Morality & Ethics

The Torah is often used to highlight various ethical values while its many ethically problematic commandments are ignored or explained away. Is there a way to treat the Torah as a moral authority while honestly confronting the ethical issues it raises?

Before his death, David commands Solomon to kill two men: Joab, his loyal general, and Shimei, his enemy, whom he had sworn not to kill.

If an Israelite wishes to marry a woman taken captive in war, she becomes part of the Israelite polity and is protected from future re-enslavement. Uncomfortable with the Torah’s permitting this marriage, the rabbis declare it to be a compromise to man’s “evil impulse,” an idea reminiscent of Jesus’ claim that the Torah allows divorce as a compromise to humanity’s “hard heart.”

As the Israelites are being freed from slavery in Egypt, God gives Moses and Aaron a law pertaining to Israelite-owned slaves.

In the Priestly Torah and the Holiness School

Using Source Criticism to Disentangle a Moral Problem in the Torah

The rabbis claim that a “subverted” or “apostate” city, which Deuteronomy (13:13-18) condemns to destruction, “never was and never will be” (t. San. 14:1). Yet the account in Judges 19-21 of the destruction or ḥerem of Gibeah, its inhabitants, animals, and property, suggests that such “internal ḥerem” was an Israelite practice, and that Gibeah is being presented as a subverted city.

Morally problematic halachot remain on the books despite rabbinic attempts to transform or reinterpret them. How do we relate to these texts as Torah from Sinai, coming from God?

The biblical law makes use of a martial idiom to forbid Israel from being cruel to a mother bird.

A Historical-Critical Reading 

The Bible already expresses ambivalence about Hebrew slavery, the rabbis expand upon it and Maimonides takes the next step, applying the negative evaluation of slavery even to non-Israelites.

The Torah and Bavli vs. the Prophets and Yerushalmi

A Time-Honored Tradition

The anomalous and paradoxical nature of the twelfth curse (Deuteronomy 27:26).

The Torah describes a practice of declaring people cherem, which means that the person, and—in some cases—his family, would be annihilated, and his possessions donated to the Temple. The rabbis were unhappy with this law and used their homiletical approach to “obliterate” it.

Tanakh as Beyond the Sum of Its Parts

Confronting the description in Megillat Esther of the Jews killing 75,000 including women and children

Are the Torah’s laws perfect or do they reflect biblical times and can adapt as society develops? The punishment of a rapist is a good test case for thinking about morally problematic biblical laws.