Like Roy Gane, a ritual-scholar hero of mine, I have benefitted greatly from Jonathan Burnside’s work on biblical law. James Bejon and Ralph Smith have raised a small raft of issues that I would be tempted to tackle. However, I want to turn to the suggestion Burnside makes toward the end of his essay when he asks, “Where are we going to get a positive social vision from?”

It’s been my experience that many (possibly most?) Christians I encounter have no idea how the Torah forms and shapes a “positive social vision,” much less that this vision was unique in its own context. I will take those two in reverse order. First, I begin with the broad consensus about the unique contributions of the Torah as possibly being the first (and only?) positive social vision in antiquity. Second, if we want Christians to engage in that vision, we need to pay more attention to those things that constantly run interference with a coherent Christian understanding of the Torah.

The Torah’s Unique “Positive Social Vision”

To be honest, I did not realize how different the Torah was in the ancient Near East (ANE hereafter) until I was invited into a workshop with ANE scholars. For years, I had been learning from my Jewish colleagues who wrote prolifically about the Torah’s singular legal vision that has shaped all of our “thinking” and “values” today, as we might say.

Joshua Berman’s Created Equal[1] and Jeremiah Unterman’s Justice for All[2] gave scholarly reasons to take the Torah’s vision seriously, and to see it as the exclusive source for our legal conceptual frameworks of fairness, equality, charity, due process, equity, and most of the things that even atheists hold dear and inalienable in the so-called “Western world.” It is Jewish thinkers such as Yoram Hazony, David Novack, and Leon Kass who have consistently highlighted the rich intellectual world of the Torah as the only positive social vision in the ancient world.[3] More recently, Jewish political scholars such as Eric Nelson and Ofir Haivry have traced how European political architects in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, such as John Selden, developed political and legal frameworks by employing what they saw as the unparalleled legal thinking in the Hebrew Scriptures.[4] Even if we want to argue that these architects held the Hebrew texts up to a distorting lens of legislative legalism, they all revered its unique and complex political thinking when assessed next to the Greco-Roman traditions.

Though I had heard my Jewish colleagues making the case, I did not fully appreciate what they were saying until I started reading ANE scholars. That’s when I ran into mid-twentieth century works from University of Chicago scholars comparing the intellectual worlds of Mesopotamia, Israel, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Henri Frankfort concluded that the Greeks and Romans did not contribute as much to our intellectual heritage as we often think:

The boundary between the ancient world and the modern is to be traced, not in the Aegean or the middle Mediterranean, but in the pages of the Old Testament, where we find revealed Israel’s attainments in the realms of thought, her facility in literary expression, her profound religious insights, and her standards of individual and social ethics.[5]

To the matter of a positive social vision, these Egyptologists and Assyriologists marveled at the Hebrew’s intellectual freedom from the tyranny of the gods and mythos as determining their conceptual world.

Here is the seeming paradox that a people, freely recognized as supremely the religious people of the ancient world, at the same time were without a peer in the power and scope of their critical intellectualism. But indeed it is not paradoxical, for religion that is not criticized quickly deteriorates into mere superstition . . .. Hebrew thinkers were able to attain a view of the world that still shapes our outlook.[6]

Even today, we find an atheist Oxford historian marveling at this discovery. Take, for example, Tom Holland’s disturbance upon seriously considering the “social vision” of the Greco-Roman traditions in light of his own moral frameworks in the United Kingdom.

Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all . . .. Assumptions that I had grown up with . . . were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of “human nature,” but very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past.[7]

I would make one friendly correction to Holland’s discoveries. When he says “Christian,” he invariably refers to the unique positive social vision of the Torah that permeates Jesus’ thinking for reasons that Burnside has illuminated. So when Holland admits, “To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions,” we understand that “Christian” essentially refers to the “positive social vision of the Torah carried through into The Way of Jesus.”[8]

For some reason, hearing ANE and classical scholars soberly admit these discoveries woke me up to the uniqueness of our Hebreo-Christian positive social vision.

The Social Vision of the Torah

So what is this vision and why don’t Christians seem to understand it? Burnside has noted aspects of this vision, and his assertion that Jesus took the Torah’s vision seriously goes a long way toward fleshing it out. Most of the Torah’s social vision has been appropriated in various degrees of faithfulness within the so-called “Western world.” It’s difficult to find a more unified source of our value for human life, human equality, consent of the governed, rest for workers, care for the vulnerable, fairness in justice, spousal relations, education for all children, inclusion of the foreigner as a full rights-bearing citizen (as we might say today), and more outside of the Hebrew Bible (and nearly impossible from Greece or Rome).

For instance, everyone puts some value on human life. The gears of slavery in the Americas assigned dollar values to African humans. Today, judges and juries assign the monetary value to a lost life in wrongful death cases. But Jeremiah Unterman notes that in the property laws of the Torah, the value of human life—even the life of the thief!—was elevated above the value of property. Stealing and home invasion (in some cases) were not capital crimes (Exod 22:1–3). For the first time in human history, human life was legally valued more than property. Theft did not warrant a punishment of death.

The examples only proliferate from here. Again, Joshua Berman’s Created Equal[9] and Jeremiah Unterman’s Justice for All[10] offer rich and thoughtful explorations of these visionary and society-shaping feats required by the Torah’s vision.

But why don’t most Christians understand and meditate on this positive social vision? One could argue that inasmuch as Christians study the teachings of Jesus, they are making substantial contact with this vision. True. But how often have we caught sisters and brothers puzzling through Jesus’ teaching absent any grasp of the Torah’s reasoning, and therefore misconstruing Jesus? Constantly! And when they do examine the Torah, how many times have we seen well-intentioned folks—biblical scholars, even—reading the Torah through the lens of modern legislative and legal frameworks? They think of law in terms of modern statutory law. Their metaphors for law are reduced to breaking or keeping the stated laws. If there is no stated law, then we have done nothing wrong.

Many biblical and ANE scholars, including Jonathan Burnside, clarify that no such view of law existed in the Iron Age Fertile Crescent. More precisely, such a view of law cannot be found in the Torah. There is no breaking metaphor in the Torah because it is not statutory law. As everyone points out, the word torah means something akin to “instruction,” and can therefore be transgressed but not broken. This difference wrongly seems insignificant to most. The primary metaphor in Scripture is keeping the Torah, where “keeping” (shamar) means something more akin to “tending,” “guarding,” or “observing.” It often clicks for students when I say, “You keep the torah like you keep a garden or keep sheep.” And then I can ask, “Can you break a garden or break sheep?” They get the point.

Every year, I teach loads of freshman an introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament). Almost every single one of them has been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that the Torah is a list of rules that one can either break or keep. It’s just a bunch of dos and don’ts. When I take them to Leviticus 18 and walk through the supposed “don’ts” of sex acts with relatives, I make them think through which relatives don’t show up on the list. Eventually, they figure out that sex acts are not explicitly prohibited with folks like “grandma” and that does not seem like a “positive social vision” to them.

Some might argue that Leviticus 18:10 covers grandparents as sexually off-limits. If it were a statute, it only prohibits the grandparent, and more precisely the grandfather, from sex acts with grandchildren, not vice versa. (And, what about grandmother?) If these are statutes, then they must list out and delineate every combination or class of individuals and actions.

Thinking of statutory law in light of the Torah, we can now see that statutes are negative and punitive in intention. They are not “dos” intending to cause a garden-society to grow; instead, they aim at restricting. Certainly the Torah demarcates egregiously transgressive actions (e.g., oppressing the vulnerable; Exod 22:21–24) and intentions (e.g., hating your brother in your heart; Lev 19:17), but that is not the center mass of its legal reasoning.

Anyone who has puzzled and meditated through the Torah, as Jesus did, quickly realizes that it’s not a collection of statutes. I have recently argued that the Torah primarily offers instruction in its legal reasoning, creating paradigms of classes of things, actions, and circumstances.[11] These form a system of reasoning because they offer logical networks and require us, the one meditating through the Torah, to extend their logic into what is unstated. They require us to guard and foster their thinking. They expect us to keep their reasoning as we encounter the pluriform ways in which their thinking can be extended into reality.

The Real Hurdle Facing the Torah Today

In my estimation, discussions such as these are good and valuable. However, they are not nearly sufficient. It’s not merely that minds need to be turned to see the Torah rightly. The American church, along with various international co-conspirators, has habituated modern legal thinking into their soft, and sometimes hard, denunciations of the Torah. We have even entertained antisemitism when we’ve portrayed the Torah as the rules that legalistic Jews slavishly followed in order to kill Jesus. We set the rulebook of dos and don’ts against the liberating power of the gospel. I have even heard pastors speak of Jesus as setting us free from the religion of following rules. It’s a relationship we are after, not a religion—so they say.

We may all roll our eyes at such nonsense, but this is the blood that pumps through the modern American and British church, along with many so-called “receiving nations” that now propagate our theologies.

Until we see this distortion as theological enemy number one, we can only naively hope against hope that the church will somehow miraculously open their Bibles and realize that it’s not envisioning any kind of legal framework with which they are familiar. This is precisely why Jesus could extend the Torah’s logic in the empire of God that he brought and is bringing to the end of the ages.

 I do not know how to fix this problem, but let us be real. This present discussion and others like it must be viewed as the referee’s intention to pull the trigger on the starter pistol of this ultra-marathon.


The Rev. Dr. Johnson teaches Biblical literature, theology, and biblical interpretation at The King’s College. He is an editor for the Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Biblical Criticism series, an associate director for the Jewish Philosophical Theology Project at The Herzl Institute in Israel; and a co-host for the OnScript Podcast. He is also the instructor for our upcoming Pentecost Term Course on a Biblical Theology of Ritual. Click HERE for registration.


[1] Joshua A. Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). See also: Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith (Jerusalem: Magid, 2020).

[2] Jeremiah Unterman, Justice for All: How the Jewish Bible Revolutionized Ethics (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2017).

[3] David Novak, Jewish Social Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Athens and Jerusalem: God, Humans, and Nature (The Gifford Lectures 2017; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Leon R. Kass, Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).

[4] Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Ofir Haivry, John Selden and the Western Political Tradition (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2017).

[5] Henri Frankfort et al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 224.

[6] Frankfort, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, 234.

[7] Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 17.

[8] Holland, Dominion, 13.

[9] Joshua A. Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). See also: Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith (Jerusalem: Magid, 2020).

[10] Jeremiah Unterman, Justice for All: How the Jewish Bible Revolutionized Ethics (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2017).

[11] Dru Johnson, Biblical Philosophy: A Hebraic Approach to the Old and New Testaments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 116–50.

Next Conversation
Torahic Christianity
P. Andrew Sandlin

Like Roy Gane, a ritual-scholar hero of mine, I have benefitted greatly from Jonathan Burnside’s work on biblical law. James Bejon and Ralph Smith have raised a small raft of issues that I would be tempted to tackle. However, I want to turn to the suggestion Burnside makes toward the end of his essay when he asks, “Where are we going to get a positive social vision from?”

It’s been my experience that many (possibly most?) Christians I encounter have no idea how the Torah forms and shapes a “positive social vision,” much less that this vision was unique in its own context. I will take those two in reverse order. First, I begin with the broad consensus about the unique contributions of the Torah as possibly being the first (and only?) positive social vision in antiquity. Second, if we want Christians to engage in that vision, we need to pay more attention to those things that constantly run interference with a coherent Christian understanding of the Torah.

The Torah’s Unique “Positive Social Vision”

To be honest, I did not realize how different the Torah was in the ancient Near East (ANE hereafter) until I was invited into a workshop with ANE scholars. For years, I had been learning from my Jewish colleagues who wrote prolifically about the Torah’s singular legal vision that has shaped all of our “thinking” and “values” today, as we might say.

Joshua Berman’s Created Equal[1] and Jeremiah Unterman’s Justice for All[2] gave scholarly reasons to take the Torah’s vision seriously, and to see it as the exclusive source for our legal conceptual frameworks of fairness, equality, charity, due process, equity, and most of the things that even atheists hold dear and inalienable in the so-called “Western world.” It is Jewish thinkers such as Yoram Hazony, David Novack, and Leon Kass who have consistently highlighted the rich intellectual world of the Torah as the only positive social vision in the ancient world.[3] More recently, Jewish political scholars such as Eric Nelson and Ofir Haivry have traced how European political architects in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, such as John Selden, developed political and legal frameworks by employing what they saw as the unparalleled legal thinking in the Hebrew Scriptures.[4] Even if we want to argue that these architects held the Hebrew texts up to a distorting lens of legislative legalism, they all revered its unique and complex political thinking when assessed next to the Greco-Roman traditions.

Though I had heard my Jewish colleagues making the case, I did not fully appreciate what they were saying until I started reading ANE scholars. That’s when I ran into mid-twentieth century works from University of Chicago scholars comparing the intellectual worlds of Mesopotamia, Israel, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Henri Frankfort concluded that the Greeks and Romans did not contribute as much to our intellectual heritage as we often think:

The boundary between the ancient world and the modern is to be traced, not in the Aegean or the middle Mediterranean, but in the pages of the Old Testament, where we find revealed Israel’s attainments in the realms of thought, her facility in literary expression, her profound religious insights, and her standards of individual and social ethics.[5]

To the matter of a positive social vision, these Egyptologists and Assyriologists marveled at the Hebrew’s intellectual freedom from the tyranny of the gods and mythos as determining their conceptual world.

Here is the seeming paradox that a people, freely recognized as supremely the religious people of the ancient world, at the same time were without a peer in the power and scope of their critical intellectualism. But indeed it is not paradoxical, for religion that is not criticized quickly deteriorates into mere superstition . . .. Hebrew thinkers were able to attain a view of the world that still shapes our outlook.[6]

Even today, we find an atheist Oxford historian marveling at this discovery. Take, for example, Tom Holland’s disturbance upon seriously considering the “social vision” of the Greco-Roman traditions in light of his own moral frameworks in the United Kingdom.

Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all . . .. Assumptions that I had grown up with . . . were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of “human nature,” but very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past.[7]

I would make one friendly correction to Holland’s discoveries. When he says “Christian,” he invariably refers to the unique positive social vision of the Torah that permeates Jesus’ thinking for reasons that Burnside has illuminated. So when Holland admits, “To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions,” we understand that “Christian” essentially refers to the “positive social vision of the Torah carried through into The Way of Jesus.”[8]

For some reason, hearing ANE and classical scholars soberly admit these discoveries woke me up to the uniqueness of our Hebreo-Christian positive social vision.

The Social Vision of the Torah

So what is this vision and why don’t Christians seem to understand it? Burnside has noted aspects of this vision, and his assertion that Jesus took the Torah’s vision seriously goes a long way toward fleshing it out. Most of the Torah’s social vision has been appropriated in various degrees of faithfulness within the so-called “Western world.” It’s difficult to find a more unified source of our value for human life, human equality, consent of the governed, rest for workers, care for the vulnerable, fairness in justice, spousal relations, education for all children, inclusion of the foreigner as a full rights-bearing citizen (as we might say today), and more outside of the Hebrew Bible (and nearly impossible from Greece or Rome).

For instance, everyone puts some value on human life. The gears of slavery in the Americas assigned dollar values to African humans. Today, judges and juries assign the monetary value to a lost life in wrongful death cases. But Jeremiah Unterman notes that in the property laws of the Torah, the value of human life—even the life of the thief!—was elevated above the value of property. Stealing and home invasion (in some cases) were not capital crimes (Exod 22:1–3). For the first time in human history, human life was legally valued more than property. Theft did not warrant a punishment of death.

The examples only proliferate from here. Again, Joshua Berman’s Created Equal[9] and Jeremiah Unterman’s Justice for All[10] offer rich and thoughtful explorations of these visionary and society-shaping feats required by the Torah’s vision.

But why don’t most Christians understand and meditate on this positive social vision? One could argue that inasmuch as Christians study the teachings of Jesus, they are making substantial contact with this vision. True. But how often have we caught sisters and brothers puzzling through Jesus’ teaching absent any grasp of the Torah’s reasoning, and therefore misconstruing Jesus? Constantly! And when they do examine the Torah, how many times have we seen well-intentioned folks—biblical scholars, even—reading the Torah through the lens of modern legislative and legal frameworks? They think of law in terms of modern statutory law. Their metaphors for law are reduced to breaking or keeping the stated laws. If there is no stated law, then we have done nothing wrong.

Many biblical and ANE scholars, including Jonathan Burnside, clarify that no such view of law existed in the Iron Age Fertile Crescent. More precisely, such a view of law cannot be found in the Torah. There is no breaking metaphor in the Torah because it is not statutory law. As everyone points out, the word torah means something akin to “instruction,” and can therefore be transgressed but not broken. This difference wrongly seems insignificant to most. The primary metaphor in Scripture is keeping the Torah, where “keeping” (shamar) means something more akin to “tending,” “guarding,” or “observing.” It often clicks for students when I say, “You keep the torah like you keep a garden or keep sheep.” And then I can ask, “Can you break a garden or break sheep?” They get the point.

Every year, I teach loads of freshman an introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament). Almost every single one of them has been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that the Torah is a list of rules that one can either break or keep. It’s just a bunch of dos and don’ts. When I take them to Leviticus 18 and walk through the supposed “don’ts” of sex acts with relatives, I make them think through which relatives don’t show up on the list. Eventually, they figure out that sex acts are not explicitly prohibited with folks like “grandma” and that does not seem like a “positive social vision” to them.

Some might argue that Leviticus 18:10 covers grandparents as sexually off-limits. If it were a statute, it only prohibits the grandparent, and more precisely the grandfather, from sex acts with grandchildren, not vice versa. (And, what about grandmother?) If these are statutes, then they must list out and delineate every combination or class of individuals and actions.

Thinking of statutory law in light of the Torah, we can now see that statutes are negative and punitive in intention. They are not “dos” intending to cause a garden-society to grow; instead, they aim at restricting. Certainly the Torah demarcates egregiously transgressive actions (e.g., oppressing the vulnerable; Exod 22:21–24) and intentions (e.g., hating your brother in your heart; Lev 19:17), but that is not the center mass of its legal reasoning.

Anyone who has puzzled and meditated through the Torah, as Jesus did, quickly realizes that it’s not a collection of statutes. I have recently argued that the Torah primarily offers instruction in its legal reasoning, creating paradigms of classes of things, actions, and circumstances.[11] These form a system of reasoning because they offer logical networks and require us, the one meditating through the Torah, to extend their logic into what is unstated. They require us to guard and foster their thinking. They expect us to keep their reasoning as we encounter the pluriform ways in which their thinking can be extended into reality.

The Real Hurdle Facing the Torah Today

In my estimation, discussions such as these are good and valuable. However, they are not nearly sufficient. It’s not merely that minds need to be turned to see the Torah rightly. The American church, along with various international co-conspirators, has habituated modern legal thinking into their soft, and sometimes hard, denunciations of the Torah. We have even entertained antisemitism when we’ve portrayed the Torah as the rules that legalistic Jews slavishly followed in order to kill Jesus. We set the rulebook of dos and don’ts against the liberating power of the gospel. I have even heard pastors speak of Jesus as setting us free from the religion of following rules. It’s a relationship we are after, not a religion—so they say.

We may all roll our eyes at such nonsense, but this is the blood that pumps through the modern American and British church, along with many so-called “receiving nations” that now propagate our theologies.

Until we see this distortion as theological enemy number one, we can only naively hope against hope that the church will somehow miraculously open their Bibles and realize that it’s not envisioning any kind of legal framework with which they are familiar. This is precisely why Jesus could extend the Torah’s logic in the empire of God that he brought and is bringing to the end of the ages.

 I do not know how to fix this problem, but let us be real. This present discussion and others like it must be viewed as the referee’s intention to pull the trigger on the starter pistol of this ultra-marathon.


The Rev. Dr. Johnson teaches Biblical literature, theology, and biblical interpretation at The King’s College. He is an editor for the Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Biblical Criticism series, an associate director for the Jewish Philosophical Theology Project at The Herzl Institute in Israel; and a co-host for the OnScript Podcast. He is also the instructor for our upcoming Pentecost Term Course on a Biblical Theology of Ritual. Click HERE for registration.


[1] Joshua A. Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). See also: Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith (Jerusalem: Magid, 2020).

[2] Jeremiah Unterman, Justice for All: How the Jewish Bible Revolutionized Ethics (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2017).

[3] David Novak, Jewish Social Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Athens and Jerusalem: God, Humans, and Nature (The Gifford Lectures 2017; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Leon R. Kass, Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).

[4] Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Ofir Haivry, John Selden and the Western Political Tradition (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2017).

[5] Henri Frankfort et al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 224.

[6] Frankfort, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, 234.

[7] Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 17.

[8] Holland, Dominion, 13.

[9] Joshua A. Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). See also: Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith (Jerusalem: Magid, 2020).

[10] Jeremiah Unterman, Justice for All: How the Jewish Bible Revolutionized Ethics (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2017).

[11] Dru Johnson, Biblical Philosophy: A Hebraic Approach to the Old and New Testaments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 116–50.

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