It has often been said that there is little more to the ethics of the Hebrew Scriptures than doing whatever God commands you to do: If you have instruction directly from God himself or from a prophet, you should obey it. If you have God’s law, obey that. There isn’t supposed to be much more to biblical ethics than this principle of unfailing obedience.

But this view rests on an overly simplistic, even careless, reading of the biblical texts. In fact, the God of Hebrew Scripture holds individuals and nations morally responsible for their actions even where they appear to have received no laws or commands from him of any kind. Thus, for example, Cain is punished for murdering his brother despite the fact that neither he nor anyone else has heard anything from God on the subject. And Noah’s generation is destroyed for their violence, and Sodom is annihilated for its perversity – despite the fact that they, too, have received no commands from God on these subjects. Similarly, the reader is expected to know, as the persons depicted in the narrative are expected to know, that Adam errs in trying to pin the blame on God for his having eaten the forbidden fruit (because God gave him Eve); that Noah sins in his drunkenness; and that his son Ham sins in looking upon his drunken father’s nakedness and telling his brothers all about it – although God has commanded nothing on these subjects. And we are supposed to know, as the persons in the narrative are supposed to know, that there is something wrong with getting your father drunk and having sex with him, as the daughters of Lot do; or with raping your neighbor, even if you love her, as Shechem does; or with entrapping and enslaving your kinsman, as Lavan does; or with enslaving another nation, as Pharaoh does – although God has commanded nothing on these subjects either. And one could easily fill pages with additional such examples. Moreover, Abraham’s famous challenge to God over the justice of destroying Sodom (“Will the judge of all the earth not do justice?”) is but the first of a series of texts in which biblical figures seem to hold God’s actions to a moral standard that does not derive from these actions themselves.