And I spake unto you at that time, saying, I am not able to bear you myself alone: The LORD your God hath multiplied you, and, behold, ye are this day as the stars of heaven for multitude. (The LORD God of your fathers make you a thousand times so many more as ye are, and bless you, as he hath promised you!) How can I myself alone bear your cumbrance, and your burden, and your strife? Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you (Deut. 1:9-13).
The theocentric focus of this law is God's delegation of judicial authority to men. Unlike God, no man is omniscient. Men must create alternatives to omniscient judgment. Moses had been burdened with the task of rendering judgment to all the people prior to Exodus 18. But he could not govern as the patriarchs had governed. There were too many Israelites. Israel needed a judicial hierarchy. While this law resembled a seed law in the sense that it derived from the fulfilled promise of seed to Abraham, it in fact was a cross-boundary law that applies to every commonwealth larger than an extended family. The problem of the division of judicial labor is to be solved by the creation of a hierarchical appeals court.
Here Moses reminded the conquest generation of the nation's first major crisis of authority. Exodus 18 records the event in detail. A long line of disputants formed outside Moses' tent every day. "And it came to pass on the morrow, that Moses sat to judge the people: and the people stood by Moses from the morning unto the evening" (Ex. 18:13). His father-in-law warned him that the magnitude of this burden as a judge would overwhelm Moses as well as the people. "Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone" (v. 18). He counselled Moses to establish a hierarchical chain of command. There would be judges of tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands (v. 21): 60,000, 12,000, 6,000, and 600, or 78,600 judges.(1)
These judges were untrained and untried. They could provide only imperfect justice, but they could do this on a systematic basis, day in and day out. This was better for Israel than the perfect justice provided by Moses, since to gain access to this justice, men would spend their days waiting in line. The value of their time was greater than the cost of imperfect justice.(2)
Moses agreed to accept Jethro's suggestion. He must have recognized the truth of Jethro's warning. There was not enough time and not enough Moses to provide justice to the entire nation. The burden of delayed justice would oppress the people. Meanwhile, Moses would waste away. And after he was dead, where would the people receive justice? Who would then render perfect justice? Better to train up a generation of judges in preparation for the transition. Better to establish a tradition of imperfect judges rendering imperfect justice on a widespread basis. Swift imperfect State justice is preferable to delayed perfect justice.
The Decision to Delegate One of the most precious of scarce economic resources is managerial talent. It commands a high price in a competitive, growing economy. No one knows how to mass produce it. There are so many competing management training systems available that no one knows which one is most effective. In different kinds of businesses, different management skills seem to be required. So, because the supply of effective managers is limited, they command a high price. Societies seek substitutes for management talent, such as compensation by commission (self-motivation) and new computerized techniques for handling information.
The creative person usually finds it difficult to delegate all but the simplest tasks. He does not trust his subordinates' efforts. He may be willing to delegate to those who have special information in areas he is unfamiliar with, but the more talented he is in several areas, the less willing he is to delegate.
The division of labor is hampered by those who refuse to delegate. The English economist David Ricardo offered an example of two producers, one of whom is more productive than his trading partner in producing a particular product. Because his skill is even greater in producing some other product, which commands a higher price, which his trading partner wants to buy, he should allow the trading partner to produce the first product and then trade for it. Similarly, a soldier who can shoot straight when under fire, but who also types fast, should concentrate on his unique advantage: shooting. There are more skilled typists than skilled shooters. Their value to an army is less than the value of straight-shooting, front-line soldiers. Even if the typist is a less-skilled typist than the straight-shooter is, the army could be overrun if the men on the front lines cannot shoot straight. That semi-skilled typist should be recruited from a pool of men who cannot shoot straight under fire.
The general who staffs his headquarters with near-sighted men who are skilled managers would be wise to delegate management to them. His job is to design better battle plans than the enemy general does. Only if the task of the senior commander is to hold together skilled generals who are in competition with each other should he be known for his management skills.(3)
In effect, the delegator is asking his subordinates to trade with him. They will provide certain forms of output within the company; he will provide other forms. His job is to put together a team whose combined output is greater than the sum of the individual parts of that team would have been, had he not organized it. If he is successful, he multiplies his efforts. He gains the output of others in a combined effort.
Multiplication and Authority Moses offered a prayer of blessing in the middle of his exposition on the hierarchy of civil authority. The King James translators placed this prayer in parentheses. "(The LORD God of your fathers make you a thousand times so many more as ye are, and bless you, as he hath promised you!)" (v. 11). He had just told them that God had already multiplied their numbers. They had witnessed this growth. Now, he prayed for more.
This is the dominion impulse. It involves the multiplication of all assets, including population.(4) He immediately asked the proper question: How could he bear the burden on him as the supreme civil judge? He saw clearly that as the number of people multiplied, the number of disputes would multiply. It is likely that the number of disputes would rise even faster than the number of people. Without imposing new rules of behavior, doubling the number of people in a room will more than double the noise, as people talk louder to overcome the noise of additional people talking. The same is true of lawsuits in a litigious society.
Moses had understood that the blessing of additional people would soon become a curse if the judicial order were not restructured. Jethro offered the solution: a series of appeals courts. Any growing organization faces a similar problem. As the number of details increases, there must be institutional alterations to keep the details from overwhelming the system. A well-designed system must either find ways of standardizing ways of dealing with these details or else find ways of resisting growth. For example, a company that pursues growth must avoid the temptation to tinker with the structure of the firm in order to deal uniquely with lots of unique problems in unique ways. It must devise standard ways to deal with unique problems. If it tries to deal with too many unique problems, its ability to grow will be thwarted. It will become bogged down in details. It must treat unique problems as parts of larger aggregates to which familiar rules apply. It must smooth over the small distinctions. This is especially true of a price-competitive firm that seeks growth through cost-cutting and mass production.
Similarly, a civil government must resist the temptation to solve every social problem, review every case, and establish case law precedents by creating solutions to difficult and non-standard disputes. "Hard cases make bad law" is an ancient saying in the common law tradition.
There must be an increase in authority as complexity increases. The question is this: Where should this increase take place? At the top of the social system or the bottom? The traditional socialist argument is that increasing social complexity requires more centralization and more planning at the top.(5) Government must assert its authority, central government above all. This argument was challenged by Hayek in the late 1930's and 1940's: as societies grow more complex, he argued, they must decentralize. Central planners do not possess sufficient knowledge to micro-manage a growing economy. Social complexity is too great. The only source of knowledge sufficient to manage this growing complexity is the free market, with its price system, its sanctions (profit and loss), its specialization of knowledge, and its decentralized power.(6)
Because God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, complexity is not a threat to Him. He can decentralize authority to man without any fear of losing His sovereignty. The same pattern is mandated for man: the willingness to decentralize, to delegate authority. By delegating authority, men reap the benefits of the division of labor. Others are given opportunities to serve in a leadership capacity. The talents of more men are called forth by a system of rules that allows those with skills to rise in the hierarchy.
Second, there are multiple hierarchies in a biblical society. There is no unitary system of authority which grants all the favors and garnishes all the acclaim. There are many areas of service and many chains of command. The civil hierarchy is severely limited by biblical law in what it can lawfully do. It can suppress public evil through the imposition of negative sanctions. But this leaves open many other areas of productivity, power, and honor within a biblical society.
Thus, by limiting the power of civil government as well as its jurisdiction, biblical law creates the judicial basis of a society that can grow in complexity without mandating the concentration of power to preserve social order. In fact, an increase in social order should accompany the multiplication of wealth, numbers, and knowledge. What creates social disorder is sin and its outward manifestations, not complexity as such. If the increasing complexity of society is the result of voluntary human action under God's law -- self-government under God -- then it is not a threat to social order. On the contrary, this complexity is a blessing for the social order. When each man can find his unique area of maximum service -- to God and man -- social order flourishes. The extension of the division of labor allows men to match their highly specialized productive talents with consumer demand. The multiplication of producers extends each man's authority by narrowing his area of service. This increase in authority is the outcome of his increased productivity. He has access to additional capital because investors shift their investments from less productive workers to more productive workers. It is not necessary for the State to centralize its authority in a doomed quest for greater social order. If it does, there will be a decrease in social order.
When men complain that "things are getting too complicated these days," they mean that they are having trouble keeping up with social change. Their surroundings are changing fast. Yet every man loves to discover an opportunity to better himself that had not existed before. But every new opportunity adds to the complexity of society. With every new opportunity comes the potential for a better world. The fact is, a member of some primitive tribe can learn to operate an electric light switch as effortlessly and as absent-mindedly as any modern man does, and in just as few tries. Within a few months, he will want his own motorbike. Complexity comes in deceptively simple steps.
If some people want simplicity, they can buy it. The Amish live simple lives, but most people think the price is too high: eighth-grade educations, no automobiles, no computers, no electricity (except in the barn), and, above all, no buttons or zippers. The visible mark of the true "plain person" is hook and loop clothing. The visible mark of heresy is the button and eye. A zipper indicates full-scale apostasy. And so it should, for the zipper is one of modern man's most amazing little technologies, so simple by most men's standards that they pay no attention to it. Yet who can explain it? Like a sewing machine's stitch, the zipper is incomprehensible to most people. Dedicated resistance to zippers must mark the anti-complexity worldview of the Amish: the temptation of the seemingly simple and cheap device that opens the door to complexity on a scale that no previous civilization could have imagined. To the Amish, a zipper is as welcome as it would have been to the high priest of Israel, had one been installed on the veil of the temple.
When sin multiplies, however, an increase in State authority may be called for. This extension of authority should not be centralized. The threat to liberty of central authority is too great. Even with God's agent Moses as the supreme civil judge, Jethro warned that Israel would suffer. Moses possessed too much authority. Better to decentralize State authority to untrained judges than to concentrate authority in one man. Such centralized authority will undermine freedom, reduce complexity, reduce the division of labor, and cut short the multiplication of wealth. Men will stand in long lines seeking justice rather than getting on with living.
Conclusion Moses had to delegate authority in order to save himself and the nation from exhaustion. The complexity of a large society overwhelms the best efforts of the best men at the top to deal with the inevitable disputes that arise among men. The solution is judicial decentralization and the delegation of judicial authority. This brings forth new knowledge that would not have manifested itself in a system of concentrated political power.
But how are disputes to be handled? By a fixed law, a predictable legal order, and self-government. Biblical social order begins with grace. The civil manifestation of this grace is God's revealed law. "Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good" (Rom. 7:12). "For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin" (Rom. 7:14). To deal with the multiplication of disputes, society requires the multiplication of judges, not all of whom are civil magistrates. A society that seeks multiplication as well as the concentration of political power will find that these goals are unattainable, long term. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 the most graphic proof of this in modern times, and perhaps in all history: an enormous empire, based on the concentration of power, simply collapsed in a period of three days, at the cost of only three lives. The Soviet Union had strangled itself in bureaucracy and misinformation, and had lost the will to resist, let alone expand. The top-down hierarchy of the centrally planned economy becomes unproductive and socially brittle.
A biblically structured social order reveals a multiplicity of hierarchies, each with its own jurisdiction, none with final earthly jurisdiction, all governed by God's Bible-revealed law. There must be ordained judges in a series of appeals courts, both civil and ecclesiastical. Voters in both church and State must retain the authority to revoke the ordination of these judges. Where the voters' authority is absent, in either church or State, the institutional supreme court inevitably becomes a legislative body. It asserts some form of divine right theory: the denial of any earthly appeal beyond the court's authority.(7)
Footnotes:
1. This was Rashi's eleventh-century estimate: Rabbi Solomon (Shlomo) Yizchaki. Rashi, Chumash with Targum Onkelos, Haphtaroth and Rashi's Commentary, A. M. Silbermann and M. Rosenbaum, translators, 5 vols. (Jerusalem: Silbermann Family, [1934] 1985 [Jewish year: 5745]), II, p. 95.
2. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), ch. 19.
3. Dwight D. Eisenhower is a classic example of a manager-general. His job, 1942 to 1945, was to keep British, American, and Commonwealth commanding officers from tearing each other's eyes out.
4. North, Moses and Pharaoh, ch. 1.
5. The classic statement of this position is Chapter 3 of Frederick Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1882). This chapter first appeared in Engels' Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (1878), Part III, Chapter II. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1987), vol. 25, pp. 254-71.
6. F. A. Hayek, "Economics and Knowledge" (1937); "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945); reprinted in Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (University of Chicago Press, 1948), chaps. 2, 4.
7. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 10.
If this book helps you gain a new understanding of the Bible, please consider sending a small donation to the Institute for Christian Economics, P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711. You may also want to buy a printed version of this book, if it is still in print. Contact ICE to find out. icetylertx@aol.com