The Jewish Origins of the Western Disobedience Tradition

By Yoram Hazony

Civil disobedience did not, as we are taught, begin with Socrates and Antigone, but with a Hebrew Bible that rejected the supremacy of human law.

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For more than a thousand years before Abraham, the Nile and Euphrates rivers had given rise to the most advanced cultures mankind had known. The great might of these rivers had been harnessed for massive irrigation projects and a flourishing waterborne trade, allowing the rise of the Sumerian states and their successors in Mesopotamia, and of Egypt of the Pharaohs. Both empires, like those of China, India and Persia, engaged in public works on an unprecedented scale to increase the land available for farming, employing their entire populations as slaves for periods of weeks or months when important projects were under way. This enforced management of millions of people was considered to be a form of taxation, and necessitated the establishment of a huge bureaucracy capable of keeping records of the entire population and its contributions to the public weal. Needless to say, it also enabled the spectacular enrichment of the king and his family, as well as necessitating the creation of a colossal military apparatus capable of enforcing the impressment and defending the public works against nomadic peoples who coveted the wealth and power being built in the river valleys.

The political consequences of such wholesale efforts on the part of entire civilizations were of the first degree. In order to bring an entire empire into the service of building mammoth physical structures such as the pyramids in Egypt, the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the Great Wall of China, every source of fear and authority which could be devised had to be brought to bear in securing beast-like submission—even where, as with these undertakings, this submission would mean the inevitable ruin of a certain portion of the people. To coerce the bodies of every person capable of physical labor, the king would employ a vast police apparatus, relying for information on the bureaucracy which read the mails and tracked legions of internal informers. While the tentacles of the state coerced the body, man’s mind too was brought under heel by a religious system which ordained that the will of the gods was identical to the will of the ruler: The king was a descendant of the gods, their principal servant and chief priest, wherever he was not himself a deity. Direct evidence of the divine powers of the state was provided by the official priesthood, which generally maintained a monopoly on science, astronomy, engineering and mathematics. Besides the intimidation inherent in this control of knowledge, these skills were applied to the erection of gargantuan towers and astronomical observatories, connecting the state to the heavens in a way that was obvious to any with eyes to see. Under such a system, religion was nothing more or less than the cosmic ideology of the state, the intellectual and spiritual mortar which fused the masses into a single tool in the hand of the ruler. Law as issued by him was therefore a reflection of the unchallengeable law of the universe, to be obeyed on pain of an earthly hell that was but a down payment of what was coming after death.⁹

It follows that there was not much discussion of a right of disobedience in the ancient world. Neither in Egypt nor in Mesopotamia, nor anywhere else, did ancient mankind struggle with questions of what limits there might be to what government may require of men. And the notion that there might be a right of the individual to dissent against unjust law was without foundation in the thought of any people. This does not mean there were no lawbreakers, of course. In every civilization there have always been rogues and thieves willing to break the law for their own gain. Likewise, every tyranny of the ancient world sired its fair share of putsches and assassinations, usually the brainchild of a would-be usurper whose concern was to bring the machinery of absolute rule under his own control. And while a successful usurpation might be rationalized as demonstrating that the new ruler had the support of heaven—and could therefore claim absolute obedience as had his predecessors—under no philosophical, moral, ideological or religious system were such actions considered legitimate in principle.

A cursory glance reveals that while the details varied, the great empires followed this formula for total rule with remarkable consistency. The rule of the Egyptian Pharaohs was constructed around the belief that they were the incarnation of the god Horus, as well as the offspring of Ra, the sun god, and they regularly mated with their own sisters and daughters to avoid diluting the divine blood in their veins. Pharaoh was understood to command nature, including the seasons which regulated the agricultural cycle and the workings of the heavens.¹⁰ He was omniscient, and all he willed was believed to come to pass.¹¹ He was high priest, chief justice and commander of the armies and government; justice itself was defined as “what Pharaoh loves,” while wrongdoing was “what Pharaoh hates.”¹² For over three thousand years, the king of Egypt was depicted on wall inscriptions as the “smasher of foreheads,” a helpless captive being dragged along in his left hand, a mace in his right with which to crush the man’s skull¹³—a ruler whose word was absolute law, and who punished transgressions by cutting the nose and ears off his subjects, impaling them through the rectum, or opening wounds on their bodies. After death, the souls of Pharaoh’s subjects were believed to stand trial, accused of forty-two “sins” almost all of which were infractions of state laws, and to be torn to pieces by a crocodile-lion monster if found guilty.¹⁴ The relationship of the subject to his king can be glimpsed in the words of a high Egyptian official around the time of Abraham, who wrote of the king Amenemhat III: “He is Ra whose beams enable us to see. He brings into being him who is to be. He is the god Khnum who fashions all flesh. He is the goddess Bast who defends Egypt. Whoever worships him is under his protection. But he is [the lion terror-goddess] Sekhmet to those who violate his commandֹ. Fight for his name, be pure for his life; and you will be free from trace of sin. He whom the king has loved will be an Honored One [in the afterlife], but there is no tomb for the rebel. His body is thrown into the river.”¹⁵

Despite the innumerable differences between Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilization, the bottom line of life along the Euphrates was much the same. The Sumerian city-states were originally organized as personal “households” of the local gods and their retinues, with much of the population living out their lives as servants in the deity’s temple, or in the palace of its chief “servant,” who was at once the earthly ruler of the city, chief justice, high priest and commander of the military. In a text from the period when southernmost Iraq, where Abraham originated, was at the height of its power, the people are told: “The command of the palace, like the command of the sky god Anu, cannot be altered. The king’s word is right. His utterance, like that of a god, cannot be changed.”¹⁶ Later, the Sumerian kings came to identify themselves with Enlil, the storm god, whose essence was compulsion and terror. Sargon and the Akkadian kings likewise called themselves “king of the four regions of the world” or “king of the universe,” and some were considered gods themselves.¹⁷

The Babylonian kings who seized the Euphrates basin in the time of the Hebrew patriarchs also asserted their kinship to Enlil, Hammurabi claiming to have been “called” by the terror god, and to have been “of the royal seed which Sin [son of Enlil] has created ... the powerful king, the sun god of Babylon who makes the light rise on the land of Sumer and Akkad, the king who brings the four quarters of the world to obedience...”¹⁸ Their Assyrian rivals likewise called themselves “king of the universe,” serving as high priests of the god Ashur, whose supremacy in heaven was demonstrated by imperial conquest on earth, fuelled by annual campaigns of aggression almost without respite for three hundred years.¹⁹ Foreigners standing in the way of Ashur’s universal dominion were understood to be “wicked devils,” while Assyrian citizens, including high officials, were considered the servants or “slaves” of the king.²⁰ As everywhere else, the principal virtue in Assyria was submission, which the state ensured through terror. As Erishum I, who ruled Assyria perhaps a century before Abraham, warned those who contemplated disobedience: “He who tells lies in the Step Gate [i.e., the Assyrian government building], the demon of ruins will seize his mouth and his hindquarters; he will smash his head like a shattered pot; he will fall like a broken reed and water will flow from his mouth. He who tells lies in the Step Gate, his house will become a house of ruin.... He who obeys me when he goes to the Step Gate, may the palace deputy assist him.”²¹

After the Persian conquest of Babylonia and Egypt, Darius similarly claimed divinity for Persian laws.²² And in India, the divinity of the king was an unquestioned tenet of Hinduism.²³ The Hindu king had sole authority to make law or repeal it as he saw fit,²⁴ and his religion taught the absolute necessity of the terror with which he ruled over his subjects: “The whole world is kept in order by punishment.... If the king did not, without tiring, inflict punishment on those worthy to be punished, the stronger would roast the weaker like fish on a spit: The crow would eat the sacrificial cake and the dog would lick the sacrificial viands, and ownership would not remain with anyone, and the lower ones would usurp the place of the higher ones.... Punishment alone governs all created beings, punishment alone protects them, punishment watches over them while they sleep.... Punishment is ... the king.”²⁵ In China the emperor was the “Son of Heaven,” signing his correspondence: “The most powerful of all monarchs on this earth, who sits on the Dragon Seat to expound the word of God.”²⁶ Believed to be ruler of the entire earth, he maintained a monopoly on executive, legislative and judicial authority, in addition to performing all major religious rites on behalf of the people.²⁷ Living roughly a millennium after Abraham, Confucius enshrined the principle of obedience to the ruler as a cardinal virtue in Chinese philosophy and religion; while he granted that government officials were supposed to judge the actions of the king, even resigning in protest, all others were to be “made to follow” the law for lack of understanding.²⁸

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