…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…
…the age of Ezra and Nehemiah. The covenant at Sinai was, however, the fulcrum on which all else turned. The Noahide and Abrahamic covenants were unilateral initiatives on the part of God. Noah and Abraham were not asked for their agreement. The subsequent ratification ceremonies were all at the initiative of human beings: prophets, kings and scribes. Only the Sinai…
The love of which the prophets spoke, of God for Israel, that fractious, sometimes disobedient people, is love for those who are different because of their difference, not for those who are the same because of their sameness. Love is particular. That is why, having given humankind, in the Noahide covenant, the general rules of a moral society, God turns…
…On the one hand, we are members of the universal human family and thus of the (Noahide) covenant with all humankind. There are indeed moral universals – the sanctity of life, the dignity of the human person, the right to be free, to be no man’s slave or the object of someone else’s violence. The three vignettes of Moses’ life…
…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…