Six, then seven
Why seven,and why in this order.
The first human being was given six. The seventh arrived after the flood, at the exact moment meat was permitted. Then Sinai came and changed what all seven of them are.
Seven laws out of one sentence
Everything begins with a single verse, spoken to one man, alone, in a garden, about what he is allowed to eat. It contains no prohibition at all. It opens with permission.
וַיְצַו ה׳ אֱלֹקִים עַל הָאָדָם לֵאמֹר מִכֹּל עֵץ הַגָּן אָכֹל תֹּאכֵל
vayetzav Hashem Elokim al ha'adam leimor, mikol etz hagan achol tochel
And the L-rd G-d commanded the man, saying: of every tree of the garden you may surely eat.
At Sanhedrin 56b the Talmud reads that verse clause by clause, and each clause yields one of the seven. Here is the whole derivation. It is worth sitting with for a minute, because once you have seen it you cannot read the verse the old way again.
- וַיְצַוvayetzavand He commandedCourts of justice
- ה׳Hashemthe L-rdReverence for the Name
- אֱלֹקִיםElokimG-dThe One G-d, and no other service
- עַל הָאָדָםal ha'adamto the manDo not murder
- לֵאמֹרleimorsayingThe boundaries of sex and family
- מִכֹּל עֵץ הַגָּןmikol etz haganof every tree of the gardenDo not steal
- אָכֹל תֹּאכֵלachol tochelyou may surely eatNo flesh from a living animal
The same passage records a second reading in which the opening word yields not courts but idolatry, on the strength of a verse in Hoshea where a people is described as having gone after a command. Hold both. They will matter further down.
Six were given to Adam, one to Noach
The Talmud states plainly, in the same passage, that the first human being was commanded on six, and that the law against eating flesh from a living animal was added to Noach. The Rambam rules the same way at Hilchos Melachim 9:1.
The reason is not stinginess. Before the flood, meat was not permitted at all. There was no such act to place a boundary around. After the flood the permission is given, and the limit arrives in the very next breath.
כָּל רֶמֶשׂ אֲשֶׁר הוּא חַי לָכֶם יִהְיֶה לְאָכְלָה
kol remes asher hu chai lachem yihyeh l'ochlah
Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.
אַךְ בָּשָׂר בְּנַפְשׁוֹ דָמוֹ לֹא תֹאכֵלוּ
ach basar b'nafsho damo lo sochelu
But flesh with its life, its blood, you shall not eat.
A new permission and a new limit, one verse apart. What appears last in the order of revelation is not the least of what was intended. Often it is the deepest, because it is the piece that could only become speakable once the world had descended far enough to have something for it to hold onto.
The covenant is with everything alive
Read the scope of what is promised after the flood: with you, and with your descendants, and with every living creature that is with you. It is called an everlasting covenant, and its sign is the bow in the cloud.
The Ramban writes on Bereishis 9:12 that the bow is set in the cloud inverted, its arc turned downward, so that it plainly is not drawn to shoot. A weapon displayed in the posture of one who has set it aside. The covenant with all flesh is signed with an instrument of war held upside down.
Then Sinai, and everything is transposed
This is easy to miss and it changes the whole subject. The Talmud establishes at Sanhedrin 59a that any commandment stated to the sons of Noach and then repeated at Sinai was stated for both. And the Rambam writes at Hilchos Melachim 8:10 that Moshe was commanded to bring all the inhabitants of the world to accept the commandments given to the sons of Noach.
Meaning: since Sinai the seven are not an ancient inheritance running quietly through history like an instinct. They stand inside the giving of the Torah. Before Sinai, a righteous act was a righteous act. After Sinai, a commandment is a channel.
Which is why the Rambam is not satisfied with the deed
At Hilchos Melachim 8:11 he rules that one who accepts the seven and is careful to perform them is among the pious of the nations of the world and has a share in the world to come, and then he adds a condition: that he accepts and performs them because G-d commanded them in the Torah, and made it known through Moshe. If he performed them by the ruling of his own reasoning, the Rambam says, he is not among them.
This is easily heard as a technicality about credit, and it is nothing of the kind. A person who arrives at the seven by their own reasoning has produced a set of conclusions. Conclusions are held by the mind that produced them, and a mind that produced them can produce their opposite. Every generation that has abolished one of the six has done so with excellent reasoning, sincerely held, and it repealed it in exactly the hour when keeping it began to cost something, which is the only hour in which it was ever load bearing.
But there is something deeper than durability here, and it is the matter of what a dwelling is. Two rooms, the same table, the same chairs, the same bread. In one, a person arranged the room to please themselves. In the other, a person prepared it because a guest is coming. Every detail identical. Only one of them is a home, and the difference is not in the room.
A seam we are not going to paper over
The closing words of that ruling exist in two forms. In the printed editions the text reads that such a person is among their wise men. In the Yemenite manuscripts it reads that he is not among their wise men. The variant is old and well known. This site does not resolve it, because the point stands on either reading.
The Midrash says: if you are told there is wisdom among the nations, believe it; if you are told there is Torah among the nations, do not believe it. Wisdom among the nations is real, and we are instructed to believe in it. The philosopher who reasons their way to the sanctity of life has done something true and worth honouring. What builds a dwelling, though, is not the quality of the insight. A person may design a magnificent room by the light of their own mind and never once turn it toward a guest.
Like a High Priest
Rabbi Meir teaches at Sanhedrin 59a that a gentile who occupies himself with the Torah of his seven commandments is like a High Priest, and derives it from a verse that says a man shall do them and live by them. The verse does not say priests, Levites and Israelites. It says the man.
Why a High Priest, of all the comparisons available? Because the High Priest is not distinguished by the quantity of his service. On the Day of Atonement he performs, in the innermost place, a service occupying a small part of one day. What distinguishes him is that he goes all the way in, alone, unwitnessed, and stands entirely inside the place he was given.
The measure is not the size of the portion. It is whether the whole of the person is standing inside it.
How the Talmud looks at the nations
At Chullin 92a, Ulla says that the sons of Noach accepted thirty commandments upon themselves and uphold only three of them, and the three are named. Look at what the Talmud does there. Twenty seven fell, and it does not spend its sentence on the twenty seven. It names what was held.
And when the Sages wanted to show a Jew what honouring a parent looks like when it is complete, they told the story of Dama ben Nesina of Ashkelon, a gentile, who lost an enormous profit rather than wake his father to take a key from beneath his pillow. The Talmud did not need that story. It chose it.
Not a wall. A door.
The tradition goes out of its way on this. It teaches that before the Torah was given to Israel it was offered to the other nations first, and each declined on the grounds of what it would cost them. It teaches that the Torah was given in a wilderness belonging to nobody, publicly, so that no nation could claim it was given on their land or say it was never offered to them. And it teaches that when Israel crossed the Jordan the Torah was inscribed on stones in seventy languages, and the nations sent their scribes to copy it.
Seventy languages, on stones, in public, at the border. The seven are the door that was deliberately left in the wall.
The deeper layer: seven where seven broke
Everything above is the plain reading. What follows is the inner tradition.
The Torah records a list of seven kings who reigned in the land of Edom, and of each of the first six it says that he died. Of the seventh it does not say he died; instead it names his wife. The Kabbalists read this passage as the account of the shattering of the vessels: seven attributes of an earlier world, each one whole and alone and admitting nothing beside it, lights too great for what was holding them, so that the vessels broke.
Of the seventh it is not written that he died, and the reason given is that with him a partner is named. Where there are two, there is a vessel. Where there is a vessel, there is no shattering, because the light is not asked to be everything by itself.
Where it ends
The Rambam closes the entire Mishneh Torah, fourteen books of the law of Israel, with the nations of the world. He rules that nothing of the ordinary course of the world will be annulled in the days of the Messiah, and then writes that the occupation of the whole world will be only to know the L-rd, and brings the verse that the earth will be filled with knowledge as the waters cover the sea.
And the prophet Tzefaniah says that G-d will turn to the peoples a clear language, that they may all call on His Name and serve Him with one shoulder. And Malachi says that from the rising of the sun to its setting, His Name is great among the nations.
The last word of the law of Israel is spoken in the language of all flesh, because the work was never the perfection of a people. It was the preparation of a place.