Nomisme

Before the word existed, the reality it designates was lived. Rabbinic Judaism was built around the conviction that God gave Israel a Law — the Written Torah and the Oral Torah — whose fulfillment structures entire existence. Tradition counts 613 commandments (taryag mitzvot), 248 positive prescriptions and 365 prohibitions, according to the count popularized by the sages of the Talmud and systematized in the Middle Ages by Maimonides in his Sefer ha-Mitzvot [Babylonian Talmud, Makkot 23b; Maimonides, Sefer ha-Mitzvot].

What the term "nomism" seeks to grasp is that observance is not, in classical Jewish thought, a means to "earn" salvation, but the response of a people to a prior election: the covenant precedes the Law. God chooses Israel by grace, tears it from Egypt, then entrusts it with his commandments as a charter of fidelity. Observance maintains the covenant; transgression, repairable through repentance (teshuva), does not destroy it. This articulation — initial grace, Law as response, repentance as return — will, much later, be the heart of the learned rereading of Second Temple Judaism. Nomism, rightly understood, is therefore not legalism: it is a life ordered by the commandments within a covenant relationship.

The negative charge of the word comes from elsewhere. From early Christian antiquity, a reading of the Apostle Paul opposes "works of the Law" to "faith," and interprets Judaism as a religion of merit. This opposition, reactivated by the Reformation—Luther reading the Epistle to the Romans through his own struggle against the merit of works—durably impregnates nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestant German exegesis.

Its most influential scholarly expression is the work of Ferdinand Weber, whose posthumous synthesis on the theology of ancient Judaism (published in 1880, reissued in 1897) presents rabbinic Judaism as an accounting system of faults and merits, deprived of the certainty of salvation. This portrait, taken up by numerous manuals, culminates in the great histories of Jewish religion in the Second Temple era that make the Law a burden. It is this framework—Judaism as "nomism" in the pejorative sense, a religion of the Law opposed to the Gospel of grace—that would be contested by Jewish voices, then overturned by a Christian scholar.

The challenge does not begin with Sanders. Already in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish scholars and a few Christians denounce the distortion. Solomon Schechter, in his Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (1909), shows that rabbinic piety breathes the joy of the Law and proximity to God, not anxiety about merit. Claude Montefiore, thinker of English liberal Judaism, explicitly criticizes the Pauline portrait of Judaism as not corresponding to the rabbinic Judaism he knows.

The major scholarly turning point is the work of George Foot Moore, Christian historian at Harvard, whose 1921 article, "Christian Writers on Judaism," explicitly denounces the Weber tradition as a distorting apologetic construction. His major work Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era (1927–1930) offers a description of tannaitic Judaism based on rabbinic sources themselves, restoring balance between covenant, Law, and divine mercy. These works prepare the ground: they prove that another reading of "nomism" is possible, but they do not yet impose themselves in the world of New Testament exegesis.

The pivotal date is 1977, with the publication of Paul and Palestinian Judaism by Ed Parish Sanders. Systematically studying Jewish literature from 200 BCE to 200 CE—the Mishna, the Talmud, the Qumran writings, apocrypha and pseudepigrapha—Sanders identifies a common "pattern of religion" that he calls covenantal nomism, "covenantal nomism" [E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, Fortress Press, 1977].

His thesis rests on a few propositions: God elected Israel and gave the Law; observance of the commandments is the response to this election, not its foundation; the means of atonement, including repentance, allow one to remain in the covenant; those who remain faithful will be saved. In short: one "enters" salvation through the grace of election, one "remains" through obedience. Second Temple Judaism is therefore not a religion of anxious merit but a religion of covenant whose Law is the expression. This concept dismantles the caricature of "legalism" and refounds the comparison between Paul and the Judaism of his time.

The shockwave from Sanders gives rise to what James D. G. Dunn names in 1983 as the "New Perspective on Paul" (New Perspective on Paul). If Judaism was not legalistic, then Paul's critique of "works of the Law" was not aimed at merit but something else: for Dunn, the identity markers — circumcision, Sabbath, dietary laws — that separated Jews and Gentiles; for N. T. Wright, the place of the nations in God's covenant purpose.

This shift sparked a lively debate. Reformed exegetes, such as D. A. Carson and the collaborators of the collection Justification and Variegated Nomism (2001–2004), object that Second Temple Judaism was far more "variegated" than a single schema suggests, and that properly legalistic currents existed within it. Others nuance the concept without rejecting it. The term "nomism" ceases to be an insult and becomes a debated analytical tool, declined in the plural: covenantal nomism, variegated nomisms, nomism without covenant. It is the sign that a concept is alive.

It is finally appropriate to name the word itself. "Nomism" derives from the Greek nomos, "law, custom, norm," a term central to Greek political and religious thought, and rendered in the Septuagint by the translation of the Hebrew torah. From nomos proceed in French "autonomie," "astronomie," "antinomie," and the suffix -isme transforms the radical into a system or doctrine: nomism is, literally, the "system of the law."

The term belongs to a lexical constellation: antinomianism (the rejection of the Law, of which Paul was sometimes accused, and which later messianic movements such as Sabbateanism would claim), legalism (pejorative), heteronomy (the law received from another). Its scholarly fortune rests on its relative neutrality: when "legalism" judges, "nomism" describes. This is why it was able to pass from confessional polemic to the vocabulary of comparative history of religions, where it designates today any religion whose revealed norm organizes existence — foremost Judaism, but also, by analogy, certain readings of Islam and Christianity.

Ferdinand Weber (1836–1879) — German Lutheran theologian, author of a System der altsynagogalen palästinischen Theologie, published posthumously in 1880. His work established for two generations the image of Rabbinic Judaism as a religion of merit and calculation of works, devoid of assurance of salvation. It was against this construction, deemed apologetic and distorting, that Moore and later Sanders successively took a stand. Weber represents thus, despite himself, the negative starting point of the debate on nomism.

Solomon Schechter (1847–1915) — Scholar of Judaism born in Romania, discoverer of the Cairo Genizah and president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York. In his Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (1909), he restores the spiritual vitality of Rabbinic piety, its joy in the Law and its confidence in divine mercy. His work constitutes one of the first learned refutations of the "legalistic" reading of Judaism and prepares the reinterpretation of nomism.

George Foot Moore (1851–1931) — Historian of religions at Harvard, of Presbyterian origin. His article "Christian Writers on Judaism" (1921) denounces by name the tradition inherited from Weber, and his Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era (1927–1930) describes Tannaitic Judaism from its own sources. He demonstrated that covenant and grace held a central place in it, opening the way to the later concept of covenantal nomism.

Ed Parish Sanders (1937–2022) — American biblical scholar, professor at McMaster, Oxford and then Duke. His magnum opus Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) forges the category of covenantal nomism and transforms the comparative study of Paul and Judaism. By distinguishing entry into the covenant (by grace) and perseverance in it (by obedience), he renders obsolete the legalistic caricature and founds the New Perspective. His influence on contemporary exegesis remains considerable.

James D. G. Dunn (1939–2020) — British New Testament theologian, professor at Durham. In 1983 he lends his name to the "New Perspective on Paul," extending Sanders by reinterpreting Pauline "works of the Law" as identity markers distinguishing Jews and Gentiles. Author of a vast commentary on the epistles, he made covenantal nomism a widely diffused interpretive key, while also discussing its limits.

"Nomism" offers the rare example of a word that changed sides. Born in Christian polemic to reproach Judaism for a supposed sterile attachment to the Law, it became, under the pen of Sanders and his successors, the instrument that did justice to the religion of Israel: a religion of covenant where the Torah is not a burden but the charter of a fidelity. From Weber to Moore, from Schechter to Sanders, the history of this concept is that of an intellectual reparation, where Jewish and Christian voices have, together, corrected a millennial misunderstanding. The debate is not closed — "varied nomisms" remind us that Second Temple Judaism was plural — but the word has acquired its descriptive dignity. It now says what the Jewish tradition had never ceased to affirm: that to live according to the Law is to answer a gift.