Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham

Conclusion

182 Conclusion Patriarchy, the Scripture teaches, is the cornerstone of the right way of life for mankind. The chosen people are a people of patriarchal families. Genesis presents, for all the future generations, models that are meant to guide the Hebrew fathers (and, through them, all fathers everywhere) in their understanding of their sublime responsibilities—and of the grave dangers and temptations that attend those responsibilities. Through the story of Abraham the Bible shows forth the exemplary patriarch, in all his pious glory. But patriarchy in and of itself, even patriarchy inspired by the model of Abraham, is far from su≈cient. In Abraham’s successors, Isaac and Jacob, we witness the decisive limitations of patriarchy, the problems that necessarily attend patriarchy, even when sprung from an Abraham:∞ we learn the crucial reasons why a society of patriarchs requires broadening to a fraternal society (consider Gen. 50:18–end) regulated and guided by a detailed legal code, by the rule of law, finally enforced by a lawful King of Kings. What Scripture will mean by the rule of law is the absolute rule of positive divine law: a code of law made for, but not by, men; a code of law recognizable as wise by human reason (Deut. 4:6–8; cf. 26:18–19) but not deducible from human nature by human reason. In order to understand the character and the need for such a rule of divine positive law, Israel (and we, vicariously) must first experience the unqualified rule of man over man, unlimited by any such higher positive law; and in order to grasp fully what such rule implies, in order to see the ultimate direction toward which it tends, we must watch as the seed of Jacob experience life under a purely human regime in its full development.≤ We must witness the great drama of Egyptian enslavement and Mosaic liberation—the drama whose culmination is the promulgation and reception of the divine law. This legislation lies at the heart of the magnificent structure of the Torah, and its exploration would be, and has been—in the hands of Maimonides above all—the peak of the encounter between political philosophy and the Bible. Conclusion 183 The present book has confined itself to a preliminary task: that of probing and clarifying the divine law’s foundations, laid down in Genesis. At the beginning of Genesis we were confronted with the challenge of the biblical conception of omnipotence, with its correlate, Creation. Then the account of the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge put squarely before us the Bible’s root understanding of sin and of human responsibility for evil. Through following the subsequent unfolding of mankind’s story from the murder of Abel to the destruction of Babel, we began to grasp the scriptural justification for a, or rather the, chosen people—and thereby the basic premises of the political science or royal art implicitly ascribed by the Scripture to Divinity. In the figure and the drama of the exemplary Abraham we learned the decisive lesson about the Bible’s understanding of what is humanly most admirable or meritorious. I hope to have demonstrated how these foundational teachings of the Bible are illuminated when they are interrogated from the perspective of political philosophy. At the same time, I have tried to indicate how political philosophy can contribute to clarifying and legitimating its own doings through such an interrogation. This dialogue requires an approach to the Scripture that treats it as a text to be heeded, and questioned in all seriousness, because one takes seriously the possibility that it may provide the answer to the most important question—the question, How ought I to live? If the Bible is true, then what is called for above all is obedience to the biblical God as simply authoritative. Philosophy as such—so long as it remains true to itself—cannot wholly surrender to such obedience, but philosophy can strive to understand what it might mean to do so; philosophy can thereby bring the legitimacy of its own independence into question , and can thereby seriously entertain the possibility of such surrender. But since this very questioning, since this very interrogation of philosophy by philosophy, remains a philosophic self-questioning, there is entailed a simultaneous questioning of what it is we ought to be and to do, if we are or were to accept the Bible’s authority. And given what we have seen to be...