Book Description

Excerpt from The Ancient Hebrew Law of Homicide The law of homicide is an index to certain sides of national character. Where there is a small, powerful class able to monopolize rule and government, the rights of the great mass of common people are weak and ill-assured. In such a society there is much violence. Arrogant and turbulent spirits are in perpetual rivalry, and compete for mastery. The stronger steadily eliminate the weaker. Life is held cheap. The chiefs, who are always risking their own lives, compel their underlings, who have no great stake in the contest, to risk theirs. It is a kind of feudal system, in which each chief is the head of a clan or other organization with whose aid he hopes to retain or to achieve pre-eminence. Out of such a condition the early laws of homicide arise. Clans in juxtaposition are never quite at peace with each other. There may be a kind of truce, but this is liable to be broken at any moment. The murder of a clansman by a member of another clan is casus belli, for the sufficient reason that it weakens the assailed clan. If unpunished, the act tends to be repeated, and this process would, in a relatively short time, bring the weakened clan under subjection to the aggressor clan. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.