These 13 essays, originally presentations at a Yeshiva University conference in 2012, explore the theme of God's judgment, mainly within Hebrew tradition, but with two essays from a Christian perspective and one relating to Muslim courts. The concept of the divine courtroom is a metaphor, drawn from human experience, and there is exploration throughout the essays of the tension between human and divine justice.
The Introduction perceptively suggests that exploration of God's courtroom amounts to humanity's trial of God, to see whether there is justice with God: a judge is always being judged. Dov Weiss highlights Jeremiah's and Job's references to God himself being on trial; Warren Zev Harvey similarly cites Maimonides and Kant. Meira Kensky explores the early Christian writer Tertullian in reiterating that the judge and the legal process are themselves on trial in any courtroom, although concluding that it is God's judgment that represents absolute justice. She follows this with a careful examination of Tertullian's Apologeticum, as he implicitly contrasts God's justice with that of his Roman audience, their sometimes flawed justice and their unwillingness to give Christianity a fair hearing.
Tzvi Abusch starts from the Mesopotamian Maqlû's ceremonial invocation of the fire god to pass judgments, and continues to the replication of stages of Mesopotamian court hearings in the dispensation of divine justice. Joseph Angel analyses the commonality between the portrayals of the divine courtroom in Daniel 7 and in the roughly contemporary (second-century BC) Qumran Book of Giants. Chaya Halberstam considers the court case against Job – curious in that here God participates as accuser rather than judge – and contrasts it with the rabbinic preoccupation in the early Christian era with projecting bureaucratic procedure on to the divine courtroom. A former lawyer, Rachel Magdalene, examines the divine courtroom in relation to the stories of Naboth's vineyard and David and Bathsheba and with respect to God's judgment on those who abused their royal power, and traces the Mesopotamian and Hebrew backgrounds to the first story. The metaphorical legal references in Job's disputation with his friends are discussed by Carol Newsom in relation to the prevailing rhetoric of the book of Job.
Job Jindo considers whether the divine courtroom concept, within its Hebrew cultural context, was a metaphorical projection or a literal description, and examines the role of the heavenly council in similar comparative terms. In contrast, Victor Bers and Adriaan Lanni demonstrate that the Greek Olympian gods were routinely portrayed as self-interestedly poor judges: Zeus, for example, punished a whole city for the offence of a single man. Indeed, the earliest of human judges, according to these authors, did not derive their authority from any divine source, and the prospect of gods as judges would have been greeted with scepticism.
Mathieu Tillier describes the reversal of roles in Islam, with the human qadis (judges) becoming the defendants before the supreme Judge on Judgment Day, and in some sources actually the main target of divine wrath for any misuse of their authority. Andrew Lincoln persuasively traces the cosmic trial of God back to Deutero-Isaiah, and finds the scenes replayed in John's Gospel. John, he believes, progressed beyond the Synoptic story in developing the notion of a divine courtroom with forensic references throughout the Gospel, presenting Jesus’ trial by Pilate as having cosmic implications and Jesus himself as witness rather than (as in the Synoptists) judge. Jesus’ human judge is being judged.
Themes emerge through the essays that cross cultural and religious boundaries. In the divine courtroom, roles are liable to be reversed, with judges being judged and even God himself being tried. In this respect, it would have been useful if an essay had been included about Elie Wiesel's horrific childhood experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, as recounted in Night and The Trial of God, where he doubted God's absolute justice and where he witnessed three Jewish scholars’ trial of God in a rabbinic court, at the end of which a unanimous verdict was given: ‘The Lord God almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, was found guilty of crimes against creation and humankind’.
This book is not for the faint-hearted, is often technical (with Hebrew and Greek terms often not transliterated or translated) and is a work of theology rather than law. However, it provides a healthy corrective to any aspiration of ultimacy on the part of any human court, civil or ecclesiastical, with its repeated theme of the relativity of justice and the courtroom within the divine perspective. And it gives permission for human beings to replicate Job's railing against God in times of apparent divine injustice. Lincoln's contribution will resonate most easily with Christian readers and, among other essays, is of definite value.
