In the thousand years before the rise of Islam, two radically diverse conceptions of what it means to say that a law is divine confronted one another with a force that reverberates to the present. What's Divine about Divine Law? untangles the classical and biblical roots of the Western idea of divine law and shows how early adherents to biblical tradition--Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Philo, the community at Qumran, Paul, and the talmudic rabbis--struggled to make sense of this conflicting legacy.
Christine Hayes shows that for the ancient Greeks, divine law was divine...
In the thousand years before the rise of Islam, two radically diverse conceptions of what it means to say that a law is divine confronted one anoth...