Israel Jacob Yuval, “The Orality of Jewish Oral Law: From Pedagogy to Ideology,” in Lothar Gall and Dietmar Willoweit, eds., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Course of History: Exchange and Conflicts (Oldenbourg: Wissenschaftsverlag, 2011), 237-260 (original) (raw)
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Critical scholarship on the Hebrew Bible a hundred years ago held a much lower estimation of the role of law in the religion of ancient Israel and of the value of biblical law than do scholars today. Julius Wellhausen, for example, whose work was the most influential of the nineteeth century, maintained that in its creative period, Israel had no law, but only “usage and tradition” which “were looked on to a large extent as the institution of the Deity.” Thus, the prophets, whom Wellhausen stressed, did not preach out of any legal tradition in his view, but rather “out of the spirit which judges all things and itself is judged of no man.” In their canonical shape, however, the materials ancient Israel bequeathed us are so strongly nomistic that even Wellhausen could not deny that at a certain point law became central, displacing the spirit. That point marks the transition from Israelite religion to something new called “Judaism,” which is distinguished by the idea of a written Torah....
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