Introduction

The Author

Alexander Pavlovich Lopukhin (1852–1904) belongs to the generation of Russian churchmen who set out, in the last decades of the imperial period, to give Orthodox Russia a biblical scholarship equal to what Western Europe had built over the preceding century. He was born in 1852 in a village of the Saratov province, the son of a clergyman, and was educated first at the Saratov seminary and then at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1878. He was a layman all his life—a scholar and a churchman rather than a priest—and his career unfolded in the lecture hall and the editor’s chair.

Almost immediately after finishing his studies he was sent abroad, serving from roughly 1879 to 1882 as a lay reader attached to the Russian embassy chapel in New York. The American years left their mark: he wrote for the English-language press to acquaint Americans with the life of the Russian Church, and he returned home with the outward-looking habit of mind that runs through all his later work. In 1883 he was appointed to the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, where he taught comparative theology and then, from 1885 until his death, held the chair of general civil history. He died in Saint Petersburg in 1904, at only fifty-two.

His enduring monument is editorial. Lopukhin took charge of the academy’s venerable journal Christian Reading and later of The Wanderer, and out of the second he launched two of the largest reference undertakings in Russian church literature: the Orthodox Theological Encyclopedia, whose first volumes he edited, and above all the Explanatory Bible — the great multivolume annotated commentary on the whole of Scripture that still bears his name and was carried to completion by his successors after his early death. The Legislation of Moses is the work of a much younger man, written before those labors began; but the instincts that produced it—command of the Western literature, confidence that the Bible could meet critical scholarship on its own ground, and a pastoral wish to make learning serve faith—are already fully present.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

The Legislation of Moses grew out of Lopukhin’s graduate dissertation and was first published in Saint Petersburg in 1882. Its full descriptive title names its scope exactly: a study of the family, socio-economic, and state laws of Moses. By the author’s own reckoning it was the first work of its kind in Russian—an attempt to treat the legal system of the Pentateuch as a coherent object of study rather than as scattered material for sermons or archaeology.

The preface states the occasion plainly. Biblical-historical science, Lopukhin observes, had been transformed in his lifetime by fresh discovery, drawing in theologians and secular historians alike; and while Western scholarship had long since taken up Mosaic law and set it beside Roman law as an object worthy of serious jurisprudence, Russian literature had left the subject almost untouched—possessing, he remarks with some frankness, scarcely a single work of genuine scholarly value upon it. He means to fill that gap. His aim is at once scholarly and apologetic: he holds that the Mosaic law offers “one of the most precious materials” for Christian apologetics, and that it contains, worked out on the basis of higher principles, a wise resolution of exactly those great social problems—land, poverty, debt, servitude—over which the finest minds of antiquity had labored in vain and which his own century faced again with new urgency. That last note is what gives the book its edge. Lopukhin wrote in a decade when the “social question” pressed hard on Russia and on Europe alike, and part of his purpose is to show that a legislation many of his contemporaries would have dismissed as archaic had in fact confronted those same questions and answered them. The book is thus addressed to the educated reader who wanted to see whether the law of Moses could stand comparison with the celebrated codes of Greece and Rome, and to find in it not an antiquarian relic but a living answer.

Argument & Structure

A substantial introduction sets the frame before any particular statute is examined. Lopukhin asks where the Mosaic legislation belongs in the history of human culture. Some scholars, he notes, place it wholly within the Eastern type, marked by the dominance of the religious element and a weak sense of individual personality; others locate it on the boundary between East and West. He sides with the second view, and argues it from the law’s own character. Where other Eastern codes present themselves as the naked command of a deity, the Mosaic law rests on a free covenant between God and the people, concluded, as Exodus 19:8 shows, on terms the people themselves accept—a fact that already lifts it above its neighbors and points forward to a higher valuation of the human person.

Its theocratic cast and its faint line between law and morality Lopukhin explains developmentally, as belonging to the stage at which the law found Israel, rather than as marks of inferiority. Law and morality, he reasons, are at bottom one; they part only in their reach, morality governing the whole inward life of the spirit and law that portion of it which shows itself outwardly and can be measured and restrained. A people at an early stage of self-consciousness has not yet drawn that distinction, and refers even its ordinary social arrangements directly to God—so that in Israel the sphere of civil law is still clothed in religious form. This is not, for Lopukhin, a defect to be apologized away but the natural condition of a nation being led, and the very thing that lets a single religious principle order the whole of its life. He is also candid about method: he surveys the German and English literature he draws upon, from comparative treatments of Hebrew, Greek, and Roman law to the biblical archaeologies, dictionaries, and commentaries of Keil, Delitzsch, Oehler, and others, and he is careful to weigh the value of each—the mark of a writer determined to meet Western scholarship on its own terms.

The main body then works through the law in three parts. The first treats the laws of family relations: the standing of children and the duties of upbringing; the biblical understanding of marriage and its regulation, including marriage with foreigners; the prohibited degrees of kinship and their moral-psychological rationale; the law of levirate marriage; the manner of betrothal and the freedom of choice left to bride and groom; the relations of husband and wife and, at length, the legal position of women; concubinage; divorce and the limits the law placed on it; and widowhood. He lingers over the status of the wife and mother, and over the restraints the law imposed on divorce and on the taking of concubines, precisely because these were the points on which the humanity of a legal system was, in his view, most severely tested—and on which he judged the law of Moses to compare well with the ancient world around it.

The second part turns to the socio-economic order, and here Lopukhin’s thesis about the wisdom of the law comes into its own. He examines the theocratic conception of the land—God, not conquest, as its true owner—with its equal apportionment of holdings and its guards against the natural drift toward inequality: the inalienability of family land, the sabbatical year, and the jubilee, whose social and economic meaning he defends against the charge of impracticality. From land he moves to inheritance (with the instructive case of the daughters of Zelophehad), to the law of debt (the treatment of interest, the distinction drawn between Israelite and foreigner, pledges, and the year of release), and to slavery, where he compares the condition of the Hebrew bondsman with that of the Roman slave, traces the graduated protections the law extended to Israelite servants, and describes the fixed terms and manumission that limited servitude in time.

The third part sets out the laws of the state. Its keystone is the theocratic principle, from which Lopukhin derives a striking picture of equality—economic equality underwriting social equality, the absence of castes, the peculiar position of the tribe of Levi, universal military obligation, and the sharing of the burdens of government. He describes the internal organization of the people, the representative and elective institutions, the national assembly, and finally the late and carefully limited emergence of kingship, with its “book of the rights of the kingdom,” reading the whole as a balance of theocratic and what he calls democratic principles.

Judicial law, Lopukhin explains, could not be fitted into the study; in its place he appends a self-standing treatise, The Trial of Jesus Christ from a Juridical Standpoint. Taking the two proceedings against Jesus—one under Hebrew, one under Roman law—as a uniquely instructive meeting of the two most celebrated jurisprudences of the ancient world, he asks whether the forms of each were observed and whether justice was done on the merits. His conclusion is that in both courts the outward procedure was in some measure kept while the judgment itself was reached in bad faith, and that Jesus was condemned on a double charge of treason: before the religious council as one who had called himself the Son of God and Messiah, before the Roman tribunal as one who had called himself a king.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

The abiding interest of the book lies in its governing claim: that the Mosaic legislation is not a primitive tribal code but a divinely ordered system whose social wisdom outstrips the philosophy of the ancient world. Lopukhin reads the law through the covenant, and the covenant through the dignity it confers on the people who freely enter it. From that starting point the particular statutes cease to look arbitrary. The jubilee and the sabbatical release, the protection of the poor debtor, the humane limits on servitude, the securing of the widow and the orphan, the restraint laid even upon the king—these he presents as a coherent expression of a single principle, the ordering of a whole society under God for the good of each of its members. In an age preoccupied, as his own was, with the social question, he offers the law of Moses as evidence that revelation had already addressed what secular reason was still struggling to solve.

There is a further significance in the book’s method. By insisting that the law be studied comparatively—beside the codes of Athens and Rome, with the full apparatus of contemporary scholarship—Lopukhin models a way of holding faith and learning together that was itself an argument. He does not shield the text from examination; he submits it to examination and finds it vindicated. The particular institutions carry a spiritual weight as well as a social one. The land that belongs finally to God and returns in the jubilee to the family that lost it, the debt forgiven in the year of release, the servant who cannot be held forever: each is a discipline in remembering that possession is held in trust and that no member of the covenant may be permanently ground down. Read in this way the socio-economic laws are not merely humane policy but an education of a people in the character of their God.

The work handles the law historically and with reverence, as genuine divine legislation given at a real stage of a people’s life, and it does so without polemic against the people to whom that law was given. The appended study of the trial of Christ carries the argument to the threshold of the Gospel: the same legal world whose institutions the book has expounded is the world in which the founding event of the Christian faith took place, examined here not for controversy but for what a careful reading of procedure can honestly establish. Read together, the study and its appendix trace a single line from the law of the covenant to the person around whom a new history began.

Reception & Influence

Within Lopukhin’s own vast output The Legislation of Moses is an early and specialized work, overshadowed by the Explanatory Bible and the Orthodox Theological Encyclopedia on which his fame chiefly rests. Yet it has proved durable precisely as legal-historical scholarship: long out of print, it was gathered in the twenty-first century into a Russian series devoted to the nation’s juridical heritage, a sign that its comparative reading of Mosaic, Greek, and Roman law is still valued by historians of law and not only by students of Scripture. For the English reader it opens a window onto a whole current of nineteenth-century Russian biblical scholarship—confident, comparative, and unembarrassed to treat the Scriptures as a subject fit for the most exacting learning—of which Lopukhin was among the most industrious representatives.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents a fresh, modernized English translation of Lopukhin’s study, rendered from the Russian original, Zakonodatelstvo Moiseya, first published at Saint Petersburg in 1882. It follows the house conventions used throughout this library: the author is named in the traditional way, as the Church and the scholarly world have received him—Alexander Lopukhin, professor and biblical scholar—while those who prepared the English are credited as translators, never as authors. The prose has been brought into clear contemporary English, and scriptural and internal references are given in the ordinary modern style (for example, Exodus 19:8) rather than in the older abbreviations of the source.

The edition carries the full three-part study—the family laws, the socio-economic laws, and the laws of the state, with the author’s own introduction—together with the appended treatise on the trial of Christ that completes his treatment of Hebrew and Roman judicial procedure. Where the nineteenth-century text assumed a reader at home in the learned languages, the translation aims to make Lopukhin’s argument available to any serious reader today.

Suggestions for Reading

The introduction repays reading first and in full: it lays down the framework—covenant, theocracy, the placement of the law between East and West—on which everything else depends, and without it the individual chapters can seem like a mere catalogue of statutes. Thereafter the three parts may be read straight through or consulted by theme, since each division is self-contained; a reader drawn to the social vision of the law will find its heart in the second part, on land, debt, and slavery. The concluding treatise on the trial of Christ stands on its own and can be read independently, as Lopukhin himself half intended, by anyone interested in how the two great jurisprudences of antiquity bore upon the central event of the Gospels.