The other day I publicly condemned the American Family Association as nithings on A Heathen’s Day – and that’s a very bad thing to say about somebody. It’s not a term I use lightly.  For the record, a nithing (ON niðingr) is a villain, scoundrel, coward, vile wretch, and more, and a niðing deed (niðingsverk) is an ill deed, or villainy; a person guilty of this sort of behavior was held in contempt.

The nature of my complaint is the projection of ancient law codes into the present day. It is, after all, 2010, the Twenty First Century, a supposedly enlightened era, and many thousands of years have passed since the earliest law codes came into existence – far in advance of the oft-appealed to Decalogue of the Hebrew Bible.

Each ancient culture had its own religion – shaped by its environment – and its own law code – also shaped by its environment. And these religions and law codes did not necessarily have anything to do with each other. Roman law for example – the Twelve Tablets – were civil law, written by humans for humans, not handed down from on high or imposed by gods on mortals, just as was the Greek legal code of Solon of Athens, upon which the Romans claimed to base their laws.

My own Norse ancestors understood that, in the words of Robert Ferguson (The Vikings 2009:31), “ethics were the province of man and the law,” and it is significant that the word sin (“synd”) does not appear in any Viking Age literary source until circa 1030 C.E., and then in a Christian context. As Ferguson points out, “Viking Age ethics were based on the opposition of shame and honour.”

Witnesses were all important – business had to be done publicly so everyone would know what you had sworn to or promised or agreed to – and shame for your failures would do the rest. This legal system was then a sort of self-regulating affair (an especially workable plan in small self-contained communities), and at gatherings such as the regional Things, these laws would be enforced by the community. Despite swearing oaths on a gold ring sacred to Thor, the laws themselves were not divine in origin.

This paradigm of separation of law and divine is generally true of the ancient world. As Bart Ehrman observes, “Greco-Roman cults did not overly concern themselves with doctrines about the gods or with the moral behavior of their devotees” (The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings 2004:33-34).

It seems to me a preferable system in some respects. Nobody was demonized in the Judeo-Christian sense or held to be “turning away from god” because they stole something. It wasn’t a god’s wrath you had to fear but that of your neighbors; it was a civil matter. Religion doesn’t have to be used as a hammer to enforce narrow – often myopic – conceptions of morality.

Not that ancient secular punishments were any less draconian than those found in the Hebrew Bible. For example, Ferguson recounts (2009:32) how a thief who tried to steal from you could be legally killed, and that even a thief convicted of a “petty offense” could be made to run the gauntlet, in which the people – his neighbors – threw stones and turf at him.

I can’t speak for all Heathens, let alone all Pagans, but I think most would agree that bringing back the gauntlet is not the first best thing we could do. Roman law could be pretty brutal too, even before the heightened judicial savagery of the first Christian century and beyond. Crosses, anyone?

As Ferguson points out (2009:39), “northern Heathendom” did not lack a culture. “Viking Age Scandinavians had their own cosmology, their own astronomy, their own gods, their own social structure, their own form of government, and their own notions of how best to live and die.” The same could be said of any ancient culture. The same could be said of the Israelites: Different, unique and true for them.

So how is it that some fundamentalist Christians, the kind Mikey Weinstein spoke of in my interview with him last week, think that the peculiarities of ancient Jewish law supersede the Constitution and a long tradition of Western legal traditions? How does the Law of Moses trump the laws of the Heathen Norse, or the Law of Solon?

Well, for one thing, they claim it is divinely inspired, and that “god’s law” trumps “man’s law.” This conceit has come to light most recently in the demand made by the American Family Association (AFA) that the killer whale that killed its trainer at SeaWorld Orlando be stoned.

Yes, stone the whale. Oh, and stone the poor curator in charge as well.

Why? Well, because the Bible demands it:

“When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable.” (Exodus 21:28)

And,

But, the Scripture soberly warns, if one of your animals kills a second time because you didn’t kill it after it claimed its first human victim, this time you die right along with your animal. To use the example from Exodus, if your ox kills a second time, “the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.” (Exodus 21:29)

This is all well and fine for the seventh century B.C.E. but this is the year 2010. We don’t live in ancient Israel anymore than we live in Viking Age Norway; we live in the United States of America. By my reckoning, some three thousand years have gone by. We have the Constitution, based not on Biblical principles but on the principles of the European Enlightenment. We have a long tradition of secular law that now governs and regulates our diverse society.

Why can’t we just make the whale run the gauntlet? And maybe the curator too? Or maybe we should nail them both to crosses, or follow Assyrian law and impale them. After all, Moshe Weinfeld (“Deuteronomy: The Present State of Inquiry,” JBL 86 (1967), 253-256) demonstrates that a series of maledictions in Deuteronomy 28 “can be proved to have been transposed directly from Assyrian contemporary treaties into the book of Deuteronomy” (cf. idem, “Traces of Assyrian Treaty Formulae in Deuteronomy,” Biblica 46 (1965), 417-427).

Who knows, the curator may even be witch and the whale his familiar. Maybe we should start gathering wood…

The absurdity of each position enumerated above should be plain to all. The Constitution – not the Bible – not Heathen Norse Thing-law, governs our society. The Founding Fathers determined – whatever revisionist fundamentalist propagandists now assert – that God – any god – does not get a vote.

So to the AFA and the like-minded I say: The Constitution, the law of mortals, rules in the United States, not the Bronze Age vassal treaty known as the Decalogue.

Note:

The Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, is nothing extraordinary or unique in the eastern Mediterranean basin of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age.  There are actually three versions of the Decalogue in the Bible, Exodus 20:2-17, Exodus 34:12-26, and Deuteronomy 5:6-21, though Exodus 20 is probably the most used and best known. In actuality, there are 19 commandments contained in the Decalogue but they are grouped so as to make just ten, as stated in Exodus 34:28, Deuteronomy 4:13 and Deuteronomy 10:4.

Links:

Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/03/american-family-associati_n_484022.html

A Heathen’s Day: http://aheathensday.com/2010/03/nithing-of-the-week-4.html