23 - Divine Law and Human Practices

Summary

One may think of law and laws, whether divine or human, from the standpoint of origins. From this vantage point the focus of the discussion might be on God’s imprimatur and commanding voice, or it might be on a study of human nature and the need for some restraint on it. The Sinaitic revelation or Hobbes’ discussion in the early chapters of Leviathan should handily serve as clear examples of discussions of law whose primary focus is on the origins and starting points of law, its foundations. Such “genetic” discussions of the origins of law, with its apparent agenda to glorify the divine (monarchy) and degrade the (merely) human, is by no means the sum of the kind of discussion one might have about the nature of law and laws. In fact, in the tradition of legal speculation that will be the focus of this chapter, the Jewish philosophical tradition, one finds that “genetic” discussions of the origins of law are no more prominent than discussions focusing, teleologically, on the end or goal of the law. Divine law is divine not only because it was given by God, but also because it leads one to God. Human law is what it is not only because it arises from human nature, but also because it serves necessary sociopolitical and communal purposes.