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Around the year 586 before Jesus
the Babylonians defeated the ancient Israelites
and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem.
About 20,000 people there, 1/4 of the population including many leaders,
were exiled to Babylon over a period of about ten years.
While in Babylon (near present day Baghdad)
these Jews wrote much of their history and laws.
About 50 years later the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylon
and released the Jews from their captivity.
Ezra, a leader of those who returned,
launched a long and sometimes secret campaign to rebuild the temple.
The majority who remained had not worshiped God or followed the law
while the leaders had been in exile.
The story is that on their return Ezra organized the priests
and planned to read the law, most of the book of Deuteronomy to the people.
Selections from Nehemiah 8-13 (edited)
All the people gathered together into the square.
The scribe Ezra brought the book of the law of Moses,
which the Lord had given to Israel.
The priest Ezra brought the law before the assembly,
both men and women and all who could hear with understanding.
He read from it facing the square from early morning until midday,
in the presence of those who could understand;
and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law....
And the Levites helped the people to understand the law,
while the people remained in their places.
So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation.
They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.
And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe,
and the Levites who taught the people said to all of them,
“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.”
For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law.
The people heard the law and pledged to adhere to the law of God,
and to observe and do all the commandments of the Lord our God
and his ordinances and his statutes.
Then the leaders of Judah came up onto the wall,
and there were trumpets and cymbals, harps, and lyres, and the singers sang.
The people offered great sacrifices that day and rejoiced,
for God had made them rejoice with great joy;
the women and children also rejoiced. [always a second thought]
The joy of Jerusalem was heard far away.
We in the churches have been told that the law of ancient Israel was a bad thing,
that there were too many of them
and that they diminished the lives of the people.
Jesus objected that requirements and obedience to laws
sometimes prevented people from helping those in need.
But here we have a story of the people who re-discovered the law
and found in it something of great importance that they had lost.
The great theologian Karl Barth, in the crisis in Germany at the end of WWI
said that the preacher must stand with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.
That is what the preacher must do today,
or find herself or himself totally irrelevant and unimportant and ultimately, faithless.
I was listening to the news on television and reading newspapers on my phone
a few weeks ago when I suddenly realized
that what has been happening in Washington DC
echoes a big story from the Hebrew Scriptures.
Words and actions by the president and the attorney general,
and support of their actions by Republican Senators
have been criticized for creating a crisis
by denying and opposing “the rule of law.”
The rule of law is the idea that all people and institutions,
including the rich and powerful, are accountable to fair and just laws
in a system of elected legislators to create laws,
an executive branch to administer those laws, and courts to oversee them.
This system is established by an accepted Constitution, for the good of society.
In such a system no one, even one in authority, is above the law.
This system is under threat and in crisis
when a president declares the right to do as he or she pleases,
ignores existing laws and norms,
and when a legislature and when courts allow the president to behave in such ways.
So listen to Deuteronomy beginning in Chapter 6 which outlines
the laws and the principles underlying the laws of ancient Israel.
You aren’t likely to read Deuteronomy, so I have done it for you.
Here I will give you a summary of what the people of Jerusalem
would have heard when the forgotten laws were read to them,
causing them to weep.
Now this is the great commandment—the statutes and the ordinances—
that the Lord your God teaches you to observe,
so that it may go well with you,
and so that you may multiply greatly
in a land flowing with milk and honey,
as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, has promised you.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your might....
The next sentence tells us why this is important:
If we diligently observe this entire commandment
before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us,
we will be in the right.
This means that obeying the law puts us on the right side of God.
If we understand that God is not a person, not an object,
not the subject of anything,
but rather the spirit behind our highest human values,
then we see that our human American rule of law
is no different than ancient Israel’s rule by God’s law.
Ancient Israel and later ancient Rome
and tribes such as the Haudenosuanee (Iroquois) of New York
were the inventors of Constitutions,
modern representation and democracy, and the rule of law.
The law is good because it expresses the values
which manifest our idea and construct of what we call God.
Therefore to mess with the rule of law
is to undermine and threaten all that is holy and sacred
and is to be treated with awe for our lives to have meaning.
So the Israelite law begins with the command:
You shall not exalt yourselves.
So now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you?
Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways,
to serve the Lord your God [by obeying the law!]
with all your heart and with all your soul...
for your own well-being....
For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords,
is not partial and takes no bribe,
executes justice for the orphan and the widow,
loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.
You shall also love the stranger,
for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Do you hear the issues of our present day
and our violation of these ancient laws?
All who have ears, hear today’s news in the book of Deuteronomy.
These are the statutes and ordinances that you must diligently observe:
There are laws on what foods to eat and which cannot be eaten.
This was the ancient way of bringing preventive health care
to the people.
There are detailed laws on giving tithes for the temple
and the government.
(This was early socialism, the novel idea
that we are not isolated individuals
with no no responsibility for our common life together,
that we should share the cost for all the things
that help us create and maintain communities,
our common basis for economic growth and social progress.)
Every seventh year you shall grant a remission or cancel all debts.
Economics has never been a science.
This shows an early understanding of how unregulated
buying and selling leads to economic inequality
which must be made right somehow.
Such cancellation of debt probably never happened as written here,
but there are numerous laws here to alleviate the poverty
of those who lost their lands and wealth to weather or oppression.
You shall appoint judges and officials throughout your tribes,
in all your towns that the Lord your God is giving you,
and they shall render just decisions for the people.
You must not distort justice; you must not show partiality;
and you must not accept bribes,
for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and
subverts the cause of those who are in the right.
Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue....
When you have come into the land
and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say,
“I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,”
you may indeed set over you a king
but you are not permitted to put a foreigner over you....
Even so, he must not acquire many horses for himself...,
And he must not acquire many wives for himself,
also silver and gold he must not acquire
in great quantity for himself.
There are laws forbidding all magic and superstitious nonsense
and con games.
This was the way they protected reason and science such as it was.
God continues to give laws against lies and for truth:
I will raise up a prophet;
I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet,
who shall speak to them everything that I command....
You may say to yourself,
“How can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken?”
If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord
but the thing does not take place or prove true,
it is a word that the Lord has not spoken.
The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; do not be frightened by it.
There are laws against crime and to protect the rights of the accused:
You shall establish three Cities of Refuge. (chapter 19)
[In the case that] someone has killed another person unintentionally
when the two had not been at enmity before:
(Suppose someone goes into the forest with another to cut wood,
and when one of them swings the ax to cut down a tree,
the head slips from the handle and strikes the other person
who then dies;)
the killer may flee to one of these cities and live....
This law will sound familiar to many of you:
You must not move your neighbor’s boundary marker,
set up by former generations,
on the property that will be allotted to you
in the land that the Lord your God is giving you to possess.
A single witness shall not suffice
to convict a person of any crime or wrongdoing
in connection with any offense that may be committed.
Only on the evidence of two or three witnesses
shall a charge be sustained.
If a malicious witness comes forward to accuse someone of wrongdoing,
then both parties to the dispute shall appear before the Lord,
before the priests and the judges who are in office in those days,
and the judges shall make a thorough inquiry.
If the witness is a false witness, having testified falsely against another,
then you shall do to the false witness
just as the false witness had meant to do to the other.
There are rules of Warfare, for treatment of captives, (chapter 20)
the Right of the Firstborn and rules for inheritance.
And this about neighbors:
You shall not watch your neighbor’s ox or sheep straying away
and ignore them; you shall take them back to their owner.
You shall do the same with a neighbor’s donkey;
you shall do the same with a neighbor’s garment;
and you shall do the same with anything else
that your neighbor loses and you find.
You may not withhold your help.
You shall not see your neighbor’s donkey or ox fallen on the road
and ignore it; you shall help to lift it up.
When you build a house, you shall make a railing for your roof;
otherwise you might have guilt if anyone should fall from it.
There are laws concerning Sexual Relations, adultery, rape,
prostitution, loans and debts, marriage and divorce, kidnapping.
There are rules for the prevention of contagion!
There are laws for making loans and collecting on them.
You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers,
whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land
in one of your towns.
You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset,
because they are poor and their livelihood depends on them.
Parents shall not be put to death for their children,
nor shall children be put to death for their parents;
only for their own crimes may persons be put to death.
You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice;
When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field,
you shall not go back to get it;
it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow,
Suppose two persons have a dispute and enter into litigation, and
the judges decide between them, declaring one to be in the right
and the other to be in the wrong. (Chapter 25)
If the one in the wrong deserves to be flogged,
the judge shall make that person lie down
and be beaten in his presence
with the number of lashes proportionate to the offense.
Forty lashes may be given but not more;
if more lashes than these are given,
your neighbor will be degraded in your sight.
You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.
You shall not have in your bag or in your house
two kinds of weights, large and small.
You shall offer First Fruits and Tithes gratefully.
In conclusion, this is the book of Deuteronomy,
this is the ancient rule of law, much like our own,
or rather ours is much like theirs because built upon it.
This suggests how I understand God, not as the giver of law,
but the creative power behind the law.
We must live by the rule of law,
even as we contest laws which we deem to be unfair or unjust
because behind the law lies God.
We cannot live without the rule of law, which makes us human.
The alternative is unthinkable.
