At Jewish Ideas Daily, Aryeh Tepper has an intriguing review of Yoram Hazony’s forthcoming book, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture :
What manner of work is the Hebrew Bible? The 17th-century freethinker Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza had an answer. As part of his war to emancipate philosophy—the quest for the truth about existence and the meaning of the good life—from the influence of religion, he reduced the biblical message to, in effect, one word: obedience. “Scripture,” wrote Spinoza, “does not teach philosophical matters, but piety alone.”According to Yoram Hazony, Spinoza’s claim is nonsense.
Hazony recently made his case for the Bible as a text that “does” philosophy at a conference sponsored by Jerusalem’s Shalem Center, of which he is the provost. There he boldly, even radically, took on the entire tradition of biblical interpretation, beginning with the New Testament. That tradition, positing a strict dichotomy between reason and revelation, categorizes the Hebrew Bible as a work of revelation—thus preparing the ground for Spinoza’s claim that the biblical message is reducible to obedience to the Law.
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[H]ere’s the crucial part of Hazony’s argument, the God of Israel is also the God of the world, and His Law, the Law embedded in the history of Israel, is not just a set of ethical and political statutes for an ancient confederation of nomadic tribes. Instead, it includes reflections upon what is good for human beings in general. Meditating upon that Law, upon the will of the God who gave it, and upon the narrative in which it is embedded, thus becomes an inquiry into the moral and political questions that animate philosophical debate. In this way, the Bible is a philosophical document.
