The Pulpit Commentary — Genesis — Section 33

26. There is, however, onothor part of the world with the history of which we are more fnmilior th1m with thone of Egypt, or China, or even of India, and in this history the actual process of the development of law may be more exactly traced from its elementary principles to its matured forms. Maine, in his well-known work on Ancient Lnw, has pointed out that "the earliest notions connected with the concep- tion, now so fully developed, of a law or rule of life, are those contained in the Homeric words, Them is or Themistes." In the Greek Pantheon Themis is the god- dess of justice in the obstract sense, and, according to Hesiod, 1 the mother by Zeus of Dike, the goddess of administrative justice. There can be little doubt that the name is derived from the Egyptian Thmei (see§ 23, supra), and the idea conveyed by the mythology is not really different 2 from that expressed in Homer, with whom Them is is the personification of the order established by custom and equity, and the assessor of Zeus, As such Themis suggested judicial awards both to kings and to gods, tho greatest of all kings; and the judgments themselves were called Themistes (the plural of Themis). It is evident that the personification was intended to represent the authority of kings as the representatives of God on earth, and thus the original basis of the idea is the truth, which Revelation supplies, of man being made in the image and likeness of God. From these divinely-directed judgments of kings there grew up in course of time, as the heroic age passed away, a body of unwritten " custom- ary law," which was in the keeping of an aristocracy, civil or religious, invested with judicial authority and privileges. "From the period of customary law we come to another sharply-defined epoch in the history of jurisprudence. We arrive at the era of Codes, those ancient codes of which the Twelve Tables of Rome were the most .famous specimen. In Greece, in Italy, in the Hellenised sea-board of Western Asia, these codes made their appearance at periods much the same everywhere, not, I mean, at periods identical in point of time, but similar in point of the relative progress of each community. Everywhere, in the countries I have named, laws engraved on tablets and published to the people take the place of usages deposited with the recollection of a privileged obligarchy." * * * "Quite enough too remains of these collections, both in the East and West, to show that they mingled up religions, civil, and merely moral ordinances, without any regard to differences in their essential character; and this is consistent with all we know of early thought from other sources, the severance of law from morality, and of religion from hw, be- longing very distinctly to the later stages of mental progress." 3 The real value to the nation of these codes of law depended much on circumstances. 'When, as in India, they were compiled at a comparatively late period by a religious oligarchy and remained in their charge, they only, tended to perpetuate corruptions and check further d·evelopment. In Rome, being the result of the struggles of the plebeians ngainst the exclusive privileges of the patricians, and embodying the usages o.f a 1uore primitive and simple age, their effect was in the highest degree beneficial, both as regnrds the liberty and the progress of the commonwealth. 26. Of the period in the history of jurisprudence subsequent to this, during which, in the great commonwealth of Rome, human law attained a maturity and perfection such that Roman law has formed a very large and powerful element in the progress 1md cousolidation of the civilisation of modern Europe, it is unnecessary to speak; bec11use the exact and complete provisions for the protection and security of person 1 At least to the nuthor of the Thcogony. 2 Maino supposes (p. 4) that the mythologicnl notion is "a modem nnJ moro developeJ. idcn," but the pnrallol with the Egyptian deity seems to contradict this. The rcrsonillcntion of an attribulo soon bccnmo II deity. 3 'Ancient Law,' pp. H-16, etc. e2 XX INl'lWDllCTION TO 'l'IIE PENTATEU JII.