The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (28 page)

The great modern exposition of the cyclical nature of all nonbiblical religion is to be found in Mircea Eliade’s
The Myth of the Eternal Return
(Princeton, 1954; corrected second printing, 1965), but Eliade’s thesis may be glimpsed under different aspects throughout his considerable
oeuvre
. Two classic works that take somewhat different tacks are James Barr,
Biblical Words for Time
(Naperville, Illinois, 1962) and Bertil Albrektson,
History and the Gods
(Lund, Sweden, 1967). The quotation from Henri-Charles Puech comes from his imposing
Man and Time
(New York and London, 1957).

As always when large historical movements are at issue, I find the need to consult
The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community
by William McNeill (Chicago, 1963). The great scholarly popularizer of Sumer was Samuel Noah Kramer in
History Begins at Sumer
(New York, 1956), though I found his
The Sumerians
(Chicago, 1963) more helpful; and from this source I took all the translations used in this chapter, except for the
Gilgamesh
material, in which case I was able to use the latest and most accurate translations by Stephanie Dalley in her admirable
Myths from Mesopotamia
(Oxford, 1989). I have made one small alteration to her translation. Where she has, as the result of Enkidu’s encounter with the harlot, “For Enkidu had stripped (?),” I offer “For Enkidu had become smooth”—that is, stripped of body hair—which I believe throws clearer light on this transformation and brings it closer to similar ancient tales about the transformation of a wild man or
woman by means of a sexual encounter. (Compare, for instance, the ancient Irish story “The Wand of the Feat.”) For the equivalent Akkadian names of all the major Sumerian gods, see N. K. Sandars,
The Epic of Gilgamesh
(London, 1972), pages 23–29. This is an attractive prose translation of the
Epic
, though considerably more coherent than the extant originals, the tablets themselves.

For readers who would like to explore further the subject of the orgy, I confess that that scene was partly of my own invention, as I imply in the text itself. I chose a male rather than a female victim because I did not wish to have the charge of male chauvinism leveled without warrant, but one early reader accused me instead of “teenage bondage fantasies,” another of “homoeroticism.” Since these were both friends, God only knows what reviewers may say. We know that the Sumerians employed temple prostitutes of both sexes, and we know that they conducted orgies involving priests, priestesses, and kings to attract the divine gift of fertility to themselves and their land—and we know that these rites were carried out in the context of cyclical religion. But we have no written liturgy or order of service for such events.

My description is not based entirely on imagination, however, but on an event I attended long ago in Kerry called Puck Fair. Anyone who has encountered Puck Fair will surely agree that it is the vigorous remnant of a prehistoric fertility festival. It was this experience that brought home to me the nature of the cyclical worldview (before I had read Eliade) and how far we have come from our pagan antecedents; and part of what I wished to accomplish in this chapter was to shock the reader into realizing how very different ancient cultures could be from anything in our contemporary experience. It is not the sex but the abstract and impersonal nature of the proceedings that I wish to impress on the reader. For much additional information on the sexual outlook of the Sumerians, see Jean Botteró,
Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods
(Chicago, 1992).

As for putting moon worship in its universal context (both here and in the next chapter), my chief source was Eliade, especially his
Patterns in Comparative Religion
(London, 1958; reissued Lincoln, Nebraska, 1996). Eliade’s
A History of Religious Ideas
(3 vols., Chicago, 1978) also proved helpful, as did the work of Ninian Smart, especially
The World’s Religions
(Cambridge, 1989).

I come down heavily in favor of Avram/Avraham’s Sumerian roots, a simplification which I believe does no harm. Some scholars doubt that the biblical reference to Ur is accurate and would place Avraham’s beginnings among the Semites of Harran, which means “Tent City” and was a hub for caravans of semi-nomadic traders. To my mind, the most balanced presentation of the case for Avraham’s Sumerian antecedents (as well as his Canaanite context) is made by William Foxwell Albright, the great figure of modern American biblical studies, in his magisterial
Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan
(London, 1968; reprinted, Winona Lake, Indiana, 1994). Though I do prefer, with Albright, to imagine Avraham as issuing from Sumer (because of the multiple traces of Sumerian thought and language throughout Genesis), my thesis is in no way dependent on Avraham’s having been a Sumerian (or, more accurately, an urban Mesopotamian of Semitic origins). If he was a tent nomad or even a Canaanite (as some would press), my contention—that from Genesis onward the Bible presents us with a new way of thinking about and experiencing reality—still holds. I use the religion of Sumer not to explain Avraham but because it is the earliest religion of which we have written record. By examining it and comparing it to the archaeological “records” and later written records from all other ancient religions, we are able to see how similar they all are—and how dissimilar is Israel’s religious
project from all of them. This is true however we interpret the development of biblical theology. If we like, we can imagine that Avraham was a Canaanite polytheist whose beliefs were prettied up by later generations; we can even imagine that he never existed. No hypothesis (even one as radical as Jon Levenson’s in
The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son
[New Haven, 1993], which traces the binding of Yitzhak to a Canaanite story of actual human sacrifice) can change the fact that Israelite religion, in its essential line of development, is unique among the thought systems of the ancient world and that it is responsible for the unique values of the West.

As for
when
this Israelite transformation took place, whether it began in the time of Avraham, Moshe, David, or some other figure, no one can say with absolute assurance because the texts of the Torah and the historical books of the Bible (such as Joshua, Samuel, and Kings) were reedited in later periods. In my text I (by and large) take the patriarchal stories of Genesis at face value simply because this is the clearest way of explaining my thesis. Those who would pursue further the study of Genesis should bear in mind that the mountain of theories and controversies surrounding the background of the patriarchs grows daily. For all that, E. A. Speiser’s Anchor Bible volume
Genesis
(New York, 1964), from which I quote, is still the most useful general commentary. I also found helpful Nahum M. Sarna’s commentary in the Jewish Publications Society’s Torah series (Philadelphia, 1989) and the sprightly and insightful annotations that Everett Fox has made to his great and good translation
The Five Books of Moses
(New York, 1995). Except as noted, I use his translation exclusively throughout Chapters II, III, and IV. My only alteration to his translation has been to place direct speech in quotation marks and to substitute “[God]” for “Y
HWH
” in the episodes prior to the encounter at the Burning Bush, in which God first reveals his name. Most commentators assume that the use of Y
HWH
in earlier episodes is a
retrojection of a later, more developed theology-revelation, and I saw no reason to confuse readers unnecessarily before I got to a discussion of the Name.

Indeed, throughout the text I have simplified complex questions so that the line of my argument may appear clearly. I am aware, for instance, that some consider the “world’s first emperor” to have been not Hammurabi but his predecessor Sargon of Akkad. I am also aware that the Sumerian worldview had more elements of real morality than I stop to deal with. Acts of charity, in particular, were not entirely despised: like the Jews in Leviticus 19:9–10, the Sumerians were counseled not to strip their fields completely at the harvest but to leave ears of barley for gleaners—the widows and orphans who had no other sustenance. (And the goddess who protected these wretches was the same goddess who would judge mankind.) On a more exalted level, though I make no explicit reference to important modern interpretations of Genesis by such figures as Kierkegaard and Freud, the absence of their names from the text should not be taken as evidence that I am ignorant of their contributions, only that I wish to show in as uncluttered a manner as possible the development that is my main subject.

The quotations from Egyptian sources are taken from the earliest Egyptian literature: by Ptahhotpe (twenty-fourth century
B.C.
) and by a pharaoh (c. 2000
B.C.
) whose name is lost but whose treatise on kingship is preserved in
The Teaching for Merikare
, his son and successor. These may be found in William Kelly Simpson’s
The Literature of Ancient Egypt
(New Haven, 1973). For a detailed discussion of the Mayan calendar and its predecessors, see Mary Miller and Karl Taube,
An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya
(London and New York, 1993); for an interesting consideration of the cyclical element in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican society, see Dennis
Tedlock’s translation of
Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of life
(New York, 1996).

The assertion that “individuality is the flip side of monotheism” came out of a discussion I had with Rabbi Burton Visotzky of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, a man whose ordinary conversation is as studded with arresting insights as a spring garden is with daffodils.

If one may profitably spend several years reading the commentaries on Genesis, one may spend at least a lifetime doing the same for Exodus. Those who have dedicated themselves in this way should bear in mind that I am not here attempting to summarize even the major points of discussion that should occupy a class of Bible students examining this book, but only tracing the line of development in thought and emotion that runs through the Hebrew Bible and that brought into being our own sensibility. Thus I have, for instance, completely omitted the echoes in Exodus of the original Creation in Genesis and the “Second Creation” after the Flood. Israel, saved from the Egyptians and the waters of Chaos, is, in effect, God’s Third Creation. But insights like this, abundant in commentaries ancient and modern, would only distract us from our main pursuit. Likewise, I barely mention the so-called monotheistic reform instituted by Akhnaton because I very much doubt that it had any effect on Mosaic monotheism—but to ford these waters would take us far afield, indeed.

I found three commentaries on Exodus particularly helpful: Brevard W. Childs,
The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary
(Philadelphia, 1974); Nahum M. Sarna,
Exploring Exodus: The Heritage of Biblical Israel
(New York, 1986); and Umberto Cassuto,
A Commentary on the Book of Exodus
(Jerusalem, 1967),
from which I took the interpretation (by no means certain) of Rameses’s name. On the philosophical infrastructure of the ancient city-state, Giorgio Buccellati’s
Cities and Nations of Ancient Syria
(Rome, 1967) was illuminating.

The three lines of Miryam’s Song I have taken from the King James Version but have changed its “thrown” to “flung,” which I think closer to the Hebrew. Because this Song is written in a form of Hebrew that stands out as archaic within the rest of the text, I find that the King James gives us a better sense of its flavor.

My sources for this chapter are, by and large, the same as for the preceding chapter. The characterization of Jethro as a business consultant was suggested by Patricia S. Klein.

It is impossible to pinpoint exactly when each of the insights that constitute the mature Jewish religious vision first made its appearance in the minds and hearts of Israelites. For one thing, an insight often develops slowly over several generations. Concepts argued today before the Supreme Court of the United States—concepts dependent on such large ideas as democracy and civil rights—can be traced back to thinkers of the seventeenth century (and then further back, through the Christian Middle Ages to the Hebrew Bible itself!). But it can be difficult, even with a history closer to us in time, to pinpoint just when some new thought first emerged. So to say—unequivocally—that monotheism and individual destiny began with Avraham or that Moshe is responsible for new notions of time and moral behavior is more than I mean to affirm. I am, as I stated earlier, using the stories of the Bible only to make clear the line of intellectual and emotional development that made our worldview possible.

On the matter of the invention of the alphabet, I recommend a
most illuminating interview by Hershel Shanks with Frank Moore Cross, “How the Alphabet Democratized Civilization”
(Bible Review
, December 1992).

In interpreting the narrative of Israel from the settlement of Canaan to the early monarchy, I found especially valuable John Bright’s
A History of Israel
(3rd edition, Philadelphia, 1981), the standard and most reliable history in English, and Norman K. Gottwald’s
The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction
(1985), which is an excellent road map to the methods and insights, borrowed from literary studies and the social sciences, that are gradually making their way into biblical studies and replacing the older historical-critical approaches. In this regard, I should note that the newer methods have cast doubt on whether the religion of Israel was corrupted by Canaanite religion (as Samuel and Kings present the matter) or whether pure monotheism was a product, long after the Mosaic period, of an educated elite. Once again, I am not interested here in settling such matters. I take the biblical narrative at face value not because I am unaware of or in disagreement with contemporary scholarly developments but only because these newer interpretations need not overly concern us as we identify those unique values of Jewish religion that have shaped the Western world. With similar rationale, I do not deal with the current scholarly assumption that Saul’s reign is presented negatively in Samuel in part because David’s claim to the throne was shaky and needed legitimizing.