International Legal Evangelism: Intelligence, Reconnaissance & Missions

[A] sword …. bathed in heaven … shall come down upon … the people of
my curse….Their slain … shall be cast out, and their stink shall come up out
of their carcases, and the mountains shall be melted with their blood. … And
the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust … into brimstone.
And on and on. But there’s a point here also that David Bederman makes—
Bederman is the author of International Law in the Ancient World—which is that
the content of these curses and the conditional self-cursing embodied in oaths (a
sort of liquidate damages clause) reflects not just a need for sanctions, but also a
primal fear of desolation and chaos. Human covenant and human fidelity are all
that lie between us and an utterly disordered world. 171 The terrible retribution
wrought upon Edom is effectively the break-up of all order on which it and other
nations depended: “from generation to generation [Edom] shall lie waste; none
shall pass through it for ever and ever. … and [the Lord] shall stretch out upon it
the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness.”
On Monday, I promised you not just Abram but Nietzsche. A lot of this is
reminiscent of Nietzsche’s discussion at the beginning of the Second Essay of his
book The Genealogy of Morals, of what was necessary to breed among humanity
“an animal that is entitled to make promises,” to bring into being a person with a
memory, who can remember and stand by what he promised, someone
who [can make] promises like a sovereign, seriously, rarely, and slowly,
who is sparing with his trust, who honours another when he does trust, who
gives his word as something reliable, because he knows he is strong enough
to remain upright even when opposed by misfortune…. 172
And Nietzsche went on to say that “there is perhaps nothing more fearful and more
terrible in the entire prehistory of human beings than the technique for developing
his memory” and his promise-keeping:
We burn something in so that it remains in the memory. … When the human
being considered it necessary to make a memory for himself, it never
happened without blood, the most terrible sacrifices and pledges …, the
most repulsive self-mutilations … , the cruellest forms of ritual in all the
religious cults. 173
Well, as the modern era dawned, sacrament and invocation died away. But
the sacramental aspect was still taken seriously by some of those we entered into
treaties with. Among indigenous peoples, e.g. native Americans: “Many tribes
171 Bederman in Janis, p. 21.
172 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, §§1-2.
173 Ibid., §3.
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