…his 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…
…because what were Jesus and Paul doing? They were spreading sheva mitzvos bnei Noach, the seven Noahide Laws, and therefore, since they were dealing with Gentiles, they don’t have to keep Shabbos, and they don’t have to have a Brit Milah, and that’s exactly what they were doing. They weren’t dissenting from Judaism, they were taking sheva mitzvos bnei Noach,…
…both essential. If we were completely different, we could not communicate. But if we were completely the same, we would have nothing to say. So, the Hebrew Bible constructs this dual structure of law. The first kind of law applies to all humanity, regardless of our differences. The Noahide Law. The universal. But secondly, the Mosaic Law, that applies to…
…made with Noah and through him with all humanity. That covenant, set out in Genesis 9, involved no human response. Its content was the seven Noahide commands. Its sign was the rainbow. But God asked nothing of Noah, not even his consent. Judaism embodies a unique duality of the universal and the particular. We are all in covenant with God…
…createdness. “Thou shall not murder” restates the central principle of the Noahide covenant that murder is not just a crime against man but a sin against God in whose image we are created. So the fourth, fifth and sixth commands form the basic jurisprudential principles of Jewish life. They tell us to remember where we came from if we seek…
…the general one He made with Noah and all humanity after the Flood. The Noahide covenant is simple and basic: it involved a mere seven commands. The Sinai covenant, by contrast, is highly articulated, covering almost every aspect of life. This aspect of God is signalled by the use of the four-letter name for which we traditionally substitute the word…
…As with the tenth plague, these were no mere miracles intended to demonstrate the power of the God of Israel, as if religion were a gladiatorial arena in which the strongest god wins. Their meaning was moral. They represented the most fundamental of all ethical principles, stated in the Noahide covenant in the words “He who sheds the blood of…
…the Noahide covenant: “He who sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God He created man” (Gen. 9:6). This was the first declaration of the principle that human life is sacred. As the Sages put it, “Every life is like a universe. Save a life and it is as if…
…not speaking about what the Bible refers to as a ger toshav, “a resident alien”, a non-Jew who lives within a Jewish state. To fall within this category, an individual was required to keep the seven Noahide laws, one of which is a prohibition against idolatry. The “ways of peace” belong to a post-biblical environment, but their strength lies in…
…universal orders of civilisation, God rejects the very concept of the universal order. He doesn’t cease the universal request that we call the seven Noahide laws, but he does no longer hope to believe that all human beings will worship God in the same way or will be a single culture. He says at the Tower of Babel: look at…