LITMIR.BIZ

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by a priest, states that Samuel sought advice of the Lord and was told to let the people have their own way, that they would pay heavily for it. Thus happened in Palestine what had happened more than a thousand years before in Babylonia; the king became the fountain head of justice until, after Israel passed under the Assyrian and Judah under the Chaldean, the priestly rule was restored for a time.

      The change to a kingly rule was immediately successful. The Jews grew in prosperity and wealth. They penetrated along the great trade routes and became active in commerce. They took their alphabet and the art of writing from the Phenicians. They produced a large amount of religious writing that was unparalleled in its elevation, although some of the Egyptian and the Babylonian literature of this kind is very beautiful. The state suffered dissensions in its exposed situation. The Kingdom became divided. These misfortunes were constantly treated by the priests as due to a departure from the worship of the Hebrew god and the rule of the kings was tempered by priestly rebukers, just as long afterwards St. Ambrose rebuked the Emperor Theodosius.¹ Underneath this history lies a legal development which began with the usual primitive practices of the Semites.

      Among inherited primitive institutions the patriarchal family stands out very clearly, and as a consequence the custom of monogamy was prevalent. The head of the family seems to have had absolute power over his children, so much so that Abraham could prepare to offer his son as a sacrifice. This is the salient fact, a father had the power of life and death over his son. Marriage had become a matter of contract, and the husband had control over the wife. The forbidden degrees of marriage were all within the kindred, except that the Hebrews were commanded to marry within the tribe. This exclusiveness was fed by a jealousy of their God toward other gods, but this injunction to marry within the tribe was continually violated. The daughters of Heth that wearied Rebecca continued to be attractive. Property was originally family property and was kept within the family by the usual expedients. There were certain customs calculated to preserve the family and its property. The widow could call upon her deceased husband’s nearest male relative to marry her. The original statement is that the widow could conscript her husband’s brothers. The story of Ruth, a very late book in the Old Testament dating from a time after the Captivity, illustrates the situation and is interesting because it turns on a point of law.

      A Hebrew, Elimelech, from Beth-lehem-judah, at a time of famine, in the period of the Judges and before Saul or David, went into the land of Moab, taking with him his wife Naomi and their two sons. The husband died, and the sons married in Moab, one marrying Ruth and the other Orpah, both Moabitesses. The sons died, and Naomi started to return to Judea. She advised her daughters-in-law to return to their own people, for Naomi said, “I have no other sons to marry you,” meaning, of course, that if she had other sons the law would compel them to marry the widows. Orpah went back to her family, but Ruth “clave” to this pearl among mothers-in-law. The two women came back to Bethlehem in the beginning of the barley harvest. Naomi now looked for some one out of her husband’s family to marry Ruth (the agnatic relation is emphasized; there was no duty to marry laid upon Naomi’s own family). The law suddenly becomes wide enough to entrap as a husband for the widow any male kinsman of the dead husband of Ruth, but the law gave the preference to the nearest male kinsman. The law, however, meant nothing to this lady. She selected the wealthy Boaz, a kinsman of her husband’s, but not the nearest; and Ruth, who had some confidence in her own good looks, suggested that she go to glean corn in the field in the hope she might “find grace” in some one’s sight. The harvest field as a place to look for a husband sounds primitive. Naomi, no doubt, took care that Ruth went to the right place to find Boaz. The detail of the tale is too prolonged for quotation, but Boaz was helpless in the hands of the two women, and they schemed it so that Ruth was, as we should say, thoroughly compromised.

      Boaz seemed much taken by Ruth’s beauty, and by the fact, so flattering to an elderly man, that Ruth “followed not young men.” There was, however, a kinsman nearer to Ruth’s dead husband than was Boaz. This kinsman had the right or, perhaps we should say, the duty to marry her, but if the nearest kinsman would not exercise his privilege, Boaz announced himself an eager candidate as the next kinsman in line. Naomi, evidently instigated by Boaz, now called upon the kinsman to redeem a tract of land of her dead husband, or perhaps she put the land up for sale; and Boaz brought the nearer kinsman before the elders of the city and offered him the chance to buy or redeem, saying, “You buy also of Ruth and you must take her with the land”; but the kinsman said that he would be compelled to go into debt for the land, and he said to Boaz, “Buy it yourself.” The beauty of Ruth had no effect upon this clod. Thereupon Boaz said unto the elders, “Ye are witnesses that I have bought the land of Elimelech and his two sons, and have bought Ruth, the Moabitess,” wife of one of the sons. So Boaz married Ruth and the story ends with Naomi holding in her arms her first grandson, whose grandson was King David. He probably inherited his ability from his great-great-grandmother. Boaz was a doomed man as soon as Naomi selected him as a husband for Ruth.

      When we look through this story to the legal conceptions behind, it shows the marriage by purchase, the fact that the land inheritance must be sold to, or, if sold, redeemed by, the nearest kinsman that wished to own it, and that it was the duty of the purchaser to take the widow of his kinsman along with the land. This tale has a plot founded upon a good law-point, the first of such plots on record. It is a curious mixture of primitive law, female perspicacity, love at first sight, and sound ideas of business.

      In the earlier law a vein of unconscious humor is introduced by the provision that if the brother or kinsman of the dead husband was so ungallant as to refuse to marry the widow, he could be haled before the old men by the slighted widow, who was permitted to address him in exceedingly contemptuous terms, and then she was given the inestimable privilege of “spitting in his face.” This also seems to be quite primitive; and yet the legend among the feminists is that the primitive laws were made by men for their own advantage.

      Another primitive element in Jewish law is the lex talionis, the age-old expedient of an exact retaliation. It is said to the law-breaker, “If any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” There crop out here and there the old taboos of defilement by the touching of any creeping thing, the eating of certain kinds of food, the eating of meat unless it have the proper butchering. All these taboos are most pronounced in the priestly code of law: “a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous, or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed...shall not come nigh” the altar. In the list of things forbidden to be eaten are the camel, hare, coney, horse, swine, eagle or osprey, the kite, vulture, raven, owl, hawk, cuckoo, swan, pelican, stork, cormorant, heron, lapwing, bat, every creeping thing that flieth and anything in the water without fins and scales. The reasons given for tabooing swine, “that it parteth the hoof but cheweth not the cud,” points to some sort of prehistoric judgment that came out as a taboo. The camel’s hump is said to be good eating, horseflesh is an excellent viand, and the swan for centuries graced the royal table. There is no reason for proscribing the eel, and locusts are said to be good food by those who enjoy them. What would become of crabs and lobsters under this divine command? Only a priest could object to ham or bacon. The injunction against eating anything that dieth of itself was sound from a sanitary standpoint. Other taboos are curious. The prohibition of a team made up of an ox and an ass, the command that a bastard’s progeny shall not enter the congregation until the tenth generation, the injunctions to keep cattle of unmixed breed, not to sow mixed seed, not to wear any garment of mixed wool and linen, have some basis in primitive beliefs. Perhaps the injunction that a man shall not wear a woman’s clothes, nor a woman a man’s, belongs in the same category. But it would seem that the Jews had never heard of a mixed team of dog and woman, such as can be seen in some European countries.

      The law considered peculiarly divine was the Ten Commandments which were delivered engraven on a stone “by the finger of God.” Moses, in his disgust at the golden calf performance of his followers, broke up the first copy, but he was furnished with a second. These laws are of a legal, a religious, or a moral character. It is worthy of note that there is no sanction to those laws as delivered; that is to say, no punishment is prescribed; but the people are plainly told

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