Biblical Law and Wisdom
Date and Time:
Thursday, March 23, 2023
7:00-8:30 pm (doors open at 6:30 pm)
Location:
Nuart Theatre
516 S Main St, Moscow, ID 83843
The relevance and role of biblical law in modern life, when considered at all, tends to be rigorously contested. One area of disagreement is in terms of how to understand the point and character of the legal material in the Scriptures to begin with. What is biblical law?
Is it a set of rules to live by? A divine net to catch us in wrongdoing? Or something different? For many of us, our ideas about biblical law—and how we allow it to inform our imaginations—is powerfully shaped by legal positivism. We tend naturally to see law as the command of a superior, the meaning of which is encompassed entirely in that command’s semantic content. Does this accurately represent the character of biblical law? Is biblical law a list of posited commands, a portable collection of statutes apt for codifying in contemporary law codes? Or might our modern understanding of law be distorting our view of what biblical law is and intends to accomplish?
In this lecture, Dr. Burnside will critically assess modern legal positivism, and urge an approach to the genre of law in the Bible in terms of its mutual relation with wisdom.
This is the first of two lectures on this subject. The second will be presented at the NSA North campus auditorium on Friday, March 24, at 3:00pm.
Jonathan Burnside is a Professor of Biblical Law at the Law School at the University of Bristol, England. He is Research Director at the Law School where he teaches Jewish Law, among other subjects. He has degrees in Law and Criminology, both from the University of Cambridge, and a Doctorate in Law from the University of Liverpool. His prolific scholarship includes the prominent work God, Justice and Society: Aspects of Law and Legality in the Bible (2011, Oxford University Press).
