The Ninth Commandment

Perjury

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 21

Track: 100

Dictation Name: RR130BC100

Date: 1960s-70s

Deuteronomy 19:16-21. Our subject, “Perjury.” Deuteronomy 19:16-21:

“16 If a false witness rise up against any man to testify against him that which is wrong;

17 Then both the men, between whom the controversy is, shall stand before the Lord, before the priests and the judges, which shall be in those days;

18 And the judges shall make diligent inquisition: and, behold, if the witness be a false witness, and hath testified falsely against his brother;

19 Then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother: so shalt thou put the evil away from among you.

20 And those which remain shall hear, and fear, and henceforth commit no more any such evil among you.

21 And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.”

This law against perjury is one of several statements of the law in scripture. For example, in 19:12 (Leviticus), we read, “and ye shall not swear falsely by my name, neither shall thou profane the name of the Lord thy God. I am the Lord.” Again, in Deuteronomy 17:6, 7, “6At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death. 7The hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterward the hands of all the people. So thou shalt put the evil away from among you.” Then in Proverbs 19:5, “A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall not escape.” Again in Proverbs 19:9, “A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall perish.” Finally, another statement, one among many, in Proverbs 25:18, “A man that beareth false witness against his neighbour is a maul, and a sword, and a sharp arrow.”

Over and over again, in verse after verse, the Old Testament condemns perjury. The New Testament again emphasizes this. A few of the many verses condemning perjury in the New Testament are Matthew 19:18, Mark 10:19, Luke 18:20, Romans 13:9, and many other passages.

Because Biblical Law rests not on coerced self-incrimination, but on honest testimony, any perjury constitutes the destruction of the processes of justice. As a result, Biblical Law regards perjury as an extremely serious offense. In fact, the law equates perjury with blasphemy. I cited Leviticus 19:12. In this verse, we are told that perjury and blasphemy are basically the same offense since it is God’s justice which is offended by the perjurer. As a result, the priests, according to the scripture we read, have apart in the procedures of the court. The oath taken by the witness before he testifies is an oath before the priest and the judges and we are told it is unto the Lord. In other words, it is taken before both kinds of ministers, that is, all civil officials, all judges, are ministers of justice. Priests, or ministers of the Church, are ministers of grace. Therefore, to emphasize the seriousness of the oath, the Biblical Law requires that it be taken before ministers of justice and ministers of grace, to emphasize it is unto the Lord.

Moreover, it makes clear what many other passages emphasize, that courts are inescapably religious establishments. The law they administer represents a religion and a morality and the procedures of every courtroom rests on the integrity of the oath. If there is no integrity, no faith behind the oath, then the testimony lacks any integrity also. This is why humanistic courts are doomed always to decline in integrity, to collapse finally into radical injustice because under Humanism, every man is his own law and every court is a law unto itself. We’ve never had in history, perfect courts. But whenever we have had Humanistic influences at work in the courts, the courts become not only imperfect, they become instruments of injustice.

And today, because Humanism is the religion of the land, courts today are ugly things to tangle with. The likelihood of justice is a rarity. And it is usually a freak where conflicting elements enter into a situation when justice is administered by the court.

The oath and the law in every country are religious. When you alter the religion behind them, you have a society in revolution. Chief Parker, a few years ago, before his death, remarked that the real revolution was the legal revolution. And he was so right. The basic revolution today is the legal one and the reason for that legal revolution is that there is a different morality and a different religion that is the established religion and morality of America. As a result, because of this fact, and because the Biblical Law emphasizes so strongly the religious character of the court and of the oath, perjury is a religious as well as a civil and criminal offense. Biblical Law requires the strictest honesty where testimony is required.

We have seen previously that there are certain kinds of testimony that cannot be required. There are certain kinds of privileged communications, certain kinds of persons who cannot be compelled to testify, but where testimony is required, the strictest kind of honesty is religiously required.

Moreover, the presupposition of all Biblical Law is individual responsibility, individual guilt. In fact, you cannot long have a law system if you become environmentalist, as we are becoming. If you become environmentalist, how can you punish a criminal? How can you have a law system? You simply destroy everything. And Biblical Law, more than any other law the world has ever seen—in fact, the only law the world has ever seen, which fully and clearly emphasizes individual responsibility and guilt. The Bible is not an environmentalist book in its explanation of sin. In Deuteronomy 17:7 as well as in Deuteronomy 19 in the passage we read, we come across the very important statement, “so thou shalt put the evil away from among you.” “So thou shalt put the evil away from among you.” What does that mean? Now we have in our English grammar, many words that are understood. You don’t say them, but they are understood. If I were to say “shut the door.” The word ‘you’ is understood. Now in this passage, the evil (one) is understood. So if you were to translate it in terms of its literal meaning, it would be, “so thou shalt put the evil one (or the evil person) away from among you.” In other words, evil is personal.

The idea that is so popular today, love the sinner and hate the sin is an impossibility from a Biblical perspective. There’s no such thing as sin or evil in the abstract. Sin and evil are always a person—always a person. So if you’re going to hate the sin, you’re hating a person. Similarly, in the Lord’s Prayer, when we pray, “deliver us from evil,” again, our English fails to convey the literal meaning. Literally, because of what is understood there in the word, the meaning is ‘deliver us from the evil one.’ In other words, from Satan and anyone who serves Satan, anyone who is evil.

C. H. Waller, an Anglican scholar of over a century ago pointed this out in commenting on these two passages where “so thou shalt put the evil away from among you,” is given. And he said “the evil” (and I quote), “the Greek version renders this ‘the wicked man.’ And the sentence is taken up in this form in I Corinthians 5:13, ‘and ye shall put away from among you that wicked person.’ The phrase is a frequent occurrence in Deuteronomy. And if we are to understand that in all places where it occurs, the evil is to be understood of an individual, and to be taken in the masculine gender, the fact that seems to deserve notice in the phrase ‘deliver us from evil’ in the Lord’s Prayer, there is really no such thing as wickedness in the world apart from some wicked being or person.” In other words, evil does not exist; sin does not exist in the abstract. When we are confronted with sin, we are confronted with a person or persons and we must deal with that person. The environmentalist approaches sin as though it were something in the abstract. He detaches it from the person and places it in the environment.

Now, this still does not make it impersonal. This was, of course, the theme of Satan. If you place it in the environment, where are you in actuality placing it? On the person of God because God is ultimately our environment. He is the one who has made all things and ordained all things. Scripture declares, “Known unto God are all His works from the foundation of the world.” So that when we blame the environment, we are saying ultimately with Satan as he spoke to Eve. It is God who is at fault, God who is the sinner. Thus, the environmentalist is always at war with God and he blames God for everything.

Furthermore, the penalty for perjury according to our text is life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. As I’ve pointed out before, this does not mean that you literally gouge an eye for an eye. I think this point has to be stated over and over again, because even fundamentalists who claim to be Bible-believing have insisted that the meaning is literal and therefore we should no longer obey it. The reason for this is that they are dispensationalists and antinomian. They don’t believe in the law, and therefore while claiming to believe in the Bible as the infallible Word of God, they wipe out most of it with their Dispensationalism and their antinomianism and therefore they work to make it ridiculous. But even G. Ernest Wright, a very able scholar, although quite modernistic, while writing in The Interpreter’s Bible admits that you cannot take this and reduce it to torture or gouging out eyes. He comments. “The principle of an eye for an eye is that on which Israelite Law is based. It is one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted principles in the Old Testament, owing to the fact that it is popularly thought to be a general command to take vengeance. Such an understanding is completely wrong. In neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament is a man entitled to take vengeance. That is a matter which must be left to God. The principle of an eye for an eye is a legal one which limits vengeance. It is for the guidance of the judge in fixing a penalty which shall befit the crime committed. Hence, it is the basic principle of all justice which is legally administered.” If there is to be any justice at any time, it has to be in terms of this principle. Thus, in a case involving a capital offense, perjury was punished by death. In a case involving restitution of $1,000 the perjurer was fined $1,000. This principle of restitution for perjury in terms of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, was once the basic premise of American law with respect to perjury.

As I’ve stated before, in Colonial America and in Early Constitutional America, the Biblical Law was simply made the law of the land. It still survives in bits and pieces. To this day in Texas, this is the law, although it is not enforced. It is on the books, however. And in a case involving a capital offense, the death penalty is still the law for perjury in Texas. It used to be the case in California also. And not too many years ago, in the late 30s, in a California court, it was stated, “It is time that the citizens of this state fully realize that the Biblical injunction, ‘thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,’ has been incorporated into the law of this state, and that every person who, having taken an oath that he will testify, declare, depose or certify truly before any competent tribunal, officer or person in any of the cases in which such an oath may by law be administered, willfully and contrary to such an oath states as true any material which he knows to be false is guilty of perjury and is punishable by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than one, nor more than fourteen years.” Thus, while in California the law had been altered, it still prevailed to a limited degree fairly recently.

As a matter of fact, in many states any decision was rendered null and void if the prosecutor deliberately used perjured testimony knowing it to be false. It was regarded as nullifying the justice of the case. This is how strictly the law regarded perjury. The death penalty for centuries, from biblical times to the present was mandatory in most of the world in capital offenses involving any perjury.

Then again, the law concerning perjury says very definitely, “thine eye shall not pity” (verse 21 of our text). “Thine eye shall not pity.” The law forbids pity toward the perjurer. Pity toward someone who is an evil doer is a revolutionary emotion. We fail to realize this, but pity if it goes toward a law-breaker is always a revolutionary emotion and a revolutionary act. Thus, whenever you see in a society whether by popular expression in comments or in the press, or today in novels, television, movies, pity for evil-doers expressed, you must recognize it for what it is—a revolutionary emotion and act which is being cultivated. Thus, anyone who expresses pity for any evil-doer needs to be told they are a revolutionist. This goes too for those who say pity or love the sinner, but not the sin. They are revolutionist whether they know it or not. And most people are party to revolution without fully realizing what they are doing.

Then we must recognize further as we consider again the fact that evil is personal, the Lord’s Prayer has the petition, ‘deliver us from evil’ or ‘deliver us from the evil one.’ Evil is personal. Immediately after that petition, what do we read in the Lord’s Prayer? ‘For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever. Amen.’ We saw a couple of weeks ago as we studied the witness of the false prophet that the claim of the false prophet in every age is that evil is lord. Evil is God, in effect. It is Satanism to confirm that conspirators rule the world, that evil governs all things. And so the petition in the Lord’s Prayer has relationship to this. ‘Deliver us from the evil one, for Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory.’ So at one and the same time that we ask for deliverance from Satan, we must affirm the sovereignty of God. We are not delivered from the evil one. And we are guilty of perjury. We bear false witness if we do not say God is on the throne. His is the kingdom, the power and the glory. And no man and no power, neither Satan nor any combination of men can take from God what is His. It is perjury ever to hold so. It is blasphemy of the most fearful sort.

The law was given to us thus by God who is sovereign. It was given to us to cope with the evil one and the evil ones. We are therefore to apply the law. We are not to pity the evil-doer but the victim and to move against the evil-doer. “So thou shalt put the evil away from among you.” It is that simple. God has given us a plan for conquest. Therefore when we pray, ‘deliver us from evil,’ we must never give to Satan power and dominion which are not his. For then we commit the ultimate perjury. And the ultimate true witness is to say to Him in deed as well as in word, “for Thine is the kingdom, power and the glory forever. Amen.”

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we come to Thee to bear true witness that indeed the kingdom, the power and the glory are Thine. Make us therefore people of Thy Law so that we may put away the evil one from amongst us, that we may put away all his cohorts and without pity, move against them. Make us ever-mindful, our Father, that our hearts might be filled with pity for Thy people, for the victims of the evil ones, that we are to move, oh Lord in obedience unto Thy Word, to enforce the law in every area, knowing that thereby, oh Lord, we shall see the triumph of Thy kingdom and the manifestation of Thy power and Thy glory. Bless us, oh Lord in our law-keeping. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all with respect to our lesson?

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, the question is, why does the Catholic liturgy eliminate the doxology at the end of the Lord’s Prayer?

We have the Lord’s Prayer in the Bible in two forms. We have it with the doxology in Matthew, and without it in Luke. Now the liturgy of the Catholic Church, as well as of the Episcopal Church and other churches in the past (and some to this day) have used the Lord’s Prayer in both forms, that is, with the doxology and without. When it is used without the doxology, it is normally so used because there is going to be a doxology or an ascription or a benediction shortly thereafter. So to repeat a doxology or a benediction or an ascription twice is thought unwise at that point.

The priest who told you it was not in the Bible and not original was obviously a modernist, because at one time it was used in both forms by the Catholic Church.

Yes.

[Audience]{?}

[Rushdoony] Ah, there are ancient documents that do not have the doxology, but these are defective manuscripts.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Defective?

[Rushdoony] Defective, yes. In other words, what they are doing, and I’ve mentioned this before but it is worth re-emphasizing. The habit of the scribes in Old Testament times and the monks and copyists in Christian times has been to copy word-for-word, then having copied, go back and read back and forth from one person to another to make sure that every word is there. Then to go through and count the letters to make sure that not an extra letter was there. Now it is very easy to leave out a line. When you type, very often when the same word or two or three words are at the beginning of two lines, your eye jumps a couple of lines and you find out that you’ve left out a couple of sentences. This often happened to copyists. What they did under those circumstances was to put the manuscript away that was defective. Later, if they needed it, they would wash that manuscript. It was a difficult process to wash and to bleach it because they used such indelible ink in those days, and dyes, but to bleach it and to wash it and to reuse it.

Now in many, many old monasteries those defective manuscripts are still there, kept, because they never threw anything away. And some of them never did get reused. Scholars, as they go to these manuscripts, they know they are defective, but they used them deliberately and then turn around and tell you there are so many thousands (Look Magazine as I’ve pointed out some years ago had an article about 20,000 variations). But these variations represent defective manuscripts. The received text is exactly as the King James gives it to us. This is why the King James is the most trustworthy. It does not involve this kind of juggling with doctored manuscripts. Unfortunately, most of the biblical scholars in supposedly orthodox or evangelical seminaries have been trained by these modernist scholars and go along with it. There are very few—almost none—who have refused to go along with it. Dr. E.F. Hills who has written On King James Version Defended and a number of other excellent studies is the most notable scholar in this area. No one knows the texts better than he does today in any theological camp.

Yes.

[Audience]… {?} blasphemy … {?} as evil {?} And, we know that the {?} in {?} parts of Europe were … {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, the question is, with respect to haunted houses in Europe where there are evil manifestations, are they personal or are they not? It is a real person haunting the house?

First of all, we don’t know enough about these things to comment too fully. But we can say this. It is not something impersonal. The haunting is always, inescapably, by some person, identifiable very often. Now whether it is actually the ghost of that person come back to haunt or of some kind of echo, as it were, is another question. But it is always personal, the haunting. Because evil is personal. And I say an echo, ah, we have had strange experiences where in one case, a Texas television station, years—about 14 years after it went off the air—was broadcasting daily in London. There was an echo of it somehow that sent back, and I do believe that this often happens in cases of some houses that are haunted. But it’s just a guess—we don’t know too much about this kind of thing, but this is a very real possibility. But in any case, it represents something personal.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Very good point. All the manifestations of hauntings represent evil persons, never godly; which is a very interesting point.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] In every case of a haunting, they find some evidence of a great crime or evil in the place, so it clearly represents evil persons or an evil person.

Yes.

[Audience] Would it be possible that our objection to that possibility would make it more real?

[Rushdoony] That’s possible.

[Audience] these … {?} evil which has somehow {?}

[Rushdoony] It’s possible, but this is a realm of conjectures, so it’s not very fruitful to investigate or explore. There’s been a lot of investigating here and none of it comes up with anything that’s too conclusive.

Yes.

[Audience] {?} … in some aspects {?}

[Rushdoony] I don’t quite… was that… part of that was the Levites and parts of it what?

[Audience] part of it .. {?} Civil… {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, of course we can’t separate the religious and the civil, because the civil is equally religious under God.

Now, let’s turn then to say the civil official and the Levite. When we studied taxation, we saw that there are two basic kinds of taxation, the poll tax (or head tax) of every male over 20. This took care of civil government; the court, basically. The other tax was the tithe which was paid to the Levites, of which one tenth went to the priests for the purely religious work. The rest went for the general kind of government which was done independently of the state. Education, health, welfare, and so on, all of which constitutes a form of government, you see; a very real government.

And as I’ve pointed out on several occasions, until fairly recently, doctors were a part of a religious establishment. Hospitals were exclusively operated by religious bodies. Only lately have hospitals become separated from a religious institution, a religious establishment, from tithed money.

And schools originally were entirely independent of the State. Only in 1834 or 35 for the first time were State funds appropriated to support schools. This is the point many people miss. For example, some people have claimed that there were public schools before Horace Mann. Well, of course there were laws requiring education for everyone. The Old Deluder Act, for example, education in the history books cite, in Colonial New England in the very early years, in Massachusetts State Colony, they passed the Old Deluder Act as it was called, requiring that all parents educate their children, lest that old deluder, Satan, work his will amongst us. Why? It was one thing for the law to say every parent had to educate their children, another for the State to say it’s our business to do it. That didn’t come until Horace Mann.

So how did the parents educate their children? Well, the tithe money created the schools. So you have a government without the State, you see. And this was true in one realm after another. All these independent agencies were interlocking and the State might require that every parent have his child in the school but the State didn’t support the school. The State didn’t control the school. The State didn’t set the standards for the school. Do you see something of the interdependence, interpenetration and yet actual lack of State control that was involved in this kind of situation?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, well look at it from another perspective. Not only in the Colonial period, but after the enactment of the Constitution, we have the Northwest Ordinance. The Northwest Ordinance specified that a sizeable section of every new territory had to be put aside for education, for schools. This was before there was ever such a thing as a public school. Now the reason was not that the State thought that, well we control the land and therefore we’ll give it and it’s a subsidy, but the premise was the earth is the Lord’s, and God wants a portion of it to go for godly purposes. And the Christian school was one of the most central of godly institutions. Therefore, before anybody else gets the land in a new territory, the Christian school has got to be there and take its choice and get a sizeable chunk. This was not, you see, a subsidy from the State. It was a recognition of God’s prior ownership of the land and that the earth is the Lord’s.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, the reason for it was this: they knew that people were sinners, and supposing they were settling a territory, they might take the best land and leave a… like a swamp for the Christian schools, you see. So in each area, a section was set aside from the beginning for the schools.

It’s interesting to know, by the way, that the colleges and universities clear across the country were Christian. As.. ah, well, California. University of California was first of all a Christian college. Later, the State took it over. But it was started as a Congregational college. College of California. It’s come a long ways in the wrong direction since then.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Except they weren’t starting from the government, they were starting with a faith. You see, this is what we have to understand. In other words, it wasn’t the priority of the government there. The government was saying {?} the Norwest Ordinance that God has the priority. This is the point. They were starting from the priority of the faith.

Yes.

[Audience] There’s one thing that I noticed {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, the various colonies also enacted that and the various churches passes such measures requiring it of the parents and so on. There was no hesitation. They wanted it. And all the schools were Christian. They were not State schools.

Yes.

[Audience] Is there a …{?}

[Rushdoony] Is there a what?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, there was not. There was a high rate of literacy as a matter of fact, and in my book, Messianic Character of American Education, I cite a report by a French scholar on the very remarkable literacy of Americans. Now, some of the things you read, some early documents sound horrible because of the spelling. But you must realize that in those days there wasn’t a standardized spelling. And this is true of Shakespeare as well. You go back there and there’s a lack of standardized spelling. In fact, Shakespeare spelled his name several ways. But The Federalist Papers I’ve cited before are illustrative of the higher caliber of reading ability by farmers of the day. The reading ability was notable.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Ah, it was almost every person was literate in those days. Moreover, they maintained when immigration began, and people were landing as immigrants in New York and Boston and Philadelphia, Christians maintained school missionary societies to teach these children. So literacy was at a very, very high rate. You find that even among some of the frontiersmen. Now, Davy Crockett, we have his autobiography, and he certainly grew up out of the wilderness. Consider Abraham Lincoln. Only three or four years of schooling, and the school term in those days was just a few weeks, not months; and yet the high degree of literacy there. So, we mustn’t underrate the literacy of the people in that period. They were well {?}

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, very good point. In those days, the child went to school, usually just for an education. He learned to read and write between the ages of 2 and 4 and his mother taught him. This was standard in the Colonial period, almost to the Civil War in some areas, it continued.

Well, our time is more than up. Let’s bow our heads now for the benediction.

And now, go in in peace. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always. Amen.