Showing posts with label Elizabeth Anscombe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elizabeth Anscombe. Show all posts

Thursday, January 01, 2009

The Distinctive Mosaic Law

Elizabeth Anscombe has an admirable summary of the distinctiveness of the Mosaic Law:

For example, it greatly heightens his own notion of the paramountcy of God,; it absolutely forbids superstition, 'seeking truth from the dead', concern with omens, soothsaying; if we suppose him [a 'seeker after God'] acquainted with, say, Arabian tribes of the fiercer sort, we can also suppose that he is struck by the prescriptions tending to check the licence and bloody revenge natural among such people; the arrangements tending to make impossible the casual jetttisoning of wives and the killing of those who have suddenly or accidentally killed your relations. for while revenge was forbidden as a matter of personal ethic, it is also made difficult as a matter of public law by the establishment of the cities of refuge. He notes the prohibition on punishing any but the offender - remember that even Roman law, as codified by a Christian Emperor, permitted the destruction of the family and close associates of a man found guilty of treason against the state; but the Mosaic law forbade it. He notes the restriction on stripes as a punishment to forty 'lest thy brother become vile in they sight' - equally astonishing when you think of Roman floggings, or floggings in the British navy up to quite recent times. There is no torture in the Mosaic law: remember again that the Code of Justinian retained the requirement to torture slaves as witnesses. He notes the fact that if you so much as knocked out the tooth of a slave, he was to go free; the asylum to runaway slaves from the nations round about, the prohibition on man-stealing; the provision whereby you could not send a slave or bondman away if he had married in your house and chose to remain; the provisions forbidding persecution of poor debtors. He sees the contrast between the estimation of offences against property [...] and offences against the person and sexual offences.

(italics original, p. 35, 'Prophecy and Miracles' in Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics)

The essay itself is very good, and I think I will read it again and maybe even post a summary.