Kosmos

"Ancient texts require ancient dictionaries."

When Jesus told Pontius Pilate that His Kingdom was not of the “world” we see one of five different Greek words found in the New Testament which have all been translated into the single word “world”. The word was kosmos, and it is defined in Strong's Concordance as an “orderly arrangement” but without knowing the historical etymology and common usage this definition by itself can be deceptive.

In Thayer's Greek Lexicon and "The Outline of Biblical Usage" we see κόσμος [Kosmos] is primarily defined as:

1. “an apt and harmonious arrangement or constitution, order, government.”

In the 7th century BC the term "kosmos" was used in constitutions to describe the jurisdictional "office of magistrate".

In the Greek and Roman view of the term Kosmos “... meant originally the discipline of an army, and next the ordered constitution of a state.”

The word κόσμος came from the Greek “komizo” meaning “to care for, take care of, provide for” or “carry off what is one’s own.”

Kosmos did not mean planet, inhabitable place, or age. It had to do with courts, militias and armies organized to establish and maintain governments.

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The Constitutional Law of Dreros

The Earliest Surviving Greek Law on Stone
(Circa 650 BCE – 600 BCE)

Meiggs & Lewis, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century B.C. (1969) No. 2 (pp. 2-3 provide the following translation of the law:

"May God be kind (?). The city has thus decided; when a man has been kosmos, the same man shall not be kosmos again for ten years. If he does act as kosmos, whatever, judgements he gives, he shall owe double, and he shall lose his rights to office, as long as he lives, and whatever he does as kosmos shall be nothing. The swearers shall be the kosmos (.e. the body of kosmoi) and the damioi, and twenty of the city."

Meiggs & Lewis p. 3 provide the following technical commentary on the law:

"The law forbids the repeated tenure of the office of kosmos, presumably, as elsewhere in Crete, the chief magistracy, before ten years have elapsed. The provision is paralleled at Gortyn... sixth century, and it has generally been explained there by the need to make a break in the financial and legal immunity of a magistrate. The length of time which has to elapse in Dreros, however, suggests strongly that the motive was rather to limit the possibilities of using the office as a stepping-stone to tyranny (the first editors) or to bolster the power of an individual family (Ehrenberg, Willets)."

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Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.09.47

Reviewed by James Kierstead, Victoria University of Wellington

"The Gortyn Law Code mandates that an heiress can only marry someone outside her phylē once she has exhausted all the options within it (col. 7.50-8.35). For Grote, this was to ensure a rotation of the powerful office of kosmos among all the city’s great families. The kosmos was rotated through the phylai, and the great families needed to be kept within their phylai if the system was not to be circumvented. The system eventually broke down in the fourth century, probably because the phylai were never equal in power, and the most powerful phylai came to find waiting for office intolerable. The Gortynian phylai also sent members to a Council."

"The situation at Dreros is less clear, but a seventh-century inscription (Koerner no. 91) contains the phrase πόλι ἔϝαδε διαλήσασι πυλᾶσι, ‘the city decided after consulting the phylai.’ Grote takes this to imply that representatives from each phylē met in a deliberative Council, which he identifies with the ‘Twenty of the polis’ mentioned in the famous inscription limiting iteration of the office of kosmos (ML 2)."

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