Our next ‘jewish invention’ myth is the claim that jews first created the legal concept of equality before the law.
Debbie Lechtman claims as follows:
‘Equality before the law was also an ancient Israelite idea. The Israelites were the first not to assign their kings divine rights; in other words, Israelites did not believe that their kings ruled in the name of God. As such, kings, too, had to obey the Ten Commandments and the other laws outlined in the Torah. In other words: the kings were not above the law.
In the Torah, Leviticus argues that all should be treated equally before the law: “You shall not commit a perversion of justice; you shall not favor the poor and you shall not honor the great; with righteousness shall you judge your fellow.”’ (1)
The problem with this again is that it is simply wrong.
The first mention of equality before the law that was actually implemented is given to us by Thucydides in his ‘History of the Peloponnesian War’ – published circa 400 B.C. – in the famous 431 B.C funeral oration of Pericles where we read Pericles describing the laws of Athens thus:
‘If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if to social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way.’ (2)
This occurs long before we hear of any jewish sources on the matter and as such – given classical Greece’s outstanding role in the intellectual life of the classical and medieval worlds – the source of any jewish ideas of equality before the law is almost certainly the Greeks given that the Greeks soon ruled the jews after this time (as the Macedonian Empire from 332 B.C. to 312 B.C. and as the Seleucid Empire from 312 B.C. to 165 B.C.) and would have transmitted the ideas to them which then got transposed into jewish thought in turn.
Thus we can see that the origin of equality before the law is Greek and not jewish in the slightest.
References
(1) https://www.rootsmetals.com/blogs/news/israelite-jewish-inventions-during-ancient-times
(2) Thuc. 2:37
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