Three of the four traditions are religions of law as much as of belief: they hold that God has given commands for the whole of life, from prayer and food to marriage, trade and justice, and they have built great bodies of scholarship to apply them. Christianity took a different path, and the contrast explains much about all four.
Halakhah
Jewish law is called halakhah (Hebrew, ‘the way to walk’). The rabbis counted 613 commandments in the Torah, 248 positive and 365 negative; the count is first recorded in the Talmud in the name of Rabbi Simlai in the third century.1 The Torah was interpreted through the oral tradition written down in the Mishnah around 200 CE and discussed at length in the Talmud, and codified in the Middle Ages, most famously by Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah, whose list of the 613 commandments is the one most often used.2 Many commandments depend on the Temple and cannot be kept since its destruction.
Canon law
The first Christians were released from most of the ritual law of Moses: the apostles at Jerusalem required of Gentile converts only that they avoid food offered to idols, blood, what is strangled and sexual immorality.3 What grew in its place was canon law, the law the church made for its own government, worship and discipline. It began with the canons of councils such as Nicaea, and was gathered by the monk Gratian around 1140 into a collection that became the core of the medieval Corpus juris canonici. The Catholic Church issued a Code of Canon Law in 1917 and a revised code in 1983, and the Orthodox and other churches keep their own collections.4 Canon law governs the church; it does not claim, as the Torah and the Qur’an do, to lay down God’s law for every part of a believer’s life.
The sharīʿah
Islamic law, the sharīʿah (شَرِيعَة, the path to the watering place), is the law God has revealed; fiqh (فِقْه, understanding) is the scholars’ effort to derive it. Its classical sources are four: the Qur’an, the sunnah or practice of the Prophet, the consensus of the scholars, and reasoning by analogy, the scheme set out by al-Shāfiʿī in the ninth century.5 Like halakhah, it covers worship and daily life together: prayer, fasting, alms, food, marriage, inheritance and commerce. Four Sunni schools of law, the Ḥanafī, Mālikī, Shāfiʿī and Ḥanbalī, grew from the same sources and recognise one another.
Mandaean rules of purity
Mandaeism has no body of case law comparable to the others, but it binds its people with detailed rules of purity: what may be eaten, how animals are slaughtered, how often and in what water a believer must be baptised, and how priests must live apart from pollution.6
A law and a method
The Qur’an speaks directly to the relation between these laws:
وَأَنزَلْنَآ إِلَيْكَ ٱلْكِتَـٰبَ بِٱلْحَقِّ مُصَدِّقًا لِّمَا بَيْنَ يَدَيْهِ مِنَ ٱلْكِتَـٰبِ وَمُهَيْمِنًا عَلَيْهِ ۖ فَٱحْكُم بَيْنَهُم بِمَآ أَنزَلَ ٱللَّهُ ۖ وَلَا تَتَّبِعْ أَهْوَآءَهُمْ عَمَّا جَآءَكَ مِنَ ٱلْحَقِّ ۚ لِكُلٍّ جَعَلْنَا مِنكُمْ شِرْعَةً وَمِنْهَاجًا ۚ وَلَوْ شَآءَ ٱللَّهُ لَجَعَلَكُمْ أُمَّةً وَٰحِدَةً وَلَـٰكِن لِّيَبْلُوَكُمْ فِى مَآ ءَاتَىٰكُمْ ۖ فَٱسْتَبِقُوا۟ ٱلْخَيْرَٰتِ ۚ إِلَى ٱللَّهِ مَرْجِعُكُمْ جَمِيعًا فَيُنَبِّئُكُم بِمَا كُنتُمْ فِيهِ تَخْتَلِفُونَ ٤٨
And We have revealed to you, [O Muḥammad], the Book [i.e., the Qur’ān] in truth, confirming that which preceded it of the Scripture and as a criterion over it. So judge between them by what Allāh has revealed and do not follow their inclinations away from what has come to you of the truth. To each of you We prescribed a law and a method. Had Allāh willed, He would have made you one nation [united in religion], but [He intended] to test you in what He has given you; so race to [all that is] good. To Allāh is your return all together, and He will [then] inform you concerning that over which you used to differ.
Qur’an 5:487
The verse accounts for both the likeness and the difference. Each community received ‘a law and a method’: the Torah for the Jews, with its commandments; and for the Muslims the sharīʿah, confirming what came before and judging over it. The laws differ in their details because God willed that they should, and the verse turns the difference into a test: ‘so race to all that is good.’ The history of the three legal traditions, each labouring for centuries to live by what it believed God had commanded, is a record of that race.
Further reading: Food and faith, Apostasy in the Abrahamic traditions, The parting of the ways.
Notes
- Babylonian Talmud, Makkot 23b. ↩
- Maimonides, Sefer ha-Mitzvot, and the enumeration of the commandments that opens the Mishneh Torah. ↩
- Acts 15:28-29; cf. Matthew 5:17; Galatians 2:16. ↩
- “Canon law,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, summary; “Code of Canon Law,” Encyclopaedia Britannica. ↩
- al-Shāfiʿī, al-Risālah, on the sources of law. ↩
- Drower, The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, pp. 47-48, 174. ↩
- Qur’an 5:48, trans. Saheeh International; Arabic text from Quran.com. ↩