Hobbes - Leviathan.pdf

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The judicial law, that is to say, the laws that God prescribed to
the magistrates of Israel for the rule of their administration of
justice, and of the sentences or judgements they should pronounce in
pleas between man and man; and the Levitical law, that is to say,
the rule that God prescribed touching the rites and ceremonies of
the priests and Levites, were all delivered to them by Moses only; and
therefore also became laws by virtue of the same promise of
obedience to Moses. Whether these laws were then written, or not
written, but dictated to the people by Moses, after his forty days
being with God in the Mount, by word of mouth, is not expressed in the
text; but they were all positive laws, and equivalent to Holy
Scripture, and made canonical by Moses the civil sovereign.
After the Israelites were come into the plains of Moab over
against Jericho, and ready to enter into the Land of Promise, Moses to
the former laws added diverse others; which therefore are called
Deuteronomy; that is, Second Laws; and are, as it is written, "the
words of a covenant which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the
children of Israel, besides the covenant which he made with them in
Horeb."* For having explained those former laws, in the beginning of
the Book of Deuteronomy, he addeth others, that begin at the twelfth
Chapter and continue to the end of the twenty-sixth of the same
book. This law they were commanded to write upon great stones
plastered over, at their passing over Jordan:*(2) this law also was
written by Moses himself in a book, and delivered into the hands of
the priests, and to the elders of Israel,*(3) and commanded "to be put
in the side of the Ark";*(4) for in the Ark itself was nothing but the
Ten Commandments. This was the law which Moses commanded the kings
of Israel should keep a copy of:*(5) and this is the law which, having
been long time lost, was found again in the Temple in the time of
Josiah, and by his authority received for the law of God. But both
Moses at the writing and Josiah at the recovery thereof had both of
them the civil sovereignty. Hitherto therefore the power of making
Scripture canonical was in the civil sovereign.
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* Deuteronomy, 29. 1
*(2) Ibid., 27
*(3) Ibid., 31. 9
*(4) Ibid., 31. 26
*(5) Ibid., 17. 18
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Besides this Book of the Law, there was no other book, from the time
of Moses till after the Captivity, received amongst the Jews for the
law of God. For the prophets, except a few, lived in the time of the
Captivity itself; and the rest lived but a little before it, and
were so far from having their prophecies generally received for laws
as that their persons were persecuted, partly by false prophets, and
partly by the kings were seduced by them. And this book itself,
which was confirmed by Josiah for the law of God, and with it all
the history of the works of God, was lost in the Captivity, and sack
of the city of Jerusalem, as appears by that of II Esdras, 14. 21,
"Thy law is burnt; therefore no man knoweth the things that are done
of Thee, or the works that shall begin." And before the Captivity,
between the time when the law was lost (which is not mentioned in
the Scripture, but may probably be thought to be the time of
Rehoboam when Shishak, King of Egypt, took the spoil of the Temple*)
and the time of Josiah, when it was found again, they had no written