As we noted yesterday, we are working our way through David Barton’s new book “The Founders’ Bible” and we’ve made it up to the book of Deuteronomy, which Barton has filled with articles about how the Founding Fathers disapproved of using the government to help the poor, wanted the Bible taught in schools, included God in the wording of oaths, created courts to carry out Biblical justice, and opposed the imposition of unbiblical progressive taxation:
America’s original system of taxation treated Americans as individuals rather than as part of a group, and it allowed, figuratively speaking, for the sun to rise alike on the good and the evil, and the rain to fall equally on the just and the unjust. This is just one of the many areas in which the Constitution specifically incorporated Biblical principles. We would do well to return to the wisdom that God establish for how to order our society. Forsaking it only invites destruction.
There is also a long article defending the Biblical legitimacy of the death penalty, which Barton roots in Deuteronomy 17:6, which says that “on the evidence of two witnesses or three witnesses, he who is to die shall be put to death; he shall not be put to death on the evidence of one witness.”
Barton again asserts that this passage is the foundation for the Constitution’s treason clause, but also explains that God was using DNA evidence way back in Genesis and so it counts as an “eyewitness” in today’s courts of law:
Biblically, the death penalty could not be applied unless there were at least two eyewitnesses to the incident. Circumstantial evidence, even when strong, is not the equivalent of multiple eyewitnesses and therefore does not meet the Biblical standard. Interestingly, however, the Bible long ago acknowledged a specific eyewitness that only in recent decades has become recognized in Americans courts.
Recall the account of Cain’s murder of his brother Abel from Genesis 4:8-10. When God asked Cain where his brother was and Cain lied, God specifically confronted him with the declaration: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground” (v. 10). Blood cries out? Blood has a voice? How can that be? We now know that DNA has a voice – that it serves as an eyewitness to specific crimes, just as when it cried out to God about Abel’s death. This voice therefore Biblically qualifies as one of the “two or three eyewitnesses” needed to secure the death penalty in a capital crime.
