How Does God Judge Humanity Before the Law Issued?

1. The Problem

In Hebrew Scripture, Israel is judged according to the Law. The Law provides the benchmark for the judging, the judgments, the criticism.¹  But the nations, to whom the Law was not given, are subject to criticism.² God, Hebrew Scripture’s divine hero, judges the world without revealing the Law to the world.³  Christine Hayes defines this problem very well.  Usually, Hebrew Scripture speaks in an apodictic, positive legal voice,⁴ and on occasion, with the axiom that the Divine Law is “natural.”⁵  This tension is the theme of Plato’s Euthyphro, is good considered to be good because the Legislator, here God, said so, or God, with Divine wisdom, by divine nature legislates what is good.

From the academic as well as Orthodox Bible perspective, Genesis 1 answers the question. For academic Biblicists,

Genesis 1 is a Priestly depiction that serves as an overture, introducing God the Commander Who is also the Creator, with the right, authority, and to command.  Enlightened Orthodox readers, i.e. those Orthodox scholars who have adopted the methodology known American New Criticism,⁶ view the Pentateuch as a literary whole. Genesis 1 finds God commanding⁷ as an act of will, and the command’s execution is reported through out Hebrew Scripture, in the very syntax of the command.⁸

This being said, Hayes strains to explain how a just God punishes sin without legislating what sin, according to His will, really is.⁹ Cain kills Abel, his brother,¹⁰ and is punished with exile.¹¹ The death penalty for murder is an act of ad hoc divine legislation.¹² The ten generations between Adam and Noah and between Noah and Abraham are judged to be evil.¹³ On what legal grounds?  We are told that Noah’s generation was corrupt.¹⁴ What according to God, Who did not provide humankind at this point in time with moral benchmarks, was Cain’s wrongdoing.  By being exiled to the land of Nod,¹⁵ Cain’s actual punishment anticipates  the Israelite institution of Refuge Cities.¹⁶ Troubled by this lacuna, Later commentaries suggest conjectured infractions  that may have occurred.¹⁷ The Oral Torah rabbis suggest that seven commands were issued to Noah,¹⁸ possibly in response to the problem of God’s holding humankind to some unknown, hidden code.¹⁹ The Rabbinic legend that the first “Torah” revealed to humankind are these seven norms,²⁰ which could but need not be understood as a natural law,²¹  is a charming but hardly historical theory. Nowhere in Ugaritic lore or Akkadian law is there evidence of such a code, or an academy of Shem and Ever that subjected this alleged to date not recorded code to either pious or critical study.²²

Hayes correctly sees Biblical law as apodictic and positive, but certain passages, especially in the wisdom tradition, use natural, universal, reasoned apologetic rhetoric.²³

The city of Sodom was deemed to be evil by God,²⁴ but we are told what they did that is improper. Only when all of Sodom’s citizen’s surrounded Lot’s house to commit gang homosexual rape²⁵ is the reader informed of Sodomite “ethics. Abraham’s challenge of God’s justice²⁶ assumes [a] there is something called justice, [b] God is indeed and in deed the Owner of justice, [c] Abraham somehow also knows what justice is, and [d] on that basis challenges God, Who does not claim sovereign immunity for God-self, not to destroy the innocent along with the guilty. The reader learns that in the attempted rape of Lot’s guests, there were not any righteous people in Sodom except for the ethically rather mediocre Lot.²⁷ By sparing Lot, the reader realizes that God accepts people with skewed or flawed decency, but basic decency needs to be present. At no place does the reader find legislation that rape is ethically or legally wrong.  There is, however, something called the  “way” of the Lord,”²⁸ which is expressed “in righteousness and in justice.”²⁹ After the reminder to observe the Lord’s specific commandments,³⁰ Israel is ordered, in the collective second person command singular, thereby including everyone, to do that which is “the right and good in the Lord’s eyes.”³¹ Later we are told that these apodictic, positive norms will be seen as “wisdom and understanding” by non-Israelites. Just what is this meta-legal “right” that the Lord requires of humankind that makes this creature “very good,”³² the apex of creation?

The sanctity of marriage seems to be another unwritten law. Abimelech interrogates Abraham regarding his misleading the Philistine locals regarding Sarah, whom he represented as his sister but in fact was his wife with whom he was seen

Interacting with Sarah marital rather than sibling familiarity.  Abraham retorted to his accuser, “that there is no reverence for God in this place,”³³ meaning that this unwritten norm, that men should not be murdered so as to free the assailant from the sin of adultery,³⁴ was felt not to be in force in Abimelech’s jurisdiction. And Joseph, the righteous one, with no one  but the One being with him,³⁵ rejects Mrs. Potipher’s unsolicited advances toward him with moral revulsion. “How can I, [with my internal proto-Torah sense of what “is the good and the right”  thing to do] do this terribly evil act and thereby  will have sinned before God.”³⁶

2. The Evidence

Underlying  the pre-Toraitic ethic is the implicit assumption that humankind will  be judged by the rules and benchmarks that it creates for and applies to itself.   If humankind  misbehaves, corrupting its way on the earth, with the causative hishchit,  to bring low,  God announces to Noah that  He is about to destroy them, bringing them low, “mashchitam, with the earth.”³⁷

Lot’s behavior and fate reflect this doctrine as well.  Like  the Greek Cyclops who violated the hospitality code,  eating rather than feeding his guests, and who was blinded by Odysseus,  Lot observed the hospitality code, like his magnificent uncle Abraham, and was therefore  worthy of being saved, Lot offered his daughters to the Sodomite mob and was seduced by his daughters in order to repopulate the earth.

This doctrine, that humankind is judged by the standards establishes is implicit in Hebrew Scripture, explicit in Christian Scripture, and well attested in Rabbinic writings.

In Matthew 7:1-3, we find:

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

² For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

³ And Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

We first find the rule, “do not be judgmental.” If we in fact are judgmental, we will be subject to judgment.  The reader is told, here explicitly, that the measure by which we do judge others will be that very benchmark  by which one will be held to account. The rule is then concretized, one ought not complain about others when one shares that flaw of others. It is reported in the name of Rabbi Nathan that “the flaw that is within thee should not be identified  [by that person doing the projection] in the other.”³⁸ Both Matthew’s and the Bavli’s narrators gloss older sayings with examples, Matthew with the metaphor of the beam and the Babli, with a folk saying.