The essential spirit of the Jewish polity has seldom, if ever, been more effectively portrayed than by Rev. Dr. HENRY M. FIELD, in his scholarly work, On the Desert, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1883. It deals with the system of law instituted by Moses, which became ingrained in the Jewish people through long centuries of victorious contention against barbarism in all its historic forms, and which remains to-day the guiding principle of Jewish life in all the relations of man to man.
We quote from Dr. Field's work as follows:
Theocracy and Democracy.
"Perhaps it does not often occur to readers of the Old Testament that there is much likeness between the Hebrew Commonwealth and the American Republic. There are more differences than resemblances, at least the differences are more marked. Governments change with time and place, with the age and the country, with manners and customs; yet at the bottom there is one radical principle that divides a republic from a monarchy or an aristocracy; it is the natural equality of men—that "all men are born free and equal"—which is as fully recognized in the laws of Moses as in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed the principle is carried further in the Hebrew Commonwealth than in ours; for not only was there equality before the laws, but the laws aimed to produce equality of condition in one point, and that a vital one—the tenure of land—of which even the poorest could not be deprived, so that in this respect the Hebrew Commonwealth approached more nearly to a pure democracy.
"Of course the political rights of the people did not extend to the choice of a ruler, nor did it to the making of the laws. As there was no king but God, it was the theory of the State that the laws emanated directly from the Almighty and his commands could not be submitted to a vote. No clamorous populace debated with the Deity. The Israelites had only to hear and to obey. In this sense the government was not a popular, but an absolute one.
"But how could absolutism be consistent with equality? There is no contradiction between the two, and indeed, in some respects, no form of government is so favorable to equality as a theocracy. Encroachments upon popular liberty and the oppression of the people do not come from the head of the State so often as from an aristocratic class which is arrogant and tyrannical. But in a theocracy the very exaltation of the Sovereign places all subjects on the same level. God alone is great and in His presence there is no place for human pride. Divine Majesty overawes human littleness, and instead of a favored few being lifted up above their fellows, there is a general feeling of lowliness and humility, in the sight of God, in which lies the very spirit and essence of equality.
"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 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.
"Moses found soon after he left Egypt that he could not administer justice in person to a whole nation, so he directed the tribes to choose out of their number their wisest men, whom he would make judges to decide every common cause, reserving to himself only the more important questions. Here was a system of popular elections, which is one of the first elements of a republican or democratic state.
"In the administration of justice a Theocracy is an ideal government, for it is Divinity enthroned on earth as in Heaven, and no other form of government enforces justice in a manner so absolute and peremptory. In the eyes of the Hebrew lawgiver the civil tribunal was as sacred as the Holy of Holies. The office of the judge was as truly authorized, and his duty as solemnly enjoined, as that of the priest. The judgment is God's, said Moses, and he who gave a false judgment disregarded the authority of Him whose nature is justice and truth. The judgment seat was a holy place, which no private malice might profane. Evidence was received with religious care. Oaths were administered to give solemnity to the testimony. Then the Judge, standing in the place of God, was to pronounce equitably, whatever might be the rank of the contending parties. 'Ye shall not respect persons in judgment, but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man, for the judgment is God's.' He recognized no distinctions, all were alike to him. The judge was to know no difference. He was not to be biased even by sympathy for the poor. 'Neither shall thou countenance a poor man in his cause. Thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty; but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbor.' Magistrates were not allowed to accept a gift; 'for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.'
"The humanity of the Hebrew code is further seen in its mitigation of slavery. This was a legal institution of Egypt, out of which they had just come. They themselves had been slaves. Their ancestors, the patriarchs, had held slaves. Abraham had over three hundred servants born in his house. The relation of master and slave they still recognized, but by how many limitations was this state of bondage alleviated! No man could be subjected to slavery by violence. Man-stealing was punished with death. The more common causes of servitude was theft or debt. A robber might be sold to expiate his crime, or a man overwhelmed with debt might sell himself to pay it; that is, he might bind himself to service for a term of years: still he could hold property, and the moment he acquired the means might purchase back his freedom, or he might be redeemed by his nearest kinsman. If his master treat him with cruelty; if he beat him so as to cause injury the servant recovered his freedom as indemnity. At the longest his servitude came to an end in six years. He then recovered his freedom as a natural gift; 'If thou buy a Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve, and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.' A Hebrew slave was therefore merely a laborer hired for six years. Nor did the law permit the servant to go forth in naked poverty, and with the abject feeling of a slave still clinging to him. He was to be loaded with presents by his late master—sheep, oil, fruits, and wine—to enable him to begin housekeeping. Thus for a Hebrew there was no such thing as hopeless bondage. The people were not to feel the degradation of being slaves. God claimed them as his own, and as such they were not to be made bondmen. Every fiftieth year was a jubilee, a year of universal emancipation. Then 'liberty was proclaimed throughout all the land to all the inhabitants thereof.' This was the time of the restitution of all things. Though a man had sold himself as a slave, his right in the land was not alienated. It now returned to him free of encumbrance. At the year of jubilee all debts were extinguished. His native plot of ground, on which he played in childhood, was restored to him in his old age. Again he cultivated the paternal acres. He was not only a free man but a holder of property. Says Michaelis: 'The condition of slaves among the Hebrews was not merely tolerable, but often extremely comfortable.'
"That the sympathies of the law were with the oppressed appears from the singular injunction that a foreign slave who fled to a Hebrew for protection should not be given up: 'Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee.' No Fugitive Slave Law remanded the terror-stricken fugitive to an angry and infuriated master and to a condition more hopeless than before.
Such was the democracy of Theocracy—a union in which one sprang out of the other. Men were equal because God was their Ruler—a Ruler so high that before him there was neither great nor small, but all stood on the same level. But the Hebrew Law did not stop with equality; it inculcated fraternity. A man was not only a man, he was a brother. That law contains some of the most beautiful provisions ever recorded in any legislation, not only for the cold administration of justice, but for the exercise of humanity. The spirit of the Hebrew law was broader than race, or country, or kindred. What liberality, for example, in its treatment of foreigners. Against race hatred Moses set up this command, 'Thou shalt not oppress a stranger,' which he enforced upon the Israelites by the touching remembrance of their own bitter experience, 'for ye know the heart of a stranger seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.' But not only were foreigners to be tolerated; they were to receive the fullest protection. 'Ye shall have one manner of law as well for the stranger as for one of your own country.'
"In several requirements we discern a pity for the brute creation. Long before modern refinement of feeling organized societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, Moses recognized dumb beasts as having a claim to be defended from injury. Birds' nests were protected from wanton destruction.
"But perhaps the most beautiful provision of the law was for the poor.
"'When ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvests. And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt have them for the poor and the stranger.' If the reaper dropped a sheaf in the field, he might not return to take it. Whatever olives hung on the bough, or clusters on the vine, after the first gathering, were the property of the stranger, the fatherless and the widow. Under the shelter of this law came many a Ruth, gleaning the handfuls of golden corn to carry home to her mother, who was thus saved from utter destitution. By these means the law kept the poor from sinking to the extreme point of misery. At the same time, by throwing in their path these wayside gifts, it saved them from theft or vagabondage. As a proof of its successful operation, it is a curious fact that, in the five books of Moses, such a class as beggars is not once mentioned. The tradition of caring for those of their own kindred, remains to this day and it is an honorable boast that among the swarms of beggars that throng the streets of the Old World or the New, one almost never finds a Jew.
"The law took also under its care all whom death had deprived of their natural protectors; 'Ye shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child.' They were sacred by misfortune. God would punish cruelty to them. 'If thou afflict them in any wise, and they cry unto me, I will surely hear their cry; and your wives shall be widows and your children fatherless.'
"Thus the Hebrew law took the poor and the weak under its special protection; death, sorrow, widowhood, orphanage, all threw a shield of protection over the desolate and the unhappy. By this spirit of humanity infused into the relations of life, all the members of a community—the rich and poor, the strong and the weak—were united in fellowship and fraternity. One sacred tie bound them still closer; not only were they of the same race and nation, but they had the same religious inheritance; all were fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God."
As a supplement to Dr. Field's effective presentation of his subject we add here, an extract from the Christian Union, on "Moses and his Laws," by HARRIET BEECHER STOWE:
"The strongest impulse in the character of Moses appears to have been that of protective justice, more particularly with regard to the helpless and down-trodden classes. The laws of Moses, if carefully examined, are a perfect phenomenon; an exception to the laws of either ancient or modern nations in the care they exercised over women, widows, orphans, paupers, foreigners, servants and dumb animals. No so-called Christian nation but could advantageously take a lesson in legislation from the laws of Moses. There is a plaintive, pathetic spirit of compassion in the very language in which the laws in favor of the helpless and suffering are expressed, that it seems must have been learned only of superhuman tenderness. Not the gentlest words of Jesus are more compassionate in their spirit than many of these laws of Moses. Delivered in the name of Jehovah, they certainly are so unlike the wisdom of that barbarous age as to justify of them to Him who is Love."
Another woman of commanding authority, GEORGE ELLIOT, speaks on this topic as follows:
"Unquestionably the Jews, having been more than any other race exposed to the adverse moral influences of alienism, must, both in individuals and in groups, have suffered some corresponding moral degradation; but in fact they have escaped with less abjectness, and less of hard hostility toward the nations whose hands have been against them, than could have happened in the case of a people who had neither their adhesion to a separate religion founded on historic memories, nor their characteristic family affectionateness. Tortured, flogged, spit upon, the corpus vile on which rage or wantonness vented themselves with impunity, their name flung at them as an opprobrium by superstition, hatred, and contempt, they have remained proud of their origin. Does any one call this an evil pride? The pride which identifies us with a great historic body is a humanizing, elevating habit of mind, inspiring sacrifices of individual comfort, gain, or other selfish ambition, for the sake of that ideal whole; and no man swayed by such a sentiment can become completely abject. That a Jew of Smyrna, where a whip is carried by passengers ready to flog off the too officious specimens of his race, can still be proud to say, 'I am a Jew,' is surely a fact to awaken admiration in a mind capable of understanding what we may call the ideal forces in human history.
"And again, a varied, impartial observation of the Jews in different countries tends to the impression that they have a predominant kindness, which must have been deeply ingrained in the constitution of their race to have overlasted the ages of persecution and oppression. The concentration of their joys in domestic life has kept up in them the capacity of tenderness; the pity for the fatherless and the widow, the care for the women and the little ones, blent intimately with their religion, is a well of mercy, that cannot long or widely be pent up by exclusiveness, and the kindness of the Jew overflows the line of division between him and the Gentile.
"On the whole, one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of this scattered people, made for ages 'a scorn and a hissing,' is that, after being subjected to this process, which might have been expected to be in every sense deteriorating and vitiating, they have come out of it (in any estimate which allows for numerical proportion) rivaling the nations of all European countries, in healthiness and beauty of physique, in practical ability, in scientific and artistic aptitude, and in some forms of ethical value. A significant indication of their natural rank is seen in the fact, that at this moment the leader of the Liberal party in Germany is a Jew, the leader of the Republican party in France is a Jew, and the head of the conservative ministry in England is a Jew."