The Ways of a King: Legal and Political Ideas in the Bible

摘要

The Bible has implications beyond its theological and moral principles. Joining a burgeoning recent literature, Geoffrey P. Miller, the Stuyvesant Comfort Professor of Law at the New York University Law School, turns to analyzing its underlying legal and political ideas. Miller's analysis of the Hebrew Bible has two basic theses. His first thesis is "both simple and far-reaching: the great history of Israel presented in the books of Genesis through Second Kings contains a systematic, comprehensive, and remarkably astute analysis of political obligation and governmental design-in short, a political philosophy that may have been written earlier than the works of Plato and Aristotle" (p. 7). "The Bible," he argues, "not the Greeks, may be the West's oldest political philosophy" (p. 11).