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Now I have a lot of respect for Orthodox Jews. They are a wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and deep insight. Although it is the Karaites who firmly hold to the written scriptures alone, Rabbinical Judaism also is full of scholars that know their bible. They also struggle with the philosophical whys and wherefores in order to come up with some excellent logical arguments to defend and uphold their view of the one true Deity.
So if they are such great thinkers, how could there be a problem with their conception of the 7 noahide laws? Well, it's easy to see a problem with the rabbinical point of view when you see where they are coming from. You see, they accept an additional revelation called the oral law, which they see as fundamentally important to understanding the written scriptures. They see it as having the same origin as the written law of Moses, i.e., that it was given by Deity at Sinai. Unfortunately, the scriptures and the history written in them do not appear to bear out their conviction (to see my understanding of the subject, see my article about the oral law). Without the firm backing of scripture, it makes it difficult to accept such a belief. So, in other words, since I don't have enough reason to accept the divine origin of the oral law, its statements cannot be taken as truth, as one would take the scripture as truth. It becomes a manmade commentary without divine authority. Also, the authority of the rabbis, the teachers of the law in Orthodox Judaism, is also based on the divine origin of the oral law. It is said that if these rabbis, especially the ancient ones, make an edict or commentary or a judgment, then it has to be followed. But since that divine origin of the oral law is rejected, and plain scripture gives no place to the rabbis, then that authority of the rabbis also disappears, and they become more like human commentators, giving their own human-based understanding of scripture, which must be tested against what is known to be divine, i.e., the written scriptures.
The problem which occurs when faced with the Noahide laws is that they are not strictly scriptural. In fact, they have their basis more in the oral law. Scripture makes no explicit mention of Adam or Noah being given six or seven laws. Genesis 9, which speaks of the covenant of Noah, says nothing about all seven, only the law against murder and eating meat with the blood in it. It is the oral law that explicitly mentions all seven laws. The Talmud is a book of Orthodox Judaism that has in it rabbinical discussions about the oral law. In fact, some Jews say that the Talmud actually contains the oral law. But in this book, in a section called Sanhedrin 56, the Noahide laws are plainly written down (along with some extra commands). It is said that these laws can be derived from scripture, but the logical rules the rabbis use to derive it is based on this oral law. So that means that, in a lot of cases, you can't just read scripture or even study it in a normal contextual and/or grammatical way and see these laws. The way the Noahide laws are put together would appear to be fundamentally based on this unproven oral law.
Here is an example of how the laws are derived, here's an example from the same section of the Talmud.
Whence do we know this? — R. Johanan answered: The Writ saith: "And the Lord God commanded the man saying, of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat." "And [He] commanded", refers to [the observance of] social laws, and thus it is written, "For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment." "The Lord" — is [a prohibition against] blasphemy, and thus it is written, "and he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death". "God" — is [an injunction against] idolatry, and thus it is written, "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me." "The man" — refers to bloodshed [murder], and thus it is written, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." "Saying" — refers to adultery, and thus it is written, "They say, If a man put away his wife, and she go from him, and became another man's." "Of every tree of the garden" — but not of robbery. "Thou mayest freely eat" — but not flesh cut from a living animal. (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, 56b, see also http://www.noachide.net/html/biblical_source.html)
Now this is an example, since there are other ways that the rabbis try to derive these laws. The strangest source for a Noahide command is the last one where Rabbi Johanan says that the law not to eat flesh cut from a living animal also derived from the part of Genesis 2:16 which says "thou mayest freely eat". But the verse as a whole is talking about eating the fruit of the trees, and this is said to give understanding to the next verse, Genesis 2:17, which says that man can't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A person reading verse 16 in context would never come up with these laws of the rabbis. And the logic used to get these laws seems a bit far-fetched and superficial. According to a Noahide teacher,
One of the 13 specific rules of authentic Torah exegesis is by a tradition of an analogy between two laws established on the basis of identical Hebrew expressions. (http://www.asknoah.org/LocateSources.html)
This is meant to explain how the rabbi quoted previously in the Talmud derived his laws. The Noahide teacher is saying that the way this rabbi got these laws is by finding identical Hebrew phrases in two places and linking them. In another article posted on my website, this is how the exegetical rule is explained:
When a word appears in two different biblical passages, the details of one can be applied to the other. When a common word appears in two different laws, the specifications of one law can be applied to the other and vice versa. (Hillel's Rule Number 2: Gezerah Shavah which is identical to Ishmael's exegetical rule number 2 of his 13 rules)
Examples are given in that same section of that article that shows how problematic this sort of "exegesis" is. Just because the word "God" or "commanded" is used in two different places in the books of Moses, that cannot be used to say that you can apply the meaning of the first place to the second, since the contexts can be completely different.
Another interesting fact about these laws of Noah is that they do not include clearly written "commands" like the one in Genesis 1:28 telling man to procreate, multiply and have control over the earth. And no part of scripture really codifies the laws for the non-Jew.
When all is said and done, the question on the mind of a person who doesn't accept the divine origin of the oral law while still holding to the divine authority of scripture would be as follows: how can one really know if keeping these Noahide laws that the rabbis have derived is what the Almighty requires?
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