The title that editors David Flatto and Benjamin Porat chose for their book—Law as Religion, Religion as Law—tells the reader exactly what to expect. Flatto and Porat reject the conventional approach to organizing law and religion, which is “dichotomous” in keeping the two fields separate (1), as in the separation of church and state. Each contribution to the book “explores a different perspective” with “law and religion as overlapping frameworks that structure the lives of individuals as well as the social order” (1). As Flatto and Porat observe, “[f]rom this vantage point, law and religion arguably share similar properties, and may even have a symbiotic relationship. Moreover, many legal systems exhibit religious characteristics” (1).

Flatto and Porat developed Law as Religion, Religion as Law from a conference held at Hebrew University, with a range of international authors involved. Two things struck me as I read. First, the contributors show that there are numerous ways to describe and analyze law and religion and their influence on one another. Second, many of the contributors challenge the Western tradition and the history of Christianity, offering perspectives from Judaism, Islam, Soviet political religion, and Zoroastrian religion. I encourage readers to work their way through these dense chapters so that they can more fully understand why people are arguing so much about law and religion—especially in the United States.

Flatto and Porat organized the book into five sections, with their individual chapters demonstrating the new approach the authors are taking. Section A is “Sanctification and Secularization.” In “Desanctification of Law and the Problem of Absolutes,” Jeremy Waldron argues the “context of desanctification involves the withering away of a spirit of transcendent normativity, a spirit that has in the past sustained certain legal absolutes” (8). Waldron nonetheless wants “some sense of absolute prohibitions in morality” (28), but he shows how difficult it is to achieve that normative dimension today. Suzanne Last Stone, in “The Paradox of Human Rights Discourse and the Jewish Legal Tradition,” suggests “efforts to reconcile human rights and religion are at risk of foundering” (30). For that reason, she recommends “a different strategy of convergence between religion and human rights that emphasizes human rights as a purely political project revolving around consensus and convention” (31). Richard K. Sherwin, in “Sovereign Imaginaries: Visualizing the Sacred Foundation of Law’s Authority,” asks if the autonomy of politics and law is the goal, or “does politics exist to serve a higher end” (57). He argues the sacred has irrupted into the world, and we must figure out where to place it. As Sherwin describes it, “[o]n the threshold of a great abyss, we stand witness, bedeviled by the urgency of naming, as the sacred irrupts anew. When worlds of meaning are at stake, we can ill afford to disavow responsibility for the metaphysics of sovereign imaginaries” (79). The sovereign imagination is “how the sacred bond that holds together a community, or a polity, may be woven anew” (78).

Semiotics is a key focus of Section B, “Legal-Religious Language.” In “Dat: From Law to Religion,” Abraham Melamed uses the history of dat —a Hebrew word that once meant law now means religion and today is being re-secularized: dat was “transformed from law to religion, and Judaism became a religion” (83). Melamed writes: “Modern religiosity—and Judaism is no exception—is a religious conversion of a secular cultural and political phenomenon, which in itself was a conversion of a Christian phenomenon” (109). The dramatic change in dat ’s meanings shows “its original meaning as law has been eliminated altogether” (112). Bernard S. Jackson, in “Halakhah from a Semiotic Point of View,” uses semiotics to provide a neutral viewpoint from which to examine law and religion. He concludes, “‘Law as Religion: Religion as Law’ is thus a secondary (or meta-) question addressing the relationship between institutional concepts rather than human behaviour in either its factual or normative dimensions. It may, however, figure large in the rhetoric of religious politics” (150). Daniel Reifman writes in “Canonicity as a Defining Feature of Legal and Religious Discourse” that “a study of the affinity between law and religion requires a methodology distinct from both philosophy of law and of religion” (151). He also recommends semiotics as a tool well suited to achieving that task. He notes that this job has a “conservative character” (151). He “propose[s] that the discourses of religion and law have intrinsically strong degrees of canonicity, such that they function as predominant forms of ‘institutional memory’ within human culture” (169).

“Legal-Theological Roots” is the title of Section C, whose contributors explore how these categories work out in practice. In “Exceptional Grace: Religion as the Sovereign Suspension of Law,” Robert A. Yelle identifies six concepts about identifying law and religion and their relationship. His “larger conclusion is that it in fact makes no sense to speak of ‘sacralization’ or ‘secularization’” because these concepts “have significance only in the context of an understanding of what ‘religion’ means” (195). In Yelle’s view religion “does not exist as something separate from a total social order that is characterized by the dynamic interplay between law and sovereignty, defined as the authority to suspend the law” (195). He adds that he “can no longer tell, at the end of this study, where law ends and religion begins” (196). Yelle leaves the reader with a question: Who shall be sovereign? Flatto contributes “A Bad Man Theory of Religious Law,” in which he raises Jewish philosopher Leora Batnitzky’s question of whether Judaism is a religion. Flatto writes that one can learn from the notions of sacrilege or heresy, and hence his focus on the bad man: “From a tradition dominated by laws in much of its formative strata, ‘Judaism’ has thus gradually developed rich discourses of theology, which are grafted onto, situated alongside, or advanced in lieu of the normative order. Indeed, in certain modern iterations, Judaism does not just make room for theology, but is even stunningly recast as the quintessential religion” (224, emphasis added). Dmytro Vovk, in “Soviet Law and Political Religion,” makes the interesting point that Soviet totalitarianism is a form of political religion: “This conception suggests that totalitarian regimes (re)produce a religious means of grounding and implementing their own power over society” (226). These regimes “sacralize their power” (227) and use religious tools for support. Vovk’s argument struck me because many critics have accused President Trump of being an authoritarian or a totalitarian as he attempts to enact religion into law. Complementing Vovk’s views in an interesting way is Kevin Crow. In “International Law as Evangelism,” Crow sees that the United Nations’ human rights have many parallels with American Christianity, especially with American Evangelicalism. These values should then be viewed “at least partly an expression of law as religion” (248). This is why he calls international law “evangelism” (252n30).

In “Religious Conceptions of Law,” Section D, Steven D. Fraade’s contribution is “Enjoin Them upon Your Children to Keep: “Law as Commandment and Legacy, or, Robert Cover Meets Midrash.” Discussing Cover’s essay, “Obligation: A Jewish Jurisprudence of the Social Order” (Journal of Law and Religion 5, no. 1 [1987]: 65–73), Fraade writes that for the “[r]abbis, and the Hebrew Bible before them, there can be no law without religion or religion without law, however we might define those slippery terms” (274). Fraade continues, “Even the anarchist in Cover would recognize law as commandment and law as legacy (like nomos and narrative) as two dialectical sides of the same coin, both being expressed by the same Hebrew verbal root, tzivah . Similarly, we might say (if we had a three-sided coin) that Cover’s two foundational myths of law as contract (rights) and law as revelation (commandments) can only be deepened by their integration with law as legacy, which incorporates both rights and obligations” (290). Rights, commandments, and legacy: a big picture of the law, indeed. In “‘Between Man and God’ and ‘Between Man and His Fellow’” Itzhak Brand considers as “categories in polemical context” those two expressions, usually viewed as a consensus distinction in most of the materials. Tannaitic literature, however, shows that they are not as separate and distinct as the tradition suggests. Reexamining that background “may lead to the conclusion that the rabbinic literature tends to reject the distinction and to combine the precepts between man and his fellow with those between man and God” (308). In “Christian Feasts and Administration of Roman Justice in Late Antiquity,” Silvia Schiavo shows that the “Christian articulation of time very slowly became intertwined with the civil calendar, influencing it profoundly. The emperors used ‘religious time’ to articulate ‘legal time’” (315). That is an interesting combination of law and religion—or, as Schiavo puts it, echoing the book’s title, “‘law as religion’ and ‘religion as law’” (339).

In Section E, “Law in Formation: Religious Perspectives,” Serge Ruzer offers “Law as a Problematic Aspect of Religion: Paul’s Skepticism in a Broader Jewish Context.” Ruzer addresses Saint Paul’s understanding of law and religion. The “crux of the apostle’s reasoning was not the annulment of the Jewish religious outlook centered on the Torah and its commandments. It was rather the perception of the deeply problematic nature of the human predicament in face of God’s will as epitomized in the code of law” (360). He also notes Paul’s “idiosyncratic singularity” (361) and his combination of “seasoned pessimism” and “eschatological hope” (360). In “When Law Meets Theology,” Yishai Kiel asks for an alternative perspective to Western legal culture and the history of Christianity. Using Jewish, Islamic, and Zoroastrian perceptions of law and religion, he hopes to contribute to “the unsettling of the Western bifurcation inherent in the ‘law and religion’ paradigm” (393). This alternative view offers “major implications for mapping the history of the dynamics of law and religion” (394).

This last chapter confirmed my main reaction to the book: it is offering an alternative to the Western tradition, Christian influence, and, I think, the separation of church and state. Flatto and Porat invite readers to consider Jewish, Islamic, and Zoroastrian perspectives on the tradition of law and religion and to learn about the distinct concepts of Judaism that are not always consistent with the way we religion scholars interpret Christianity. Read the book and learn about the alternatives. Even the section headings identify the many ways we can think about law as religion and religion as law. Religion and legal scholars, graduate students, law students, and some undergraduates will learn a great deal from the book Flatto and Porat have provided.