In her recent book, What’s Divine about Divine Law, Christine Hayes examines how Jews in antiquity thought about the laws of the Torah. Many, especially those influenced by Greco-Roman thinking, considered halakhah divine because of its nature or characteristics; others saw it as divine simply because it was commanded by God. (This division, she remarks, corresponds neatly to the one in modern legal theory between those who believe in positive law and those who believe in natural law.) According to Hayes, many Greek-speaking Jews—including the Alexandrian philosopher Philo and the apostle Paul—found the two competing notions to be disturbingly dissonant, but the talmudic rabbis, for their part, tended toward a conception of law that transcended the distinction between them. (Interview by Joseph Ryan Kelly. Audio, 52 minutes.)
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