The Rules of the Pharisees

The Pharisees were a group of zealous Jews who were contemporaries of Jesus Christ. They believed that the way they would please God and make it to heaven was by meticulously following a long list of religious rules and regulations.

The Mosaic Law

The foundation of the Pharisaical rules was the “Torah” – the law that God gave through Moses to the Jewish people of the Old Testament (OT). The most famous part of the Torah is the 10 Commandments, but these are actually just 10 of a total of 613 commandments given to the ancient Israelites.

The Mishnah

While following 613 commandments would be hard enough, over time Jewish leaders began to slowly add to these laws in the Mishnah. This additional teaching is an ongoing compilation of sermons and sayings by Jewish rabbis meant to interpret the original Mosaic Law. The original intent of these additions was to clarify the law, but it ended up adding many layers of complicated regulations. This Mishanh was already lengthy in Jesus’s day and continues to grow to this day. So for the Pharisees, they not only tried to follow the 613 commandments of the Mosaic Law, but the literally thousands of new commandments that were created to clarify the original 613 commandments.

[External Resource: What is the Mishnah? What is a midrash?]

For example, in the Mosaic Law, one of the commandments is to keep the Sabbath holy, which means that Jews were not supposed to work on Saturdays. But to clarify this, the Jewish scholars created thirty-nine separate categories of what “work” means, and within those thirty-nine categories there are many sub-categories. So to follow the rule of not working on the Sabbath, there are literally thousands of sub-rules to follow, including how many steps you can take, and how many letters you can write on the Sabbath.

The Problem of the Pharisees

While most average Jews in Jesus’s day didn’t even attempt to follow all of these additions to the original Mosaic Law, the Pharisees did. They prided themselves on following not just the letter of the Mosaic Law, but even the letter of the Mishnah. Most notably, the Pharisees sought to abide by the external laws that distinguished the Jewish people from all of the other nations – the laws that made them outwardly distinct. These included laws about what to eat, what to wear, circumcision, how to pray out loud, etc. Jesus’s critique of the Pharisees was that they were legalistic – only concerned with the external appearance of keeping the Law rather than the inward spirit of the Law.

Matthew 23:27-28 What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs—beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity. Outwardly you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness.

For Christians today, we should take care not to fall into the trap of Pharisaism – caring more about the letter of the law than the true meaning and power behind it.