Israel is currently preoccupied with its election campaign and America with its newly divided government, leaving both countries little attention to spare for issues beyond day-to-day politics. But moments of change are excellent times to pause and consider the fundamentals of the Western political tradition. And as a recent contribution to the growing scholarly genre of political Hebraism reminds us, one of those fundamentals is the surprisingly large role the Hebrew Bible has played in Western political thought.
In John Locke’s Political Philosophy and the Hebrew Bible, Yechiel Leiter (full disclosure: a friend and neighbor) convincingly argues that the Bible heavily influenced Locke’s thought. Since Locke’s work, especially his Second Treatise on Government, is widely considered to have significantly influenced America’s founding fathers, this is further evidence that when people talk about America’s “Judeo-Christian” roots, the “Judeo” half is no mere courtesy. Judaism in fact contributed significantly to America’s political traditions.
Nevertheless, this raises an obvious question. Locke and his fellow 17th-century political Hebraists (including John Selden, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes) were Christians, not Jews. So why, in developing their political thought, did they rely far more on the Hebrew Bible than the Christian New Testament?
In Locke’s First Treatise on Government, for instance, he “quotes the Hebrew Bible more than 80 times,” yet there’s a “near total absence of quotes from the New Testament,” Leiter writes. And even in the Second Treatise, which has fewer biblical quotes, “nothing is quoted with any comparable frequency as the Hebrew Bible.”
Nor are these biblical references mere padding, Leiter argues. Locke uses them to develop several key concepts.
For instance, Locke posits a “natural law” superior to any human law—one man can grasp through ordinary reason—and argues that men are entitled to overthrow governments that violate this natural law. The Second Treatise illustrates this concept with the Cain and Abel story, in which Cain, having just murdered his brother, complains to God that “everyone that findeth me, shall slay me.” Yet God only explicitly prohibits murder five chapters later. This, Locke explains, is how natural law works: No explicit prohibition was needed because Cain’s own reason sufficed to understand that murder is unacceptable.
Locke uses this same story in developing his doctrine of individual executive power, which holds that in the absence of a legitimate governing authority, anyone has the right to punish crimes like murder (“everyone that findeth me, shall slay me”). By extension, people are entitled to punish tyrannical governments (which are inherently illegitimate) by toppling them.
Indeed, as Leiter notes, Locke’s belief in the legitimacy of rebelling against tyrants is a recurrent theme in the Hebrew Bible, yet contrasts markedly with the New Testament’s doctrine of obedience to authority. The latter is epitomized by Paul’s dictum, “The powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God” (Romans 13:1-2).
Leiter argues that Locke’s view of human equality similarly derives not from the New Testament—where equality, to quote the Book of Galatians, stems from being “One in Jesus Christ,” seemingly excluding anyone who doesn’t accept Christianity—but from the creation story in Genesis, where all people are created by “one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker,” in Locke’s words.
The Jephthah story bolsters Locke’s argument that unless God directly appoints a leader, this power devolves to the people: Jephthah, unlike most biblical judges, was appointed by the people rather than God. The transfer of kingship from Saul to David, rather than to Saul’s son Jonathan, is cited as evidence that a ruler’s son has no inherent right to succeed him.
Locke uses Jephthah again to claim that it’s legitimate to appeal to higher authority against an unjust government; Jephthah’s “appeal to heaven: before going to war to evict a foreign occupier thus serves him as a precedent for the English Revolution. And so forth.
So why does Locke rely so heavily on the Hebrew Bible rather than the Christian one? Leiter shows that Locke himself answered this question in an earlier work, Two Tracts on Government. The New Testament, Locke wrote, “is for the most part silent as to governmental and civil power,” since Jesus “seems to refuse deliberately to involve himself in civil affairs” and left “the civil government of the commonwealth … unchanged.”
The Hebrew Bible, in contrast, is anything but silent regarding “governmental and civil power.” A significant portion of the Pentateuch consists of laws that are supposed to govern the soon-to-be-established Jewish commonwealth. And a significant portion of the subsequent books describes how Jewish self-government played out in practice.
These biblical stories explore various types of government, from anarchy through limited monarchy to tyranny, and show the pitfalls or benefits of each. Nor are they simplistic morality tales; they show politics in all its complexity. One of the Bible’s greatest moral and political leaders, the prophet Samuel, sees his model of leadership rejected towards the end of his life, when the people demand a king. One of its wickedest kings—Ahab, who famously had a subject murdered in order to steal his vineyard—presides over a flourishing, prosperous kingdom. King Solomon’s dominion reaches unparalleled heights of both hard and soft power, but collapses into civil war under his son. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Thus for anyone interested in how politics works, the Hebrew Bible is a treasure trove. Nor is belief in God necessary to derive insights from it, just as faith isn’t necessary to derive insights from Locke or Shakespeare. As with any great work of literature or philosophy—and the Bible, quite aside from its religious significance, is both—all that’s needed is close and careful reading of the text.
Leiter’s book thus reinforces what should already have been obvious: The Bible is too important to the Western political tradition to be as widely ignored by serious students of politics, as it currently is in both America and Israel. The West’s greatest political philosophers believed that the Hebrew Bible had something worthwhile to say about politics. Both countries’ dysfunctional political systems might benefit from following those philosophers’ lead.
This article was originally syndicated by JNS.org (www.jns.org) on February 27, 2019. © 2019 JNS.org
@ Ted Belman:
HI, Ted
I am speaking as a practicing Christian, from personal experience. That experience is eclectic, but by no means all-encompassing. I have never been connected with Rev. Hagee. I was raised Roman Catholic (mostly pre-Vatican II), and later was involved with the “Jesus Movement” (two separate groups), with a Oneness Pentecostal church, with a Conservative Jewish Synagogue, with another independent (formerly Plymouth Brethren) church, and with nondenominational independent house churches. One of those churches has a Messianic Jewish emphasis; another does not. My daughter is active in the “Three Self” church system of China, and close relatives are active in American Baptist and independent churches.
There are two types of Christianity, often moving in the same indivituals at the same time. I will very briefly touch on both:
1. Scriptural Christianity. Whereas Judaism emphasizes observance of written and oral Torah, Scriptural Christianity looks at Torah as instruction to point us in the direction of becoming God-like. The end of this instruction is a human individual who is perfectly aligned with God’s Spirit AND Torah. Scriptural Christianity considers that this has been accomplished in Jesus; so his life has become to us a living Torah to be read by all who accept him as Messiah.
2. Practical Christianity is, for all intents and purposes, a collection of institutions — the largest, by far, being the Roman Catholic Church. That is why I said “tithing” the most important of doctrines (in Protestant churches, but see below re the Catholics); because without income, churches fail. This happens regardless of the theology or practice of the congregants. The Roman church has its own package of doctrines, which bind the congregants to the clergy with their souls and finances. The sale of indulgences, which Martin Luther opposed, was the most flagrant of these.
Doctrinally, there is a vast disconnect between these two types of Christianity. Jesus taught neither tithing nor indulgences; and the salvation he proffered did not depend on Sunday worship, the taking of communion, extreme unction nor adherence to a common creed. He personally satisfied all the requirements for salvation; the believer’s only obligation is to receive it.
I am currently on the “outs” with the ex-Plymouth-Brethren church, having rubbed its two self-appointed leaders the wrong way by privately questioning their teaching. The doctrine in question was whether Jesus was indeed identically the same as YHWH God (something the NT solidly disavows). This came on the heels of a teaching by one of those leaders that “The Jews are our enemies”, and the assertion by the other leader that “The Jews are our enemies because they do not accept that Jesus is YHWH”.
Does that sound like a religion rooted in the Hebrew Bible? It isn’t even rooted in the New Testament! But rooted it is, and very deeply — and those roots are family and business relationships binding the congregants together.
If Rev. Hagee sees Christianity as deeply rooted in Tanakh, he is correct. It is a mark of Christians’ ignorance of the scriptures and of history, that they do not see that the thing their religion is really rooted in, namely, the person Jesus (a completely observant Jew) is inextricably connected with Tanakh.
Michael S Said:
Thanks for this inside look at Catholic education. But I am surprised with this quote. I always thought that evange3licals, certainly those under Rev Hagee’s sway, dote on the HB. They readily acknowledge their debt to the HB as their foundation stone..
“In Locke’s First Treatise on Government, for instance, he “quotes the Hebrew Bible more than 80 times,” yet there’s a “near total absence of quotes from the New Testament,” Leiter writes. And even in the Second Treatise, which has fewer biblical quotes, “nothing is quoted with any comparable frequency as the Hebrew Bible.””
I have found this to be true in Christian churches as well:
1. During the six years that I attended Catholic school, I was taught the Ten Commandments and the “Laws of the Church”. My only exposure to the New Testament, was the “reading of the gospel” on Sundays. This was presented as a medley of proverb-like vignettes, read in a three-year rotation. Until I read the NT on my own, at age 24, I had no idea that the gospel stories were even interconnected in an overall treatise.
2. Some Baptist and Evangelical churches make a serious effort of presenting the New Testament. Some Evangelicals even go so far as to say that nothing in the Hebrew Bible applies to Christians. Even so, the “stuff” of these sermons, seems to come from the HB; and the Christian moral teaching on holiness is essentially the Ten Commandments plus plus.
3. In Christian circles, I have seen the NT most assiduously applied, in shunning fellow Christians and pointing out their “errors”. The HB, on the other hand, is the most cited foundation of that most important of all Christian doctrines, namely, “tithing”.
Locke believed thaat only persons who voluntarily accept the authority of the state and and the nation that it represents were entitled to citizenship in it. The State, in his view, is formed by a voluntary contract or compact between a group of people who agree to form a government that will act as an impartial arbiter and judge of disputes between them. People who do not participate in this voluntary union of people have no right to citizenship in it. As for those who are at war with the state, they are entitled to no civil rights whatsoever, and may either be put to death or used as slaves. And he defined war with the state as a “fixed, settled design” to destroy it, even if the enemy of the state carried out no overt act of violence for a long time. Last but not least, he thought that only those individuals who had a legitimate claim to a share in the ownership of the land were entitled to be citizens. If Locke were alive today and an Israeli, his views would probably be close to Otzma Yehudit.
Brilliant analysis and review. Will have to order book.