Exodus chapter 10:1-13:16
Laws Endowed with Life
Chapter 12 of this week’s reading contains the first commandments given to the people of Israel, starting with the laws of the new month and then moving on to the laws of Passover. The great medieval scholar Rashi began his commentary on the Torah by quoting a certain question concerning this arrangement: If the whole purpose of the Torah is to teach us what to do, then why didn’t the Torah start here, in Exodus chapter 12, with the first mitzvot, and skip all the stories that precede them? No creation of the world, nor Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, or any of the others—just the do’s and don’ts of biblical law.
I’d like to think that most readers would be puzzled by the question itself. Surely there is, and always has been, more to the Torah than just a dry list of commandments. Not only are there all the narratives that precede this week’s reading, but all those that follow as well: the rest of the exodus from Egypt, including the parting of the Red Sea and all that happened at Mount Sinai, plus the Golden Calf, Israel’s wilderness wanderings, Bil‘am’s unwilling blessing of Israel, and everything from Exodus to Deuteronomy and Moses’ last day of life. There seems to be something essential about narrating all that the Torah narrates.
Long before Rashi, another great Jewish thinker had wrestled with the same question, the first-century Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. His answer to this question is surprising. The Torah’s laws, he says, were in a sense merely copies based on human originals—the virtuous heroes whose stories are recounted earlier in the Torah. In fact, he says, their stories took precedence over the laws themselves in two senses—not just precedence in time, but also (I think I’m reading him correctly) in quality, since any original is by nature truer than the copies it subsequently inspires. “For in these [human portraits]” Philo wrote, “we have laws endowed with life and reason.” In other words, the Torah’s stories of biblical figures were something like a living, breathing embodiment of the laws that were to follow.
It probably hasn’t escaped most people’s attention that the main “character” (so to speak) in biblical narrative is God Himself. Indeed, one might say that it is precisely the interaction between human beings and God that constitutes the great, ongoing theme of those biblical figures. This is hardly to gainsay the importance of the Torah’s laws, but it is well to keep Philo’s point in mind. The word “Torah” in Hebrew (as well as in its usual Greek translation, nomos) means much more than law. It designates a whole way of life, one that makes of these biblical heroes “laws endowed with life and reason.”