Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: parole che dicevano gli uomini son tutti uguali

vengono dalla Bibbia, dal tanto bistrattato Antico Testamento.
Chissa' se Persio ci ha mai pensato
 
http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2012/1/17/main-feature/1/america-the-biblical/e
 
 
January 17, 2012
America the Biblical
By Diana Muir Appelbaum
 
The Greeks did not invent equality.  Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and
the gang famously believed that the rich are different from you and me—
not merely because they are shaped by their privileges but because
they are actually, literally made of superior stuff.  The Greeks
believed that the gods formed the rich from finer clay, with gold
mixed in for the aristocrats, silver for the commercial class, and
cheap iron and brass for the rest of us lowly plebeians.  Almost
invariably, great men were born to aristocratic parents, as Plato and
Aristotle were.  Inexplicably, plebian parents occasionally produced a
superior man like Socrates; but this was rare.
 
Much of the world, then and since, has agreed with the Greeks.  But as
Joshua Berman points out in his important book, Created Equal: How the
Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought, the Jews thought
differently.  The Bible often echoes Mesopotamian myths: Sargon of
Akkad, after all, was another baby placed by his mother in a rush
basket that was waterproofed with pitch and set afloat on the river.
But Berman, one of a number of scholars currently working to
understand the Bible's political and social ideas, shows us that a
yawning chasm separates these ideas from those of the rest of the
ancient Near East.
 
Berman illustrates this difference by recounting the great
Mesopotamian creation epic of Atrahasis.  It tells us that in the
beginning, the world was inhabited only by gods.  There were
aristocratic gods called Annunaki and a lower class of gods, the
Igigi.  The aristocratic Annunaki, born to rule, owned and ran the
world.  The non-aristocratic Igigi did all the work, digging
irrigation ditches, farming, cooking, and sweeping up after the
aristocrats.  It sounds familiar.
 
Then the Igigi revolted, besieging the home of the aristocratic god
Enlil and demanding less work for more pay.  The gods averted crisis
as only gods can:  One unlucky god was sacrificed and his flesh mixed
with clay to create human beings—somebody else to do the menial labor
needed to support the gods' lifestyle.  The new humans, like the gods,
were divided by birth into classes: underlings, aristocrats, and
temple priests.  In Mesopotamian cosmology, the world depended on
offerings of wheat and gold that were made to the gods by priests and
kings.  Naturally, it was necessary and right that the priests and
kings who performed these essential rituals should own the land, exact
heavy taxes, and array themselves in gold and fine linen while
commoners sweated in the fields, the purpose for which they were
created.
 
The Bible tells a very different story.  Here, too, humans are created
out of clay; but the cosmology is radically different.  In the Bible,
ordinary men and women are not created to labor for the benefit of
others.  From every fruit-bearing tree and seed-bearing herb, God
provides food to all of his children, telling them to be fruitful and
multiply and giving them dominion over the earth.  God gives
possession of the world directly to people in general; not to a king,
aristocracy, or temple.
 
Berman does not argue that every biblical law was carried out as
written.  Rather, he shows that parts of the Bible, particularly
Deuteronomy, represent a statement of the way society should be
structured.  Others have called it an ancient constitution.  And the
political, social, and economic program represented by Deuteronomy
contrasts sharply with that of the ancient Near Eastern empires.
 
In Egypt and Mesopotamia, the land belonged to the gods, though it was
the temples and the king that collected the rent.  But biblical Israel
was a nation of small-hold farmers who held their leases directly from
God.  Israelite priests received, and depended on, offerings and
tithes from the people; but a 10-percent tithe was a shockingly low
tax rate by ancient Near Eastern standards, and a good portion of the
tithed produce went not to a king or temple but to the poor.
 
A man who fell on hard times might sell his land, or himself and his
family, into debt-slavery; but every fifty years, in the jubilee year,
debt-slaves went free and lands reverted to the families that
originally owned them.  These were powerful mechanisms for ensuring
that property—and, thus, the resources necessary to enable people to
be members of a political community—were broadly distributed.  Whether
or not the mechanisms actually operated as written, the biblical text
itself became a powerful force.
 
What is interesting about these laws is that they carefully describe a
social and economic system calculated to produce a broad middle class,
which is, as it happens, the only type of system in which it is
plausible to claim that all men are created equal.  Neither the
ancient nor the medieval world paid much attention to these biblical
ideas—that all members of a nation should be treated as equals before
the law and that society should be organized so as to prevent the
concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few.  Louis XVI
had no more use for such an idea than Joseph Stalin or the Han
Emperor.  Certainly neither Bashir Assad nor Kim Jong-un has the least
use for it today.
 
In contrast, the men and women who founded the American colonies and
the American republic were profoundly affected by notions of human
equality that are essentially biblical in origin.
 
This distinguished lineage of ours poses a temptation to indulge in
excessive self-congratulation.  But before we succumb, we should
remember the protests of this summer and fall in the United States and
Israel.  They remind us that both societies have serious work to do in
building the egalitarian ideas of our Constitution, drawn from the
Bible, into our economic and political reality.

 The Greeks did not invent equality.
 
sempre a rosicà, sti sionisti. E fatevi una vita...