Divine Law

Abraham (אַבְרָהָם) Sees Sodom
in Flames, by James Tissot

Divine Law |
Monday – September 21, 2026

Divine Law is a subject that I keep returning to on this page, and thus far I have written a lot about secular law,* but I have not covered adequately divine law, mostly because this is a large subject and also not an easy subject to write about, since there is not one divine law, at least not today. Today, we are left with, for instance, the 613 laws in the Torah (תּוֹרָה), or why not the Decalogue (עֲשֶׂרֶת הַדִּבְּרוֹת)? At any rate, there is no reason to think of one divine law, instead we are left with trying to figure out what divine law is and what divine law concerns us. It would be quite accurate to suggest that a Jew has little use in observing the Sharia (شريعة), and vice versa. Well no, not vice versa, because a Moslem could very well find use in at least reading the Torah and trying to understand the 613 laws, and this is due to the inherent theology of most major Islamic denominations. This is why the memory of Abraham (אַבְרָהָם) must endure in the West and in the Near East, and in the Middle East to a lesser extent as well. I am here referring to one unifying principle, and even to the unifying principle that came before Abraham, read "My Views on the Unity of the Source". Yes, it is this unifying principle that I chifley refer to whenever I comment on "divine law", and to that extent it would be true to refer to the Sharia or the Talmud (תַּלְמוּד), for instance, as divine law, but these laws all descend from the great one, the unifying source, at the summit of spiritual realization. Of course, the fact that man has attempted to figure out this divine law is nothing strange, and really the application of divine law was always a necessity in any healthy civilization, in any society that wished to leave the deep stone age past behind. Yes, Moses (מֹשֶׁה) said it himself: the stone tablets (לֻחֹת הָבְרִית) represents law, and men needs law in order to be governed and in order to live in harmony with Yahweh (יהוה); this was me paraphrasing Exodus (שְׁמוֹת) 32 and Deuteronomy (דְּבָרִים). Of course, the stone tablets and the 613 laws, represented the sacred covenant between the Jews and Yahweh, and if you wish to read more about this, then follow my "Bible Study series".

    The point of all this is that the Jewish people were led out of bondage in Egypt by divine command and by following divine law, or rather Moses followed divine law, and without divine law, there would have been no hope of the Hebrews. Of course, divine law is also a matter of temporal power, and before the dawn of the modern world, which can be placed around the early 14th century, divine law did rule the land, and here I am mostly referring to Europe, but since the 14th century, we have witnessed a most painful and tragic destruction of divine law, and really what people refer to modernity, is in this context, nothing but a great convulsion, convulsion and upheaval. If divine law is mandated by heaven, then this mandate of heaven is lost, and this alone would explain all the comotion and all the strife in the modern world, read "My Views on the Concept of 'Gender-Queer'". Now granted, some of the modern confusions that we are living through at the moment are caused by spiritual confusion, a counter force against the currents of time, and to some extent such things as "genderqueer" can be explained by this, for in certain cultures, particularly in the Middle and Far East, we do find a certain level of flexibility when it comes to the question of gender, read "Gender Roles", and within the purview of these traditions, homosexual and sometimes homosexual women did find a place in society when they became enabled to for instance align with the Hijras, Tṛtīyā Prakṛti (तृतीय प्रकृति), but I digress. These practises do not have a Western equivalent, and this is mostly due to the historical fact that the Western world has been defined by action, and action begets action oriented civilizations, whereas the Far East in particular has been marked by great contemplation; considerations like the one made above simply do not fit into the narrow and severe box that is action orientation, again when we compare the West and the East this is.

    And so, perhaps the story and the facts of Sodom and Gomorrah should be mentioned here as a signal example of why divine law must stand above man's law, but I have decided to hold off on going into too many details about this story in Genesis (בְּרֵאשִׁית), mostly because I will cover this later in my "Bible Study series"; in the meantime we may still borrow some insights. Why did Yahweh destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, was it perhaps due to their lack of order, order based in the cosmos? First of all, the populations in these two cities did not adhere to divine law, and they knew it, but still Yahweh allowed Abraham to plea with him, even down to the level of 10 men against 1000 beasts, but still Yahweh could not find 10 men who lived in accordance with divine law, and so Yahweh had the cities destroyed, and this sacred act of destruction was indeed a form of justice, read "Destruction!", a necessary and urgent move against unrepentant wickedness, and these men knew that they were wicked, that they were lost to time.† This was divine law in action, but divine law can come in many forms: for instance, in the Far East the concepts of Dharma (धर्म) and Karma (कर्म) informs us about both divine law and the actions that we may perform in order to stay aligned with the Dharma. It is commonplace for men in this region of the world to place emphasis on the Karma whenever they should face hardships, and so they still hold a certain understanding about the scales of the celestial order. I suppose that if anything is true from all of this, it must be this: if humanity continues down this path, which they most likely will, then they may face punishment, divine punishment. Again, remember that punishment, or what most people think of as "punishment", is a matter of restoring the cosmological equilibrium; all that punishment is nothing more than a counterforced initiated by the wicked person in the first place. For instance, if a man, a junkie and an addict, decided to steal an angle grinder in order to destroy a gravestones at a cemetary in order to collect scrap metal so that he can continue to feed his addiction, then most people would consider that man evil, immoral and wicked, regardless of his status at the social margins, for he is after all controlled by a demonic urge, the addict that he is – a junkie, a bum, truly a bottom dweller, read "Hierarchy". Yes, someone or something has to restore the balance in the wake of the severe disruption caused by the man in the example, or else the world would be without law, and in which case the story of Sodom and Gomorrah would seem clearer still.

Reginald Drax (AKA, M. C. Dutt) – September 21, 2026.

Footnote(s)

* For more on this, I must direct you to my posts: "The Problem of Sacred Law", "Should You Break Rules?", and "The Law Of The Land".

† I should add here, that some people make the argument that this passage in the Bible somehow supports the idea that Judaism—before any other revealed tradition—made the individual relationship between God and man a matter of utmost importance, really that the Bible puts the individual in the foreground; to this I can only say that this is a rather libertarian interpretation of this passage.