Pangle and Burns-The Bible

4
The Bible*
In turning from Athens to Jerusalem, we venture into a new realm. In a

sense, we leave behind political philosophy, as it was originally founded
by Socrates and carried on by his successors. We engage a writing that
offers a radically alternative way of understanding and living human
life. The Bible never refers to philosophy or to science, to “politics” or
“the political.” The Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) and the Christian
Gospels never speak of “nature” in general or of “human nature” in
particular – or of “natural law,” “natural right” or “natural rights,” or
“human rights.” The Scriptures never refer to “democracy,” “oligarchy,”
“republics” or republicanism, “statesmanship,” “citizenship,” “constitu-
tions,” “regimes,” or “forms of government.” The Bible elaborates a com-
prehensive, normative account of the whole of human existence – of
righteousness or justice, of law, of cities and nations or peoples, of rul-
ers and ruled, of family, of love, of education, and, above all, of divin-
ity – without reference to, or apparent need for, many of the seemingly
essential terms, categories, and concepts by which classical political phi-
losophy sought to clarify the enduring meaning for human existence
in all times and place of what the philosophers observed around them
in republican practice. Starting with Socrates, the political philosophers
claim that their unassisted human reasoning about empirical evidence
available in principle to everyone makes decisive progress in uncover-
ing the deepest permanent needs and problems of human nature from
which one may derive lasting standards of good and bad. The Bible, in
contrast, presents itself as the revelation to all mankind, through select
* Translations in this chapter are, with some emendations, from Robert Alter, The Five
Books of Moses (New York: Norton, 2004); the Jewish Publication Society translation (1962–
1982); and the Revised Standard Version.
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118 Biblical Political Theology
inspired prophets, of authoritative guidance that humbles and shows

the limitations of all merely human understanding and experience. The
God who speaks through the Bible is a transcendent God, who as the
creator of heaven and earth is not limited by any necessities, as his very
name – “I will be what I will be” (“Ehyeh-‘Asher-Ehyeh” – Exod. 3:14) – sug-
gests. His only limits are those he imposes on himself by his unfailing
promises or covenants that bespeak his adherence to and enforcement
of justice: a justice that is intelligible to human critical thinking (Gen.
18:23–33; Deut. 32:4). He is known through the narration of his deeds
and his commands.
Creation
“In the beginning,” an unnamed narrator begins, “God was creating
heaven and earth.” The Bible presents the world as the creative work of
a being Who calls beings – starting with light – into being out of darkness
and the void. Whoever tells us this certainly wasn’t there; it must, then,
have been revealed to him. (By tradition, it was Moses to whom this was
revealed, and to whom authorship of the irst ive books is ascribed.)
The statement is a revealed answer to a question that arises of its own to
any thoughtful human being, to one who asks: “How did this world in
which I live come to be?” Before the one God created the world, there
was nothing; there was a “void,” welter and waste and darkness. God was
not constrained in any way, it seems. There were no necessities that he
had to manipulate, no preexisting beings that would limit His power. As
subsequent theologians have put it, creation was ex nihilo, out of nothing;
everything that is, is without a necessitating cause. It did not have to be,
and could have been otherwise. According to philosophers, if anything
could come to be without a cause, without a necessity, then the world
would be unintelligible; according to the opening passage of the Bible,
then, the world, created by God, is fundamentally unintelligible.
There is nonetheless a discernable order to God’s creation, one that
establishes in the reader’s mind something about the intention of God in
His creation. Three initial days of creation: of light, of the earthy, of the
watery, of nonlife, and of plants, that is, of beings with no locomotion,
no capacity to move or change – are followed by three days of creation
of beings that move from place to place: irst, sun and moon and stars,
and then animals (with no ixed motion), and then humans. We are
given a complete picture of the creation of the whole by a God who cre-
ates the whole merely by speaking – a distant God of awesome, sublime
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acts – an account that presents a rank ordering of the parts of creation;

the heavenly bodies, which might otherwise appear to be divine beings
worthy of worship, or (alternatively) evidence of unchangeable necessi-
ties, are deprecated: The sun isn’t needed for vegetation, for example.
But there is a commonsensical division that God has made of things into
kinds, a “way” for each thing to live and move. The description of the
irst creation is, moreover, one of a clear ascent: We learn irst of a homo-
geneous being (light), then of beings that have little motion, then of
beings that have growth, then of living beings – animals – that have loco-
motion, and inally of the highest created being, man, that has a motion
within him, an ability to rule the others, and who can move or change or
go wrong in yet another way. But we don’t learn of the last until we get,
as we do next, a second account of creation.
The Second Account of Creation and the Fall

Humans are the center of the second story of creation. God makes man
from the earth, and then plants a garden for him. Life is pleasant in the
garden, and every plant that is good for food is there. It is fertile and well
watered by four rivers. And God plants in this garden a tree of knowledge
of good and evil, as well as a tree of life – from the latter of which, if he
should eat, the man will live forever. Man is commanded by God on the
other hand not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He can
eat of every other tree, but if he eats of this tree, on that day he shall die.
The second account calls to our attention, in the irst place, the didac-
tic character of the accounts: We have not one, but two accounts, each
meant to unfold something signiicant about the world that we ind our-
selves in, something that cannot be captured or adequately conveyed by
a single account. Second, the Bible presents contradiction as not some-
thing inherently troublesome to readers. The second account of crea-
tion, in which God is a kind of craftsman, working with given materials,
tells us of God’s plan for Man: Out of a rib of Adam (Man) God inally
fashions a being suitable for Man, Woman (Eve). “This,” declares Adam,
“is at last bone of my bone and lesh of my lesh.” And the narrator
pauses, for the irst time, to refer to a contemporary practice of readers:
This, he says, is the reason that a woman shall leave her father’s house
and cling to a man. This, in other words, is the basis of sexual union and
of marriage. This part of the account is given, then, explicitly, in order
to explain human sexuality and marriage. We are then told how the two
lived up to God’s plan. And God walks in the garden and talks to Adam.
The commandment given to Adam is that he not eat of the tree of

knowledge of good and evil. The commandment does not demand that
he or the woman do something manifestly impossible; it is not like a
commandment never to eat, for example. It is a commandment whose
obedience is clearly within the realm of human possibility, freely to be
obeyed. But it is so because, and only because, God has placed these
irst humans in a paradise, where their needs are easily met. That is, the
perfect beginning of man’s life on earth supports the argument that
the deiance of God’s commandment – the eating of the tree of knowl-
edge of good and evil – was not an act compelled by, and so excused by,
the harshness of their situation. Since the original situation of human
beings was one of bounty, they were free to obey God’s commands, and
so are responsible for their deed. The account of the perfect begin-
ning supports, and is meant to support, the moral understanding with
which a reader approaches the text: Human beings are not compelled
by their needs or self-interest to commit wrongs, but are free to do what
is right.
A single creator God has made the world and made it a home for Man,
who was to live happily in a state of childlike innocence but having an
exalted place in creation, being a steward of God’s creation, naming and
having dominion over its other parts and recognizing the female of his
species as the only fulilling object of his longing.
But the cunning serpent tempts Eve, telling her that God has deceived
her – that she shall not die but instead will know good and evil, like
God. Eve sees that the fruit is good for food, and a delight to the eyes,
and desirable for wisdom (she has already some knowledge of good);
so she eats it, and gives it to Adam, who eats it, and suddenly they real-
ize that they are naked, that is, that they somehow are not supposed
to be naked. They have shame, which they did not have before. And
that is the evidence that they now know good and evil. God states his
punishments (Gen. 3.14). The irst punishment is of the serpent, who
will henceforth crawl on his belly (having somehow not done so before)
and there will be enmity between himself and women; not just human
beings but other parts of creation are affected by the Fall. The second
punishment is of Woman, who will henceforth bear children in pain; the
Bible thus explains why an apparently good (commanded) and ordinary
part of a woman’s life, childbirth, is so painful. Woman will also desire
man and be ruled by him, as her punishment. The third punishment is
of Adam, who henceforth will have to toil and sweat to live; God curses
the ground so that it will produce food only through the hard labor of
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Man. God then expels them from the garden before they eat of the tree
of life and live forever. God is jealous of his knowledge combined with
his eternity. And the humans, not knowing good and evil, had not given
thought to the tree of life: They were not very aware of their mortality or
its meaning. But human death now enters the world, with no possibility
for humans to return to the garden. So while Adam and Eve, and their
descendants up to Noah, live very long lives, relecting their proximity
to the original state of man – when God breathed his life into him – they
will all eventually die. Yet God continues to care for man and to seek
man’s loving obedience and gratitude for that care, even as man contin-
ues to rebel against it.
The two accounts of creation disclose, then, a single God creating
heaven and earth and all that is in it, a deprecation of heavenly bodies,
and an account of our falling away from God’s original plan. In the irst
account we are told that God’s creation is in his eyes “very good,” and in
the second how it and in particular its peak, human beings, came to be
not so good. Human beings, freely disobeying God, eating of the tree of
knowledge of good and evil, drifting into disobedience, came to know
good and evil, or to know it more fully, and were punished by God and
expelled from the garden. Humans must now live with this knowledge
and with a disrupted world. What they do with it determines whether or
not they are good or evil.
Cain, Abel, and the Founding of Cities

The question of what humans do with the knowledge of good and evil
forms the next part of the biblical narrative, which concerns the irst
descendants of Adam and Eve, the brothers Cain and Abel. Cain is a
farmer, Abel a shepherd; each offers to God a sacriice (which God
clearly expects) from the fruits of their respective work. He is pleased
with Abel’s sacriice but not with Cain’s. God seems to prefer the offer-
ing of the nomad Abel, who relies upon God’s bounty, more than that of
the settled farmer Cain, who forces from the earth more than it would
otherwise produce. God warns the angry Cain that he must rule over
his wrath, or sin will result. But Cain murders Abel. God confronts Cain
about the whereabouts of Abel, and Cain deiantly and with dissimu-
lation answers with a question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He seems
unaware that God knows what he has done. “Your brother’s blood cries
out,” says God. And God curses Cain: He will labor in vain to produce
fruit from the earth and will become a fugitive and a wanderer, leading
the very opposite of the settled life he had sought. Cain declares the
punishment too severe; he will no longer see God, and wandering, he
will be slain for his act. God assures him that he will not be, and puts a
sign upon him. The punishment is in fact quite mild, relecting the fact,
perhaps, that there was no law laid down by God against murder.
Cain represents in his agriculture both settled life that relies on human
art rather than on God and the desire to be irst in esteem. His descen-
dants are, we are told, the founders of cities and of the arts or crafts
(musical instruments, cutting instruments of brass and iron, etc.). One
of his descendants, moreover, Lamech, boasts that he as an avenger slays
more men than does God. From the line of Seth, on the other hand –
who replaces Abel – come no inventors or artisans or cities, but Enoch
son of Jared, of whom it is said that he “walked with God” and not that,
or when, he died, but simply that God “took him” (Gen. 5:24). Noah,
too, is Seth’s descendant, and becomes the very last righteous man in
the world. Human arts, with which man would know and transform the
given world, and cities, in which man would govern himself, are a move-
ment away from reliance upon God and his provident care for men.
They stand, we may say, for a proud autonomy. The Bible stands irmly
against such autonomy through arts. What we would call “civilization” or
“progress” or “development” is altogether different from the “righteous-
ness” the Bible calls for.
So great is the difference, in fact, that by the time of Noah, the wick-
edness of everyone else on earth besides Noah causes God to repent of
his creation of man. So evil does human life in cities become that there
is left in the world only one righteous man. God saves Noah and his fam-
ily and all animal species on the earth by having him build an ark and
gather pairs of all living things into the ark. God then loods the earth
and kills all living things on it.
Prior to the lood, then, mankind lives without law, in freedom from
revealed law or restraint. But the result is disastrous. Man, now fully
awake, knowing good and evil, knowing that he will die, lives unrigh-
teously, in rebellion. God has to wipe out most of creation and start over.
This time, He will give a law, but he will do so not as a mere imposition.
He will do so in a covenant with Noah. When Noah emerges from the
ark after the waters have subsided, he sacriices many of the animals to
God, who, after smelling the sweet sacriice, declares the desire of man’s
heart to be evil from his youth. Yet God will never again destroy almost
all life on earth. He is now prepared to make concessions to humani-
ty’s evil bent or to bring mankind back to Him in some way. He puts a
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rainbow in the heavens as a sign of his irst covenant with men. So now
the human condition, humanity’s second chance as it were, is better.
There is greater hope for man, with God realizing how this being is.
But with that hope comes also an increase in punishment: A command-
ment for capital punishment of murder, as an indication of the dignity
of human being (compare Gen. 9:2–6 with 1:26–30 and 2:15), and now
the beasts fear and dread man. This is the irst covenant that God makes.
The second will be with Abraham.
Noah, the irst man to have a vineyard and hence wine, gets drunk one
night, and one of his sons, Ham, sees him drunk and naked. (Wine seems
to remove the shame that knowledge of good and evil entails, or perhaps
that very knowledge.) The other two sons of Noah, Shem and Japheth,
cover their father’s nakedness. The next day Noah curses Ham (who will
become the father of Canaan) for having violated an un-promulgated
law against seeing one’s father naked. Noah blesses his other two sons.
The land that Ham settles in, which became known through his son as
“the land of Canaan,” will be taken from his descendants, since God
promises it subsequently to Abraham and his descendants. Mankind is
now divided between the “cursed” and the “blessed.”
We are also told of one of Noah’s descendants, Nimrod, who
becomes a “mighty hunter before God,” a conqueror of beasts and of
men, that is, a man who relies on himself and seeks glory through con-
quest. Nimrod founds a kingdom that includes a large city called Babel.
It becomes the peak and emblem of the continuing attempt to rebel
against reliance on God, or of proud autonomy. For its people seek
to build a great city and a tower to the very heavens – the abode of
God – lest they be scattered over the whole earth. They seek, that is, to
remain together and to build a name for themselves. Their efforts have
the opposite result. For God “comes down” to see what they are up to,
and again speaking of himself in the plural, says: “‘Behold, they are one
people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to
do; and now nothing will be withheld from them, which they purpose
to do. Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that
they may not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered
them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left
off to build the city.” The account thus explains how there came to be
out of the single race that God had created, and then saved, various
nations who cannot understand one another. God moves to thwart,
through dividing men into nations, human accomplishment or human
self-reliance and art.
Abraham and the Binding of Isaac

God calls Abraham to become the father of one of these nations, a new
and blessed nation. Commanded by God to separate himself out from
others in order to spawn this chosen nation, the childless Abraham is
repeatedly promised, as he grows older and older, that he will be made
that father. Abraham is commanded to circumcise himself and every
male in his household as a sign of this new covenant. But besides this
incisive sign, what characterizes Abraham and thus this chosen nation
of which he is to be the father? We begin to learn this through three
episodes: the birth of his son Isaac, the dialogue with God over the fate
of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Binding of Isaac. Through them
we learn of a development that, though coming as a consequence of
the Fall, represents an ascent from our original state. It is a deepening
human awareness of mortality and a consequent deepening of human
faith in and love of God.
“Isaac,” Abraham’s son, whose name means “he will laugh,” is so
named because of the laughter that his parents both expressed upon
hearing the news from God that he would be born to them (Gen. 17:16–
17, 18:9–15). Abraham was ninety-nine and his wife, Sarah, eighty-
nine when Abraham was told by God that Sarah would bear him a son.
Abraham’s love of and trust in this wonder-working God, a trust that is
the opposite of contemptuous laughter – which presupposes that there
are things possible and impossible – makes him deserving of being the
father of the chosen people.
We learn more of what it means for Abraham to trust in God and in
his righteousness in the immediate sequel (chapter 18), which tells us
God’s plan for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Their peoples are
wicked, and God intends to kill them. Abraham intervenes, and appeals
to God to spare the city of Sodom – if ifty, then forty-ive, then forty,
thirty, twenty, and inally ten righteous men are to be found in it. Or
rather, he asks God if he will destroy the cities if ten righteous men are
found. Abraham, that is, knowing better than his predecessors that he is
going to die (see Gen. 18:27: “who am but dust and ashes”) trusts that
God is not a God who destroys the righteous along with the wicked. His
hope or trust is that God rewards the righteous. He acts together with
God; he acts as if he has a share in the responsibility for God acting
righteously.
God has through a wonder given Abraham a son, and Isaac embod-
ies Abraham’s love of the chosen people, of his people who will trust
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in the Lord. But God says to Abraham: “Take your son, your only one,
the one you love, Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriah and offer
him up as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I shall say
to you” (Gen. 22:2). It would appear that in making this demand, God
is putting an end to the fulillment of His promise and is violating the
law He gave to Noah, concerning the shedding of innocent blood. Yet
Abraham obeys; he is commanded to surrender to God, to give to God
what is dearest to Abraham, to sacriice his deepest hope to God, with-
out expectation of any reward. Abraham loves not himself but God.
God rightfully demands that he, and not oneself or even God’s chosen
people, be loved without qualiication. Abraham obeys with a child-
like trust in God, yet aware that he is mere dust or will die. And he is
rewarded: God spares Isaac’s life. God is a righteous God, not a tyrant
God. But only by not presuming upon God’s righteousness, only by
accepting that God is an unfathomable God, does one come to merit
a reward. In this way, by presenting God as unfathomable but just, as
one who in His unfathomability makes possible the prospect of genu-
ine sacriice of one’s own good, the Bible preserves the possibility of
devotional, self-sacriicial love, just as it had begun to do in the story of
Adam and Eve, with the clear indications there of human freedom and
hence responsibility.
This unfathomability or ierce uncanniness of God, and hence the
deepening of trust in and love of him, will become still more pronounced
as God reveals himself to Moses, in Exodus:
And Moses said to God, “look, when I come to the Israelites and say to
them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they say to me,
‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?” And God said to Moses,
“I-Will-Be-Who-I-Will-Be.” And he said, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites,
‘Ehyeh, I-Will-Be, has sent me to you.’”
God’s very name bespeaks mystery or an unfathomable will. As God says

later in Exodus, “I shall be gracious to whom I shall be gracious, and I
shall show mercy to whom I shall show mercy” (33:19). Even the way in
which He fulills his promises – which are the only actions of His that
one can predict – are unpredictable. “My ways are not your ways, nei-
ther are my thoughts your thoughts, says the Lord” (Isa. 55.8). God is
accordingly said to dwell in a thick cloud or darkness (1 Kings 8:12),
disclosing Himself unpredictably. What He does disclose of His purposes
and His will is disclosed through the Torah, through the irst ive books
and its laws.
Jacob/Israel, Joseph, Egypt

The people whom this mysterious God has chosen are to relect His
mysteriousness, and so are to be distinct from other peoples. Isaac’s son
Jacob, who comes to be named Israel and thus the Eponymous Patriarch,
is perhaps most instructive in this respect. Jacob is easily the most deceit-
ful character in the Hebrew Scriptures. Even his name means “crooked,”
like a heel – the heel of his brother, which he grasped when they were
born, as if Jacob were trying to pull him back into the womb so that he
would be irst. Rebekah, the boys’ mother, prefers Jacob to Esau, and sets
up a wily scheme to have Jacob deceive his father and take his brother’s
blessing. So the question is, why does God permit this? Why does He
prefer Jacob? Why are this man’s deeds presented at such comparative
length?
The account of how Jacob comes by his brother’s birthright gives us
some guidance (Gen. 25:27–35; cf. 38). From it we see that Esau is an
impatient, impetuous, grunting, crude man of appetites, and while he
is a clever hunter of animals, he is otherwise rather stupid. He has the
appearance of a strong and spirited man but of one who is quite weak in
understanding and self-control. Jacob is more delicate or gentle, but also
clever with humans. God’s preference may be said to be for the gentle
but wily over the physically strong but slow.
After Jacob steals the inal blessing that Isaac intended for Esau, he
goes to Mesopotamia and eventually has an endogamous marriage to
Leah and to Rachel, daughters of his uncle Laban. The two wives of
Jacob and their slave girls have between them some ten children by
Jacob before Rachel herself inally has a son by Jacob, Joseph. Jacob then
manages by a trick to get all the healthiest of Laban’s lock and heads
back with them to the land of Canaan, secretly: Jacob is a timid man.
One passage in the account of his exit from Laban’s lands warrants our
special attention. Rachel had stolen her father Laban’s household gods,
unbeknownst to Jacob. So when Laban comes to get his gods back, Jacob
says that whoever should be found with them will die. Rachel has hidden
them in a camel cushion upon which she sits in her tent. “Let not,” she
tells her searching father, “my lord be incensed that I am unable to rise
before you, for the way of women is upon me.” Rachel refers to her men-
strual period as “the way of women,” and her words provide a striking
example of the Bible’s manner of referring to what philosophers would
call “nature.” The Bible’s word is “way.” It is the same word used for “cus-
tom,” as in “the way of the Philistines.” No distinction is drawn between
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what is by nature and what is by law or custom. The way of birds is to have
wings and feathers and to ly, the way of ish is to have scales and gills and
ins, the way of Americans is to wear blue jeans, and the way of women is
to menstruate. Or one could say “the custom of birds is to ly.” The Bible
goes to great lengths, that is, to ensure that since all the world is the work
of the creator God, no distinction should arise between nature and cus-
tom that would call that creative work into question.
Jacob returns to Canaan to meet with Esau, but before he gets there
he wrestles, in his dread of Esau’s approaching men, all night long with
some nameless being, God, and God renames him Israel, and Jacob is
permanently lamed, made physically crooked, limping. (He will soon
suffer also the loss of Rachel and, as he thinks, of Joseph.) The nar-
rator pauses to explain a dietary law, the removal of the sciatic nerve,
that results from the event: “Therefore the children of Israel do not eat
the sinew of the thigh which is by the hip-socket to this day, for he had
touched Jacob’s hip-socket at the sinew of the thigh.” This is the irst
time that the Bible refers to God’s people as “the children of Israel,”
which became their name thereafter. Jacob, the eponymous ancestor, is
clearly the model for that people – a timid, wily man who wrestled with
God and was physically weakened by that event.
Jacob had sent news of his arrival in Canaan to Esau, but the latter had
not replied; he has sent instead, ominously, his four hundred horsemen.
The frightened Jacob attempts to placate his brother with many sheep
and cattle before meeting him himself, and it works. The two are rec-
onciled, with Jacob now calling him “my lord” and calling himself “your
servant.” He in effect gives up his claim to any worldly title to rule. And
when his daughter Dinah is raped by the son of the local prince (Gen.
34), Jacob does nothing. Two of his sons, to avenge her honor, trick the
whole tribe of men into circumcising themselves and then kill them all
while they are recovering! Jacob, however, is angry at their deed, telling
them that they have stirred up trouble in the land, while they are only a
handful of men. The proud sons protest: “Like a whore should our sister
be treated?” Keenly aware of his weakness, Jacob inds his sons’ proud
avenging of their sister’s honor to be a mistake. (He says nothing about
the terrible trick by which they accomplished it.) Then God appears
again to Jacob to give him a way out, telling him to go to Bethel. Jacob
rids his household of all other gods. “And the terror of God was upon the
towns around them, and they did not pursue the sons of Jacob” (Gen.
35:5). A little later, when Rachel dies in childbirth, and Jacob’s oldest
son, Rueben lies with Jacob’s own concubine, Jacob hears of it and does
nothing. He apparently does not wish to make trouble. Such is the one
whom God has favored, one with little sense of pride or honor, no desire
to rule, and with a keen awareness of his worldly weakness and a strong
reliance upon God.
In striking contrast with this account of Jacob, we are told next of all
the kings who sprang up among the descendants of Esau, and explicitly
told that Esau’s land, Edon, had kings “before Israel ever did.” This, our
irst indication that Israel will eventually have kings, comes by way of
contrast: Israel will not, despite or rather because it is the people of God,
emerge as a people through the rule of kings. The contrast continues as
we learn next that Jacob loves his second youngest son, Joseph – a tat-
tletale – born of Rachel, better than he loves Joseph’s tougher, prouder
brothers. When the brothers hear Joseph’s prophetic dream of the
sheaves – of how they will all bow to him one day – they have had enough
of him, and throw him into a pit and then sell him as a slave, report-
ing to their father that he was killed by a wild beast. As a result Joseph
ends up going to Egypt as a slave, is falsely accused by his master’s wife
of attempted rape, goes to prison, interprets well the dreams of a fel-
low prisoner who is a chief of Pharaoh, ends up interpreting Pharaoh’s
dreams, and becomes Pharaoh’s right-hand man. During the seven years
of famine that Joseph had correctly interpreted Pharaoh’s dream to fore-
tell, Jacob/Israel sends his sons into Egypt for food, setting the stage for
the inal, touching scenes in Genesis, and the last of its many accounts of
deceptions, this time by Joseph, who does not disclose who he is and who
plants a silver goblet on Benjamin in order to get his father into Egypt.
(But whenever Joseph deceives his brothers, he weeps.) Once they are
all there, Joseph discloses himself and is reconciled with them, and the
people of Israel gradually lourish and prosper, so much so that the
Egyptians consider them a threat to their rule, and enslave them. The
people of Israel thus come to endure four hundred years of Pharaonic
despotism, serving another people; they become a large people without
experiencing any political rule of their own, with no great or proud lead-
ers, no sense of proud independence, no military conquests, no partici-
pation in political deliberation.
Moses and the Divine Law

The Israelites are inally liberated from the Egyptians by their uncanny
God and his wondrous works; Moses is the great prophet of God who
leads them out. At every stage of their exodus and their forty-year journey
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to the promised land of Canaan, they are both reliant on God and rebel-
lious against God, wishing to have a visible god like others, complaining
about the lack of food, and then about the monotony of the very nour-
ishing food that God provides them. For forty years Moses wanders in
the wilderness with them, ighting off other tribes with God’s miracu-
lous help, and receiving from God on Mount Sinai the commandments
by which his people are to live. Finally the promised land is in sight.
But their leader, the prophet Moses, who spoke with God, is not even
deemed worthy to lead God’s people into that land. The people is God’s
people, not Moses’ people.
Before we are given the account of their entry into the promised land
led by the military leader Joshua – for whom God parts the rivers of
the Jordan and knocks down the walls of the city of Jericho – we are
given three books comprised largely of laws: Leviticus, Numbers, and
Deuteronomy. And while these books lack the drama, the narrative
enchantment, of the books that precede and follow them, they provide
us with an understanding of the normative conceptions of authority
in which the theocratic political thinking of the Bible is most deeply
rooted. In stark contrast to classical political philosophy, neither the laws
given in these books nor any other part of the Bible presents an explicit
teaching on the “best regime.” So what, if anything, takes the place, in
the Bible, of the discussion of the best regime, or of the basic principles
of legitimate government?
The Chosen People

The closest thing to an answer, as we have now begun to see, is that we
ind in the Bible a single, exemplary, chosen people, and an unfolding
account of a succession of systems of authority under which that people
lives. Each of these successive systems is blessed, or approved – though
in every case with some severe reservations – and all of them are seen
in vivid contrast to a worst system of authority: the Egyptian Pharaonic
despotism. To begin with, then, we may say that the Bible appears to lay
down as its clearest benchmark or standard what is worst, what is most
to be avoided, as opposed to what is best, what is to be aspired to, in
politics.
To better understand the biblical outlook, we need irst to raise and
seek an answer to the following question: Why is there a single chosen
people, distinguished from the rest of humanity, given the fact that the
biblical God is the one and only God, the creator of all mankind in His
image? The elements of an answer appear in the parables of Genesis that

precede and lead up to the designation of Abraham and his offspring
as the chosen people. Humanity is created in the image of God, but
out of the dust. Humanity partakes of divine intelligence and freedom,
but in a subordinate capacity that requires a constant struggle to rule
over the lower dimensions of human existence. When humans are left
to themselves, they exhibit an overwhelming tendency to lose sight of
this proper ordering. Mankind is prone to pervert its divine attributes
in a proud attempt to escape, to replace or to usurp, the rule of God.
Only through a long and painful process of humiliating and purifying
education can the human race gradually recover a irm grasp on the
strictly subordinate transcendence implied in its being created in the
image of God. The chosen people is forcibly set apart and commanded
to live as an image of transcendence that will be exemplary for all man-
kind because of the terrible tests to which this chosen people is put –
tests recorded for all humans in the Scriptures (Isa. 42:6–7; cf. Lev. 10:3,
11:44; Deut. 28:10).
The Pre-Mosaic Biblical Forms of Human Authority

The testing takes political shape in a succession of what we may call biblical
regimes. First, and in an important sense, perduring, is patriarchy – epito-
mized above all in the story of Abraham. The monogamous family, headed
by the father but with a place of high honor assigned to the mother, is a
cornerstone of any and every society favored by the Bible. The cultivation
of familial kinship, of familial devotion, of familial responsibility, and of
future hope centered on the family, remains always at the heart of biblical
virtue. But patriarchy, though it begins as the sole form of Hebrew rule,
and though it remains the kernel of Hebrew society, soon is shown to be
inadequate as a mode of rule over a people of many families. As we have
seen, Jacob, who so successfully procreates the large band of brothers that
becomes the source of the twelve tribes of Israel, proves quite incapable
of maintaining order or even peace among those brothers.
What is needed over and above the patriarchs, the Scripture teaches,
is the rule of law. What Scripture means by the rule of law is the absolute
rule of divine law – of a code made for, but not by, humans. In order to
understand the character and the need for such a humbling, superhu-
man law, the people of Abraham – and we readers, vicariously – must
irst experience what human rule can become when it is un-humbled,
unlimited by any such law beyond the human. We must experience the
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temptation such rule holds out – for the ruled even more than for the
ruler. We must watch as the Israelites embrace the delusive comforts or
pampering effected by eficient, untrammeled human administration.
It is Joseph, the Pharaoh’s right-hand slave (for all under Pharaoh are
slaves) who starts the chosen people – and us – down this path. It is
Joseph who brings Jacob to reside in Egypt and, what is more, it is Joseph
who devises the abolition of private property among all Egyptians, thus
completing the absolute character of the Pharaonic despotism (Gen.
41:39ff., 47:20–26).
Yet the Bible does not present this economic absolutism of Pharaonic
rule in so pejorative a fashion as we today are inclined to view it; the
Bible does not present Joseph in the dark light in which he appears in
some contemporary analyses of Joseph as the arch-typical assimilating,
and thus self-destructive, court-Jew. It seems characteristic of biblical
political judgment, as opposed to our modern judgment, that what for
the Bible seems to deine the peculiarly monstrous character of the evil
represented by the Pharaonic system, what sets the Egyptians apart from
all other peoples, is their technological success in mastering their environ-
ment. The Egyptians are the one people who, the Scripture stresses, have
almost no dependence on the weather: They have learned to use irriga-
tion to master the Nile, and thereby to achieve apparent independence
from forces beyond human control; the seventh plague, the plague that
is the irst to break the will of the Egyptians, is thunder and hail, which
(the Bible says) “had not fallen on the land of Egypt since it had become
a nation” (Exod. 9:24; cf. Deut. 11:10–12). The Pharaoh, one is inclined
say, is presented as believing that he has realized what was sought in the
construction of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:3ff.). The result is that the
Egyptians, as depicted in Exodus, worship no gods (but cf. Gen. 47:22,
41:45, 50; Num. 33:4). They seem to substitute, for religion or worship
of deities, a very powerful human magic (Exod. 7:11ff.). Pharaonic des-
potism, the Scripture suggests, is so limitlessly oppressive, so ruthlessly
cruel, and so complete or all-embracing, because this despotism embo-
dies and exempliies the power of human contrivance constrained by no
sense of a higher power that limits or would humble human arrogance.
Liberation from Human Despotism to Divine Law

The third political order, decisive for all the rest of biblical time, is of
course the Mosaic liberation from Pharaonic despotism, to the divine law
that puts an end, among the chosen people, to such unchecked human
rule. Yet as we have foreshadowed, the biblical rule of law is something

quite unlike what we have come to identify as the rule of law. Our concep-
tion of the rule of law is guided by the Lockean-Montesquieuian notions
of law as the guarantor of pre-legal individual rights, and of government
as a human institution that draws its legitimate authority solely from the
consent of the governed. We need to try to free ourselves from these con-
temporary presuppositions in our effort to see clearly the authentically
biblical conception of law, and to confront the challenge that concep-
tion poses to our ways of thinking.
Under God’s close instruction, Moses wields enormous political power.
He carries out purges of his opponents and thus occasionally overawes
with terror the mass of the Hebrews, who are disciplined for forty grim
and often frightening years in the desert. This fear and rigor are in ser-
vice to a noble educative enterprise intended and required to trans-
form a mass of demoralized slaves into a “kingdom of priests and a holy
nation” (Exod. 19:6). The covenant between God and his people on
Mount Sinai precedes the purging and training; and so what Moses most
evidently is aiming at by his protracted indoctrination is the formation
of a popular consciousness that can sustain and exemplify a covenantal
and hence consensual form of divine as well as human authority. Yet it
is important to see that the law delivered to the chosen people at Sinai
is not the product of human wisdom, whether that human wisdom be
conceived as arising from popular deliberation or from aristocratic or
monarchic guidance; the law does not depend for its authority on the
consent of those who are to live under it. The most that could be said is
that the people’s consent seals, by submissive acknowledgment and com-
mitment, the unquestionable authority of the law for and over them. In
other words, the consent of the people of Israel is solicited not in order
to validate the law’s wisdom or its authority but rather in order to elicit
from God’s people their solemn pledge to respect the divine law’s intrin-
sic, and therefore permanent and noncontingent, authority and supe-
riority, in wisdom and in rightness. Moreover, the people agree to obey
God’s law not for the sake of the rewards or beneits it promises, but for
the sake of the law, and its lawgiver, and a life in obedience to the law,
as supreme ends in themselves (Exod. 20ff.; Deut. 5–6). The covenant
is thus radically dissimilar to the covenants later variously articulated by
Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and their successors.
By the covenant centered on the law given at Sinai, God continues
and deepens that revelation of his character as ruler that he began in
and by the previous covenants with Noah and Abraham. God’s rule is
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that of a being whose power is total and whose authority is absolute, but
who chooses in His grace to limit or to deine His rule by unconstrained
but unshakable legal commitments – and who demands from His chosen
people a congruent solemn vow. God, however mysterious He may be, is
a moral ruler: He rules, not with a view to some contingent self-interest
or need or whim, but in accordance with solemn, unfailing promises
based on immutable principles of lawful justice.
What is the substantive content and the spirit of the biblical law, con-
ceived as a code of life whose regulative authority dwarfs all human pre-
tensions to self-government?
In the economic sphere, we observe that the law of Moses protects pri-
vate property, and especially private landed property, while imposing
severe limits on the increase of such property. What we would call cap-
ital accumulation, as well as selish enjoyment of the fruits of labor and
investment, are not only limited but compelled to bow before the duties
of charity. All property is conceived as owned ultimately, not by the com-
munity, and still less by the government, but rather by God, the Creator
of heaven and earth (Exod. 21–13; Lev. 25; Deut. 15, 23, 26–27).
In the erotic sphere, sexual pleasure is severely limited to what con-
duces to the procreative life of the patriarchal family (Lev. 15, 18–20;
Num. 5, 30; Deut. 21:15ff., 22:5ff.).
In the sphere of penal law, the principle of retribution prevails, with
a grave sense of human responsibility and guilt. The Mosaic law codi-
ies what we have learned from the book of Genesis about the terrible
human proclivity to sin, the resultant condign divine punishment (tem-
pered by divine mercy), and the desperate need humans have to seek
divine forgiveness – as well as divine assistance in overcoming the con-
stant temptation to sin. Especially if one compares the penal legislation
of Plato’s Laws with the letter and the spirit of the Mosaic penal legisla-
tion, it becomes clear that it is in this sphere that the Mosaic revelation
most manifestly challenges the Socratic moral outlook, epitomized by
Socrates’ and the Athenian Stranger’s oft-repeated and self-consciously
paradoxical contention that virtue is knowledge, and that vice is there-
fore a form of ignorance.
Not only guilt but something more elusive and pervasive haunts and
tarnishes human existence as well as other parts of creation: an impu-
rity, an uncleanness, for which man is partly responsible, and that would
seem to be in some measure a consequence of the incarnation of the
divine “image” in the partly animal man. The law fully reveals to humans
this uncleanness that haunts them (Lev. passim; Deut. 14:21, 23:10ff.).
The speciic purgatory laws direct humans to the admission or full rec-
ognition of their impurity, as the irst step to mitigating or perhaps even
overcoming that contamination – with God’s help and through a vast
and complex array of rites. These rituals, and the spirit that is to infuse
them, are not merely negative or purgative. They are also, and perhaps
most fundamentally, directed upward, toward transcendence of human-
all-too-human weakness, and thereby toward a share in the godlike exis-
tence that is mankind’s ultimate destiny as the creature created in the
image of God; God’s words in Leviticus are: “you shall be holy, for I am
holy” (11:44–45, 19:2). God’s holiness is inseparable from, though not
simply identical with, His righteousness or justice. That righteousness
is irst and foremost His punitive law enforcement: “And exalted is the
Lord of Hosts by just judgment; the Holy God is proved holy by retrib-
utive justice,” says the prophet Isaiah (Isa. 5:16). But retributive justice,
which after all comes into play only in response to human imperfec-
tion, has its source in a higher and purer aspect of justice: God’s un-
needy, and therefore unqualiiedly and even unfathomably generous,
care and love for the common good of all His creatures. And the human
ascent toward holiness is an ascent from the uncleanness of unjust or
sinful selishness toward justice in this rich, positive sense: toward not
merely respect, and compassion, but love – for one’s “neighbor” and also
for “the stranger,” as “oneself” (Lev. 19:18, 34) – and then, above and
beyond, to a self-forgetting love of God as the simply most lovable, and
as the source of everything else lovable (Deut. 6:5, 30:6). This indeed is
for the Scripture the most important purpose of the rule of law: loving
worship or adoration of God, and the puriication and elevation of man-
kind toward assimilation to the radically transcendent “holiness” of the
deity. This ascent to holiness entails the constant struggle to rise above
everything selish and ugly or disgusting and merely animal (especially
sexual – Lev. 15, 18–20; Deut. 22:5ff.), above the trammels of what is
material, mundane, and mortal – in order to ascend toward the realm of
that sublime spiritual beauty whose eternal, un-needy grace promises to
slake our soul’s deepest thirst (Lev. 21). In the Mosaic regime, this ascent
is perhaps most vividly undertaken through the proper employment of
the ine arts in the gifts given to God, and especially in the joyful con-
struction of the Tabernacle and execution of the priestly rituals associ-
ated with the Tabernacle (Exod. 25–31, 35:10–40:35).
From the point of view of political philosophy, the most obviously puz-
zling dimension of the divine law given through Moses is its lack of clar-
ity regarding the organization of human rule or administration under
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God’s law. If we try to discern clues to the intended structure of human

authority, we are struck, to begin with, by the absence of any democratic
institutions in the divine law. The “assembly” – the heart of the classical
democratic regime – is barely alluded to, and given no regular meet-
ing time or place (Num. 35:24–25). What is more, there is no provision
for popular election, let alone for selection of oficers by lot (though
see Num. 1:16 and 16:2). The one moment of nascent “popular sover-
eignty” is the attempt, on the part of the rebel Korah (leading “the whole
community”: Num. 16:19) to challenge Moses’ singular authority in the
name of widespread or even universally shared divine inspiration. That
attempt meets with horrifyingly instructive divine punishment.
On the other hand, however, neither is there a king or a clearly deined
political aristocracy, whether established on the basis of blood, or elec-
tion, or divine anointment, or criteria of merit. (There is of course an aris-
tocratic priesthood, administering the all-important rituals of worship.)
Instead of a governing assembly or an aristocracy or a monarchy, we are
confronted with a number of appointed or anointed rulerships, whose
lines of jurisdiction and authority overlap in what one is tempted to char-
acterize as a maze. To begin with, there are the “Elders,” whose author-
ity antedates Moses and some of whom prove to have prophetic gifts
(Exod. 3:16, 4:29, 17:5, 18:12, etc.); then there are the “Tribal Leaders”
(who also antedate Moses, but are ratiied by God – Deut. 1:13ff.) – but
these are different from the Tribal Heads whom God commands to be
appointed to lead the pioneers into the promised land (Num. 13). Then
there are the new “Chiefs” who are also “Judges,” appointed by Moses
not through any divine inspiration but instead at the pertinent sugges-
tion of his father-in-law Jethro, who comes to the aid of the apparently
rather bewildered and overworked Moses (Exod. 18:13ff.). Then there
are “Overseers” and “Scribes” (Exod. 5:6, 10, 14; Deut. 16:18, 20:5–9);
last but by no means least, there is the divinely appointed warlord and
successor to Moses, Joshua (Num. 27:15ff., 34:16).
From Joshua to David

The potential for turbulence that is implied in this constitutional jum-
ble does not become evident in the irst generation after Moses, that
is, in the fourth regime, which carries out the conquest of the promised
land. For the conquest requires disciplined military obedience to the
warlord Joshua. On the whole, from the account in the book of Joshua,
one may judge that this regime appears to be the most successful of all
those described in the Scripture, not only militarily but, above all, in
terms of the steadfastness of the people’s piety (Josh. 24:31; Judg. 2:7,
3:10ff.). This might suggest that the pressure of external foes is required
in order to maintain steady pious observance of the law. Yet even this
regime-at-arms exhibits a decisive law, precisely in regard to pious obe-
dience. On account of a combination of folly and softness (especially
Joshua’s pact with the Hivites – Josh. 9) the chosen people fails to extir-
pate entirely the idolatrous and abomination-practicing inhabitants of
Canaan. The subsequent recurrent corruption of the chosen people,
caused by intermarriage with the idolatrous native people, is the terrible
price the Hebrews pay for this negligent disobedience of God’s unambig-
uous commandment of pitiless exterminating conquest (Deut. 7:16ff.;
Josh. 23:9ff.).
The persistence of Canaanite idolatry and of other Canaanite abom-
inations contributes to the serious dificulties experienced in the ifth
regime, the rule of the Judges that succeeds the generalship of Joshua
(for whom God appoints no successor). Under the Judges, the full poten-
tial for disorder implicit in the bewildering Mosaic constitutional provi-
sions becomes manifest. The epoch of the Judges is characterized by a
nigh-anarchic luidity and unpredictability, and by a tribal confederacy
that proves woefully inadequate to deal with foreign threats. The recur-
rence of charismatic leaders – Deborah, Gideon, and Samson being the
most notable – halts only temporarily a process of descent into lawless,
internecine savagery.
The apparently obvious solution is the institution of a divinely
anointed monarchy, the sixth and inal form of biblical regime.
Monarchy is repeatedly foreshadowed in the book of Judges, and earlier
in the Deuteronomic prophecies of Moses himself (Deut. 17:14ff.). Yet
the advent of monarchy is condemned by the prophet Samuel, appar-
ently speaking for God as well as for himself (1 Sam. 8). Through this
condemnation, Scripture compels us to wonder whether the Divinity
does not look with considerable favor upon something like the regime
and the world described in the book of Judges. The biblical God would
seem to have good reason to prefer the turbulence, uncertainty, fragil-
ity, and vulnerability, the recurrent unexpected eruption of charismatic
saviors, which characterizes the epoch of the Judges. The biblical God,
one may be tempted to conclude, wants humans to remain unsettled,
challenged by criminals within and by fearful enemies without, who
keep alive the threat of becoming enslaved again, unless God sends
charismatic savior-leaders.
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Still, when all this has been said, it remains dificult to avoid the con-
clusion that monarchy at its best is depicted as the real peak of Israel’s
historical existence. For monarchy brings an unprecedented grandeur
of biblical virtue, both intellectual and moral, even as it also brings, in
the persons of the best as well as the worst kings, an enormity of biblical
vice approaching at times the monstrosity of the Pharaoh. The peak that
monarchy reaches in the Bible can be summed up in one name: David.
Certainly the Judges’ deepening corruption – taking bribes, extorting
choice cuts of meat meant for God, sexual liaisons with the women who
come to offer sacriices to God – makes the Judges become contempt-
ible. Equally, if not more importantly, they are manifestly unable to lead
the Israelites in battle against their Philistine neighbors, and a desperate,
misguided attempt to use the ark of the covenant for this purpose ends
in disastrous failure. Even the prophet Samuel’s sons become corrupt.
The elders of Israel therefore demand of the aged prophet Samuel, the
only uncorrupt priest and judge, that they be given a king, “like other
nations.” Samuel, who has received revelations from God since his youth,
is opposed to this demand. Samuel’s reaction bespeaks his fear that
acquiescing in the desire of the Israelites for a king will indeed make
Israel merely “like other nations.” But the elders persist, and Samuel
therefore brings their request to God with a heavy heart. God’s response
is ominous; he tells Samuel to grant the request, so that the people will
come to experience life under an earthly ruler, in all its selish aggran-
dizement, corruption, and oppression (1 Sam. 8).
Yet the kingship that God proceeds to arrange does not bear out this
grim warning. The man whom God directs Samuel to anoint as future
king is Saul, from the humblest tribe (that of Benjamin) and its hum-
blest house – but a man who is very handsome and tall. After his anoint-
ing, Saul briely becomes a prophet, and through a lottery he is selected
as king. When he hears of a horrible threat from one of Israel’s ene-
mies, the Ammonites, the spirit of God comes upon Saul; he becomes
enraged, and issues a dreadful threat to any men of Israel who should fail
to come out with him against the Ammonite. He wins a victory, which he
attributes to the Lord, and is then solemnly made king (1 Sam. 9ff.). In
selecting Saul, God certainly did not select a man lacking in royal capac-
ities or in pious humility. By any ordinary human standards, Saul might
well be judged a ine king. But Saul is nonetheless shown to be seriously
lawed as a king of God’s chosen people: And his speciic failures are
deeply instructive as to the difference between human and divine stan-
dards of excellence in human ruling.
For when the Philistines irst threaten, Saul does not follow the com-
mandments of God concerning burnt offerings, and Samuel tells Saul
that God will therefore eventually replace Saul with another king, “a man
after His own heart” (1 Sam. 13). The unsteadiness of Saul’s obedience
to divine commandment – his tendency to follow instead his own human
prudential calculation of what is worth doing – becomes still more evi-
dent when Saul fails to follow Samuel’s order from the Lord to destroy, as
a punishment of the enemy Amalek, everything in Amalek’s camp. Saul
instead allows the people of Israel to keep “all that is good” and destroy
only the “worthless” things (1 Sam. 15).
As the future replacement for Saul, God designates David, the lyre-
playing youngest son of Jesse, a shepherd boy who is short and unpre-
possessing to behold: “For the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks
on the outward appearances, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Sam.
16:6). The story of David’s victory over Goliath, and of the aftermath of
that victory, are among the most famous depictions of God’s relation to
his people, and are most revealing of the Hebrew Scriptures’ implicit
as well as explicit teaching about the kind of ruler and rulership that is
best among humans. David is sent by his father to the Israelite camp with
food for his oldest warrior brothers. When he arrives, he hears the chal-
lenge being made by the colossal, well-armed Philistine warrior Goliath,
who seeks a battle of individual champions: Let one of the men of Israel
come out to ight me, and the victor’s people will enslave the people of
the vanquished, without a battle of the whole armies. David asks what
reward is offered for the man who will oppose this Goliath, and learns
that it is great indeed. He then expresses open disdain in the Israelite
camp for Goliath. “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should
defy the armies of the living God?” (1 Sam. 17:26). His brothers take this
as a taunt directed at them, and angrily tell David to go back to his sheep,
accusing him of aiming at his own glory. But David is undeterred; he
continues to ask his deiant question, and is eventually brought before
King Saul.
Saul questions David: How can you, a mere youth inexperienced in
battle, ight Goliath, who has been a soldier from his youth? David’s
words to the king are both frank and an implicit challenge: “The Lord
delivered me from the paw of the lion and the bear, and He will deliver
me from the hand of this Philistine.” What is Saul to do? Can he openly
admit that he lacks faith in the Lord, the God who is the very reason for
the being of his people? “Go,” Saul says, “and the Lord be with you.” But
in another failure of faith, Saul attempts to dress David in his own armor.
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David takes it off, saying that he has no experience in it; David is not yet
a soldier and will rely solely on God and what God has given him.
David then goes out to meet Goliath, who taunts him: “Am I a dog,
that you come to me with sticks . . . Come to me, and I will feed your
lesh to the birds of the air and the beast of the ield.” David’s response is
telling: “You come to me with sword and shield and spear, but I come to
you in the name of the Lord God of the hosts, the God of the armies of
Israel, whom you have deied.” “This day,” David prophesies, “the Lord
will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down, and I will cut off
your head, and I will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines
this day to the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth.” Then David
proclaims the purpose in all this: “That all the world may know that there
is a God in Israel, and that all of this assembly may know that the Lord
saves not with sword and spear.” David places the outcome of the bat-
tle not in his own strength or capacity, or in any weapons of war, but
squarely in the hands of God. And David declares his motive to be not
his own glory but a manifestation to all the world of the glory of the God
of Israel, and a reminder to his own people and the Philistines (“this
assembly”) of their need to rely on God rather than on human means
of salvation.
David uses his shepherd’s slingshot to strike a blow with a stone to
Goliath’s forehead, and the giant falls. David then rushes to him, takes
Goliath’s sword, and decapitates him. The narrator ensures that we
realize that what has transpired is God’s wondrous work: “There was
no sword in the hand of David.” The shepherd boy has won, against all
odds, because of God – and the victory is God’s. Yet do the Israelites fully
understand? After the Israelites then put the Philistines to light, they
sing David’s praises, explicitly over and against those of Saul: “Saul has
slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” Saul has lost the con-
idence of the people to David and will soon lose the kingship to him –
despite his attempts to kill David.
After much bitter ighting, David marries Saul’s daughter, Michal,
takes the throne, and eventually conquers the city of Jerusalem, naming
it the City of David. As he is bringing the ark of the covenant into the
new capital city, David dances before the ark wearing only a loincloth,
so as to display both his passion to subordinate his musical ability to the
Lord and his own humble rank before God. This uncontrolled display
of humility arouses the disdain of David’s wife and queen. Michal inds
her husband’s behavior unbecoming a king. Michal is a lady, a woman
of proud taste and propriety, who wishes her David to live up to his rank.
The Bible shows what God thinks of this: Michal is not merely brought
low by God, but spends her life barren of children, while David loves and
takes other wives. David is not a “gentleman” of the sort one encounters
in classical political life, and he is not to have as his wife a high-class lady
pulling him in the direction of gentlemanly pride and self-suficiency (2
Sam. 6).
But a dark and sinful self-centeredness lurks even in the heart of David
the anointed of God. He proves to be fundamentally lawed, fundamen-
tally disposed to crime. David sees from his palace the beautiful wife of
Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba, bathing, and is overcome by desire for her.
He takes her to bed and she becomes pregnant with his child, and he
schemes to have Uriah killed by putting him in a chariot at the head of
his armies against the Ammonites, so that he, David, can have Bathsheba
as his wife. David succeeds in his scheme. Soon, however, David is vis-
ited by a prophet of the Lord, Nathan, who brings home to David his
sinfulness and his desert – which David is led to passionately pronounce
upon and against himself (2 Sam. 12:1–7). David has made himself pub-
licly righteous but has been privately selish, adulterous, and murderous.
David’s punishment is God’s removal of his and Bathsheba’s son, whom
he loses despite his fasting and wearing sackcloth and pleading with God
for mercy. Still, David and Bathsheba are granted a second son, Solomon.
On his maturity, when asked by God for any gift, Solomon requests wis-
dom rather than riches and glory, and so is blessed by God. Solomon
rather than David is authorized by God to build in Jerusalem a magnii-
cent temple for the ark of the covenant and for sacriices to God.
Nevertheless: Not despite but in a way because of David’s profound
acceptance of his guilty sinfulness, David stands as the Bible’s peak para-
digm of human rule. In all subsequent accounts of good kings, the high-
est compliment the Scripture pays is to say: “He was like David,” and the
Messiah, promised by the great prophets as the future, unprecedented,
divinely anointed king of all the world, is promised as a new David. In
David we seem to ind the fullest expression of biblical humanity. He is at
once the most profoundly and beautifully poetic, the most passionately
erotic, the most heroic, and – as an essential foundation for all the pre-
ceding – the most effective ruler in the biblical narrative (the effective-
ness and competence of David’s rule is made most evident in the books
of Chronicles). It seems necessarily implied or involved in these virtues
that David is also the most spectacular (though of course not the most
corrupt or degraded) sinner in the Bible. Through his sinning, prepared
and made possible precisely by his spectacular talents and achievements,
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above all as a king, confronting the awesome challenges and temptations

of full political responsibility, David comes to know what it means to love
God, with a clarity and heartfelt eloquence and educative power that is
unrivaled by any other human presented in the Bible. The proof and the
product of David’s unrivaled experience and articulation of love are the
Psalms – which, the Bible stresses, are not the direct products of special
revelation. (David is not a prophet, but a singer.)
It is true, of course, as we have indicated, that there is another monar-
chic peak, another king who rivals David for wisdom, and indeed for
eroticism and for poetry: King Solomon, who is granted his wish or
prayer of becoming wise. The proof of Solomon’s wisdom, as well as
his poetic power and capacity for love, is found in his Song of Songs,
his Proverbs, and, above all, his Ecclesiastes. Yet a careful study of these
amazing writings reveals, we think, that in the Bible’s eyes wisdom in
humans is a mixed blessing. Solomon is wiser than David; Solomon is
all too wise. Solomon’s wisdom reveals, by way of contrast, the superi-
ority of David’s more impassioned and less questioning insight. What is
the problem in Solomon’s wisdom? Solomon’s wisdom outruns his love.
His peak expression of love is his Song of Songs, a love song written by a
young man, in whom love is directed to the enchanting beauty of wom-
anhood. Such love of woman, Solomon writes in the culmination of the
Song, “is as mighty as death.” But in Ecclesiastes, written by an old or
mature man, love has become eclipsed, and even chilled, by the pros-
pect of death. Solomon seems never to have altogether realized what the
Bible teaches to be the highest and truest love, the love given perhaps
its most beautiful and moving expression in David’s sixty-third psalm.
This love of David’s – this love of God that trembles between desperate
personal need and self-sacriicial devotion, this love that David seems to
have fully achieved only at rare, peak moments – is rooted in a faithful
trust, not only in God’s justice but in the divine love for man implicit in
that justice. David’s psalms sing of three great themes: love, death, and
justice. Fully to understand justice or the law, and the demand of justice
or the law, is also to understand what transcends even justice, and what
alone fulills the promise, the hope, embodied in justice and in obedi-
ence to the law. It would seem that full consciousness of God’s mercy,
of the mercy that justiies the hope that alone truly surmounts death,
requires something like the ecstatic experience of love that is expressed
in the Psalms. Solomon did not reach that ecstasy, perhaps because of his
excessive wisdom, perhaps because (on account of that wisdom?) his love
remained tethered to the tangible beauty and joy of the human-all-too-
human. Solomon was indeed wise enough to glimpse his own limits; he
concludes his Proverbs (31:30) with the wise teaching of a wise woman,
the mother of King Lemuel: “The beauty of a woman is evanescent; it is
for her fear of the Lord God that a woman is to be praised.” Ecclesiastes
gives the impression of being the most “philosophic” book in the Bible.
But the Bible makes room for philosophy only on the Bible’s own terms.
Precisely because Solomon is shown in Ecclesiastes approaching some-
thing like the philosophic outlook, Solomon is there revealed as a man
verging on despair – at the power of death, in light of the weakness or
inscrutability of divine justice and providence. The wise and quasi-phil-
osophic Solomon is overshadowed, in the Bible, by the passionate and
poetic David. At the peak of biblical politics, we may conclude, is not the
philosopher-king but the poet-king.
From the Old to the New Testament

Under the increasingly decadent successors of David, the people of
God is eventually subjected to another enslavement, at the hands of the
Babylonians, who destroy Jerusalem and its temple. But the Hebrews
are promised, and inally given, a restoration to their homeland. They
rebuild the temple and are commanded to live in the promise of a far
greater restoration, under a new David, the Messiah, who will come –
after generations of troubles – to elevate Israel to unprecedented power
and glory infused with righteousness, presiding over the entire earth
illed with universal obedience to divine law (Isa. 2:1–5, 11, 35:5–10,
52–53, 60, 65:17ff., 66:12ff.; Jer. 23:5–8; Mic. 4–5; Zech. 9:9–17). The
Christian Scriptures present Jesus as the true, if paradoxical, fulillment
of these prophecies.
The son of Mary is revealed to be God’s own son (Matt. 3:17). This
does not signify, however, that the Christ has been sent to assume any
sort of political rule. The devil offers to Jesus “all the kingdoms of the
world and the glory of them.” But the devil makes clear that this politi-
cal power comes at a price: worship of the devil. In rejecting the bargain
and the temptation of political rule, Jesus quotes the authority of the law
of Moses: “You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you
serve” (Matt. 4:1–11; Deut. 6:13).
For what, then, has the Son of God come into the world? What is the
new revelation embodied in Christ? After Jesus has preached and taught
in the synagogues, has gathered his disciples, and has practiced wide-
spread healings of mental as well as physical illness, along with exorcisms
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of devils, he delivers his most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount
(Matt. 5). Its central passages, the “beatitudes,” proclaim eight human
types who are “blessed” – who are, that is, not cursed but instead can
expect something beyond any and all merely worldly happiness. The
beatitudes thus circumscribe Jesus’ vision of the right way of life.
In the irst place, the “poor in spirit” are blessed – those who do not
grasp at wealth or power but are content with what is given, who are
neither greedy, nor angry, nor envious, nor resentful. “Theirs is the king-
dom of heaven”: They are promised, that is, an eternal life.
In the second place, “those who mourn” are blessed. Jesus blesses
not those who laugh or exult (Jesus himself is never said to laugh), but
those who suffer, those who feel in their bones that life is a vale of tears
(Jesus is twice said to weep). Those who mourn shall, Jesus promises, be
comforted.
In the third place, Jesus blesses “those who hunger and thirst for righ-
teousness”: They, he promises, shall be satisied. Through Jesus, justice
will somehow inally and fully prevail. We note that Jesus takes the neces-
sities of the body, hunger and thirst, and, instead of promising to satisfy
these physical needs, turns them into a spiritual metaphor: True hunger
and thirst should be for righteousness, for being righteous oneself, seek-
ing it as one would food and drink, day in and day out.
“The merciful” are blessed: They shall, Jesus promises, be shown mercy.
Mercy is a virtue. For Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, mercy or pity is
a passion, requiring direction by a sense or appreciation of the noble, so
that actions following from it are done in the right way at the right time
to the right people; mercy or compassion is not in itself a virtue, and
when misdirected it becomes a vice. It may, for example, prevent the nec-
essary harshness entailed in the punishment of crime and the ighting
just wars. Christ elevates mercy, or compassion, to a major virtue.
“The pure of heart” are blessed; they shall “see God.” This signals that
what is important is not so much what one accomplishes as the spirit in
which one strives; one’s motives ought not to be mixed.
“The peacemakers” are blessed: They will, declares Jesus, “be called
sons of God.” There is a special afinity between Christ, the Son of God,
and those who strive to make peace. Jesus indicates no close afinity
between himself and warriors, however heroic or noble they may appear
to mankind.
“Those persecuted for righteousness” are blessed: “The kingdom of
heaven is theirs.” Jesus thus signals that justice will not soon prevail on
the earth. Closely connected is the inal beatitude, pronounced on those
“persecuted and reviled for my sake.” Here at the end Jesus brings him-
self to the center of things; he does so in signaling that it will not be easy
to follow him in this life that he is describing; it will bring persecution.
But it will not be worthless: There is reward (and punishment) in a life
to come.
How does this new teaching stand with respect to the Hebrew
Scriptures, and in particular to the laws, the commandments, revealed
to Moses, and the direction given by the subsequent prophets? Jesus
answers this directly: “Think not that I have come to abolish the Law
and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulill them”
(Matt. 5:17). All the commandments, it seems, are to be kept; noth-
ing is to be relaxed. Jesus then makes explicit that his commandments
demand even more than was demanded by the Mosaic law. In Matthew
5:21–48, he takes various Mosaic commandments and intensiies their
dificulty, repeatedly using the expression, “You have heard that it was
said . . . but I say. . . .” Not only murder but insults, contempt, and anger
are condemned as what came to be called “mortal sins,” that is, deadly to
blessedness. The Mosaic law condemned adultery; Jesus condemns even
adulterous desire, even lusting “in your heart.” Similarly, whereas the
Mosaic law made provision for divorce, Christ permits no divorce except
on grounds of adultery. Swearing by oaths is forbidden, since such expos-
tulation draws a distinction between big and small lies, both of which are
to be condemned. In every way, the fullest moral purity, as the logical
conclusion of the law, is commanded.
Most striking is the new disposition toward the wicked, which may be
said to sum up and clarify the rest of Christ’s moral teaching: The wicked
are not to be resisted in their deeds against oneself. “If a man strikes
your right cheek, give him the other also, and if any one would sue you
and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces
you to go one mile, go with him two miles.” Coming to the aid of others
who are suffering evil is certainly still demanded, but for evil against one-
self, Jesus counsels a surrender of one’s own pride and material good,
an offering of oneself to the evildoer in an attempt to change his heart.
Finally, Jesus says, “you have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your
neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and
pray for those who persecute you.” As we saw in the Polemarchus section
of the Republic, the distinction between friend and foe is central to the
life of the good citizen. Jesus condemns this distinction as something
like a collective, worldly self-interest. His command is to seek one’s ene-
mies’ good, to convert one’s enemies to righteousness, rather than being
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taken up by the desire to inlict harm upon them or to demonstrate one’s

superiority over them. The law of Jesus aims at the securing of a heavenly
rather than earthly reward: Eternal life, which had been dimly present as
a promise in the Hebrew Scriptures (see, e.g., Gen. 5:24; 2 Kings 2:10;
Pss. 16:10, 37:37–38, 49:16, 61:7, 68:21, 86:13, 88:11, 107:20, 116:8;
Ezek. 18:4ff.; Dan. 12:2), now becomes fully explicit. And the new com-
mand is an explicit attempt to have the people of God, by aiming at
this end, ascend above the practice of other nations: “If you salute only
your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the
Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly
Father is perfect.” But if the people of God is to surrender itself in this
way to its enemies, will it not disappear as a distinct political entity? Does
the new revelation not point, from the start, in the direction of an end to
the traditional distinction between Gentile and Jew, even as it presumes
that distinction?
This question is perhaps most clearly addressed when Jesus is asked by
an expert in the Mosaic law what he must do to inherit eternal life (Luke
10:25). The questioner means to tempt or to test Jesus – to show that
what Jesus is teaching is not orthodox but instead a corruption of Mosaic
law. Jesus therefore responds initially with a question of his own: “What
is written in the law? How do you read it?” The expert in the law gives a
standard summary of the law (from Deut. 6:5 or Lev. 6:19): “You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your
strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus
tells him that his answer is correct (orthos), and that if he does this, he
will live. But then the expert in the law, aware that Jesus has been attack-
ing the experts in the law and claiming that the true wisdom has been
revealed to him and thence to his uneducated disciples, presses him, in
order to “justify” his own claim of the need to know the law. “Who,” he
asks, “is my neighbor?” Jesus replies (as was his wont) with a parable – of
the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–37). In this parable, a priest and then
a Levite (from the tribe of Moses), in careful observance of the Mosaic
law concerning the need to avoid the ritual deilement that would result
from touching a dead body, steer clear of a victim of robbers lying by
the side of a road. But a Samaritan, that is, a member of a nearby peo-
ple claiming to be descendants of Joseph and following a more ancient
version of the Torah, acts out of compassion and proves himself a good
neighbor by saving the man and having him nursed back to health. The
Mosaic lawyer’s question is thus turned on its head; rather than distin-
guishing neighbor, or friend, from foe, Jesus renders the commandment
into a demand to prove oneself a “good neighbor” to any and all others,
through compassion or mercy.
Mercy lows from love, and Jesus makes love (Greek: agape, Latin: cari-
tas) central to his teaching. Divine love had of course been presented
in the Hebrew Scriptures as ever manifested by God for his people. So
in the famous psalm 136 – in which David sings of God’s creation, the
wonders he worked in liberating his people from Egypt, and in defeat-
ing Israel’s enemies – every other line refrains: “for his steadfast loving
mercy (hesed) endures forever.” (This psalm is sung, moreover, as part of
the Seder, the Passover Meal, which Mosaic law prescribed to commem-
orate the Israelites’ liberation by God from slavery in Egypt, a liberation
that entailed the destruction of vast numbers of Egyptians, including lit-
tle children.) Nor is this celebration of divine love unique to this psalm.
“Thy loving kindness,” sings David in psalm 63, “is better than life.” And
the prophet Isaiah proclaims: “For the mountains may depart, and the
hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you . . . says
the Lord, who has compassion on you” (Isa. 54:10). Jesus fastens, as it
were, on this steadfast, merciful, divine love, experienced most richly
by David, as something to be emulated by all of his own followers, even
singling it out as his “new commandment”: “A new commandment I give
to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also
love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if
you have love for one another” (John 13:34). Love is now something
commanded. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my
love” (John 15:9). Paul, after detailing the characteristics of love or of a
truly loving soul, concludes by stating what came to be called the three
chief Christian virtues and signals the priority of love over the other two:
“faith, hope, love abide; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13).
The tension between Jesus’ teachings and those of the Pharisees – who
had, since the Babylonian captivity, preserved and interpreted Mosaic
law and the teachings of the subsequent prophets – is exacerbated by
the large following that Jesus develops, owing in part to the miracles that
he appears to be performing. Things inally come to a head when Jesus
enters Jerusalem in a procession, to much acclaim. The chief priest, the
Scribes, and the rabbis move to have the Roman authorities enforce their
law against blasphemy. Following his own teaching concerning resistance
to evil against oneself, and as an exemplar of it (1 Pet. 2:21–23), Jesus is
eventually killed, “like a lamb led to the slaughter.”
After a trial under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, Jesus suffers a
gruesome death on a cross just outside Jerusalem. This death comes to
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be understood as the redeeming, through atoning sacriice of God’s son-

made-man, of all human beings from the sin and condign punishment
initiated by Adam (Mark 10:45). Jesus is subsequently called the “last
Adam” (1 Cor. 15:45) or the “new Adam.” His death is not understood to
be for the chosen people alone, but for all mankind: “Sin came into the
world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to
all men because all men sinned,” but “if many died, through one man’s
trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace
of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many” – “as one man’s tres-
pass led to condemnation for all men, so one man’s act of righteousness
leads to acquittal and life for all men” (Rom. 5:12–18).
Not only is Jesus’ death to be understood as having redeemed all of
humanity but, according to the Christian Scriptures, Jesus is resurrected
to life on the third day following his death, appearing bodily to his dis-
ciples and explaining to them how he is the fulillment of all that Moses
and the other prophets had written. His resurrection is taken to be the
evidence of the overcoming of death itself, evidence of the possibility of
eternal life for all mankind (Rom. 6:5; 2 Cor. 4:10; Col. 2:12, 3:10).
According to the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, during his
days on earth the resurrected Jesus also bids his disciples “receive the
Holy Spirit,” breathing on them (John 20:22) – as God had breathed on
Adam to give him life – and thereby granting them an awesome privi-
lege and responsibility with respect to humans’ seeking of divine forgive-
ness: “Whoever’s sins you forgive, they are forgiven them, and whoever’s
sins you hold bound, they are held bound” (John 20:22). Finally, Jesus
instructs his disciples, before his ascent into heaven, to “go forth there-
fore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19). These passages moved subse-
quent Christian theologians to declare that while God is one, he none-
theless has, mysteriously, three “persons”: the Father, the Son (Jesus),
and the Holy Spirit, the latter of whom bestows upon human beings cer-
tain sacred “gifts” that assist them in the path to heavenly salvation. The
mission of the Jewish people is now understood by Jesus’ followers to
have reached its fulillment and hence its conclusion in the revelations
of God-Man; all nations are now to be included in the reception of the
new revelation of the Trinitarian God.
Still, the disciples of Jesus for their part continue to adhere to the
Mosaic law and to assume that Jesus came as a Messiah to the Jews. But
how can this be, when Jesus has commanded them to go out and teach all
nations – and non-Jews are prepared to accept Jesus as the Son of God,
while many Jews are rejecting this claim? Must one be Jewish – accepting
the covenants with Abraham and Moses – in order to be accepting of
the Messiah and hence eligible for eternal life? At a subsequent council
of the disciples held in Jerusalem, the question of baptizing Gentiles is
debated and settled, and the requirements for Gentile converts to the
new faith are spelled out (Acts 15:1–35). The crucial and momentous
question of whether Gentiles need to be circumcised is answered in
the negative: Even the sign of the everlasting covenant with Abraham
is deemed no longer necessary. The members of the council communi-
cate their decision by letter to the church of Antioch (Acts 15:22–35).
Paul is then sent out on a mission to convert Gentiles in Greece and Asia
Minor (Acts 15:36–20:38) Much of the Mosaic law comes therefore to
be called by Christians the “old law,” or the “ceremonial law,” conceived
as prescriptions that obtained only so long as the ceremonial worship of
God in the temple lasted, but henceforth no longer in force.
The universalizing commandment to teach all nations is taken up
especially by Paul, who calls himself “apostle to the Gentiles” (Gal. 1:16,
2:8). Paul was originally a persecutor of Christians; we irst hear of him
at the stoning of Steven (the irst Christian martyr), which he looked
upon with approval. But after what he describes as a personal revelation
from Jesus, Paul becomes a zealous converter of others to Christianity
(Acts 9:1–9). He more than anyone convinces the followers of Jesus that
faith in Jesus replaces obedience to the Mosaic law. He is especially zeal-
ous in teaching the decision of the council of Jerusalem concerning the
admission of noncircumcised people into the new faith. “The people of
God,” Paul explains, is no longer to be understood as a chosen nation
or race, nor as followers of the divinely revealed Mosaic law. What char-
acterizes its members, instead, is faith in the redemptive deeds of Jesus
as the only Son of God, and following his teachings. Paul articulates this
most forcefully in his letter to the Galatians, using a distinction Jesus had
drawn between the spirit and the lesh to condemn Mosaic law itself as
belonging to the lesh. “By works of the law,” he says, “no one shall be
justiied.”
Abraham, not Moses, becomes now for Christians the greatest igure
in the Hebrew Scriptures, the exemplar of faith and therefore righteous-
ness, or as he is called in the Catholic mass, “our father in faith.” The
laws of Moses were, Paul explains, a mere “custodian” of the people of
God, until faith in Jesus Christ was revealed as the true way; now that
this has been revealed, the law has been superseded. Salvation, eternal
life through faith, is indiscriminate; it entails an amazing abolition of
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distinctions, not only between Jews and Gentiles but between slaves and
free, and between women and men.
In the absence of Mosaic law, then, how are Christians to live? What
are the economic, sexual, and political ramiications of the new Christian
teaching?
Turning irst to the economic realm, we ind that the Christian
Scriptures teach that one should be even less concerned with worldly wel-
fare and gain than the Hebrew Scriptures had indicated. In an account
given in all the Synoptic Gospels, a young man asks Jesus – this time not
seeking to trip him up but in earnest: “What shall I do to inherit the king-
dom of heaven?” Jesus replies with the standard answer: “Keep the com-
mandments,” and lists some of the most important of them. The young
man responds that he has observed all of them. “If you would be perfect,”
Jesus replies, “go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will
have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” The young man went
away sorrowful, “for he had great possessions.” Jesus then expounds on
what has happened and, to the astonishment of his disciples, declares:
“I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than
for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt. 19:16–22; cf. Mark
10:17–31; Luke 18:18–26).
The unwillingness to part with one’s many possessions is preceded, of
course, by a desire to possess things in the irst place, to acquire wealth,
to be devoted to its increase. Paul addresses this desire, and the mis-
taken distrust toward providential divine care that lies behind it, in his
First Letter to Timothy: “Those who desire to be rich fall into tempta-
tion, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge
men into ruin and destruction.” For “the love of money is the root of all
evils; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the
faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs.” As for “the rich in this
world, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on uncer-
tain riches, but on God who richly furnishes us with everything to enjoy”
(1 Tim. 6:6–19).
On this crucial issue, of the bountifulness of the (created) world,
Paul clearly follows the teaching of Jesus himself. Jesus draws a con-
trast between, on one hand, the desire for wealth – which he associates
with the soul’s desire to live a life of ease and pleasure, obscuring one’s
inevitable mortality and its unknowable hour – and, on the other hand,
reliance on God’s bountiful providence. Jesus implores his listeners to
dispel their anxiety about the need for wealth by considering God’s prov-
ident care for nonhuman life: “I tell you, do not be anxious about your
life, what you shall eat, nor about your body, what you shall put on.” For
“life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.” Consider
“the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor
barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more worth are you than
the birds!” Consider “the lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin;
yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of
these. But if God so clothes the grass which is alive in the ield today and
tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you,
O men of little faith!” (Luke 12:13–30).
Private property, it almost goes without saying, is not presented as an
inherent “right” in the Christian Scriptures, and certainly not as a means
to a needed increase in the stock of goods available to humans. Instead,
the virtues of generosity, liberality, and piteous aid to the poor are com-
manded. The irst Christians, awaiting the Second Coming as something
imminent, “were together, and had all things in common. And they sold
their possessions and goods, and distributed them all, as any had need”;
“the company of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no
one said that any of the things which he possessed was his own, but they
had everything in common” (Acts 2:44–45, 3:20, 4:32).
The Christian teaching on sexuality and the family is, similarly, a
combination of what is ordained in the Hebrew Scriptures and the new
commandments of Jesus. As we saw above, the Sermon on the Mount pro-
claims an even more severe stricture to maintain the monogamous fam-
ily. And while there is in Genesis a clear subordination of women to men
as a consequence of the Fall, and an afirmation of this subordination
later (see, e.g., Esther 1:20–22), the subordination becomes emphatic
in the Christian Scriptures, especially in the Epistles, which reach back
to Genesis for justiication of this subordination. In his First Letter, the
apostle Peter – who became the irst bishop of Rome and hence the man
to whom all popes look as their irst predecessor – after describing how
Jesus submitted to his suffering and death, calls for wives to submit in
a similar way to their husbands, to live reverently and chastely, to dress
modestly. Peter calls for husbands to show consideration to their wives as
“the weaker sex” (1 Pet. 3:1–8; see similarly Paul, in Col. 3:18–4:1; 1 Cor.
11:3–12; 1 Tim. 2:8–15).
As regards the political teaching of Christianity, things are still less
clear than they had been in the Hebrew Scriptures. Immediately after
the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus is approached by a Roman
centurion, an oficer of the imperial Roman army, who begs him to heal
his servant. The servant is at home, paralyzed, and the centurion says
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that Jesus need not go there: “Speak but the word, and my servant will be
healed.” This is the only place in the Gospels, so far as we have observed,
where Jesus is said to “marvel” at anything: He marvels at the centurion’s
faith, which goes beyond anything, he says, he has seen in Israel. He
cures the servant instantly (Luke 7:10; cf. Matt. 8:5–13). Strikingly, Jesus
does not tell the centurion to abandon his military ofice, nor upbraid
him for holding it; he instead suggests to his disciples that men such as
this, “from east and west,” will sit at table in the kingdom of God with
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Likewise in Acts, Peter baptizes a Roman
centurion (Cornelius), after having a vision in which he is told that
animals unclean by Mosaic law may be eaten, since nothing that God
has cleansed is unclean (Acts 10:10–48). The only question in this case
appears, that is, to have been not whether a Roman soldier may be a good
follower of Jesus, but whether the conversion of a Gentile was appropri-
ate. It appears that the activity of “peacemaking” that Jesus had described
in the Sermon on the Mount has to do with the disposition of one’s soul
rather than with one’s ofice or occupation, even if it be in the service of
the military activities of one’s city or nation.
As to the question of devotion to one’s city or nation and its regime,
whatever it might be, there is little guidance offered. In one of the
most oft-quoted passages of the Christian Scriptures, Jesus is asked by
Pharisees, in yet another effort to trip him up, whether it is lawful to
pay taxes to Rome. Obtaining a coin, Jesus then asks, “Whose image and
inscription is this?” “Caesar’s” is their reply. “Then render unto Caesar,”
says Jesus, “what is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s” (Matt.
22:15–22; Mark 12:13–17; Luke 20:19–26). The reply entails a clear low-
ering of political life, dividing – as was never the case in the ancient city –
the political from the higher divine.
Still, precisely because the ancient city was devoted to virtues of soul,
including – as we have seen in Plato’s Apology – the virtue of piety, Jesus’
response invites more questions than it answers. What is Caesar’s? What
is God’s? Should one obey the laws and commands of the non-Chris-
tian authorities? Should one honor the heroes of one’s city or coun-
try, the exemplars of its virtues? Should one ight in its wars? What if
they are unjust? Should one hold political ofice? As the clear teaching
of the Sermon on the Mount is one of passive obedience and submis-
sion to evildoers, so the clear counsel of the disciples is that Christians
should indeed obey their country’s rulers and laws, wherever they hap-
pened to live. Concerning the Roman Empire in particular, Peter writes:
“Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it
be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish

those who do wrong and to praise those who do right” (1 Pet. 2:13–17).
Paul, similarly, counsels obedience to rulers: “Let every soul be subject to
the ruling authorities.” For “there is no authority except from God, and
those that exist have been instituted by God.” Therefore “he who resists
the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will
incur judgment” (Rom. 13: 1–3). The civil authorities, Paul points out,
punish wrongdoers, and he advises his listeners to live in love, to avoid
wrongdoing, to avoid retribution, and to honor those to whom honor
is due. The full and problematic import of Paul’s counsel of obedience
becomes clear when we realize that it was written under Nero, one of
the most tyrannical of the Roman emperors and one who was persecut-
ing Christians. The central guiding thought of a Christian, it is clear, is
that humans are mere pilgrims on this earth, living in a vale of tears and
awaiting both a Second Coming of Jesus and an eternal life after death.
But since the Second Coming did not arrive immediately, as the ear-
liest Christian had thought it would (consider Rom. 13:11–12), the
question became acute: How is one to live in the meantime, especially
when the world becomes Christian – when the old law has been aban-
doned and the new law is radically otherworldly in its direction? Should
Christians be good citizens of Rome, or of any other city? Should they
be good soldiers for Rome and its empire? What of the injunction to
turn the other cheek? How is a redeemed Christian to live in an unre-
deemed world? It is to these questions that the Christian political theo-
logians addressed themselves. We turn next to the most inluential of
these: St. Thomas Aquinas.

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4

In turning from Athens to Jerusalem, we venture into a new realm. In a

inspired prophets, of authoritative guidance that humbles and shows

acts – an account that presents a rank ordering of the parts of creation;

The Second Account of Creation and the Fall

The commandment given to Adam is that he not eat of the tree of

Cain, Abel, and the Founding of Cities

Abraham and the Binding of Isaac

God’s very name bespeaks mystery or an unfathomable will. As God says

Jacob/Israel, Joseph, Egypt

Moses and the Divine Law

The Chosen People

image? The elements of an answer appear in the parables of Genesis that

The Pre-Mosaic Biblical Forms of Human Authority

Liberation from Human Despotism to Divine Law

rule. Yet as we have foreshadowed, the biblical rule of law is something

God’s law. If we try to discern clues to the intended structure of human

From Joshua to David

above all as a king, confronting the awesome challenges and temptations

From the Old to the New Testament

taken up by the desire to inlict harm upon them or to demonstrate one’s

be understood as the redeeming, through atoning sacriice of God’s son-

be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish

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