A Short History of Jewish Ethics E-Book

Alan L. Mittleman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 510

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A Short History of Jewish Ethics traces the development of Jewish moral concepts and ethical reflection from its Biblical roots to the present day. 

• Offers an engaging and thoughtful account of Jewish ethics
• Brings together and discusses a broad range of historical sources covering two millennia of writings and conversations
• Combines current scholarship with original insights
• Written by a major internationally recognized scholar of Jewish philosophy and ethics

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Ethics in the Axial Age

Moral Realism and Divine Command

Holiness, Goodness, and the Emulation of God

Agency, Free Will, and Responsibility

Hebraism and Hellenism

2 Some Aspects of Rabbinic Ethics

Midrash: Virtuous Character and Conduct

Ethical Tractates: Moral Motivation

Talmud and Talion

3 Medieval Philosophical Ethics

Theories of Virtue and Obligation

Saadya Gaon

Baḥya ibn Pakuda

Maimonides

4 Medieval Rabbinic and Kabbalistic Ethics

Moshe ben Naḥman

Jonah Gerondi

Baḥya ben Asher

Isaac Aboab

Moses Cordovero

Ḥasidei Ashkenaz

5 Modern Jewish Ethics

Baruch Spinoza

Moses Ḥayim Luzzatto

Moses Mendelssohn

From Ḥasidism to Musar

Lazarus and Cohen

Into Late Modernity

Conclusion

Index

This edition first published 2012© 2012 Alan L. Mittleman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mittleman, Alan.A short history of Jewish ethics : conduct and character in the context of covenant / Alan L. Mittleman.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-8942-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-8941-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Jewish ethics–History. 2. Ethics in the Bible. 3. Ethics in rabbinical literature.4. Bible. O.T.–Criticism, interpretation, etc. 5. Rabbinical literature–History and criticism. 6. Jewish philosophy–History. 7. Cabala–History. I. Title. BJ1280.M58 2012296.3′609–dc23

2011024865

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444346589; Wiley Online Library 9781444346619; ePub 9781444346596; mobi 9781444346602

Hear, my son, the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the teaching of thy mother

                                                                        Proverbs 1:8

Acknowledgments

It was my good fortune to have written this book while teaching at The Jewish Theological Seminary. I was able to ask my colleagues questions about areas where their own expertise far exceeded mine. Some of the persons who assisted me include Professors Ben Sommer, Leonard Levin, Eitan Fishbane, Judith Hauptman, David Marcus, and my doctoral student, Rabbi Geoffrey Claussen. I have also profited from frequent discussions with Professors Lenn Goodman and David Novak. Both of them, as persons and as scholars, have inspired and challenged me over the years. Their friendship and support have enriched my life. I have also profited from conversations with my friends Professors Steven Grosby, Jonathan Jacobs, Hartley Lachter, Abraham Melamed, Leora Batnitzky, and Michael Morgan. I wish to thank as well my assistant, Bobbi Raphael, who helped in the preparation of the manuscript. Needless to say, I bear sole responsibility for any errors the book might contain. My wife, Patti Mittleman, encouraged me every step of the way, as she has done with all my writing. Without her, nothing would be possible. My children, Ari and Joel, no longer minors, suffered no parental neglect during the writing of this book, unlike several previous ones. From afar, their humor and filial love buoyed me during the sometimes lonely endeavor of writing. This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Shirley Leah (Goldberg) Mittleman, who passed away in the spring of 2010. Her long decline into Alzheimer’s pressed me to think about the moral meanings of respect and love for a person whose personhood has ebbed away. May her memory ever be a blessing.

Introduction

When I was in graduate school, many years ago, I had the good fortune to come upon Alasdair MacIntyre’s A Short History of Ethics. I found this book insightful and useful; I still consult it with profit today, even though MacIntyre has distanced himself from the sort of study the book represents. More of that in a moment. I wondered back then whether a similar study could be written on Jewish ethics. This book is an attempt to respond to my decades-old query.

There are a number of formidable problems in thinking about Jewish ethics as a conceptual category, let alone in organizing a presentation of Jewish ethics along historical lines. I will try to work through some of these problems in the pages that follow.

As mentioned, MacIntyre himself repudiated the kind of historical presentation of Western moral thought he achieved in his Short History of Ethics.1 He abandoned the view that each of the great moral philosophers whom he treated was talking about the same kind of thing such that one could see them as existing within a single, ongoing tradition. He came to the view that Western moral thought – down to the most fundamental issues of what morality can be said to include – is so irreducibly variegated that it cannot be held to constitute a single tradition. Rather, there is a congeries of traditions of “moral enquiry.” Criticizing a famous nineteenth-century Victorian predecessor in the business of writing histories of ethics, MacIntyre writes:

Sidgwick’s falsifying history thus projected back into the past the conceptual structuring of the author’s present and thereby suggested that Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Kant and Sidgwick himself were all offering accounts, albeit rival accounts, of the rational status of one and the same timeless subject matter.2

MacIntyre came to believe that these variegated traditions of inquiry into morality are so different from one another as to be incommensurable. Between Nietzsche and Aquinas, say, such “irreconcilable division” and “interminable disagreement” reign that there is no way to interpolate both figures into a single tradition of inquiry. “So general is the scope and so systematic the character of some at least of these disagreements that it is not too much to speak of rival conceptions of rationality, both theoretical and practical.”3

Having abandoned an approach that construes the major moral philosophers as all speaking to the same subject matter, albeit in different ways, MacIntyre puts in its place characterizations and analyses of discrepant, incompatible traditions of “moral enquiry.” “When I speak of moral enquiry,” he writes, “I mean something wider than what is conventionally, at least in American universities, understood as moral philosophy, since moral enquiry extends to historical, literary, anthropological, and sociological questions.”4

These concerns speak directly to the methodological problems of Jewish ethics. First, it is very helpful that MacIntyre should parse moral thought into complex, historically articulated traditions rather than flatten it into a series of texts which one might take to be doing the same thing, namely philosophical ethics. As we shall soon see, Jewish ethics seldom presents itself in an official philosophical uniform. One must ferret it out of legal texts, stories, commentaries, wise sayings, and so on. If one looks for Jewish ethics in a form comparable to that of the Western philosophical treatise, one will find very little. And yet one ought not to deny that Jewish thinkers reflected seriously and with great sophistication on the demands of conduct and the ideals of character. Locating and analyzing that reflection is the work of an historical presentation of Jewish ethics. That MacIntyre complicates and pluralizes the philosophical tradition opens a space for traditions of Jewish moral reasoning to display their own patterns of rationality.

Second, the idea of tradition is itself quite helpful. Jewish moral thinkers located themselves within the broad normative traditions of the Jewish people. They made constant reference to the Bible and to the foundational texts of the ancient rabbinic sages. While some of these normative traditions pull in different directions, so much so that a prominent modern scholar prefers to talk of “Judaisms” rather than Judaism, the incommensurability of traditions may be less of a problem for Jewish ethics than for Western ethics, on MacIntyre’s telling. What we have in Judaism are traditions of moral reasoning, of intellectual engagement with conduct and character, going back millennia. The sustained reference to prior foundational texts, such as the Bible, builds a common denominator into the Jewish moral project, without depressing its internal diversity.

Third, MacIntyre’s idea of inclusive “moral enquiry” as an improvement on stringently philosophical analysis suits the sources of Jewish ethics which we must explore. The tools of literary analysis, anthropology, sociology, moral philosophy per se, political theory, and jurisprudence all bear on the identification and understanding of Jewish ethics.

This last point implies another significant problem. To put it baldly: What is our subject? What is Jewish ethics? If Jewish ethics requires all of these approaches, does it actually exist as a distinct domain? Is it a native category for Judaism or is it a Procrustean bed, an attempt to make Jewish texts answer to Western categories? Dissenting from the assumption that Jewish ethics is a legitimate domain, the contemporary theologian Michael Wyschogrod writes, “Ethics is the Judaism of the assimilated.”5 For Wyschogrod, the urge to construe Judaism along the lines of ethics is typical of liberal, non-observant modern Jews. Jewish law, halakha, is the operative authentic category of Jewish self-understanding. The Jewish ethics project of liberal modernity is an attempt to substitute something purely rational, universalizing, cross-culturally intelligible, and respectable for the highly particular, divinely revealed law to which pre-modern Jews gave their allegiance, come what may. Jewish ethics is, on this view, a kind of political statement, a polemic on behalf of a reconstructed non-offensive Judaism.

Wyschogrod has a point. One sees in contemporary American Judaism, especially that of the large Reform stream, a dethroning of Jewish law and a coronation of Jewish ethics as the sovereign category of Jewish representation both to insiders and outsiders. That is an historic break with classical and medieval models of Jewish self-understanding. Contemporary denominational politics aside, however, the deep and abiding problem is whether the category of Jewish ethics has a legitimate conceptual role to play, given the vast scope and power of law in traditional Judaism. Any construction of Jewish ethics has to make sense of the relationship between ethics and law. Nor is this simply a problem for acculturated modern Jews. There are legitimate conceptual issues here which must be freed from the ideological framework in which they are embedded.6 Part of what is wrong with the ideological framework is its underlying facile assumption that we know what “ethics” and “law” mean. Rather than carry us more deeply into a fundamental inquiry into the nature of normativity, ideology arrests investigation.

To begin to grasp the problem, consider Deuteronomy 6:18: “Do what is right and good in the sight of the LORD that it may go well with you and that you may be able to possess the good land that the LORD your God promised on oath to your fathers.”7 Doing what is “right and good” (ha-yashar v’ha-tov) may be taken as an indicator of ethical conduct and yet it is commanded by the law or rather it is enunciated as a divine command. What foothold can ethics get here? Is law, in the sense of divine command, not the master category, indeed, not the exclusive category? (Let us leave aside the Kantian problems presented by the text such as whether divine commandment or the prudential motive of possessing the land vitiates ethics. The problem we need to focus on here is one of fundamental categorization.) Sensing the problem of categorization, the great thirteenth-century exegete, Moshe ben Naḥman (Naḥmanides), finds a foothold for ethics in this text. As comprehensive as the law is, it cannot cover every future case. Therefore, we need to develop good judgment and the willingness to compromise; we need to see our fellow’s point of view and restrain ourselves from asserting our legal rights to the limit. Doing the right and the good is required by the law but it complements and completes the law. Persons can be commanded but personhood needs to be nurtured; the law cares for the character of its adherents. Duty and virtue hang together.8 This play in the joints of the commandments seems to be Naḥmanides’ version of how ethics may relate to law. Naḥmanides invokes the concepts of peshara (compromise) and lifnim me-shurat ha-din (roughly: going beyond the letter of the law) to indicate the supererogatory standards which life according to law itself requires. For the law to work, one must go beyond the law.

But how far beyond the law does one go if the law commands that one go there? There is a hefty debate among contemporary scholars of Jewish ethics as to whether lifnim me-shurat ha-din, insofar as it is commanded by the law itself, can be thought of as in some way extra-legal and thus foundational for the category of Jewish ethics.9 Similarly, there are debates between scholars of Jewish law as to whether the law per se is answerable to extra- or pre-legal normative standards or whether those standards are necessarily immanent in the law itself. This debate tracks roughly speaking that between natural law theorists and legal positivists. The natural law position – that there exists discernable normativity prior to and abidingly over and against halakha – opens up a conceptual space for Jewish ethics. But on the positivist view, Jewish ethics cannot become a stable category; it is stillborn rather than viable.10 Although these debates are of some philosophical interest, what I want to argue for here is a way of moving beyond them.

MacIntyre provides a clue. In his Short History of Ethics he noted, and in his later writings came to question, the notion that morality is a distinct phenomenon separable from, for example, the ritual purity taboos of archaic societies.11 The very act of distinguishing an identifiable domain labeled “morality” to be studied by a conceptually discrete method known as “ethics” is a matter of historical contingency. MacIntyre’s dissent goes back perhaps to Elizabeth Anscombe, who made this point half a century ago in her celebrated “Modern Moral Philosophy.”12 Not all societies have made this move, nor is there any rational necessity that they should have done so. That what we have come to call ethics is held to be distinct from what we have to come to call law need not reflect badly on cultures which have not cut that distinction. Nor is this a putative failing of intellectually immature cultures. Recently, the view that moral phenomena are conceptually distinctive, requiring their own language and evaluative logic, has also been attacked, from a different philosophical point of view than MacIntyre’s, by Philippa Foot. Her Natural Goodness argues for the non-uniqueness of moral predicates such as “good” when applied to good actions or intentions vis-à-vis other forms of evaluation (“That’s a good dog.” “Joe has good vision.”).13 The details of Foot’s argument need not concern us. I want simply to note her project: ethics may be a naturalized inquiry; it may have to do with what enables us to flourish as a species, different yet not inseparable from animal species.14 Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss have made comparable arguments. This represents a massive dethroning of the categoricity and autonomy of ethics, so crucial to the work of Kant and his followers. Insofar as the standard debate among Jewish scholars as to the relation between law and ethics seems to presuppose a well-formed, if largely tacit, conception of ethics, it likely presupposes too much.

The search for a categorically distinct domain of ethics, Jewish or otherwise, may be misguided from the outset. One might also add that construing the rule-following traditional Jewish way of life (halakha) as law might also entrain a conceptual baggage that misleads as much as it illumines.15 Halakha is surely comparable to uncontroversial cases of legal systems in some respects but it is incomparable in others. Its claim to divine origin, its articulation and endurance under conditions of exile and lack of political sovereignty, its failure to be recognized as binding by many if not most Jews in the present age, and, most notably for our purposes, its enshrining of aspirational, virtuous ideals distinguish it from the legal systems of secular societies.16 Jewish law is no less problematic as law than Jewish ethics is problematic as ethics. To seek categorical distinctions in these matters may be methodologically foolish. To try sharply to distinguish between law and ethics may be rewarding conceptual work in a system where those distinctions are incipient or explicit but may be misguided when applied to Jewish thought. A picture, as Wittgenstein might have said, holds us captive. The picture of a hard disjunction between law and ethics is the wrong picture to apply to Judaism.

Rather than treat these concepts as timeless designations that refer extensionally to definitely described items, we should treat them as related, contrastive terms. Law and ethics hang together, partially defining the domain of the other in a fluid, culture-bound way. They gain their meaning intensionally from their semantic interplay. Yet, there is something below the level of semantics. “Law” and “ethics” point toward human impulses for normative ordering. Perhaps we should say that human beings go in for norms as they go in for language. Normativity per se, just as much as speech, is native to us; it is part of our evolutionary biology, the diversity of its culture-bound expressions notwithstanding. (To gesture toward an explanation of the normative in this way is not, of course, to engage in a normative argument.)

If there is an underlying capacity and potential for normativity, one could say that law and ethics, as well as custom, are its, by no means mutually exclusive, modes. “Law” and “ethics” describe overlapping and interpenetrating kinds of norm. Terms such as “custom” or “constitution” describe other modalities of the normative. We should not expect hard distinctions between these terms any more than we should expect hard distinctions between culturally embedded linguistic phenomena such as poetry and prose.

The fluid, contrastive interplay between law and ethics is exemplified by numerous Jewish texts, which suggest a relationship of mutual dependence between norms answering at least prima facie to the two categories. Thus, Jewish tradition itself tries to draw some distinctions. Hebrew has a term – musar – which if not strictly coterminous with “ethics” nonetheless points in that direction. In biblical Hebrew, musar signifies “chastening,” “discipline,” or “exhortation.”17 In the Middle Ages, a genre of musar literature develops which extends down to modern times, even giving rise to a movement in the nineteenth century.18 This literature looks to both conduct and character; to what ought to be done as well as to the dispositions, attitudes, values, and intentions of the doer. It is concerned with what we would call moral psychology, with motivation, akrasia, attention and inattention, attitude, indecision, focus and distraction; it is the Jewish equivalent, in broad terms, of the study of virtue. Classic works of musar, such as the eleventh-century Book of the Direction of the Duties of the Heart by Baḥya ben Joseph ibn Paquda, work in tandem with overtly legal texts. Baḥya presents a good example of trying to develop a contrast between “law” and “ethics” while nonetheless holding them together. He distinguishes between the customary halakhic “duties of the limbs” and the equally halakhic but more elusive (and, according to his plaint, frequently neglected) “duties of the heart.” The latter correspond to what we might think of as ethics, but they are no less “legal” than the former. Nonetheless, a working phenomenological distinction has been made. Maimonides also sees no rift between enjoining the development of practical and intellectual virtues and the behavioral stipulations of halakha. His great code, the Mishneh Torah, begins with elucidations of metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical matters along broadly Aristotelian lines as a prolegomenon to the codification of Jewish law. And yet these matters are themselves matters of law; the law requires that Jews be metaphysicians and moral philosophers up to a point.19 Indeed, the Mishnah itself includes in the order dealing with civil and criminal law an exhortatory, musar-oriented tractate, Pirke Avot (The Chapters of the Fathers, often interpretively rendered The Ethics of the Fathers). The placement of the tractate by the second–third century CE editors of the Mishnah seems to indicate that its purpose is to help form what we would call “judicial temperament” in those who would interpret and apply the law stipulated in the surrounding books. All of this is to suggest that although theorizing a bright-line distinction between law and ethics in the manner of Western philosophy may be a dead end for Jewish thought, there are still distinctions to be made. Those distinctions inhere in the material as such. A conceptually and historically sensitive treatment will try to highlight the contrasts felt by the authors themselves.

Can we then propose a way of thinking (I hesitate to call it a definition) about Jewish ethics, which is warranted by the evidence of texts and yet guides the interpretation of those texts in a heuristic, intellectually productive way? I suggest that an historical inquiry into Jewish ethics attend to Jewish reflection on conduct and character. This is sufficiently minimal and broad as to avoid on principle labeling and excluding relevant material. (That’s law, not ethics! Ethics is what supplements, complements, or even underlies law!) Nor is it so broad as to be vacuous; not everything reflects on conduct and character. The term “reflection” is also important. While looser than “analysis” or “argument,” it still marks an intellectual engagement with the problems of conduct and character. That engagement could be manifest in a legal text or it could be found in a poem. There is no reason to stipulate in advance what will count as ethics and what will not. Nonetheless, reflection implies cognitive content, a real grappling with an issue relevant to conduct and/or to character. Although a study of Jewish ethics cannot be, as argued above, a strictly philosophical inquiry, it must nonetheless expose patterns of thought, as well as the questions that motivated the thought and the justification for the answers moved by the texts. The historical study of Jewish ethics should be descriptive, normative, and metaethical – the latter even in the absence of strictly philosophical source materials. All serious reflection makes a case and seeks to justify its position. I aim here to expose those intellectual transactions.

The idea of Jewish ethics as reflection on conduct and character suggests that Jewish ethics attends to two foci at once. I would like to call this dual focus, using Greek-derived terms, an aretaic–deontic pattern.20 Virtue and rules work together in a mutually reinforcing way. Both are necessary. The idea that duty, obligation, or justice – the tissue of a legal system or of a deontological concept of ethics – requires a complement in virtue is as old as Plato and Aristotle. (Insofar as this is the biblical view, it is, of course, even older.) In the Nicomachean Ethics (Book X, Chapter 9 1179b 32), Aristotle is not content to leave the inculcation of those dispositions and habits that comprise the virtues to the vagaries of custom. He would charge the laws of the city with the task of shaping the souls of men. Thus the Ethics flows into the Politics, into the study of constitutions and the sort of person, virtuous or vicious, whom they produce. In Aristotle’s case, the vast majority of his analysis is devoted to the virtues; law enters as a necessary if subsidiary appendix. Arete trumps deon. In Kant, by contrast, deontology rules. Even Kant, however, develops a doctrine of the virtues as a necessary adjunct to his duty-oriented system. Virtue, in The Metaphysics of Morals, is a kind of internal, private law-giving; virtue facilitates that self-legislation which is constitutive of normativity for Kant. The virtuous person is inclined to duty on purely internal grounds. Virtue entails developing oneself in the direction of holiness, of willing unmediated compliance with the moral law. Kant takes over the classic aretaic ethics of antiquity and domesticates it to a duty-bound framework.21

Contemporary Kant-inspired thinkers, such as John Rawls, have scanted virtue, fearing that any comprehensive vision of the good life, from which virtues as means toward achieving human flourishing draw their intelligibility, will be anti-democratic. Rawls’ exclusively justice-oriented “Kantian constructivism” led to a backlash on behalf of the virtues, both among communitarians and among liberals, such as Stephen Macedo and William Galston, who sought accounts of “liberal virtues.”22 Onora O’Neill’s work seeks explicitly to integrate justice and virtue, arguing that “concern for justice and for the virtues can be compatible, indeed that they are mutually supporting …”23

None of this would seem foreign to generations of Jewish thinkers. Indeed, the modernist divorce between justice and the virtues is what would call out for vindication. What accounts for this? The naturalness of the aretaic–deontic framework for Jewish thought is arguably to be traced to the covenantal origins of Judaism, indeed, of the Jewish people. The Bible portrays Israelite origins in two modes. On the one hand, Israel is presented as an extended family descended biologically from a single patriarch, Abraham. On the other hand, Israel is presented as a nation constituted at least in part by the non-primordial ties of consensual religious identification, acceptance of a common constitution, political cooperation and solidarity, etc. It is both consanguineous and voluntary: one can be born into it or one can choose to identify with it. The vehicle by which the latter possibility is effectuated is the covenant (berit).24 Masses of non-consanguineous people chose to identify with Israel when the latter was liberated from Egypt. The people as a whole gained the full stature of their nationhood by the acceptance of a constitution (the Torah) at Mount Sinai. The narratives of Exodus and especially of Deuteronomy frame the encounter between God and the people in covenantal terms: the people voluntarily accept God’s rule and God’s teaching. They enter into a relationship with Him, as He desires a relationship with them. They consent to serve Him in response to His choice of them. By so doing, they become a full, if unique nation. Not all texts in the Bible reflect a covenantal perspective, but that perspective has shaped the whole as well as all subsequent Jewish self-understanding.25

A key consequence of the radically foundational nature of covenant is that law must be thought of as chosen, not imposed. Although the God of the Hebrew Scriptures is famously stern, He is not tyrannical. Israel entered into a relationship, which, however unequal the parties to it, is still mutual. The lives of the Jews and of God, as it were, are henceforth and forever joined. Law must be understood within the context of a shared form of life devoted both to justice and to the good. Covenant, unlike compact or contract, is about the whole of life. The individuality of the covenanting parties is retained but the relationship works a transformation on both of them. God wants Israelite society to instantiate norms of respect, friendship, kindness, compassion, and equity. He also wants Israelites to manifest holiness, saintliness, self-sacrifice, empathy, and courage. (As to the transformation of God, Moses repeatedly dissuades Him from obliterating Israel, bringing out, as it were, the better angels of His nature.) Deontic and aretaic considerations are inseparable here. The theological–moral–political framework which covenant is resists reduction for other than ideal-typical analytic purposes into disjunctive categories such as ethics vs. law.26

This is due in part to the comprehensiveness of the covenantal framework. Judaism is not, in a crucial sense, a religion if by religion we mean a discrete, separable dimension of belief and ritual supervening on a secular way of life. The Torah, understood classically, is the way of life of a holy, yet politically instantiated nation. Unlike Christianity, which was born in the cities of the Roman Empire, Judaism was born, on its own telling, in the wilderness. There was no civil authority to order the political functions of the society. The Israelite project was civilizational: everything had to be included. Although the Jews developed distinctions between civil and religious authorities, these were not as sharply formulated as they were among Christians. There is no Jewish St Augustine.

The archaeological discovery of Hittite treaty documents in the early twentieth century suggested to biblical scholars that ancient Israel understood its relationship with God along the lines of a “suzerain–vassal treaty” or covenant. Later, political and social thinkers, most notably Max Weber, saw that covenant described not only the “vertical” relationship between God and Israel but also defined the “horizontal” relationship among Israelites.27 Israel was a federal (from the Latin foedus, covenant) polity. Individual clans and tribes federated by oath into a political superstructure. A feature of the Hittite treaties, which continues strongly into Israelite covenantalism, is that the vassal is enjoined to love the suzerain. In the Bible, this becomes ḥesed – covenant love/loyalty. God wants not only the obedience of Israel, but their love for Him. Indeed, God wants Israel to be like Him, insofar as that is possible for human beings. Here again, a substantial internal, “ethical” dimension is built into life under the constitutive “legal” obligations of the covenantal relationship. As Jon Levenson remarks, “… all law codes in the Torah were ascribed to the revelation to Moses on Mount Sinai. That is to say, all law in Israel, whether casuistic or apodictic in form, has been embedded within the context of covenant.”28 The mutually supportive interplay of duty, especially of legally stipulated duty, with the aspiration toward goodness is native to the covenantal framework of biblical Israel and hence of subsequent Judaism.

This book is an historical study of the unfolding of the aretaic–deontic pattern across a diachronic range of Jewish sources. By “historical” I mean something not much more than “chronological.” As was the case with MacIntyre in his Short History of Ethics, my concern is for conceptual analysis of reasoning rather than intellectual history. I don’t pay more attention to influences, sources, continuities, innovations, cultural or political contexts, and other standard preoccupations of historians than I have to. Jewish Studies is heavily populated by intellectual historians. I want here to take a somewhat different tack. I take my cue both from MacIntyre and from Stanley Cavell, who writes of his own approach that “my idea of the history of philosophy is that it can be approached only out of philosophizing in the present.”29 Although the majority of the texts we will consider are not overtly philosophical, all of them qua reflections on conduct and character make an argument, present a vision, or affirm the value of a way of life. I try to evoke, describe, analyze, and sometimes criticize these arguments and affirmations. Each chapter tries to uncover and reconstruct patterns of reasoning about conduct and character, neither scanting the strangeness of that reasoning in the eyes of modern readers nor romantically consigning it to the exotic or primitive. I try to find reasons for the positions taken by historical thinkers and, whenever possible, to consider whether they are good reasons. Although the task is primarily interpretive, I am also concerned to display the aretaic–deontic framework as a well-formed conceptual approach to the moral life. One might say that it is a traditional conceptual approach to the moral life, shared by Jews and non-Jews alike. A full theoretical defense of such an approach lies beyond this work. I hope, at least, to provide some resources from the Jewish tradition for anyone who would undertake that worthy end.30

In Chapter 1, we explore biblical ethics in terms of Karl Jaspers’ paradigm of the “Axial Age.” The biblical literature is the primary source for the development of Jewish moral concepts and ethical reflection over the ages. This chapter explicates some of the main ethical issues in this highly variegated literature both within its own historical context and in order to show how later Jewish thought interprets, transforms, and preserves earlier views. We consider the relationship between cultic, “religious” orientations and “ethical” orientations, the nexus of law and ethics, the nature of moral agency and constraint, including a biblical approach to the problem of free will and determinism, and the tensions between a naturalistic and a revealed grounding for ethics. Insofar as our framework is the Axial Age rather than biblical civilization per se, we also consider the fusion of overtly philosophical, Hellenistic ethics and biblical ethics in Aristeas and Philo.

Chapter 2 looks at ancient rabbinic understandings of conduct and character. Judaism reads the Bible through the eyes of the post-70 CE leadership collectively known as the Sages. How did the Sages interpret and transform the moral teachings found in the ancient literature that they canonized as “written Torah”? This chapter explores aspects of rabbinic legal and non-legal exegesis, focusing on texts that are alive to ethical considerations. It explores what constitutes exemplary character and moral motivation through a study of aggadic (non-legal) interpretations of the patriarch Abraham. It looks as well at the question of the limits of ethics: could religious considerations suspend or cancel ethical considerations? The chapter then explores the issue of reward and punishment as a ground for moral motivation. It engages the complex of issues surrounding the Kantian dichotomy of autonomy and heteronomy. It argues that the Sages were alive to the moral nobility of autonomy but were also concerned to moderate the demand for autonomy given their theistic context. Finally, the chapter turns to an analysis of the concept of justice, as refracted by the rabbinic discussion of the lex talionis. The Talmud’s effort to read an “eye for an eye” as a “civil” rather than a “criminal” matter, as a matter of financial compensation rather than mutilation, reveals a subtle appreciation of how ideal norms of justice must be adapted to the contingencies of the social world.

A self-consciously philosophical treatment of ethics emerges in the Middle Ages. This development is explored in Chapter 3. Prior to the ninth century only the Greek Jewish writer Philo wedded an external philosophical system to Jewish tradition. Jewish participation in the “medieval enlightenment” restored this intellectual opportunity. This chapter considers the genuinely philosophical ethics produced by Jewish thinkers in the Muslim orbit including Saadya Gaon, Baḥya ben Joseph ibn Paquda, and Moses Maimonides. What new elements did the absorption of philosophy add to Jewish moral thought? What tensions did philosophy introduce into Jewish ethics? What permanent influences did philosophy wield on Judaism? How did traditional Jewish moral teaching shape the philosophical concepts and methods adopted by Jewish thinkers?

Alongside philosophical work, a popular version of ethical instruction developed. Rabbinic authors of the Middle Ages and early modernity produced numerous works of moral instruction utilizing different literary genres. Several of these popular, non-philosophical books (although often indebted to their philosophical predecessors) are explored in Chapter 4. In addition to popular pious moralizing, ethical works drawing from the mystical teachings collectively known as kabbalah emerged by the thirteenth century. The chapter considers rabbinic ethical works exemplifying several of these genres, including Naḥmanides’ Sermon on the Words of Ecclesiastes (Drasha al Divrei Kohelet), Rabbi Jonah Gerondi’s Gates of Repentance (Sha’are Teshuvah), Baḥya ben Asher’s Jar of Flour (Kad ha-Kemach), Isaac Aboab’s Lamp of Illumination (Menorat Ha-Maor), and Moses Cordovero’s The Palm Tree of Deborah (Tomer Devorah). We will also look at a parallel development, the mystical pietistic movement of medieval Franco-German Jewry, the Hasidei Ashkenaz. The focus will be on a late medieval work influenced by this trend, the anonymous Ways of the Righteous (Orḥot Tzaddikim). In addition to describing and analyzing some of the arguments and vision of these works, the chapter reflects on the gaps between the medieval moral imagination and the modern horizon of Jewish thought.

In Chapter 5, we explore the impact on Jewish ethical thought of those fundamental changes to Jewish life in Europe brought on by Emancipation and Enlightenment in the West and by the spread of Ḥasidism in the East. Spinoza stands at a watershed, in some ways negating all of Judaism, in others suggesting, albeit inadvertently, how Judaism might go forward. A great classic of Jewish ethics, Moshe Ḥayyim Luzzatto’s The Path of the Just (Mesillat Yesharim), although falling chronologically within this period, takes little account of the growing Enlightenment. It represents an attempt to continue the old, pietistic–mystical trend. Within a few years of Luzzatto, Moses Mendelssohn and his followers reintroduced philosophical ethics to Jewish thought and re-envisioned a new basis for Judaism, which gave ethics an extraordinarily prominent role. In the East, ḥasidic homilies and treatises revivified traditional patterns of moral aspiration. The Lithuanian reaction to H.asidism also gave rise to a new emphasis on ethics, the Musar movement. This chapter considers examples of these various trends. We then consider the development of a highly philosophical, albeit apologetic, presentation of Judaism as an ethical monotheism in German-speaking central Europe, focusing on the work of Moritz Lazarus, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Martin Buber.

We turn then to the diverse forms of Jewish ethical writing that have flourished in the past several decades, looking first at Emmanuel Levinas and then noting areas of applied ethics. We note also the philosophical ethics of such scholars as David Novak, Elliot Dorff, Lenn Goodman, and Eugene Borowitz.

In the Conclusion, we raise questions about the uses of the Jewish moral tradition and its prospects.

Notes

1 MacIntyre’s criticisms and corrections appear in the Preface to the second edition (1998) of A Short History of Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998). The first edition was published in 1967.

2 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), p. 28.

3 MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, p. 13.

4 MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, p. 8.

5 Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: God in the People of Israel (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 181.

6 For a sketch of the ideological context (that is, the division between Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform approaches to Judaism) in which the ethics/law relation is configured, see Menachem Marc Kellner, ed., Contemporary Jewish Ethics (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1978), p. 17.

7 All biblical references, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Jewish Publication Society (NJPS) translation.

8 Ethics, on this account, is not identical with virtue qua corrective to pure legalism. Virtue and duty interpenetrate; you can’t have one without the other. Ethics is found in the virtuous observance of the law. This point of view pervades Jewish texts. Part of the burden of this book is to exemplify this claim, to account for it, and to argue that it offers a valuable way both to think about ethics and to live an ethical life.

9 Aharon Lichtenstein, “Does Jewish Tradition recognize an Ethic Independent of Halakha?” in Kellner, ed., Contemporary Jewish Ethics, pp. 102–123. In this classic article Rabbi Lichtenstein argues for an expansive understanding of halakha, which includes an ethical dimension that is analytically distinguishable but not finally separable from law (din). A natural ethic or morality exists but its relevance is circumscribed, post-Sinai, for Jews. For a review and synthesis of this debate, see Louis Newman, Past Imperatives: Studies in the History and Theory of Jewish Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), esp. Chapter Two. See also Jonathan Jacobs, Law, Reason and Morality in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), Chapter Seven.

10 Representative figures in this debate are, on behalf of positivism, Marvin Fox, “Maimonides and Aquinas on Natural Law,” Dine Israel 3 (1972), reprinted in Marvin Fox, Interpreting Maimonides (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). On behalf of natural law, David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a review of and an original contribution to the debate, see Jonathan Jacobs, “Natural Law and Judaism,” Heythrop Journal, Vol. 50, No. 6, pp. 930–947.

11 MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, p. 28.

12 Originally in Philosophy, 33 (1958), reprinted in G. E. M. Anscombe, The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Vol. III (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 26–42.

13 Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), see especially Chapter 2. Another formidable critic is the late Bernard Williams. Williams attacked what he termed “the morality system” – the post-Kantian common wisdom as to what constitutes the distinctive sphere of moral obligation. Williams contrasted a broader field of “ethical considerations” with the narrower morality system. He sees morality as entailing a false understanding of practical necessity, interests, value, freedom, character, and so on; the morality system is the false religion of godless modernity. In its place, he would reintroduce a modest, rather culture-bound ethics. See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), Chapter 10. See also Raymond Geuss’s genealogy of modern philosophical ethics in Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), Chapter 3. On Geuss’s view, the central question of philosophical ethics – what ought I to do? – derives from a medieval world in which doing God’s will was the paramount human task. With the loss of that world, a secularized equivalent takes its place. Ethics becomes an ever more total domain, compensating for the absence of the divine. It is difficult, although worthwhile for Geuss, to get “outside” ethics.

14 Note the application of this, broadly speaking, evolutionary paradigm to rationality per se in Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), especially Chapter IV.

15 For a view of the conceptual complexities of distinguishing a legal system from other socially articulated forms of normativity, see Martin Golding, Philosophy of Law (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1975), Chapter One.

16 For a further consideration of these matters, see Alan Mittleman, The Scepter Shall Not Depart from Judah: Perspectives on the Persistence of the Political in Judaism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000), Chapter 8.

17 See Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgarten, A Bilingual Dictionary of the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1998) s.v. musar for extensive text references, p. 503.

18 For a good general overview of musar literature (sifrut ha-musar) see Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1974), Vol. 6, pp. 922–932. For the Hebrew reader, see the Introduction to Isaiah Tishbi, Mivḥar Sifrut Ha-Musar (M. Newman: Jerusalem, 1970).

19 The twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, Leo Strauss, took the integration of philosophy into law to be a mark of the superiority of the “medieval Enlightenment” over the modern Enlightenment. For Strauss’s classic statement on this subject, see his Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and his Predecessors, trans. Eve Adler (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995).

20Arete is ordinarily translated as “virtue.” Its semantic range covers goodness, excellence, perfection, merit, fitness, bravery, and valor. Deon implies “what one must do.” For a caution regarding the latter term, see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 16.

21 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Part II, Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Virtue.

22 Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). William Galston, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). An early communitarian critic of Rawls who argued contra Rawls for the priority of the good over the right is Michael Sandel. See his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

23 Onora O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 10.

24 The life’s work of the late political scientist, Daniel J. Elazar, was devoted to analyzing the moral and political consequences of the idea of covenant. See Daniel J. Elazar, “Covenant as the Basis of the Jewish Political Tradition,” in Daniel J. Elazar, ed., Kinship and Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and its Contemporary Uses, 2nd edn (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997). See also Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel, Vol. I of The Covenant Tradition in Politics (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998).

25 On the dangers of over-extending the category of covenant, see Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 50.

26 An excellent discussion of the usefulness of the concept of covenant for theorizing Jewish ethics may be found in Newman, Past Imperatives, Chapter 3.

27 For Weber’s contribution to an understanding of the moral and political implications of covenanting, see Mittleman, The Scepter Shall Not Depart from Judah, pp. 59–68. See also, Alan Mittleman, “Judaism: Covenant, Pluralism and Piety,” in Bryan Turner, ed., The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

28 Levenson, Sinai and Zion, p. 49.

29 Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 327.

30 O’Neill, Justice and Virtue, Chapter I.

1

Ethics in the Axial Age

The Bible is not a philosophical text. It does, however, provide rich content for philosophizing. Although it does not, therefore, provide formal or rigorous arguments on behalf of its ethics, it does provide broad patterns of reasoning about proper conduct and character. It does not simply assert and command; it invites the engagement of our reason. Despite its modern reputation as a blunt record of divine commands, it often appeals to our intellect and conscience. In Deuteronomy, for example, the Israelites are told that other nations will admire their wisdom and wish to emulate them: “Surely, that great nation [Israel] is a wise and discerning people” (Deut. 4:6; cf. Isa. 2:1–3). The Israelites will be thought to model a way of life that non-Israelites will find appealing. The eighth-century prophet Isaiah has God imploring the Israelites to “come, let us reach an understanding” (Isa. 1:18). The literary mode of this prophetic discourse, the lawsuit (riv), suggests a dialogue between parties who can rise above their passions and prejudices and seek a reasonable solution. The ethics of the Hebrew Bible is typically not presented as a purely human affair but it is nonetheless answerable to shared, rational criteria of evaluation. Abraham famously challenged God, when he learned of God’s impending judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” (Gen. 18:25). The text assumes a natural apprehension of justice, which Abraham and God both share.1 The significance and range of ethical naturalism in the Bible will be considered below.

The biblical literature has much to say about the ensemble of human excellences that constitute the best life for human beings. It ensconces its teaching in narratives, poetry, law, and wise sayings, examples of which we will presently explore. It is concerned as well with the best ordering of society, of economic life, and of political matters. In none of these domains is its vision systematic or deductive. It is often suggestive and casuistic, asserted rather than explicitly argued. The Bible’s style, although differing by genre, is typically laconic. It does not dwell, as Homer did, on the elaboration of pictorial detail, nor does it develop in its narratives reports of the psychological states of its characters.2 One would love to know what Abraham and Isaac, for example, thought during their three-day trek to the mountain where Abraham would attempt to sacrifice his son. But we are told nothing; the lacunae are filled by later imaginative Jewish (and Christian) literatures.

The collection of, according to the traditional Jewish enumeration, 24 books that constitute the canonical scriptures came into being over a span of almost a millennium.3 (Nor is the process by which some books were included in the canon and others excluded clear or easily datable.) The Bible’s earliest constituent texts reflect, although probably do not derive from, a late Bronze Age Near-Eastern civilization. Its latest text, usually assumed to be the Book of Daniel, comes from a second-century BCE Hellenistic world for which the Bronze Age was a remote antiquity. The Bible expresses not only a stream of Israelite and Judean-Jewish creativity stretching over centuries, it also expresses a continual reworking of inherited textual materials, symbols, literary motifs, beliefs, and values; a history of intra-biblical development and commentary. It is as if the English-speaking world continued to rewrite and develop Shakespeare for twice the amount of time that has elapsed since the Elizabethan Age. Beyond this, the biblical literatures themselves represent a radical reworking and revolutionary challenge to earlier, non-literary forms of Israelite and Judean religion.4 The Bible is a polemic against what came before, against an Israelite and Judean culture that was hardly distinguishable from the “pagan” cultures in whose orbit it lived. The remnants of that banished form of life are half-veiled in the biblical text and partially revealed by archaeology. An historical account of ethics has to take this development into account.

The world of biblical religion, as opposed to its Israelite–Judean precursor, comes into being in the so-called Axial Age, a term of art that comes not from the vocabulary of the archaeologist but from that of the philosopher and social theorist. The Axial Age refers to a set of developments in the major civilizations of the world – Greece, China, India, Persia, and Israel inter alia – with roughly overlapping features. It represents a major shift in beliefs, values, religious consciousness, social and political thought, as well as in the social structures and centers of authority that fomented and sustained these shifts. The term was coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers. Jaspers contrasted the Axial Age with its predecessor “mythical age.” The Axial Age represents the triumph of “logos against mythos.” “Rationality and rationally clarified experience launched a struggle against the myth; a further struggle developed for the transcendence of the One God against non-existent demons, and finally an ethical rebellion took place against the unreal figures of the gods. Religion was rendered ethical, and the majesty of the deity thereby increased.”5

In pre-Axial Age, “mythic” civilizations, there was a sense of a distinction between the mundane and trans-mundane spheres. Animistic forces or, where present, gods penetrated mundane experience. The forces and gods were distinguishable but not radically different from human beings. Shamans crisscrossed the realms; magicians influenced the trans-mundane to assist human beings in their quest for purely mundane goods such as health, fertility, victory, and survival. Society was typically organized in clan and tribal structures. Authority was traditional or charismatic. With the rise of the Axial Age, a new relationship between the mundane and what Jaspers called the trans-mundane occurs. The trans-mundane ceases to be a rather more charged version of the ordinary world of experience and becomes fully transcendent. There is now a “sharp disjunction” between worlds.6 In Israel, for example, the God who earlier “moved about in the garden during the breezy time of day” (Gen. 3:8) became an inconceivably austere sovereign who speaks and the world comes into being (Gen. 1:3). The creation account that features this sovereign as its main character, Genesis chapter 1, although the most famous in the Bible, is only one of many. Other accounts, preserved as fragments rather than fully fleshed-out literary narratives, speak of that older conception of the deity. In texts such as Psalms 74:12–17 and 104:6–9, Isaiah 51:9–11, or Job 38:8–11 are preserved cultural memories of a more mythological God fighting primordial monsters and suppressing the forces of chaos.7 This God is much closer to his Babylonian analogues than the God of Genesis, chapter 1. With the rise of an intellectual class, the literary prophets of the eighth century, God became fully transcendent rather than trans-mundane. The sixth-century anonymous prophet known as Deutero-Isaiah gives pointed expression to this sense of radical transcendence when he proclaims: “For My plans are not your plans, Nor are My ways your ways, declares the LORD. But as the heavens are high above the earth, So are My ways high above your ways” (Isa. 55:8–9).

The fully transcendent God is increasingly revealed through word, law, and the cognition of value rather than through adventitious experiential, especially visual, encounters.8 No longer are archaic experiences of God, conveyed by such texts as Genesis 18:1–14 and 32:24–30, Exodus 4:24–26 and 33:23, Joshua 5:13–15, or Judges 6:11–23 and 13:2–24, possible. God comes increasingly to be conceived as pure spirit; without a body, there is nothing to see. Where there is something to see, it is not God but a mediated presence (Isaiah, chapter 6; Ezekiel, chapter 1). The experience of God, to the extent that it is possible, requires levels of mediation. In the popular religious imagination, angels come into being as designated intermediaries. In earlier Israelite religion, as in some of the texts just cited, angels, divine messengers, are not stable entities. They have no fixed identity – God and His messengers are one and the same. In mature biblical religion God is distinct and radically unique. As God’s transcendence grows, the “space” between the mundane and the transcendent is increasingly populated by a heavenly host. The religious imagination abhors a vacuum.

The challenge of the Axial Age, in all of the world civilizations, was to align the mundane order with the newly envisaged transcendent order.9 Social and political life, once timelessly organized along traditional tribal and clan lines, became an intellectual and a practical problem. How can the social and political realm reflect the eternal order of transcendence? For Israel, this problem had two interrelated solutions. The first was found in the concept of covenant, the conceptualization of the relationship between the nation of Israel and its transcendent sovereign along juridical and moral lines.10 The second was found in the reorganization of the social sphere under a divinely legitimated monarchy. In pre-Axial civilizations, deities were more powerful versions of humans but similar in nature. The totems or gods of the clan brought fertility, successful hunts or growing seasons, victory in battle, etc. The relationship between the group and its trans-mundane counterparts was natural, organic, and mutually beneficial. With the development of the Axial civilization, the social group – now orders of magnitude more complex than a clan-based or tribal society – becomes accountable to the god or, more precisely, to the eternal, transcendent values that the god represents. The higher order, in the Israelite case represented by terms such as justice (mishpat) and righteousness (tzedek), must be appropriately actualized in the mundane realm. God is now known as one who wills tzedek and mishpat for his people; who is approached through acts of tzedek and mishpat. The relationship between people and deity is no longer natural and organic but juridical and moral: they are linked to God through a deliberate acceptance of a mode of life in which tzedek and mishpat, which are willed by the divine, become operational.

The prophets, themselves ethicized and intellectualized descendants of earlier shamanic figures from Israelite–Judean religion, are the carriers of this consciousness of accountability. The prophets speak in the name of a universal God, uniquely revealed to (albeit frequently ignored by) Israel, and at the same time lord of all the world. As a mature, Axial Age phenomenon, prophecy arraigns the Israelite and Judean elites for their failures to instantiate tzedek and mishpat in the life of society and state.

Prophecy develops in tandem both with monarchy and with increasing disparities of wealth in society. Its terms of reference are grounded in covenant, both the presumptive nation-founding covenant of Sinai and the political-founding covenant of Zion, which established the legitimacy of David and his descendants. As in the case of national existence per se, political rule is legitimate only if it accords with transcendent norms of justice and righteousness. The prophetic enterprise is oriented toward reminding the king that his authority is conditional on his fidelity to norms underwritten by a higher authority. The political is subsidiary to the moral and the juridical. There are evidences of a “political ethics” along the lines of realpolitik in the Bible but the dominate voice subordinates realist decision making to transcendent religious-ethical norms.11 When kings follow raison d’état, they usually do what is evil in the eyes of the Lord.

Covenant establishes a set of moral referents in some ways reminiscent of the culture of constitutionalism in the modern West. (This should not be surprising in light of the fact that biblical covenantalism lies at the roots of Western constitutionalism.12) Constitutions, especially written ones such as the Constitution of the United States, appeal to some prior normativity such as natural right while also standing on their own voluntaristic, contractual character.13 The covenant of God with Israel at Sinai reflects this dual foundation. In part, the covenant rests on the normative claims of the divine per se. God is that goodness that ought to be chosen.14 There is something ineluctable about the claims God makes on us, in the Bible’s view. Yet unlike the pure contemplation of the good in Plato, the Bible presents the human encounter with divinity as requiring choice, response, consent. There is a recognizable, practical picture of moral agency in the Sinai story. Israel is offered a choice. Perhaps not a fully free choice – a powerful God has just liberated her from bondage and brought her to a barren wilderness. Neither ingratitude nor abandonment is a desirable option. Nonetheless, the choice is real, if constrained – like most morally significant choices in life. Under these circumstances, Israel chose to bind herself to the One who showed her favor, who liberated her from slavery. Israel met God’s offer of relationship with a rational response of gratitude and a pledge of fidelity (Exod. 19:7–8). The imperatives of biblical law are contextualized within a narrative that emphasizes consent, rather like the social contract tradition that it anticipates. The law is also tied to, in the sense of requiring and promoting, the virtues of gratitude, fidelity, and love. Law must not be seen in purely deontological terms, nor should it be framed solely by reference to heteronomous commands. The covenant entrains its own distinctive virtues.