purity – not part of the universal Noahide commands between God and humanity as a whole – testify not to superiority but to national vocation. Like the priest, Israel…
…you can sort of visualise these words, but listen to them carefully. They are the sixth verse of the ninth chapter of Bereishis, the key sentence of the Noahide covenant. Shofech dam adam be’adam damo yeshafech. Can you hear that? A, B, C, C, B, A. In other words, there is a kind of mirror image between the first half…
…truths. We have already seen one in our study of Succot. Judaism embraces both the universal and the particular, the universality of our humanity, given religious force in the Noahide covenant, and the particularity of our people’s relationship with God, epitomised in the covenant at Mount Sinai. The Jewish calendar gives weight to both. There is the cycle of the…
…one family, one nation: the children of Israel. He intervenes in their history. He makes a highly specific covenant with them at Sinai – not at all like the general one He made with Noah and all humanity after the Flood. The Noahide covenant is simple and basic. The Sages said it involved a mere seven commands. The Sinai covenant,…
…view, apply to non-Jewish societies. The Noahide covenant requires every society to set up courts of law, but it does not imply that a failure to prosecute a wrongdoer involves all members of the society in a capital crime. The debate continues today among Bible scholars. Two in particular subject the story to close literary analysis: Meir Sternberg in his The Poetics…