The Hellenistic Origin of the Torah — A Review of Russell Gmirkin’s Books Part 3 of 4: Plato’s Laws and the Torah

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Under the reign of King Josiah (639–609 bce), during repair work in the Temple, the high priest Hilkiah discovered a “scroll of the Law (Torah)”. It was brought and read to the king, who then convened all his subjects, “priests, prophets and the whole populace,” and read to them aloud “the entire contents of the Book of the Covenant discovered in the Temple of Yahweh.” The king made this book Law, and ordered the priests “to remove all the cult objects which had been made for Baal, Asherah and the whole array of heaven.”

That story is told in chapters 22 and 23 of the second book of Kings. Most scholars today regard that story as a piece of propaganda engineered by royal and priestly powers to present their new law code, containing Deuteronomy and Leviticus, as the restoration of an old, lost one. The Torah was not “discovered” but written or at least edited during the reign of Josiah, these scholars say. Since the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel I and II, Kings I and II are cast in the same ideological framework as Deuteronomy; it is assumed that they were written during the same period, although incorporating older material.

More skeptical scholars, however, point to a serious problem with that theory: it is inconceivable that Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic history were written and promoted under a monarchy, because they belittle the royal institution. The king is entirely absent from the Pentateuch except in Deuteronomy 17, only to have limits imposed on his power, his accoutrements, his wealth, his horses and his harem. The idea that a king would sponsor such a law code and a national history presenting royalty as only grudgingly conceded by God to an unfaithful people (in 1Samuel 8:7), makes no sense at all. The Deuteronomic ideology better fits the theocratic regime envisioned by Ezra and Nehemiah: the rule of a caste of priests, with a weak king or no king at all. In the words of Philip R. Davies, author of In Search of “Ancient Israel”: A Study in Biblical Origins (1992), “the ideological structure of the biblical literature can only be explained in the last analysis as a product of the Persian period.” It means that the “reform of Josiah” itself, and not just the staged discovery of the Torah, is “bound to be regarded as a pious legend, just about possible perhaps, but extremely improbable.”[1] This Torah supposedly written by Moses, abandoned and then revived two centuries later by Josiah, then becoming obsolete again as the country was ravaged, then finally returned from Babylon by Ezra to a people who no longer remembered it — this Torah had in fact never been known before Ezra made it up. It is a lie within a lie within a lie.

Philip Davies may be called a “low minimalist”, compared to Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson, the founders of the Copenhagen International Seminar, who go one step beyond and theorize that the Torah was written after the Persian period, in the Hellenistic period. The Dominican priest Étienne Nodet has joined their ranks, and suggests that “the final shape of most of the Hebrew Bible was carried out at the library of Alexandria, in two major steps: first the Pentateuch in the third century bc for all the Israelites, and then a Jewish library including the Prophets and many writings in the second century bc.”[2]

Another influential author in the movement is Philippe Wajdenbaum, who made a big contribution with his book Argonauts of the Desert (2011), a minute account of the similarities between the Bible and Greek literature, which can only be explained by Greek influence during the Hellenistic period. Wajdenbaum finds that the most significant influence was from Plato’s Laws, and he writes:

According to the results of my analysis, the Bible’s author(s) wanted to transpose—in the form of their own national epic—the Ideal State of Plato’s Laws, a political and theological project initiated in the Republic. The biblical story, recalling the foundation of a twelve-tribe State that is endowed with divine laws which enable it to live ideally, seems to be inspired by Plato’s Laws. … In Genesis–Kings there exists an opposition between the twelve-tribe Ideal State—a State governed only by laws, for which the plan is given by God to Moses and which is founded by Joshua—and the monarchy. The monarchy of the nations in Genesis and Exodus, and that of Israel in the books of Samuel and Kings, is one whose excesses will first bring Israel to division, and then to its eventual downfall.[3]

Wajdenbaum tells of “[his] astonishment that a complete and neutral comparative study of the Bible with Plato had not been done before,” but, reflecting on the backlash that he received from the academic community, he concludes: “This resistance, this rejection a priori of the thesis, coming both from believers and non-believers, is a testament to the total success of the biblical project and the deep attachment of Westerners to the sacredness of the text.”[4]

Russell Gmirkin built upon the work of Wajdenbaum and others. In his first book, which I discussed in my two previous articles, he attempted to prove that Genesis 1–11 and Exodus borrowed from histories of Babylon and Egypt written in the 270s and 280s bc. In his second book, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible (Routledge, 2017), he looks at the legislative sections of the Pentateuch (Torah) and argues that it emulates the Greek ideal, albeit with a few national idiosyncrasies: a society of free and equal citizens, all landowners (except for the itinerant Levites), ruled by law, where offices (including that of king) were available to all. Gmirkin points to striking parallels between biblical and Greek constitutional institutions, laws, law collections, and legends about law enactments, that are for the most part absent from Ancient Near Eastern legal tradition. Specifically, he argues that the Pentateuch writers borrowed directly from Plato’s Laws.

Since Greek literature only became known to the Jewish world after Alexander the Great, an unmistakable influence of Greek legal and political philosophy would confirm the Hellenistic date of the Pentateuch that Gmirkin has already defended on other grounds in his first book.

Such parallels are exceedingly difficult to explain under the hypothesis that biblical legal traditions developed in the Persian Era or earlier, when direct Athenian influence on Jewish legal writings can be ruled out, even under the theory of an Eastern Mediterranean cultural sphere. However, Jewish access to the legal collections found in the Great Library of Alexandria provides a direct mechanism whereby the biblical authors could have become familiar with both Athenian laws and with Plato’s Laws.[5]

The implications are enormous. If the Bible is inspired by Plato, then it is not inspired by God in the way it claims to be. Philo of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus and other Jewish writers have alleged that Plato had read Moses, or had known about him through Jeremiah, whom he could have met in Egypt. We don’t know of any Greek who believed that lie, and we know of one, Apion from Alexandria, who wrote a book (lost, of course) to expose it. It took Christianity for the Romans to believe in the Jewish lie. Church Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, Origen and Eusebius repeated Philo and Josephus’s charge of “theft by the Greeks.”[6]

To his credit, Augustine repudiated this idea: “a careful calculation of dates,” he writes in the City of God 8.11, proves that “on that voyage of his [to Egypt], Plato could never have seen Jeremiah, who was dead so long before, nor have read those same scriptures which had not yet been translated into the Greek language.” On the other hand, Plato may have learned from Jews in Egypt about their scriptures “by means of conversation.”

The Church vouched for the priority of the Bible. Until Voltaire, it was commonly believed that the Bible was the first book ever in human history. And since the Bible’s claim to antiquity is the preamble to the Jews’ claim to chosenness, Christians became the Jews’ best advocate, the guardians of the Temple (the Bible being the Jews’ portable temple since 70 ad).

The Hebrew Bible as a Hellenistic program

The Torah is a legal constitution. Constitutions were a Greek innovation. The constitution of a Greek polis defined the arrangement of the highest government offices, and outlined their duties and the manner of their appointment.[7] “A constitutional definition of legal institutions and their functioning,” says Gmirkin, “was essential to the citizen self-rule of the polis, in which the citizens themselves held the reins of government. It was for this reason that the constitution arose as a distinct genre among the Greeks, but was unknown in the Ancient Near East. Under the absolute rule that characterized both the great empires and the lesser city-states of the Ancient Near East, the exercise of governmental power did not require a formal constitution, because the state was essentially an extension of the power of the king and those under his command.”[8] “The king of the Ancient Near East was a ruler over subjects, with authority passed down within a dynastic royal line, and whose dominion was an expression of raw power. Ancient Near Eastern kings exercised supreme military, judicial, economic, executive and (as patrons of temples) cultic powers.” The description of the office of king in Deuteronomy 17:14–20 is inconsistent with kingship as practiced in the Ancient Near East. “For instance, the Deuteronomic king appears to have been appointed by his fellow-citizens, that is, by the citizen assembly; the king’s rule was to be subject to written laws, from a copy prepared under priestly supervision; the king was assigned no military, judicial, cultic or executive responsibilities, and indeed the duties of his office are entirely unclear in the Torah of the King.”[9]

Not all laws in the Pentateuch are of Greek inspiration—laws allowing for polygamy and bride-price, or priestly sacrificial procedures are not—but many are.

Biblical indebtedness to Greek law seems incontrovertible in the statutes on heiresses, inheritance and levirate marriage, which corresponded in extraordinary detail with Greek epiklerate laws. The Greek laws addressed precisely the same legal issues that arose when the head of a household died without a male heir: the preservation of the family name, the role of the heiresses in disposition of the ancestral estates and the potential loss of such estates to the kinship group and the tribe. The solutions adopted for these problems within the biblical and Greek legal systems were virtually identical.[10]

Likewise, “Biblical laws on homicide have almost nothing in common with the Ancient Near East,” where there were no laws concerning blood vengeance or the role of the kinship group in prosecuting cases. The blood of the slain man calling for vengeance, the defilement of a city caused by innocent blood, the role of the kinsman avenger in judicial accusation and prosecution of murderers are found in Greek myth, poetry and tragedy, as well as in Plato’s Laws (9.872d–e). They also figure prominently in biblical mythology.[11]

The Decalogue is adapted from a Greek model, according to Gmirkin. It has no parallel in Ancient Near Eastern literature but resembles the Commandments of the Seven Sages, a collection of ethical maxims (Follow God, Obey the Law, Honor Your Parents, Know Yourself, Despise a Slanderer, Guard Friendship, and so forth) that tradition attributed to the Seven Sages of archaic Greece, and that were inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, home to the famous oracle. “The prominent display of the Commandments of the Seven Sages in the most revered of all Greek temples gave these wise commandments an aura of divine sanction, much like the tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments said to reside in the ark of the covenant within the Jewish temple (Ex. 25.16; 40.20; Deut. 10.5; 1 Kgs 8.9).[12]

Not only the Mosaic laws, but the narrative framework of their enactment is of Greek inspiration, according to Gmirkin. “Greek literature abounds with examples of constitutional and legal topics discussed within prose narratives that provide rich and compelling parallels to biblical legal narratives. … The formal rise of the Israelite nation is presented within the narrative context of a formulaic Greek foundation story, with the introduction of a democratic constitution and laws by the oikist Moses.[13]

In conclusion:

The Pentateuchal law collections evoke an entirely different time and a different culture from the Ancient Near East, one in which the land was divided among all the citizens, who were brothers with an equal share in their own government; in which a single law applied to all, from the poor to the king, not one law for the ruling class and one for the serf; in which both the laws and the justice system were in the hands of the citizens, not the king; in which obedience to the law was secured, not by terroristic threats, but appeal to citizen values such as love of freedom, shared ancestral traditions, piety and social conscience; a world, in short, that was foreign to the Ancient Near East until the arrival of democratic egalitarian Greek values in the Hellenistic Era. Several biblical legal genres were encountered throughout the Greek world, but absent in the Ancient.[14]

Dependence on Plato’s Laws

Gmirkin notes that a number of biblical laws “contain features that were not merely broadly Greek, but specific to Athens.”[15] Moreover “many features of the Pentateuchal legal institutions conform more closely with the system described in Plato’s Laws than with historical Athenian institutions, leading to the conclusion that the biblical authors were acquainted with this specific text of ca. 350 bce, Plato’s last work.”[16] For example,

the biblical preoccupation with stoning as a preferred method of execution of offenders by the community seems to reflect Plato’s Laws. Although stoning was well known in the Greek world, it appears exclusively in extant sources as an extra-legal expression of community outrage with the sole exception of Plato’s Laws 9.872c–873c, where the extraordinary crime of parricide was to be punished by stoning. The Pentateuch’s near-exclusive legal specification of execution by stoning is thus best explained by literary dependence on Plato’s Laws.[17]

Several laws found in both Plato’s Laws and the Pentateuch are otherwise unique. For example, “Plato was the first to introduce a legal distinction between premeditated and unpremeditated murder, as also found in the Covenant Code [Exodus 20:22–23:19]. … The biblical laws on the division of the land into equal lots and the inalienability of citizen landholdings as a cure for poverty also resembled legal provisions in Plato’s Laws but not in Athens.”[18]

Plato’s Laws discussed the drafting of a constitution and laws for an imaginary colony in Creta named Magnesia. It envisioned that the initial set of colonists should be divided by lot into twelve tribes, each tribe being assigned a territory: “The city shall be placed in a suitable situation, as nearly as possible in the center of the country, and shall be divided into twelve wards. Twelve lots will be assigned to twelve gods, and they will give their names to the tribes” (Laws 5.745b-d).[19] This, Gmirkin points out, is strikingly similar to the way the book of Joshua narrates the conquest of the land, the creation of tribal territories, and the allotment of land to the colonists.

According to Gmirkin, the book of Deuteronomy itself “was written according to directions laid out in Plato’s Laws as a speech to the gathered colonists of the nation about to be founded, recounting their laws suitably framed by hortatory introductions and other educational and rhetorical content. This shows the very direct impact of Plato’s Laws on the creation of the Torah by the biblical authors.”[20] The very creation of the Pentateuch seems to be following the instructions recorded in Plato’s Laws. For example, “Plato’s Laws contained many examples of suggested mechanisms whereby the new laws and institutions of the polis might convincingly be portrayed as ancient and divine.”[21]

Plato also recommends the formation of a national literature by the systematic collection of older hymns and literary texts, their eventual revision, and the creation of new texts that conform to the State ideology and theology—exactly what the Pentateuch is.[22] A picture thus emerges in which the Pentateuch authors used Plato’s Laws as a blueprint for rebuilding the Jewish nation on the basis of a national literature and body of laws that was given a false antiquity.

The primary aim of the Torah was to lay out a constitutional and legislative framework for the nation, suitably presented in a persuasive format that would encourage its adoption by the citizenry. A second objective was to give these laws an aura of antiquity, divine authority and unchangeability in line with Greek notions of revered ancestral laws so as to link obedience to the law with deep-seated notions of piety and tradition. A third goal was to create a charter myth for those divine laws in the dramatic narrative form of a foundation story that forged a powerful sense of national identity in those who adopted this literary narrative as their own historical past as descendants of the ancient children of Israel.[23]

One can now begin to understand the full scope of the reorganization — one might say reinvention — of Jewish national life undertaken by the legislators of ca. 270 bce, following the ambitious program laid out in Plato’s Laws. Their task began only with the creation of a new constitution and law collection, written with persuasive features as Plato’s Laws dictated, and narrated within a charter myth that described the nation’s ancient, divine origins. Additionally, as “legislators of the arts,” they oversaw the creation and approval of a national literature centered on the book of the law, but encompassing every literary genre, designed to give the nation’s foundation myths the apparent factual force of history and to promote the nation’s laws and ethical values through songs, stories and discourses directed at both the rational and the irrational, in order to shape the mind, emotions and impulses of every citizen, young and old. The legislators also established a new system of universal education to disseminate the laws and national myths to the citizenry by means of both the written texts of the approved national literature and by the oral and dramatic presentation of these same laws and myths through a new festival system designed to reinforce their national heritage in a heightened atmosphere of pageantry and celebration that involved all the senses and emotions. The creation of all these new national institutions — the establishment of new laws, approved literature and reinvented festivals — constituted a refounding of the Jewish nation along the lines laid out in Plato’s Laws, with careful attention to imbuing the citizenry by every means possible with fierce loyalty to their laws, their land and their mythic past.[24]

The Fake Antiquity

The Pentateuch’s dependance on Greek literature, and on Plato in particular, “points to Jewish access to the texts housed in the Great Library of Alexandria after ca. 290 bc. The tradition that put visiting Jewish legal experts at Alexandria in ca. 270 bc at the invitation of Ptolemy II Philadelphus for the purpose of adding a text on Jewish laws to the holdings of the Great Library provides a historical context for the confluence of Jewish and Greek cultures that stimulated the creation of the Pentateuchal law collections.”[25]

Besides the formation of a national consciousness among Jews, the Pentateuch authors had the ambition of giving the Jewish nation, in the eyes of the Greeks, a prestigious antiquity and a priority in the discovery of the ideal law system. Thus in Deuteronomy 4:6–8, Moses claims that when the nations will hear of his statutes and judgments, they will recognize the greatness of Israel. “This appears to indicate that the Deuteronomist(s) … anticipated that the Deuteronomic law collection would be of interest to an international reading audience, pointing to an intellectual environment in which comparisons of the relative virtues of various legal systems was a topic of widespread interest.”[26]

The claim, inbuilt in the Bible, of the Bible’s antiquity and of Moses’ authorship, “came to be widely accepted at face value within a few short generations.”[27] In Against Apion 2.145–295, Josephus recognized that the Jewish laws closely resembled Plato’s ideal polis, but then declared that since the Jewish laws had been established 2,000 years earlier, in the time of Moses, they must necessarily have influenced Plato’s writings as well as those of other Greek philosophers. The charade, repeated unanimously by Jewish scholars, and later by Christian apologists, was remarkably successful.

The attachment of the Jews as a religion and as a people to their literature was and is extraordinary. No other nation in antiquity was so thoroughly defined by its literature. In later times, the Jews would come to be known as “the people of the book,” an apt description, because to an extraordinary degree the Jews derived their distinctive culture, religion, ethics, laws, historical traditions and sense of ethnic identity from their treasured national literature. Remarkably, the Jewish people, religion, literature and way of life long outlived even the disastrous fall of the Jewish nation and its temple in 66–70 CE. Although one must challenge both the exaggerated antiquity of the Jewish laws and the direction of influence between Moses and Plato as claimed by Josephus, the historical persistence of Jewish laws and literature after the time of Josephus matches and exceeds even Josephus’ extravagant claims. If judged by “the test of time” (2.279–80), the sacred biblical texts can be understood as perhaps the world’s most successful experiment in social engineering, having created not one but two ethnoi — the Samaritans and the Jews — that have successfully persisted for over 2,000 years with an undiminished loyalty to their respective foundational national literatures, much as Plato predicted. The Torah and the Hebrew Bible, understood as ancient literary implementations of the program found in Plato’s Laws, demonstrate how extraordinarily successful Plato’s legislative and literary strategies for nation-building were when applied in the real world.[28]

The irony, though, is that the constitutional system imagined by Plato in Laws was not adopted by the Hellenistic Lagids or Seleucids, while its Jewish adaptation, the Torah, became the very foundation of the Jewish nation and has remained so for more than two thousand years. Better still: half of the planet has come to regard the Jewish Torah as “the Book”.

It must be stressed, however, that Jews who put together their holy book in Alexandria had a much bigger geopolitical agenda than Plato. Plato’s Laws were imagined for a city-state, while the Torah was tailored for a nation with imperial ambition. If you obey the Law, wrote the Deuteronomist, “Yahweh your God will raise you higher than every other nation in the world,” wrote (Deuteronomy 28:1). The ambition to make Jerusalem the capital of a regional superpower ruling from the Euphrates to the Nile did not suddenly arise in the Hellenistic period. The land of the Jews is in the middle of the Fertile Crescent, between Mesopotamia and Egypt. It had always been a battlefield between the two, and the Jewish elite understood that Israel could never achieve its national independence unless it became a regional superpower in its own right. Already after the conquest of the Northern Kingdom by Assyria, Yahweh vowed to take his revenge through the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 1–39), foreseeing the day when “the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem. Then he will judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples” (2:3–4). That was the program already.

In the Hellenistic period, after Alexander the Great had conquered both Egypt and Persia, the Jewish elite saw their opportunity. With an urban diaspora of one million in Alexandria, and with both the will and the skill to influence the Ptolemies’ policy (following in Joseph’s imaginary footsteps), the Jewish elite had every reason to believe that they could extend Judea-Samaria’s domination over the whole of Syria and beyond. The dream of Greater Israel was born then. The imaginary kingdom of Solomon was the model.[29] Jerusalem’s ambition, however, clashed with other local nations. The administrative boundaries between Samaria, Judea, and Idumea under the Ptolemies are not clear, but Judeans held both a sense of kinship and a strong hostility to the Idumeans or Edomites, which is reflected in the Pentateuch (Edom is another name of Esau, the brother of Jacob, whose other name is Israel). That hostility, attached to the memory of Edom’s siding with Assyria against Israel, would never cease. The Idumeans were Arabs (Nabataeans according to Strabo, Geography 16.2.34), and their kingdom roughly coincided with today’s Jordania.) History does rhyme!

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[1] Philip Davies, In Search of “Ancient Israel”: A Study in Biblical Origins, Journal of the Study of the Old Testament, 1992, pp. 41, 94.

[2] Étienne Nodet, “Editing the Bible: Alexandria or Babylone?”, in Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum, eds., The Bible and Hellenism: Greek Influence on Jewish and Early Christian Literature, Routledge, 2014, pp. 36-55,  p. 37.

[3] Philippe Wajdenbaum, Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible, 2011, Routledge, 2019, p. 4.

[4] Ibid., p. 9. Wajdenbaum is also the co-editor, with Thomas Thompson, of the collection of essays, The Bible and Hellenism: Greek Influence on Jewish and Early Christian Literature, Routledge, 2014.

[5] Russell Gmirkin, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, Routledge, 2017, p. 4.

[6] Thomas L. Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum, eds., The Bible and Hellenism: Greek Influence on Jewish and Early Christian Literature (Copenhagen International Seminar), Routledge, 2014, p. 5.

[7] Gmirkin, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, op. cit., p. 10.

[8] Ibid., p. 11.

[9] Ibid., p. 34.

[10] Ibid., p. 98.

[11] Ibid., pp. 84-85.

[12] Ibid., pp. 204-205.

[13] Ibid., p. 234.

[14] Ibid., p. 144.

[15] Ibid., p. 145.

[16] Ibid., p. 13.

[17] Ibid., pp. 85-86.

[18] Ibid., pp. 145-146.

[19] Ibid., p. 21.

[20] Ibid., p. 250.

[21] Ibid., p. 255.

[22] Ibid., p. 266.

[23] Ibid., p. 262.

[24] Ibid., p. 269.

[25] Ibid., p. 146.

[26] Ibid., p. 73.

[27] Ibid., p. 270.

[28] Ibid., p. 274.

[29] Israel Finkelstein and Neil Adher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, S&S International, 2007.