Subproject 3: “The Social and Political Impact of Divine Laws in Ancient Israel and Judah”

This subproject investigates the influences of the establishment of the notion of divine law in the Hebrew Bible on the concrete religious, social, and political history of Israelite/Judean polities, especially from the 6th to 2nd centuries BCE during the Persian and Hellenistic periods. In particular, it will address the question of how utopian and how concretely different societies and epochs viewed these laws.

In the realm of politics and society, the ancient Jewish concept of divine law apparently presented few problems under Persian and early Hellenistic rule (i.e., the 6–4th centuries). The Persians especially tolerated local laws and refrained from imposing central, imperial laws upon their subjects. Ezra imagines the “law of the king” as the law of God (Ezra 7). However, the biblical sources of Ezra and Nehemiah provide initial portrayals of “divine law” applied to issues related to exogenous marriage (Ezra 9; Nehemiah 13) and political solidarity (Nehemiah 5, 10).

The situation changed drastically under the Ptolemies and Seleucids. Judaism clashed dramatically with the dominant cultures of the Hellenistic Empires that were, to some extent, based on different concepts of authority: God’s law according to the Jews and the law of the empire according to the Greeks. Therefore, Jewish communities respecting the Torah were pressed to make concrete decisions concerning how they would view the authority of the Torah’s divine laws for social and political life. Some Jewish writings formulate and detail polemic literary and historical rejections of Hellenistic culture and authority (cf. Daniel; 1–2, 4 Maccabees). One well-known example appears in the priest Eleazar’s refusal to eat swine on pain of death before the Seleucid King Antiochus (4 Maccabees 2). Other Jewish writings of the Hellenistic period seek to identify the Torah with the natural law (Sirach 24; Baruch 4; cf. Psalm 19), an approach coming to full fruition later in the work of Philo of Alexandria. This trajectory powerfully influenced Christianity and Islam. On the other hand, the Maccabean Revolt and ensuing Hasmonean kingdom led to the first wide-scale attempt to implement biblical divine law in a political regime.