The Greeks did not invent equality. Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and the gang famously believed that the rich are different from you and me—not merely because they are shaped by their privileges but because they are actually, literally made of superior stuff. The Greeks believed that the gods formed the rich from finer clay, with gold mixed in for the aristocrats, silver for the commercial class, and cheap iron and brass for the rest of us lowly plebeians. Almost invariably, great men were born to aristocratic parents, as Plato and Aristotle were. Inexplicably, plebian parents occasionally produced a superior man like Socrates; but this was rare.
Much of the world, then and since, has agreed with the Greeks. But as Joshua Berman points out in his important book, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought, the Jews thought differently. The Bible often echoes Mesopotamian myths: Sargon of Akkad, after all, was another baby placed by his mother in a rush basket that was waterproofed with pitch and set afloat on the river. But Berman, one of a number of scholars currently working to understand the Bible's political and social ideas, shows us that a yawning chasm separates these ideas from those of the rest of the ancient Near East.
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