A.E. Harvey on the Concept of Agency

Further precision may be gained from the Jewish law of agency as it prevailed at the time [of Jesus]. Agency was an effective means of conducting business only if the acts of the agent could be assumed to be approved by his principal, and therefore to bind the principal in respect of legal liability. To express the relationship, the maxim was coined that ‘A man’s agent is like himself’, that is to say, for the purpose of the transaction for which the agent was authorised, it was as if the principal himself were present, and the agent must receive the respect which would be due to the principal—a good biblical instance if Abigail’s prostration before the messenger-agents of David who came to seek her consent to marriage (1 Sam 25.41). (A.E. Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints of History [Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1982], 161)