Torah Study Blog

Most of us are familiar with the Ten Commandments. And many of us may be aware that Jewish tradition teaches that there are 613 commandments in the Torah that Jewish people are obligated to live by.

Using biblical literalist chronology, which uses genealogies and timespans of biblical events to calculate dates corresponding to the modern civil calendar, the Ten Commandments were given to Abraham sometime around the 18th century BCE. But, also according to that chronology, humans have been on the face of the earth since well before the 18th century BCE. The chronology dates creation at roughly 4000 BCE, and Noah and the Great Flood at roughly 2100 BCE.

Since the laws were not given to Abraham until the 18th century BCE, how did people know right from wrong? According to this week’s Torah portion, they didn’t: “The Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time ... The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with lawlessness” (Genesis 6:5-11).

According to Genesis, God “decided to put an end to all flesh” (Genesis 6:13) and he casued the Great Flood which wiped out all creatures on earth, except for Noah and his family, and the animals that Noah brought aboard his ark.

This week we looked at how people could have been considered wicked or lawless given that there were no laws yet. How could the people be held to a standard of behavior when they had no idea what the standard was? And, with death as the ultimate penalty for these lawless beings, how could their destruction represent the actions of a fair and just god?

The ancient Rabbis wanted to believe in a God of justice. But there are other troubling passages in the Bible where God acts less than scrupulously. There are passages where God acts in anger, and even passages where God lies. In order for the God of the Jews to be held up as

a beacon for the Jewish people, he would need a little PR help. And this is where the Rabbis came in...

The ancient Israelite religion that can be found in the writings of the Hebrew Bible was one of animal sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem. A transition away from this form of worship may have already begun when the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE by the Romans, but its destruction put a final end to the rituals of priests at the Temple, and a new form of leadership of the Jewish people began.

The Rabbis were scholars who studied the ancient writings of the Jewish people and tried to help their followers make sense of their place in the world. People would have questioned the wisdom of worshipping a fickle God that wiped out all of humanity (with the exception of Noah and his family). The Rabbis needed to provide clarity on the Noah story.

Jews claim their ancestry from the ancient Israelites. But, according to the biblical literalist chronology, there were no Israelites before Abraham. This chronology tells us that Noah lived hundreds of years before Abraham, so Noah was not Jewish because Judaism did not exist yet. Noah was a member of the general human population.

Turning to ancient writings, the Rabbis could claim that there was recognized universal law, or moral code, that was binding on all humanity. The oldest parts of the book of Isaiah can be dated to the 8th century BCE and contain a passage indicating that people “transgressed teachings, violated laws and broke the ancient covenant” (Isaiah 24:5). And the book of Jubilees, an ancient Jewish text that is not preserved in our Bible, but is preserved in the Christian Bible and would have been writing with which the ancient Rabbis were familiar, indicated that Noah taught his grandsons “ordinances and commandments, and all the judgements that he knew” (Jubilees 7:20).

The Rabbis, by close scrutiny of passages, words, and even single letters of the Torah, were able to provide answers to pressing questions. In the case of which laws the people living before the time of Abraham might have been subject to, the Rabbis created a list of seven laws that they claimed were indicated from a line in the book of Genesis and were binding on all mankind. That line is: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘of every tree of the garden you may freely eat...’” (Genesis 2:16). The laws the Rabbis based on this one line are now known as the Noahide Laws and they are:

• Do not blaspheme
• Do not practice idolatry
• Do create a system of civil law and justice
• Do not murder
• Do not commit adultery or other sexually immoral acts not steal
• Do not eat limbs/flesh from a living animal

Because Noah is a symbol of all humanity, not just Jews, the ancient Rabbis also taught that any person, regardless of religion, who accepts and observes these seven Noahide Laws enjoys a place in the world to come.

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misquotes or misunderstandings in what Rabbi Jaech taught us are the responsibility of Tara Keiter