The Torah
The Torah is the first of the three divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures, the five books of Moses from Genesis to Deuteronomy; its Hebrew name means "teaching," the Greek Bible rendered it "law," and the Church receives it as God's own instruction, read in her worship and read through Christ.
For Inquirers
When you open a Bible, the first five books are the Torah, a Hebrew word that means "teaching." The books it names begin with the making of the world and end with Moses looking across a river at a land he will never enter. In between come the stories of one family growing into a people, a rescue from slavery, and a mountain where God speaks aloud, and woven through the stories are the commandments: how to worship, how to treat a neighbor, what to eat, how to keep a day of rest. The Greek Bible rendered the word "law" and English followed, so a first-time reader is often surprised by how much of the Torah is simply story.
In traditional Jewish life the Torah is read aloud in the meeting place every week and studied for a lifetime, and Jewish teachers have gathered a great body of discussion about how to live it out, which many Jews count as part of the Torah too. Not every Jew keeps the traditional laws; the scholar Jonathan Klawans notes that many modernizing or secular Jews set them aside in part or entirely. Another Jewish scholar, Amy-Jill Levine, writes that Israel's election rests on God's grace and that observance answers a love already given. Christians hold the same five books as Scripture and have prayed with them from the first days of the Church, and they read them in the light of Jesus, who said He had come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 5.17).
The earliest Christians had to settle almost at once whether a follower of Jesus must keep every commandment in the Torah. The apostles at Jerusalem did not lay circumcision and the Mosaic code on Gentile believers, though they asked them to keep from idol-food, sexual immorality, strangled meat, and blood (Acts 15.19; Acts 15.20). The Church holds that the commandments to love God and neighbor stay fully in force, while the observances that prefigured Christ are fulfilled in Him and are no longer practiced; Augustine writes that no Christian, Jewish-born or not, is now free to observe those old rites. Jews and Christians still see this line differently, and Klawans observes that they share more than they commonly realize.
Overview
- The Torah is the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Its Greek name, the Pentateuch, comes from words meaning "five" and a "volume" or "scroll," and the books are also called the Law of Moses and the Books of Moses.[^ow-pent][^oca-law]
- Torah is a Hebrew word for teaching or instruction. The Greek translators rendered it nomos, "law," and Latin and English followed, so that books of narrative, commandment, and exhortation are now usually called "the Law."[^jant-law][^dy]
- The Torah is the first division of the Hebrew Scriptures. "The law and the prophets" names the first two divisions, and Luke's Gospel adds the Psalms as a third (Luke 24.44).[^jant-law]
- Rabbinic tradition holds that God gave Moses an Oral Torah along with the written one, later recorded in the Mishnah and the Talmud, and the Torah is read in the synagogue every Sabbath.[^jant-law][^jant-syn][^jant-gloss]
- The Church receives the Torah as Scripture and as fulfilled in Christ (Matthew 5.17). Paul says that faith "establishes" the law (Romans 3.31), and the apostles at Jerusalem did not require Gentile believers to keep it whole (Acts 15.19).
- Augustine and Justin distinguish the commandments that bind every Christian from the observances that prefigured Christ, and Tertullian and Chrysostom answer those who reject the Law with the unity of the God of Moses and the God of the Gospel.[^aug-cf19][^just-45][^tert-m4][^chrys-mt16]
- The weekday readings of Great Lent focus on Genesis, Proverbs, and Isaiah, and the Church sings the songs of Moses at Matins, and reads from Exodus and Leviticus when the Lord is brought to the Temple.^ow-lent[^lash]
Summary
The first five books of the Bible were called, in the language of the people who first received them, torah, and the word carries more than the English "law" can hold: it means instruction, and the instruction arrives as history, genealogy, poetry, and sermon as well as statute. The Greek-speaking Jews who translated them rendered it nomos, a broad word that also took in custom and a people's whole way of life, and the narrower Latin and English "law" that followed has shaped how Paul's letters are read ever since. The Torah speaks of itself as wisdom and as the nearness of God to Israel (Deuteronomy 4.6; Deuteronomy 30.14), and the Psalms sing of it as light and delight. Jews of the first century heard it read in the synagogue every Sabbath, the rabbis received alongside it an oral interpretation that was later written down in the Mishnah and the Talmud, and Amy-Jill Levine asks Christians to set aside the old stereotype of a legalism that earns God's favor. The Lord says He came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, and Chrysostom explains the fulfillment as His own sinless keeping of it, as the righteousness He works in His people, and as the new commandments He gave. Chrysostom hears Paul's statements that Christ is the end of the law and that the law was a tutor as naming the Law's goal and its schoolmaster. The apostles at Jerusalem refused to bind Gentile Christians to the Mosaic code, and the Church has since drawn a line, in Augustine's phrase, between moral precepts and typical sacraments, while holding against Marcion that one God gave both the Law and the Gospel. The books remain in the Church's worship through the Lenten readings, the songs of Moses, and the lessons for the Lord's Presentation.
The word and its translations
Anyone who learns the five books under the name "the Law" has been handed an interpretation along with the name. The Hebrew word torah means teaching, and Jonathan Klawans, writing in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, notes what the New Jewish Publication Society translation does with it: where the New Revised Standard Version reads "the law of Moses" in 1 Kings 2.3, the Jewish translation reads "the Teaching of Moses," a rendering that fits both the reverence Jews have for the Torah and the word's fuller meaning.[^jant-law] The reason is the contents. The Pentateuch holds many narratives, and Klawans names Genesis and the opening chapters of Exodus and Deuteronomy among the teachings that are not legal in nature.[^jant-law] Fr. Stephen De Young makes the same point in his lectures on Genesis, observing that a reader who hears only "commandments" in the word is taking in roughly half the Torah and leaving out the whole of Genesis and the first half of Exodus.[^dy]
The step from Hebrew into Greek was taken by Jews. Klawans observes that the Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, together called the Septuagint (The Septuagint), render torah with nomos, "law," with nearly perfect consistency, that the word does sometimes mean "law" in the Hebrew itself (he gives Leviticus 11.46), and that a book so full of statutes and ordinances invited the name.[^jant-law] De Young adds what nomos meant to a Greek ear. It covered the laws of a people and also its customs, its religion, and its whole way of life, so that one could speak of the nomos of Athens and mean its worship of Athena as much as its constitution, and philosophers set it against what exists by nature.[^dy] On his account it was a sound match for torah in breadth, with one small shift, since teaching from God to humanity became the nomos of a single nation among others. Jerome's Latin lex at first kept much of that breadth, he says, and over the medieval centuries it narrowed to the civil law of the modern world, which is the sense English "law" now carries.[^dy] The chain from Hebrew through Greek and Latin to English is followed further in Translating Scripture.
Klawans points out that nomos appears nearly two hundred times in the New Testament with no single meaning throughout, and that Mark's Gospel, despite its many arguments about commandments, never uses the word.[^jant-law] The notes of the Jewish Annotated New Testament on Romans observe that Paul can mean the Torah by nomos, but also the law of a particular people, circumcision, the bond of marriage, and in Romans 7 and 8 the "law" of sin and death and the "law" of faith, life, and Christ.[^jant-notes] De Young adds that an English reader who meets "the law" in Paul tends to hear only the commandments, and so mistakes a wide argument about the whole Mosaic teaching for a narrow one about legal rules.[^dy] Any account of the Torah in the New Testament has to begin with the whole range of the word in view.
The five books
The names of the books are a small history of their own. The ancient Jews, according to Bishop Alexander (Mileant), referred to each book by its opening words, "In the beginning" for the first, and the familiar titles arrived later, apparently first in the Septuagint.[^mileant] The Greek names say something about content. Genesis means "beginning," Exodus "exit" or "departure," and Deuteronomy "second law," a name that fits the book in which Moses, on the plains of Moab, retells and expands what was given earlier.[^ow-ot][^oca-law][^mileant] Leviticus takes its Greek name from the Levites, the tribe that served in the worship (Levites), and Numbers is the book of the census and the wilderness journey.[^mileant][^oca-law] The name for the whole, Pentateuch, means a fivefold scroll or volume, and De Young notes that the five books have circulated as a single unit as far as the evidence goes, sometimes on one large scroll and sometimes on five.[^ow-pent][^dy] Athanasius, giving the books of the Old Testament in his Festal Letter, keeps the same order: "The first is Genesis, then Exodus, next Leviticus, after that Numbers, and then Deuteronomy."[^ath-39]
The story the five books tell has an arc that the Church reads as one. The Orthodox Church in America's summary has Genesis tell of creation, the fall, and the patriarchs, ending with Jacob's family settled in Egypt; Exodus tell of the deliverance under Moses, the revelation of the divine name, the Passover, and the Ten Commandments at Sinai; Leviticus give the priestly and ritual laws; Numbers record a census and the movement of the people through the wilderness; and Deuteronomy retell the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic laws before ending with Moses' blessing and his sight of the promised land.[^oca-law] Mileant treats the covenant at Sinai as the key to the Old Testament and describes the Pentateuch as history joined to prophecy, an account of beginnings that prepares for the Redeemer.[^mileant] Authorship, textual history, and critical theory are set out at length in Book of Genesis, Book of Exodus, and Book of Leviticus.
In Orthodox usage the books carry several names at once. The Orthodox Church in America says that the first part of the Bible is called the Torah, glossed as "the Law," and also the Pentateuch and the Books of Moses, and that in the tradition of Israel and of the Church the Law stays bound to Moses, even though scholars find older oral and written traditions and later material in it.[^oca-law] The Lord Himself speaks of Moses as a writer: "For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote about me" (John 5.46).
The Torah in its own words
In Deuteronomy Moses tells the people to keep the ordinances and judgments, "for this is your wisdom and understanding before all nations," and the nations that hear of them will say, "Behold, this great nation is a wise and understanding people" (Deuteronomy 4.6). The reason he gives is the nearness of God: "what manner of nation is so great, which has God so near to them as the Lord our God is in all things in whatsoever we may call upon him?" (Deuteronomy 4.7). The law is presented as the visible shape of a relationship, the way a people lives beside the God who spoke to it "out of the midst of the fire" (Deuteronomy 4.12).[^deut4]
The great commandment, the one the Lord later names first, comes wrapped in a program of teaching. After "Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God is one Lord," and the command to love Him with all the mind, soul, and strength, the people are told: "thou shalt teach them to thy children, and thou shalt speak of them sitting in the house, and walking by the way, and lying down, and rising up" (Deuteronomy 6.4; Deuteronomy 6.5; Deuteronomy 6.7). The words are to be fastened as a sign on the hand and written on the lintels of the houses and gates (Deuteronomy 6.8; Deuteronomy 6.9). The Torah here is a household curriculum, spoken at the table and on the road, and the Greek word that came to name it, nomos, is best heard against that background.[^deut6]
Near the end of Deuteronomy Moses says how close the commandment lies: "For this command which I give thee this day is not grievous, neither is it far from thee. It is not in heaven above, as if there were one saying, Who shall go up for us into heaven, and shall take it for us, and we will hear and do it?" (Deuteronomy 30.11; Deuteronomy 30.12). The answer is "The word is very near thee, in thy mouth, and in thine heart, and in thine hands to do it" (Deuteronomy 30.14), and the choice laid before the people is "life and death, the blessing and the curse: choose thou life" (Deuteronomy 30.19).[^deut30] Paul takes up this passage in Romans 10.
The Psalms pray the Torah as a delight. The first psalm blesses the man whose "pleasure is in the law of the Lord; and in his law will he meditate day and night" (Psalms 1.2), and the long psalm that the Greek Bible numbers 118 is one extended praise of it: "How I have loved thy law, O Lord! it is my meditation all the day" (Psalms 118.97). The psalm numbered 18 in the same Greek Psalter gathers the attitude into a line: "The law of the Lord is perfect, converting souls: the testimony of the Lord is faithful, instructing babes" (Psalms 18.8). Its next verse calls the ordinances "right, rejoicing the heart" and the commandment "bright, enlightening the eyes" (Psalms 18.9).[^psalms] Those psalms are part of the Church's prayer (The Psalter), and in them the Torah, in Israel's own voice, is loved before it is argued about.
Israel also identified the Torah with Wisdom. At the end of Wisdom's speech in Sirach the sage says: "All these things are the book of the covenant of the most high God, even the law which Moses commanded for an heritage unto the congregations of Jacob" (Sirach 24.23).[^sirach] The notes of the Jewish Annotated New Testament observe that this identification of Wisdom and Torah continues into rabbinic literature, and they connect it with the way the Prologue of John speaks of the Word.[^jant-notes]
What Jewish tradition holds
Amy-Jill Levine argues in the Jewish Annotated New Testament that Christian preaching has often described the Jewish reading of the Torah from outside and wrongly.[^jant-errors] The picture that emerges from that volume is of a tradition that treated the Torah as a gift, studied it as a community, and held that it was never meant to stand alone.
Read aloud every week
Lee Levine, writing on the synagogue, calls the reading of the Torah the core of synagogue worship by the first century, attested in almost every kind of source from Judea and the Diaspora.[^jant-syn] He gives Josephus's claim that Moses ordained that every week the people should leave their work and gather to hear the Law and learn it exactly, a practice Josephus says other lawgivers neglected, and he cites an inscription from first-century Jerusalem recording that a priest named Theodotos built a synagogue for the reading of the Law and the study of the commandments, with a guesthouse for travelers.[^jant-syn] The first-century buildings excavated so far, he adds, had no permanent shrine for the Torah, and scrolls seem to have been brought in for the reading and then taken away.[^jant-syn] The New Testament shows the same practice from inside. "He entered, as was his custom, into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up to read," Luke says of the Lord at Nazareth (Luke 4.16), and at Antioch in Pisidia the rulers of the synagogue send to Paul and his companions after the reading of the Law and the Prophets (Acts 13.15), and James at Jerusalem takes it for granted that "Moses from generations of old has in every city those who preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath" (Acts 15.21).[^nt-synagogue] Levine notes that no other form of worship in the ancient world consisted of a whole community regularly hearing and studying a sacred text, apart from certain mystery cults whose texts were read to initiates.[^jant-syn] The institution is taken up in Synagogue.
Written Torah and Oral Torah
Klawans explains that for many first-century Jews "the Law" was more than the written text. He says that the Pharisees followed traditions not found in the Bible, such as washing the hands before meals, that the Dead Sea Scrolls attest laws absent from the Hebrew Bible, and that later rabbis derived further law from Scripture by midrash.[^jant-law] His example is the stumbling block placed before the blind in Leviticus 19.14, which the Sifra reads as a ban on deceiving anyone by word or deed. In time rabbinic Judaism came to hold that revelation had come in two forms, written and oral, and he gives the story of Hillel telling a would-be convert that there are two Torahs.[^jant-law] The glossary of the same volume records the rabbinic belief that the Oral Torah was given to Moses at Sinai along with the written one, and describes the tractate Avot of the Mishnah as tracing the transmission of the oral law from Moses to the rabbis.[^jant-gloss]
The belief shaped practice, and Klawans says how far. Once it took root, whole areas of Jewish life such as food, Sabbath, and the synagogue could develop with hardly any basis in the biblical text, justified by the conviction that they came down in the Oral Torah.[^jant-law] After the destruction of the Temple the rabbis kept circumcision, extended the dietary and Sabbath laws, and built out systems of marriage, civil, and criminal law, while preserving the memory of the purity and sacrificial laws no longer practiced, and the first great monument of this work was the Mishnah.[^jant-law] The Mishnah and its Talmudic and midrashic companions are treated in Mishnah, Midrash, and Rabinic Judaism, and the movement from which they descend in Pharisees.
Marc Zvi Brettler adds a point of fairness that cuts in both directions. The New Testament and the rabbis, he says, each treat the Hebrew Bible as a sourcebook, selecting themes and passages and reading them in ways the casual reader would not expect: the rabbis derive the separation of milk and meat from the command not to boil a kid in its mother's milk, and the Letter to the Hebrews reads Jeremiah's promise of a new covenant as a new revelation replacing the old.[^jant-brettler] A Jewish reader may judge that the New Testament gives Isaiah 53 more weight than the Tanakh does, he writes, and he argues in turn that rabbinic Judaism likewise does not represent the Hebrew Bible in a proportionate fashion.[^jant-brettler] Klawans draws the common conclusion: Christians and Jews alike hold that the Pentateuch "does not stand on its own," and each has found its fulfillment elsewhere, the Christians in the New Testament and the Jews in the Oral Torah.[^jant-law]
The Jewish voice in the Dialogue
Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho gives a Jewish objection through an interlocutor, Trypho, whom Justin, a Christian, wrote himself, so the words are to be read with that in mind. Early in the conversation Trypho advises Justin to be circumcised, "then observe what ordinances have been enacted with respect to the Sabbath, and the feasts, and the new moons of God; and, in a word, do all things which have been written in the law: and then perhaps you shall obtain mercy from God."[^just-8] That advice makes the Law the way to mercy. Later Trypho says what he and his companions find hardest to understand about Christians: that they profess piety and suppose themselves better than others, yet "do not alter your mode of living from the nations, in that you observe no festivals or sabbaths, and do not have the rite of circumcision," and hope for good from God "while you do not obey His commandments."[^just-10] Justin's replies on the Law are set out below.
Grace, not a ladder
Levine's essay lists among ten stereotypes that remain in some Christian preaching the charge that Jews keep the Torah in order to earn God's favor.[^jant-errors] She answers that the election of Israel rests on grace and not on merit, that the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 10.1) says all Israel has a share in the world to come, and that observance is a response to a love already given.[^jant-errors] She cites Deuteronomy 30.11 against the picture of a law too hard to bear, and she notes that Acts 15.10 ("a yoke which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear") supplies the language behind that picture.[^jant-errors] A Talmudic tradition preserved in a note on Galatians says that the Torah holds 613 commandments and that Habakkuk reduced them to a single principle, that the righteous shall live by faith.[^jant-notes]
Levine also challenges the picture of Jesus as a critic standing outside the tradition. On her reading, Jesus wears the fringes the Torah prescribes, keeps the Sabbath, and argues with fellow Jews about how to observe the commandments, and one does not argue over a practice in which one has no stake; he takes the Great Commandment from the Torah, and in the Sermon on the Mount he makes the Law stricter, forbidding anger as well as murder and lust as well as adultery.[^jant-errors] Klawans calls the charge of Jewish legalism, with its picture of tedious attention to ancient ritual, a stereotype that has not fully disappeared from Christian criticism of Judaism, and the glossary of the same volume defines the word as a pejorative label used by Christian writers.[^jant-law][^jant-gloss] Levine adds that the purity laws, the Sabbath, the food laws, and tithing helped Jews resist assimilation, served as signs of identity, and helped support the poor.[^jant-errors] This is the tradition to which the Lord, Paul, and the apostles belonged, and its estimate of the Torah has to be heard before the Church's estimate is understood.
The Law and the Prophets in the Lord's mouth
"Don't think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn't come to destroy, but to fulfill," the Lord says in the Sermon on the Mount, and goes on: "until heaven and earth pass away, not even one smallest letter or one tiny pen stroke shall in any way pass away from the law, until all things are accomplished" (Matthew 5.17; Matthew 5.18). Both sentences bind His coming to the Law down to its smallest stroke. The verses that follow warn that whoever breaks even the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so will be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven, and that unless the hearers' righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees they will not enter at all (Matthew 5.19; Matthew 5.20).[^mt5] The setting of these words in the Gospel is the subject of Book of Matthew, and the larger doctrine of fulfillment is laid out in Fulfillment of The Law.
The phrase "the law and the prophets" recurs in the Gospel as a summary of the whole Scripture of Israel. The Golden Rule is "the law and the prophets" (Matthew 7.12), and love of God and love of neighbor are the two commandments on which "the whole law and the prophets depend" (Matthew 22.40). After the Resurrection the Lord tells the disciples that "all things which are written in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms concerning me must be fulfilled" (Luke 24.44), a sentence that makes the Torah's own books a testimony to Him.[^lawprophets] Klawans notes that "law" and "prophets" in Matthew's verse mean the first two divisions of the Hebrew Bible.[^jant-law]
Chrysostom, preaching on the passage, finds three ways in which the Lord fulfills the Law. The first is that He kept it. "He did fulfill it all," Chrysostom says, and he points to the Lord's word to John, "thus it becomes us to fulfill all righteousness" (Matthew 3.15), and to His challenge to His opponents, "Which of you convinces me of sin" (John 8.46).[^chrys-mt16] The second is that He brings the Law's aim to its end in His people. Chrysostom ties Matthew's verse to Paul: "since the law was laboring at this, to make man righteous, but had not power, He came and brought in the way of righteousness by faith, and so established that which the law desired: and what the law could not by letters, this He accomplished by faith."[^chrys-mt16] The third sense, he says, is "that future code of laws, which He was about to deliver to them," which gives the commandments of the Sermon their place in the argument.[^chrys-mt16] He observes that the Lord's words check the obstinacy of the Jews and also stop the mouths of the heretics who say that the old covenant is of the devil, a remark that returns in the section on Marcion.
The commandments of the Sermon that go beyond the letter have a Jewish setting as well. Klawans points out that when the Lord says "You have heard that it was said, ... but I say to you," and takes "an eye for an eye" to forbid resisting an evildoer (Matthew 5.38; Matthew 5.39), or reads the divorce provision of Deuteronomy 24 more strictly, He does something rabbinic law also does with the same texts: the rabbis read the law of the talion as requiring monetary payment, and a Dead Sea text likewise suggests that divorce results in adultery.[^jant-law] The point he draws is that "fulfilling" the Law could include questioning its plain sense in a way ancient Jewish discourse knew, and that the sayings of Jesus fit within the range of that discourse, though he also notes that early rabbinic law has no exact parallel to the principle of nonresistance.[^jant-law]
Paul and the law
Paul's letters are where the question of the Law is argued hardest. He says that "by the works of the law, no flesh will be justified in his sight; for through the law comes the knowledge of sin" (Romans 3.20), and in the same chapter that "a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law" (Romans 3.28). He then asks the question the reader cannot help asking: "Do we then nullify the law through faith? May it never be! No, we establish the law" (Romans 3.31).[^rom3] Paul's own answer is that faith upholds the Law. Chrysostom hears in the word "establish" an admission that the Law had become worn out, and then shows how faith helps it: the Law's purpose was to make man righteous, which it could not do, and faith, "when it came," did what the Law's whole system aimed at. "The intention then of the Law it did establish, and what all its enactments aim after, this has it brought to a consummation. Consequently it has not disannulled, but perfected it."[^chrys-rom7]
In Romans 7 Paul speaks more darkly about the Law's relation to sin, and then draws back: "Is the law sin? May it never be! However, I wouldn't have known sin except through the law" (Romans 7.7), and "the law indeed is holy, and the commandment holy, righteous, and good" (Romans 7.12). Chrysostom takes up a debate about which law Paul means and decides that it is the law of Moses, giving as one reason that the law of nature was not given by the Spirit and Paul calls this law "spiritual" (Romans 7.14). He then insists that the Law is not to be blamed for the sin it exposes: the passage shows "the preëminence of grace above the Law, the preëminence above, not the conflict with, the Law," and he tells his hearers that if the Law lacked the strength to heal, it should still be given "a crown for its intention," while the power of Christ is adored the more.[^chrys-rom12]
Romans 10.4 reads: "For Christ is the fulfillment of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes." In the translation in which Chrysostom is read the word is "end," and the note of Mark Nanos in the Jewish Annotated New Testament takes "law" here to mean circumcision and "end" as "goal," adding that on this reading Paul argues for the Torah's ideal aims and not for its abolition, and that the verses that follow paraphrase Deuteronomy 30.11-14.[^jant-notes] Chrysostom reads the verse through an image of medicine. "For the end of the physician's art is health," he says. The man who has Christ therefore has the end of the Law as well, and he draws the consequence for the Law's feasts and sacrifices: "This then was the end of the Law and to this it looked throughout, and for this all its parts were made, its feasts, and commandments, and sacrifices, and all besides, that man might be justified."[^chrys-rom17] Nanos and Chrysostom, by different routes, both resist a reading in which the verse cancels the Law.
Paul tells the Galatians something sharper. He says that "as many as are of the works of the law are under a curse" (Galatians 3.10), and that "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law" (Galatians 3.13). He asks "Then why is there the law?" and answers that "It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come" (Galatians 3.19), so that "the law has become our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith" (Galatians 3.24). The notes of the Jewish Annotated New Testament observe that the curse falls on those who cannot keep the entire Torah, that Paul posits a mutually exclusive relationship between the covenant, the promise, and the inheritance on one side and the law on the other, and that his remark that the Law came through angels and a mediator ranks it below the covenant with Abraham, though he stops short of setting the Law against the promises.[^jant-notes]
Chrysostom reads "added because of transgressions" as a gift. God gave the Law so that the Jews "might not be let live carelessly," and placed it on them "as a bridle, guiding, regulating, and checking them from transgressing."[^chrys-gal3-19] The tutor, he explains, works together with the teacher, and when the youth's habits are formed the tutor leaves. "Those then are the greatest traducers of the Law, who still keep it," he writes, "just as the tutor makes a youth ridiculous, by retaining him with himself, when time calls for his departure." He also gives the picture of a candle that gave light by night and that, if it kept us from the sun when day came, would injure us, so that the Law becomes an adversary of grace only if it stands between us and greater benefits.[^chrys-gal3-24] The same letter states what it cannot be taken to deny: "the whole law is fulfilled in one word, in this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself'" (Galatians 5.14), and Paul warns that whoever receives circumcision as a means of justification becomes "a debtor to do the whole law" (Galatians 5.3).[^gal5]
The second letter to the Corinthians gives the severest-sounding phrase: "the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life" (2 Corinthians 3.6). Chrysostom explains that Paul does not say it absolutely, that by "letter" he means the Law which punishes those who transgress, and by "spirit" the grace given through Baptism: the Law put to death a man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath (Numbers 15.32), while the Gospel, finding a murderer, enlightens and gives him life.[^chrys-2cor6] In his next homily he sums up the whole contrast as showing "the superiority, not the enmity or contradiction, of the New Covenant in respect to the old."[^chrys-2cor7] The notes of the Jewish Annotated New Testament on 2 Corinthians 3 describe Paul's use of an argument from the lesser to the greater, which the Talmud counts among the seven principles of Hillel, and they say it is disputed whether Paul meant only that the Law is not binding on Gentiles or that it no longer applies to Jews either.[^jant-notes] Klawans concludes that Paul did not reject the Pentateuch, whose narratives of Abraham and Hagar he treats as permanently valid, and that the "works of the law" that troubled him were certain rituals concerning food and the body, most of all when Gentiles took them up.[^jant-law]
Jerusalem
Acts 15 records an early decision of the Church about the Torah. Some men came down from Judea and taught that "Unless you are circumcised after the custom of Moses, you can't be saved" (Acts 15.1), and believing Pharisees insisted that the Gentiles be commanded "to keep the law of Moses" (Acts 15.5). Peter asks why they would "put a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear" (Acts 15.10), and James gives the judgment that Gentile believers be spared trouble but asked to abstain "from the pollution of idols, from sexual immorality, from what is strangled, and from blood" (Acts 15.19; Acts 15.20). James adds a reason drawn from the synagogue's weekly reading: "For Moses from generations of old has in every city those who preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath" (Acts 15.21).[^acts15] The council itself is treated in The Council of Jerusalem.
Chrysostom reads James' verses as a measure of respect for the Law inside a decision that lightens its burden. "Since then they had heard of the Law," he says, "with good reason he enjoins these things from the Law, that he may not seem to make it of no authority." He adds that the decree is then made in common, with the whole Church.[^chrys-acts33] On Chrysostom's account the authority that releases the Gentiles from circumcision is that of the apostles and elders, to whom it "seemed good" along with "the Holy Spirit" (Acts 15.28), exercised with respect for the Law.
David Freidenreich, in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, observes that the decree exempts Gentile Christ-believers from most Jewish dietary laws but keeps two fundamental taboos. Jews of the Second Temple period regarded food offered to idols as tantamount to idolatry, and passages in the Torah and the Prophets treat blood as forbidden to all people or to the whole covenant community; early Christian authorities, he adds, uniformly read the decree literally.[^jant-food] Klawans describes the seven Noachide laws that the rabbis developed, building on Genesis 9 and possibly on Jubilees, as the minimal obligations on Gentiles, lists the Talmudic version, and relates the idea to Paul's remark in Romans 2.14 that some Gentiles "do by nature the things of the law."[^jant-law] Neither essay identifies the Jerusalem decree with the Noachide laws, and the connection is better treated as a suggestion than a finding.
Dividing the Law
Once the Law was no longer binding in its entirety, it mattered how the Church distinguished what stays from what goes. Justin draws one division in the Dialogue. Asked whether those who lived by the law of Moses will be saved, he answers that what in the law "is naturally good, and pious, and righteous" was done also by those under the law, and he sets beside it "what was appointed to be performed by reason of the hardness of the people's hearts."[^just-45] On the latter he tells Trypho that God laid the many ordinances on Israel so that "by the large number of them, you might keep God continually, and in every action, before your eyes," and he lists the fringes and the phylactery as examples, adding that such ordinances contribute nothing to the performance of righteousness and piety.[^just-45][^just-46] Trypho agrees that Abraham and the patriarchs, who kept none of these ordinances apart from circumcision, are saved, and the argument turns on that agreement.
Augustine draws a different distinction, in answer to the Manichaean claim that Christians must have destroyed the Law since they do not do what it says. The only things Christians do not observe, he replies, are those that prefigured Christ, and these have ceased because they are fulfilled: "Do not Christians observe the precept of Scripture 'Hear, O Israel; the Lord your God is one God;' 'You shall not make unto you an image,' and so on?" He runs through the commandment against taking the name in vain, the Sabbath "in the sense of a true rest," honoring parents, and abstaining from fornication, murder, theft, false witness, and coveting. Everything on his list, the Sabbath as true rest included, is something Christians still do. He concludes: "These moral precepts are distinct from typical sacraments: the former are fulfilled by the aid of divine grace, the latter by the accomplishment of what they promise."[^aug-cf19]
Augustine's letter to Jerome concerns the rites themselves. The circumcision and other rites of the Old Testament were, he writes, "given to the Jews with divine authority, as signs of future things which were to be fulfilled in Christ," and after the fulfillment they remain for Christians to be read for understanding the prophecies and not to be practiced. He compares the rites to the dead, who should be carried honorably to the grave and not cast out to be torn by their enemies, which is why the apostles could honor them sincerely for a time.[^aug-ep82] In the same letter he insists that in his own day no Jew who becomes a Christian is required or free to observe the ceremonies of the old dispensation, and the exchange with Jerome turns on whether the apostles kept them sincerely or feigned. Augustine reports that Jerome regards the ceremonies as harmful and deadly, and both men agree that they are not binding now.[^aug-ep82]
Other writers cut the Law along different lines and for different reasons. The Apostolic Constitutions hold that God "gave a plain law to assist the law of nature," that this law is the decalogue, which is good and holy and lays no compulsion in things positive, and that after the people made the calf God added the sacrifices and the distinction of meats as bonds in punishment. The Lord's coming, they say, confirmed and completed the law and took away the additional precepts: "He did not therefore take away the law from us, but the bonds."[^ac-vi19-22] Here the division rests on a history of sin and its remedy. Tertullian, answering a Jewish interlocutor, grounds the moral precepts in nature instead: he argues that the precepts later given through Moses were contained in embryo in the commandment given to Adam in paradise and that "before the Law of Moses, written in stone-tables, I contend that there was a law unwritten, which was habitually understood naturally, and by the fathers was habitually kept."[^tert-jews]
Basil, in his letter on marrying a deceased wife's sister, states a working limit: "whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law; otherwise we shall be subject to circumcision, the sabbath, abstinence from meats."[^basil160] He does not dismiss Leviticus 18 on that ground. He keeps the marital prohibition and argues for it from custom and from the law's own meaning, as Book of Leviticus sets out.
These writers supply materials for a division of the Law into moral, ceremonial, and civil parts, but they do not agree on why the non-moral half exists. Justin treats it as a discipline imposed for hardness of heart, Augustine as a set of signs of Christ that cease when He comes, and the Constitutions as bonds added after the calf. The Orthodox Church in America describes the Law's commandments as concerning moral and ritual conduct.[^oca-law] The headings themselves appear by name elsewhere: OrthodoxWiki's page on Leviticus says the New Testament abrogates the Old Testament's ceremonial law, Eusebius reports the Ebionites holding the observance of the ceremonial law necessary, and Jerome's letter to Augustine speaks of the burden of the ceremonial law.[^ow-lev][^euseb-325][^jer-112] Mileant's outline of Exodus gives the moral and civil laws and then the laws related to worship and priesthood, and he describes the Mosaic code as a judicial code that reaches well past religion into political, social, and family affairs, regulating even the power of kings and the impartial administration of justice, a likeness to other ancient codes that he traces to the moral law set by God in every human soul.[^mileant]
Klawans raises a caution about a related move in modern scholarship. Some scholars explain Paul by supposing that he rejected the ritual or ceremonial laws and kept the moral ones, which fits his refusal of circumcision and food laws and his insistence on sexual and ethical conduct. But Paul does not himself draw a clear line between ritual and ethics, Klawans says, nor does rabbinic literature or any other Jewish legal source of the Second Temple period, and it is not clear that Paul's ethical advice is entirely rooted in Jewish Scripture.[^jant-law] Freidenreich adds that the Letter of Aristeas and Philo already explained the food laws as lessons in moral virtue whose observance sets Jews apart, which complicates any clean sorting of commandments into ritual and moral, and Levine argues that the purity, Sabbath, food, and tithing laws helped Jews resist assimilation, served as signs of identity, and supported the poor.[^jant-food][^jant-errors] Klawans notes that the Ten Commandments keep binding force for many Christians.[^jant-law] He addresses scholars' readings of Paul and not the Fathers' scheme, but the absence of a ritual-ethical line in Jewish legal sources is worth keeping beside it.
Marcion and the rejection of the Law
If the Law is holy, the Church had to answer those who said it was not, among them Marcion. Irenaeus summarizes him: Marcion "advanced the most daring blasphemy against Him who is proclaimed as God by the law and the prophets," and held that Jesus, sent from a Father above the Maker of the world, came "abolishing the prophets and the law, and all the works of that God who made the world."[^iren-127] OrthodoxWiki adds that Marcion made the Gospel of Luke, Acts, and ten of Paul's epistles his only canon and rejected the Old Testament entirely as of no value to Christians.^ow-marcion The details of his canon are treated under Canon of Scripture, and the wider family of movements to which he is related under Gnosticism.
Tertullian reports Marcion's method in his book against him. Marcion wrote a work of contrary statements called the Antitheses, intended to effect "such a severance of the law from the gospel as should divide the Deity into two, nay, diverse, gods." Tertullian answers by granting the contrast and denying the conclusion. He allows that one order ran its course under the Creator and another is on its way under Christ, and that the teachings differ, but "all this diversity is consistent with one and the same God, even Him by whom it was arranged and also foretold."[^tert-m4] Tertullian thus concedes what is plain, that the Law and the Gospel differ, and holds that one God ordered both and announced the change beforehand. Marcion's position is known here only through his opponents.
Chrysostom, preaching on Matthew 5.17, brings the same principle to the Lord's words. Of the heretics who hold the old covenant to be of the devil he asks: "if Christ came to destroy his tyranny, how is this covenant not only not destroyed, but even fulfilled by Him?" A Christ who had come against the Law would not have fulfilled all of it when He came.[^chrys-mt16] The Constitutions address a different error, that of the followers of Simon, who abuse the law of nature supposing they will not be judged by it, and answer that Christ "nowhere has dissolved the law, as Simon pretends, but fulfilled it," with Moses and Elijah present at the Transfiguration as friends of Christ.[^ac-vi19-22] Chrysostom argues that the Law cannot be the devil's if Christ fulfilled it, and the Constitutions that Christ confirms the Law and does not dissolve it.
Does the Church keep the Law?
The apostles at Jerusalem released the Gentile believers from circumcision and the Mosaic code and laid on them four requirements (Acts 15.28; Acts 15.29). Paul warns the Galatians that receiving circumcision as a ground of acceptance puts one under the whole Law (Galatians 5.2; Galatians 5.3), and says elsewhere that "the law is good if a person uses it lawfully" (1 Timothy 1.8). Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the Magnesians, says that to go on living by Judaism is to avow that grace has not been received, and "It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practise Judaism."[^ign-magn] Basil's principle that the law speaks to those under it applies the same release, and the Constitutions tell the faithful to abstain from the old observances, the distinction of meats, and daily washings, while holding that Christ took away the bonds and left the law.[^basil160][^ac-vi19-22]
Justin gives a more generous answer than Ignatius or Augustine. Asked by Trypho whether a man who believes in Christ and still wishes to keep the Mosaic institutions can be saved, he says: "In my opinion, Trypho, such an one will be saved, if he does not strive in every way to persuade other men — I mean those Gentiles who have been circumcised from error by Christ — to observe the same things as himself, telling them that they will not be saved unless they do so."[^just-47] He adds that some people refuse fellowship to such persons and that he does not agree with them, and he says that those who keep the ordinances out of weak-mindedness, while holding the Christian hope and not pressing them on Gentiles, should be received as kinsmen and brethren.[^just-47] Justin allows the observance as a personal practice and calls it weak-mindedness, and he denies it as a requirement. Ignatius and Augustine take the stricter view that a Christian has no liberty to practice Judaism.
The Fathers speak of the Law in a range of tones. Augustine compares its rites to the dead who are to be carried honorably to the grave, Ignatius calls the practice of Judaism monstrous, and Chrysostom says the Law had worn out and that those who still keep it do it the greatest wrong, though he also says Christ perfected it and did not annul it. The Church prays the Psalms that praise the Law, reads the books in her worship, and holds that the commandments of love stay in force. The Constitutions say that Christ "did not take away the law of nature, but confirmed it," and that He who said in the law "You shall love your neighbour as yourself" says in the Gospel that He gives a new commandment.[^ac-vi19-22] Love is the commandment that carries over unchanged, and Paul, writing to Rome, says that "he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law" (Romans 13.8). Chrysostom holds that the Law's purpose is accomplished in the one who believes, and that to keep the Law after Christ in the way a tutor keeps a boy would be to hold a grown man back.[^chrys-rom17][^chrys-gal3-24] The shape of this fulfillment is the subject of Fulfillment of The Law, and the older reading of the Law's rites as shadows is traced in Typology in Scripture.
Klawans notes that Paul upholds the Law when the word is taken to mean the Pentateuch, and that Christians and rabbinic Jews share more than they commonly realize, since both include the Torah in their canon as divine teaching and neither has set out to abolish it.[^jant-law] Levine's list of ten errors is a catalogue of the places where Christian preaching has fallen short of that fairness.[^jant-errors] Chrysostom's severe homilies against Christians who kept Jewish feasts, and the debate over how they should be read, are discussed in Book of Leviticus. Chrysostom would give the Law "a crown for its intention," and Augustine insists that its rites were given by divine authority.[^chrys-rom12][^aug-ep82]
The Noachide laws enter the question only through the Jewish Annotated New Testament, which presents them as a rabbinic list of minimal obligations on Gentiles, built on Genesis 9 and possibly on Jubilees, and sets the list near Paul's remark about Gentiles who do by nature what the law requires; it does not make them the Church's rule, and the Fathers cited above do not appeal to them.[^jant-law] The Church's rule for the Gentile believers is the one the apostles gave at Jerusalem, and Chrysostom explains it as the decision of the apostles and elders made in common and with respect for the Law.
The Torah in Orthodox worship
The Church's worship is thick with the Torah, and a good deal of it passes in the singing. OrthodoxWiki records that during Great Lent the weekday readings are taken only from the Old Testament, focusing on Genesis, Proverbs, and Isaiah, so that Genesis is read in the weeks in which the Church prepares for Pascha.^ow-lent At Matins the nine Biblical Odes begin with the First Song of Moses, from Exodus 15, and the Second, from Deuteronomy 32, follows it; OrthodoxWiki notes that the second is normally omitted for its severity, with an exception in the Great Canon of Andrew of Crete.^ow-odes The first song opens with the people's words after the sea: "Let us sing to the Lord, for he is very greatly glorified: horse and rider he has thrown into the sea" (Exodus 15.1).
The services also speak of the Law and its giver directly. The troparion for the feast of the Prophet Moses on September 4 praises him for receiving the tablets of the Law and for bearing the writing within himself.[^moses-trop] The vesperal service of Holy Saturday, which the Orthodox Church in America quotes, says that Moses mystically foreshadowed the day when he wrote that God blessed the seventh day, and in this way the Sabbath of creation and the Sabbath of the tomb are held together.[^holy-sat] On the feast of the Meeting of the Lord the Church reads a composite lesson built from Exodus 12.51 to 13.16 together with passages from Leviticus 12 and Numbers 8, which sets the Lord's Presentation against the law of the firstborn and the purification, the rules Luke names in his account (Luke 2.22; Luke 2.23).[^lash]
These readings show the Church holding the Torah as both teaching and promise. She sings the songs of Moses as her own, and the reading of the Law at the Lord's Presentation sets His coming among the commandments He came to fulfill. Typology in Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and Fulfillment of The Law each explain this from their own side, and the Church's answer is there in small: a Law honored and a Christ in whom it is complete.
Sources
[^oca-law]: Orthodox Church in America, "Law."
[^dy]: Stephen De Young, The Whole Counsel of God, "Introduction to the Torah" (podcast lecture on Genesis).
[^mileant]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, part 2: The Pentateuch, "Introduction," and the sections on Genesis, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.
[^jant-law]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Law" (Jonathan Klawans), 515–18.
[^jant-syn]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The Synagogue" (Lee I. Levine), 519–21.
[^jant-food]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "Food and Table Fellowship" (David M. Freidenreich), 521–22.
[^jant-errors]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "Bearing False Witness: Common Errors Made about Early Judaism" (Amy-Jill Levine), 501–4.
[^jant-brettler]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The New Testament between the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and Rabbinic Literature" (Marc Zvi Brettler), 504–6.
[^jant-notes]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, notes on John 1.1–3; Romans 2.12 and 10.4–8; Galatians 3; 2 Corinthians 3.
[^jant-gloss]: The Jewish Annotated New Testament, Glossary, s.v. "Oral Torah," "Pirkei Avot," "legalism."
[^deut4]: Deuteronomy 4.6–Deuteronomy 4.8; Deuteronomy 4.12 (Brenton).
[^deut6]: Deuteronomy 6.4–Deuteronomy 6.9 (Brenton).
[^deut30]: Deuteronomy 30.11–Deuteronomy 30.14; Deuteronomy 30.19 (Brenton).
[^psalms]: Psalms 1.2; Psalms 18.8–Psalms 18.9; Psalms 118.97 (Brenton, in the numbering of the Greek Psalter).
[^sirach]: Sirach 24.23 (Brenton).
[^nt-synagogue]: Luke 4.16–Luke 4.17; Acts 13.15; Acts 15.21 (WEB).
[^mt5]: Matthew 5.17–Matthew 5.20 (WEB).
[^lawprophets]: Matthew 7.12; Matthew 22.37–Matthew 22.40; Luke 24.44 (WEB).
[^rom3]: Romans 3.20; Romans 3.28; Romans 3.31 (WEB).
[^gal5]: Galatians 5.3; Galatians 5.14 (WEB).
[^acts15]: Acts 15.1; Acts 15.5; Acts 15.10; Acts 15.19–Acts 15.21; Acts 15.28–Acts 15.29 (WEB).
[^ath-39]: Athanasius, Festal Letter 39, §4.
[^chrys-mt16]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Homily 16, on Matthew 5.17–19.
[^chrys-rom7]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, Homily 7, on Romans 3.31.
[^chrys-rom12]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, Homily 12, on Romans 7.12–13.
[^chrys-rom17]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, Homily 17, on Romans 10.4.
[^chrys-gal3-19]: John Chrysostom, Commentary on Galatians, chapter 3, on Galatians 3.19.
[^chrys-gal3-24]: John Chrysostom, Commentary on Galatians, chapter 3, on Galatians 3.24–26.
[^chrys-2cor6]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Second Corinthians, Homily 6, on 2 Corinthians 3.6.
[^chrys-2cor7]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Second Corinthians, Homily 7, §5.
[^chrys-acts33]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Homily 33, on Acts 15.13–21.
[^just-8]: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 8.
[^just-10]: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 10.
[^just-45]: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 45.
[^just-46]: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 46.
[^just-47]: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 47.
[^aug-cf19]: Augustine, Against Faustus the Manichaean 19.18.
[^aug-ep82]: Augustine, Letter 82 (to Jerome), §§15–17.
[^ac-vi19-22]: Apostolic Constitutions 6.18–23.
[^tert-jews]: Tertullian, An Answer to the Jews 2.
[^tert-m4]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.1.
[^basil160]: Basil the Great, Letter 160, §3.
[^iren-127]: Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.27.2.
[^euseb-325]: Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.
[^jer-112]: Jerome, Letter 112 to Augustine (printed as Augustine, Letter 75).
[^ign-magn]: Ignatius of Antioch, To the Magnesians 8.1; 10.3.
[^moses-trop]: Troparion for the Holy Prophet and God-seer Moses, September 4 (Orthodox Church in America).
[^holy-sat]: Orthodox Church in America, "Great and Holy Saturday," quoting the Vesperal Liturgy of Holy Saturday.
[^lash]: Ephrem Lash, trans, Anastasis, "Readings February to April," reading 32 for the Meeting of Our Lord, with note.