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Constitutional Law
Part 2: “What Were They Thinking?”
Digression: “A History of Government in 6 Revolutions: From the Paleolithic to Philadelphia”
119. Inventing God and Law: Theocracy
TITLE: Part M: Theocracy
Panel 1: The high priest in Jerusalem, wearing his ceremonial breastplate, hat, and robes, mumbles an incantation while placing a golden crown on a new king’s head.
FEZ GUY (offscreen):
The Persians did let us try kings again.
-=-
Panel 2: The new king, wearing his golden crown, is crazed with power.
FEZ GUY (offscreen):
But, you know?
NEW KING:
BWA HA HA HAAA!
The power is mine!
All mine!
-=-
Panel 3: The high priest slaps the crown off the new king’s head, making him go bug-eyed.
FEZ GUY:
It just didn’t take.
Besides, isn’t Yahweh supposed to be our sovereign?
-=-
Panel 4: Sis and Joe, as talking heads, with a backdrop of an eastern fairy-tale castle in a mountainous land.
SIS:
Hold up.
What does that even mean?
JOE:
I’m glad you asked.
SOVEREIGNTY means ultimate political authority.
A sovereign is that person or entity in which all of a society’s political authority is vested. Every power of every government institution, of every government official, is delegated from the sovereign.
This is important: There is no higher power that you can appeal to, to limit or constrain or overrule a legitimate sovereign’s exercise of political power.
“Ultimate” really means ultimate!
(More on this later, I promise)
-=-
Panel 5: The high priest, in full regalia, raises an “aha!” finger. Three other officials look skeptical.
NARRATION:
This presented the priestly elites with a conundrum: How to get regular folks to really and truly accept that a heavenly deity was—really and truly—their political ruler on Earth?
HIGH PRIEST:
I have it!
Remember that law code we had to copy out back in Babylonian scribe school?
OFFICIAL 1:
Eh?
You don’t mean…
OFFICIAL 2:
Hammurabi?
OFFICIAL 3:
Ugh, don’t remind me. The first year, they scared us to death… the second year, they worked us to death… then the third year, they bored us to death.
*Old law student refrain.
-=-
Panel 6: Repeat of panel 7 from page 104, with the two Mesopotamians reading a law code stele. Next to it is a repeat of panel 6 from page 106, with Yahweh seated on his throne.
NARRATION:
Thus the Covenant Code, with which we began this discussion!
As the Mesopotamian law codes had symbolically imbued a king’s authority with the legitimacy of the gods…
…so now the Covenant Code imbued the Yehudites’ god with the legitimate political authority of a king!
-=-
Panel 7: A stick figure man and woman stand beside an empty throne. The man looks at a bright light shining where a king would normally be, and the woman makes a sassy gesture.
NARRATION:
The result?
A kingdom without a king!
MAN:
Not one we can see or hear, anyway.
WOMAN:
Or petition…
Or persuade…
-=-
Panel 8: Three bright lights rise from the bottom left to the top right, in rhythm with the text.
NARRATION:
This was a radical new reality. To regain their identity, the Yehudites had made a covenant—and a Covenant Code—which had then transformed their god into something humankind had never before imagined:
A god that was singular… supreme… and sovereign!
NARRATION (below “singular”):
No father,
no consort,
no pantheon.
NARRATION (below “supreme”):
There was no greater deity in all the spirit world.
NARRATION (below “sovereign”):
Their god—that is, nobody on Earth possessed ultimate political authority.
-=-
Panel 9: The Persian emperor, in a golden headdress and purple robes, stands before bas-relief figures of four-winged celestial beings.
NARRATION:
What did the Persian emperors think of this?
EMPEROR:
Meh.
So long as they pay their taxes and stay out of trouble, who cares what they believe?
-=-
Panel 9: Turban Guy looks askance at Fez Guy, who makes a confident gesture.
NARRATION:
True, gods and government had always gone together—both created at the same time, to solve the same social need for cooperation, and by the same human necessity of narrative.
But thus far, it had naturally been people who issued commands and made the rules.
What now, when the commands and rules could only come from a—let’s face it—fictional character? From a being you couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, and above all couldn’t question?
TURBAN GUY:
And who doesn’t seem to be making any new rules, either.
FEZ GUY:
Oh yeah?
That’s what you think.