law

Distinctions

Chok (חק)

Root ח-ק-ק, "engrave." The pair is set by the pesukim: "this is the chok of the Torah" of the parah adumah (Bamidbar 19:2), "there He placed for them chok and mishpat" at Marah (Shemos 15:25), and "you shall do My mishpatim and safeguard My chukim" (Vayikra 18:4-5). Yoma 67b on that last: chukim are the mitzvos the yetzer hara mocks as pointless (pork, shaatnez, chalitzah, the metzora, the sa'ir la'azazel); the Gemara raises the possibility that they really are pointless and answers from the end of the pasuk, "I am Hashem, I promulgated them (chakaktiv)," and you have no license to second-guess them. Rambam (Shemonah Perakim 6, Moreh 3:26) follows the sugya closely: chukim have a rationale hidden from us, mishpatim a rationale more evident. Rabbeinu Bachya (to Bereishis 26:5; Shemos 15:26; Devarim 6:17, 7:12), Ibn Yachya (to Tehillim 147:19) and Radak (to Tehillim 119:1) follow him: chukim are mitzvos whose reasons were not revealed, mishpatim the intuitive laws of interpersonal life. Peirush HaRokeach, put simply: issur v'heter versus dinim.

Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim: because chukim are not intuitive, only the One who commands them truly knows the reason and everyone else is following orders, so they are the likelier to be forgotten and therefore tend to be committed to writing to last (Yeshayahu 30:8, Iyov 19:23). He also holds that chok was borrowed for any quota set from above (the brick tally of Shemos 5:14), whose prescribed number is as arbitrary as an unexplained law. Rabbi Klein notes that chok is commonly rendered "statute" in English, a type of law whose details seem somewhat arbitrary: a statute of limitations sets a period that could as easily have been longer or shorter. Pappenheim further reads engraved writing as inseparable and everlasting, so chok is an unmitigated, unchanging law, which is why the word is so often joined to "forever" (Shemos 12:14, 30:21; Vayikra 3:16, 23:14).

• Rabbi Eliyahu Menachem Margules (Emunas Eliezer): chok does not inherently mean a mitzvah with no known reason, but carries that implication through chakuk, engraved. Obedience out of rational understanding is conditional and lasts only while the reason holds; obedience out of commitment to Hashem's will is unconditional and so more engraved in the person, and the Mishnah's love that depends on nothing and is never lost (Avos 5:16) is the parallel.
• Rabbi Shlomo Astruc (to Shemos 15:26): a chok is so called because it engraves on the soul a picture of how Hashem's commands are to be carried out.
• Rav Hirsch (to Tehillim 119:5): kuf interchanges with gimmel, so chok is kin to chag, at root a circle, and a chok encircles us with mitzvos and further chances to develop ourselves. The basis for that connection is a midrash (Shemos Rabbah 15:25) on "He told His words to Yaakov, His chukim and mishpatim to Yisrael" (Tehillim 147:19), which reads it of the yamim tovim, since the chagim are elsewhere called a chok (Tehillim 81:4-5) and their dates turn on the calendrical rulings of the court.
• Shadal (to Bereishis 26:5): chok is related to chag, a circle: a statute fixes a law to which nothing may be added or taken away, as a circle marks exact bounds.

It might seem from all this that chukim outrank mishpatim and accomplish more. Rabbi Yisrael Salanter points out that in practice the reverse is generally true: chukim often serve as stepping stones toward mishpatim, since keeping the mitzvos whose reasons are not revealed trains a man's intellect to grasp the reasons behind the mishpatim and to keep those too. He describes chukim as rungs on a ladder leading to the fulfillment of mishpatim, the pinnacle of moral perfection.

Mishpat (משפט)

Root ש-פ-ט, "judge."

• Yoma 67b: the laws that would have been written had the Torah not commanded them (idolatry, arayos, murder, theft, blasphemy).
• Rabbi Moshe Shapiro: not "a law with a reason" by definition but a decision between two viable options, as a shofet decides between two legitimate litigants (Tikkunei Zohar, Patach Eliyahu: the Middle Pillar).
• Bedersi (Chosam Tochnis): against din, mishpat is the verdict rendered that settles the dispute.
• Pappenheim: what ethics demands; a worker's wage is a mishpat.
• Wertheimer: the judiciary's discretion among legal outcomes.
• Onkelos renders mishpat as din (Shemos 21:1) and as halachah (21:9).

Keeping a mishpat, whose reason is meant to be understood, means functioning like a judge who weighs his options and reasons to a conclusion; a chok asks no such decision, the law being already set in stone.

Chok and mishpat as Written and Oral Torah

Many sources tie the pair to the two Torahs, and they divide on which is which.

• Rabbi Berachiah Beirach Shapiro (Zera Beirach): chok alludes to the Written Torah, which is not fully explained, and mishpat to the Oral Torah, which reveals the logic behind the Written Torah's terse commandments.
• The Zohar (3:113a) takes the opposite view: chok is the Oral Torah and mishpat the Written. Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg, explaining the Zohar, connects chok to cheik, the bosom, and so the middle or interior of a person, since what is engraved is cut into a thing's interior; the Written Torah is an accessible text with a plain sense on its surface and so corresponds to mishpat, while the Oral Torah digs into the interior for the less obvious meanings and so corresponds to chok.

Both readings stand, neither preferred.

Din (דין)

Root ד-י-ן.

• Pappenheim: DALET-NUN is judicial decision-making and its execution; hence dan, din itself, dayan, madon (litigation), adon (one with jurisdiction over another, a husband over his wife or a master over his slave), Adonai as the Master of all creation, and medinah (the area under one court system). Rabbi Klein adds on his own account the given names Dan, Daniel, Avidan and Dinah.
• Bedersi: the controversy or fight between two opposing litigants, so a litigant is a baal din (Avos 4:22). A similar point is implied by gmar din, a judicial decision or sentencing.
• Wertheimer: the penal system that metes out punishment to those who break the law.
• Maharal: law the intellect presumes true; or, alternatively, law between man and his fellow, that is civil law.
• Rabbi Yosef Nechemias (to Esther 1:13): the letter of the law.

Din is frequent in Tanach but occurs only twice in Chumash, both in the one pasuk charging the Sanhedrin that sits in the Mikdash with deciding "between din and din" (Devarim 17:8).

Dat (דת)

Where it occurs. Twenty times in Megillas Esther, where it covers the body of law the king's jurists have mastered (1:13), the drinking "according to the dat, without duress" (1:8), what is to be done with Vashti "according to the dat" (1:15), Haman's charge that the Jews keep a dat unlike every other nation's and do not keep the king's dat (3:8), and the promulgation of both the decree against the Jews and the later leave to defend themselves, "the dat was given in Shushan the capital" (3:15, 8:14). The only other occurrence in the Hebrew of Tanach is Ezra 8:36, besides dat or data another fourteen times in the Aramaic of Daniel and Ezra, and possibly the krei of אשדת (Devarim 33:2, so Menachem Ibn Saruk in Machberes Menachem; Ibn Janach, Ibn Parchon and Radak do not list that verse under dat). Several proper names are connected to the word: Dosan (Bereishis 37:17) per Old Midrash Tanchuma (Vayeshev §12), Dasan (Bamidbar 16:1) per Sanhedrin 109b, and Yedusun (Tehillim 62:1) per Yalkut Shimoni there. In today's Hebrew dati means religious, as in dati leumi, and secular Israelis often call religious Jews dosim after the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the tav; but Rabbi Klein holds that the word's original sense may have had nothing to do with religion as such.

Rav Hirsch (to Bereishis 11:7), writing on how a language expresses the essence of things, observes that the Torah has no word for religion. Where religion is one part of life it can be named, and the name marks it off from everything else; where all of life, from birth until after death, is bound up with it, no one can take its measure or give it a name, since it informs everything and everything is included in it.

What separates it from din.

• Rabbi Shmuel Laniado is clear that one of the two words means the Torah's laws while the other means either pragmatic measures for temporary circumstances or the rules set by the governing power; Rabbi Klein's objection is that Laniado himself is unsure which word is which.
• Rabbi Yosef Nechemias (to Esther 1:13): din is the letter of the law and dat what was done in practice, so that even if Vashti was within her rights not to appear (din), there might still be ground to punish her as an extra-judicial deterrent to others minded to defy the king (dat); this is why the Megillah puts dat before din, though in theory din should come first.
• Ibn Ezra (to Esther 1:13): dat is the law of the land, here of the kings of Persia and Media, and din the particular verdict decreed on the offender; alternatively, he suggests, dat is what Divine fate dictates and din what the astrological forces decree, a reading also cited by Rabbi Moshe Chalavah there.
• Maharal: the laws dictated by the established norms of a polity, essentially common law, against din as the laws the intellect presumes true; or, alternatively, dat is law between man and himself, ethics, morality and religion, and din law between man and his fellow.
• Rabbi Yosef Zecharia Stern likewise: dat is the norms a country needs for governance or for a given situation, a pragmatic matter, and din is justice set in law, a logical and moral one.
• Wertheimer: dat is the rule of law itself, whether revealed or merely societal, while mishpat is the judiciary's discretion and din the penal system.
• Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin: din is law promulgated on logic and rationality, dat the ruler's prerogative to legislate by fiat even where reason does not carry it; Haman's charge (Esther 3:8) alluded to dina d'malchusa dina (see Gittin 6b), that a government's din is recognized as halachah, and his claim was that the Jews kept Achashverosh's din, rooted in reason, but not his dat, which might be irrational, and were therefore disloyal. Rabbi Tzadok adds that in Torah the two are a tandem, dat and din being Written and Oral Torah, both needed to keep the law properly.

Etymology.

• Pappenheim (Cheshek Shlomo) traces dat to the biliteral DALET-TAV or the monoliteral DALET: practice by force of custom, whether a custom of one person, a family, or a nation; he also connects odos, on the topic of, to the same root. He contrasts mishpat, what ethics demands, and chok, what the law of the land demands: a worker's wage is a mishpat, one's taxes a chok, and tipping the bearer of good news a dat.
• Others trace dat to the same etymon as din: Avraham Even-Shoshan, in his Hebrew dictionary, holds the tav of dat to be a suffix added to din with the nun dropped, so that the two share a root, and Yehoshua Yaron (Mevo L'Midrash HaLashon) proposes much the same.
• The prevailing understanding in scholarly circles, however, is that dat comes from Old Iranian: the etymology was first proposed by Gesenius, who traced Hebrew and Aramaic dat to Persian data, the passive past participle of da, "to give," which linguists now trace to the Proto-Indo-European roots dō- and dǝ-, "to give." Benjamin J. Noonan, Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible: A Lexicon of Language Contact (2019), p. 89, writes that no reason exists to reject the loan hypothesis and that Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic dat undoubtedly come from Old Iranian data-. If so, how does a Persian word reach Chumash, written long before the Jews met the Persians? Rabbi Eliyahu Benamozegh (Eim La'Mikra to Devarim 33:2) writes that this does not trouble him, since he finds Egyptian, Greek and possibly even Latin words in Chumash.

אשדת (Devarim 33:2). The word is obscure, and Bible critics have dealt with it by a heretical emendation of the penultimate letter.

• The Masoretic tradition reads it as two words, aish and dat, and on that reading Ramban has a religion of fire, Onkelos a Torah given through fire, and Rashi the primordial Torah written in fire.
• Abarbanel has two faces to Torah, a fire that burns up sinners and a dat, a legal framework, for those who want to act justly.
• Rav Hirsch (to Devarim 33:2) derives dat from DALET-VAV-TAV, attested mainly in Mishnaic Hebrew: a dut is a cistern (Rosh HaShanah 3:7, Bava Basra 4:2, Keilim 5:6 and 7:1, Ohalos 5:6), always paired with bor, and unlike a bor dug into the ground a dut is built up at the level on which people walk, so that just as its life-giving water is easy to reach, dat gives guidance for life that a person can readily apply to himself. He explains aish dat from the ever-changing contours of a raging fire, which answer to the ever-shifting circumstances of life, the Torah being the gift that supplies guidance for every kind of situation. Hirsch further suggests, on the interchange of dalet and tav, a phonetic tie between dat and dod, an uncle being a close relative charged with the sort of help one expects from a parent, the implication being that Hashem gave the Torah as that kind of support against the aish of life; he suggests connecting dud, a pot, and dad, a breast, as well.

A second stream takes אשדת as written, without splitting it.

• Shadal (to Devarim 33:2) reads it as a form of ashdos or eshed, a waterfall or mountain slope (Bamidbar 21:15; Devarim 3:17, 4:49; Yehoshua 10:40, 12:3, 12:8, 13:20), from ALEPH-SHIN-DALET; his student Rabbi Moshe Tedeschi (Otzar Nirdafim §402) traces those to the Aramaic SHIN-DALET-ALEPH, pouring, the slope being where melted snow and canyon water pour out.
• Ibn Janach, in Sefer HaShorashim, had already rejected that root when Abu Omar Ibn Yaqwi, a Hebrew grammarian of Cordoba, argued it, and follows the Masoretic view that אשדת is a portmanteau of aish and dat.

Bedersi. He does not treat dat and din as a pair at all. He discusses din as a possible synonym of mishpat, and two entries later treats dat as an ostensible synonym of chok, though Rabbi Klein finds it not quite clear how Bedersi distinguishes those two. What is clear is that he rejects Ibn Janach's definition of dat as bris, covenant, and prefers to see dat as effectively coterminous with din.

Nimus (נימוס)

Rabbinic, and a loanword from Greek nomos, law, with the pronunciation, it seems, slightly modified. Nomos underlies English economy, astronomy, autonomy, antinomy, nomism, antinomianism and nomic, and the name Deuteronomy is duet, twice, plus nomos, a direct Greek rendering of Chazal's Mishneh Torah. It does not appear in Tanach and appears once in Mishnah: a husband must tell his agent plainly to write and give a get, and "free her," "sustain her," "do for her as the nimus" or "do for her as is fit" are hints too vague to authorize it (Gittin 6:5), nimus there meaning the law. It occurs elsewhere in both Talmuds, as in Mordechai being "crowned by his nimusim" (Megillah 12b). Rabbi Eliyahu HaBachur (Meturgeman, Sefer HaTishbi): Targum uses it for chok (Vayikra 18:3), mishpat (Shmuel I 2:13, Melachim I 18:28, Yechezkel 5:7 and 20:18), and torah (Tehillim 1:2, Mishlei 1:8). Many of the sources above on dat in fact use nimus to define it; Rabbi Nissim of Marseilles (Maaseh Nissim) sets them apart: nimus is the rules and regulations society sets, dat what Hashem commands. In modern Hebrew nimus has lost the legal sense and means manners or etiquette.

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Tetzaveh/Purim: Do the Din," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 8 March 2025.

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Laws and Orders," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 6 July 2019.

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Laws and Orders," What's in a Word? Synonyms in the Hebrew Language (book manuscript).

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Do the Din," What's in a Word? Synonyms in the Hebrew Language (book manuscript).

Cited in the essay: Esther 1:8, 1:13, 1:15, 3:8, 3:15, 8:14; Ezra 8:36; Bereishis 37:17; Bamidbar 16:1, 19:2, 21:15; Shemos 5:14, 12:14, 15:25, 30:21; Vayikra 3:16, 18:3, 18:4-5, 23:14 with Yoma 67b; Devarim 3:17, 4:49, 17:8, 33:2; Yehoshua 10:40, 12:3, 12:8, 13:20; Shmuel I 2:13; Melachim I 18:28; Yeshayahu 30:8; Yechezkel 5:7, 20:18; Tehillim 1:2, 62:1, 81:4-5; Mishlei 1:8; Iyov 19:23; Sanhedrin 109b; Gittin 6b, 6:5; Megillah 12b; Rosh HaShanah 3:7; Bava Basra 4:2; Keilim 5:6, 7:1; Ohalos 5:6; Avos 5:16; Rambam, Shemonah Perakim 6, Moreh 3:26; Rabbeinu Bachya to Bereishis 26:5, Shemos 15:26, Devarim 6:17 and 7:12; Ibn Yachya and Shemos Rabbah 15:25 to Tehillim 147:19; Radak to Tehillim 119:1; Rav Hirsch to Tehillim 119:5; Zohar 3:113a; Bedersi, Chosam Tochnis s.v. דין, דת; Pappenheim, Cheshek Shlomo s.v. DALET-TAV, DALET-NUN; Old Midrash Tanchuma Vayeshev §12; Yalkut Shimoni to Tehillim 62:1; Otzar Nirdafim §402; Benamozegh, Eim La'Mikra to Devarim 33:2; Gesenius; Avraham Even-Shoshan's Hebrew dictionary; Yehoshua Yaron, Mevo L'Midrash HaLashon; Noonan, Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible, p. 89; Shadal to Bereishis 26:5; Rabbi Shlomo Astruc to Shemos 15:26; Bereishis 11:7 with Rav Hirsch.