The philosopher Dallas Willard used to tell a story about a bumper sticker. He was driving one afternoon behind a car that carried the words STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS. It is as ordinary a sentence as American English produces. Bob Marley built a chorus on it. We print it on placards, we chant it in the streets, we hand it down to our children as if it were the opening line of any decent life. And Willard said that as he sat there in traffic reading it, a second sentence arrived in his mind that he had never once seen on any car in his life. No one, he realized, had ever printed a bumper sticker that read STAND UP FOR YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES. No one prints that. No one would buy it. And the longer you sit with the absence, the louder it becomes.
That absence is the subject of this essay. We have built, across the last several centuries, an enormous and still-expanding vocabulary for everything that is owed to us, and almost no vocabulary at all for what we owe. The whole moral imagination of the modern West leans in one direction, toward the claim, the entitlement, the thing I may demand, and away from the obligation, the debt, the thing I am bound to render. I want to ask in this first half how that happened, and whether the structure we lean on can bear the weight we have placed on it.
I do not think it can. I think it was never built to.
So let me make a claim that many readers will want to reject before they have reached the end of the sentence, and I would ask them to wait. The claim is that rights are a kind of fiction. I do not mean that injury is imaginary, or that justice is a delusion, or that the cruelties done to human beings in the name of denying their rights are anything other than real. I mean something narrower and more dangerous than that. I mean that a right is a thing we made and not a thing we found. It belongs to the same family as money, as a border, as the corporation (especially as a person), as the contract. They all share the same features: structures entirely real in their effects, and entirely invented in their origin, that exist because enough people agree to act as though they exist, and that are held in their place by the use and the threat of force. Money is real. You cannot eat without it. But it is not real the way bread is real, and a right is real in the way that money is real and not in the way that bread is. Almost everything in this essay follows from that single distinction. Jeremy Bentham, no friend of sentiment, called the natural rights of the French declaration nonsense upon stilts, and while I will not follow him the whole way into his contempt, I think he saw the architecture clearly. 1
Rights Have a Birthday
The first thing to notice about a right is that it has a birthday. Defenders of natural rights point, understandably, to a long shelf of documents: Magna Carta, the treatises of Locke, the pamphlets of Paine, the American Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Universal Declaration the United Nations published in 1948. It is an impressive shelf. But put a simple question to it. If rights are natural, woven into the human creature as such, present wherever a human being is present, why were they discovered so astonishingly late? Consider simply what is agreed upon as Western tradition. Athens reasoned about justice for centuries and produced no theory of natural rights. Rome built the most sophisticated body of law the ancient world had seen and produced none. The Church governed the moral and legal life of Europe for the better part of a thousand years and produced none. Across all of that reflection, all of that litigation, all of that moral seriousness, the idea of a right belonging by nature to every person simply does not appear. A thing that is supposed to be the very foundation of human dignity went unnoticed by the most reflective civilizations that the west has produced, until quite recently. That is a strange property for a law of nature to have.
Alasdair MacIntyre put the observation at its sharpest. There is, he noted, no expression in any ancient or medieval language that can be correctly translated as a claim of natural rights until close to the end of the Middle Ages, and the absence is not a gap in the surviving records but a gap in the thought itself. The concept was not there to be expressed. From this he drew a conclusion as blunt as any in modern philosophy, that belief in natural rights stands on the same footing as belief in witches and in unicorns, not because the things they name are wicked, but because every serious attempt to demonstrate that they exist has failed. 2 And when the historians go looking for the moment the concept does at last appear, they do not find it descending from heaven. They find it being written, by particular men, in a particular place, for particular reasons. In other words, it is not found in nature but in history. The patient work of Brian Tierney and of Richard Tuck traces the language of subjective rights to the canon lawyers of the twelfth century, jurists working out the property and the standing of persons inside the law of the Church. 3 4
Rights were not unveiled to humanity by nature, they were drafted by and for humans.
This is why Magna Carta, for all its grandeur, is the wrong place to begin the story, or rather it is the right place to begin a different story than the one we usually tell. The barons who forced that charter on a cornered king in 1215 were not claiming rights that belonged to all men everywhere. They were extracting specific liberties for specific people, customary privileges wrung from a sovereign by the credible threat of war. Which is exactly the point. The earliest of the great rights documents of the west records not the discovery of something eternal but the transfer of something contingent, granted by power because power had been compelled to grant it. That is the true genealogy of a right, and it is written on the face of the founding charter for anyone willing to read it plainly. Those who wish to push the lineage further back sometimes reach for the Cyrus Cylinder, a clay artifact ca. the 530s BCE that a more recent age has been pleased to call the first charter of human rights. But the scholars who can actually read the Akkadian are nearly unanimous that it is no such thing. It is a royal inscription of an entirely conventional Mesopotamian kind, a king announcing his own legitimacy and his building works. The human rights reading was laid upon it in the twentieth century, by people who wanted an ancient pedigree for a modern invention. The wanting is itself the evidence. We do not have to manufacture an ancestry for the things that were truly there from the beginning.
There is a simpler test than any of this, and it cuts to the bone. The things in this family, rights and laws and money and borders and contracts, are precisely the things that can be broken. You cannot break any physical law that we know of (so far). If you appear to, it only means we stated the law imprecisely. But you can break a speed limit, and you can violate a right, and you can counterfeit a currency, and you can default on a contract, and the possibility of the breaking is not a defect in these things, it is their signature. A norm that can be transgressed is by that very fact a made thing and not a found one, because only the things we have constructed have the kind of being that can be defied. The unbreakable belongs to nature. The breakable belongs to us. The philosopher John Searle gave this whole family its proper name. He called its members institutional facts and set them against what he called brute facts. 5 A mountain is a brute fact; it is there whether or not anyone agrees. Money, property, marriage, the nation, the corporation, the contract, and yes, the right, are institutional facts; they exist only because a community collectively accepts that they exist and lends them their force. This is not a slur. Institutional facts are among the most powerful things in human life. But they have a different mode of being than the mountain, and the entire argument of this essay turns on refusing to confuse the two.
A reader may answer that lateness proves nothing, since the calculus and the germ were also discovered late and are real. But notice the difference, because it is the whole difference. Once the calculus was found it compelled the assent of everyone competent to follow it, and it needed no enforcement, because the integral does not require a magistrate. Once the germ was found it went on causing disease in those who denied it exactly as in those who believed. The mark of a genuine discovery is that it enforces itself. A right enforces nothing. It is contested in every generation, and where it is not backed by power it accomplishes precisely nothing. To see why, we have to look at the shape of the thing.
A right has a shape, and the shape is a quarrel. Notice when the word appears in actual human speech. No one invokes their rights in the middle of a happy collaboration. The word surfaces at the moment of conflict and only then, because a right is the form a demand takes when it is aimed at an adversary.
A right is the grammar of the standoff.
You can see this most plainly in the very document Americans revere most on the subject, the Bill of Rights, which on inspection contains almost no rights at all. It names no human goods, paints no portrait of a flourishing life, describes no duty of care that any person owes to any other. It is a list of restraints upon a government. Congress shall make no law. Shall not be infringed. Shall not be violated. Shall not be required. From beginning to end it is a hedge thrown up around a dangerous concentration of power by people who simply did not trust it, which is a wise thing to build, but it is a treaty between suspicious parties and not a description of the good. And what is true of the right is true of the law that enforces it. A law, stripped of its robes, is a norm written in procedural language and backed by the threat of force. 6 That is not a cynical definition; it is very close to what the most clear-eyed students of law have always taken it to be. Remove the procedure and the force and you are left with a suggestion. Which means that law, like the right it serves, is conflict-shaped to its core. It presumes parties who must be restrained from one another, and it speaks the language of penalty because penalty is the only language the structure knows.
Simone Weil saw to the bottom of this. The whole vocabulary of rights, she observed, belongs to the register of the marketplace, of measure and exchange, of who has more and who has less, of claims lodged and claims contested. 7 It carries, she said, a commercial flavor it can never quite wash off. When a right is invoked, something is being bargained over. And whatever else the deepest human obligations are, they are not bargains. The mother does not hold a contract with the child. The vocabulary of rights cannot reach the thing that matters most, because it was built for the courtroom and not for the bond. Here, then, is the rule the whole first half has been circling. Whatever is summoned only by conflict was built for conflict, and will reproduce conflict wherever it is installed as a foundation. Rights are conflict-shaped. Laws are conflict-shaped. To build a society upon them as its first principle is to set the quarrel into the foundation stone and then wonder why the house is forever at war with itself.
There remains the hardest of these observations, and it is the one that turns the argument from a historical curiosity into an indictment. A right that no power will vindicate is not a right. It is a wish with good grammar. The right exists, as a fact in the world rather than a sentence on a page, exactly where and exactly insofar as some force stands ready to make it good, and nowhere else. We can watch this in something as small as a speed limit. The sign says fifty-five. The number is set down in law, properly enacted, valid in every sense the word can bear. And every driver alive knows that the number is one thing and the radar is another, that the limit lives or dies on the presence of the trooper, and that on the empty highway at three in the morning the fifty on the sign has the binding force of a rumor. The law did not stop existing when it stopped being enforced. But see what that tells us. Its existence on the page and its existence in the world are two different existences, and only the second one ever stopped anyone from doing anything. The same is true, all the way up the scale, of the grandest right ever written and of the currency in your pocket, which is paper the moment a people stops honoring it and a state stops standing behind it.
On the page these things are valid. In the world they are worth exactly the force behind them.
And this is where the made thing betrays its maker, because a constructed fact does not fall on everyone alike. Gravity does not consult your bank balance before it pulls, and the mountain does not check your papers. But the law does both, ceaselessly, and so does the right. The same act is a crime in one body and a liberty in another. The same border is a formality for one passport and a wall for the next. The selective, unequal, intermittent way that rights and laws actually descend upon human beings is not a sign that they are being imperfectly applied. It is the fingerprint of what they are. A thing that bends toward power was made by power, for power, and the bending is not the corruption of the system but the system showing you its face.
If you want the purest demonstration the historical record affords, you need not reach for any of our present quarrels. You need only read the most luminous sentence in the American founding: the assertion that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Then remember that the hand which wrote it owned and enslaved other human beings, and that many of the hands which signed beneath it owned them too. The rights were declared universal and self-evident in the very breath that they were withheld, by force, from a fifth of the people standing on the same soil. This is not a hypocrisy to be tutted at and stepped over. It is the mechanism itself, laid bare on a single page. The rights reached precisely as far as power was willing to let them reach and stopped at the exact line where power found them inconvenient, and that line ran straight through the middle of the men who proclaimed them. No charter has ever been more eloquent, and none has ever more completely refuted the thing it claimed. I will not pretend that our own age has escaped this arithmetic. Every generation learns, usually too late, which of its solemn guarantees were load-bearing and which were ornament, and it learns this in the only way the question can be answered, by watching what happens when power decides to test them. But the demonstration does not depend on any contested example I might offer. It has been legible in the founding documents the whole time.
So the family stands convicted on every count. Its members were invented, and we can very nearly name the century. They are shaped like quarrels, and they manufacture the opposition they claim to resolve. They exist only where the force of violence consents to make them exist, and they fall upon the powerful and the powerless in exactly opposite directions. And they are called natural, eternal, self-evident, God-given, by precisely the people whose interests they secure, because a thing that everyone believes was woven into the cosmos is a thing no one thinks to tear down.
But tearing down is the easy labor, and I have no interest in stopping here, because a demolition is not a home. If we could live without fictions of this binding kind, the honest course would be to abandon them and walk away clean. We cannot, and the pretense that we can is a luxury available only to those who have never had to hold anything together. So the destruction does not end the inquiry. It sharpens it to a single point. We cannot avoid building some binding fiction to live inside. The only questions left standing are which one we will build, and what we will require it to answer to.
If Not Rights, Then What…?
We left the first half with one sentence: the fiction worth building is the one that binds us to the cry. Everything that follows is the attempt to make good on it, and it begins not with a construction but with a refusal, because before such a fiction can build anything it has to set down the very thing this essay has spent its first half taking apart.
It has to set down the claim.
Consider what a claim is, exactly. It is not a possession you hold quietly by yourself, the way you hold a memory or a wound. It is a vector. It runs from a claimant toward a respondent and it has no other shape. To hold a right is to hold a purchase on someone else’s conduct, a lever on what another person must do or must not do, and the jurist Wesley Hohfeld demonstrated, with a precision no one has since undone, that every claim-right is welded to a duty laid upon another person, the two of them the opposite ends of a single bar. 8 This is why a world assembled out of rights can never be anything but a standing field of opposition. The adversarialism is not a flaw in how the rights are applied. It is in the grammar of the thing. Each of us is the permanent respondent to everyone else’s demands, and we have learned to call that arrangement freedom. The covenant starts somewhere else entirely. It does not offer to distribute the claims more justly, because to redistribute a claim is only to move the opposition to a new address.
It offers to lay the claim down.
The Hebrew has a word for the laying-down. Shemitah, release, the deliberate loosening of a grip that had every legal warrant to keep holding. And it has a word for what the opened hand is then free to do, shalom, which we translate as peace and thereby cheapen, because shalom is not the silence after the war. It is not the ceasefire, that frozen hostility with the weapons merely holstered. It is wholeness, the bond made entire, the relationship standing as it was meant to stand. It is a pervasive sense of well-being for all participants. So the mechanism at the heart of this is two strokes and not one. The hand releases the claim, and the released hand restores the bond. Renunciation is not the end of it. It is the clearing of the ground so that the one obligation that was ever real, the answer to the cry, has somewhere to stand.
What is being renounced, in the end, is not this claim or that one but a whole way of standing toward another person, and we could call it without much exaggeration the repentance of competition as a mode of life. I have to be careful here, because competition is not one thing and I have no wish to indict the runner straining at the tape or the mind sharpened against a better mind, which this same tradition praises when it says that iron sharpens iron. What must be repented is narrower and deeper than effort. It is the prior arrangement of two lives as a zero-sum, the settled assumption that your good is the obstacle to mine and mine to yours, so that we meet always as rivals before we have met as anything else. René Girard spent a career tracing how that rivalry installs itself at the root of human desire and human violence, and reading the figure at the center of what follows as the one who exposed the mechanism and refused to feed it. 9 I claim Girard as illuminating rather than proven, but the shape he describes is the shape we are trying to escape, and the escape has a name and a history.
The name, in the tradition I write from, is Yehoshua, and an honest account of him has to open with a concession, because there is a weaker version of this argument that I want to refuse outright. It is sometimes said that he rejected rights, rejected representation, rejected the republican and democratic machinery of the West and chose the Covenant against them. He did not, and he could not have, and the concession is the reason. Rights, as the first half of this essay has labored to show, had not yet been invented; no one can reject a thing that will not be drafted for another twelve hundred years. The voting assembly of Athens was by his lifetime a memory three centuries cold, and the Roman Republic had already collapsed into the Principate, so that the machinery of self-government was not some live option lying around his Galilee waiting to be spurned. To credit him with rejecting these things is to hand him an anachronism and call it courage.
But strip the anachronism away and something far stronger is left standing, because the deeper thing that rights would eventually formalize was everywhere in his world. The grammar of the claim, of entitlement pressed and counter-entitlement filed, of the self and its interest as the basic unit of all social arithmetic, saturated the Roman law he lived under, the honor contests of his Mediterranean, the patron and his client, the creditor and his debtor. Yehoshua faced the identical questions that rights theory faces, who is owed what and how shall we live together and what is to be done about harm, and he answered them, again and again, in the exact inverse of the claim. Turn the other cheek. Release not seven times but seventy times seven. Give to the one who asks, and from the one who would take your coat do not withhold your cloak. Go the second mile. Settle with your accuser on the way to the court. Do not take the high seat; take the low one. Not one of these is a silence about rights from which we are left to guess his meaning. Each is a deliberate, repeated, public refusal to press a claim that was his to press.
The argument from his silence is weak, and we can abandon it. The argument from his teaching is overwhelming, and we do not need the other.
What he pointed toward instead was covenant, and the distance between a covenant and a contract is very nearly the whole of what this second half has to say. A contract is the claim made respectable. It is consideration traded for consideration, conditional in every clause, adversarial by design because each party drafts it to guard itself against the other, and enforced, when it fails, by claim and remedy in a court. Above all a contract dissolves on breach. If you default, I am released, and that release is the very thing I purchased when I signed. This is the structure the modern West chose for society itself when it dreamed up the social contract, a bargain struck among wary and self-interested parties for their mutual protection, which is to say a society founded on the premise that we are, at bottom, one another’s adversaries, managing the adversity by agreement.
Covenant inverts every term of that. The political theorist Daniel Elazar spent his life recovering covenant as a distinct model of the human bond, neither the organic hierarchy that swallows the person nor the contract that isolates her, and the older scholars who set the Sinai compact beside the treaty forms of the ancient West Asia showed how its structure was borrowed and then transfigured. 10 11 The single feature that does all the work is this. A covenant is precisely the bond that does not dissolve on breach. The word the tradition gives to its binding force is hesed, covenant loyalty, the steadfastness that holds even when the other party has failed, and the whole of the prophetic literature is one long drama of that loyalty outlasting a faithlessness that any contract would have terminated at the first default. To stand in covenant is to have surrendered in advance the right to invoke the other’s failure as your exit.
Now look again at those teachings, because they are no longer a scattered list of hard sayings. They are the operating logic of a bond you cannot leave, stated at the scale of one human being. Turn the cheek, forgive seventy times seven, love the one who has made himself your enemy: this is what chesed looks like when a single person practices it toward another who has every contractual ground to be abandoned. Rights and contracts are the grammar of the conditional, the exitable, the enforceable. Covenant is the grammar of the unconditional, the mutual, the bond you do not get to walk out of.
This would stay a private and fragile thing, a heroism reserved for saints, if the tradition had left it in the individual heart. It did not. It wrote the renunciation into law and set it on a clock. The seventh year is the shemitah year, and in it debts are released, not as a kindness from the soft-hearted but as a constitutional requirement falling on everyone at once. The fiftieth year is the yovel, the Jubilee, and in it the land returns to those who lost it, the debts are cancelled, the indentured walk free, and the great accumulations of half a century are taken apart by law so that the society resets to something near its beginning (Leviticus 25). The Sabbath is the same logic written into the week, a standing refusal of the endless production and accumulation that the surrounding empires took to be the nature of things. None of this is devotional ornament laid over the covenant. It is the covenant’s economic constitution, the concrete and recurring form of the abandonment of claims.
And here the most important thing in the whole structure comes into view, the thing that divides it from every counterfeit that has ever worn its language. The renunciation runs uphill. Read the shemitah law and notice who is commanded. It is not the debtor who is told to be patient. It is the creditor who is told to release. The one ordered to open his hand is the one who holds the claim, which is to say the one who holds the power. The Jubilee does not instruct the dispossessed to accept their dispossession; it dispossesses the accumulator and returns what was taken. For centuries the powerful have preached a forgery of this, the turned cheek recommended to the slave and the patience urged upon the poor, and that forgery is the exact inversion of the covenant’s real demand, which aims its full weight at the strong and tells them to let go. 12 To the one who has been harmed, the covenant never says drop your claim. It says your release is written into the constitution, on a clock no creditor controls.
This is also the answer to the suspicion that renunciation is only surrender, the lone good man devoured by predators who feel no such scruple. The covenant never asked for the lone renouncer. The shemitah is mutual and universal and simultaneous; a whole people opens its hands together, in the same year, so that no one is left holding claims against the released, which is a wholly different thing from a single soul disarming in a field of the armed. And the renunciation is asymmetrical in the one way that matters most. I lay down the claim I would have pressed on my own behalf. I do not lay down my obligation to stand between you and the one who would harm you. The covenant disarms self-interest and arms the defense of the other in a single motion, which is why a community of such people is not a flock of prey. It is a society in which no one presses his own claim and everyone answers his neighbor’s cry, and that is the opposite of defenseless.
Two objections will be pressing on the reader by now, and each deserves a straight answer. The first is the proudest boast of rights, their universality. A right, we are told, belongs to every human being as such, while a covenant binds only a particular people and leaves the outsider beyond its care. But the Sinai covenant wrote the outsider into its center. You shall love the ger, the stranger and sojourner in your midst, the law commands, and it grounds that command not in his abstract humanity but in your own memory of having been a stranger in Egypt. The prophets widened the circle, and Yehoshua widened it past breaking, making the hero of his most famous parable the despised foreigner who stops for the beaten man the respectable had stepped around. Covenant does not reach the stranger by the thin universality of a right that belongs to everyone and so obligates no one in particular. It reaches him by the thick universality of an obligation that expands to meet him where he lies. The abstract right sits unenforced in its charter while the man bleeds in the road. The covenantal obligation is the Samaritan already kneeling in the dust. One of these universalities shows up. The other is on paper.
The second objection mistakes what is being refused. To set covenant against the adversarial claim can sound like a rejection of self-government itself, a yearning after some benevolent throne, and that reading would be fatal to everything proposed here, so let it be said plainly. What covenant refuses is the adversarial premise, my interest set against yours and mediated by claims and proxies and force. What covenant does not refuse, and in fact deepens past anything the empires around it managed to imagine, is a people binding itself together by its own consent. The Sinai compact was ratified. All the people answered together and said, we will do it, which puts a constitutional convention with popular ratification at the very headwaters of the tradition, something far closer in spirit to a continental congress than to any coronation. The opposite of covenant is not democracy. The opposite of covenant is the war of each against all, dressed in the language of rights and kept in check by the threat of force.
Which carries us back, at the last, to the question the demolition left standing. We cannot live without some binding fiction, and the only choice before us is which one and what we will hold it to. The case for covenant is not that we happen to prefer it, for if it were only a preference we would be back in the marketplace, my fiction bidding against yours. The case is that covenant is the one fiction deliberately cut to fit the one thing in this entire argument that was never a fiction at all. Rights answer the cry of the harmed body badly, and late, and only for those with the power to enforce a claim. Covenant answers it directly, binding us to the need itself before any claim is established and whether or not one ever could be. That is why responsibility is not the rival of rights but their honest replacement, the thing the whole apparatus of rights was a clumsy and self-serving attempt to approximate and never could, because it was built facing the wrong way, toward what I am owed rather than toward what the cry requires.
I will not pretend this is easy, or that the empire will meet it halfway. A covenant community does not abolish the competitive world by announcing a better grammar. It would build an interior governed by that grammar and an edge that keeps widening, and in the meantime it would have to navigate, and partly armor itself against, the extraction all around it, which is exactly what the surviving cooperatives do, keeping faith within while contending without in order to live long enough to grow. The claim here is bounded, and I want it bounded, because a frictionless utopia would be only one more fiction facing the wrong direction. What I am describing is harder than that, and more possible than that. It is a people setting down its claims upon one another, on a clock, by mutual and open consent, and turning the freed hand toward the one in need.
Dallas Willard never did see that second bumper sticker, the one asking us to stand up for our responsibilities, and he was right that no one would print it. But the absence he noticed is not a gap in our slogans. It is a gap in the foundation, and we have spent two centuries decorating the house above it. The work in front of us is to go down and lay a different stone.
Notes for the Nerds
Jeremy Bentham, “Anarchical Fallacies,” in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh, 1843), vol. 2. The phrase appears in Bentham’s critique of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). The “witches and unicorns” judgment and the claim about the late appearance of rights language are in chapter 6.
Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997).
Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995).
The reduction of law to command backed by sanction is most associated with John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832); H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), refines and complicates it, distinguishing a law’s validity from its efficacy, which the present argument relies on below.
Simone Weil, “Human Personality” (1943), in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles.
Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919). The correlativity of every claim-right with a duty in another is the load-bearing point.
René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001); see also Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). The mimetic theory is illuminating and contested; cited as the former.
Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995).
On the Sinai covenant set against ancient Near Eastern treaty forms, see George E. Mendenhall, Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East (Pittsburgh: Biblical Colloquium, 1955), and Delbert R. Hillers, Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969).
Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), reads the hard sayings of Matthew 5 as defiant nonviolent resistance rather than passive submission.
A valid and painful look in the mirror of our own illusions. You have stated plainly what exists, without the pretty ribbons and window dressing. I have no argument against any point that you make. That, in and of itself, makes it closer to truth than the argument defending our current system. Thank you for the slap across the face. It was enlightening.