What's Divine about Divine Law?

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In the millennium before Islam's emergence, two distinct views of divine law clashed, leaving a lasting impact. This work explores the classical and biblical origins of the Western understanding of divine law, highlighting how early biblical tradition followers—like Hellenistic Jewish writers, the Qumran community, Paul, and the talmudic rabbis—navigated this tension. For ancient Greeks, divine law was defined by intrinsic qualities such as rationality, truth, universality, and immutability. In contrast, biblical authors grounded divine law in revelation, without assumptions of rationality or universality. The book examines the collision of these perspectives during the Hellenistic period and the efforts to reconcile the resulting cognitive dissonance. Writers from the Second Temple and Hellenistic Jewish traditions, including the author of 1 Enoch and Philo of Alexandria, aimed to bridge the gap between classical and biblical views, while Paul sought to expand it in his letters to early Christians. Additionally, the talmudic rabbis pursued a provocative third path, constructing a view of divine law that intentionally opposed Greco-Roman and Pauline interpretations, which would later dominate the Christianized West. This intellectual history sheds light on an ancient debate that continues to influence contemporary perspectives on law and Scripture's authority.