Note: Scott Lively holds a Certificate in International Human Rights, earned at the U.N. Affiliated Institute of International Human Rights in Strasbourg in 1997, and has served as a consultant on human rights issues in numerous countries.
World leaders are gathered in New York this week to debate an international order that many of them no longer obey and fewer still understand.
Only by establishing and maintaining a slate of universal moral and practical norms have the diverse cultures of the world been able to cooperate for mutual benefit – albeit imperfectly, due to the realities of human nature. Natural law, used to translate Biblical law into terms more palatable to other religious systems, has been the essential fabric upon which modern civilization has been embroidered. This was an intentional project of Jews and Christian Hebraists from the Protestant Reformation onward. Jewish and Christian refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, sharing core elements of millennial hope, cooperated to recover the Israelite Republic as the optimal governmental form to usher in the Millennial Kingdom.
God’s covenant with Abraham, recorded in Genesis 12 around 2000 B.C., marked a new foundation for civilization. The Hebrews were chosen (I contend) to display the best and worst of human nature, measured by obedience to God’s law. That divine perspective sees the world as a created order authored by God, filled with reason, logic and connection. From it flows natural law: a moral order discernible by reason rather than mere human command.
Hebrew Scripture is the original source of the protean forms of natural law. Genesis 1 portrays a created order marked by purpose, distinction and inherent logic. The Noahide covenant in Genesis 9 establishes a universal moral code binding on all humanity after the flood. Proverbs 8 presents wisdom as a cosmic principle present at creation. Psalm 19 declares that the heavens reveal God’s glory without speech. Amos 1–2, around 760 B.C., judges surrounding nations by universal standards of justice, not merely Israelite covenant law.
Secular history attributes natural law to the Greeks, specifically Anaximander who, in the 6th century B.C., proposed the apeiron – an eternal, boundless principle – as the origin of things, reflecting cosmic order and justice in nature.
However, Joel 3:6 refers to Hebrew slaves sold to the Greeks, and I contend they introduced Hebrew natural law concepts at least two centuries earlier. Anaximander lived in Miletus, an Ionian trading hub tied to the Levant and Phoenicia, with a large slave population, presumably including Hebrews carrying the biblical worldview. A seventh-century B.C. ostracon from Naukratis bearing a Yahwistic name supports my hypothesis.
Scholars differ on the dating of Joel, but I favor the early date of ninth or eighth century B.C., because Joel’s text mentions neither Babylonian exile nor Persian rule, its enemies are pre-exilic, its style closely aligns with Amos and Hosea, and its temple focus fits the first-temple era. That dating places Hebrew captives in the Greek world well before Anaximander.
Returning to the Reformation era, Jews and Proto-Protestants believed they could establish a political order patterned after the Israelite Republic, serving the common goals of overthrowing Spain’s tyrannical Roman Catholic empire and replacing the “Divine Right of Kings” with what would later be called constitutionalism.
The Father of Christian Hebraism, Johannes Reuchlin (whose great-nephew and protege Philipp Melanchthon tutored Martin Luther in Greek and wrote the Augsburg Confession) reopened Christian access to Hebrew Scriptures. Then, at the University of Basel, Johannes Buxtorf the Elder and his son Johannes Buxtorf the Younger formalized Hebrew studies for Christians, establishing a Hebraist pipeline of scholars and literature, including the respublica Hebraeorum – casting Israel as a republic under divine law rather than a sacral monarchy.
Hugo Grotius, the Father of International Law, built upon those Hebrew sources to seek a natural law common to the nations. John Selden organized that law around the Noahide commandments and presented ancient Israel as the first juridical state. John Locke inherited that reading and translated it into the practical political philosophy adopted by the founders of the American republic (the third of three preceded by the Dutch and English prototypes).
When that scholarly stream entered English Common Law the tradition already contained equity, reason and a higher law that restrained arbitrary power. Natural law supplied the philosophical and theological articulation. William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769) is the clearest statement of the synthesis. The law of nature, coeval with mankind and dictated by God Himself, is superior in obligation to any other. It binds all countries at all times. No human law contrary to it is valid. Municipal law derives force from conformity to this higher law. Blackstone rooted the rights of persons, the principles of property, the wrongfulness of certain crimes, and the structure of English legal reasoning in that foundation. His work became the standard text for lawyers in England and in the American colonies. Through Blackstone, a natural-law understanding of justice – shaped by biblical and Hebraic sources – entered Anglo-American constitutionalism.
The harmony of natural law with biblical law is visible in the founding documents of the modern order. The Declaration of Independence (1776) appeals to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It holds certain truths self-evident: that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, and that governments exist to secure those rights. This is natural-law language formed by the biblical and Blackstonian inheritance.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) affirms the inherent dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family. Framed in more secular terms after the Second World War, its core claims – life, liberty, security of person, equality before the law, freedom from arbitrary power – continue the same tradition. They presuppose a moral order that transcends any single culture or regime and that obliges nations to limit power for the sake of human dignity.
In both documents the long project bears fruit: biblical moral substance rendered through natural-law reasoning into norms capable of commanding the assent of diverse peoples. The rules-based international order, for all its imperfections, depends upon this foundation. When the foundation is neglected or denied – when law is reduced to mere will or power – the capacity for genuine cooperation erodes.
Natural law remains the essential fabric. It is the means by which the enduring moral truths revealed in Scripture have been, and can continue to be, made serviceable for the governance of a fallen yet still ordered world.
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[ H/T WorldNetDaily ]
