The Gifts of the Jews

  The difference between the two great figures of Judaism’s beginnings constitutes additional evidence of their essential historical authenticity. Both men are alike in that they were settled and prosperous but called to be nomads—to wander over many years without any timetable for eventual settlement. But if their stories were simply the myths of an oral Semitic culture, we would find it hard to distinguish between them, for they serve such similar functions. We cannot know how many Sumerian businessmen God may have tried to speak to before Avram heard his voice. Nor can we know how many Hebrews, engaged in building Egyptian cities like Rameses, may have heard a troubling voice before they flicked it away like a fly and returned to their bricks. But Moshe, building on the cherished ancestral stories of a God who spoke to men, is able to add new definition and concreteness of detail to this revelation—of a God who leads his pilgrim people, refusing to desert them despite their appalling limitations.

  The family god of Avraham, the Terror of Yitzhak, the Angel who wrestled all night with Israel, has become the God of a people, the Israelites, whom he means to guard like a jealous husband. But he is more than the God of Israel, for he is the universal God, the Creator of all, who has deigned in his mysterious mercy to single out this people and make them his holy nation. Everything proceeds from the double revelation of Sinai, the covenant of the Ten Words and the revelation of God’s essential self: He-Who-Is, He-Who-Will-Be-There.

  The fire of Sinai, both in the revelation of the Ten and in the revelation of the Name, will not desert Israel, but will gradually be reconfigured from a symbol of the storm god’s anger to the refining fire of God’s love:

  We only live, only suspire

  Consumed by either fire or fire,

  wrote T. S. Eliot. We must be consumed either by the anger of the storm god or by the love of the living God. There is no way around life and its sufferings. Our only choice is whether we will be consumed by the fire of our own heedless fears and passions or allow God to refine us in his fire and to shape us into a fitting instrument for his revelation, as he did Moshe. We need not fear God as we fear all other suffering, which burns and maims and kills. For God’s fire, though it will perfect us, will not destroy, for “the bush was not consumed.”

  This insight into God is the unearthly illumination that will light up all the greatest works of subsequent Western literature. From the psalms of David and the prophecies of Isaiah to the visions of Dante and the dreams of Dostoevsky, the bush will burn but will not be consumed. As Allen Ginsberg will one day write, “The only poetic tradition is the voice out of the burning bush.”

  1 Mahn-hu, or “whaddayacallit,” which most English Bibles transliterate as “manna” (and is traditionally thought of as “the bread of heaven”), was probably white edible insect secretions to be found on the branches of some rare Sinai plants.

  2 The sound of the ram’s horn, still blown in Jewish ritual.

  3 It is the mention of two tablets that encouraged later commentators to assume a division of the Commandments into two kinds, those concerning God and those concerning man. But the two tablets probably hark back to the treaty conventions of the ancient Middle East, with one copy intended for each party to the agreement, just as we provide in contracts to this day What writing system the Ten could have been written in and who could have read them are unanswerable questions. The alphabet is a Semitic invention, developed in the Levant by Phoenician scribes. Its stupendous advantage over the earlier Sumerian and Egyptian systems, which required mastery of thousands of symbols, lies in its simplicity, which allows it to be learned by anyone, not just the cultivated and leisurely. It represents, therefore, a giant step toward democratization (and it would over the ensuing centuries be copied with variations by Greeks and Romans). But whether Moshe, who would have known hieroglyphics (from which the Semitic scribes borrowed most of the forms for their new system), could have been aware of such a system (which did, indeed, exist by the likely date of Exodus), we just don’t know

  4 The Torah (or “Teaching,” sometimes translated inadequately as “Law”) is the name Jews give to the first five books of the Bible. (For more information, see “The Books of the Hebrew Bible” at the end of this book.) The Torah is like a great mosaic, and though its simple underlying pattern may be attributed to one artist (according to later tradition, Moshe himself) its intricate parts and complex impression are the work of many hands. Despite what I take to be the essential historicity of this material, it is hardly without special agendas. Patched into the narrative of the Egyptian captivity, for instance, are ritual prescriptions that date to a much later time, when Israel was long settled in Canaan and its priests had the leisure to develop intricate rubrics. In this way, the Passover Lamb and the prescriptions concerning the matzahs (or unleavened bread to be used at the Passover Seder), which stemmed originally from springtime agricultural festivals, were added at a much later date to the original narrative, because the priests wanted the great story of liberation as justification for their rituals.

  FIVE

  CANAAN

  From Tribe to Nation

  Deuteronomy, the fifth and last book of the Torah, ends on an elegiac note, full of the sadness that all true endings possess. Moshe is standing on the peak of Mount Nebo in Transjordan, looking out across the Dead Sea and the River Jordan to Canaan, the Promised Land that he will never enter. He can see the whole land of the Promise, from Dan in the north to the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Negev desert in the south. Opposite him across the river is Jericho, Moon City, “the city of palms” according to Deuteronomy—the oldest town on earth.

  And YHWH said to him:

  “This is the land

  that I swore to Avraham, to Yitzhak, and to Yaakov, saying:

  ‘To your seed I give it!’

  I have let you see it with your eyes,

  but there you shall not cross!”

  So there died there Moshe, servant of YHWH,

  in the land of Moav,

  at the order of YHWH.

  He buried him

  in a valley in the land of Moav,

  opposite Bet Pe’or,

  and no man has knowledge of the site of his burial-place until this day.

  Now Moshe was a hundred and twenty years old at his death;

  his eyes had not grown-dim,

  his vigor had not fled.

  The Children of Israel wept for Moshe in the Plains of Moav for thirty days.

  Then the days of weeping in mourning for Moshe were ended.

  Now Yehoshua [Joshua] son of Nun was filled with the spirit of wisdom,

  for Moshe had leaned his hands upon him,1

  and (so) the Children of Israel hearkened to him

  and did as YHWH had commanded Moshe.

  But there arose no further prophet in Israel like Moshe,

  whom YHWH knew face to face,

  in all the signs and portents

  that YHWH sent him to do in the land of Egypt,

  to Pharaoh and to all his servants, and to all his land;

  and in all the strong hand

  and in all the great, awe-inspiring (acts)

  that Moshe did before the eyes of all Israel.

  To a large extent, the lives of Moshe and his patriarchal predecessors must remain opaque to us, almost as opaque as the lives of our dimmest ancestors, the hominids of prehistory. We know they looked up at the night sky in wonder, wandered ceaselessly with only a vague notion of a destination, and heard the promptings of an inner voice, which they associated with the terrifying marvels of nature. But the harsh and singular specifics of their lives were quite unlike our own, we who can scarcely close our ears to the ceaseless din of modern advertising, who never venture far from the familiar, for whom the night sky, eclipsed by round-the-clock electricity, is no longer a marvel at all.

  But in this ending, in the death of Moshe, we can feel a basic human kinship beneath the dramatic differences. The description of the still vigorous old man must
recall to us the ancient grandeur of Michelangelo’s Moses, huge-armed, straight-backed, eagle-eyed, who after so many harrowing meetings with God and disappointments with his people can face death without flinching. We, too, shall die without finishing what we began. Each of us has in our life at least one moment of insight, one Mount Sinai—an uncanny, other-worldly, time-stopping experience that somehow succeeds in breaking through the grimy, boisterous present, the insight that, if we let it, will carry us through our life. But like Moshe or Martin Luther King, though we may remember that we “have been to the mountaintop,” we do not enter the Promised Land, but only glimpse it fleetingly. “Nothing that is worth doing,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, “can be achieved in our lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; there-we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.” That accomplishment is intergenerational may be the deepest of all Hebrew insights.

  It is Joshua, Moshe’s young general, who leads the Israelites across the Jordan into the Promised Land with the ark at their head, Joshua first sending his men through the camp with these instructions: “When you see the ark of the covenant of YHWH your God being carried by the levitical priests, you will leave your position and follow it, so that you may know which way to take, since you have never gone this way before.” This is the great moment, the moment of maximum anticipation—to go the way one has never gone before, and yet to go home:

  The ole ark’s a-moverin’, moverin’, moverin’,

  The ole ark’s a-moverin’,

  An’ I’m goin’ home!

  An is not long before Jericho is defeated, its walls collapsing at the sound of Joshua’s trumpets:

  Joshua fit de battle ob Jericho, Jericho, Jericho,

  Joshua fit de battle ob Jericho,

  And de walls come tumbelin’ down.

  Perhaps no one in all history has understood the liberation narrative of Israel as profoundly—and with such affection and joy—as the black slaves of the American South. There is even evidence that something like the destruction of Jericho may have occurred, since archaeologists have found that several Palestinian towns were flattened about the year 1200 B.C., to be succeeded by a new culture that from a material point of view was decidedly inferior—and may represent the Israelite occupation of ruined Canaanite settlements. But Jericho’s ruin apparently preceded Israel’s invasion of Canaan by centuries; and it may be that its ruined walls encouraged the Israelites of a later period to imagine that they had been its conquerors.

  The conquest of Canaan, as presented in the Book of Joshua (which brings the Epic of Israel—from founding patriarch to final settlement—to its conclusion) is a grisly business, reminding us of just how primitive a society we have been considering. All the Canaanites—“men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys”—are put to the sword, their settlements burned to the ground, their objects of precious metal set aside as “holy,” “devoted” to the sanctuary of YHWH—that is, priestly booty. The Canaanites, too, are set aside as “devoted”—that is, marked for extermination. As far away from the Jordan valley as prehistoric Scotland, the sacrificial victim, the prisoner of war offered to a god, was called the “Devoted One.” What we have here is human sacrifice under the guise of holy war, compelling us to recognize how powerful a hold the need to scapegoat and to shed blood has on the human heart.

  But this legendary “conquest,” described with such bloodthirsty relish in Joshua as an overwhelming victory, was actually a very gradual affair. From its base in Transjordan, the tribes that Moshe had led through the desert migrated into the central hill country of Canaan, overwhelming its Iron Age settlements when possible, but at other times entering into league with Canaanite villagers, sometimes to overthrow an oppressive tyrant, at other times in mutual protection pacts. Egypt’s Dusty Ones and Moshe’s kvetchers had indeed been toughened by adversity and now presented themselves as impressive warriors whom peaceful farmers had better not tangle with. Cutting a swath of conquest across a small area, these warriors no doubt attracted many new adherents to the religion of their conquering God, adherents who came to see themselves as Israelites, the people of YHWH, the God who could humble even Egypt.

  But cultural exchange is seldom a one-way affair. After settling the central highlands and intermingling with the natives, “the Israelites then did what is evil in YHWH’S eyes and served the Baals.” Baal was the Canaanite storm god, who must have seemed rather like YHWH to unlettered Israelites, so what the hell. “To serve the Baals” was to worship one of Baal’s many images, metal bulls and phallic stones erected at various sanctuaries throughout Canaan. Baal’s consort was Astarte, the Canaanite form of the Mesopotamian fertility goddess Ishtar. Astarte (or Astoreth) was also called Asherah, a word that probably means “consort.” The pure religion of YHWH, under the influence of these local superstitions of vegetative, animal, and human fertility, was often to be compromised and combined with Canaanite cults in unexpected ways. Inscriptions have been discovered dating to the period of the monarchy, a couple of centuries after Joshua, that seem to be prayers to “YHWH and his Asherah,” leading many to the conclusion that the desert religion of YHWH underwent a kind of paganizing syncretism as soon as the hardened Hebrew warriors settled down to the business of farming and herding among their Canaanite neighbors.

  The period after Joshua’s invasion is called the period of the Judges—local military leaders who also settled disputes between Israelites in the manner of Moshe’s desert judges. As described in the Book of Judges, this appears to have been a time of continuing settlement and consolidation, in which Israelite warrior-farmers gradually spread out through Canaan in loose tribal confederations till in less than two centuries they occupied most of the Promised Land. In the Books of Joshua and Judges, success is invariably linked to Israel’s faithfulness to YHWH, defeat to their prostituting themselves to “other gods … of the surrounding peoples.”

  Despite the overall success of the settlement, the Israelites are never without enemies, especially the growing menace of the Philistines, the Sea People, who after the collapse of Mycene sailed across the Mediterranean and began to occupy coastal towns such as Gaza, then inland towns such as Gath. Their encroachments brought them uncomfortably close to the Israelites, who sometimes found themselves living in Philistine towns under the boot of these enemies, whose name will come to mean “crude and uncultivated” and will serve as the basis for the word “Palestine.” (The story of Samson, the magnificent Israelite strongman who harried the Philistines, belongs to this period.) At last, the Israelites reach the conclusion that what they need is someone to give them visible unity, someone capable of uniting them in greater emotional cohesion—a king.

  But YHWH is their king. Since the days of the qahal, the desert assembly of the pilgrim people, Israel’s political understanding has been that they are the gathering of God’s people, led by his handpicked spokesmen and answerable to no earthly king, a sort of theocratic democracy. “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you,” God advises the reluctant Samuel, his prophet and priest, whom the people have asked for a king. “It is not you they have rejected but me, not wishing me to reign over them anymore. They are now doing to you exactly what they have done to me since the day I brought them out of Egypt until now, deserting me and serving other gods.”

  God is prepared to accept a monarchy, provided the people understand what they are getting themselves into. Samuel gives the people YHWH’S warnings: “This is what the king who is to reign over you will do. He will take your sons and direct them to his chariotry and cavalry, and they will run in front of his chariot. He will use them as leaders of a thousand and leaders of fifty; he will make them plough his fields and gather in his harvest and make his weapons of war and the gear for his chariots. He will take your daughters as perfumers, cooks, and bakers. He wi
ll take the best of your fields, your vineyards and your olive groves and give them to his officials. He will take the best of your servants, men and women, of your oxen and your donkeys, and make them work for him. He will tithe your flocks and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry aloud because of the king you have chosen for yourselves, but on that day YHWH will not hear you.”

  YHWH’S percipient warnings, illuminating the unavoidable reality that when human beings invest one man with special power they simultaneously divest themselves, no longer resonate with the people. Because of their fear of the Philistines and other neighboring enemies they are willing to alter their constitution permanently. “No! We are determined to have a king,” they cry, “so that we can be like other nations, with our own king to rule us and lead us and fight our battles.”

  YHWH’S choice is Saul, “a handsome man in the prime of life,” someone capable of symbolizing the people’s aspirations. “Of all the Israelites there was no one more handsome than he,” states the Book of Samuel. “He stood head and shoulders taller than anyone else.” Samuel anoints Saul, who is confirmed by the whole people. The ceremony of divine anointing (or deputizing), followed by popular confirmation, will become the pattern for the Israelite monarchy. The anointing by a priest or prophet is meant to signify that this man is YHWH’S choice, the confirmation by the assembly of the people that he is also the popular choice. In this way, Israel’s new monarchic constitution is to retain a democratic aspect, suggestive of the medieval maxim “Vox populi, vox Dei” (“What the people approve, God approves”). This same procedure will be copied by the early church in its election of bishops (but because power adheres to the powerful, confirmation by the people has fallen into disuse).