Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel and this episode is dropping on the 4th of July, which amuses me because I didn't plan for that. But today we're gonna be talking about law.
[00:00:30] I know, I know. I've been talking about covenant. I've been anticipating a conversation about J Harvey Walton's dissertation, but that is in fact why we're talking about law today. I am gonna be going through a book that Walton used for his sources in his dissertation. This book is by Dr. Michael LeFebvre, who also wrote The Liturgy of Creation, which I talked about in episode 52. I love the book The Liturgy of Creation because it explains how what we see in the Torah as far as dates and chronology is not a modern way of discussing things, but it's rather based on the festival calendar of Israel.
[00:01:18] Really good book to read. If you wanna check out episode 52, I can highly recommend that as far as getting into the work of Dr. LeFebvre. Now the Liturgy of Creation is a little bit more of an accessible book than the one I'm talking about today.
[00:01:34] This book is very scholarly, and when I say scholarly, I don't mean it's difficult to read. I just think that most people are not going to be all that interested to read it. But today I'm gonna be talking about Dr. LeFebvre's book, Collections, Codes and Torah, the Re- Characterization of Israel's Written Law. This is part of the Library of Hebrew Bible and Old Testament Studies, and it's a really deep dive into the question of law and legality and regulation.
[00:02:12] Now for most of us, we tend to think that something like law is really straightforward, but in fact, there's a long philosophical history, even in recent times that works to try to understand law. What it is, what it does, what it looks like, how it's set and used and applied. This is not an easy subject, so this book might be a little bit above something that is really approachable for the layperson. It's not like it's difficult to read, but it's not really a page turner for most of us.
[00:02:52] Now, the reason I'm going to talk about this book and kind of review the information here, is because of Walton's suggestion that there is a change in how law was perceived from the Old Testament to the New Testament. And we need to get into that context and that change to really understand Genesis and particularly what's going on in Genesis two to three. Today we're not really gonna be talking about that, but this conversation will set that up for us.
[00:03:26] We also want to understand the intersection of covenant and law or command and ethics and legislation, because really when we're talking about law, it's more than just one thing. And in the ancient world, that's probably even more the case. Our ideas of law and what it looks like and what it's used for changes through time.
[00:03:56] Of course many Christians emphasize legalism, works righteousness, merit, and justification. And there is a later tradition, although it's still fairly early in the church, where we have a moral, ethical, and ceremonial law distinction. I'm not sure that's what we actually see in the context of the Old Testament, but we do have Justin Martyr talking about this distinction, and he's using this distinction as justification for why Christians don't have to follow the law.
[00:04:35] Now even in that description by Justin though, the way that Justin puts, that suggests that law is legislative. We're going to challenge that at least as far as the Old Testament context, and we're gonna ask how and why did it change? Or at least that's what LeFebvre is asking.
[00:05:00] It is always a question for us to wonder why we should have an earlier understanding of the text when later understanding kind of overrides that earlier one.
[00:05:11] Now, I would suggest it doesn't have to be an either or. I don't think the later understanding has to override the earlier understanding. Nor do I think the earlier understanding necessarily prevents a later understanding. In biblical theology, we want to be able to understand other people at their time in their context, and it shouldn't be a war between later times and earlier times. And it shouldn't be a surprise to us that philosophical ideas and possibly even ethics can change through time.
[00:05:53] Now, I'll be honest with you, not long ago, I didn't really care all that much about getting into the context of law because it seemed like a minefield.
[00:06:05] Frankly, I had a really modern conception of what the law was, and I think most of us do. Even when we boil it down to some tendency for us to kind of wish it away by calling it wisdom. Now, that might be actually part of how we should see it, but if we're honest with ourselves, the go-to wisdom is probably a justification of, well, if it's wisdom, then we don't have to follow the letter of the law, right?
[00:06:40] Again, that might actually be honestly the case, but we ought to look at our motivations for preferring certain ideas over others. If we're just trying to get out of obeying the letter of the law because we want to equate wisdom and law. Well, that says something about us, doesn't it?
[00:07:01] But here's the thing. If Torah law is not even supposed to be legislation to begin with, then there's no need to spiritualize it, and nor does it have to be just about a fuzzy wisdom living thing. But we could see it as actively living under a law, whatever that means at your time and place.
[00:07:31] That doesn't make it random. Or we don't wanna go all postmodernist and say that there is no such thing as a stated law.
[00:07:42] But we have a problem today because we don't use oracles to apply law. We don't see the mirroring of heaven and earth like the ancient people did. What would it mean if we did those two things? What would it mean if we did see that?
[00:08:04] So here's a couple of questions for us today. What is legislation? What is written law? What is the purpose of that? What is the relationship between command and legislation? And how regulatory or binding is the law? As far as that question goes, when we're looking at history and we're looking at actual past texts, we'd wanna see as far as the binding of the law is a correlation between what is written in the law and what is actually practiced. And here's the bad news for those of us who want to see it as legislation. In the Ancient Near East, those two things rarely happened. The writing of the law did not correspond to the practice of the law.
[00:09:05] Okay, so let's set up a few definitions here. We're going to define a law code and a law collection. A law code is a systematic set of legal rules that is intended for official enforcement. It's designed for courts. It's designed to have something that is, we might say, objective to point to in order to live out the law. A law code has stipulations with fixed binding rules. When it's written, it's written, and that's what we go with.
[00:09:47] Now, a law collection on the other hand, is what we could call a curated set of legal teachings that don't necessarily claim exhaustive or uniform coverage. A law collection could be more reflective and it could show themes and wisdom, and it could have case law examples, but the purpose here is not to form a legislative regulatory body of writing, but rather the purpose is more along the lines of ethical formation, cultural memory, instruction. And it's not really the thing that you're gonna go to in order to enforce the law. Now, a law collection is certainly going to have written documents, just like a law code, and they could look exactly the same when you're just picking them up to read them. But the point here is that this kind of written law is illustrative, but it's not binding. And as such, it can be changed.
[00:11:09] Now, the question before us is, what is the Torah?
[00:11:15] Dr. LeFebvre is going to suggest it's more like the law collections rather than a law code. But over time, the idea of law code did get applied to Torah. The question is how and why?
[00:11:33] I know I don't have nearly enough time to give you all of the data in this book, but I will try to give you the briefest of overviews. If you're interested, it is available on Amazon. You can go check it out yourself.
[00:11:48] It is pretty clear that by the time of the first century, The law came to be prescriptive rather than descriptive. Right? Like a prescriptive view of law is like the written law codes are prescribing the way that you do law. A law collection on the other hand, is a descriptive view of law. It's describing examples. It is used to teach and provide examples for people to actually conduct law, but not as a written stipulation where this is the way it is and everybody has to abide by what's written.
[00:12:37] As I said, the ancient Near Eastern cuneiform law writings show a clear divergence between laws written and laws practiced.
[00:12:48] But what we see a little bit more is that royal edicts were cited more often in the records when we see writing that shows law being actually practiced in a real situation. That's going to matter for how we're thinking about this. You'd think that a royal edict should align with the written law, right? Because the king is supposed to be the source of the law, we would think in a kingdom. And we might think that, well, a royal edict is an exception to the law.
[00:13:25] That might be the case. But again, we can see this broader picture of what it means to be a king. And LeFebvre is suggesting that there is a way to see the king in relation to law that doesn't make law a binding thing upon the king himself.
[00:13:46] And if the law is not binding to the king, then what we have is something different than what we have with a law code where we would presume that the ruler is going to be under that law code just like we are.
[00:14:04] That's a situation that does seem to develop within the Old Testament itself, this idea that the law isn't just for people, it is also for rulers. LeFebvre lays out the whole story about Josiah's reforms and what do those reforms mean, for instance.
[00:14:25] But we'll get into that in a moment. First of all, we want to understand what the other purposes of a law could be other than statutory writing. One purpose could be simple literary exercises. Laws are the product of a scribal elite and they compile idealistic collections of problems and solutions. Of course, these are going to reflect real problems, but they don't have to actually line up to real problems.
[00:15:01] One example of that is how frequently we see the idea of oxes goring people. We see that across the board in the ancient Near East. That is a very common topic for a law. Now to suppose that oxs goring people is such a widespread problem that they were like, well, guess we'd better make a law about this.
[00:15:28] That might be a bit strange. The alternative to ox goring being a massive societal problem is that this was just an example that is going to be illustrative to teach people who are applying law as to how they might do it in a situation that is similar or something like that.
[00:15:53] A second purpose for writing could be royal apologetics. Law writing was absolutely employed for monumental purposes to extol the justice of great kings.
[00:16:09] A third purpose might be judicial treatise. Now what is that? Well, it's a little bit like a medicine treatise where you have an ancient text that says, if you have this circumstance, then this is the diagnosis and treatment.
[00:16:30] So it seems like there was this genre, a genre of teaching for professional use. So in such a case, a law collection would have a direct link to law practice, but it would be forming an instruction. It wouldn't be something that the people who are deciding cases would actually consult the law. Rather, they were trained up in this law so that they knew how to judge justly.
[00:17:04] And in fact, that point is actually brought out specifically by Aristotle. Aristotle wrote about ancient Near Eastern law writings, and he said, quote, " In those lands, laws enunciate only general principles, but do not give directions for dealing with circumstances as they arise.
[00:17:32] So that in an art of any kind, it is foolish to govern procedure by written rules. And indeed, in Egypt, physicians have the right to alter their prescription after four days, although if one of them alters it before he does so at his own risk. It is clear therefore that in those lands, government, according to written rules, that is laws, is not deemed the best for the same reason." End quote.
[00:18:05] Now we'll be talking more about this context of what Aristotle is saying here, but that's fascinating.
[00:18:14] So what we could have in law collections is a list of hypotheticals. These are hypothetical dilemmas that are going to train the person who is going to be judging cases in the future as to how you deal with things. That is different from being regulatory law.
[00:18:37] One of the parts of the book that LeFebvre goes into is the context of Athens, and this is absolutely fascinating because Athens is a known source for the concept of regulatory law in the ancient world.
[00:18:54] Now, for Athens, it seems like it was a two stage development. First, they developed the idea of popular democracy, but then they realized that that was a problem when you're fighting a war. Running a war by majority vote made them lose the Peloponnesian War.
[00:19:18] As such, they developed law as an objective standard that can be appealed to. So it was still based on democracy but the popular vote created something that was sovereign and outside just mob rule. It's a really fascinating process here.
[00:19:40] Now, of course, that's in Athens. How do we get that into the world of the Bible? It's not really a simple argument. We don't just have a direct correspondence between Athens and the Jews.
[00:19:57] But let me read this from LeFebvre. He says, quote, " In the society which views law writings non legislatively, a conceptual separation exists between actual law and written law. That is what is written may be a description of what law looks like, but what is written is not viewed as being law. When judges in a non legislative society hear a case, they appeal to an abstract, generally religious, sense of righteousness to support their rulings. They do not look to texts to authorize their rulings.
[00:20:39] " Whatever law writings are used for, they're not used to prescribe judicial decisions. The idea of law in these cultures is abstract, like the ideas of justice, truth, and righteousness. All of these ideas can be discussed in writings, but none of them are ever supposed to be embodied by a text.
[00:21:04] " For instance, a written text about righteousness points beyond itself to the unwriteable abstract ideal that is righteousness without that text itself becoming perceived as being the righteousness. Likewise, a written text about law may be useful for describing divine law, but it is not itself supposed to be the law.
[00:21:33] " There is a distinction between actual law and law writings in the non legislative society. Within the legislative society, actual law is identified with written law. A law writing is more than a portrait of law. It is law. Actual law, and written law are one in the same. Law is written down and becomes a source for legal practice." End quote.
[00:22:04] Now, I think we can see pretty obviously by the time of the New Testament, that's the situation we have. But the context of the ancient near East of the Old Testament isn't viewing things that way.
[00:22:20] Now, let's actually look at written law in ancient Israel.
[00:22:25] LeFebvre says, quote, " The general consensus is that Israel wrote laws for idyllic, not regulatory purposes." End quote.
[00:22:38] Now, I am not gonna take the time to go through all of the examples, but you could go look at Numbers 27 with the daughters of Zelophehad. And we might think that that is an example of an actual case, and maybe it was, but the way it's written applies it to a wider context, right? Because we have an actual situation. But the text also says things like, and if he has no daughter, then to his brothers, and if he has no brother, then to his father's brothers, and so on.
[00:23:18] Numbers 27 says it shall be a statute and a judgment for the Sons of Israel as Yahweh commanded Moses.
[00:23:26] Oh, well we might say, there you go. It's a statute. It is a legal, legislative law.
[00:23:34] But again, we need to be really, really careful not to put our context onto the past. If this was a regulatory statute, then we would be seeing the text itself being appealed to when laws are decided. But we don't see that.
[00:23:54] For instance, we have the trial of Jeremiah in chapter 26. It's a really detailed description of a trial in the Old Testament, one of the few. And law writings are never cited as decisive in a court of law. And often we see the contradiction to what is written.
[00:24:17] So back to the uses of law, we could see it as being monumental uses, right? When we inscribe the law on stone, and those are witnesses.
[00:24:30] We have archival uses. Moses instructs the Levites to place the book of the law with the Ark.
[00:24:38] We have didactic uses, which are educational, and we've already talked a lot about that.
[00:24:45] We also have ritual uses. Ritual reading of the law.
[00:24:52] So, if writings are not the source of law, what is? Well, there's two things. First of all, we have oracle. The one who is adjudicating something, will go to the deity and ask what the proper end result should be.
[00:25:12] We have the fascinating section of Exodus 18 where Moses develops a system so that he doesn't have to be the judge for everyone. He delegates the responsibility, but he only delegates some of it. He delegates dispute resolution, but he does not delegate divine inquiry or the teaching of the law.
[00:25:39] What's fascinating about this is a designation of a hierarchy where there is this sense of people having a little bit more divine access, but the judges are still not Moses.
[00:25:54] But throughout the text we have this suggestion that eventually we have oracles for everyone. The people could take their disputes to local leaders once they're in the land.
[00:26:09] Now once a judge receives an oracle, then teaching follows after that, not before it. So the published laws of Moses don't seem to be addressed to the judges at all, rather, they're for national exhortation.
[00:26:28] Another source of law could be simple custom, and that is where you have the law collections come into play. Because people would be familiar with these stories in all likelihood, especially if they're published publicly or they're read publicly, and so these laws would form ideas in people's mind of, this is what justice looks like.
[00:26:54] Now, some people want only the Decalogue to be a formalized law. There's a few problems with that. Of course, we're talking about the 10 Commandments when we use the term Decalogue. The problem here is that the 10 commandments are very imprecise. They're more like moral ideals than enforceable offenses.
[00:27:20] Now we've seen people in history and today derive actual statutes from these, like taking God's name in vain is interpreted as a law against magic. Or the command to honor parents is a law against repudiating their ancestral religion. The command not to covet is condemning property seizure, et cetera. So you see, in order to use the 10 Commandments as law, you kind of have to take another step.
[00:27:56] Alright, so let's get into the different sections of time that might suggest this change between the Old Testament context and the New Testament context. There's actually a couple of possibilities within the timeline of the Old Testament itself.
[00:28:14] First is the Deuteronomic School. This of course, focuses on Deuteronomy. There's quite a bit of data that suggests that the seventh century had a big change in how people were viewing the text or practice in general of their religion. This revolves around the idea that Deuteronomy was discovered at the time of Josiah. This is described in Second Kings chapter 22. Here we are identifying Josiah's law book with Deuteronomy.
[00:28:52] Now, there are reasons people do that, but there's also reasons to question that. Other suggestions are the Book of the Covenant from Exodus or the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32.
[00:29:06] Now, the question before us is whether or not this time during the seventh century BC displays a new attitude toward law?
[00:29:16] It seems like for Josiah, the law book is a basis for official action. That means he's using writing in an official way. It doesn't seem to be just a descriptive reality, but he's using it prescriptively. Is law actually being perceived as a body of written rules that you have to then match your practice up with?
[00:29:44] There's problems with that because there are in fact differences between what we see in Torah and what we see with Josiah's practices. So what we could see instead is that there is a royal function, but not necessarily a legislative one. And those can be similar but different.
[00:30:10] We can also notice that Josiah finds the book of the law, and then what does he do? He doesn't just base his actions on that book. He goes and asks for an oracle.
[00:30:25] Now, I mentioned that there's differences between Torah and Deuteronomy, and what we see in Josiah. One of those major differences is that in Deuteronomy and the Torah, It's the priestly class that is supposed to be overseeing the temple cult. But Josiah is presented as a king who is governing the cult. That's very different. It's difficult to reconcile those two things if Deuteronomy is functioning as a set of regulations.
[00:31:01] There's several distinctive differences between Deuteronomy and what Josiah's doing, and I'm not gonna go into all of that, but you can go and compare the text yourself. What it seems to be happening here is not that the written law is being used as legislation. But it is being used as cultic reform.
[00:31:24] And interestingly enough, there is a whole genre of stories in the ancient world where we have this idea of a king or a leader finds a ancient book and due to that finding of the ancient book, they're actually able to reform their religious practices. Basically the story of finding a holy book and reforming things is an old, old story. In order for Josiah to overturn traditions that are entrenched, he needs a reason to do so.
[00:32:03] We can also note that Josiah's reforms are exclusively cultic. He's not removing corrupt officers. He's not said to be caring for the poor. He's not reforming any matters of justice. Now, presumably, and hopefully those things will also be happening at the same time and it's just not mentioned because social justice is absolutely connected to the practice of religion, but the point is the reforms are not legal reforms. They're cultic reforms. And as such, we can't presume that suddenly we have a new view of understanding what law is.
[00:32:50] There's also this really interesting and perhaps strange to us way of looking at what is old, what is new and what is renewed. Because what we have in both the stories of Josiah as well as the stories of Ezra Nehemiah, is that they are going back to the law and they're instituting changes and reforms. And in some cases they're saying this is the law from Sinai, and yet there's differences. Do they think people are stupid that they can't tell that there's differences? I don't think so. I think it's a different way of viewing things. If the Sinai Covenant was legal, legislative stipulations, then they couldn't be changed.
[00:33:44] If, however, those laws are actual guidance for time and if they are descriptive, then when the people get into a new situation, they can change things according to their new situation. Now they call that the same law. They call that the old law. To us, it would not be the same. But then we're looking at it as a prescriptive thing, not a descriptive thing.
[00:34:14] Another change that we have with Josiah is that not only is the law to be an instruction for the people, but it is also to be an instruction for the king. That probably was a really big change.
[00:34:31] And also if we don't presume that Torah is legislative code, then there is no change between the Old Testament and the New Testament in the idea that LeFebvre says, " Just living is not the result of acting upon a text, but acting from the instructed heart." End quote.
[00:34:55] It's actually quite interesting to think that the ancient context of the Torah originally as not being legislative code actually seems to align with the new covenant and the idea of living in wisdom. And being taught wisdom. Those two things actually align really well. It's like we've had this hiccup in time where we wanted to insist that law is always legalistic. The ancient Torah said, no, it's not. Jesus seems to also say, no, it's not. And those two things actually match.
[00:35:36] So this is absolutely fascinating to me because remember earlier I mentioned about how we might have the idea of an earlier understanding and a later understanding, and we wanna know which one we should go with. As I study in biblical theology, there might not actually be a problem here at all.
[00:35:58] All right, I'm gonna go ahead and skip ahead. Another possibility that we have with the change in ideas of what a law is, is during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. This is another place where we have a lot of references to the law book. And some scholars will say that this is where we have statutory law.
[00:36:22] LeFebvre says, quote " In Westbrook's view, Deuteronomistic scribes first divised the potential for employing law writings as statutes. And this innovation achieved general currency under Ezra's legal experts. But does the fact that Ezra wanted the people to understand the law book mean that he expected it to provide statutory rulings? To state the alternative, could this not be a further instance of Israel's law book being employed after what Westbrook calls the Mesopotamian concept of a law code as a pedagogical tool." End quote.
[00:37:06] All right, we have the situation where Ezra wants the people to understand the law. Putting that into the context, we also have to realize that the law was written in a different language than the people might be familiar with. That might possibly be a reason why he would want them to understand it. So it would be read, but it would also be explained because if it's not explained, then it's not gonna function very well as a teaching tool.
[00:37:37] Some people wonder if the idea of statutory law came from the Persians, but the Persians really didn't have an idea of statutory law as the Greeks later did.
[00:37:50] Okay, I am not gonna go into all of the details with Ezra and Nehemiah, but suffice to say that LeFebvre lays out a really solid argument for the idea that this is not where the change happens.
[00:38:04] So where does it happen? And how does it happen?
[00:38:09] LeFebvre puts forth an idea and he admits that this is fairly hypothetical and that we don't have enough information to really solidly place a distinction here, but his argument is a very influential one, in my opinion. He suggests that it is the Greek Hellenistic era that really changed things in a big way and there are a few reasons for that.
[00:38:37] I've mentioned before about Athens and their law codes, but it's not just Athens, it's also the influence of Egypt who was in turn influenced by Greek ideas as well.
[00:38:52] Ancient Egypt conception of law seems to be quite in line with ancient Near Eastern law in general. You know, for the ancient Egyptian, you had Pharaoh. He was the source of the law, but Pharaoh was only the source of the law because he had that divine connection. He was able to use oracles. Plus the fact that, in ancient Egypt there were abstract ideas of law and justice.
[00:39:19] Let me introduce LeFebvre's argument about Hellenistic Judea and Ptolomaic influence being the source of this change and understanding of law. LeFebvre says, quote, " This shift in Jewish legal thinking occurred in the Hellenistic era through two basic mechanisms, namely the administrative structure of the Ptolomaic court system, which it will be argued, facilitated towards recasting as legislation in fact. Then the second mechanism, the social philosophy of law brought by the Greeks, which it will then be argued, made Judaism's characterization of Torah as legislation popularly attractive, indeed, virtually irresistible." End quote.
[00:40:12] Now LeFebvre again admits this is hypothetical. And he says that what we see in historical practice is very messy. There is just no one answer and one thing, especially when you consider different sects in Judaism. They understood things differently in different places.
[00:40:33] Now I don't have time to really outline the whole history here. But there is a buildup and an instigation of these ideas. First we have Alexander the Great. Alexander The Great didn't make up a whole lot of ideas himself. But along with the establishment of his empire came this idea of civilization versus barbarian.
[00:40:58] Basically what this boils down to is that the Greeks were saying that civilization happens because of a set written law versus barbarians who are ruled by a changeable king. That's kind of the narrative that's floating around. Now that by itself doesn't have to influence or change the Jews. Especially when we know that a lot of the Jews were resistant to ideas from Greek philosophy. They didn't want to be Hellenistic, although that in and of itself also plays, its really stringent part here.
[00:41:36] So we have Alexander the Great. Then after Alexander the Great's death, the land was situated between the Ptolomies and the Seleucids, and there's a whole big story about that, right? Well, the Ptolomies come from Egypt and they are forming regulations. They're trying to form the situation where you have more production.
[00:42:03] At first, it seems like it's mostly an economic thing. Their rules of regulation actually increased production of the Nile. So they discovered that setting down rules actually produced more for them. So that's convincing. But again, that's not gonna cause the Jews to entirely change the way they're understanding law.
[00:42:28] So then we have the matter of government and ruling. Initially you have the empire and the kings and the army, right? You have military occupiers. And so first of all, you have the king who is the head. You have the military who is going to enforce things, and then you have the people under that.
[00:42:51] There seems to have been a change between that kind of top-down authority and the establishment with the Ptolomies especially of the idea of rule of law in between the king and the military occupiers and the people.
[00:43:09] This actually strengthened the royal government, even though at the same time it made the king a little bit more distant, right? So instead of the king being a tyrant and saying, all of you guys are gonna obey me. You had the king establish a rule of law, which became something that was a little bit more objective. Then the king could say, well, I'm not trying to be a tyrant. I'm just ruling in a civilized way.
[00:43:42] But not only that, it's not just a top down giving of the law. The king didn't just say, I am creating a law and you all are going to obey it. The genius of the time was that yes, there was some of that that happened, but they also went into the land and looked at native practices and native law, and they fit those native practices and laws into the ruling body of law as described by the king.
[00:44:17] And this would be a little bit easier if I could visually diagram it. It went from the king using military rule down to communities, to the king creating royal law and the king becoming the law giver, but also acknowledging need of law as being part of that. And remember, this is all wrapped up in the story of civilization versus barbarian.
[00:44:46] So here's what LeFebvre suggests. He suggests that this situation seems to have formed a structure which really fit well into the people at the time. Because there were a few different ways that people could take this Greek framing of law. First of all, they could just accept it and say, oh, you're right. We are barbarians and we want to be civilized, so we'll give up our past and move into the Greek rule of law future.
[00:45:19] Second way they could take it is they could deny the way the Greeks were framing it. They could say that, you know what? Kingship is better and we're gonna continue to hope for a king.
[00:45:33] A third way is that they could reframe their own writings as being just like the legal norms of a civilized society. And that is what seems to have actually happened. And we see this actually in Jewish writing. LeFebvre brings out several examples where some of the Jews are saying, it wasn't the Greeks who invented the law. It was us and they took it from us. They studied Torah, and that's how they developed their civilized law.
[00:46:09] Second way that we see this described from a Jewish perspective is that, well, you know what? They have a point, but unfortunately they didn't have Torah. Luckily we do, and thus we are better. Our teachings are superior to the Greeks because we are the original instigators of law as divine stipulation.
[00:46:36] So there's different ways that Jews are taking it and trying to put that spin on it, right? But either way, Greek standards are starting to be used to evaluate Torah.
[00:46:48] Philo says that the Greeks are just too prideful and they don't want to acknowledge their debt to Moses. Josephus is still a little bit worried about having a barbarian status.
[00:47:03] So even though what LeFebvre is saying is hypothetical, we actually have Jews who are wrestling with this and trying to fit what they see in the new context. And as they're doing it, they are accepting the Greek framework. This happens all the time and people don't realize that they're doing it.
[00:47:28] Like when somebody comes along and tries to knock down your argument, a lot of times we fight back in their playing field. We accept their terms for the conversation. That's what's going on here. The Jews were actively changing the way that they viewed law because they were trying to fight against the Greeks, but really they were accepting the Greek formulation of what law was.
[00:47:58] LeFebvre has some really good things to say about the first and second book of Maccabees and how that fits into all of this as well. It seems like we have not a Jew gentile distinction in many places, but a law tyranny distinction.
[00:48:17] Sometimes the good guys and bad guys aren't Jew and Gentile, but civilized law keepers versus barbarians who just go along with a tyrant. This is fascinating stuff.
[00:48:32] All right, I'm gonna go ahead and start wrapping this conversation up, but I hope you guys can kind of see how absolutely fascinating this is. This conversation has such wide ranging implications that I can't even possibly bring them out here.
[00:48:52] Now, like I said, we do have a really interesting dynamic of what we actually see play out during the Greco Roman era regarding all of this.
[00:49:03] Sometimes some people are going to side really formally on law as legislation and others are not. And sometimes it's gonna be hard to tell. One place that's hard to tell is within the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have a document that they call the Community Rule. The Community Rule establishes well rule for community. It establishes the ideals of governance.
[00:49:38] Now, of course, we don't know how this was actually established and enacted, and it's also fuzzy whether or not Torah was being applied to originally in this. Or whether Torah was kind of an ad hoc explanation for why they were doing things the way they did.
[00:49:58] There are some really strong suggestions that this Community Rule was being used prescriptively, however.
[00:50:06] But like I said, it doesn't necessarily go along with Torah. So were they seeing Torah as being prescriptive? That's a bigger question. There could be a distinctive difference there. And it's very possible that the Community Rule was established and then later on they had to legitimize it with scriptural intention.
[00:50:32] And it's very interesting to then try and move this conversation into Christianity. Christians are pretty much taken with the idea of Torah as legislation. This is why we want to do things like reduce it to a manageable size, or we want to distinguish types of laws like ceremonial and ethical and moral. If we didn't see Torah as legislation, we wouldn't be doing things like this.
[00:51:04] When you go into the use that Jesus had for the law, it's really hard for us to put down our presuppositions. Was Jesus calling back to Mosaic law as prescriptive? Well, things like his discourse on divorce suggest that he's not. He seems to be calling to law in created order and not the text.
[00:51:31] We might also ask if we're going back to the idea of a king as the law giver. If we read the gospel of Matthew, for instance, is Matthew promoting a return to absolute king?
[00:51:46] Is the collection of law written to bear witness instead of being a legislative set of rules? I mean, obviously we have great emphasis on Jesus' lineage from David. Jesus is the king, so reading the gospels in light of this idea that having a king meant barbarism, it's very interesting.
[00:52:12] LeFebvre says, quote, " Unlike sects, which sought to reckon Torah with received traditions, Matthew's Jesus possesses authority to change traditions and the stipulations of Torah. He does so without any sense that this somehow violates true law. The appearance is like that of a barbarian sovereign.
[00:52:36] " Moreover, in keeping with the traditional ancient Near Eastern ideal and contrary to Hellenistic stereotypes, Jesus is presented as a sovereign who employs his absolute power, not for self aggrandizement, but to care for the poor and needy. It might even be wondered whether a decisive issue for sectarian approaches to law writings was just this: a Judaic sect, which had a divine king, ie, a messianic sect, would tend to recover a traditional role for the law book A Judaic sect which lacked a king required an alternative sovereign, which rule of law theory offered through legal exegesis of the prescriptivized Torah. It was Jesus's claim to be the Davidic heir combined with his free handling of the Torah that contributed to the ultimate breakdown." End quote.
[00:53:39] LeFebvre is suggesting that there's something really unique and different about Jesus. He is the king. He is able to handle Torah in a free way, we might say, but he can do that because he is the source of Torah.
[00:53:56] LeFebvre says, quote, "Matthew's Jesus may have had a simpler view of Torah, which explains his insistence on its continued observance, albeit not after the manner in which other Judaisms were observing Torah. Was a return to traditional ancient near Eastern ideals of a king and law collection with Jesus as that king behind the Nazarene sect? To state the question is to suggest the possibility that some sects, as late as the Roman period, may have yet resisted the Torah's re-characterization as a law code." End quote.
[00:54:36] All right, well here we go. That is basically the argument. Really interesting, and again, I'm sure you can think of all kinds of implications and things that this is going to touch on. What we're gonna do in the future is how this conversation can help us understand covenant and the intersection of law and covenant and what that looks like.
[00:55:03] I hope that this kind of opened a door for you to understand things a little bit differently and I hope that that's helpful. It is very difficult to get away from our preconceptions because we don't always know that they are preconceptions. And of course there's many ways that we can take these ideas and marry them with ideas we already have, like law as wisdom and law as lived out covenant with God.
[00:55:34] I hope that I've set up enough to now have the conversation about Walton's thesis, but we'll kind of see what I think about this week. This seems to be a really key piece to some of his arguments though.
[00:55:48] And you know, when I've brought up the idea that law might not be legislative and that covenant might not be all about stipulations. Well, there's a lot of kickback to that and rightly so. And I think a lot of that has to do with the way that we're just viewing things and honestly, I don't think we're always thinking about just how modern our ideas are. Particularly in the West, we are so influenced by Greek ideas that we don't even realize that.
[00:56:21] Another fascinating connection to what we're gonna be talking about in the future is the idea of written law code as a civilizing force. Now, both John Walton and his son are all about talking about order and how we get order and how God functions in that. So it's super interesting here that in this context we have the explanation for why people are civilized is a written law.
[00:56:53] A little bit of a teaser for the conversation in the future is that when we take this idea of written law as a source for civilization, and then we bring that into conjunction with the idea of covenant, and we marry covenant and law together in legal stipulation, meaning that covenant is broken if you break a law and these laws are written down and regulated.
[00:57:20] If we bring those ideas back into the story in Genesis two and three, what we come away with is the idea that Adam got kicked out of the garden because he broke a law. This is a very common idea in Christianity and interpretation here.
[00:57:41] At any rate, I hope this is all set up to look at his pushback and see where it is or is not valid. I actually think he sets things up in a way that he is self-defeating to some extent. But that is a long conversation to have. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you learned some new things. I hope you wrote down some notes. And if you have any feedback or any questions, please get ahold of me.
[00:58:14] You can find me on Facebook, or you can contact me through my website at genesis marks the spot.com where there is a little tab that says contact on the top or something like that. And you can write me a little note and I will get it and hopefully respond.
[00:58:34] Apologies if sometimes I miss the boat on that, but if I do, you can always bug me again. I never mind being bugged again if I somehow miss something.
[00:58:47] Well, before I leave today, I should also say that I am really excited about this new idea I have. My new idea has to do with community and discipleship and learning together and developing some things together. So I hope that you'll join me if you are interested in community, if you're interested in deeper Bible study, if you are interested in finding ways to help other people to come to these ideas, even if they don't listen to podcasts like this. I hope you'll stay tuned because I've got some ideas of how to develop that, but I can't do it myself. I am going to need your help and I hope it's fun. I don't want this to be a burden on anyone. I think this is gonna be amazing and great and I think you'll love it.
[00:59:46] So stay tuned in the next couple of weeks because I will be formally announcing what I'm talking about here.
[00:59:55] At any rate, I wish you all a happy 4th of July and a blessed week, and we will see you later.
