The concept of rights came up in two separate Bible passages this morning. In Proverbs 29:7, the “righteous case” of the poor is translated as the “rights of the poor,” and in 2 Thessalonians 3:9, the “authority” of a minister to demand pay, is translated “the right [to support].” I’m curious about this, because I was kind of led to believe that the concept of rights, that is, as a collective noun to be possessed, was invented out of whole cloth by John Locke, as an attempt to approximate natural law. Of course, the ability of a person to demand that someone else do “the right thing” without first resorting to violence in order to impose one’s arbitrary will… that has a much longer history.
neumatikos 