5. Family and Delinquency (Remastered)

Family and Delinquency

R.J. Rushdoony

Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Delinquency and the Family, Deuteronomy 21:18-21:

“If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.”

We have referred to this particular law several times in recent weeks, we shall return to it somewhat later. It is a particularly important law. Before we go into its meaning, it is interesting to note that the Talmud gives a great deal of attention to this particular law, but the gist of the attention that it gives it, and some of the worst passages in the Talmud are connected with this, is to take away the possibility of enforcement. When it gets through defining what a son is, it’s virtually impossible to convict anyone under their definition. Their interpretation is very much like the Supreme Court decisions of our day which take away the meaning of the law in the name of the law.

The meaning of this law, however, is central to an understanding of Biblical Law. Certain things appear very clearly in this law. First of all, this law indicates a limitation on the power of the family. The Roman father had the power of life and death over his children. He could expose the children as infants if he did not want them, and he could kill them as youths. This power of life and death over one’s children is a common power in many non-Biblical cultures. The presupposition is this; the parents as god give and take life. But according to Scripture, of course, God is the giver of life and God establishes the conditions of life, and the only conditions under which life can be taken. 

Now, in this law, as we saw from the reading, a delinquent child, that is, an incorrigible delinquent, is to be reported by the parents, tried by the city council, the elders at the gates, and to be executed if guilty.

Now this brings us to a second point with respect to the meaning of this law. It clearly means that the law requires that the family align to itself with law and order rather than with the criminal son. In other words, their loyalties are to be, not in terms of love, but in terms of law. Because this law, by requiring that the parents report an incorrigible delinquent to the city council and witness at his trial, requires a fundamental alignment in terms of law, not in terms of love. It means, therefore, that if the parents refuse to complain, they were guilty either of condonation or of participation in their son’s crime. And of course, you know that to condone or to participate in a crime is a criminal offense. The parents are not legally, in this case, complaining witness in the normal sense and therefore not executioners, the men of the city are the executioners. But the parents are, in effect, given a choice. Are they going to become participants in their son’s crime, or are they going to be participants in law and order? And this is an important point.

Recently, a young man was arrested for a particularly fearful crime, he was caught in the act, it was an ugly, perverted act. And yet, according to the daily papers, and this happened within the past month, the father and the mother said they were deeply shocked and grieved, it was more than they could bear, almost, and they were losing sleep, and I believe the father said he was worried about his wife’s health. “But,” he said, “we will stand by our son.” They were guilty of participation or condonation. They had no right under Biblical Law to stand by their son when he was obviously guilty. We must stand in terms of law and order.

Now, a third point is also apparent here. When we began our studies in Biblical Law, we saw that Biblical Law is case law. That is, the Ten Commandments give us the general principles of law and then the rest of the law gives us case laws which establish what has come down in our law as precedent, that is, particular incidents which illustrate the scope of the law. 

Now, in this particular case law, the principle is this; if even a son cannot be defended by parents or by the family when he is guilty of a crime, it is certainly true of any other member, or any friend or relative. If it is true here with a son, how much more so elsewhere of any incorrigible criminal? In other words, the family turning over its son to the law will turn over anyone. And of course, the law goes on to specify that friends and relatives, if they are guilty, are to be denounced. Daughters are clearly included; we saw this last week:

“There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel.”

Deuteronomy 23:17.

And other such laws. No Hebrew, in other words, could be an incorrigible criminal and remain alive, and it is significant that the very word for ‘prostitute’ in the Hebrew means a foreign woman, because there could be no Hebrew girl go astray and remain. If she wanted to stay alive, she’d get out of the country. So the only word in Hebrew for prostitute, apart from a word that meant the sacred prostitutes of the Canaanites, was a foreign woman.

Now this points very clearly to the fourth principle that appears in this law, namely that:

“…so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.” 

In other words, all incorrigible delinquents, all incorrigible criminals, were to be executed, so that Biblical Law does not visualize a professional criminal class. No such class could exist if Biblical Law were kept. This means, therefore, that when the law deals with theft, it does not deal with the professional criminal, but some employee or some citizen who, in a moment of weakness, has stolen and must make, of course, restitution, as we shall see when we come to the commandment. It does not visualize, in any area of crime, a professional criminal class, because the professional criminal had to be eliminated. As soon as a lawbreaker was established to be an incorrigible criminal, he had to be tried and executed. 

We have a trace of this law still surviving in American law in most States, although it’s beginning to disappear now because this was once a part of our law. In some States, if you are a three-time or a four-time loser, you are sentenced to life in prison. In other words, you have no standing before the law in terms of any further citizenship, any further freedom or parole. Unfortunately, one State in which this law is now surviving is in process of having the law challenged in the courts by the criminals themselves. 

But in terms of Biblical Law, a professional criminal class of incorrigible delinquents could not exist. Now, when you permit their existence as we are now doing, you are in effect subsidizing them because law constitutes a war against somebody. You try by law to eliminate a particular class. Law is a subsidy to the good and a war against the evil. But when you permit the evil to live indefinitely, and when the law becomes easier and easier on them and finally penalizes the godly, then the war has been turned around, and the law has become a warfare on the godly. This is exactly our position today.

We’ll return to this point much later in our study of Biblical Law. But for the present, to cite the significance of this, let me quote from the paper of just a few days ago, just the first two paragraphs of the story:

“Use of marijuana is so vast in the Bay Area that it is simply not in the realm of possibility for law enforcement agencies to stop it.

In Berkeley on a Saturday night there may be 2000 pot parties going on—can you have an informer or a policeman at each one?” ⁱ

In other words, it’s beyond the possibility of enforcement. The same is true in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, and in many, many other communities, it’s beyond enforcement. But is it just marijuana? Not at all. Coming here this morning on the radio, I learned that a problem here in Los Angeles is the increasing amount of purse snatching from older women, to the point where it’s impossible to do anything about it. Not enough policemen can be put on the streets downtown to prevent it. Or the fact that young hoodlums have been going into the city parks and burying broken bottles and glass in the sand underneath children’s slides so that when the children come down the slide in their bare feet, they land on that. Now, how can you stop that? In other words, these illustrations, and we could go across the field, whether it is sex crimes, theft, whatever crime you want to name, is increasing beyond the possibility of enforcement. You’re not going to change this by electing a new mayor or a new president because the problem is that there are far too many incorrigible delinquents, incorrigible criminals, who have been so long favored by the law that now they are out of control. And if you really want a scare along these lines, talk to a police officer who will speak frankly on these matters, and he will tell you how far beyond control it is.

Now the whole point of this law that we have been analyzing, Deuteronomy 21:18-21, is precisely this, that the incorrigible delinquent, the incorrigible criminal, must be executed. 

“…so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.” 

Law is, as we saw earlier, a warfare. Its purpose is to eliminate a particular class from society and to keep evil within bounds. When it fails to do that, it means that the warfare has been turned around. 

Fourth, obviously, this law does not permit pity by parents for an incorrigible delinquent child. The Biblical Law demands pity for the offended, not for the offender. And in law after law, Biblical Law requires that pity be withheld from the criminal. For example, Deuteronomy 7:16, 13: 6-9, 19:11-13, 19:21, 25:11-12, and many, many other laws. Pity, in other words, cannot be used as a subsidy to evil, because when your heart is full of pity towards the evil, you are then pitiless towards the person who has been assaulted or robbed. 

Fifth, the crime of the delinquent son involves an assault or war on fundamental authority. The incorrigible is described as “stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother.” In other words, this is the root cause. Criminality begins with a fundamental rebellion against authority in the home. And in Hebrew, the most fearful expression describing an evil person is precisely the expression ‘stubborn and rebellious,’ the epitome of lawlessness, striking out from childhood against the authority of the home, and throughout all life against all law and order, against all authority.

Now sixth, this law makes clear that capital punishment is godly. Life is created by God, it is to be lived only in terms of His Law-Word. We saw earlier that the Roman father had the power of life and death over his children, purely according to his whim. And this is true in most non-Christian societies the world over because ancestor-worship or pure paganism does not see God as the author of life but the parent, and it begins very, very early. In other words, in those societies, and there is a connection, where the parents have the right to abort the fetus, they also had the right to take the life of the child. The one follows the other, very logically. If they have the right to kill the life in the uterus, they have the right to kill it afterwards because they are the creator and the governor of life. 

But according to Scripture, neither the parents nor the state are the creators of life, and therefore neither one can fix the terms of life. And in this fact is our greatest safeguard of freedom. A godly state can only deal with offenders in terms of God’s Law, and take life only in terms of God’s Law, and in terms of God’s Law it must protect the godly. 

Finally, the formal charges against the son which we have just referred to, “stubborn and rebellious,” does not indicate a weak-willed person but a strong-willed person; strong in evil. He is stubborn and rebellious, a glutton and a drunkard, an incorrigible delinquent lacking in discipline and self-control. He is a person who has denied his inheritance of faith and law, and the inheritance of faith and law is, according to Scripture, life itself. And a rebellion against this inheritance is a rebellion against life, the very conditions of life. Therefore, the sentence of death, brings death to those who refuse life.

This law, therefore, is of central importance in Scripture. You cannot have a godly society when you deny the fundamentals of God’s Law. And how can you have a godly society when incorrigible criminals can trifle with the law and go free and terrorize the godly to the point where law and order breaks down, where confessed rapists have been turned loose by the Supreme Court to go out and almost immediately commit another rape? Where there are more offenders than there are police, where law and order is breaking down because the criminals now, the incorrigible, the professional criminals, are so great an army that they outnumber all the police in the United States, where they possibly outnumber our armed forces? 

Some years ago, in a city of about 22,000, I talked with a deputy sheriff and he said:

“I can put my finger on the professional criminals in this community tomorrow. I’ve seen it over a period of years. He said we have about 300 juvenile delinquents in this city. About 150 of those are going to be weaklings all their life but they’re not going to be professional criminals. But about 100-150 of those are going to be professional criminals no matter what we or any church or any social agency wants to do. Over the years I have seen precisely these delinquents graduate and become the permanent criminals of the community, and if they drift on elsewhere, they are the criminals there because we hear, and we get inquiries, and we know their record.”

Now this is the obvious, the well-known fact. We are perpetuating, we are subsidizing, we are protecting an army of criminals. We can never cope with it until the Biblical Law, which requires the execution of professional criminals, incorrigible professional criminals, until that law is the law of any land. 

Today all over the world, country after country is in the same crisis. A new prime minister and a new president or a new governor is not the answer. A return to God’s Law-Order is.

Let us pray.

* * *

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto thee for this, thy Word. We thank thee, our God, that thou hast called us to be the people of thy Word and we pray that by thy grace we can again re-establish the sovereignty of thy Word in this land so that this may again be a land of liberty, a land where thy blessing prevails. Bless us to this purpose, make us strong, bold and confident in thy service, unto the end that the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ. Grant us this we beseech thee. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

* * *

Are there any questions now?

Yes.

[Audience member] Question about Jewish names.

[Rushdoony] Well, a great many of the Jewish names today are really German or Polish or Russian or Spanish, depending on their point of origin, but some of them are still from the Hebrew; for example, ‘Cohen.’ Cohen, in Hebrew, means ‘priest.’ And it’s a curious thing but that word has traveled all over the world. For example, in Hawaii the name for a priest is, or a medicine man is ‘kahuna,’ Cohen. It’s that word in particular has traveled into every continent. 

Yes.

[Audience member] …have any left…preach again…understand their background…

Yes.

[Audience member] According to the passage, it seems that conviction and execution of the sentence follows the accusation.  ⁱⁱ

[Rushdoony] No, if they had been incorrigible delinquents up to this point, they are tried on the evidence. In other words, this is a legal trial that it visualizes here. If they repent, they die as repentant criminals, but they still die. In other words, the law does not recognize anything but acts. 

Now in early America, when the law sentenced a man to death, it tried him in terms of his acts. But even in the course of the sentence, the judge asked the criminal to repent of his crimes and then delegated, not only certain ministers, from whence we get chaplains, but urged the public officials as they dealt with this man day by day in prison as he awaited execution, plead with him that he repent and die in grace. So that, you see, you cannot convert a religious repentance into evidence in a criminal trial, a criminal trial deals with evidence, of acts.

Yes, another question?

[Audience member] What about those who say that because of problems in the judicial system you dare not execute the penalty of death, given the possible of a miscarriage of justice.  ⁱⁱⁱ

[Rushdoony]Yes. You can say, “I agree with you, I think it’s a fearful thing for any innocent person to be convicted. But aren’t you in leaning over backward to be easy on the criminal, in each case, convicting someone? Aren’t you convicting and punishing in a sense, the offended party? If it’s your money that’s been robbed or a member of your family that’s been killed, and he takes that attitude toward the criminal, ‘Well I’m ready to lean over backward to give him the benefit of every reasonable doubt,’” you’ll say, “Yes, but if you’re going to press this to the point where you’re going to release a person whom the overwhelming evidence points to as guilty, you’re convicting me.” 

So, you see, every trial, even though it does not result in a conviction, does result in a penalty for somebody.

Yes.

[Audience member] Question about adherence to procedures being of greater concern to the court than the facts of the case and the application of justice.

[Rushdoony] Yes, the point you’ve made, and that’s a good legal opinion in case you didn’t hear Mr. Maxwell, the law today proceeds not on the facts but on procedure. And of course, that is thoroughly Biblical, your objection to this because the Biblical Law requires that the law proceed on the basis of facts.

Now, the reason for this shift from facts to procedure is because we have gone from common law to statutory law, and with that it becomes the quibbling about the rules and the statute rather than the fact of the crime. 

Every time you drift away from common law, which is Biblical Law, you destroy the law because it becomes endlessly involved in procedure and it acquits a man in terms of procedure.

Yes.

[Audience member] Comment about the transformation of prisons and penal institutions into ‘correctional facilities.’

[Rushdoony] Yes, right. It’s a part and parcel of the whole thing that they have become correctional facilities rather than prisons and penal institutions. And I have visited at that correctional facility, and it is a fearful place. They have classes in psychology for the inmates, and the criminals who get along are the ones who play the game, and they know it. And the smarter and the more dangerous they are, the better they are at playing the game of this whole correctional bit.

Yes,

[Audience member] I wonder when a child should be recognized as being such. 

[Rushdoony] Well, in our law, the child is a child until he is 21 or until he marries, he or she marries. So it could be much younger.

[Audience member] At what age was the child conceived of as being a child in that legislation?

[Rushdoony] Well, there’s nothing said on that score and the answer to that is, it was at an age sufficient for the child to be involved in serious acts. It could be younger for some and older for others and it probably varied in different periods.

Now this is the kind of thing the Talmud went into at great length and virtually nullified the Law. 

[Audience member] Why was the Early Church instructed to sell all they had and put it into a common fund and live communally? ^iv

[Rushdoony] Yes. Only in Jerusalem did this happen, and they were not instructed to sell all they had and to put it into the common treasury. Only in Jerusalem. And why? And it was voluntary. Some members, we are told, sold what they had and put it in the treasury. Why? Why only in Jerusalem and what was involved?

Remember now, these people were people who had heard Jesus speak a few weeks or months or two or three years before. And what had Jesus said? He had said, and you can read it in Matthew 24, that Jerusalem was to be destroyed. God’s judgment was on Jerusalem, the whole nation was to be wiped out. Paul writes, “They believed our Lord. Therefore they said, “Now there’s no point in continuing to do business here.” Some of them moved elsewhere. But those who remained, the wealthy among them, did give part or all of their possessions to the common treasury for missionary work there so that they could try to convert their friends and relatives. 

Now, it involved no idea of communal living. To the best of our evidence, both from the book of Acts, where it appears, and from Church history, a very limited number of the wealthier members did this, and they did it for missionary purposes. So there is no pattern of communal living ever required in the Scriptures. It is purely private ownership, voluntary giving. 

[Audience member] Why were Ananias and Sapphira killed by God?  ^v

[Rushdoony] Because they lied to God. They tried to deceive God and gain credit, as some other members of the church had. And so, for this blasphemy, they were struck dead as a warning.

Yes.

[Audience member] Question about the prodigal son.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The question is with respect to the prodigal son. Now, the Parable of the Prodigal Son does not deal with civil law or criminal law. This is a parable that deals with what? God as the father. Now, who is the faithful son and who is the prodigal son? The so-called ‘faithful; son, who has never left the house, is supposedly the law-abiding classes; the Pharisees, the Sadducees, those who were against Christ. Who was the prodigal son? The publicans, the ones who were repenting and coming to our Lord, you see. 

So the parable there has a theological reference. Its reference is not to criminal law. And you cannot take something that has reference to criminal law and apply it to theology, or something that deals with a theological principle and apply it to criminal law. So, the Parable of the Prodigal Son cannot even be applied to unbelievers, Gentiles, as against believers. The parable has reference to the situation in Israel, and today it would have reference to the situation, say, in the Church. So we cannot take, you see, something out of its context.

Now, I want to take just a couple of minutes to deal with a point that someone raised yesterday. As you know we had a bazaar at the Green Hotel. And someone said, “You know when I was in a particular church, any idea of bazaars or money-making dinners was strictly forbidden in the church. How do you feel about that? What is the Scripture about that? After all, didn’t Christ cast out, this is what I was always told, those that bought and sold in the temple and the money-changers?”

A very good question and I think we ought to deal with that, because that incident of the money-changers and those that bought and sold in the Temple is used on two sides. First, it is used by the liberals to say, you see how God regards business. So the left-wingers make heavy use of that incident to condemn all buying and selling as though somehow it has a dirty connotation, and it cannot be associated with God. 

On the other hand, very well-meaning people feel very strongly about anything connected with the church that involves buying or selling. I know I went to one church once to speak at an evening service, and they had a book and tract and pamphlet rack and table in the narthex and there were quite a number of pamphlets for twenty-five cents, and books, and I saw a book that I’d long wanted, and it was out of print, and I wanted to get. So I picked it up after the service, and I said, “Whom do I pay?” Well, then there was considerable embarrassment all the way around because they had them there, they wanted the people to buy them, but not on Sunday. You took it on Sunday, but then you mailed in a check, or you paid when you came to prayer meeting Wednesday night because on the Sabbath, you couldn’t do it. And I said, “Well I’m only here in this town tonight, and I just can’t bother to mail it.” Well, it ended up that I wrote out a check and gave it to somebody who was going to bring it Wednesday night and then the transaction wouldn’t have taken place on Sunday.

Well, you have to respect such intense desire to obey what they believe is Biblical, but it just doesn’t jive with Scripture. Because our Lord didn’t say, “You’re desecrating the Sabbath Day.” What did He say? “My house is the house of prayer for all nations, but ye have made it a den of thieves.” So He didn’t say they had violated the Sabbath or that they had violated the Temple, that there should be no buying and selling within the Temple, no money-making attached to the Temple, but that they had been stealing. So what was involved?

Alright, now what was going on there? First of all, money-changing. Why money-changing? Well, what was the money out in the streets? It was Roman money, was it not? Remember our Lord asked that a coin be given to him, and He said, “Whose image and superscription is this?” Caesar’s. Alright. Caesar’s money was used on the streets. Well, the priests and the high priests had passed a rule that you couldn’t use Caesar’s money in the Temple. That was dirty money. So when you came to the Temple, you had to use a special coinage made for the Temple. In other words, Caesar’s money was dirty money in the Temple, so you had to exchange your money for Temple money. Now, the exchange rate was set at such a rate that every time you stopped there to exchange Caesar’s money for the High Priest’s money, the profit was tremendous. So it varied from High Priest to High Priest, but you lost half your money in the transaction with some high priests.

Then, of course, you came to offer up sacrifices. Remember when our Lord was brought, or when the Virgin Mary came to the first visit to the Temple with our Lord for purification, she offered up a couple of pigeons. Now, originally, people brought the pigeons or the lamb or the kid or the bullock to the temple or to the sanctuary. Later on, for convenience for those who came at some distance and could not bring it very easily, the Temple began to provide the animal so that you could buy it there. That was fine. But then the High Priests and Levites got the idea, “Let’s corner the market. Let us pass a rule that you cannot bring an animal, you have to buy what we provide. Now, imagine the profit. Nobody can bring an animal for sacrifice.” They have to buy what is provided there in the Temple and at their price. 

Well, when the Romans took over Judea they found very quickly that the most powerful person was the High Priest. His take from this traffic was so great that he was a millionaire in a year’s time. In fact, the take, as I recall it, reached as high as 20 million in one year—just the High Priest’s portion. And you realize that during the Passover there were only, there were over million pilgrims for that festival alone in Jerusalem, you can realize how tremendous the take was. 

So all the priests attached to the temple and all the Levites really made money! Now, do you see why our Lord twice cleansed the temple and said it was a den of thieves? In other words, this is the whole point. So it is wrong, wrong, very wrong to take a Scripture out of its context. Our Lord condemned them for what they were: thieves. They were robbing the people, robbing them; both by saying, “You can only use our money as an offering in the Temple,” and, “You have to buy our animals for sacrifice.” Just think of the take if we had somebody sitting inside the door or outside the door and saying, “You can only use a certain kind of money as an offering here, and you have to buy that money from us at our price.” So you see, when any portion of the Scripture is misinterpreted how dangerous it becomes.

i. Robert McLaughlin, “A Policeman’s Nightmare: Mountains of Marijuana,” (quoting David Kershaw), in Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Friday, December 6, 1968, p. A-13.

ii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

iii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

iv.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

v.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.