I’m Joshua Berman of Bar-Ilan University. Many people think of the Torah, the Five Books
of Moses, as a book of religious ideas. But the Torah was also a revolutionary book of
political ideas. Throughout the ancient world, the truth was
self-evident: all men are not created equal. These cultures celebrated hierarchy: everyone
knew his station in life, each according to his class. By contrast, and for the first
time in history, the Torah presented a blueprint for society to take power from the powerful, and
a place newfound emphasis on the common man. I’d like to share with you how the Torah
introduced six big ideas that are cornerstones of our own political and economic order today.
The first big idea is the rule of law. In the ancient world, law was composed and
promulgated by kings who were above the law, not subject to it. The Torah takes us from
the law of rule to the rule of law. Long before the thinkers of Athens, the Torah introduced
to the world, the idea of equality before the law. All public institutions in the Torah
– the judiciary, the priesthood, the monarchy, the institution of prophecy itself – are all subordinated
to the law. Big idea number 2 is rule by popular consent.
There is no record in the ancient world of a nation choosing its king or of citizens
appointing their own judges. Yet, in the Torah, the people choose their king. There is a modern
idea—credited to Montesquieu—that for the people to trust the judicial system, it
is essential that the judges receive their appointment from the people themselves. Prior
to Montesquieu, that idea is found in only one other text – The Torah.
Our third big idea is that all citizens are eligible for office.
We take it as a given that all citizens can run for public office. But it wasn’t always
this way. Consider the British parliamentary system. It has a House of Lords and a House
of Commons. The thinking was to divide legislative power so that the two houses could balance
each other. But notice who is given power. Throughout the history of governments in which
several bodes share power, the concept was always the same: you identify the competing
classes within society and assign each a little bit of the power. By design and by definition,
you can hold a political offices only if you belong to the right social group. Only with
the American Founding Fathers do we eventually find a new notion of political office without
reference to class, and which any citizen can hold. This revolutionary notion of political
office has only one pre-cursor: the Torah. Any citizen may be chosen to be king, and
any citizen may be chosen to be a judge.
In the Torah it turns out that God is an economist. Here we find the western tradition's first
prescription for an economic order that minimizes the distinctions of class based on wealth,
and instead ensures the economic security of the common citizen, for without equity, there
is no equality.
The fourth big idea is bankruptcy protection. In the ancient world land was owned by the
king and by the temples, while the common folk worked as serfs or sharecroppers. But
in the Bible, God – who owns the land – gives it over to the people of Israel, and so here
we have history's first example of universal private ownership of land by the citizens.
And when a landowner became insolvent and sold his land, the Torah ensured that the
land would revert back to that man’s ownership during the Jubilee year—history’s first
example of bankruptcy protection. Our fifth big idea is the idea of redistributive
taxation. In modern capitalist socieites, social justice
is served by taxing those that are most successful to aid those that are less fortunate. In the
premodern world, this idea is unheard of. Historically, taxes were levied to support
the palace and the temples. Only in the Torah do we find a tax that productive farmers pay
to support the less-well-off: history's first redistributive tax for a social purpose.
And finally, the sixth big idea is the creation of the week and the weekend
What is most remarkable about the Torah's economic reforms is the manner in which the
way we measure time itself is marshalled to achieve social justice. In the ancient world,
calendars measured days, months and years—but not weeks. Days, months and years, were measured
on the basis of the astronomic cycles of the sun and moon. The “week,” however, is
the invention of the Torah, and is rooted, of course, in the Torah's account of Creation,
in which God worked for six days, and rested on the seventh. In the ancient world, people
worked day in and day out. By contrast the Torah says that all must be granted rest one
day a week, giving us, ultimately, the modern concept of a weekend.
Not all great advances in political and economic thought are found in the Torah. Yet it is
difficult to think of another document that revolutionized so much, and with so little
precedent to inspire it.