Law and Religion: Towards a General Theory of Procedure in light of the Torah

Abstract

Religion plays an important role in history due to its stipulating of limits on behaviors and organizing of practices in community. In this sense, Jewish precepts stand out in the shaping of Western culture and may be considered as a cultural and moral heritage. Hebrew society has a wealth of traditions, with its legal framework one of these. Our analysis thus adopts the perspective of history and the philosophy of law in order to examine the regulatory concepts of Jewish society, enshrined in the Torah and related to modern procedural standards, seeking to identify a general theory of procedure. In light of this challenge, the text has specifically sought the following: to demonstrate that Jewish norms are not only moral and religious; to identify which norms extracted from the Sacred Texts are similar to the norms and principles of Brazilian procedural law; to demonstrate the legal interpretations given to these biblical norms in the philosophical, legal, and religious field. The result is a bibliographic study that is exploratory and descriptive in its approach, with content analysis and use of the comparative method. The result obtained reveals that the norms present in the Pentateuch represent a proto general theory of procedure.