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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In Plato’s Crito, Socrates explains his reasons for obeying the unjust command of the Athenian state, by envisioning the accusation that the laws themselves would level against him, should he choose to harm them by escaping execution. In a discourse which constitutes one of the classic rejections of disobedience on record, the laws of Athens tell Socrates:

Could you, in the first place, deny that you are our offspring and servant, both you and your forefathers? ... Do you think you have [a] right of retaliation against your country and its laws? That if we [i.e., the laws] undertake to destroy you and think it right to do so, you can undertake to destroy us, as far as you can, in return? ... Is your wisdom such as not to realize that your country is to be honored more than your mother, your father, and all your ancestors, that it is more to be revered and more sacred, and that it counts for more among the gods and sensible men, that you must worship it, yield to it and placate its anger more than your father’s? You must either persuade it or obey its orders, and endure in silence whatever it instructs you to endure, whether blows or bonds, and if it leads you into war to be wounded or killed, you must obey. To do so is right.... Both in war and in courts and everywhere else, one must obey the commands of one’s city and country, or persuade it as to the nature of justice.⁸⁷

Far from being a disobedience theorist, Socrates was in fact an unflinching supporter of the pagan idea that man is the “offspring and servant” of the state, and therefore must give up his life at the state’s request, even if the request be unjust.⁸⁸

Aristotle is often mentioned in discussions of disobedience theory for his belief in an objective natural law to which state law should in theory conform. But as far as the Jewish claim of a right to disobey unjust law, Aristotle betrays no sympathy for it in either his works on politics or ethics. In fact, so committed was he to the Greek notion of the sanctity of the laws of the state, that he found it difficult to accept that even rulers should seek to alter them for the good of the city.⁸⁹ In fact, the source of the myth that Aristotle supported the concept of disobedience is in his Rhetoric,in which he advises lawyers that if they have “no case according to the law of the land,” they may nevertheless be able to win their case by arguing that the law is unjust⁹⁰—a utilitarian piece of wisdom which offers nothing in terms of an a priori right to disobey the law. The same can be said for the Roman Stoic thinker Cicero, who in the first century BCE—five centuries after the great Jewish prophets—actually did go so far as to argue that an unjust law did not properly deserve to be regarded as law; he therefore supports empowering the courts to sidestep the written rule in such cases.⁹¹ But regarding an individual right of disobedience before state injustice, Cicero too is silent.

In fact, in the eight-hundred-year history of Greco-Roman antiquity before Christianity, Antigone, the third play in Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy, stands out as the single genuine exposition of the case for disobedience before state injustice. In the tragedy, the king orders that Antigone’s dead brother, who is a traitor, be deprived of burial as a sign of disgrace. Antigone argues that the customary laws of the city demand that he be buried, and proceeds to bury him herself. It is typically Greek that while Antigone is depicted as being clearly in the right in defying the king’s decree, she nevertheless ends up paying for her heroism with her life—in stark contrast to the dramas of the Hebrew Bible, in which defiance of injustice is generally depicted as having a good chance of being carried out successfully. Typically Greek, too, is the fact that Antigone disobeys the king in order to obey the law of the state. Indeed, Athenian thought was so immersed in the belief that the just life consists of participating in the life of the city-state that even a radical work such as Antigone found the question of disobedience to the laws themselves untouchable. Only in cases where the ruler was himself in clear violation of the customary laws of the city could the question treated in Antigone even arise.

But as for the question of whether an individual may defy the state and its laws on the grounds of conscience—whether, for example, Antigone would have been right to go about freeing the slaves of Athens when the laws clearly forbade such an action—this issue was never raised by Greek thought. Justice was, for the Greeks, not determined by any conception of right independent of the state, but was itself possible only within the state. The result was that, as in the rest of the ancient world, disobedience to the Athenian state was held to be the ultimate ingratitude, and could hardly merit the name “justice.” In the absence of a separation of the sphere of right from that of worldly power, which was achieved in Israel through the independent “constitutional” standing of the prophet, the Greek moral sense remained stunted, unable to break free of the smothering gratitude each citizen felt towards his parent and creator, the city-state.

Yet if disobedience to unjust laws is not a Greek idea—if it did not, as is claimed, follow a philosophical highway leading inexorably from Athens to Rome to the modern West, and instead originated in the thought of the Jews—how is it that such a revolutionary idea has come to be a cornerstone of the Western political heritage? How, indeed, did the decision at Nuremberg become possible? The answer lies in the thousand-year history of the Western mind’s encounter with the Christian Church, which, despite the circumstances of its birth, eventually came to see the Hebrew prophets as the central model for its relationship to worldly rulers and their states.

Christianity arose in a world that was particularly inhospitable to Jewish ideas of individual disobedience to the state. Rome had become a world empire, succeeding the tyrannies of the Hellenistic Macedonian and Seleucid empires. It was now headed by a god-emperor like all the imperial tyrannies that had preceded it, any question of the rights and liberties of citizens all but dead. The state of the Jews, the last independent Mediterranean people, had been ruthlessly suppressed, and continued talk of defiance looked to be so much foolishness. But at the frontiers, the barbarian hordes moved and chafed, probing for the fault-line in the Roman defenses they knew they would one day find. The dread of the Emperor came to be regarded as the last hope of preventing the final collapse of civilization—and the arrival of far worse.

By the time that Christianity arose as a force, any aspect of Greco-Roman thought which might have been interpreted as allowing for individual resistance had been dead and unmourned for hundreds of years. Hellenistic political thought had jettisoned the individualistic implications of democratic Athens centuries before, and had largely reverted to promulgating theories of the ultimate beneficence of the dictator, whose power and wisdom were considered the sole forces by which society could be saved from its various afflictions. Thus in his De Clementia we find Seneca serving as a mouthpiece for that Roman emperor-god which presumes to be lord over life on earth: “All those many thousands of swords which my peace restrains will be drawn at my nod; what nations shall be utterly destroyed, which banished, which shall receive the gift of liberty, which have it taken from them ... this is mine to decree.”⁹²

It was under such conditions of complete submission to authority that Jesus’ apostles rose to preach, their teachings adapted to a universal audience beset by a universal loss of hope. Certainly, some of the Jewish character of the early Christians was well in evidence in the New Testament writings, with many fundamentally Jewish ideas, such as the existence of a truth transcending the dictates of earthly power, remaining thankfully intact. But the political ideas of the Hebrew Bible could not be taught without being substantially revised. Rome was no Jerusalem—and the emperors were no Jewish kings, ready to suffer the indignities heaped upon them by the independent institution of the prophet. With the most powerful minds of the Roman world singing paeans to the atrocities of Tiberius and Caligula, the harassed and persecuted Christian sect was in no condition to take to the marketplaces and challenge state authority. No longer did Jewish promises of salvation in this world have much appeal; and the apostles began to speak of the next. No longer did the classical Jewish will to fight seem to have much point; and the apostles thought it better if one were to submit to earthly power and receive one’s reward later.

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