The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, March, 1880

by Various

The Mosaic Law In Greece, In Rome, And In The Common Law Of England.

There is no logical reason against the thought that God gave to man law in the gift of speech or language. Speech is not natural to man. He does not express his feelings and passions with sighs and groans systematically and invariably as do the lower animals. The speechless child has no order of this kind; the lower kingdom differs widely from man in this respect; the same animals have the same manner of expressing their feelings and passions throughout the world; but man has language to express ideas. Infants learn to speak by imitation; they do not speak naturally. Language is the result of education, of the imitative faculty of man. “It has been experimentally demonstrated that a man who has never heard the articulations of the human voice can never speak.” So deafness always carries dumbness along with it when that deafness is from birth, or contracted in early childhood. I have in my mind at the present moment two bright-eyed girls in their “teens,” who contracted deafness in infancy from the [pg 112] spotted fever; both are destitute of speech. If there ever was a language of nature it was abandoned when artificial language was taught. The greatest philosophers have failed to account for the origin of language or speech. The Pagans have declared that it was a gift from the gods. If all the inhabitants of the world could be congregated, and all would consent to the use of one and the same vocabulary, then we might, through universal training in that vocabulary, have an universal language. How could such a convention be assembled? The truth is, the origin of language or speech is neither natural or conventional, but imitative, and it is a fact, beyond the possibility of cavil, that the thing must have existed before it could have been imitated. With whom did it exist? “We think by words, and infants think by things.” Words were from God.

Two lessons we must have as a capital to work with, and all else that we need will grow legitimately out of exercise in those two. “First, The elementary ideas. Second, The elementary words significant to them.” Such was doubtless given man, as the Bible teaches, as a capital stock, and all languages are, directly or indirectly, from this original stock, and its results upon the human understanding; for who can set limits to possibilities of the human mind when once it is furnished with a capital stock and learned the art of its use? In Europe twenty-seven languages are known, which are kindred branches from three roots, and these three roots are scions of one stock; all languages are traceable to one stock. The Bible alone accounts for the origin of speech, which was, doubtless, the origin of law. Chaldea, Media, Persia, Phœnicia and Egypt, under the sovereignty of Chedorlaomer, had everything in legislative knowledge to learn from the Hebrews. This “Chedorlaomer was king of Elam, in Persia, in the times of Abraham. He made the cities in the region of the Dead Sea his tributaries; and on their rebelling he came with four allied kings and overran the whole country south and east of the Jordan. Lot was among his captives, but was rescued by Abraham.” See Zell's Encyclopedia. Lycurgus, [pg 113] a celebrated legislator of Sparta, who was born 926 years before Christ, gave an agrarian law that finds its prototype, without its defects, in the agrarian law of the Hebrews. Solon, one of the seven wise men of Greece, who died 558 years before Christ, transcribed, from the laws of Moses, the laws prohibiting certain degrees in marriage. The laws of descent, among the Grecians, are almost identical with the laws of descent among the Jews. The Grecians borrowed many laws from the Hebrews. They had their harvest vintage festival; the presentation of the best of their flocks; the offering of their first fruits, and the portion prescribed to their priests; the law against garments of divers colors; protection from violence to the man who fled to their altars; the law prohibiting all from the altar who had touched a dead body or any other impurity; the law prohibiting from the priesthood all those having blemishes upon their persons. All these laws, found in the Athenian code, had their origin with the laws of the Hebrews—were taken from Moses.

During the reign of Artaxerxes Longimanus, who was the brother of Darius, and who ascended the throne of the kingdom of Persia in the year 465 before Christ, the Jews were scattered all over the kingdom of Persia, and their laws were the subject of conversation and notoriety. Haman speaks of them to the king as differing from the laws of all other people.

The oldest and most noted legislators and wise men took their laws from the law of Moses. The Egyptians and the Phœnicians borrowed from the Jewish laws. Ancient and modern writers affirm that the individuals commissioned by the Senate and tribune under Justinian to form the “Twelve Tables” were directed to examine the laws of Athens and the Grecian cities. This took them at once to the consideration of many of the laws of Moses. Zell, in his Encyclopedia, says: The glory of Justinian's reign is the famous digest of the Roman law, known generally as the Justinian code, which was compiled out of the Gregorian, Theodorian and Hermogenian codes, by ten of the ablest lawyers of the empire, under the [pg 114] guiding genius of the Jurisconsult Tribonian. Their labors consisted, first, of the “Statute Law.” Second, The “Pandects,” a digest of the decisions and opinions of former magistrates and lawyers. These two compilations consisted of matter that lay scattered through more than two thousand volumes, now reduced to fifty. Third, The “Institutes,” an abridgement in four books, containing the substance of all the laws in the elementary form. Fourth, The laws of modern date, including Justinian's own edicts, collected into one volume and called the “New Code.”

The word “Pandects” is a term of great importance in the investigation of the origin of the Roman laws; it points directly and certainly to the fact that the Roman laws, known as the Pandects, were gathered from all laws, for such is the import of the term itself when it is associated with the term laws. Moreover, it is a Greek term, showing at once that the Grecian laws contributed largely to the Pandects of the Roman laws. The term is defined by Liddel and Scott in the words, all-receiving, all-containing, so the Pandects were gathered from all laws, consequently from the laws of Moses as well as from the Grecian laws, which were largely from the laws of Moses. This relationship, existing in the science of law, between the laws of the Bible and the Roman laws gotten up under Justinian, can be set aside by the infidels when stubborn facts, as well as similitude, are set aside.

Sir Matthew Hale says: Among the many preferences which the laws of England have above others, the two principal ones are, the hereditary transmission of property and the trial by jury, which originated with the Jews, for, by the law of Moses, the succession in the descending line was to the sons, the oldest having a double portion. If the son died in his father's lifetime, the grandson heired the portion of his father. Trial by jury was first suggested in the administration of penal justice among the Jews. Such trials came off publicly in the gates of the city, and their judges were elders and Levites, taken from the general mass of the citizens. “A part of the common law, as it now stands, was first collected by Alfred [pg 115] the Great, youngest son of Athelwolf, or Ethelwolf, King of the West Saxons, who took the crown in 871. It is asserted by Sismondi, in his history of the fall of the Roman Empire, that when the above named prince caused a republication of the Saxon laws he inserted several laws taken from the Judaical ritual into his statutes to give new strength and cogency to the principles of morality. So it is a common thing in the early English reports to find frequent references to the Mosaic law. Sismondi also states that one of the first acts of the clergy under Pepin and Charlemagne, of France, was to introduce into the legislation of the Franks several of the Mosaic laws found in the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. It is truthfully said that the entire code of civil and judicial statutes throughout New England, and throughout the States first settled by the descendants of New England, were the judicial laws of God as they were delivered by Moses. From God himself one nation, and one only, received their laws, and they are worthy of being regarded as models for all succeeding ages. The learned Michaelis, who was professor of law in the University of Gottingen, says that a man who considers laws philosophically, who would survey them with the eye of a Montesquieu, would never overlook the laws of Moses.”

Goguet, in his learned treatise upon the origin of laws, says: The more we meditate on the laws of Moses the more we shall perceive their wisdom and inspiration. They alone have undergone no changes, amendments or retrenchments for more than three thousand years, while all others have been receiving amendments and additions.

Milman, in his history of the Jews, says: The Hebrew law-giver exercised a more extensive and permanent influence over the destinies of mankind than any other individual in the annals of the world. The late Fisher Ames, a distinguished statesman and jurist, said, “No man can be a sound lawyer who is not well read in the laws of Moses.” The seat of this law is the bosom of God, and her voice is the order, peace and happiness of the world.