The Jewish Origins of the Western Disobedience Tradition

By Yoram Hazony

Civil disobedience did not, as we are taught, begin with Socrates and Antigone, but with a Hebrew Bible that rejected the supremacy of human law.

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Of course, the prophets did not draw from this the conclusion that the state should risk dissolution over every wrong done; on the contrary, in most of the celebrated confrontations between the prophets and the Jewish kings, the intention was to humble the ruler and bring the behavior of the state back into line, thereby strengthening its claim to rule rather than undermining it. Such was the case when Nathan accused King David of arranging the death of one of his subjects to die in battle that he might have his wife; such too was the case in Elijah’s crusade against the abominations of Ahab.⁷⁰ But some of the great prophets did in fact draw the ultimate conclusion when faced with irreperable tyranny and corruption, organizing active disobedience against the Jewish kings and even plotting revolution. Thus when Saul’s rule becomes intolerable, the prophet Samuel declares David his successor, in effect overthrowing the ruling line.⁷¹ The prophet Elisha goes further, pronouncing Jehu king during the villainous rule of Jehoram and Jezebel, thereby touching off the execution of the royal family and its priesthood.⁷² Similarly, when the prophet Jeremiah believes that Jerusalem is about to be destroyed because of the suicidal policies of Zedekiah’s government, he calls for the people to disobey the law and go over to the Babylonian enemy.⁷³

Nor does the Jewish tradition of opposition to state injustice end with the destruction of Jerusalem. The biblical history of the Jewish nation closes with the exile of the Jews into Babylonia and then Persia, a turn of events which might have been expected to temper Jewish enthusiasm for uneven fights with authority. It is remarkable that even the biblical books which describe the period of Jewish humiliation and exile in Babylonia and Persia, are as unabashed as their predecessors in advocating disobedience: In the book of Daniel, three Jewish servants of the Babylonian king, Hanania, Mishael and Azaria, brazenly defy the law of the state requiring them to prostrate themselves before a gold statue, telling the king: “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. For our God whom we serve is able to deliver us.... But even if he does not, let it be understood, O King, that we will not serve your gods, nor worship the golden image you have erected.”⁷⁴ Daniel himself later refuses a similar order to worship the Persian king Darius, although the price of his disobedience is to be thrown to the lions.⁷⁵ The book of Esther is even more aggressive, not only sanctioning the violation of unjust laws, but establishing the effectiveness of abrogating other state laws in the pursuit of right. Thus Mordechai’s repeated refusals to obey the king’s edict and prostrate himself before the tyrannical vizier Haman⁷⁶ are only the opening rounds in a campaign against the king’s edict to destroy the Jews—a campaign which includes an illicit court appearance by Mordechai in mourning attire,⁷⁷ his incitement of Esther to enter the throne room unsummoned despite the prohibition against such appearances,⁷⁸ and finally Esther’s two separate decisions to break this law and come before the king to plead for her people, saying: “I will go into the king, though it is against the law, and if I perish, I perish.”⁷⁹ Through their willingness to violate the law at the risk of their lives, Mordechai and Esther eventually manage to depose the vizier, legalize the arming of Jews throughout the empire, and conduct a violent purge of Haman’s supporters which finally succeeds in lifting the threat of annihilation hanging over their people.⁸⁰

The biblical history of the Jewish nation thus closes with Esther’s disobedience, through which the Jews are saved from destruction—much as it begins with their being saved by the disobedience of Shifra, Pu’a and Jochebed. In between, the Hebrew Bible covers a period of nearly a thousand years of the history of the first Jews—as individuals and as a people, in their own land and in exile. And throughout this entire period, in all cases and in every possible context, its message was unambiguous: The laws of men can bind only when they are just. When they are not, the Jew, and every man, is obliged to break the law.

And it was this spirit, too, which animated the subsequent course of Jewish history—from the revolt of the Maccabees against the state-religious edicts of the Seleucid Greeks roughly three centuries after Esther, through the bitterest days of resistance to Roman rule, and on into the crystallization of the rabbinic tradition demanding disobedience to state laws which collide with the higher law. Indeed, never in the history of the Jewish tradition has the concept of disobedience in the face of the injustices of the state been challenged, and it remains as valid today as in the time of Abraham.⁸¹

The fusion of the roles of king and high priest throughout the ancient world ensured that the dictates of government were everywhere considered identical with the dictates of justice. By contrast, the fundamental Jewish political innovation, and that which ultimately separated ancient Israel from the nations, was the understanding that no earthly power, no matter how well guided, can be the final measure of right and wrong. The prophets drew a line which had never been drawn before, declaring the king, whether he was God’s anointed or not, to be only human, his actions prone to error and evil like those of any human being, and that there was nothing the state or its official priesthood could do to make an injustice right.

But the prophets, while wielding none of the institutional trappings of power, were not entirely powerless. The function which they undertook in Israel—to critique the state, to expose its excesses, to rally the people to oppose and violate unjust laws, and, in the extreme case, to take the lead in seeking the removal of evildoers from power—was supported by their unique status within the Jewish tradition as the guardians of the truth in the face of power, the first “watchdog” group. It was the support for this institution of the prophet among the populace, the recognition of what we would today call its “constitutional” standing, both in the marketplace and in the palace, which gave it the power it needed to persist from one generation to the next, sometimes in the face of merciless opposition from the king. And while it was never exactly safe to be a prophet in Israel, this “constitutional” status within the Jewish polity was sufficient to afford those individuals who determined to say the truth aloud a degree of freedom—freedom of speech, assembly and religious and political doctrine—never before mustered under any regime on earth. It was the institution of prophecy among the Jews which was the origin of the Western concept of freedom of conscience.⁸²

Yet despite the repeated and overt calls for resistance against state injustice in the Hebrew Bible, scholarship on the subject has rarely sought to trace the disobedience teaching to its biblical source. Without being aware of it, most contemporary writers draw their understanding of the history of political ideas from nineteenth-century German historiography which, following Hegel—and often sliding into shameless anti-Semitism—sought to show that virtually anything of value which has come down to the West is directly descended from Greek philosophy;⁸³ the Hebrew Bible, on the other hand, “whose basic premise may be said to be the implicit rejection of philosophy,”⁸⁴ has been dismissed categorically as having been without significant influence. But in the case of the idea of disobedience, the Jewish influence is so in evidence—and any other possible competing claim so forced—that were this not the standard history, one would have to dismiss it as ludicrous.

In seeking the intellectual source for disobedience theory, writers generally turn to Greece, where three sources are mentioned again and again: Socrates, Aristotle and Sophocles’ fictitious heroine, Antigone. These are sometimes said to have influenced the Roman thinker Cicero, who in turn inspired resistance theory to develop in the Church; some writers even skip the Church entirely, and go directly from Roman thought to Locke—in 1690 CE.⁸⁵ But an interrogation of the Greek sources proves them to be devoid of unequivocal disobedience teachings, even as individual cases, and certainly to offer nothing similar to the vast tradition of disobedience embodied in the political institution of the Jewish prophets.

One must turn first to Socrates, whose systematic public humiliation of Athenian fetishes in his quest for truth is one of the great legacies of intellectual independence and courage bequeathed to mankind. Nevertheless, a crusader for disobedience he was not. Socrates spent almost his entire life within the confines of the city of Athens, and his relationship to that city was diametrically opposed to that of the Jewish shepherds, whose view of civilization was from the outside: That is, Socrates never swerved from the quintessentially Athenian view that the just man recognizes that he owes everything to the city-state—and submission to its laws, even if they be unjust, most of all. The great drama of Socrates’ trial at the hands of his fellow Athenians, who charge him with heresy and “corrupting the youth,” is a case in point. What Socrates actually did during his life was to teach the youth of Athens to see the city and its institutions critically and with brutal honesty, a calling not dissimilar to that of the prophets in Israel, and one which Socrates clearly does not believe to have been in violation of any law. On the contrary, at his trial he argues that Athens should be grateful for this service, and proposes that the city should pay him a stipend to pursue it. The Athenians are unimpressed by this proposal, and by a narrow margin the court sentences Socrates to death, a decision which resembles the injustices of Jewish kings depicted in the Hebrew Bible—Saul’s decision to have Jonathan killed for violating his law, or his murderous campaign against David, or Ahab’s vendetta against Elijah, all readily come to mind. As in the biblical narratives, Socrates receives moral support from individuals who believe the ruling of the state to have been unjust, and who offer to help him flee Athens rather than die at its hands. But whereas in the Bible these efforts to avert injustice are lauded and rewarded—Jonathan is saved by an open confrontation between his supporters and the king; David and Elijah both succeed in fleeing into the wilderness—Socrates refuses to accept assistance and escape the country. Instead, he takes the hemlock handed him by the jailer, servant of the state, and drinks it himself.⁸⁶

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