Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. For thousands of years, the view that only rulers conferred rights or privileges on everyone else was taken for granted in traditional societies around the world. In the ancient empires of Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, only those whom rulers regarded as their peers had value, or what the Romans called dignitas. Hindu societies enshrined the ruler as one who embodies the divine order of the gods, and established a hierarchical rank for everyone else. The caste system even defined some people as “outcaste,” with no right to move freely and little recourse from lifelong servitude. The anonymous Babylonian scribes who wrote the legal code of Hammurabi some 4,000 years ago seem to have regarded human value as a quality that the king could grant to certain people and deny to others. This code assigned privileges, and what we call “rights,” according to a strictly hierarchical view of social power. The archaeologists who discovered Hammurabi’s code must have been surprised, at first, to see that it offered certain protections from mutilation, torture, and execution. But it became clear that these were dependent on one’s social rank. The king—who authorized the code—assigned punishments based on the social status of the offender and the victim. Ancient kings and emperors enforced their power through terror and violence. They claimed to derive their own prerogatives from the gods—from Marduk, in Babylonia; Ra, in Egypt; Jupiter, in Rome. Ancient philosophers held similar views. More than 2,000 years ago, when Plato wrote his famous treatise on “The Laws,” he declared that human laws merely articulate the will of the gods, and extend privileges to people like himself, members of the aristocratic class in Athens. Aristotle took a different approach, invoking what would later be known as biological determinism. Observing that among wild animals, different creatures possess different innate abilities, he argued that the same is true of humans—for instance, that disparities in intelligence and physical strength predispose people to be natural-born rulers or slaves. The Declaration of Independence, by contrast, speaks of the rights to life and liberty as sacred gifts that “Nature” and “Nature’s God” have given freely to all humanity. These principles were inspired partly by the Enlightenment, the philosophical movement that emerged in Europe after hundreds of years of horrifying religious war. But they originated in the Book of Genesis, which declares that every human being has value. As Thomas Jefferson knew when he wrote the Declaration, the idea of innate rights to life and liberty was a bold innovation. The “truths” for which the Founders risked their lives were not in fact “self-evident.” That makes preserving them all the more important. By suggesting that ultimate value resides in the individual, regardless of their sociopolitical status, the Bible defied some of the world’s most enduring conventions of rank and worth. Genesis declares that adam (Hebrew for “man” or “humankind”) was created in the image of God, thus affirming the intrinsic value of all human beings—a fundamental theme for “peoples of the book,” Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. The Bible describes how, for several hundred years, the ancient Israelites governed themselves by tribal councils, maintaining a measure of equality. In a crisis, when tribal councils failed to reach consensus, Israel’s people agreed to choose a king, “like the other nations.” But they also developed methods to resist autocratic power. Those who wrote the Bible well remembered the oppression that Israel’s people had experienced in Egypt and Babylonia. Biblical chronicles that tell of the great King David’s triumphs also show that when he acted wrongly, the prophet Nathan rebuked him, speaking on behalf of the Lord, and ordered him to repent and reform. In that culture, moral law remained as binding for the king himself as for his subjects—David obeyed the prophet’s command. Other kings of Israel, too, were reprimanded by prophets when they failed to act morally. Jesus of Nazareth amplified the theme of innate rights by advocating generosity and love toward all people. Jefferson admired the Bible’s ethical principles, but was skeptical of its metaphysics. He famously took a razor to the New Testament, excising the miracles while leaving intact the teachings of Jesus, whom Jefferson venerated as a philosopher and the author of “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” [From the November 2020 issue: James Parker on reading Thomas Jefferson’s Bible] In drafting the Declaration, Jefferson cited the “sacred and undeniable” truth that “all men are created equal.” He also drew on the idea of natural law that ensured human rights—a concept that had been popularized in mid-18th-century Europe with the Enlightenment. The final version of the document, of course, referred to humans’ natural rights as “self-evident.” Above all, the Founding Fathers agreed that because these are innate rights, they can only be recognized, and not conferred, by human beings. They went on to state, “To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This contradicted prevailing views not just from ancient times but also from their own day. From the fifth to the 18th centuries, Europe’s Catholic and Protestant kings claimed to rule by “divine right,” insisting that the lower status of everyone else, whether aristocrat, merchant, servant, or slave, was simply God’s will. (To this day, the British Crown’s ancient motto proclaims: “God and My Right.”) This was also an ideal that Jefferson himself did not live up to. Glancing out his study window at Monticello, he would have seen people whom he had bought as property working in his fields, people denied rights of any kind. It took another war to extend those rights to Black Americans, and the work of protecting the rights defined in the Declaration is an ongoing project. But over the course of its first 250 years, the United States became the strongest and most prosperous
