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By Aaron Theophilus (COUNTER-ROLL PUBLISHING) National scope · Public documents only · Nothing unverified enters these pages
Every code has a song before it has a rule. The law of the covenant was given to a people who sang it: the statutes were taught to the children in song, the judgments were kept in the memory by the melody, and the whole administration of the ancient jurisdiction moved to the music of the Psalter. This book sets the procedural law of the modern courts beside that songbook, rule by rule, psalm by psalm, and asks what each rule administers when it is seen in the light of the psalm that bears its number.
The premise is plain and it is stated plainly at the outset: the rules of civil procedure that govern the courts of the United States are not inventions of the modern age. They are the secular administration of an older jurisdiction, the law of the covenant, and the Book of Psalms is the songbook of that law. The blessed man of the first psalm delights in the law of the Lord and meditates in it day and night; the first rule of procedure commands the courts and the parties to construe, administer, and employ the rules to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action. The one is the substance; the other is the administration of it. The psalm sings what the rule does.
The correspondence is not forced. Where the rule is a genuine substantive right (the summons, the trial, the judgment), the psalm of the same number carries its spiritual content, and this book says so plainly. Where the rule is a procedural overlay of the old Royal Court (the clerk's authority, the sealing of records, the default of the contumacious), this book says that too, and traces the true lineage: from the biblical tradition of stamping and sealing, through the chancery and the royal courts, to the modern rule. Law is law, and doctrine is marked as doctrine. Every rule is quoted truly; every psalm is quoted truly; and where the correspondence is interpretation, it is offered as interpretation, to be weighed, not taken on trust. Nothing unverified enters these pages.
The Codex is laid out as the rules themselves are laid out: in parts, each part a jurisdiction of the practice, from the scope of the action to the general provisions at the end. Each part opens with a doorway explaining the jurisdiction it administers, and each chapter sets the psalm and the rule side by side: the psalm first, then the rule, then the story of how the rule administers what the psalm sings. The reader may go straight to the rule that concerns him; but the book is written to be read as a chain, because the rules themselves are a chain, and the psalms are the song of the whole.
A book that sets the Psalms beside the law must say plainly what text it sings from, and why. The matter is not indifferent; it is the whole matter. The Psalter is a songbook, and a songbook translated is a songbook interpreted: every rendering is a choice about what the song means, and the choices are not all equal.
The Ethiopian canon holds the one full, true, and complete text: the eighty-eight books that the Church of Ethiopia has kept whole and entire from the earliest age, with the Psalter among them in its fullness. When this book speaks of the completeness of the scripture, it speaks of that canon: the whole counsel, uncurtailed, unexpurgated, kept in the tongue and the tradition that never lost a book and never added a convenience. It is the standard by which completeness is measured, and every other text is measured against it.
The Geneva Bible (the Bible of the Reformation, the Bible that the exiles carried from Geneva to every shore) kept the spiritual meaning of the war. Its translators read the scripture with the eye that saw the principalities and powers behind the visible adversaries: the wrestling that is not against flesh and blood, the warfare that the psalmist names when he sings of the kings of the earth setting themselves and the rulers taking counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed. Geneva rendered that war with its spiritual depth intact: the translation that the martyrs sang and the reformers argued, the text that carried the full counsel of the heavenly warfare into the earthly tongue. It is the translation of the covenant people standing against the principalities, and it kept what the later, smoother renderings would drop.
The King James Version is the statutory text: the register of the civil power, the Bible of the courts and the crown, rendered in the language of the state. And in that rendering something was cut out: the open acknowledgment of the spiritual war was trimmed to the statutory line, the principalities were flattened into the page, and the song was set in the key of the earthly jurisdiction. The KJV is in these pages deliberately, because the Federal Rules are themselves a statutory text, and this book sets the statute of the earthly court beside the song it administers, statute beside statute, register beside register. But the register must never be mistaken for the substance. The KJV is quoted here as the law's own tongue; the completeness of the Ethiopian canon and the spiritual depth of the Geneva are the measure of what the statutory text carries and what it leaves out. Where the Geneva keeps a spiritual meaning that the KJV flattens, this book says so. Where the Ethiopian text holds what the later translations dropped, this book says so. The hierarchy is not hidden: the Ethiopian canon is the one full, true, and complete text; the Geneva is its spiritual heir in the western tongue; and the King James is the statutory voice: the voice this Codex must speak beside the rules, but never the voice that defines the song.
The difference is not an abstraction; it can be read in a single chapter of the apostle. Ephesians the sixth sets the suitor against the principalities in terms that leave no room for the earthly register to mistake the enemy. Hear the two renderings of the twelfth verse. The King James reads: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." The Geneva reads: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, and against the worldly governors, the princes of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness, which are in the high places." The statutory text flattens the enemy to "rulers of the darkness of this world"; the Geneva names them: the worldly governors, the princes of the darkness, who stand behind the visible thrones of the earth. And Geneva does not stop at the verse; its margin opens the verse like a window on the war: "He declareth that our chiefest and mightiest enemies are invisible, that we may not think that our chiefest conflict is with men… Against men, which are of a frail and brittle nature, against which are set spiritual subtleties, more mighty than the other by a thousand parts." There it is, in the margin of the Geneva: the conflict is not with men; the mightiest enemies are invisible; the visible adversary is frail and brittle, and behind him stand the spiritual subtleties more mighty by a thousand parts. The King James kept the words of the verse and lost the window; the Geneva kept the verse and the window both. The reader of this Codex should hold that difference in mind through every chapter that follows: the earthly court deals with the frail and brittle adversary who appears in the caption, but the suitor who sees only the flesh and blood has missed the war that Geneva names. The Codex quotes the statutory text because it administers the earthly court; the Codex reads with Geneva's eye because the earthly court is never the whole battle.
The first part of the rules is the threshold of the whole jurisdiction. It answers the questions that must be answered before any other: what do these rules govern, what is the one form of action, how is an action commenced, how is the defendant brought in, how are papers served, and how is time computed. These are the gate-keeping rules, the rules of the doorway itself, and the psalms that bear their numbers are the songs of the threshold: the blessed man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, the anointed king against whom the rulers of the earth take counsel in vain, the morning cry of the man who files his prayer at dawn, the summons to the adversary to tremble and be still, the filing of the cause in the morning, and the computing of the appointed season.
The modern litigant who enters a federal court walks through this doorway whether he knows it or not. The rules of Part I decide whether his action exists, whether the court may reach the man he sues, whether the record will hold his papers, and whether his time is kept. The man of the first psalm walked through the same doorway four thousand years ago: he chose his counsel, he stood or refused to stand, he delighted in the law or sat in the seat of the scornful, and the psalmist's verdict on that choice is the substance of which the rules of Part I are the procedure. The wicked shall not stand in the judgment. The rules of Part I determine who stands, and how, and when. That is why the Codex begins here: at the threshold, where the jurisdiction is entered, and where the psalmist's blessed man first appears: his psalm opens the book, and the rule that administers his cause follows after it, as every chapter that follows opens with the scripture and then sets the rule beneath it.