Abstract:
Philosophical approaches to ancient Israelite religion are rare, as is metaethical reflection on the
Hebrew Bible. Nevertheless, many biblical scholars and philosophers of religion tend to take it for
granted that the biblical metaethical assumptions about the relation between divinity and morality
involve a pre-philosophical version of Divine Command Theory by default. In this paper the
author challenges the popular consensus with several arguments demonstrating the presence of
moral realism in the text. It is furthermore suggested that the popular consensus came about as a
result of prima facie assessments informed by anachronistic metatheistic assumptions about what
the Hebrew Bible assumed to be essential in the deity–morality relation. The study concludes with
the observation that in the texts where Divine Command Theory is absent from the underlying
moral epistemology the Euthyphro Dilemma disappears as a false dichotomy.
