Creed religions are generally eager to gain new converts. So missionary zeal and proselytism are high on their agenda.
As beliefs are central to creed religions, the slightest variation in belief can result in other religions or groups within the same religion being branded as heretics or infidels. Creed religions therefore tend to be intolerant of other religions and even of other groups within their own religion. The conflict between Catholics and Protestants is a prime example, as is that between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims.
Communal religions are generally vague and flexible in terms of belief. As a result, they are largely tolerant of other religions and of variations within their own religion. Recent research has shown that the tradition of Roman persecution of Christianity is a myth. It is important to note that there have never been any religious wars between communal religions.
Because a communal religion does not have an existence separate from that of the community, there is no drive to make converts. In the ancient world every nation had its own religion. There was no desire on the part of any nation to convert members of any other nation to its religion any more than to its nationality. Neither Judaism nor Hinduism nor Shinto is a proselytising religion. Quite the opposite in fact.
The only time a person in the ancient world would change their religion was as a result of conquest. If your nation was conquered by another, you would become absorbed into the conquering nation — and automatically into its religion at the same time.
The belief peddled by atheists that all religions are intolerant is false. Creed religions generally are intolerant, but communal religions are largely tolerant.
These features are confirmed by the case studies of Hinduism, the Roman state religion and Christianity and the further quick surveys of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and the Yazidi religion at the end of the chapter.
Would the world be a more peaceful place if communal religions again prevailed? Wars of religion might disappear but wars for political or economic reasons would be as frequent as ever. And even when creed religions go to war with one another in the name of religion this is often caused by other factors, usually political or economic.
CHAPTER FIVE
Judaism: A Religion at the Crossroads
Judaism began as a communal religion but has now become something of a hybrid between a communal and a creed religion. Instead of the tolerance which is a typical feature of communal religions, certain Jewish denominations now display intolerance especially towards certain other Jewish denominations. As a result, Judaism has become more fragmented than ever. And certain denominations even apply a creed test, which is alien to communal religions generally but typical of creed religions. Hence the pun in the title that I have given this chapter: orthodox Judaism must decide whether it is to add creed as a new test of membership, making it a hybrid between a communal and a creed religion, with the worst features of both.
Judaism as a Communal Religion
Judaism began life about three thousand years ago as a communal religion. (See Chapter 4.) Most religions in the ancient world were of this type, in which religion and society were one. Jews have never had a distinct religious identity separate from their communal identity.
In common with most other communal religions, the Jewish religion has never even had a distinctive name separate from that of the nation. The English words “Jew” and “Judaism” are a modern coinage based on “Judah”, the name of one of the twelve tribes and of one of the two Jewish kingdoms of antiquity. But in the Bible the label tends to be “the Children of Israel” (often translated as “Israelites”), and the term “Hebrews” is also found. At no point did the religion have a distinctive name of its own separate from that of the nation.
Like most other communal religions, ancient Judaism had a hereditary priestly class (made up of two groups: priests proper, in Hebrew cohanim, and their assistants known as levi’im, or in English as “levites”), which was in charge of the religious side of life based in the Temple in Jerusalem. Ritual was central to Jewish religious life, as is clear from the Hebrew Bible, which goes into minute detail on the animal sacrifices required for every eventuality, and also on the precise vestments to be worn by the priests.
There is practically nothing in the Hebrew Bible that can be called a creed, except for prohibition of idol worship and strong emphasis on belief in the One Jewish God who is portrayed as the Creator of the universe and at the same time as having singled out the Jewish people for special favour (and also for punishment for their transgressions). Hence the label attached to the Jews both by themselves and in a sneering tone by their detractors as “the Chosen People”.
Even belief in an afterlife was not shared by all Jews. It hardly figures in the Hebrew Bible, and it is certainly not held out as promising reward or punishment for an adherent’s conduct in their earthly life. The Book of Job, for example, where such promises might have been expected to be found, contains not a single mention of life after death. Job’s undeserved suffering, together with his acceptance and resignation, is rewarded instead with very earthly gifts:
And the LORD restored the fortunes of Job, when he had prayed for his friends; and the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before. Then came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and ate bread with him in his house; and they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him; and each of them gave him a piece of money and a ring of gold. And the LORD blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning; and he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she-asses. He had also seven sons and three daughters… And after this Job lived a hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons’ sons, four generations. And Job died, an old man, and full of days.190
What then of the well-known verse which is particularly memorable because of Handel’s haunting musical setting of it in his Messiah? The verse in question reads as follows: “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.”191 The Christian interpretation of this verse is that it refers to resurrection and that the “redeemer” is Jesus.192
There are two main reasons for rejecting this view. First, it is flatly contradicted by the passage quoted above, which shows that Job’s “redemption” came in purely earthly terms. Secondly, the word translated here as “redeemer” is the Hebrew word goel, which can also be translated as “avenger” or “champion”. So, for example, in the book of Isaiah God is called the “redeemer of Israel” for redeeming the Jewish people from captivity. Goel can even be translated as “kinsman”, whose duty it is to “redeem” a relation from slavery193 or to marry his late brother’s widow in a so-called “levirate marriage”.194 In short, therefore, the word “redeemer” has no necessary mystical or otherworldly connotations.
Conversion
Like most other communal religions, in ancient times the Jewish religion was tolerant of other religions and was not interested in converting non-Jews to Judaism. The pattern in the ancient world was for each nation to have its own religion and its own god or gods. It would have been as unthinkable for an Egyptian, a Philistine or an Assyrian to convert to the Jewish religion as it would have been for them to switch to Jewish nationality.
Conversion hardly figures in the Hebrew Bible at all. There are just four episodes in the whole Old Testament that have any possible relevance to conversion at all.
Ruth’s Conversion to Judaism
The prime incident, and the only one that can truly be regarded as an example of a conversion, occurs in the Book of Ruth. Set in the period of the Judges (around 1150 BCE), the Book of Ruth tells the probably fictitious story of a Jewish family, Elimelech, Naomi and their two sons, who during a famine migrate from Bethlehem in Judah to the nearby Kingdom of Moab. The two sons marry Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. After the death of all the menfolk, Naomi decides to return to her native Judah, accompanied by her two Moabite d
aughters-in-law. Naomi begs the two young women to go back to their own families in Moab and remarry. Orpah does so, but Ruth is determined to stay in Bethlehem with her mother-in-law, Naomi. Ruth’s declaration of loyalty to Naomi is one of the most moving passages in the Bible:
Entreat me not to leave you,
Or to turn back from following after you;
For wherever you go, I will go;
And wherever you lodge, I will lodge;
Your people shall be my people,
And your God, my God.
Where you die, I will die,
And there will I be buried.
The LORD do so to me, and more also,
If anything but death parts you and me.195
The key to this declaration is contained in the words, “Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.” This effectively encapsulates the essence of the nature of a communal religion. Ruth recognises that by choosing to join her mother-in-law Naomi in Naomi’s country, Judah, Ruth is not primarily changing her religion but her nationality. By choosing to join the Jewish people she also automatically joins the Jewish religion. Note that there is no mention whatsoever of any religious creed other than belief in Naomi’s “God”.
Once Ruth is converted by means of this informal but moving declaration she is fully accepted as Jewish in every respect, and according to the Book of Ruth was the great-grandmother of King David. This would make Ruth an ancestress of the Messiah, who according to Jewish tradition must be of the House of David.
Ezra and the Foreign Wives
The charming but almost certainly fictitious story of Ruth contrasts markedly with the probably brutally true historical episode associated with the name of Ezra in the canonical biblical book of the same name. Probably in about 457 BCE Ezra, a Jewish priest, led a large body of Jewish exiles from Babylon back to Jerusalem, where he re-established Jewish observance among the Jews who had already returned from exile.
Ezra was shocked to discover that many of these Jews had taken non-Jewish wives, including Canaanite, Hittite, Perizzite, Jebusite, Ammonite, Moabite, Egyptian and Amorite women.196 He immediately invoked the injunction against such foreign marriages contained in the Book of Deuteronomy and issued a proclamation requiring all returned exiles to assemble in Jerusalem on pain of forfeiture of their property and exclusion.197 Ezra then shamed the men concerned into putting away their foreign wives and the children that these foreign wives had borne them. The Book of Ezra even contains a list of the Jewish priests, levites and leading Jewish citizens concerned.198 The Book of Ezra ends with this verse: “All these had married foreign women, and they put them away with their children.”199
Here is the Deuteronomic injunction against foreign marriageswhich Ezra invoked:
You shall not make marriages with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons. For they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods; then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire.200
Although Deuteronomy (literally, “second law”) was purportedly a code of laws issued by Moses at the time of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt, it was probably actually compiled several centuries later, during the reign of King Josiah (641–609 BCE), who was determined to extirpate from the Temple in Jerusalem and all around his kingdom the worship of Baal and other foreign gods which had been introduced by Josiah’s grandfather, King Manasseh.
The Rape of Dinah
A highly discreditable example of pretended conversion occurs in the story in Genesis of the rape of Dinah, daughter of the patriarch Jacob. Jacob had bought some land from Hamor, a Canaanite prince, and pitched his tent there. Hamor’s son Shechem raped Dinah and then asked his father to approach Dinah’s father for her hand in marriage.
Hamor’s proposal was not only for his son Shechem to marry Dinah but also for a more general arrangement: “Make marriages with us; give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for yourselves. You shall dwell with us; and the land shall be open to you; dwell and trade in it, and get property in it.”201
Dinah’s brothers knew of her rape by Shechem but pretended to agree to his father’s proposition on condition that all their menfolk were circumcised: “Only on this condition will we consent to you: that you will become as we are and every male of you be circumcised. Then we will give our daughters to you, and we will take your daughters to ourselves, and we will dwell with you and become one people.”202
Hamor and Shechem readily agreed and all their menfolk were duly circumcised. But, when they were writhing in agony on the third day after the operation, two of Dinah’s brothers secretly crept in on them and killed them all.203
The key phrase in the pretended agreement is “we will dwell with you and become one people”. The story of Dinah is probably fictitious, but what we have in this phrase is the typical communal attitude to religion as an integral part of a person’s social or national identity. As we saw in the case of Ruth, joining the Jewish people entails joining the Jewish religion; and the Jewish religion requires male circumcision. The only surprise in this regard in the Dinah story is that the pretended intention was for the Jewish people to join that of Hamor, not the other way round.
Jonah’s Non-Proselytising Mission
The story of Jonah might have been expected to promote conversion to Judaism, but it does nothing of the kind. The Book of Jonah is almost certainly a parable with no pretence to being a factual historical narrative.
The Book begins with God instructing Jonah to go to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, to preach repentance to the people living there. To the Jews of the ancient world Nineveh was the equivalent of Nazi Germany to the Jews of today. Not surprisingly, therefore, Jonah is unwilling to accept this mission, because he does not want to help the Ninevites to escape divine retribution. It is in his attempt to run away from God that Jonah boards a ship bound for “Tarshish”, probably Tartessus in southern Spain, in exactly the opposite direction from Nineveh. It is on this voyage that the well-known episode involving the whale (or “big fish”, to be precise) occurs. God catches up with Jonah and churns up a great storm at sea, which results in Jonah’s fellow passengers blaming him and throwing him overboard, where he is swallowed by a “big fish” and eventually vomited out on dry land.
God now repeats his instruction to Jonah to go and preach repentance to the people of Nineveh, who were supposedly guilty of evil and violence. Jonah reluctantly obeys, preaching, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh will be destroyed.” To Jonah’s chagrin, his message is successful. The King of Nineveh (a fictitious character) proclaims a general fast, covers himself in sackcloth and ashes and orders his people to do the same.
The Ninevites’ genuine repentance stirs God to relent, and Nineveh is spared the threatened destruction. Jonah is so angry about God’s mercy to the people of Nineveh — the sworn enemy of the Jews — that he sulks and even asks to die. But through the parable of the gourd God brings it home to Jonah that God must concern himself not only with the Jews but with the people of Nineveh as well, who are just as much part of God’s creation as the Jewish people.
The message of the Book of Jonah is a universalist one: God judges people on their merits and not in terms of which nation, people or religion they belong to. There is no suggestion in the Book of Jonah that the people of Nineveh need to convert to Judaism in order to be saved, and there is no mention of conversion or indeed of Judaism in Jonah’s message to them.
If Jonah were to be translated to a modern setting, the first questions to ask would be: Why has Jonah been sent on this mission? To what religion or cult do the Ninevites have to sign up in order to be saved? And who is paying for Jonah’s campaign anyway?
However, unlike Paul’s preaching to communities dotted all around the Graeco-Roman worl
d — a campaign which was unabashedly geared to winning recruits for his fledgling new Christian religion — Jonah’s mission has no ulterior motive. Not a word is said about the Ninevites’ own gods, although the historical Assyrians did of course have a pantheon of gods, including Marduk, Ishtar (or Astarte), Tammuz (who gave his name to one of the months of the Babylonian calendar still used in the Jewish religion) and Ashur (presumably named after “Assyria”), who was still being worshipped as late as the 4th century CE.
Whenever the Book of Jonah was written, which is unclear, it undoubtedly dates from a time when communal religions were the order of the day and every nation had its own god or gods. When Jonah tries to escape his mission to Nineveh by boarding a ship heading in the opposite direction, the ship is soon caught up in a huge storm sent by God. We read: “Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried to his god.”204 The sailors then cast lots to discover who is to blame for the storm. “So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.” Whereupon the sailors round on Jonah and ask him: “What is your occupation? And whence do you come? What is your country? And of what people are you?”205 Three of these four questions are essentially the same, asking Jonah about his nationality. None are specifically about religion, because in an age of communal religions a person’s religion was determined by their nationality. But Jonah’s answer does refer to his religion: “I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”206 Jonah is here making the point that his nation’s god is not just another communal god but is also the creator of the world. After throwing Jonah overboard at his own request, we read: “Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.”207
God Without Religion Page 13
