What's Divine about Divine Law: Early Perspectives

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In the thousand years before the rise of Islam, two radically diverse conceptions of what it means to say that a law is divine confronted one another with a force that reverberates to the present. What's Divine about Divine Law untangles the classical and biblical roots of the Western idea of divine law and shows how early adherents to biblical tr

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Winner of the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Biblical Studies, Rabbinics, and Jewish History & Culture in Antiquity, Association for Jewish Studies Winner of the 2016 PROSE Award in Theology & Religious Studies, Association of American Publishers Winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship (Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award), Jewish Book Council "Hayes's careful examination of the full range of this literature, especially her deep evaluation of the developments within Rabbinism, represents a major step in understanding of both a central concept in law and a fundamental underpinning of Judaism from antiquity until the present day."--A. J. Avery-Peck, Choice "Christine Hayes has both enriched and challenged the scholarly community with a thoroughly explorative, ambitious, and erudite study of the modalities of Jewish law in relation to Graeco-Roman law theory."--Peter J. Tomson, Journal for the Study of Judaism "This book is beautifully written, carefully structured and as such represents a wonderfully clear way in to the bewildering world of rabbinic Judaism as well as shedding new light on some of the ongoing debates in both Jewish and legal studies."--Joshua M. Heyes, Theology

Author Bio

Christine Hayes is the Robert F. and Patricia R. Weis Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at Yale University. Her books include Introduction to the Bible, The Emergence of Judaism: Classical Traditions in Contemporary Perspective, and Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud.