The Evolution of Love

“For Sheldon W. Liebman, Judaism’s very lack of an established, coherent account of theological doctrine is a virtue. With commanding erudition and rare expository grace, he argues that the often inchoate and contradictory meditations of the meaning of Israel’s covenantal relation to God as recorded in the Tanak and intertestamental and rabbinic literature attest to a vibrant religious and spiritual sensibility that resisted doctrinal closure. Guided by an overarching concern to understand what is Israel’s responsibility toward God, these meditations increasingly affirmed human agency in the realization of divine love as focused on a compassionate and morally alert attention to one’s neighbor and the stranger. Thus was set the foundational principle of Judaism and Christianity.”


—Paul Mendes-Flohr, Professor Emeritus of Jewish Thought, University of Chicago and Hebrew University of Jerusalem





“Judaism has too often been caricatured, based on certain polemical passages in the New Testament, as a desiccated, legalistic tradition obsessed with rewards and punishments. Sheldon W. Liebman has synthesized an immense amount of scholarship, both Jewish and Christian, to demonstrate that Judaism—as it evolved over the many centuries of biblical tradition and ‘intertestamental’ literature, leading to the open-ended approach of the Pharisees and their rabbinic successors—is solidly based on the principle of love. When, for example, Jesus distills Torah into the two ‘love’ commandments from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, he is well within the discourse of his pharisaic teachers. Partly a corrective, partly a biblically rooted plea for a more just world, The Evolution of Love is itself a loving challenge to both Jews and Christians to rethink traditional assumptions and resist closed theological systems.”


—Laurence L. Edwards, author of Luke’s Pharisees and How Do You Read? Jesus in Conversation with His Colleagues