"by the standards of his time and of ours"

After where I left off yesterday there is a paragraph in which Marilynne Robinson points out that compared to English law in the Tudor period and in much of Europe, the Law of Moses was mild, especially noting the fact that while European law hanged people for petty theft, the Mosaic law didn't execute people for property crimes.

Continuing with the next paragraph.

Consistent with the polemical treatment of the Old Testament law is the equally polemical approach to American Puritan culture, which was indeed influenced in a remarkable degree by this law. A code published in 1641 called The Massachusetts Body of Liberties makes this clear.  It is often compared to the Magna Carta, to which it in fact bears little resemblance.  A notable feature of the code is a list of twelve infractions for which the punishment is death.   In each of them, and for them only, the penalty is justified , or perhaps required, by citations from Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy.   One may not worship another god, practice witchcraft, blaspheme, commit willful murder, murder in rage, poison, have relations with an animal, have relations with another man, commit adultery, steal someone [by which I would guess is meant kidnapping], or bear false witness in a capital case.  A twelfth unbiblical law forbids any attempt to overthrow the commonwealth.  By the standards of the period this code is remarkable in that it does not even mention property crime as a capital offense.  The capital crimes are the kind of thing for which we would find any society of the period stern or intolerant  But these laws, like the laws of Moses, do not foresee that the poor will be made first beggars, then thieves, and then corpses as Thomas More said of British law.

I would contrast this with the laws of the various "Enlightenment" regimes in 18th and 19th century Britain, France and 20th century regimes that claim the same heritage and it's clear that the Puritan law, reputed to be so terribly harsh was far less so - that isn't to say that that there was not harshness that fell outside of that code, the hanging of Quakers, an example.  I'm not claiming nor does Marilynne Robinson assert that there weren't serious wrongs done under Puritan law and I know that she wouldn't advocate any kind of a return to the worst of it.  That doesn't mean that we can't acknowledge the best of it which should be influential in our law and policy and habits now, as she points out.

Where the Liberties depart from biblical example, they are compromised by habits of mind the colonists had not yet unlearned.  Number 43 stipulates that "No man shall be beaten with above 40 stripes."  Deuteronomy 25:3 says,  "Forty strypes shal [the judge] cause him to have and not past, lest he shulde excede and beate him above that manie stripes, thy brother shoulde appeare despised in thy sight."  Again this haunting solicitude for the vulnerable, even one made vulnerable by his own transgression.  And solicitude as well for one who risks the sin of despising his brother.  The second clause of the colonists' law reads "nor shall any true gentleman, nor any man equall to a gentleman be punished by whipping, unles his crime be very shamefull, and his cours of life vitious and profiligate."  This adaptation draws attention to the absence of such distinctions in Moses's law.  That said, it is instructive to compare the Massachusetts Liberties with the Grand Model for North Carolina, drawn up by John Locke at the request of the king and published in 1663, which would have established landed aristocracy and virtual feudalism in that colony.  

According to the Massachusetts code, 

Every person within this Jurisdiction, whether inhabitant or forreiner shall enjoy the same justice and law, that is general for the plantation . . . If any servants shall flee from the Tiranny and crueltie of their masters to the howse of any freeman of the same Towne, they shall be protected and susteyned till due order be taken for their relife . . . If any man smite out the eye or tooth of a man-servant or maid-servant or any mayme or much disfigure him, unlesse it be by meere casualtie, he shall let them goe free from his service . . . No man shall exercise any Tiranny or Crueltie towards any bruite Creature which are usuallie kept for man's use . . . No man shall put to death without the testimony of two or three witnesses or that which is equivalent thereunto . . . For bodilie punishments we allow amongst are none that are inhumane Barbarous or cruel. 

Theses are all drawn from the laws of Moses, to be realized again in early Massachusetts.  They were not by any means in effect universally in the thirteen colonies or the early United States.  That the same reforms were emerging in contemporary British law is unsurprising, since Puritanism was on the rise there, reaching the point of revolution and an attempted social reordering.  They were in some degree contravened in Massachusetts after the Cromwell period, when British authority over the colony could be more effectively asserted.  

I'll break in here and note that the infamous Salem witchcraft trials, executions and imprisonments were in 1692-3, during the Restoration period just mentioned.

That the teaching and example of Calvin were of great influence on Puritan and political thought is a common place, of course - the word "Puritan" and "Calvinist" are virtually interchangeable, and the harshness associated with both words is taken to be the predominant feature of the societies they created. In crowded, besieged, and turbulent Geneva, severity might be expected and perhaps even excused.  Yet on the subject of beggars and how begging is to be eliminated, though Calvin sas, like Thomas More, "To be shorte, of Roges, they become robbers, & in the ned what must become of that?," his argument then takes a characteristic turn.

But yet howsoever the case stand, let us see that the poore be maintained.  For if a man fobid begging, & therewithal doe no almes at all it is as much as if he did cut the throtes of those that are in necessitie.  Nay, we must so provide for the poore, and redress their want, that such as are stout beggars and apparently seeme not to be pitied, may be reformed.  For they doe but eate up the others bread, & rob the needy of that which should be given unto them.  That (say I) in effect, is the thing we have to marke here.  But how may it be done?  First, the Hospitals should brovide wel for such needs . . . [L]et not men play the good husbands in harding up the things that ought to be bestowed upon God & upon those whome he offreth unto us.  Also as every man knoweth the particular needs of his neighbors, so let him indevor to succor them, and consider where wante or neede is, and helpe to remedie it.  If this be done, then shal beggerie be taken away as it ought to be, and they shall not neede to make a simple forbidding of it;  saying, let not men beg any more; * in the meane season the poore shall be left destitute, to die for hunger and thirst. 

Calvin says,  "[A]lthough a man cannot set downe a Lawe certeeine in this behalfe;  yet must every man be a rule to himselfe, to do according to his own abilitie and according to the need that he seeth in his neighbors."  This is from a sermon on Deuteronomy delivered in French in 1555.  

Like the New Englanders, Calvin shows the influence of his time and culture, tending in certain ways and degrees to modify the liberalism of Moses - for example, interpreting as respite for debt the always that call for outright forgiveness and release.  Nevertheless there is a striking generosity in his approach to the problem of theft, by the standards of his time and of ours.  The provisions of the poor which structure both land ownership and the sacred calendar in ancient Israel, the rights of gleaners and of those widows, orphans and strangers who pass through the fields, and the cycles of freedom from debt and restoration of alienated persons and property, all work against the emergence of the poor as a class, as people marked by deprivation and hopelessness.  There is no sense of fearful urgency, there are no special measures to suppress crime driven by need except, as Calvin clearly understands, the preemption of crime through the alleviation of need.

Can you imagine what would happen to any law maker in Congress, the Senate or any state legislature who asserted the need to make THOSE parts of the Mosaic law part of the law of the land?  Not only would conservatives shout it down in rage, large numbers of modern-style liberals would think it was insane.   But how true it is.  Though I would say the provision of material sustenance  - vital as that would be to stop any tendency in the poor to commit crimes - they would also need to know that they were respected, yes, even loved, and included in a supportive and loving community.  The role that status and fashion and the exclusion of large numbers of people from that system of unequal esteem probably has a lot to do with why children and adults are drawn to gangs and crime which give them a chance to gain status and esteem.   I have read recently that it was that which created the M-13 gang among marginalized children in American cities and that the cycle of expulsion exported it to El Salvador only to have it reinforced here.

Walter Brueggemann points out that the Mosaic laws that Marilynne Robinson discusses in this essay, the cycles of debt forgiveness, high among them,  not only had the effect of providing sustenance to the poor, the destitute and the marginalized, it was a means of preventing the creation of what in our society and world are the billionaire oligarchs who reproduce the Pharaonic political economy that the Children of Israel experienced and escaped from in ancient Egypt.  There is a reason that that story resonates wherever it is known and people are oppressed, over cultures, races, even religions.  It is why the "Enlightenment" order sought to denigrate it and destroy its influence because materialism doesn't only not see people as made in the image of God and, therefore, the possessors of equal and inalienable rights, but as some combination as economic resources by those who can lord it over them to be managed or as those who are to be eliminated in a competitive struggle for existence.  As I mentioned several weeks back, any such "liberals" as buy into that "enlightened" view of people and life in general who maintain some notion of provision for the poor are merely exercising habits that materialist-scientistic thinking will eventually break them of.

The reason that American liberalism is on such hard times is a combination of the the libertarian-liberalism, the elitism and snobbery that inevitably generates, the erosion of the basis of genuine American style liberalism necessitated by buying into that system of thinking which makes consumerism the ultimate value, and the attacks on those who long ago gave up The Law, the Prophets and the Gospel even as they go to church and practice some pantomime of "christianity" and even a lot of those have even given that much of it up.  Look at Donald Trump and how he showed the disingenuousness of the religious pretenses of the "evangelicals" who support him.