The Seven Noahide Commandments or Laws are considered the minimum guidelines for any civilized society. The Noahide commandments are a rabbinical construction and are not mentioned as such in the Bible. Years ago I bought a book worth reading at a thrift store: ‘As long as the mezuze fits properly…’.¹ This concerns an exchange of letters between the Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Lody B. van de Kamp and Dick Houwaart, who returns to religious Judaism later in life. According to Van der Kamp, Jews must adhere to the Torah, the set of Jewish laws and teachings. Non-Jews, on the other hand, are expected to observe the seven Noahide laws. But if the Noahide commandments are not in the Bible, where do they come from?
- Hot issues
- Talmud: Mishnah and Gemara
- The Noahide Laws: The Seven Laws of Noah
- Noahide movement
Hot issues
The letters deal with serious and moving topics such as the Shoah, the Hebrew word for ‘destruction’, which refers to the Holocaust. Van de Kamp regards the Endlösung der Judenfrage (final solution to the Jewish problem) ,as a kind of final station of destruction,. And according to him, the greatest miracle of God is the fact that the Jewish people still exist. I can only agree with that.
The book also deals with hot doctrinal issues that are difficult for modern (liberal) Jewish people to digest. An example of such a tricky point is the fact that every decision made by a rabbi within his office is just as authoritative and binding as the words of Moses and the other prophets. Or the question of whether liberal Judaism that does away with tradition is also Judaism. It is also sometimes about questions that seem to matter less, such as the turbot issue, where the Jews in The Hague are allowed to eat turbot and the Jews in Amsterdam are not. I won’t go into this further. If you are curious about the answer: read the book!
I want to talk about an interesting discovery I made years ago when I read the book. Every book, or rather every good book, is a journey of discovery into other worlds, ideas and concepts. A book should take you to unknown places, every chapter should be a Gulliver’s journey. As long as the mezuze is right, it was such a discovery book for me.
For the Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Van de Kamp it is evident that truth is an absolute given and that the Jewish view and religious attitude is the exclusive truth, thus excluding other religious truths. No postmodern relativism: there is no Truth, there are only truths that can all coexist. Not the popular and easy-going ‘there-are-many-roads-to-Rome’ point of view. No, none of that. One Gd, one truth, one religious window from which the world is viewed, explained, understood and confronted.
Babylonian Talmud / Source: Library of Jewish Community in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA-4.0)
Well, according to the orthodox view, the difference between the Jews and the other peoples consists solely in the way in which each of them regulates their religious life. The Jews do this by adhering to the 613 commandments and prohibitions that, according to tradition, are found in the Torah, the five books of Moses. The Torah governs every aspect of human existence, it is a way of life. Gentiles are not required to adhere to the entirety of Jewish laws and teachings, but they are expected to observe the seven Noahide laws. In Judaism, seven is the number of fullness.
Talmud: Mishnah and Gemara
I grew up with the Bible, but I had never heard of the seven Noahide laws. So I turned to the Bible book of Genesis. To no avail, I couldn’t find the Seven Commandments. After some googling I discovered that the seven laws come from the Talmud.
The Talmud is the second most important book in Judaism, next to the Tanakh (Torah, Prophets and Writings, better known as the Old Testament). The Talmud consists of two parts:
- The Mishnah, or Oral Teaching, which explains to Jews how the Torah, the Written Teaching, should be interpreted and applied in specific situations.
- The Gemara, which again comments on and discusses the Mishnah.[2]
There are two Talmuds, namely:
- the Jerusalem; and
- the Babylonian.
Overview map of Mesopotamia / Source: Jcwf, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA-4.0)
Of the two Talmuds, which differ greatly, the Babylonian one enjoys the most authority and is therefore most often studied and commented on by well-known Jewish scholars such as Rashi (Hebrew acronym for: Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzchaki 10401105). It is not entirely clear why the Babylonian Talmud is the most popular. The Babylonian Talmud was recorded approximately between 500 and 1000 AD in Mesopotamia, the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, modern-day Iraq.
The Noahide Laws: The Seven Laws of Noah
The seven Noahide laws are intended as a moral code for all peoples on earth. Those who live according to these laws are called Bne Noach (sons or children of Noah) or also Noahides. These universal commandments are found in the Babylonian Talmud.[3] This concerns the following regulations:
- Creating a legal order (based on Genesis 18:19, “To do righteousness and judgment.”);
- The prohibition of blasphemy (derived from Leviticus 24:16, “And whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death.”);
- The prohibition of idolatry, idolatry (based on Exodus 32:8, “And they turned aside from the way which I commanded them, and made for themselves a molten calf, and worshiped it, and offered the offering and said, These are your gods, O Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt.,);
- The prohibition of immorality, immorality (derivable from the institution of marriage between a man and a woman in Genesis 2:22-24, but this also includes the moral precepts in Leviticus 20:10-21);
- The prohibition of shedding blood, murder (see Genesis 9:6, “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for God made man in His own image.”);
- The prohibition of theft (the rabbis refer here to the command found in Genesis 2:16-17, And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden you shall freely eat. But of the tree of knowledge good and evil, thou shalt not eat thereof: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Everything belongs to God, so eating from a tree without His permission is theft.);
- The prohibition against eating meat taken from a living animal (Genesis 9:4 is very clear about this: “But you shall not eat the flesh with its soul, which is its blood.”).
One commandment and six prohibitions for the Children of Noah, all exegetically derived from the Bible. According to tradition, the first six precepts were already revealed to Adam and the seventh precept was first made known to Noah. As mentioned, it is stated in the Talmud, a scripture written by and for Jews. This is in contrast to the New Testament, which was written by Jewish writers for all humanity:
- “For [the Gospel] is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek .”[4]
Greek here stands for all non-Jewish peoples. So what was my surprise: Today there are countless non-Jewish adherents of the view that God has given the above-mentioned universal guidelines that humanity should adhere to. There is a real Noahide movement worldwide.
Noahide movement
In the Netherlands there is the organization ‘Noachieten Nederland’ (http://noachieten.nl), which assumes that these commandments were created to lay the foundation for a well-functioning, cohesive society. After the legendary flood, God promised that He would never again destroy life on earth with a flood. God made the rainbow covenant with Noah. This covenant is a covenant of eternal life, through which the non-Jew can acquire a place in the world to come. The rainbow consists of seven colors and serves as a visual reminder of humanity’s obligation to keep Noah’s seven commandments. Every non-Jew must live in accordance with the seven ‘laws of Noah’, according to the Noahites.
In this movement, man’s redemption and salvation depend on his own efforts. There is no room for a God who – to quote the Psalmist – breaks our bonds. However, our salvation can never depend on personal discipline and efforts.
The bands of death encircled me, the terrors of Hades seized me ,
I felt fear and pain. Then I called on the name of the LORD: O LORD, save my life! (Psalm 116:3-4)
Notes:
- A mezuze is a tube containing the Bible text ‘Shema Yisrael’ that should be attached to the right doorpost of the house: “Hear Israel, the Eternal is our G-d, the Eternal is one.” This is the most famous Jewish prayer and is said twice a day and on various religious occasions.
- For further study on this subject I recommend: The real Torah: the history of the Talmud by Rabbi Mr. Drs. R. Evers; What is the Talmud? Introduction to the ‘oral tradition’ of Judaism, by Roland Gradwohl; Introduction to the Talmud by Dr. JL Palache; Everyman’s Talmud – The major teachings of the rabbinic sagas of Abraham Cohen; and last but not least: Zapping through the Talmud by Leo Mock.
- To be precise: in ‘BTSanhedrin 56ab’. Let me clarify this. BT means Babylonian Talmud. Sanhedrin is the name for the relevant part of the Talmud, also called a tractate. The number ’56’ indicates the page number and the letters ‘ab’ indicates the page, as each Talmud sheet has two pages.
- Romans 1:16. Italics by the undersigned.
read more
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- Acts of the Apostles: Birth of the Messianic Church
- Messiah: meaning and proof Jesus promised Jewish Messiah
- Messiah (Moshiach) both God and Man in Old Testament (OT)
- Twelve Jews find the Messiah: Ben Hoekendijk