(13) "And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword.
(14) "But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath given thee."
Comparatively mild, like these rules for warfare, were the Jewish rules regarding their foreign slaves. Such slaves were not without legal protection. The master who killed a slave was punished (Exodus ii. 20); if the master struck his slave so severely that he lost an eye or a tooth, the slave became a free man (Exodus ii. 26 and 27). The Jews, further, allowed foreigners to live among them under the full protection of their laws. "Love ... the stranger, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt," says Deuteronomy x. 19, and in Leviticus xxiv. 22 there is the command: "You shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger as for one of your own country."
Of the greatest importance, however, for the International Law of the future, are the Messianic ideals and hopes of the Jews, as these Messianic ideals and hopes are not national only, but fully international. The following are the beautiful words in which the prophet Isaiah (ii. 2-4) foretells the state of mankind when the Messiah shall have appeared:
(2) "And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.
(3) "And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths; for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
(4) "And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
Thus we see that the Jews, at least at the time of Isaiah, had a foreboding and presentiment of a future when all the nations of the world should be united in peace. And the Jews have given this ideal to the Christian world. It is the same ideal which has in bygone times inspired all those eminent men who have laboured to build up an International Law. And it is again the same ideal which nowadays inspires all lovers of international peace. Although the Jewish State and the Jews as a nation have practically done nothing to realise that ideal, yet it sprang up among them and has never disappeared.
The Greeks.
§ 39. Totally different from this Jewish contribution to a future International Law is that of the Greeks. The broad and deep gulf between their civilisation and that of their neighbours necessarily made them look down upon those neighbours as barbarians, and thus prevented them from raising the standard of their relations with neighbouring nations above the average level of antiquity. But the Greeks before the Macedonian conquest were never united into one powerful national State. They lived in numerous more or less small city States, which were totally independent of one another. It is this very fact which, as time went on, called into existence a kind of International Law between these independent States. They could never forget that their inhabitants were of the same race. The same blood, the same religion, and the same civilisation of their citizens united these independent and—as we should say nowadays—Sovereign States into a community of States which in time of peace and war held themselves bound to observe certain rules as regards the relations between one another. The consequence was that the practice of the Greeks in their wars among themselves was a very mild one. It was a rule that war should never be commenced without a declaration of war. Heralds were inviolable. Warriors who died on the battlefield were entitled to burial. If a city was captured, the lives of all those who took refuge in a temple had to be spared. War prisoners could be exchanged or ransomed; their lot was, at the utmost, slavery. Certain places, as, for example, the temple of the god Apollo at Delphi, were permanently inviolable. Even certain persons in the armies of the belligerents were considered inviolable, as, for instance, the priests, who carried the holy fire, and the seers.