John Barton, Ethics in Ancient Israel. New York: Oxford, 2014. pp. xii + 317. ISBN 978-0-19-878517-0.

John Barton’s 2014 monograph sets out to remedy a major shortcoming of scholarship on biblical ethics. He describes the situation:

“The Bible does not usually appear in works on the history of ethics. On the one hand, it is seen as not the same kind of thing as the works of philosophers and ethicists, because (taken as a finished whole) it is the Holy Scriptures of two religions, and one cannot compare a body of scriptures with the thought of individual thinkers. On the other hand, it is generally assumed that what the Bible says about ethics is in any case both simplistic and voluntaristic: it simply tells us what God wants us to do, with no attempt at analyzing the nature of ethical obligation at any more sophisticated level. Study of ethics in the Bible belongs to theology and religion, not to philosophy, and biblical scholars are not seen as discussion partners for historians of ethics” (273).

The use of “the history of ethics” here is crucial. Barton does not set out to write yet another “Old Testament Ethics,” but rather an overview of ethical thinking among the authors of the Hebrew Bible insofar as this thinking is discernible from these texts, and his choice to call the work “Ethics in Ancient Israel” is thus quite deliberate: “[T]he book has no confessional or religious apologetic motivation” (4). Such a statement may seem unnecessary to anyone familiar with Barton’s work or with critical biblical scholarship more generally, but the problem of confessional anachronism is particularly pronounced in this corner of the field as is clear from a quick Googling of “biblical ethics.” The vast majority of work done on the topic speaks more toward a concern with applied ethics among Jewish and especially Christian Scripture-readers than it does to historians of ideas.

Barton’s work is thus meant not at offering clarity for believers as they try to live more “biblically,” but rather to argue that ancient Israelite thinkers deserve a seat at the table among other ethical thinkers throughout history. His thorough engagement with previous biblical scholarship is very impressive, and the book is quite valuable simply as a means of access to the discussion of biblical ethics in German. It is worth noting, however, that his most strongly-held convictions on the topic are more often directed at public opinion than they are toward debates with other scholars: “The air of reasonableness about biblical law – of which the general public today is entirely unaware, thinking instead that it is supremely unreasonable and dictatorial…” (24); “In popular culture there are two assumptions about [universal and particular obligations], which go in opposite directions… Neither of these opposed assumptions holds up all that well under historical scrutiny” (42). Many other examples could be adduced.

The book is divided into ten chapters, each devoted to a different aspect of ethical thinking in ancient Israel. The core contribution of the book, however, lies with chapters 4 and 5, titled “The Moral Order” and “Obedience to God,” respectively. The chapters that precede and follow these refer quite often forward and backward to them, and it is clear from the introduction and conclusion to the book that these are where Barton’s interests are situated primarily. Barton is particularly motivated by the desire to push back on the idea that the Hebrew Bible simply demands obedience to the deity, and chapter 4 begins thus: “There is an almost universal popular belief, supported by much technical biblical scholarship, that biblical morality is the parade example of a divine command theory of ethics… The Bible thus comes down very clearly on one side of the Euthyphro Dilemma: what is good is so because God commands it… One aim of this book is to contest this assumption” (94). The chapter proceeds by exploring seven ways in which the Hebrew Bible attests to an idea of a moral order that is distinct from positive legislation from the deity (even if that legislation aligns with the moral order in some instances), and the arguments laid out are quite compelling. The concluding section of the chapter takes up the issue of whether this idea of order ought to be designated “natural law,” with which it largely coincides. Barton, who has used the phrase in his previous work in reference to the Hebrew Bible, suggests now that it is best avoided, as it “makes Israelite ethics sound too much like the ethics of some philosophers indebted to the Greek and Latin traditions” (125). This point exemplifies in my view the care with which Barton wishes to make his case. He is, as mentioned, quite interested in thrusting the biblical text into discussions of the history of ethics, and one might suggest that the most useful way to do this would be to flag those points in the Hebrew Bible where the text seems to speak to concepts that have been important for the study of ethics in the West. That he does not take the opportunity to equate the idea of moral order with “natural law” in order to resist anachronism demonstrates well his concern for understanding ancient Israelite thinkers on their own terms.

Barton acknowledges that the popular idea which he is combatting – that the Hebrew Bible simply demands adherence to divine commands, and that these commands are often irrational – is present in a number of biblical texts. Chapter 5 takes up these examples, and seeks to argue that, while they are certainly there, they are not as thoroughly positivistic or irrational as is often assumed. He walks the reader through five ways in which the irrationality of divine commands is often mitigated, showing clearly that legislation stemming from the deity is very often justified by appeal to external standards. The discussions in this chapter of both motive clauses and what Bernard Jackson has called “wisdom-laws” are especially illustrative.[1]

While he occasionally dips into the world of early Jewish literature, Barton is concerned for the most part with the Hebrew Bible. Be this as it may, I found myself wanting some engagement in these two chapters especially with the realism-nominalism discussion among scholars of ancient Judaism. Perhaps his commitment to taking ancient Israelite thinking on its own terms precluded him from digging in to the ideas that were developed in subsequent centuries, but the extended treatment of a moral order on the one hand and obedience to positivistic divine commands on the other certainly maps on well to this debate. There is a short section (127-129) in which Barton gestures toward post-biblical Jewish thought on the issue, and here he groups together the rabbis and Ben Sira as adherents to an ethic of obedience: “This is the normal way of understanding ethics in early Judaism, and the rabbis often stress not only the centrality of obedience to God’s commands but their often irrational, or at least incomprehensible character: ‘irrational obedience’ here comes into its own. We find the same idea in Ben Sira…” (129). The passage from Ben Sira that is then quoted (Sir 33:7-8) speaks to the distinguishing of seasons through the Lord’s wisdom, an idea that seems to me to fit more comfortably in the context of creation theology and a moral order than with an ethic of divine command. In any case, Barton’s suggestion that the rabbis and early Jewish thinkers held the same ethical views runs counter to the dominant position in the realism-nominalism discussion,[2] which views the Qumran sectarians taking the opposite view of the rabbis on the issue of an order.[3]

This objection notwithstanding, the book as a whole is a very impressive work of scholarship that takes aim at a widely-held and overly-simplistic view of ancient Israelite ethics as obedience to divine commands. There are almost no typographical errors (“anthropomonous” [132 n. 14]), and the book is very well-annotated. Perhaps most praiseworthy is the fact that there is a through line – most evident in chapter 7 on impurity – of combatting characterizations of ancient Israelite ethics that have been used as fodder for anti-Semitism. This is an absolutely essential component of any treatment of thought in the Hebrew Bible, and especially, I would argue, for those of us who teach in divinity schools. I plan to teach a graduate seminar on ancient Israelite and early Jewish ethics in the near future, and I’m certain that I’ve found my textbook.

James Nati is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible & Old Testament Studies at Santa Clara University’s Jesuit School of Theology and the Graduate Theological Union.



[1] Bernard S. Jackson, Wisdom-Laws: A Study of the Mishpatim of Exodus 12:1-22:16 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

[2] The realism-nominalism discussion is about theories of law more narrowly than about ethics in general, but there are certainly significant points of contact between that discussion and the topics addressed in chs. 4 and 5 of Barton’s book.

[3] See Christine Hayes, What’s Divine About Divine Law?: Early Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 195-221; Aryeh Amihay, Theory and Practice in Essene Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 19-30.