Julius Wellhausen Quotes

… from the time of the Mosaic revelation through to the final collapse of Jewish sovereignty, God’s people observed no distinction between civil and religious law.

[We] relegate to the Moslem and Judaic religious authorities all matters relating to personal ethics, inheritance, and religious practices, leaving other civil and penal matters to the courts presided over by professional magistrates.

The Law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code.

The Ten Commandments are the divinely revealed law.

These call themselves the Supreme Court? They're worthless. They should be put in a bottom court … for them [God] created all of the torments in the world. Everything that [the people of] Israel suffer from, is just for these evil people. Empty and reckless... What do they know? One of our children of 7–8 years knows better than they how to learn Torah. Who says that the nation wants such judges, such evil [ones]... They have no religion and no law. All of them have sex with Niddot. All of them desecrate the Sabbath.

The Old Testament gave us the law; the New Testament reveals the love upon which the law rests.

You cannot have man legislating and playing God in Parliament, and at the same time believe that Allah is the only legislator.

Well the book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers.

It is reported in the supplement of the council of Nicæan that the fathers, being very perplexed to know which were the cryphal or apocryphal books of the Old and New Testaments, put them all pell-mell on an altar, and the books to be rejected fell to the ground. It is a pity that this eloquent procedure has not survived.

I admit that books were voted in and out, and that the Bible was finally formed in accordance with a vote.

The Bible is interpreted by the Talmud. Except, in Rabbinic tradition, a Talmudic law has the weight of the Biblical law. Sometimes we say in a prayer, "Blessed are Thou, O God, who has ordered us and commended us," to do something. But you don't find that "something" in the Bible; you find it in the Talmud. So Talmudic law becomes as important as Biblical law.

It is the simple truth to say that the New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them doing so.

Few things are more commonly misunderstood than the nature and meaning of theocracy. It is commonly assumed to be a dictatorial rule by self-appointed men who claim to rule for God. In reality, theocracy in Biblical law is the closest thing to a radical libertarianism that can be had.

Judaism is absolutely incompatible with the abandonment of the Torah.

Since my daughter is only half-Jewish, could she go in the water up to her knees?

It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.

The thing about an executive order - there has never been an executive order that a Congress couldn't say, "You know, we don't like that so we're going to do something else," if there is a majority in Congress to do something else.

The Ten Commandments are for lame brains. The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be; the second five are half truths, neither complete nor adequate.

Go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant. They're quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 Commandments.

I like the power given the Legislature to levy taxes, and for that reason solely approve of the greater house being chosen by the people directly.

I think there has been an unfortunate tendency for a lot of different groups to forget that distinction between natural law and revealed truth and to say: Our complete agenda is to be enacted into laws governing the entire society. Many different religious groups claim that authority, not only Catholics. A lot of different Protestant groups as well are stepping forward to say: Here is our agenda, it is a moral agenda, ergo it must be enacted into law. I think that the distinction between natural law and more ultimate kinds of doctrine is being lost.

But the wisdom and authority of the legislator are seldom victorious in a contest with the vigilant dexterity of private interest.

If these laws [in the Bible] belonged to any other ancient culture we would approach them very differently. We need not bother to reject the code of Hammurabi. Presumably it is because Moses is still felt to make some claim on us that this project of discrediting his law is persisted in with such energy. The unscholarly character of the project may derive from the supposed familiarity of the subject.

The power of the legislative being derived from the people by a positive voluntary grant and institution, can be no other than what that positive grant conveyed, which being only to make laws, and not to make legislators, the legislative can have no power to transfer their authority of making laws, and place it in other hands.

It is the peculiar province of the legislature to prescribe general rules for the government of society; the application of those rules to individuals in society would seem to be the duty of other departments.