“Sacred Law—Greek, Roman, Jewish.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions, edited by Eric Orlin, Michael Satlow, Michael Pregill, Jennifer Knust, and Lisbeth Fried. London: Routledge, 2015. (original) (raw)

SACRED LAW " All laws of men are nourished by one law, the divine law. " So wrote the fifth century Greek philospher Heraklitos. The concept of " Sacred Law " is likely the remnant of a category first used in 1906 to define a particular corpus of Greek inscriptions pertaining to cult practice. It constitutes a subcategory of the vast category— " all laws of men " —that includes the intersection of the normative and the divine. Sacred law is not the abstract, pervasive, and diffuse notion of divine sponsorship—however conceived—of state power, or the vast realm captured between the terms " religion and law, " but covers a subcategory of explicit norms that govern religious cult practice. Despite being shaped by a particular curatorial moment, the term is a useful rubric for entry into the ancient materials, since the study of practice is an important cognate to studies of theology or belief. Sacrifice and the apparatus that developed to regulate it were perhaps the most important religious institutions in the ancient world—the stakes of obedience were cosmic in scale. Though modern readers may be accustomed to dismissing the legalistic component of ancient religion as primitive and though the laws themselves can be tedious to read, they are nonetheless a critical language through which these cultures communicated their idea of divinity. Moreover, they permit scholars an important inroad for comparison of phenomena, the commonalities of which, were one to look only (and anachronistically) at " theology " would be lost. Moreover indeed, one cannot understand religion at all in the ancient Mediterranean through the category of belief alone; right action, or orthopraxy, was not only what could be prescribed, but was what mattered. Sacred laws are preserved in a variety of corpuses, each of which presents challenges concerning analytical method. Within each culture, sacred laws, which are a category classified by content, must also be considered according to the genres in which they appear. While historical, literary, and other material remains tell us much about how religion was practiced, our concern here is with legal sources that take prescriptive and normative form. The standard compendia of Greek sacred law are made up of inscriptions, and so preserve distinctly public and emphatically local data, while Jewish sacred laws are preserved largely through textual collections composed in both earlier and later ages. The main sources here are the priestly materials in the Torah, a collection of laws governing the cult compiled in the Persian period (5 th c. BCE) or slightly earlier, but which take as their stated object the tabernacle, or tent of meeting, of earlier narratives. The second major source is the Mishnah, an early third-century CE legal collection that emerged from the rabbinic movement. The rabbis, who thrived only after the cessation of Jewish sacrifice following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, were a group of lay Torah experts whose complex relationship to the cult is belated and ambivalent, holding archival, nostalgic, and polemical motives in tension. Roman sacred laws are found in a wide array of sources, and much of what we know comes from collections compiled under the Christian empire, which combines a similar dual stance—conservative and polemical—toward the cultic traditions. Sacred laws are difficult to use as historical data. Their narrow focus and paradigmatic content testify to their profound conservatism across time and space, such that a phenomenological approach may be best. It is not unusual to see an inscription from the fifth century BCE anthologized alongside or discussed seamlessly and without comment beside another from the first century CE. Compounding this is the fact that most sacred law is technical and telegraphic —they have been compared to recipes for master chefs, so in lieu of a full recipe, we may have only an abbreviated list of ingredients. And given the ubiquity and centrality of sacrificial