Across the ancient world, the image of God did the work of God on the earth. In the Israelite context as portrayed in the Hebrew Bible, people are in the image of God in that they embody his qualities and do his work. They are symbols of his presence and act on his behalf as his representatives...
The foundation of Israel’s understanding of human dignity was the democratized image of God passed on generation by generation, beginning from a pair of primordial ancestors. In the large ancient Near East, human dignity was located in the service to the gods as their needs were addressed.
Moses’ choice of the concept of the “image of god” to describe humans would have revolutionary implications for all time, but especially for the people in Moses’ day. If each individual person was the image of God on earth, then each is a priest and has access to God in much the same way as pagan priests who had exclusive access to their idols. The concept foreshadowed Moses calling the citizens of the new nation a kingdom of priests, as he wrote in Exodus 19:6, “you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Much later, the Apostle John referred to Christians in the same way: “You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.” (Rev. 5:10) “and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father...” (Rev. 1:6)
In terms of government and economics, being the image of God on earth meant that each person enjoyed the same status of a king or pharaoh in terms of owning property and authority. Kings ruled over their subjects in the pagan world because of their unique status as the image of a god. By making each person equal to the king, God is declaring that no man has the right to rule over another just as no king has the right to rule over other kings.
The Bible prohibited the Hebrews from making images of God or any other thing supposed to be divine: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exod. 20:4). God prohibited such artificial images because he had already created a representation of himself on earth in humans. God told Noah and his sons that he will require an accounting for the spilling of human blood, for humankind is made in his image (Gen. 9:6). Through the concept of the image of God, the privileges of the few were transferred to the many.
No king
Philosophers and politicians have debated government for millennia, but God made very clear the type of government he prefers. He created only one system of government in the history of mankind. And, since the form of government and the laws regarding property determine the economic system, God has declared in the Torah the economic system he prefers. What God wants is also what is best for mankind. It will not only encourage godliness and peace, but economic prosperity as well.
The most striking feature of the Torah government is the radical degree to which it differed from that of ancient Egypt. Moses was raised in the pharaonic school and enjoyed an education in the Egyptian wisdom that awed the Greeks. The children of the pharaoh, nobility and foreign vassals attended the boarding school that trained them in the knowledge and skills needed to run the country in the future while indoctrinating them in the worship of the pharaoh and Egyptian philosophy. The curriculum included reading and writing in the Egyptian language and Babylonian cuneiform, mathematics, music, and military strategy. It’s likely that Moses lived and went to school with the pharaoh who reigned during the exodus and died in the Red Sea.
Israel could not have been more different from the governments of ancient Egypt and Babylon, or for that matter any government since. Israel’s government instantiated the idea of each person bearing the image of God: it had no human king because each person enjoyed the authority of kings over his property. That meant Israel had no executive branch. There was no prime minister or president, no bureaucracies, cabinet heads, or ministers of trade, roads, defense, agriculture, health, environment or the hundreds of other agencies that breed and clog the machinery of modern governments. Israel had no standing army, no police, pentagon, FBI, ATF, NSA, CIA or any other of the alphabet soups of agencies, so Israelis did not have to pay taxes to fund an overbearing bureaucracy as did ancient Egyptians, U.S. citizens and most taxpayers of the world. Family members performed the police work of catching criminals while service in the military was voluntary, except for peer and family pressure. Egypt’s executive and legislative powers resided with the pharaoh, according to Walton:
As individuals who stood between the divine and human worlds, kings were expected to discern the divine will and facilitate its execution. In Egypt the almost total immersion of the persona of the king into the divine realm led inexorably to the conclusion that the acts of Pharaoh were the acts of deity.
Whereas the Sumerians and Egyptians saw their kings as gods or descendants of gods, Israelis had very little good to say about them. Kings are absent in the early chapters of Genesis and when they appear Moses was critical of the violence and arrogance of Lamech and the imperialism of Nimrod. God was very displeased with Israelis for demanding a king in I Samuel 8 and besides David, Hezekiah and Josiah, the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures have very little good to say about any Israeli king.
The Israel created by God had no legislature. God retained Israel’s legislative authority and only God could make or change laws. That was necessary since God had created mankind in his image, which made it impossible for one man, or a group of men, to have legislative authority over others. All men were equal in terms of the authority to create legislation, which meant no authority. God gave the first law to Moses on Mount Sinai and again after the forty years of wilderness wanderings just before Moses died and Joshua led the nation to conquer Canaan. The second issue of the law contained some minor additions and changes to the first, but from that point on no man could add to or subtract from the law. Moses needed to be a prophet as well as a judge in order for God to give Israel his laws, but Joshua was no prophet and only one of the judges was a prophet, so no one could add to the law. One of the most important jobs of the priesthood was to teach the people God’s laws.
Courts and law
The only branch of modern or ancient government that God instituted in Israel was the court system. The courts of ancient Israel settled disputes between citizens while families and tribes enforced court decisions. The lower courts judged the most common disputes while the more difficult ones filtered up through the system to Moses. Originally, Moses tried to judge all of Israel by himself, but his father-in-law, Jethro, wisely encouraged him to spread the burden among the people. After the conquest of Canaan, the lowest courts convened at the gates of cities large enough to have walls with the elders of the city acting as judges and jury. The people chose respected men as justices who had the wealth necessary to allow them to take time off from work to participate in court.
Israelis paid no taxes to support an executive, legislative or even judicial branch of government. The only tax required was a tithe (10 percent) paid to support the temple and priesthood. God did not give the tribe of Levi land in Canaan for the priesthood, although they could own houses in towns and work at a trade. God intended the tithe to support the priests and provide for the poor. From the perspective of government, the tithe was voluntary: no army, IRS, police or other tax collector would extract payment or throw a citizen in jail for not paying the tithe. As far as we know, no one could take a citizen to court and charge him with a crime for not paying the tithe. Only God enforced the tithe because it served as a test of the people’s devotion to God. A godly people would pay the tithes and offerings and cause the temple and priesthood to flourish. But when the people rebelled against God, the priesthood suffered. Such may have been the case in Judges chapter 17 where we read about a priest named Jonathan wandering the countryside looking for a means of support and being taken in as the family priest by Micah. On the other hand, the priest may have been lazy and did not want to submit to the life of a good priest.
Preachers who emphasiz
e tithing today should keep in mind that God instituted the tithe in a government with no taxes, which left believers with more of their own money to live on. U.S. governments - local, state and federal - take close to half of the income of workers in the U.S. and make tithing on gross income much more difficult than it would have been for Israelis under the judges.
According to some Jewish scholars, the Torah law has a mere 613 commandments. Compare that to the tens of thousands of laws regulating American life. The Federal Register publishes only new regulations and has averaged 75,000 pages each year since 1970, totaling over three million pages of new regulations in the past forty years alone. In 1925, all the federal codes could be contained in one four-to-five-inch thick volume. By 1998 the code took 201 volumes on nineteen feet of shelf space but in 2013 it spread out to twenty-five feet. That does not include the tens of thousands of pages of common law created by court decisions or the laws and regulations passed at the state, county and city levels.
Three types of law make up the Torah – religious, moral and civil. Religious law covers the operation of the temple and sacrifices and what God requires of his followers, such as Sabbath observance. Moral law includes responsibilities that people owe others as a result of our relationship to God, such as the requirements to give to the poor, not covet or bear false witness. The failure to perform these duties incurs moral guilt, but does not rise to the level of criminality. The civil law covers criminal activity such as theft, rape, violence, fraud or murder, which the courts adjudicated.
Protestant theologians have maintained the division of the Torah law into moral, religious and civil. For example, John Calvin, quoted by Fred Graham in The Constructive Revolutionary: John Calvin and His Socio-Economic Impact, partly based his defense of charging interest on loans to the fact that the prohibitions of usury were part of the civil law: “The law of Moses (Deut. 23:19) was political, and should not influence us beyond what justice and philanthropy will bear.” In other words, Calvin believed that God had instituted the political (civil) law of ancient Israel for a particular place and time and did not intend it to apply for all time as he did the moral law. The moral law is universal because it issues from God’s character, which never changes.
The courts did not get involved in religious or moral law. They left religious law to the priests and enforcement of moral law to families and God. Joseph Lifshitz wrote in his book Judaism, Law and the Free Market: an Analysis that giving to the poor was not a legal obligation:
For this reason, the Sages defined charity foremost as a moral principle, not a juridical one. Thus, they admonished those who would take money from others in order to give it to the poor: ‘Better is he who gives a smaller amount of his own charity than one who steals from others to give a large amount of charity.’
All the limitations placed by Jewish religious law on property rights are of a moral nature – they have no legal or monetary standing, and there is nothing in them that changes the legal definition of property rights. Hence, any interpretation that claims the existence of distributive justice in Jewish law as separate from the individual’s religious identity, and defines individual obligations in legal terms and not in moral ones, must be merely a reduction of Jewish Law’s theological principles to an anachronistic political position, and in doing so, also distorts the judicial principle.
A superficial reading of the Torah has convinced many people that all 613 commands in the Torah are civil laws that the courts, the only governmental institution in the nation, must enforce. But Torah scholars have stubbornly disagreed through the ages. Israelis could not take neighbors to court for coveting, for example, or breaking the Sabbath laws. Nor could they sue a neighbor in court for refusing to abide by the poor laws, such as the prohibition of harvesting the corners of a field.
Some scholars will argue that the division of the Mosaic Law into the three divisions is a recent idea, having appeared only in the Reformation. However, judges in ancient Israel must have confronted the issue of whether forced morality and religion are true morality and true religion. They could not have avoided it. If forced by the power of the government, both morality and religion degenerate into ritualism, as often happened anyway in Israel and was one of God’s most frequent complaints against them. Considering that the rest of the Hebrew Bible places great importance on Israelis voluntarily following the moral and religious laws, it seems unlikely that the early judges would have been unaware of the problem. Two passages from the ancient Jewish book Ethics of the Fathers quoted in Brad H. Young’s Meet the Rabbis: Rabbinic Thought and the Teachings of Jesus illustrate the limited nature of the Israeli courts:
(5:11) Seven kinds of punishment enter into the world on account of seven major transgressions. When some people give their tithes and others do not, then famine ensues from drought. Some people suffer hunger while others are full. When they all decide not to give tithes at all, a famine ensues from civil disorder and drought. If they resolve not to give the dough-cake (Numbers 15:20), a deadly famine comes. So a pestilence may come into the world to fulfill those death penalties threatened in the Torah which is not given over to human court systems, and for the breaking of the laws regarding the produce of the seventh year. (Leviticus 25:1-7) [Emphasis not in the original]
(5:12) During four seasons of time pestilence increases: in the fourth year, in the seventh, at the conclusion of the seventh year, and at the conclusion of the Feast of Tabernacles in each year. In the fourth year, it increases on account of failure to give the tithe to the poor in the third year (Deuteronomy 14:28-29). In the seventh year, it increases on account of failure to give the tithe to the poor in the sixth year; at the conclusion of the seventh year, on account of the failure of observing the law regarding the fruits of the seventh years, and at the conclusion of the Feast of Tabernacles in each year, for robbing the poor of the grants that are legally assigned to them.
The last sentence in the first paragraph is bolded for emphasis. Both passages demonstrate that Moses left the enforcement of the moral laws in the Torah to God, not the courts. God would punish violations with drought, famine and pestilence. God used war with Syria and Babylon to punish idolatry, not the courts. Moses specified what types of cases the courts were to adjudicate:
Purchase and sale (Lev. 25:14).
Liability of a paid depositary (Ex. 22:9).
Loss for which a gratuitous borrower is liable (Ex. 22:13-14) .
Inheritances (Num. 27:8-11).
Damage caused by an uncovered pit (Ex. 21:33-34) .
Injuries caused by beasts (Ex. 21:35-36) .
Damage caused by trespass of cattle (Ex. 22:4) .
Damage caused by fire (Ex. 22:5) .
Damage caused by a gratuitous depositary (Ex. 22:6-7) .
Other cases between a plaintiff and a defendant (Ex. 22:8) .
Property
As God’s representative on earth, having been created in his image, mankind exercises dominion over the earth as if he were God and as long as he acts within God’s mandates. A quick search through a concordance for other verses using the Hebrew word for dominion, radah, reveals the extent of that dominion. Those verses use the word in the context of a king exercising complete control over his realm. Man expresses his dominion over the earth partly by enjoying it. As Lifshitz wrote:
Man’s dominion finds expression, first of all, through his enjoyment of the good of creation…the Jewish sources teach that man is entitled, even obligated, to take pleasure in the world. This is not an endorsement of hedonism; rather, the aim is to enable man to actualize the potential hidden in creation and thereby to bring the work of creation to completion. By benefitting from the world, man infuses it with spiritual content, which serves as a link between the Creator and creation. “If one sees beautiful creatures and beautiful trees,” the Talmud teaches, “he says: ‘Blessed is he who has such in his world.’” This is not simply an expression of gratitude but an act of elevating the mundane. This is why the Rabbis taught
that “man will have to account for all that he sees with his eyes and does not partake of.” When we deny ourselves the experiences of this world, even the simplest of pleasures, we cut the creation of God off from its higher source and condemn it to a crude, brutish existence. Judaism insists that man would not limit himself to his bare necessities but instead delight in the goodness of the world as an expression of his dominion over it.
Asceticism did not come from Judaism, but from pagan Greek and Romans. Ultimately, man articulates his dominion through his creativity; one of several traits mankind shares with God and distinguishes him from animals. The church fathers held that the world belongs to God, and man in his state of sinfulness has no right to exercise absolute dominion over it. Judaism, however, insisted that man is required not only to be involved in the world but also to perfect it through creative acts. According to Judaism, man’s creative development of the world is the ultimate expression of his unique status.
Judaism anchors property rights to the principles of God having created mankind in His image and having given him dominion over the earth and all other creatures. Only through his property rights can man actualize his role as the image of God with dominion over the earth. And as Lifshitz wrote, “…the right to private property in Judaism is nearly absolute and can be restricted only in the most extreme circumstances.”
Of course, one might argue that God may have given mankind as a whole dominion over the earth, but not individuals. In other words, the dominion is corporate. However, the Torah makes clear that the dominion applies to individuals. God gave the newly conquered land of Canaan to tribes who then divided it among families. The law then specifies how families must relate to each other concerning land and other property. They were
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