§ Debates · Ch. 2 · Becoming the People of the Book
How did the rabbis understand biblical law and its death penalty?
2 positions · no single answer
Position A · held by The rabbis
Binding law, elaborated by the Oral Torah
The Sinai revelation included an Oral Torah, not recorded in the Five Books and passed from Moses to Joshua, the prophets and the rabbis, which details biblical law, adds qualifications and makes exceptions.
Rests on: p. 61
Reads the same page as : the same source, different readings.
Where the debate comes up
Statements tied to the debate
- Why do Jews not apply the Bible's death penalty today, say for collecting sticks on the Sabbath? The authors reply that rabbinic thinking shaped what biblical law means in Jewish culture; the rabbis arose in the centuries after the Second Temple fell. They regarded their contemporaries as inheritors of the Sinai covenant, so biblical law, capital cases included, still bound them. But in their view Sinai had also given an Oral Torah, absent from the Five Books and handed down by word of mouth from Moses to Joshua, then to the prophets and finally to the rabbis.
- The Oral Torah expands on biblical law, filling in what the Bible leaves out, adding conditions and carving out exceptions. Rabbinic Jews do not carry out the death penalty for breaking the Sabbath because, they hold, no court in our time has the power to order it, and even a competent court would probably not have applied it to such a trivial offense. Their readings of scripture in effect made the penalty unenforceable, either by requiring extremely strict proof (a prior specific warning to the offender) or by limiting it to the era of desert wandering.