will of the national God is to say that it is not, for example, the observance of custom or of allegedly universal human norms. Once distinctions like that are possible, we are in the realm of moral philosophy—though no doubt of a fairly primitive kind—whether we like it or not. Better to acknowledge this and try to be sensitive to such systematization and metaethics as there may be in the Hebrew Bible, than to ignore it and uncritically accept one model—usually that of ethics as obedience—as if