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.

PDF Format

previous (page 3 of 11 - view all) next

In pre-democratic Greece, the king was considered to be of divine origin and was also the chief priest.²⁹ His godly powers were described by Ulysses as bringing forth wheat from the earth and fruit from the trees, as well as inducing the sheep in the fields and the fish in the sea to multiply without bound.³⁰ It is true that some of the Greek city-states for a period managed to rid themselves of the institution of the king, but these “democracies” were nevertheless absolutist states in the full sense. They contemplated virtually no limits on the power of government over non-citizens, who were always the great majority of the population, and these were brutally tortured if suspected of disobeying the laws of the state;³¹ and citizens, too, could suffer unchecked cruelty if, as in Socrates’ case, their fellow citizens felt they had misbehaved. Moreover, whatever wisps of a disobedience teaching one may have been able to detect among particular Athenian thinkers were doomed to leave no trace of an influence on Greek civilization: No religious or political tradition of a right of disobedience ever emerged, and any hope of such a tradition was destroyed root and branch with the relapse of Greece into totalitarianism under Alexander of Macedon. Alexander, like the other world-emperors of antiquity, claimed to have been descended from the gods. He referred to his father, King Philip, as “my so-called father,” and when a friend chided him for his disrespect, Alexander remedied the situation by thrusting a spear through his stomach.³² After the dissolution of Alexander’s empire, both of the rival dynasties, the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, claimed absolute authority in both secular and religious matters.³³

Roman tendencies toward worship of the emperor go back to the earliest kings of Alba and Rome, who declared themselves to be descended from Jupiter.³⁴ And despite the existence of a republic with an extended patrician citizenship (as in the Greek city-states, an absolutist oligarchy leaving the vast majority without rights against the state), by the time of Julius Caesar the idea of the ruler’s divinity had returned to the fore. It was officially adopted under Augustus, and those refusing to participate in the imperial cult were put to death.³⁵ The power of the emperors rapidly became perfect, and perfectly arbitrary. According to the Roman historian Dio Cassius, the emperors were able “to collect taxes, to declare war or peace, to rule citizens and foreigners alike, always and everywhere, even to the extent of condemning senators and equites to death.... By virtue of holding the office of Censor they were able, apart from conducting the census, to investigate our private lives and morals, to enroll or expel senators and knights. By virtue of being chosen as High Priest ... the Emperor came to concentrate in his own hands all power, both sacred and profane.”³⁶ Indeed, senators were killed by the emperor for smiling at the wrong time, or for an ill-advised silence. The emperors were called by the titles God Manifest, God and Master, Savior, Benefactor, Creator.³⁷ Virgil and Horace, the great Roman poets, were no better, lauding the emperor Augustus in similar terms.³⁸ In the face of the demonic rages of Emperor Nero, the moral spine of Stoic philosophy collapsed like a house of cards, the leading Stoic philosopher, Seneca, becoming no more than an apologist for the psychotic despot’s power lust.³⁹ And Justinian’s Institutes codified the principle that “the whim of the prince has the force of law.”⁴⁰

These words were set down two thousand years after Abraham’s escape from Ur, yet even then the ideas that were promulgated and preached, sung and dreamed from one end of humanity to the other, remained at root unchanged. Everywhere, philosophy and religion joined hands with the threat of physical annihilation to ensure that wherever a different thought, a different truth and a different way might come forth, it would be stillborn. And it was this stillborn world from which Abraham became a fugitive. An old man when finally his searches were answered and his way clear to him, he turned his back on this cosmos of slave labor and terror gods, claiming as his own a rough piece of high-ground where he could shake off the yoke of what man had achieved. It was here, in Canaan, that Abraham and his children’s children, shepherds all, learned to gaze deep into their desert world and the night sky beyond it, free from the corrupt will of corrupted men, seeking right. The Bible is the story of this decision, and its consequences for mankind.

III

In all of antiquity, the Hebrew Bible is the single document that consistently advances the essential ideas which comprise the contemporary belief in “civil disobedience,” unequivocally articulating principles which, when they were first advanced, were alien to the entire world: That there is an absolute of right and wrong that transcends the decrees of the state; that the state has no right to rule if it rules unjustly; that conscience and not the state must be the ultimate arbiter of the actions of every man; that individual disobedience is justified and obligatory in the face of state injustice; and that resistance and even the overthrow of the state are justified and obligatory in cases of unbearable tyranny. Indeed, the biblical narrative consists in large part of explicit indictments of both Jewish and non-Jewish governments for the injustice of their laws and the unjust behavior of their rulers—accounts in which those who are capable of acting independently and offering resistance are in every case depicted as the heroes.

Remarkably, this message of Jewish resistance to state idolatry and injustice has been consistently misread and ignored by those—both opponents of religion and its “friends”—who have sought to characterize the Bible as a book of submission. Such interpretations invariably point to Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command.⁴¹ But this reading distorts the plain import of the text, which is that Abraham was willing to sacrifice that which was most precious to him in the world, the son for whom he had waited all his life, in the service of a higher cause. The call for submission to God does not in any way connote a call to submit to human authority; indeed, it is the exact opposite. For God’s will in the Bible can be considered similar to what is referred to in secular terms as higher law or universal justice. To equate obedience to the dictates of justice with obedience to injustice is to miss the point of the entire Bible, which is that the individual must obey only the dictates of moral truth, even when these violate the dictates of the state.

The background for the disobedience teaching of the Jewish Bible is its message of individual moral responsibility, which is the cornerstone of the Jewish faith. Unlike the heroes of other ancient narratives, the figures of the books of Moses are neither royalty nor nobility; nor, after the fashion of modern literature, are they democratic figures at the bottom of the social structure. Instead, Abraham and his descendants are shepherds, who view civilization from outside, looking down from the hills at the doings of society and state as they chart their own independent course through the wilderness. The splendor and lies of urban life are of little worth to them; even less so the beast-life of the farmers in the valleys, living out their days in toil that they may provide their human lords with bread. Indeed, when the Jews later dream of returning to Canaan from their Egyptian prison, it is to “a land flowing with milk and honey” that they long to return⁴²—a land of sweet freedom and the shepherd’s life, rather than one of grain and enslavement. For in Canaan, Abraham and his people have found what is more precious to them than all else, political and ideological independence: Political independence in that they live as nomads, ungoverned, their labor and their property and their actions unregulated and untaxed by anyone other than themselves; ideological independence in that their vantage point and the freedom of their work allow them to focus on what truly matters: The proximity of all men to danger, error and death, and the consequent responsibility they must take for discovering the true course and acting on it.

The degree to which the Bible values conscience as the very heart of such moral independence is dramatized perhaps most forcefully by the fact that the biblical heroes do not, as might have been expected, submit passively even to the will of God: Abraham, the first Jew, is depicted as a man with the conscience and strength to challenge God himself: “Will not the judge of all the earth do justice?” he argues before the divine decree against Sodom, and God himself accepts the argument.⁴³ Moses, the archetypical Jewish national and religious leader, argues with God and alters the course of his judgments.⁴⁴ And, in case the message is somehow missed, the books of Moses inform us that the very name of the Jewish people, Israel, is derived from this most crucial of qualities, the ability to struggle with the world as it has been decreed: “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed”—Israel meaning “will struggle with God.”⁴⁵ What in other cultures would have been sacrilege is therefore elevated into a national symbol and the crux of Jewish belief: The refusal of the shepherd-hero to accept the order of the universe as it has been ordained, and the demand of his conscience to know why it cannot be improved.

PDF Format

previous (page 3 of 11 - view all) next