Constitutional Law

Part 2: “What Were They Thinking?”

Digression: “A History of Government in 6 Revolutions: From the Paleolithic to Philadelphia”

120. Inventing God and Law: Inventing Scripture

TITLE: Part N: Scripture

Panel 1: A large scene. In the distance, the Tower of Babel rises so high that it vanishes into the blue of the sky. Closer by, a young noblewoman in a sheer green linen dress stands on the grassy bank of a river, and points to two slave women, who stand waist-deep in the river alongside bulrushes and cattails and lotuses, and other Egyptian riverside plants with purple flowers. One, topless with her skirt floating on the water, holds on to a wreath of flowers set on her head, while the other, in a full-length linen dress that the water has made translucent, reaches for a wicker bassinet floating on the water. Nearer to the viewer, the river converts into a raging sea where Noah’s ark tosses and spills water from its prow, while a zebra and lion look over the railing and a giraffe pukes over the side. The sea divides, and Moses leads a throng across the sea floor in between the waters. On the other side, a grinning Jonah gives us a thumbs-up from the mouth of a happy whale, and the tablets of the Ten Commandments and a Torah scroll are inset.

NARRATION:

The Covenant Code was a start, but they needed more. Newly freed from captivity, yet still beholden to a distant empire, and now actually ruled by a divine god? These were a people in desperate need of a new identity. They needed to invent a new narrative of who they were, and what that even meant. They needed a founding mythology.

Thus came stories of Moses and Noah… of Abraham and Jacob… of Exodus and kings and covenants. Over the coming centuries (mostly between 450 and 350 BC), such stories would be invented, remembered, borrowed, redacted, and repurposed—becoming the books of the Old Testament.

But these weren’t mere stories.

These were holy texts: the one place where they could find anything their sovereign god had said.

These books were filled with rules, regulations, and procedures: all the laws which governed their society.

You couldn’t amend them or get new laws, of course. How could there be any higher authority?

Instead of a sovereign making the laws, it was the laws that were sovereign.

In other words, their scriptures were sovereign!

How was that supposed to work?