Talya wrote:
This isn't "because Taly says so."
This is because of the following:
(1) Of the 10 commandments, only three are present in any way in US law at the federal level.
(2) Those three commandments were present in every legal system ever recorded both long before and long after the ten commandments, without any line of descent from the laws of Israel.
(3) Of the laws unique to the ten commandments, that may have originated in Israel, none of them made their way in any form into US law.
(4) Ergo - nothing in US law came from the ten commandments.
(4) does not in fact follow from any of the other 3 above it. More importantly, the 3 elements you cite came from the commandments; whether they were present in other systems or not is irrelevant.
In fact, by that logic, no ancient system with elements against stealing, murder, etc., can be said to be an influence because it can always be found in some other system. AT BEST this leads to a simplistic analysis where simply appearing in a certain place first means it came from there and nowhere else, but this is the understanding of a child. The mere fact that these elements are common to every system means that they developed as important basic elements of law, and ALL primitive law systems deserve credit - credit which cannot be effectively divided up as more or less.
All you are doing is engaging in special pleading fallacy where you argue that the Ten Commandments didn't have any influence, but everything else DID because those elements are present in anything else. You are using one set of criteria for the Commandments and a different one for every other system.
So yes, it's "because Taly says so". No one thinks that the Constitution was influenced solely by the Ten Commandments, or even directly; the idea however that the Ten Commandments had no influence whatsoever because ~reasons~ is utterly novel and you're certainly not in a position to pass off your terrible opinions as scholarly research.
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(5) Some ancient law systems OLDER than the ten commandments have unique legal elements that appear to have originated with those legal systems, and DO appear in the US legal system. Therefore, the code of Hammurabi can be 100% proven to have influence on the US legal system. There is no evidence for the 10 commandments to have done the same.
Simply having been somewhat older does not mean that Hammurabi influenced the U.S. system and the Ten Commandments did not. No one is arguing whether Hammurabi had an influence or not, but showing that it did and that it's slightly older does not somehow contest that the Commandments did. Influence cannot be measured in any quantifiable form and the influence of one does not preclude the influence of the other.
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As for influence - Ancient Israel was a tiny, reclusive, xenophobic nation that did NOT influence those around them. Any influence from Israel on the world as a whole came afterward, when Christianity spread. Christians, however, did not follow Israelite law, ever. They were never mandated to follow the ten commandments as a code.
Israel may have had some ideas about being "reclusive" but their location prohibited that, and they certainly did have a degree of influence on nations around them. You don't get to put "not" in capitals and have it become true. Simply by being there they had significant influence - the idea that a nation had no influence works for geographically isolated places, not for highly central ones. In fact, merely by getting invaded and conquered on more than one occasion they had significant influence as conquerors tended to adopt from what they conquered.
More importantly, though, it doesn't matter how much ancient Israel influenced the nations around it. When Christianity appeared, it spread throughout the Western world and was a major part of the societal background against which all Western legal systems developed. Whether Hammurabi was part of that influence or not is irrelevant - those legal systems eventually arrived at the U.S. Constitution. As for "not following the Ten Commandments as a code" that's technically true, but they still form the fundamental basis for what is considered sinful in Christianity. Dispensing with Jewish legalism does not mean they were somehow unimportant in Christianity. That's why they're still prominent today; they have always been important.
All ancient systems influenced them either by inclusion or omission, and trying to isolate out one particular one - which is widely agreed by historical scholars to be a major influence anyhow -
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If the Ten Commandments influenced the US law at all, it was like this. "Should we include these?" "**** NO." "Okay." Which is why they aren't in there, at all, in any form.
Aside from "Do not murder", "do not steal" and as for the thing about adultery, that's a valid reason for divorce claim - civil law.
You are engaging in a highly simplistic understanding of "influence" wherein all you're doing is looking for simple repetition. Influence has far more subtle and extensive aspects to it than this, and can't be measured by how much is repeated and how much is not.
You've also switched from "The Constitution" to "The U.S. Legal system" which are two different things. The Constitution includes only one example of statutory law; it's purpose is not to proscribe specific behaviors and so it would necessarily not actually repeat the Ten Commandments. However the influence is still there in the spirit of the document - the idea that it comes from a source beyond men, and in the fact that both are short, easily understood documents on their face. (If you compare the Constitution to practically any other U.S. law, or even many state Constitutions it's remarkably short and concise). Simple numeric counts of repetition are a meaningless, ignorant method of comparison and you are focusing on them to get a result you want. A good example is the "free exercise" clause. It does not MANDATE no other Gods before Me" but what it does is protect anyone from being required to place any other god first. the same applies to "no state religion". The first amendment is heavily influenced by that commandment - as filtered through the intervening ~3000 years or so. Trying to disagree with it because it doesn't apply in the same way it is to ancient Israel is to redefine "influence" as "repeated verbatim".
Furthermore, the U.S. legal system and the elements it contains today are very different from at the time of founding and a lot more similar elements were present in various statutes and ordinances in the past. Many have subsequently been rejected, but that does not mean their influence was not present. More importantly, the Constitutional provisions as we understand them today are not the same as the understanding at the time of writing. Libertarians bemoan this, but that change of understanding is how we got the decision that spawned this thread. People who think liberty has been steadily eroding tend to focus only on changes that support that idea and ignore ones that hurt it, which is why you get supposedly "libertarian" people trying to argue there was a problem with the 13th-15th amendments. Regardless, influence is not positive or negative. To take for example your complaint earlier that a certain commandments puts wives and children on the same level as property - so what? That's irrelevant to the influence or lack thereof of that commandment. It doesn't matter whether we approve of it or not; that has no relevance to the question of influence.
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