The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (18 page)

Despite the thinning of their numbers, the Children of Israel do not improve. They lose heart at the least reversal, their complaints are never-ending, their quickness to revolt a constant threat to the whole enterprise. After putting up with their yammering for a couple of years, God decides to make them wander the Sinai for a full forty years before settlement in Canaan, in this way ensuring that the whole
generation of Egyptian-bred complainers will die out and be replaced by a more rugged generation, hardened by wilderness trials—born nomads who expect always to journey on, rather than displaced city mice longing for the remembered fleshpots.

One of the most remarkable features of the Torah narrative—and a feature evidenced in no other ancient literature—is a hypersensitivity to the decisive influence of environment and its ability to shape both conscience and consciousness. Neither Sumer nor Egypt is ever described; from the Bible alone we would know virtually nothing of the first, and of the second mainly that its king was a fool who thought he could withstand the Real God. Any good museum of art can give us a better sense of these ancient societies than does the Bible, which actually sprang from these lush cultural sources. We can walk through an exhibition, admiring the golden statues of the pharaohs and the winged gods of Babylon without the least inclination to incline the head or bow the knee. But the Bible is a believer’s history, not a history of art or culture, and one that was all too close to the temptations of Egypt’s fleshpots and Sumer’s hieratic cruelties. Its authors felt no need to indulge in literary descriptions of civilized luxury, for cult and culture were so wedded in the ancient world that any appreciation of the cultural values of Egypt or Sumer (and, later, Babylon) could only tempt weak and wayward Israelites from the difficult way of the living God to the easy worship of the Golden Calf.

It is no accident, therefore, that the great revelations of God’s own Name and of his Commandments occur in a mountainous desert, as far from civilization and its contents as possible, in a place as unlike the lush predictabilities and comforts of the Nile and the Euphrates as this earth of ours can offer. If God—the Real God, the One God—was to speak to human beings and if there was any possibility of their hearing him, it could happen only in a place stripped of all cultural reference points, where even nature (which was so imbued with contrary, god-inhabited forces) seemed absent. Only amid inhuman rock and dust could this fallible collection of human beings imagine becoming human in a new way. Only under a sun without pity, on a mountain devoid of life, could the living God break through the cultural filters that normally protect us from him. “Y
HWH
, Y
HWH
,” he thunders at Moshe, the man alone on the Mountain:

This is God’s self-description, the one he would have us remember. He is the God of mercy and forgiveness, the God who never deserts his people, faithful to the end, patient with all our failings however dismaying, but reminding us that a household—a familial environment, holding three (or sometimes four) generations—cannot escape the sins of the oldest generation; they necessarily infect the atmosphere.

Moshe, the medium for this revelation, is both God’s representative and the people’s. To God he speaks on the people’s behalf, to the people on God’s behalf. His is a far more difficult calling than that of Avraham, who was almost a Sumerian Odysseus—a man with a mission, all right, but a wily character who seemed up to any challenge. Moshe is a man who does not think highly of himself, who never relies on his own talents, only on God’s word. He was, as Exodus says of him, “the humblest man on earth,” an extraordinary description in a world of boastful heroes. In his humility he has been hollowed out like a reed, so that there is nothing in him—no pride or quirk of personality—to distort God’s message. He can serve, therefore, as an authentic medium, a true channel.

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:

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
C
ANAAN
 
From Tribe to Nation

D
euteronomy, 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.