Print
PDF FormatGod’s answer to the people of Ammon is: “You shall not commit adultery,” which is understood to include prohibitions on marital infidelity, incest, homosexuality, and bestiality. They reply that they cannot possibly accept such a commandment. This is because, according to the Bible, their nation emerged from the act of incest between Lot and his daughters.20 Here again, the immoral act is not just the deed of a lone individual, but an officially justified, even constitutive act. Incest is therefore something intrinsic to their historical identity as a nation, so they could not possibly accept such a prohibition.
The reply to the people of Ishmael is: “You shall not steal.” They too answer that they cannot accept such a command. Apparently, state-sponsored theft was the norm in their society, and provided its members with a source of income. The chief characteristic of Ishmael, their progenitor, is that “his hand will be in everything,”21 which, according to the midrash, became a trait that was valued andencouraged by the nation that descended from him.
The question that flows from this is as follows: If all these nations were to accept the Tora as we understand it, that is, the complete Tora containing the 613 commandments of the Written Law, then why did God not tell them that the Tora requires them to keep the Sabbath, or to observe the dietary laws, or to leave the corners of their fields for the poor? In other words, why did he not say what Jews are supposed to say to prospective converts, namely, what some of the specifically Jewish requirements of the Tora are, some of the requirements that would be new to them once they became Jews?22 If the aim had been to say something about the Tora as a unique law, God would not have relied on laws which would be seen by many nations as self-evident. Quite the opposite: In a famous passage in the Talmud, Satan and the nations of the world taunt the Jews for some peculiarly Jewish requirements, such as not eating pork and not wearing clothes of wool and linen weave.23
In the legend, what the gentiles are told by God is, in effect, what they should already have known. The Ten Commandments do not mark the first appearance of the prohibition on murder in the Bible. Rather, when God asked Cain after he murdered his brother Abel, “What did you do?”24 it is assumed that Cain already knew that murder is not to be done. Even though the prohibition had not yet been written down, he is held responsible for its violation. “You shall not commit adultery” is likewise not first revealed in the book of Exodus. Rather, when Joseph is tempted to sleep with Potiphar’s wife, he says to her, “How can I commit this great evil and thus sin against God?”25 The assumption is that not only is Joseph supposed to know that adultery contravenes the universal law of God, but so is Potiphar’s wife. Even though this prohibition is not yet written down in the Tora of Israel, Joseph is considered to be morally upright for knowing it is wrong, and resisting the great temptation he faced.26
Finally, when God says to the Ishmaelites, “You shall not steal,” it is not a new ethical pronouncement, and might very well be alluding to the prohibition of kidnapping, which is the rabbinic interpretation of this commandment.27 Stealing, in this sense, is the serious crime of taking someone else’s liberty, which is only slightly less heinous than taking someone else’s life, but much more heinous than taking someone else’s property. Here again, Joseph is the best example of the pre-Sinaitic, universal status of the prohibition of kidnapping. When he is in prison, after Potiphar’s wife has betrayed him, lied about him, and framed him for the sin she sought to commit, Joseph complains to the chief butler who was imprisoned with him: “I was truly kidnapped from the land of the Hebrews.”28 It is clear from the narrative that Joseph is attempting to have his liberty restored by appealing to what he hopes will be the moral outrage of the Egyptian. In other words, he assumes that this Egyptian already knows that kidnapping, as well as the legal “kidnapping” involved in wrongful imprisonment, is “not to be done” by anyone. The prohibition on stealing, as on murder and adultery, is a clear example of the rules of upright behavior about which the Talmud says: “If they were not written, they should, by right, have been written.”29
In the Bible, and especially the rabbinic interpretations of it, we discover an original Jewish teaching to the effect that the nations of the world, including the Jews, can be held accountable to certain moral standards—but not because the Jews invented these standards or because they were revealed to the Jews exclusively. Jews should not regard the idea of a universal law, which is inherent in the Bible and rabbinic doctrine, to be an example of what the Mishna, in another context, says: “Do as the Jews tell you to do.”30 But if, on the other hand, Jews assert that these standards are uniquely “Jewish, “that somehow or other natural law came from the Jews, then the idea of natural law would indeed be a form of legal, political, and cultural imperialism, as some have argued.31 In other words, if Jews claim that this universal law is derived only from the Tora, then this law would be nothing but Jewish law for gentiles. Indeed, those Jewish thinkers who have made this claim have also denied that this universal law is natural law. For them, the only connection anyone can have to the law of God is through the Jews.32 But this approach ignores the fact that other peoples and other cultures have discovered for themselves, independent of the Jews, much of the content that the Jewish tradition recognizes to be universal. Therefore this law not only ought to be universal (de jure); in many cases it is universal (de facto).
Just as the rabbinic sages had many negative things to say about the gentile nations with whom they came into contact, they also had positive things to say about the moral integrity of some of them.33 When this insight was developed by Jewish philosophers, the moral integrity of the gentiles was attributed to their law being grounded in the creative wisdom of God, and discovered by the moral wisdom of man.34 In fact, one can see in the biblical term “justice,” or mishpat, the designation of a created natural order, especially a created natural human order.35 The rabbis saw that there is an inherent rationality in those laws the Bible called “judgments” (mishpatim), that is, those laws whose justice is immediately evident.36 Medieval Jewish thinkers of a philosophical bent called them “rational commandments” (mitzvot sichliot).37
This insight, it seems, lies behind the rabbinic idea of the seven Noahide laws, which are actually general ethical-legal categories, each one of which contains several specific norms.38 This became the framework by which Jews judged the character of other nations—not as a standard that the Jews invented, but as one they had discovered and assumed that other nations had discovered, or ought to have discovered, as well. According to Jewish tradition, the Jews took this universal standard upon themselves prior to the revelation of the Tora at Mount Sinai—indeed, as we have seen, its acceptance made it possible for the Jews to accept the Tora with moral integrity. The question has always been, though, whether a particular gentile nation had accepted these basic obligations of justice and morality. Accordingly, the existence of such a universal standard enabled the Jews to judge rationally whether they should respect another people, whether they should do business with them, whether they should enter into political alliances with them.39 All of this influenced the way the Jewish law, or halacha, structured relations between Jews and gentiles, including the norms of behavior that Jews would demand of gentiles after regaining their national sovereignty.40 Likewise, this standard would affect the Jewish state’s relations with both gentile nations and individual gentiles living under Jewish rule.41 For Jews in the diaspora, it also was to have an impact on individual and communal relations with the non-Jewish regimes under whose rule they lived.
The idea of natural justice, therefore, has profound significance for relations between Jews and gentiles today, both in Israel and in the diaspora. But it also affects the way Jews see themselves. The Talmud says, “Correct yourself and then correct others.”42 In other words, a standard used to judge the gentiles has moral import only when Jews use it to judge themselves, that is, to determine how they should observe the specific set of laws given to them by God. Along these lines, the Talmud states as a general principle, “There is nothing that is permitted to Israel which is prohibited to the gentiles.”43 In other words, the maximal morality the Jews expect of the gentiles is the minimal morality they are to expect of themselves.
