Laurence L. Edwards

The Evolution of Love

World Religions

“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.”