The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (24 page)

Thus the metaphor of a courtship and “holy marriage” between Israel and God, first broached in the desert narrative of Exodus, is given a new twist. But both
Amos and Hosea also look forward to a “Day of Y
HWH
,” a terrible day of vengeance in which the exploiters will receive their justice and, according to Amos, only a “remnant” will be saved. The images of the Day and the remnant, met here for the first time, will come to be of increasing importance as the new prophetic movement grows in strength.

In 721, the Day of Y
HWH
arrived for the Kingdom of Israel, which had recently been reduced to the status of a vassal kingdom by the expanding Assyrian empire to the northeast. But soon after the death of
Tiglath-pileser III, Assyria’s great warrior emperor, Israel decided to flex its muscles and throw off the Assyrian yoke. This was its last mistake. The Assyrians descended and carried off all the
people of property, dispersing Israelite nobles throughout the empire as nameless slaves who would never be heard from again. In time to come, their land would be colonized by subject peoples from elsewhere in the empire, who one day, intermarried with the remaining peasant stock, would come to be known as Samaritans.

Amos knew what he was talking about. He even had right the direction of this permanent exile—northeast “toward Hermon,” as he had warned the “cows of Bashan,” now deprived of their homes and finery and even their identities. As a people, Israel had simply evaporated—ten Lost Tribes,
¹
who leave no further trace in the historical record.

W
e do not know how this horrific confirmation of Amos’s and Hosea’s prophecies was understood by the remaining Children of the Promise—the Judeans of the southern kingdom, the people who would soon be known as the Jews—now “the remnant” prophesied by Amos. But the people of the south had their own new prophets; and preeminent among these gadflies stood the man who is perhaps the greatest of all prophets,
Isaiah of Judah. Quite unlike Amos, Isaiah was an educated man with access to kings and may even have been a writer—the first literary prophet, though the less than seamless quality of the Book
of Isaiah suggests that his oracles were arranged by his disciples after his death.

When Isaiah was twenty-five, he had a vision in Solomon’s Temple at Jerusalem of God enthroned in his heavenly sanctuary, surrounded by seraphim, the six-winged “fiery ones,” who shout

Isaiah, whose lips are purified with a fiery coal by one of the seraphs, is then sent forth to tell the truth, which no one will believe, “until towns are in ruins and deserted, houses untenanted and a great desolation reigns in the land, and Y
HWH
has driven the people away and the country is totally abandoned.”

Isaiah’s first prophecies have all the well-wrought balance of literature:

If the mild young prophet’s first utterances are a little erudite and indirect, he soon learns to put his literary gift at the service of a stark message, cursing the uncaring people of Judah, “who call what is bad, good, and what is good, bad, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness.” Like Amos, he rails against their injustice toward the poor and vulnerable and against their religious hypocrisy, but he does it with unmistakable style. There are probably more well-known quotations from Isaiah than from any other
book of the Hebrew Bible except the Psalms: “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib.… Come now, let us reason together … though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.… They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.… What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor? … the bread of adversity and the water of affliction.”

As Amos and Hosea had threatened Israel, Isaiah threatens the dreadful Day of Y
HWH
upon Judah, but his promise of a remnant to be saved is imbued with poetic power that they could never have matched:

But before these decidedly messianic prophecies can come to pass, the Day of Y
HWH
must be endured, after which the Jews will stop relying on tyrants:

At last, the Peaceable Kingdom shall be theirs:

Though Isaiah’s oracles will be preserved by his followers, they fall on deaf ears, as had the prophecies of Amos and
Hosea. Isaiah’s contemporaries are neither terrified nor thrilled by the condemnations and comforts he offers them. Though Judah has the good fortune to see two reforming monarchs—Hezekiah and Josiah—ascend the throne in a hundred-year period, it also has the misfortune to be governed by two of the worst of all the Davidic dynasty, Ahaz and Manasseh. Isaiah was an adviser to Hezekiah (715–687) and, according to legend, was sawn in two by Manasseh (687–642).

The reforming monarchs attempted to cleanse the cult of Y
HWH
from odious Canaanite admixtures, permitting worship of the only God only in the Temple and demolishing the old sanctuaries and high places, long-tolerated venues for a syncretistic practice
of Canaanite paganism and the religion of Y
HWH
. But Ahaz and Manasseh not only tolerated the Canaanite gods but went further than any of the earlier kings of Israel and Judah (except perhaps Ahab) by offering children to Moloch, the horrible child-devouring god whose cult was practiced in the smoke-filled
Valley of Hinnom
²
south of Jerusalem, where perpetual fires were stoked by ash-streaked priests, always ready to throw a fresh and quivering victim into the flames.

The prophet
Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah’s, makes reference to this charred horror when he imagines an idle devotee asking himself how best to worship God: should he sacrifice his own child so that his petition may be answered to his satisfaction?

Micah abhors such musings, which draw on this mixed tradition of Canaanite and Israelite religions but miss the point of everything:

For the prophets, there is a profound link between idol worship and injustice. Baal and Astarte and Moloch are the gods of human desires: they can bestow power and riches, prestige and victory, and can be wheedled into doing so by some rigmarole or other, some offering. But our God is the God of heaven and earth, who has told us that the only acceptable offering is justice like his justice: to treat others fairly and compassionately and never to stoop to the cruelty that these quid pro quo transactions can entail—things as
hideous as the sacrifice of children. The religion of Y
HWH
has come a long way from the Binding of Yitzhak; and it is corning close to establishing a new axiom by dividing the population in two: the rich are the idolators and sacrificers of children, the poor are the righteous. But the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah can only delay, not turn aside, the Day of Y
HWH
, made inevitable by the chronic apostasy of the Judean remnant of the Chosen People and by the painful inequalities in their society, growing ever more acute since the days of Solomon.

In the second half of the seventh century, during the reign of Josiah, when the Books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings were set down, there rose
Jeremiah, the prophet of God’s judgment, who, speaking on behalf of Y
HWH
, might well be called the prophet of the last chance: “ ‘Amend your behavior and your actions and I will let you stay in this place. Do not put your faith in delusive words, such as: “This is Y
HWH’S
sanctuary, Y
HWH’S
sanctuary, Y
HWH’S
sanctuary!” But if you really amend your behavior and your actions, if you really treat one another fairly, if you do not exploit the stranger, the orphan and the widow, if you do not shed innocent blood in this place and if you do not follow other gods, to your own ruin, then I shall let you stay in this place, in the country I gave for ever to your ancestors of old.’ ”

In Judah it was long believed that the promises made to David concerning eternal Jerusalem and the presence of Y
HWH
above the ark in his Temple would shield Judah—unlike the northern kingdom—from ultimate catastrophe. Jeremiah predicts the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple and the departure of Y
HWH
. He is very precise about what
will happen:
Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, which has now eclipsed Assyria in the power politics of Mesopotamia, will descend with all his forces on the people of Judah, leveling their city and Temple and reducing “the whole country to ruin and desolation.” Seventy years of enslavement in Babylon will follow.