Adam’s Wisdom and Israel’s Law

The concept of natural law—universal moral knowledge—is often associated with Stoic philosophers, Thomas Aquinas, or the medieval Jewish rabbis. But Jews in the Second Temple period had their own model of natural law, interpreting the story of Adam and Eve so as to associate the primordial pair with "wisdom," "law," or "commandment." In this tradition, when God created humans he endowed them with moral knowledge. "Adam’s wisdom" was a common motif in Jewish literature of the Greco-Roman period. Some texts—namely, Sirach, 4 Ezra, and Paul’s Letter to the Romans—combined Adam’s law with the tradition of Israel’s reception of the law at Sinai.

Rony Kozman offers a careful reading of these three early Jewish writings and shows that Jews coordinated Adam’s wisdom and the torah of Moses so as to emphasize natural law as divinely revealed. This interpretive tactic heightened the moral knowledge God gave to all people by dressing Adam’s commandment in the cloak of Sinai’s thunderous revelation; it further underscored humanity’s culpability alongside God’s justice. But Jewish writers thought differently about the possibility of fulfilling natural law’s obligations, and deployments of the motif toward particular rhetorical-theological ends resulted in divergent perspectives: Sirach secures humanity’s moral agency; 4 Ezra diminishes it; Romans incapacitates it altogether. Kozman reads key passages from Romans to show Paul’s universal problem with God's law and his solution. The arrival of Law’s global dominion in Adam and Moses subjected everyone to the reigns of Sin and Death. Paul’s gospel announces that in Christ, Jews and gentiles have been liberated from Law’s reign so that they fulfill its just commands.

Adam’s Wisdom and Israel’s Law remedies the scholarly neglect of natural law in the New Testament, recontextualizes the Apostle Paul within his Jewish milieu, and emphasizes the importance of attending to both the common and diverse interpretations of the figure of Adam in the Second Temple period. As Kozman demonstrates, Adam was an important site for contesting theological and philosophical issues, including epistemology, ethical obligation, divine justice, human freedom, and how Jews and gentiles relate to God’s law.