Deuteronomy

Habitual Criminals

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 68-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 068

Dictation Name: RR187AK68

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. There is there no condemnation to those which are in Christ Jesus. For as many as are led by the spirit of God they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear but you have received the spirit of adoption whereby we cry Abba, Father. Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father we give thanks unto Thee for Thy providential care. We thank Thee that Thy mercies are renewed unto us day by day so that our days are filled with Thy mercies, Thy providential care and Thy blessings. Make us joyful in Thee and in Thy word, Thy kingdom and in all things that pertain to our calling in Christ. We pray our Father that Thou who art the judge of the nations may rebuke them and bring them back into Thy fold. Use us in Thy service in Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is in Deuteronomy 21:18-23. Deuteronomy 21:18-23, our subject: Habitual Criminals.

“If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:

19 Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;

20 And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.

21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

22 And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree:

23 His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day; (for he that is hanged is accursed of God; that thy land be not defiled, which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance.”

Few laws in the Bible have earned more hatred than this one. It is regularly attacked to indicate how infamous biblical law is. Moreover it is regularly misinterpreted so that it is held that it calls for stoning little children. There is nothing like that in the text. But I think if you understand this law you understand what is happening in our day. Why we have the problems that we do. Now this law was once basic to the law of the United States, namely the execution of incorrigible criminals. After the third or fourth offense depending on the state the criminal was declared to be a habitual offender and was executed. By this means a criminal class was severely limited. In order to understand how thoroughly this law was applied I recall in one case where a man whose fourth offense involved something valued at twenty dollars he was still executed because he was clearly a habitual criminal. He did not think he was only getting twenty, he was committing the crime for more and he was habitually guilty of crime. This was still the law in many states through the 1960s, the Supreme Court set it aside in 1972 and I believe the criminal in question they used to set it aside was black. Abandonment of this law led to a great proliferation of crime by habitual criminals and a large criminal class which is what we have today. This law for colonial times until early in the seventies was the law in much of the United States even though at the time it was not often enforced. Now crime is a form of warfare against society. The law abiding citizenry becomes a target of assault by the criminal element. Thefts, rapes, murder and a general contempt for the people mark the criminal mind.

The humanist sees the criminal as misguided or as a victim of society whereas the criminal sees society and its peoples as his victims. Failure to recognize the reality of sin and evil leads to the inability to assess reality for what it is. The habitual criminal justifies his behavior. He insists that all of life is amoral, that business is a form of theft, interesting that comes regularly from criminals and now it’s a part of our politics. And he insists, the criminal does, that he is more honest than most men because he lives without hypocrisy supposedly. Prison is for him an occupational hazard and he often takes it lightly. To view the criminal as a victim is to reverse the moral order. Now it is true enough that the criminal has a very low level of literacy in our time. Studies in prisons have shown that virtually all the prisoners are functionally illiterate. And this is used to demonstrate that they are victims of society. But what it really means is that he rebelled against studying, against discipline, very early and favored instead lawful activities. When I went to school there was only one person I knew among the students in the ten fifteen years thereafter when I was still fairly closely in touch with everyone who wound up in San Quentin. He was a very intelligent young man but he was rebellious. He resented discipline. The crime is not limited to the functionally illiterate it is prevalent in high places although very often it does go unpunished for political reasons. This law however is not only about habitual criminals it is about the family as well. Not blood but faith must be the determining factor. The family having the fullest knowledge under normal circumstances of a son’s criminality has the moral obligation to report him to the authorities. He is a stubborn son, in the Hebrew the word is translated by Robert Young as ‘apostatizing son’. It can mean also refractory and a revolter or one who is in modern terms anti-social in life and deeds.

The word translated is rebellious, means to rebel, to provoke, to resist. Then the word glutton is applied to him. Here again our English has weakened in its meaning. The Hebrew means ‘loose, worthless, riotous or vile’. The English Revived Version renders glutton as riotous liver. Those who hate this text insist on calling the son a child or a baby and of accusing scripture of demanding that little children be executed. The text is clear that the son is an adult who is in total war against society in word, thought and deed. He resists radically any attempt by the family to control him. The parents have the duty to take the lead in the son’s arrest and prosecution, a choice is required of them. The son may be living elsewhere but their status as parents requires them to choose God’s justice against the family solidarity. If the family, God’s basic institution, does not favor justice over blood neither church nor state is likely to be strong, the society is headed for disasters. This means that lesser steps must have preceded this radical one. The parents have the duty where and when possible earlier to rebuke and chastise their son. In some instances I t would mean requiring the son to leave the family’s home if the rebelliousness continues. The law simply summarizes all this. In following all these preliminary steps and the final step the parents make clear that their loyalty is to God’s future, not to a wayward family member. Roman law gave fathers an arbitrary and lawless power over their children and many ancient cultures children could be sold into slavery by the parents. This law severely limited parental powers to the limits of God’s law. The parent had to be totally under God and the restriction of god’s law is to have justice.

The parental duty to initiate the legal proceedings could come after some criminal offense. Even if the son were apprehended by civil authorities the parental duty to file the charges remained. This established the religious dimension of the family and its importance to the justice system. But at present the family has no such place. The state by insisting on the girl’s right to an abortion without parental knowledge places the family outside the legal system and irrelevant to it at key parts. We have had a legal revolution. Modern scholars seem willfully determined to misunderstand this law. David F. Pane, an intelligent scholar, writes for example and I quote:

“In a peasant economy few households could possibly afford such a son, hence the very severe penalty which was no doubt meant as a warning not as an inflexible or frequently applied ruling.” Unquote.

He has no basis for that status. No society can afford habitual criminals in its midst unless it is suicidal as ours seems determined to be. In fact, perhaps the more complex the society the greater the potential destruction. In verse twenty one we read that all the men of the community had to participate in the execution. They thereby affirmed the primacy of justice over the family. Their part in the act meant that they upheld God’s law as binding even where the closest ties existed. An English scholar, an able one, Clemence held that a bad son is a state peril. This is true certainly but a bad son is also a religious peril and a family one. In verses twenty two and twenty three we have a law against the public display of executed persons. Even in the 19th century in some European countries executed persons were displayed in public places. In many instances the bodies would remain until they disintegrated. This was done in a belief that such an exhibition of bodies would restrain other criminals and traitors.

But this is strictly forbidden in God’s law. No matter what the crime at sundown the body had to be taken away for burial. The reasons for this are very important. First, as [unknown] centuries ago rendered the cause in verse twenty three ‘for he that is hung is a reproach to the image of God’. The Jewish Publication Society of America and its translation of the Masoretic text in the 1961 edition renders it: he that is hanged is a reproach unto God’. Even though the criminal is a depraved and evil man he bears God’s image and it is offensive to God to have His image bearer treated with contempt. Justice, yes, but not contempt. Second, to treat the human being or his body with contempt is to defile the land. The land is an inheritance from God, both the unsolved murders and contemptuous treatments of the executed human body defile the land. The Hebrew word for defiled means contaminated, polluted, unclean. Deuteronomy 28:15-68 tells us that the curses God brings on a defiled and unrepentant land are the severest imaginable. God as the landlord evicts those who defile His earth. Now it is interesting that on both counts we no longer have any regard for God’s law. We do not feel that the habitual criminal should be executed because we believe criminals are basically victims. We do not have the respect for God’s image in man to deal with man alive or dead with respect for the image of God. Such an attitude places a land under judgment. Let us pray.

Our Father we thank Thee for Thy word. We pray Lord that men may again return to Thy law and to this law that the land may be cleansed. Oh Lord our God we know that we are under judgment and undeserving of the least of Thy mercies. But in judgment remember mercy, preserve Thy own and use us for Thy kingdom, in Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] Well most people believe in capital punishment, there were a number of polls in England on that subject and they overwhelming favored on the par….[becomes unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes, I would say that just since capital punishment was abolished there has been a growing public opinion against the abolition of capital punishment and in favor of capital punishment. Instinctively people are realizing that to favor the criminal is to show disfavor to law a biding people and I feel that’s precisely the attitude that those in power have. Such an attitude is not new. One of the arguments Tertullian as a lawyer used in his appeal to the emperor to stop the persecution of Christians by Rome was that why are you persecuting us? We are your most law abiding citizens, we are the faithful tax payers and we are your best soldiers. Does not make sense! You’re going against the best interest of Rome. Tertullian although a very brilliant man didn’t appreciate that when a civil order like Rome or like the governments of the Western world today has chosen evil they are going to be against the good and against their own best interest from a Christian perspective. That’s what marked Rome, it was suicidal and that is what marks us today, we a suicidal people or government. And until that it is turned around there is not much hope. Yes?

[Question] Well I sometimes think that liberalism in a modern sense is a religious substitute.

[Rushdoony] Yes, it is, very emphatically, because basic to it is a belief in the natural goodness of man or at least in some forms man’s neutrality in his nature to good and evil. This means therefore that they are environmentalists; they believe the environment is determinative with regards to man’s nature. Therefore anyone who is lawless is the target of a bad environment. Well who is the environment? Why the law abiding. Therefore, somehow, we are guilty of the offenses of the lawless. So we have to be dealt with rather than the criminal. So it’s a reversal of the moral order. Now, it is tragic when there is a deterioration of opinion on the side of what should be the godly. One of the neglected books of the fall of Rome is Salvian, the governance of God. And what Salvion did when the first major bastion, treir, fell to the barbarians and he lived there and he saw that very soon Rome would fall because there was no resistance, nobody was ready to fight, and he indicted first of all the Christians. He said that now you are successful and have been for a century, you have picked up all the traits of the Romans, all their moral evils and therefore you are no longer the salt that should preserve the empire but you have become a part of the problem. And this is an aspect of the fall of Rome that we don’t hear about. We forget also that this same condition preceded the Reformation. Rome was, I mean Europe was radically corrupt, medical historians have estimated that a third or more were venereally diseased, that the whole character of the people was headed for physical degeneration as a result of moral degeneration and the birth of human monsters was not uncommon. And yet within a short time there was a dramatic moral Reformation throughout Northern Europe and in the Counter-Reformation brought about a dramatic change in the Catholic portions of Europe. So that the future of the civilization there, of Christendom, was preserved! And this is what we need again, the same kind of thing and this law, I feel, is a kind of symbol because it is singled out for such a vehement attack, the hatred for this law is phenomenal because it says the criminal class has to be eliminated to the best of your ability, a society must work to eliminate the criminal class. That seems a logical fact but not if they are victims and we who are the godly are the guilty ones. So this radical reversal of moral order, I think, is a more radical reversal than we have seen in two thousand years perhaps. Yes?

[Question] Is part of this the arrogance of the liberals who think that they alone can rehabilitate the criminal thereby replacing repentance?

[Rushdoony] Yes, they believe they can do it, given enough money and enough psychiatrists and what have you, they believe that they have the capability of making rehabilitation. And yet all their efforts have been singularly disastrous. The relationship between the amount of money they’ve had to spend on rehabilitation to results is a negative one. Up until somewhat recently there were states who have had old fashioned attitudes and they had a better rate of rehabilitation than the states with more modern practices. So that applying this type of humanistic answer to the problem of crime has been a disaster. Yes?

[Question] Several English monarchies would defile the land by cutting up their political enemies bodies into pieces and put them on…

[Rushdoony] Yes that was quite prevalent in England for quite a while and on the Continent in many places and it was of course lawless. Charles the Second insisted upon doing this with the bodies of Cromwell and others and he was a man who also moved against biblical law. John Elliot had started a number of praying villages as they were called, praying Indians, in New England where they built an entire society on biblical law. They were enormously successful prosperous communities. Every copy that they could get and they got all but two of Elliot’s book detailing the biblical premises for such a society were ordered burned by the public hangman and the villages had to be dispersed. So Charles the Second and his administration hated a society built on biblical law. And I feel that 1660, the time he came to the throne which also was roughly within a few years the time of Louis the Fourteenth and Philip the Third of Spain and so on, marked the beginning of the Enlightenment and the end of the old order of Christendom because all of them were in revolt against God’s law; some more openly than others. And it was about that time that the Magnificant of the Virgin Mary was banned from liturgies throughout Europe as revolutionary. Any other questions or comments?

Well if not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank Thee that Thy word is truth and Thy word stands in men and nations, stand or fall in terms of Thy word. Grant oh Lord that we return again as a people to Thy word. That the evil forces throughout the world be overthrown, that Thy people begin in their daily lives to live in faithfulness to Thee to the end that Thy kingdom may indeed come and Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And now go 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.