A Lawyer s Studies in Biblical Law.
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readily be seen to be self-contradictory. If, | life was established and persons from dif for instance, the father is guilty of idolatry, ferent parts of the world mingled with the then according to this text he and his son Hebrew communities, many, no doubt, settled and grandson and great-grandson would be among them and became absorbed in the punished for the crime; yet, if we suppose body politic. The person adopted was prob that the son was not an idolater but a pious ably taken into the family that had no chil and God-fearing man, then according to the dren, for the purpose of keeping the family second part of the text, mercy would be alive and providing an heir. Eliezer of Dam shown to him unto the thousandth genera ascus seems to have been adopted by Abra tion. Furthermore, if the grandson is again ham as his heir apparent, and he occupied an idolater like the grandfather, it would be that position until the birth of Isaac (Genesis, xv, 2-3). He is spoken of as " a son of the difficult to determine under a literal con struction of this text, whether he was to be house," which he could only have become by punished for the sin committed by himself or some mode of adoption. Mordecai, who ap for the sin committed by his grandfather, or pears to have been childless, seems to have whether he was to be unpunished because of adopted Esther as his daughter (Esther, ii, 17). The law of the Levirate Marriage, reference the virtue of his father. Obviously, there fore, this text is not a law, but a sermon. It to which has been made, furnishes a special simply gives expression in a rhetorical case of adoption in which the son of the manner to the well-known social fact that widow by her second husband is considered children suffer for the deeds of their father, to be the child of her first (deceased) hus and that they enjoy the results of their band. There was probably a larger proportion of fathers' virtues, not by reason of any legal enactment, but through the force of a certain foreign elements in Israel by reason of mixed undeterminable public sentiment. By mak marriages than by reason of the adoption of ing this distinction between the legal and strangers. As a result of all this admixture, ethical views of the question, we can under it is difficult to determine how far the present stand how the notion of family responsibility so-called Jewish race characteristics are continued to exist in the popular mind even originally Jewish or what influence admix after it had been legally abolished. It will ture with non-Jewish people has exerted upon always continue to be a strong theme for the race. From Egypt, a mixed multitude went out with the Hebrews (Exodus, xii, 38) preachers and moralists. As was above suggested, the theory of the and from that time down to the time of Ezra, kinship of members of the family was not history records frequent intermingling with disturbed by the admission of strangers hav foreign people. In Ezra's time, the severity ing alien blood. Adoption by proper formali with which the foreign women and their ties was not unknown, and was undoubtedly children were expelled left its impress upon frequently practised among the ancient the whole subsequent history of the people, Hebrews. Strangers taken into the body of so that thereafter such union with non-Jewish the Hebrew people by adoption were usually people became exceptional. The importance of legal fictions in the his prisoners of war or freedmen. The early nomadic life of the patriarchal age precludes tory of civilization is nowhere better shown the idea of the extensive adoption of strangers than in the instance above mentioned, where in other instances than these. When city the notion prevailed among the people that
