Hebrew law

“ As the Hebrew law recognized no natural distinctions among the people, neither did it create any artificial distinctions. There was no hereditary class which had special rights; there was no nobility exempted from burdens laid on the poor, and from punishments inflicted on the peasantry. Whatever political power was permitted [496] to the Hebrews belonged to the people as a whole. No man was raised above another; and if in the making of the laws the people had no voice, yet in the administration of them they had full power, for they elected their own rulers. ”

“ There is a very common reflection upon the Hebrew Lawgiver, which, though it does not call in question any particular law, is yet designed to vitiate and weaken the impression of the whole — that he was a stern and relentless ruler, who may indeed have understood the principles of justice, but whose justice was seldom tempered with mercy. ”

“ A general disqualification, under Hebrew law, to act as judges in any case; (2) a special disqualification to sit in judgment upon the life of Jesus.
Among all the great systems of jurisprudence of the world the ancient Hebrew system was the most exacting in the matter of judicial fitness. In the palmiest days of the Hebrew Commonwealth the members of the Great Sanhedrin represented the most perfect mental, moral, and physical development of the Hebrew people. A man could not be a member of this court who had any serious mental, moral, or physical defect. ”

“ Ancient Hebrew law is meant, and as that law was interpreted from the standpoint of ancient Judaism. The policy and precepts of the New Dispensation inaugurated by Jesus can hardly be considered, in a legal sense, to have been binding upon Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, since the very claims of Jesus to Messiahship and identity with God were to be tested by the provisions of the Mosaic Code and in the light of Hebrew prophecy. ”

“ I have already stated to your Excellency that only the fourth part of the Hebrew population in each town or village is engaged in commercial pursuits, and supposing even for a moment, that all the merchants in any one town might be liable to transgress the law of excise and customs (which case, I think, almost impossible, as the Hebrew law distinctly forbids such transgressions) , surely so wise and benevolent a Government will not cause the removal of the entire Hebrew population from the Austrian and Prussian frontiers, because a few among them may have acted in opposition to the law? ”

“ In the Hebrew state not only did all classes enjoy the same liberty, and have the same rights — not only were all equal before the law, having the same claim to justice and protection — but the Hebrew polity aimed to secure among the people a general equality of property and of condition. ”

“ Now on such a view of the general similarities many have expressed the opinion that the Hebrew laws are a more or less revised adaptation of the Babylonian law, perhaps as locally already modified in Canaan to suit the prejudices of the invaders while they were changing their habits of life and became a settled people. ”

“ The Hebrew law appears to have legislated for a small people, among whom human life was precious and property scanty. The Babylonian law protects property with far severer penalty, and makes little account of a criminal’s life. This is appropriate to a nation of commercial instincts and a wealthy populous state. It recognizes grades of wealth and position. The theft of an ox is punished by a five-fold restoration in the Hebrew law, in the Babylonian by thirty times its value, or in the plebeian’s case by a ten-fold penalty. ”

“ It has long been held that the laws of the Israelites, as revealed by God to Moses, by him embodied in the books of the Pentateuch and since preserved by the zealous care of the Jewish people, are incomparable. Accordingly they have been adopted professedly by most Christian nations and were early accepted by our own king Alfred1 as the basis of the law system of this our land.
We live in an age of devotion to comparative methods, when it is an article of faith to hold that the most fruitful means to attain a clear understanding of the exact nature of anything is to compare it with its like. ”

“ Can any one suppose that in Israel the husband could demand and secure what compensation he chose? Surely the Hebrew law is a concise way of saying the same thing as Hammurabi’s Code does. The scale of payment could hardly be expected to be the same in both lands owing to the difference in money values. A discretionary power in the judges, or a liberty of composition between the parties, is implied in the Code which everywhere states maximum penalties. This is made clear by contemporary practice. Both legislations further take into account the possible death of the woman herself. ”

“ To call it the rights of the Hebrew slave is surely to miss the whole point. It is still more misleading to call it the law of male slaves. It is the law of the hostage for debt. It concerns only the person assigned as mancipium. No other comes into view. And such is not a slave at all. There is, therefore, here no information about the treatment of slaves in Israel. All the fine talk about the humane character of the Mosaic law may apply elsewhere, not here. The law simply insists on the release of a debtor held to work off a debt at the end of a fixed term. ”

“ I dare not say that we owe no benefits to the Jewish nation, I do not feel sure whether we do or do not, but I can see no good thing that I can point to as a notoriously Hebrew contribution to our moral and intellectual well-being as I can point to our law and say that it is Roman, or to our fine arts and say that they are based on what the Greeks and Italians taught us. ”

“ Here, if anywhere, we can find a clear idea of common Semitic custom, so often appealed to to account for the similarities between Jewish law and the Hammurabi Code. But other scholars look on these narratives of the patriarchal life with deep suspicion as being a late attempt to sketch, in the light of a writer’s knowledge of what the nomads of his day were like, an instructive and edifying ancestral background for a set of very dissimilar tribes or clans, whom some political necessity led to amalgamate into the Hebrew people. ”

“ But to these precepts and usages the Hebrew legislator has imparted in general a higher import and a religious consecration. We must not suppose, however, that he has taken all his laws from this source, or make this a matter of reproach to the Jewish law-giver, as many critics of our own times have done; for, to minds enslaved by the narrow spirit of the age, difficult, indeed, is it to transport themselves into that remote antiquity. ”

“ The Hebrew, on the other hand, begins from the belief of an objective external God, but One who cares for more than his individual soul; as One who is the ever-present guide, and teacher, and ruler of his whole nation; who regards that nation as a whole, a one person, and that not merely one present generation, but all, past or future, as a one “Israel”—lawgivers, prophets, priests, warriors. All classes are His ministers. He is essentially a political deity, who cares infinitely for the polity of a nation, and therefore bestows one upon them—“a law of Jehovah.” ”

“ It is found that all men everywhere do hit upon much the same solution of the same social problem. We may say that the likenesses we perceive between the Code of Hammurabi and the Hebrew laws are due to the natural dictates of human experience. If we take up the laws, one by one, which are common to the two systems, we can account for almost all the likenesses in this way. Some very remarkable similarities have been shown by Professor D. H. Müller to exist between the Code of Hammurabi and the Twelve Tables of the Roman Law. ”

“ Of course, if his master gave him a wife, the master retained power over her and the children. We cannot, however, suppose that if the enslaved Hebrew married a free woman while in servitude that the master claimed to treat her as a slave. Probably, however, the master had power to forbid such a marriage. Thus there really was no case likely to arise in Israel to compare with that legislated for in Babylonia, which law regulated all cases except this in Canaan also. The only new regulation which had come into use is the restriction on the man’s term of service. ”

“ He would accept no compensation for a blow as might a commercial plebeian. The exact retaliation ’eye for eye, tooth for tooth, limb for limb’ was his sole satisfaction. The mushkênu or commoner had to be content with a money payment. So far for the contemporary public opinion. We say that the proud patrician was conservative of a more primitive type of law, which we find to be that of a nomad Semitic folk, the Bedawin Arabs, still. So far as the Hebrew clung to the same law we discern aristocratic views with a lower type of civilization. ”

“ The Hebrew is never a beggar; he has always kept the law--life by toil--often under severe and oppressive civil restrictions. It is also true that no race, sect, or class has more fully cared for its own than the Hebrew race. But the sudden transfer of such a multitude under conditions that tend to strip them of their small accumulations and to depress their energies and courage is neither good for them nor for us. ”

“ We must then admit that if Babylonian law had sway in Canaan at all, it must have been that of the Code to all intents and purposes. We thus have a linked chain of hypotheses. If Canaanite civilization was once an offshoot of Babylonian, and gradually asserted its influence over Hebrew legislation, then we ought to find more and more likeness to the Code of Hammurabi in Israelite law as time goes on. For that purpose we may concede as much as the critics wish to claim for their arrangement of successive codes in the Books of Moses before the Code was discovered. ”

“ All these terrible judgments fell upon the Jewish nation, yet they were not utterly destroyed, a remnant was all the time preserved, and to-day, in every nation under heaven is found a remnant of the seed of Israel, retaining the Hebrew language, many of their ancient manners and customs, their old law written on parchment, which is read in their synagogues every Sabbath day. In nearly all the countries in which they have been scattered they have been subject to the most extreme abuse. ”

“ No man and no group in this country is above the law. Indeed, for 1000 years and more my people have lived with the Hebrew phrase, "Di nai delma cultna de nai." [Phonetic.]
"The law of the land is the law."
Unless that law is upheld and enforced, we all of us are victims and we Jews know this very well.
I have here, Senator Dole and gentlemen, resolutions from the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the New York Federation of Reformed Synogogues, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis, all pointing out the very real dangers implicit in the cults that plague our land. ”

“ There is a certain delight which some feel in propounding views calculated to shock some one. The cruder view that the Hebrew lawgiver, call him Moses or some higher critical periphrasis for the same thing, sat down with a cuneiform copy of the Code before him and copied out the Babylonian laws with some adaptations, may have been enunciated with some such amiable wish, but was too crude to disturb any one. ”

“ Such in Rome became a real slave, and might easily have so become in Israel and Babylonia but for Moses and Hammurabi. There is no evidence that a Hebrew was ever a slave in any other sense. We shall return to the point again. This is not really a slave but a hostage for debt. Hammurabi had a special name for him, as had the Roman law. The Hebrew term covers such, using a word that may mean a servant, a hostage for debt, or a proper slave. ”

“ In no nation, either ancient or modern, has slavery existed under so mild a form, and guarding the rights and persons of the slaves with such jealous care, as among the ancient Hebrews. These topics, and some to which we have not had space to allude, were discussed in the opening lecture. In his second, the learned Professor drew a portrait of the illustrious Hebrew sage and law-giver, developed the general policy of his laws, and traced the obligations of other nations, in their legislation and philosophy, to his institutes. ”

“ But one would expect progress in five hundred or a thousand years of settled life in Canaan. That so primitive a folk as Israel is usually supposed to have been on entrance into Canaan, or even in the early days of the monarchy, should have a law so advanced would be remarkable enough. But we note that apparently the Book of the Covenant wishes to include breach of trust as well as unlawful detention of property. ”

“ The oath of a Gentile or a Samaritan cannot be taken in evidence against a Jew. If a dispute occurs between two Israelites, they must go before their own judge.1 It is sinful to have recourse to foreign tribunals, and all the decisions of the latter, when adverse to Jews, must be quashed. Although the heathen court pass sentence according to Hebrew Law, the plaintiff or denouncer becomes impious, sacri‐
1 The system of the Beth‐din (house of judgment) is kept up even in the British Islands. ”

“ Divine revelation of principles and prohibitions in the Hebrew Scriptures form the basis of Jewish law, or halakhah, which is a key component of the faith. While there are extensive traditions of Jewish halakhic and theological discourse, there is no final dogmatic authority in the tradition. Local communities have their own religious leadership. ”