I enjoyed reading Joshua Berman’s ambitious essay, which examines over 3,000 years of Jewish law through the lens of the contrast between common law and statutory law. Particularly enjoyable was the first section, where he maintains that both the Code of Hammurabi and the Torah are not codes of law but rather collections of precedents applied in a flexible fashion by later judges.
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More about: Bible, Common law, Conservative Judaism, Halakhah, Jewish identity, Joshua Berman, Maimonides, Mishnah, Orthodoxy, Shulhan Arukh, Talmud