The disregard for human life is nothing new

The disregard for human life is nothing new

In the year 107 CE, during a four-month celebration of his conquest of Dacia, Trajan—who was perhaps trying to match Augustus’ record—held a major tournament in which 10,000 gladiators and 3,000 animals fought. This meant that whoever sat through that spectacle watched at least 5,000 people die. Trajan was so fond of this kind of massacre—and he had a large supply of Dacian prisoners of war for the purpose—that he apparently sent 23,000 people to their slaughter between 106 and 118 CE.
It was all horrible and perverse, and if you thought it could not get worse, consider that Commodus (emperor from 180 to 192 CE) organized fights between crippled people and finished them off himself.
Of the Roman philosophers and great thinkers, only Seneca saw anything wrong with death as entertainment ... Other Roman greats were not as soft as Seneca. Cicero, for example, thought that gladiatorial contests promoted courage and endurance, although he was of the opinion that they were not all that entertaining. Juvenal, who criticized everything, loved the games. And Pliny found that watching people be massacred toughened the audience and therefore had educational value.
That about sums up the ancient world attitude toward the value of life. The key thing to keep in mind, however, is that the Greeks or Romans did think that law and order were essential to the efficient functioning of society, and laws under both empires were many and strictly enforced. But the idea that along with your status as a human being came the right to life (forget about life with dignity) was not a given by any means.

AGAINST THE GRAIN: THE JEWISH VIEW

“I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation ... fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.” (John Adams, 2nd president of the United States)
“Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might have eventually stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without Jews it might have been a much emptier place.” (Paul Johnson, Christian historian, author of A History of the Jews and A History of Christianity)

Could that be true?
Is it really possible that our moral values do not originate in one of the great civilizations but have been bequeathed to us by a small, otherwise insignificant nation inhabiting a tiny piece of real estate in the Middle East?
I venture to say that the ancient Hebrews (who later came to be known as the Israelites and still later as the Jews) would have disagreed with the statements of Adams and of Johnson above. They would have insisted that they had nothing personally to do with inventing the values which ran against the grain of the world around them, and indeed were totally unknown to other peoples. They would have insisted that these values came from God, and they were merely the people chosen to disseminate them worldwide.
This was the story they told from the time they appeared on the world scene around 1300 BCE, hundreds of years before the ascent of the Greek civilization. Back then, they were still a newly emerging nation that functioned more like a large extended family, all family members tracing their ancestry to a man named Abraham who had lived somewhere around 1,800 BCE. They were a strange people with an even stranger religion:

• They believed in only one God—all-powerful, infinite, and invisible—who had created everything known to man, a notion totally foreign to every ancient people that preceded them.  
• They claimed that all of them—some 600,000 men and untold number of women and children—had miraculously escaped from slavery in Egypt and crossed the Red Sea, then the mightiest empire on earth, through the miraculous intervention of their God.  
• They claimed that after their great escape, they reached a mountain in the wilderness, Mt. Sinai, where they all had an encounter with God; during that encounter, and through the person of their leader Moses, they supposedly received a code of behavior—compiled in a holy book known as the “Torah”—which they scrupulously followed.

A STRANGE PEOPLE - The Jews

It was a story bound to raise more than a few eyebrows in the ancient world. Of course, the ancient people believed all sorts of wild things about divine relationships with human beings, so the Jews’ story was not in itself all that outlandish. Nor was a society governed by laws so strange, after all, previous law codes, the Code of Hammurabi being the most famous, set forth rules governing property rights and the like. What the ancient world could not fathom was this particular code. Indeed, it was a code that to the ancient mind seemed irrational.
“The Jews are distinguished from the rest of mankind in practically every detail of life,” wrote Roman philosopher Deo Cassius, expressing his disapproval. “In particular ... they do not honor any of the usual gods, but show extreme reverence to only one God.”
Part of that “extreme” reverence translated into following that God’s law, a law which could not be altered as was convenient. It was an absolute, God-given standard, and by that fact alone it stood apart from any law of any other society.
But there was more about the Jews that was strange, besides their God and their law. The Torah—or the Biblos as the Greeks would call it—was like no holy book of any people before or since, in yet another way. It made the Jews look bad. In it, they are shown as shirkers and complainers, often sinning against their own God and His law. And yet they insisted that they needed to carry around with them the history of their failures as well as their successes in order never to lose sight of their mission to elevate humanity.
We shall now take a look at how the ancient Jews related to the basic human right to life and see how close they came to our standard…
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[A note to the reader: This is the just the beginning of one of the most fascinating dramas in human history. Despite all odds, the tiny Jewish people not only outlasted the great Empires of Greece and Rome—the unique ideology of Judaism ultimately triumphed over the paganism of the West.
Directly and indirectly—through the Bible, Christianity, Islam and modern democracy—the vast majority of humanity has been profoundly impacted by Judaism and the monumental quest of the Jewish people to perfect the world.]