Interchapter Query: Chapter 10 - 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
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Interchapter Query: Chapter 10
In Chapter 10: There are 3 mentions of Chapter 8, below.
Note: These are three of the known mentions of Chapter 8 (see this general query) that are (or were) in other chapters (as they were written in earlier edits). Some of these mentions were edited or were cut completely from other chapters but still provide a hint of what was intended to be added to Chapter 8, with your help. Mentions are indicated with code formatting (gray background with pink-color font on regular text, and normal blue-color font with gray background on links). This is an example of a mention of Chapter 8.
First Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 10
Note: This mention was later omitted from Chapter 10’s body and moved into a query, at this link.
1.Interchapter QueryThis mention was later omitted from Chapter 10’s body and moved into a query, at this link. This is of course hardly surprising in view of the fact that
, as the preceding Chapter 8 has described,temples were civilization’s first corporate institutions, at least in the Bronze Age Near East. But these public corporate entities were only part of the interface between the deities and economic life.
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Second Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 10
2.
[PUT THIS IN CORPORATION CH.8?]The term “hierarchy” derives from Greek “hieros,” meaning sacred. It certainly is a better term than “priesthood,” whose theological implications distract attention from the primarily secular functions of most temple officials.[In Corporation Ch.8, perhaps as transition to Ch.9:]
What initially were weighed out were not for the most part market goods, but in-house commodity allocations. As Measures, Rules, and Prices has described, Mesopotamia’s temple or palace dependents received rations instead of money-wages to be spent on purchasing their livelihood in the open market, and temple administrators took their prebend income in barley. (It is not clear whether this was only for their own food needs or afforded also a marketable surplus—that in turn might be converted into silver.)
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Third Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 10
Note: This (Chapter 10 mentions, item 3) was deleted from Chapter 10. We’re not sure if this was meant to be about Chapter 8, Chapter 10, or a different chapter altogether.
3.
[Creation of Order Religious Chapter]Interchapter QueryThis (Chapter 10 mentions, item 3) was deleted from Chapter 10. We’re not sure if this was meant to be about Chapter 8, Chapter 10, or a different chapter altogether.
Introduction: The Worldly Relevance of Early Religion [Heading Level: 1]
The Etymology and Semantics of ‘Religion’ [Heading Level: 2]
But above all, religion went hand in hand with order. It was necessary for civil order. As the great classical historian Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff observed a century ago: “Not good or bad, but injurious or useful are the differences”Citation NeededCitation needed. emphasized by early Greek religion.
Archaic justice was primarily distributive justice. It was as such that this set out to protect the poor, above all from the depredations of usury by society’s creditors.
Religion and Authority [Heading Level: 2]
Religion and the Specialization of Labor and Division of Society Into Classes [Heading Level: 3]
1. Religion always has sought to sanctify the status quo. But initially, the idea was to restore an idealized status quo ante.
2. But the epoch of “divine kingship” gave way in the first millennium BC to military emperors and an epoch of rulers who were administrators for the increasingly powerful oligarchies that ended in control of society throughout the Roman Empire.
The downfall came when religion sanctified emperors and creditors. [Root]Verify Citation“[Root]” is likely an indication to cite a work by Margaret Cool Root. Can you help us find the source (ideally linked) to add?
3. Authority became increasingly inequitable. Rome’s property-based law.
Conclusion: The economic historian can trace the dissolution of religion into individualistic personal salvation rather than a preservation of social order.
It was this modern stage of religion that has become otherworldly and decayed into mere superstition.
So we are brought back to the anti-science crowd, which turns out also to be the anti-religious crowd as the term historically has been understood.
So, modern economic and religious thought reacts against two abuses stemming from within religion itself. In Germany, Luther reacted against the decay of religion into an autonomous, self-serving bureaucracy. In Scotland, Adam Smith’s Protestant views protected the individual against government intrusion into the economy by ambitious rulers. The State as well as the Church had become self-serving classes for themselves, seeking power rather than social order.
One might hope that the State would provide a check against Church bureaucracies, while the Church provided a reciprocal check on abuses of government. Instead, they joined hands against the rest of the population. Already by the high medieval period Church and State supported each other’s bad behavior. Both sectors became all the more “worldly” in the sense of supporting secular wealth, even as finance was taking over governments, physical capital, and with them repressing labor and its living standards in a mutual expression of worldly opportunism.
It was in this setting that individualism emerged.
The royal andurārum acts cast light not only on early Judaism, but also the Christianity that emerged out of it, while being a protest against the Sadducees and Pharisees—the vested interests that had taken over Jewish religion and made it worldly in quite a different sense than was originally meant.
By contrast, a surviving Dead Sea scroll shows how immediate was the concern with debt at the time Christianity emerged. It was a world in which rural usury was reducing over a quarter of the population to bondage. In this world the preaching of the early social prophets such as Isaiah and Amos struck a vital chord.
[Creation of Order:] Heaven was the sky, hence up. It was the source of order on earth. And so, symmetrically, hell became “down there,” below, the underworld.
The religious advocacy of the “straight” and its condemnation of the “crooked” reflected its primary role as creating order and preventing disorder from disrupting society’s continuity.
“In the beginning” religion was coterminous with the law. And the law also was straight—German “Recht.” As the historian of religion Martin Nilsson[1] has noted: “Profane law (as well as religious law) had been placed from time immemorial under divine protection. Zeus watches over law and justice, and even after men had begun consciously to shape and after the positive laws, Zeus sees that justice takes her proper course. For all primitive peoples law has divine sanction and authority.” This of course was long before there were lawyers.
The law was an early form of social planning, by laying down rules grounded in moral ethics.
Public rather than private credit would avoid much modern polarization, along with administered prices for monopoly goods and services.
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- ↑ Martin P. Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion, 2nd ed. (New York: 1964).
