The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (27 page)

I
t is no longer possible to believe that every word of the Bible was inspired by God. Fundamentalists still do, but they can keep up such self-delusion only by scrupulously avoiding all forms of scientific inquiry. They must also maintain a tight rein on their own senses, for, even without access to modern biblical criticism, any reader might wonder at the patchwork nature of the scriptures, their conflicting norms and judgments, outright contradictions, and bald errors. But even without resorting to modern scientific methodology or noticing what an inconsistent palimpsest the Hebrew Bible can be, we must reject certain parts of the Bible as unworthy of a God we would be willing to believe in. We read, for instance, in the Book of Joshua that God commanded the Israelites to put all Canaanites, even children, to the sword; and in the Psalms the poet regularly urges God to effect the brutal destruction of all the poet’s enemies. Though the people who wrote such words may have believed they were inspired by God, we cannot.

God may be “slow to anger and quick to forgive,” but he is also terrifying and at times as arbitrary (as in his dealings with Saul) as any Mesopotamian monarch. I don’t think it should bother us that he is no Hallmark greeting card. If God is to be God the Creator of all, he must be utterly beyond our comprehension—and, therefore, awfully scary. More than this, I, for one, am willing to give God the benefit of the doubt in certain dubious cases—even in an episode
as grotesque as the near-sacrifice of Yitzhak. He had to jump-start this new religion, and he didn’t always have the best material to work with.

But it remains true that there is no way of attributing mass carnage and vindictive slaughter to a God worth believing in. Even the fiercest believer among us must, I think, admit that these operations were the work of human beings who had wrongly convinced themselves that God was on their side. The story the Hebrew Bible has to tell is the story of an evolving consciousness, a consciousness that went through many stages of development and that, like all living things, sometimes grew slowly and at other times in great spurts.

We can, however, believe that the experience on which this story is based is inspired—that the evolution of Jewish consciousness, taking place as it did over so many centuries, was animated and kept warm by the breath of God. The story of Jewish identity across the millennia against impossible odds is a unique miracle of cultural survival. Where are the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians today? And though we recognize Egypt and Greece as still belonging to our world, the cultures and ethnic stocks of those countries have little continuity with their ancient namesakes. But however miraculous Jewish survival may be, the greater miracle is surely that the Jews developed a whole new way of experiencing reality, the only alternative to all ancient worldviews and all ancient religions. If one is ever to find the finger of God in human affairs, one must find it here.

There is nothing neat about the Bible. As the record of one “family” over the course of two millennia—millennia
that are now two to four millennia distant from us—the Bible harbors all the mess and contrariness of human life. It is possible, therefore, to interpret the sprawling data contained within its covers in many different ways. We can say, with certain feminist critics, that what we have here is a collection of old husbands’ tales, myths invented by a primitive patriarchy to glorify itself. But to say this we must ignore the later, personalist material, such as the Book of Ruth, and refuse to consider that the Bible is a kind of documentary record of the evolution of a sensibility, an evolution that began in the primeval worldview of Sumer. We can say that the Bible represents a revolution in which the original Earth goddess was supplanted by newly aggressive warrior males and their heavenly projections of themselves, but this hypothesis is itself a projection, a sort of feminist wish fulfillment without substantial confirmation in the archaeological record. Our best evidence suggests strongly that the aboriginal great god was always “in heaven”—that is, as completely Other as human imagination could make him—and that, because he acted on earthly life as the seed-giver, he was imagined as male.

We can force the evidence, as
Joseph Campbell did, and say that all religions are cyclical, mythical, and ahistorical—and just who do the Jews think they are, pretending that their religion is based on history and therefore unique? But this sort of argument is what logicians have always called “begging the question,” the logical fallacy that
assumes
as a given the very thing that must be proved. All religions
are
cyclical, mythical, and without reference to history as we
have come to understand it—all religions
except
the Judeo-Christian stream in which Western consciousness took life.

We can read the Bible (as do postmodernists) as a jumble of unrelated texts, given a false and superficial unity by redactors of the exilic period and later. But this is to ignore not only the powerful emotional and spiritual effect that much of the Bible has on readers, even on readers who would rather not be so moved, but also its cumulative impact on whole societies. The Bible’s great moments—the thunderous “
lekhlekha”
spoken to Avram, the secret Name of God revealed to cowering Moshe, Miryam’s song on the far shore, God’s Ten Words, David’s Good Shepherd, Isaiah’s Holy Mountain—are hard to brush aside as merely human expressions with no relationship to the deepest meanings of our own individual lives. Nor can we imagine the great liberation movements of modern history without reference to the Bible. Without the Bible we would never have known the abolitionist movement, the prison-reform movement, the antiwar movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the movements of indigenous and dispossessed peoples for their human rights, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, the Solidarity movement in Poland, the free-speech and pro-democracy movements in such Far Eastern countries as South Korea, the Philippines, and even China. These movements of modern times have all employed the language of the Bible; and it is even impossible to understand their great heroes and heroines—people like Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Mother Jones, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Helder Cámara, Oscar Romero,
Rigoberta Menchú, Corazon Aquino, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Charity Kaluki Ngilu, Harry Wu—without recourse to the Bible.

Beyond these movements, which have commonly taken the Book of Exodus as their blueprint, are other forces that have shaped our world, such as capitalism, communism, and democracy. Capitalism and communism are both bastard children of the Bible, for both are processive faiths, modeled on biblical faith and demanding of their adherents that they always hold in their hearts a belief in the future and keep before their eyes the vision of a better tomorrow, whether that tomorrow contains a larger gross domestic product or a workers’ paradise. Neither ideology could have risen in the cyclical East, in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, or Shinto. But because capitalism and communism are processive faiths without God, each is a form of madness—a fantasy without a guarantee. Democracy, in contrast, grows directly out of the Israelite vision of
individuals
, subjects of value because they are images of God, each with a unique and personal destiny. There is no way that it could ever have been “self-evident that all men are created equal” without the intervention of the Jews.

If it is possible to read the Bible as a hodgepodge with only a superficial unity, it is also possible to read it as a tremendous literary whole. This is the tack taken so dazzlingly by Jack Miles in
God: A Biography
, in which God is seen as a developing literary character. In quite a different way, it is also the tack taken by biblical literalists, whether Jewish or Christian, who see the Bible as a kind of “handbook
to life” that tells them everything they need to know. To me, at least, the most satisfying way to read the Bible is to see it as a collection of varied documents, each showing us the same revelation at different stages of development but capable of bringing us at last to a processive, personalist faith in a completely mysterious God. As
Martin Buber pointed out so beautifully, it is in saying “Thou” to God that I can at last say “I” and it is in saying “I-Thou” that other “thou’s” become real.

We are the undeserving recipients of this history of the Jews, this long, excessive, miraculous development of ethical monotheism without which our ideas of equality and personalism are unlikely ever to have come into being and surely would never have matured in the way that they have. This was the necessary evolution. But since it cannot be proven that God exists, it can hardly be shown that he spoke to Avraham, Moshe, or Isaiah. Each reader must decide if the Voice that spoke to the patriarchs and prophets speaks to him, too. If it does, there is no question of needing proof, any more than we require proof of anyone we believe in. For in the last analysis, one does not believe
that
God exists, as one believes that Timbuktu or the constellation Andromeda exists. One believes
in
God, as one believes
in
a friend—or one believes nothing. So, in the sense that this whole business depends on faith in God, each reader must be left to wrestle with his own, her own doubts and beliefs.

But it can be demonstrated, as I hope I have done, that the belief system we have come to call Judaism is the origin of the processive worldview, the worldview to which all
Western people subscribe, a worldview that has now taken hold in many (and, to some extent, all) non-Western societies. This “processive worldview” is regularly referred to in history, literature, philosophy, religion, and theology texts and regularly contrasted with its opposite, the “cyclical worldview,” but it is seldom explained; and an otherwise well-informed humanities or social sciences student may pass through an entire degree program without ever coming to understand the meaning of these terms and their radical consequences.

In a cyclical world, there are neither beginnings nor ends. But for us, time had a beginning, whether it was the first words of God in the Book of Genesis, when “in the beginning God created heaven and earth,” or the Big Bang of modern science, a concept that would not have been possible without the Jews. Time, which had a beginning, must also have an end. What will it be? In the Torah we learn that God is working his purposes in history and will
effect
its end, but in the Prophets we learn that our choices will also
affect
this end, that our inner disposition toward our fellow human beings will make an enormous difference in the way this end appears to us.

Unbelievers might wish to stop for a moment and consider how completely God—this Jewish God of justice and compassion—undergirds all our values and that it is just possible that human effort without this God is doomed to certain failure. Humanity’s most extravagant dreams are articulated by the Jewish prophets. In Isaiah’s vision, true faith is no longer confined to one nation, but “all the nations”
stream to the House of Y
HWH
“that he may teach us his ways” and that we may learn to “beat [our] swords into plowshares.” All who share this outrageous dream of universal brotherhood, peace, and justice, who dream the dreams and see the visions of the great prophets, must bring themselves to contemplate the possibility that without God there is no justice.

But those who claim to believe in God must contemplate a prospect no less unsettling. Throughout our Western world, though shaped by this Jewish matrix, the cry of the poor so often goes unheard. The prophets harangued Israel and Judah unceasingly about the powerless and marginalized, the overlooked widows, orphans, and “sojourners in our midst,” who are still with us today as single mothers, hungry children, arid helpless immigrants, wraiths invisible in our prosperous societies. Throughout the world, half of all children go to bed hungry each night and one in seven of God’s children is facing starvation. Before such statistics, believers should never forget Dostoevsky’s assertion that the suffering of children is the greatest proof against the existence of God; and we must ever contemplate the awful Day of Y
HWH
, the coming destruction of our wealth and security, the razing even of the bastions of our faith, the Temple leveled and Y
HWH
gone.

For without justice, there is no God.

A
s in the first volume in this series, I would like to give the reader not an exhaustive bibliography of everything I consulted (which, given the vastness of studies on the Bible and the ancient Near East, would dangerously increase the size of this small book) but a sense of which studies I found most valuable. The passkey to all this literature is
The Anchor Bible Dictionary
(New York, 1992), of which I was the happy publisher but for the content of which I can claim no responsibility. Its six massive volumes, ranging to every subject imaginable, make it the philosophers’ stone of contemporary biblical studies. Whatever you don’t know, you can learn about here. Each of the major entries gives the reader a tour of all the modern scholarship on a particular subject, as well as a guide to the many migraine-inducing scholarly controversies and, most important, a complete bibliography.

Though I cannot recommend the
ABD
too highly, it often gives the nonexpert far more than he wants, sometimes in impenetrable academese. Fortunately, a marvelous alternative is at hand—
The Oxford Companion to the Bible
, which, like all the Oxford Companions, gives the ordinary reader just what he needs to know without fuss and feathers.
The Jerome Biblical Commentary
, the work of a group of American Catholic scholars, is also highly regarded. Other excellent sources of information for the non-specialist are the back issues of
Bible Review
and
Biblical Archaeology Review
. Both publications are edited by the legendary Hershel Shanks, who performs the daunting service of encouraging scholars of renown to write in a popular vein.