Review of Berman, "Created Equal"

JOSHUA BERMAN, CREATED EQUAL: HOW THE BIBLE BROKE WITH ANCIENT POLITICAL THOUGHT is reviewed by Diana Muir Appelbaum in Jewish Ideas Daily: America the Biblical. Excerpt:

What is interesting about these laws is that they carefully describe a social and economic system calculated to produce a broad middle class, which is, as it happens, the only type of system in which it is plausible to claim that all men are created equal. Neither the ancient nor the medieval world paid much attention to these biblical ideas—that all members of a nation should be treated as equals before the law and that society should be organized so as to prevent the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few. Louis XVI had no more use for such an idea than Joseph Stalin or the Han Emperor. Certainly neither Bashir Assad nor Kim Jong-un has the least use for it today.

In contrast, the men and women who founded the American colonies and the American republic were profoundly affected by notions of human equality that are essentially biblical in origin.