This important book is a reflection on the radically different, but intersecting, visions of divine law that developed in the Ancient Near East in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) and among the Greeks. Christine Hayes, the Robert F. and Patricia Weis Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at Yale University, describes the clash, and its many reverberations down to the present, between the Biblical understanding of divine law reflecting the “will of a divine sovereign” in which the ideal human is the “obedient servant,” and the later ancient conception of divine law that emerged among the Greeks. The latter rejected the role of the gods in setting divine laws, and tied the divinity in law to “certain qualities inherent in it”—notably its rationality, its universality, and its “static unchanging character.”
It is Hayes' thesis that these two discourses “collided head-on” following Alexander's conquest of the eastern Mediterranean in the 4th century BCE, a collision that created “a cognitive dissonance that the West has been grappling with ever since.”
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