Longstanding readers will, I hope, have twigged by now that my fascination is with the relationship between reality and its representation—and, especially, what happens when the two drift apart and how that drift can be corrected.
What interests me most is “functional corruption”, more like how a floppy disc (I’m an 80s kid) left next to a magnet gets its bits twiddled than “transactional corruption” with brown envelopes under the table.
This preoccupation has manifested itself in various toolkits:
my ∆∑ Canon for describing how reality is compressed into representation;
the Prolegomena for asking whether that representation remains attached to reality;
Geometry–Topology–Field–Observability (GTFO) for analysing the visible and hidden structure of reality’s runtime; and
Recognition–Reconstruction for tracing the path back from representation to the reality from which it arose.
They are different tools for essentially the same problem:
How do we stop the map quietly replacing the territory?
It turns out that this problem is rather older than information theory, artificial intelligence, or modern systems engineering.
So old, indeed, that the Bible has quite a lot to say about it.
This is my field report from a short intellectual expedition into that space. I am not a theologian or a Bible scholar, so I offer it as yet another correctable representation of what that reality might be. Feel free to comment (comments are open to all) or write back to me.
I hope this short summary proves useful.
The question I am now asking myself is whether I can build another AI tool that provides an initial Biblical readout on a legal controversy.
Obviously, one cannot solve all the world’s moral problems in a short AI script, nor turn Scripture into an oracle that dispenses answers to modern lawsuits. The value would lie elsewhere: in anchoring a dispute in something larger, older and logically prior to statutes, procedure and positivist law.
Before asking what does today’s official rule say?, such a tool might ask more primitive questions. There is a natural three-part structure that arises in any functioning system of justice:
Establish reality: What is actually true? What distinctions and relationships does that reality contain? How faithfully have they been represented? What testimony or evidence connects the representation back to its source?
Reach a sound judgment: Have competing accounts been adequately tested? Has judgment been reached using honest and consistent measures?
Correct and restore: Can newly discovered truth still correct the result? If error or wrongdoing is established, what would putting it right require? What would restored order look like?
These are nine modern-sounding questions, expressed in the language of information, evidence and procedure. But my little expedition into Biblical law suggests that they have surprisingly ancient counterparts.
[As an aside, I am using AI extensively in this intellectual expedition; I never generate whole essays, but architect them and then use AI to help me fill in the pieces.]
The Biblical correspondence isn’t one-to-one. Rather, the older concepts seem to describe the same broad movement: reality is established, judgment is reached, and disorder is corrected towards restored order.
Establish reality
Gevul — reality has boundaries. Things are distinct; relations have limits; what belongs here cannot simply be represented as belonging there.
Honest measure — representations must correspond to reality. The measure must not change according to whose interests it serves.
Testimony — claims about reality must remain truthfully connected to what actually happened. Judgment needs a trustworthy path back to its source.
Reach a sound judgment
Mishpat — judgment must discriminate according to truth. Competing claims are heard, tested and judged rather than merely asserted or institutionally recognised.
Correct and restore
Shuv/metanoia — error must remain corrigible by reality. When the representation is shown to be wrong, there must remain a possibility of turning back towards what is true.
Tsedaqah — right relationship is restored. Recognising the error is not yet the same thing as putting the resulting disorder right.
Restitution — correction propagates into consequences. Where the false account has caused loss or displacement, justice may require more than changing the record.
Reconciliation — adversaries can cease being adversaries without falsifying what occurred. Peace need not require historical amnesia.
Shalom — the resulting order is whole. The purpose is not endless accusation, litigation or correction, but a stable order in which the relevant relationships have been put right.
I am not claiming that these nine ideas are presented as this particular framework in the Bible. I am deliberately mashing up concepts from across the Biblical tradition—from the Torah and the wider Hebrew Bible through to the New Testament—and recasting them in modern systems language.
In order to test my hypothesis that legal disputes can give rise to Biblical insight, and Biblical insight can help illuminate legal disputes, I decided to use the ongoing spat between my friend Andrew Stephenson and Northern Powergrid as a calibration object.
I am not trying here to adjudicate the matter, evaluate the parties, or critique the court. Rather, I am using a situation with which I am intimately familiar to see what emerges when a scriptural perspective is placed directly alongside a legal one.
If you want the full background, I have written these three articles:
But the essence is remarkably simple:
There is an industrial power cable beneath a private lane.
The soil beneath the relevant part of the lane belongs to someone.
There is a dispute about where the ownership boundary lies.
A court was asked to determine that question.
Instead, the claim was struck out without the ownership question being determined.
To save you from suspense, four key insights emerged:
Ontological — what is this really about?
This is not the theft of common-law land rights by a corporation. That framing is unhelpful. This is about moving boundary stones—an ancient problem.
Epistemic — what is preventing resolution?
The competing accounts are not being required to meet the same standard of proof: the scales are tipped.Juridical — what does the law actually need to establish?
A downstream assertion of ownership (“Farmer Jones said we can put a cable here!”) cannot answer an unresolved upstream question of title (did Farmer Jones have the right?). The provenance has to close.Remedial — what should happen if a right was infringed?
Fixing the record isn’t the same as fixing the harm. The Biblical answer is restitution. And here is the interesting bit: in some cases, add a fifth.
So let’s unpack how we got there, using our nine Biblical questions under the same three headings: 1. Establish reality, 2. Reach a sound judgment, and 3. Correct and restore.
To keep the exercise grounded, I will compare and contrast the skeleton arguments put forward by both sides.
1. Establish reality
Gevul — Where is the boundary?
Gevul is the Biblical idea of a boundary or border. The prohibition on moving your neighbour’s boundary stone is deceptively simple: before we can decide who has wronged whom, we need a stable account of where one person’s thing ends and another’s begins.
The stone records that ownership reality; it does not create it.
Moving the marker record does not change the reality.
That is almost literally the problem here. The historic conveyance effectively set a virtual boundary stone when the land was severed. The modern title plan came later. It maps that legal territory; it does not determine it.
Northern Powergrid itself acknowledges that Land Registry title boundaries are general, not exact. Its skeleton initially says that the lane “appears to fall within” the title registered to Andrew’s neighbour, and that the title plan “appears to show” the lane within his ownership.
That caution is entirely proper: as we noted, the plan is evidence of the boundary, not a precise determination of it.
Yet a few paragraphs later this has hardened into a rigid fact: the neighbour is described as “the freeholder of the farm which included the lane.” [I have edited the quoted text to protect the privacy of those involved.]
Andrew’s account runs in the opposite direction. He says you have to go back to the common ownership and subsequent separation of the estates in the 1940s and 1950s; work out what land passed at that point; and only then ask what the modern land register and later leases represent. The underlying proprietary reality was fixed long ago; don’t confuse the modern map with the underlying terrain.
That does not mean Andrew is automatically right about the boundary. He may be wrong for other reasons. But it exposes the first Biblical insight:
The (Land Registry) map is not the (lawful) boundary stone.
A representation whose boundary is expressly approximate cannot, merely by being the official representation, settle the underlying question of where the real property boundary actually lies.
Otherwise something very ancient has happened in modern form:
The marker has moved, while the land stayed where it was.
And that has been a wrong for millennia.
Honest measure — Are the scales equal?
The Bible repeatedly returns to honest weights and measures. A dishonest scale is not merely one that produces the wrong answer; even an honest scale can be miscalibrated or faulty. The dishonesty arises because you get different measures depending upon who is standing on the scale.
That is where this land dispute becomes interesting.
Northern Powergrid says that before Andrew can advance his claim “in any shape or form” against them, he first has to independently show that he owns the land beneath the cable.
Yet the same skeleton accepts that the ad medium filum viae presumption (by which adjoining ownership can extend to the middle of a road) both exists and can apply to a private road such as the one here.
For the neighbour, the standard looks rather different.
Here, Northern Powergrid relies upon the later lease as evidence that he was “clearly exercising his ownership rights” over the whole lane, not just up to the mid-point.
So compare the two propositions.
Andrew says:
I own this half of the lane because the historic facts engage a legal presumption which supplies that proprietary consequence.
The answer from Northern Powergrid is:
First prove that you own it (while we seek to strike-out your claim that might establish that same proof).
The neighbour grants a lease over land, limited in contract to what we had a right to grant, and Northern Powergrid assumes he owns it all, not just to the mid-point.
Then their answer is:
That is evidence of his ownership of everything.
Again, this difference in treatment does not immediately prove Andrew owns the land he says he does. Nor does it mean that somebody acting as owner is irrelevant evidence. But it exposes an epistemic asymmetry:
Andrew’s asserted ownership must be independently established before it can do any work.
The neighbour’s exercise of ownership is allowed to do work towards establishing the ownership it presupposes.
That is the Biblical problem of the scales. Before asking which side is heavier, ask whether the same weights are being used on both pans.
Testimony — What supports the claim?
Biblical law places enormous weight on testimony. But testimony is not merely a statement made confidently in formal language to a court. Its value depends upon whether there is a trustworthy path from the statement back to the reality it describes.
Here the two accounts run in opposite directions.
Andrew’s runs forwards through time:
there was one common ownership of the whole farm area including the lane;
his property was later severed from the farm;
the ad medium filum viae presumptions are said to operate upon that history, making the mid-point of the lane the boundary;
the modern title and cable come later.
There is still an important question at the beginning of that chain—whether the historic facts are sufficient to engage the presumption that the earlier owner owned the lane soil—but that is a question capable of investigation.
Northern Powergrid’s account largely runs backwards:
The neighbour is the registered proprietor of the farm.
The title plan appears to include the lane.
He later granted Northern Powergrid a lease.
From this, the skeleton says he was “clearly exercising his ownership rights.”
But notice what that establishes:
the neighbour purported to grant Northern Powergrid rights over the land, and
that Northern Powergrid treats that act as evidence of his ownership.
It does not, by itself, tell us how the disputed soil entered his neighbour’s estate.
This is where the provenance problem becomes visible.
NPG’s assumption that the grantor owned the land cannot itself supply the missing proof of superior title by which he came to own it. A lease only tells us that Farmer Jones granted—or purported to grant—a right. It cannot by itself answer the logically prior question:
Did Farmer Jones have that right to grant?
That is the juridical significance of testimony.
Naming a source does not make a representation true.
The source must itself have the authority or relationship that the representation attributes to it.
Or, put much more simply:
“Farmer Jones said we could” is evidence of permission. It is not necessarily evidence that Farmer Jones owned the thing he gave permission to use.
The testimony has outrun its source.
2. Reach judgment
Mishpat — Has truth been judged?
Mishpat is judgment: not merely bringing a proceeding to an end, but discriminating between competing claims according to what is true.
That distinction matters here because Andrew went to court seeking declarations about the ownership of the disputed land and the rights flowing from it. Northern Powergrid’s response was, in essence, that the court should dispose of the claim without deciding whose land it actually was.
Its skeleton says:
the presumption cannot operate “against” Northern Powergrid because it is not the adjoining owner;
that the neighbour would need to be involved in any determination affecting his title; and
ultimately that the court “cannot adjudicate” matters outside Northern Powergrid’s control, namely ownership of the lane.
Those may raise perfectly real procedural questions. Perhaps another party needs to be joined. Perhaps the pleadings need changing. Perhaps a different procedure is required.
But none of those propositions answers the underlying question.
That gives us a surprisingly useful distinction between
disposing of a case, and
adjudicating a dispute.
The first happened. The second did not.
The ownership of the disputed soil remains what it was before everyone entered the courtroom. Either Andrew owns it or he does not.
If his neighbour needed to be present before that could properly be determined, that explains an obstacle to adjudication; it does not turn the underlying question into something without an answer.
And that is what mishpat brings into focus: a court can reach a procedural conclusion without the underlying truth having been judged.
The Biblical question is therefore almost embarrassingly simple:
If the boundary remains unknown when the process ends, what exactly has been settled?
The case has been disposed of. The boundary question has not.
There is a wider distinction here: finality and truth are not the same thing. Every system of justice needs closure, but closure by itself cannot turn an unresolved proposition into a resolved one.
3. Correct and restore
Shuv/metanoia — Can error be corrected?
Shuv means to turn or return; metanoia carries the related New Testament idea of a change of mind or direction. In systems language, the important property is corrigibility: what happens when reality tells us that our existing account is wrong?
Andrew’s position is unusually easy to falsify. He says, in effect: establish that the relevant soil did not pass with his property, and he loses. His own oral submission could hardly be clearer:
“I may ultimately be wrong on title. That is for determination.”
But what exactly would falsify Northern Powergrid’s account?
This is where something odd happens. Its skeleton does not identify the proprietary history by which the disputed half of the lane came to belong to Andrew’s neighbour.
It says Andrew must instead prove his ownership; says the presumption cannot operate against Northern Powergrid; and alternatively relies upon the later lease as an exercise of the neighbour’s ownership rights.
But Northern Powergrid never tells us what actually happened to the land.
Did the original owner never own the lane soil? Did he own it but retain it when the property was severed? Did it pass with the property and subsequently move into the neighbour’s title by some later transaction? Or is Northern Powergrid relying upon some right that does not depend upon the neighbour owning the soil at all?
Those possibilities can be investigated. But first somebody has to say which reality is being asserted.
And that exposes a subtle problem of corrigibility.
You cannot easily disprove a history that has never been stated.
Evidence capable of defeating one explanation can simply leave the others untouched.
Andrew’s account can therefore be wrong in an intelligible way. There is a proposition about the history against which reality can push back.
Northern Powergrid’s case, as presented in the skeleton, is much harder to turn because its objections to Andrew do not themselves amount to an alternative history of the land.
That is the shuv question in its sharpest form:
What would Northern Powergrid have to discover about the history of this land in order to say, “We were wrong”?
That seems a useful test for almost any contested account: what conceivable evidence would cause its advocate to abandon it? Being able to explain why you are right is not enough. A corrigible account must also have some way for reality to prove it wrong.
If there is no clear answer, the representation lacks a defined route for correction.
If there is no answer at all, then what is Northern Powergrid’s cable doing there?
Tsedaqah — What puts things right?
Tsedaqah is difficult to compress into a single English word. Righteousness, justice and right relationship all catch something of it. For our purposes, the important idea is that ending a disagreement is not the same as putting the underlying relationship right.
That distinction is stark here.
Suppose Andrew is wrong. If the disputed half of the lane belongs to his neighbour, establishing that fact resolves the central uncertainty. Andrew’s claimed boundary is wrong; the neighbour had the relevant land to grant; and Northern Powergrid’s cable can rest upon that chain of rights.
Now suppose Andrew is right. A rather different set of things needs putting in order. The boundary needs to be recognised correctly. The basis upon which the cable occupies his land needs to be identified or regularised. And consequences that depended upon the contrary account may need revisiting.
The important point is that either outcome can produce right order. Andrew does not have to win for tsedaqah to be satisfied. Reality has to win.
That is why striking out the claim produces such an interesting result when viewed through this lens. It ends the proceedings without producing a stable fixed state of a shared legal reality:
It does not establish Andrew’s boundary.
It does not establish his neighbour’s boundary.
And it does not establish the proprietary history by which the neighbour acquired the disputed soil.
This is closure without correction. The process has terminated, but the underlying representation has not been brought back into alignment with reality.
So the Biblical question is not simply, “Has the conflict stopped?”
It is:
“Have the things that were out of alignment been put back into alignment?”
On the facts presented here, that work remains to be done.
Restitution — What must be restored?
Restitution takes us one step further. Discovering the truth and recognising the right relationship are not necessarily enough.
What consequences have already flowed from getting it wrong?
Biblical law is very practical about this. In certain cases involving wrongful taking or withholding, restoring the principal was not enough: a fifth was added.
I am not suggesting for a moment that this is Andrew’s entitlement under English law. The interesting idea is structural:
Correction has to propagate out into the real world.
Apply that symmetrically here.
If Andrew is wrong, there may be very little to restore. The neighbour owned the relevant land, the cable right derived from someone entitled to grant it, and Andrew has pursued a mistaken claim. He may owe some legal costs to Northern Powergrid.
But if Andrew is right, simply saying “yes, you owned the land after all” would leave rather a lot untouched:
There would still be a cable occupying it.
There would still be the question of what right Northern Powergrid has to keep it there.
And there would be financial consequences—including the £10,000 costs order—that arose from proceedings which ended without the title question being determined.
None of that tells us what remedy English law would actually award; that is a separate legal question.
The Biblical insight is more primitive:
Putting the record right and putting the consequences right are different jobs.
And the “fifth” adds a further thought. A system in which the worst consequence of using someone else’s property without first establishing your right to do so is merely having to give them what they would originally have been due creates a peculiar incentive: why even ask first?
The Biblical restitution principle recognises that problem. Sometimes restoration requires not merely returning to zero, but adding something for having got there the wrong way.
The Bible even speaks of sevenfold repayment for theft. But this isn’t theft. The more interesting parallel is less dramatic: in some cases, restore what was due—and add a fifth.
And there is wisdom in fixing the fifth in advance: the remedy does not become another dispute.
Reconciliation — Can peace be made truthfully?
Reconciliation is not the same as deciding that the past no longer matters. Peace bought by requiring one side to accept something untrue is not reconciliation.
There is an intriguing point of agreement buried in this dispute. Andrew says he brought the claim to obtain certainty so that matters could be regularised. Northern Powergrid’s own skeleton records that objective: to “obtain clarity” so that the parties might, if possible, “regularise matters by agreement.”
That suggests that reconciliation does not actually require everyone to agree about the entire history.
Suppose the parties cannot establish with confidence exactly what happened to this strip of soil many decades ago. They could nevertheless agree a properly documented right for the cable to remain, settle the associated disputes, and move forward without pretending that a court had determined something it had not.
Alternatively, if the title can be established, everyone can arrange their affairs around that reality.
What does not produce reconciliation is leaving the underlying contradiction in place while declaring the argument over.
This gives us another simple Biblical test:
Can the parties make peace without anyone having to pretend that something unresolved has been resolved?
If they can, there is a route out.
Reconciliation does not require a shared mythology of the past.
It requires an honest basis for the future.
My question to Northern Powergrid would be:
What would it take for you and Andrew to leave this dispute with one agreed basis for the cable being there?
If there is no answer, what remains is power, not law.
Shalom — What does wholeness look like?
Shalom is usually translated as peace, but the idea is richer than simply the absence of conflict. It carries a sense of completeness, soundness and things being in their proper relation.
So what would shalom look like here?
It is surprisingly concrete.
One strip of soil. One boundary. One cable.
One intelligible basis for the cable being there.
If Andrew owns the disputed half, that fact should be capable of recognition and the cable should rest upon some valid right to occupy his land—or cease to do so.
If his neighbour owns it, the proprietary history should be capable of supporting that conclusion and Northern Powergrid’s derivative right can rest upon it.
Either answer works.
What does not work is the present mismatch:
a title plan whose boundaries are acknowledged to be general;
a lease granted by someone whose ownership of the disputed soil is itself in question;
a physical cable that indisputably exists; and
litigation that has ended (subject to appeal) without determining the boundary.
There is a wonderfully mundane test for whether shalom has been achieved:
Could Andrew sell the property tomorrow without handing the purchaser this dispute along with the deeds?
If the answer is no, then whatever else has been brought to an end, the disorder attached to the land has not. Northern Powergrid put the cable there, so the unresolved disorder travels with it. The moral burden is upon them.
That may be the most useful thing the Biblical lens has shown us. Peace is not simply the moment when everybody stops fighting.
Peace is when reality, its representation, and the relationships built upon it finally agree.
Looking back over these nine questions, I think there is a simpler pattern underneath them: justice is a closed loop.
For that loop to function, each part has to remain connected to the next:
Reality has to enter the legal system.
Its relevant boundaries and distinctions must be preserved.
Representations of reality must remain faithful to their source.
Testimony must retain a traceable path back to what it claims to represent.
Competing accounts must be weighed consistently.
Judgments must remain corrigible when reality contradicts them.
Where error has propagated into the world, correction must propagate back out into the world.
Only then can the loop close.
Finality is not enough. A court can close a file. It cannot close the gap between a representation and reality merely by ceasing to look at it. That is closure without correction.
The boundary stone, the scales and the fifth address three ways this can happen:
The record can displace the reality.
The scales can favour one account over another.
And even when the error is finally recognised, its consequences can be left where they fell.
Ancient law understood something we are in danger of forgetting:
Justice is not complete when the process stops.
It is complete when what is wrong has been put right.
The file may be closed. Reality remains open.
Which leads me to one final observation.
In America, at least in the cases I have followed, attorneys who join the bench cease practising as advocates. In England and Wales, the same person can remain a practising barrister while also holding part-time judicial office, moving between advocacy and judging in different cases.
Northern Powergrid’s barrister is also a Deputy District Judge. There is nothing improper about this; it is an ordinary feature of our legal system.
Yet while acting as an advocate she advanced arguments that, I contend, are structurally incompatible with the framework of justice explored above—a framework that our positive law still broadly aspires to deliver.
This is not misconduct. But it is informative.
Justice ought not to change when you change chairs.
Would the same arguments look equally satisfactory from the bench? Would they look equally satisfactory from Andrew’s side of the dispute?
That question takes us somewhere deeper than professional roles. The Bible does not merely give us rules for settling disputes. Again and again it asks something more demanding of us: to love truth, to judge honestly, to put right what we have made wrong, and ultimately to love our neighbour.
Law is necessary precisely because we so often fail to do these things voluntarily. It stands as our guardian where love and truth have failed.
Perhaps that is the real Biblical lesson.
Excellent analysis, Martin, very enlightening. And I have now seen two of your mashups and find them quite intriguing. You need more distraction time. :-)
Mate, I think the one thing that the evangelical Christian world is lacking is the understanding that when Jesus said, "It is finished." He wasn't saying, "I'm dead..." He was saying that the atonement had been made and the new covenant established, nullifying the laws of the Old Testament and old covenant. I see evangelicals running back to Deuteronomy all the time... That's foolish. That repudiates the sacrifice of The Lamb of God, right?