A Lawyer's Studies in Biblical Law.
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A LAWYER'S STUDIES IN BIBLICAL LAW. THE POWERS OF THE PATRIARCH. By Dav1d Werner Amram. THE patriarch had a two-fold legal status, he controlled the internal affairs of the family and represented it before the outer world. As was indicated in the article on "The Patriarchal System," the heads of the houses in their capacity as representatives of the family met in their councils and gradually built up a system of public law, which largely helped to undermine their own ancient pre rogatives. We are not at present concerned with the Jewish public law, our interest be ing confined to consideration of the status of the patriarch as the head of the family in the exercise of his powers over its members. Originally his power rested on might, and was uncontrolled and unrestricted. Its ab soluteness is best illustrated by the fact that the patriarch exercised the right of life and death over his children. When Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac (Genesis xx, 2), and when Jephthah actually sacrificed his daughter (Judges xi, 30-40), neither the con temporaries of the actors in these family dramas, nor the chroniclers who record them, see anything illegal or immoral in their acts. When Reuben on leaving his two children as pledges with his father says to him (Genesis xlii, 37), " Slay my two sons if I bring him (Benjamin) not to thee," and when Judah, upon receiving a report of his daughter-inlaw Tamar's supposed immorality, said (Genesis xxxviii, 24), " Bring her forth and let her be burnt," they were simply exercis ing the powers of the patriarchs in dealing with members of their family. The recognition of the sacredness of hu man life has arisen among men not by reason of any innate moral sense which condemns
murder, but because of the active and per sistent objections the people had to being killed. The legal and social convention, now generally recognized, that murder is wrong, grew out of the instinct of self-preservation which prompted men to spare life, when, by so doing, they improved the prospect of hav ing their own lives spared. In the early patriarchal days " Thou shalt not kill " really meant "thou shalt not kill the member of another family," because the legal conse quences of murder were visited on the mur derer only when the victim of his crime was a person who was not under his potestas. Eventually public policy which restricted the right to kill as between members of different families, checked the power of the patriarch over members of his own family. Other factors contributed to this result. Although we find that Isaac was entirely willing to be made a sacrifice at his father's request, it can be readily understood that grown and bearded men, with families of their own, would not tamely submit to the uncontrolled exercise of such vital power by their father over them, and in the Mosaic age the law had progressed so far that the life of the child had become as sacred as that of the father. The last stage of the exercise of this power was the offering of the child as a sacrifice to the Deity. This remnant of the old unrestricted power was preserved by ecclesiastical sanction. As long as the priesthood considered human sacrifices acceptable to the Deity, a justifica tion still remained for the exercise of this ancient patriarchal right, but after the Levitical code had pronounced the law (Leviticus xviii, 21) " Thou shalt not let any of thy
