Seven Laws of Noah


The Seven Laws of Noah, also referred to as the Noahide Laws or the Noachide Laws, are a set of imperatives which, according to the Talmud, were given by God as a binding set of laws for the "children of Noah" – that is, all of humanity.
According to Jewish tradition, non-Jews who adhere to these laws are said to be followers of Noahidism and regarded as righteous gentiles, who are assured of a place in Olam Haba, the final reward of the righteous.
The Seven Laws of Noah include prohibitions against worshipping idols, cursing God, murder, adultery and sexual immorality, theft, eating flesh torn from a living animal, as well as the obligation to establish courts of justice.

The Seven Laws

The seven Noahide laws as traditionally enumerated are the following:
  1. Not to worship idols.
  2. Not to curse God.
  3. To establish courts of justice.
  4. Not to commit murder.
  5. Not to commit adultery, bestiality, or sexual immorality.
  6. Not to steal.
  7. Not to eat flesh torn from a living animal.
According to the Talmud, the rabbis agree that the seven laws were given to the sons of Noah. However, they disagree on precisely which laws were given to Adam and Eve. Six of the seven laws are exegetically derived from passages in Genesis, with the seventh being the establishing of courts.
The earliest complete rabbinic version of the seven laws can be found in the Tosefta:

Origin

Torah sources

According to the Genesis flood narrative, a deluge covered the whole world, killing every surface-dwelling creature except Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives, and the animals taken aboard Noah's Ark. According to this, all modern humans are descendants of Noah, thus the name Noahide Laws is referred to the laws that apply to all of humanity. After the flood, God sealed a covenant with Noah with the following admonitions :
The Book of Jubilees, generally dated to the 2nd century BCE, may include an early reference to Noahide Law at verses 7:20–28:

Acts 15

The Jewish Encyclopedia article on Saul of Tarsus states:
The article "New Testament" states:

Modern scholarship

Rabbinical

, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, published and spoke about the Seven Laws of Noah many times. He taught, based on a detailed reading of Maimonides' Hilchot Melachim, Talmud and Scripture, that the Seven Laws originally given to Noah were given yet again, through Moses at Sinai, and it is exclusively through that giving of the Torah that the Seven Laws derive their current force. What has changed with the giving of the Torah is that now, it is the duty of the Jewish people to bring the rest of the world to fulfill the Seven Laws.
The posek Rabbi Moshe Weiner details the sources for all seven of the laws in his legal compendium Sheva Mitzvot Hashem. Adam, the first man, was given six laws. When Noah was permitted to eat meat, the proviso against meat from a living animal was added. At Sinai, the Laws were given again through Moses, together with their details. He concurs with the Rebbe, based on his analysis of other Acharonim that the current authority for the Laws is from the Torah from Sinai, where before it was from ancestral oral tradition from Noah and Adam. To enumerate his sources for each of the laws:
, a professor of religious studies, the laws were not mentioned in Genesis but were extracted from the Torah by second-century rabbis.
David Novak presents a range of theories regarding the origin of the Noachide laws, including the Bible, Hittite law, the Maccabean period, and the Roman period.

In Halakha

Talmud

According to the Talmud, the Noahide Laws apply to all humanity. In Judaism, בני נח B'nei Noah refers to all of humankind. The Talmud also states: "Righteous people of all nations have a share in the world to come". Any non-Jew who lives according to these laws is regarded as one of "the righteous among the gentiles".
The rabbis agree that the seven laws were given to the sons of Noah. However, they disagree on precisely which laws were given to Adam and Eve. Six of the seven laws are exegetically derived from passages in Genesis. The Talmud adds extra laws beyond the seven listed in the Tosefta which are attributed to different rabbis, such as the grafting of trees and sorcery among others, Ulla going so far as to make a list of 30 laws. The Talmud expands the scope of the seven laws to cover about 100 of the 613 mitzvoth.

Punishment

In practice Jewish law makes it very difficult to apply the death penalty. No record exists of a gentile having been put to death for violating the seven laws. Some of the categories of capital punishment recorded in the Talmud are recorded as having never been carried out. It is thought that the rabbis included discussion of them in anticipation of the coming messianic age.
The Talmud lists the punishment for blaspheming the Ineffable Name of God as death. The sons of Noah are to be executed by decapitation for most crimes, considered one of the lightest capital punishments, by stoning if he has intercourse with a Jewish betrothed woman, or by strangulation if the Jewish woman has completed the marriage ceremonies, but had not yet consummated the marriage. In Jewish law the only form of blasphemy which is punishable by death is blaspheming the Ineffable Name. Some Talmudic rabbis held that only those offences for which a Jew would be executed, are forbidden to gentiles. The Talmudic rabbis discuss which offences and sub-offences are capital offences and which are merely forbidden.
Maimonides states that anyone who does not accept the seven laws is to be executed, as God compelled the world to follow these laws. However, for the other prohibitions such as the grafting of trees and bestiality he holds that the sons of Noah are not to be executed. Maimonides adds a universalism lacking from earlier Jewish sources. The Talmud differs from Maimonides in that it considers the seven laws enforceable by Jewish authorities on non-Jews living within a Jewish nation. Nahmanides disagrees with Maimonides' reasoning. He limits the obligation of enforcing the seven laws to non-Jewish authorities taking the matter out of Jewish hands. The Tosafot seems to agree with Nahmanides reasoning. According to some opinions, punishment is the same whether the individual transgresses with knowledge of the law or is ignorant of the law.

Subdivisions

Various rabbinic sources have different positions on the way the seven laws are to be subdivided in categories. Maimonides', in his Mishneh Torah, included the grafting of trees. Like the Talmud, he interpreted the prohibition against homicide as including a prohibition against abortion. David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra, a commentator on Maimonides, expressed surprise that he left out castration and sorcery which were also listed in the Talmud.
The Talmudist Ulla said that here are 30 laws which the sons of Noah took upon themselves. However he only lists three, namely the three that the Gentiles follow: not to create a Ketubah between males, not to sell carrion or human flesh in the market and to respect the Torah. The rest of the laws are not listed. Though the authorities seem to take it for granted that Ulla's thirty commandments included the original seven, an additional thirty laws is also possible from the reading. Two different lists of the 30 laws exist. Both lists include an additional twenty-three mitzvot which are subdivisions or extensions of the seven laws. One from the 16th-century work Asarah Maamarot by Rabbi Menahem Azariah da Fano and a second from the 10th century Samuel ben Hofni which was recently published from his Judeo-Arabic writings after having been found in the Cairo Geniza. Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Chajes suggests Menahem Azariah of Fano enumerated commandments are not related to the first seven, nor based on Scripture, but instead were passed down by oral tradition.

Ger toshav (resident alien)

In earlier times, a Gentile living in the Land of Israel who accepted the Seven Laws in front of a rabbinical court was known as a ger toshav. The regulations regarding Jewish-Gentile relations are modified in the case of a ger toshav.

Contemporary status

Historically, some rabbinic opinions consider non-Jews not only not obliged to adhere to all the remaining laws of the Torah, but actually forbidden to observe them.
Noahide law differs radically from Roman law for gentiles, if only because the latter was enforceable judicial policy. Rabbinic Judaism has never adjudicated any cases under Noahide law, Jewish scholars disagree about whether Noahide law is a functional part of Halakha.
Some modern views hold that penalties are a detail of the Noahide Laws and that Noahides themselves must determine the details of their own laws for themselves. According to this school of thought – see N. Rakover, Law and the Noahides ; M. Dallen, The Rainbow Covenant – the Noahide Laws offer mankind a set of absolute values and a framework for righteousness and justice, while the detailed laws that are currently on the books of the world's states and nations are presumptively valid.
In recent years, the term "Noahide" has come to refer to non-Jews who strive to live in accord with the seven Noahide Laws; the terms "observant Noahide" or "Torah-centered Noahides" would be more precise but these are infrequently used. Support for the use of "Noahide" in this sense can be found with the Ritva, who uses the term Son of Noah to refer to a Gentile who keeps the seven laws, but is not a Ger Toshav. The rainbow, referring to the Noahide or First Covenant, is the symbol of many organized Noahide groups, following.
To various modern theologians the Noahide laws represent the inclusive nature of Judaism because they affirm the equality of Jews and non-Jews. To other intellectuals these seven laws represent natural law which are accessible to all through intellect and do not require revelation. According to Robert Eisen the second stream of thought ignores how a non-Jew could access these laws without the Jewish revelations. To Eisen, these set of laws impose a Jewish understanding of morality upon non-Jews. To Eisen, the Noahide laws represent more of a barrier between Jews and non-Jews, because non-Jews are forbidden to observe Jewish laws.

Maimonides

The Jewish scholar Maimonides held that Gentiles may have a part in the world to come just by observing Noahide law and accepting it as given by Moses. Such children of Noah become the status of Chasidei Umot HaOlam—Pious People of the World, and are different from children of Noah who only keep the seven laws out of moral/ethical reasoning alone. He writes in his book of laws:"
Some later editions of the Mishneh Torah differ by one letter and read "Nor one of their wise men." The later reading is narrower. Spinoza read Maimonides as using nor and accused him of being narrow and particularistic. Other philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Moses Mendelssohn have used more inclusive interpretations of the passage by Maimonides.
In either reading, Maimonides appears to exclude philosophical Noahides from being Righteous Gentiles. Thus Maimonides emphasizes that a truly Righteous Gentile follows the seven laws because they are divinely revealed and thus are followed out of obedience to God. According to Steven Schwarzschild, this position has its source in Maimonides' adoption of Aristotle's skeptical attitude towards the ability of reason to arrive at moral truths, and "many of the most outstanding spokesmen of Judaism themselves dissented sharply from" this position, which is "individual and certainly somewhat eccentric" in comparison to other Jewish thinkers.

Christianity

The Apostolic Decree recorded in Acts 15 is commonly seen as a parallel to Noahide Law; however, some modern scholars dispute the connection between Acts 15 and Noahide Law, the content of Noahide Law, the historical reliability of the Acts of the Apostles, and the nature of biblical law in Christianity. The Apostolic Decree is still observed by Eastern Orthodoxy and includes some food restrictions.
The 18th-century rabbi Jacob Emden proposed that Jesus, and Paul after him, intended to convert the gentiles to the Noahide laws while calling on the Jews to keep the full Law of Moses.

Chabad movement

stated that God commanded Moses to compel the world to accept these seven commandments. In 1983 Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson urged his followers to actively engage in activities to inform non-Jews about these seven commandments, which had not been done in previous generations.

Sefer Sheva Mitzvot Hashem

After Rabbi Schneerson started his Noahide Campaign in the 1980s, a codification of the exact obligations of the Gentiles in the spirit of the classical Shulchan Aruch was needed. In 2005, Rabbi Moshe Weiner of Jerusalem accepted to produce an in-depth codification of the Noahide precepts. The work is called Sefer Sheva Mitzvot HaShem, published 2008/2009. As it was approved by both of the then presiding chief rabbis of Israel as well as by other Hasidic and non-Hasidic halachic authorities, it can claim an authoritative character and is referred as a Shulchan Aruch for Gentiles at many places.

Public recognition

United States

In 1987 President Ronald Reagan signed a proclamation speaking of "the historical tradition of ethical values and principles, which have been the bedrock of society from the dawn of civilization when they were known as the Seven Noahide Laws, transmitted through God to Moses on Mount Sinai", and in 1991, Congress stated in the preamble to the 1991 bill that established Education Day in honor of the birthday of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of the Chabad movement:

Israeli Druze

In January 2004, Sheikh Mowafak Tarif, the spiritual leader of Israeli Druze, signed a declaration, which called on non-Jews living in Israel to observe the Noahide Laws. He was joined by the mayor of Shefa-'Amr.