The Right Side of History

by Ben Shapiro

  Now imagine everything changes.

  Imagine someone tells you that you are worthwhile. You, a mere commoner scrabbling in the dirt. You’re not a slave; you’re a free and powerful human being with inherent value. You’re no longer a cork on the waves of life—you’re captain of your own ship. And you and your family and your community have but one job: to direct that ship toward the God that made you, the God that cares about you.

  This is the Jewish and Christian God. This is the Judeo-Christian civilization. This is the foundation for the greatest culture and civilization in world history—the West, the greatest force for material prosperity and freedom in the history of the planet. The Light that allegedly shone at Sinai incontestably illuminated the world.

  The revelation at Sinai, in approximately 1313 BCE according to traditional Biblical belief, changed the world by infusing it with meaning for those who knew the story. In particular, Judaism (and later, as we’ll see, Christianity) granted individual purpose and communal purpose. It did so through four faith-based claims that were utterly different from the pagan religions before it.

  First, Judaism claimed that God was unified, that a master plan stood behind everything.

  Second, Judaism stated that human beings were held to particular behavioral standards for moral, not utilitarian reasons—we were ordered to be moral at the behest of a higher power, even if God’s rules could benefit us in this life.

  Third, Judaism claimed that history progressed: that revelation was the beginning, but it was not the end, that man had a responsibility to pursue God and bring about a redemption of mankind, and that God could use a particular example—a chosen people—to act as a light unto the nations.

  Finally, Judaism claimed that God had endowed man with choice, that men were responsible for their choices, and that our choices mattered.

  Christianity took the messages of Judaism and broadened them: it focused more heavily on grace, and successfully spread the fundamental principles of Judaism, as emended by Christianity, to billions of human beings across the planet.

  In today’s West, such a contention is deeply controversial. Western leaders routinely use phrases like “Western values” to remind citizens that we have a moral purpose, that there is something special about the West. And there is.

  But those same leaders all too often attack the roots of those values. They portray religious believers as fools or bigots, mock them as antirational and backward, suggest that true enlightenment rests on the destruction of the Judeo-Christian heritage. They place the religious beliefs that undergird Western civilization in direct opposition to Western values, as though Western civilization can only be preserved through destruction of its own roots.

  Those same leaders suggest that we live in a world of destructive chaos—that there is no plan, no progress, no personal accountability. They’ve argued that we are nothing more than victims of the systems into which we are born—we are inescapably earthbound. There’s political benefit to this kind of demagoguery: it allows politicians to proclaim themselves materialist messiahs, prepared to save us from uncaring fate.

  The last time this kind of thinking was widespread, there was no Western civilization. And it’s easier to return to the status quo ante than any of us will admit.

  GOD’S ORDERED UNIVERSE

  Before there was God, there were gods.

  It is difficult for most Westerners to conceive of the notion of multiple gods nowadays, because the Judeo-Christian God has loomed so large for millennia. But the vast majority of religions prior to Judaism were polytheistic. That’s not because polytheists were fools. It’s actually because polytheism is sophisticated and natural in many ways.

  Polytheism is sophisticated in its willingness to absorb new, strange gods. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were polytheists, and would routinely incorporate the gods of other religions into their own religion. As the famed British Orientalist Henry William Frederick Saggs points out, “Accepting a polytheistic view of life, the ancients were under no pressure to deny the existence of the gods of other peoples. . . . Difficulties only surfaced when one group assertively denied the very existence of other gods. This was the case with the Jews, who in consequence became the least tolerant of all ancient peoples.”1

  Paganism also recognizes that the universe is a chaotic place, one we can’t fully understand. A prime mover—a singular God instead of myriad gods—would require that logic govern the universe, a predictable set of rules discernible by the human mind. There are no such obvious rules; therefore, the universe must be an interplay of various minds battling with one another for supremacy.

  Pagan religious creation stories demonstrate colorfully how such beliefs manifest. The Mesopotamian creation story—which is similar to both Polynesian and Native American creation stories in a wide variety of ways—states that Apsu, god of the fresh water, was murdered, and that his wife, Tiamat, goddess of saltwater, threatened to destroy the other gods; Marduk murdered her and split her in half. One half of her became heaven; the other half became the earth.2 The plethora of gods were created to explain a world without rules. In that way, polytheism is more pessimistic and more cynical than Judeo-Christian monotheism.

  Finally, polytheism is rooted in a hardheaded belief in that which we can see. As former British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out, “The pagan perceives the divine in nature through the medium of the eye.”3 The simplest explanation for a multitude of objects is a multitude of creators. Or, more simply, God is nature, and nature God—a pantheistic notion that continues to resonate down until today in “spiritual but not religious” circles, as well as in many Eastern religions. The Mesopotamians worshipped literally thousands of gods, and built massive ziggurats that were supposed to provide an earthly abode for the gods. Idols were built for the gods to inhabit, and the gods were worshipped through service, including feeding them on a regular basis.4 The Egyptians had a different creation myth based in each major city, and a plethora of gods as well.

  Judaism denied all these central tenets of polytheism.

  Judaism claimed that God was now singular. The first of the Ten Commandments was simple and direct: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”5 God was the first and the last, the creator.

  Furthermore, Judaism claimed that God had rules—and that He abided by those rules. The universe wasn’t random; the rules were generally discoverable and largely understandable. The Bible isn’t a set of just-so stories designed to explain why the rain falls and the sun shines. Instead, the Bible lays forth, for the first time, an argument for the internal logic of the universe. God, according to the Bible, worked through a singular, unified system; nature operated according to a set of predictable rules from which God could stray if He so chose. In Genesis, for example, the patriarch Abraham asks God to abide by His own rules for right and wrong: when God says he wants to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham argues with God over right and wrong, and asks God whether collective punishment is appropriate if there are good people still living in the city. God answers him; God doesn’t merely ignore Abraham or silence him. Rather He engages with him. In a chaotic world with no master moral values, the story of Abraham would make no sense.

  Now, Judaism does not claim that we are capable of understanding all of God’s motives or actions. In Exodus, Moses specifically asks God to show him His face; God refuses, answering, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But . . . you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”6 This metaphor is God’s way of saying that we humans cannot completely understand God. In fact, as Genesis makes clear, the human notion of good and evil doesn’t mirror the Divine notions of good and evil. But God does have a standard, even if we can’t fully comprehend it. God does not randomly cha
nge His standard—“He is the Rock, his ways are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he.”7 The notion of a moral universe is a Judaic creation. It’s woven into the name of Israel itself: Yisrael, in Hebrew, means “struggle with God.” And God wants human beings to struggle with Him—so much so that He will refuse to intervene to correct human beings even if they are wrong. The Talmud famously retells this shocking incident:

  [During a debate about a matter of Jewish law] Rabbi Eliezer brought all possible proofs to support his opinion, but the rabbis did not accept his answer. . . . Finally, Rabbi Eliezer said, “If the law is in my favor, Heaven will prove it.” A Divine Voice then stated, “Why are you arguing with Rabbi Eliezer, as the law is in accordance with his opinion everywhere?” Rabbi Joshua stood and stated [quoting Deuteronomy 30:12], “It is not in heaven.” Rabbi Jeremiah said, “Since the Torah was already given at Mount Sinai, we do not listen to a Divine Voice, as You already wrote at Mount Sinai, in the Torah, to follow the majority.” [Exodus 23:2] Years later, Rabbi Nathan encountered Elijah the prophet and asked him, “What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do at the time of that debate?” Elijah answered, “He smiled and said, ‘My children have triumphed over Me; My children have triumphed over Me.’”8

  Finally, Judaism rebuked the notion of a corporeal god in ringing fashion. Judaism is antimaterialism; it specifically rejects the idea that what we can see is all there is, or that the spiritual must be made physically manifest. The Second Commandment bars Jews from making graven images. Jews are specifically enjoined to destroy idols.9 This isn’t nearly as tolerant as paganism, but it is also less human-bound, less sensory. It requires us to reach beyond that which our senses perceive. We must think beyond our physical limits—and we must recognize our own limited thinking, since any description of God is bound to be physical, and thus homonymic rather than literal. The notion of a Divine Being who reaches out to humanity with words, who runs the universe according to certain rules, and who stands beside us even if we can’t see Him—that places God within human reach, even if God will always lie just beyond us.

  GOD’S EXPECTATIONS FOR MAN

  Before the Bible, man was merely cosmic chattel, a speck being bruited about by the forces of the divine. The gods expected little of man beyond simple bribery; there was no linkage between what we would deem “moral” behavior and divine expectation. As Saggs states, “There were no doctrines in the sense of definitions of required belief, and accepted standards of conduct were not explicitly linked to religion.”10 The gods were arbitrary. They were unchained to rules. This meant that human behavior wasn’t tied to divine behavior.

  The Bible offered a different perspective. A singular God meant a singular standard for behavior. Consequences couldn’t merely be attributed to the interplay between the various self-interested gods; instead, consequences were life lessons, meant to teach us to be moral. Sin had consequences in the real world. Now, that didn’t mean that every sin would be punished with a prompt and proportional consequence—God doesn’t play whack-a-mole with human sin. But it did mean that following God’s commandments would usually lead to better life results than doing the opposite. Polytheism argued that the gods were holy, and thus human beings ought to serve them; Judaism argued that we ought to be holy in imitation of God.11

  Why, then, does the Bible focus so much on seemingly pagan sacrifices? Because Biblical sacrifices aren’t designed merely to appease a higher power. They’re designed to change us, to teach us something. Maimonides argues that sacrifices were originally designed to woo polytheists toward monotheism by repurposing an ingrained cultural ritual and directing it away from sheer appeasement and toward self-betterment. According to Maimonides, sacrifices are intended to remind us that we ought to pay for our sins ourselves, and that only the mercy of God allows us to escape that accountability.

  The Talmud openly acknowledges that we could use reason to learn certain character traits;12 Judaism suggests that we can in fact determine certain moral injunctions—even ignoramuses, Judaism believes, can determine that there is a God and that murder is wrong, for example.

  But such learning is incomplete, Judaism holds. Reason can teach us how not to be bad—how not to harm others, for example. The seven Noahide Laws that governed humanity before revelation are all designed to minimize human cruelty: bans on murder, theft, idolatry, sexual immorality, animal cruelty, cursing God, and the positive commandment to set up courts of law in order to punish crimes. And those Noahide Laws are incumbent on everyone, regardless of whether they even know about the Bible, specifically because they’re so perfectly obvious.

  But revelation teaches how to be good: it teaches us which values we ought to hold dear, which characteristics we ought to cultivate. Revelation is necessary to raise us beyond the realm of the mediocre.

  GOD: THE FORCE BEHIND PROGRESS

  History in many cultures has no beginning and no end. Greek thought saw the universe as permanent and moving in circular fashion—history would recur, grow, and decay. There could be no vision of a progression in history, an inexorable movement toward a better time or Messianic era.13 Progress itself was, for many of the ancients, an illusion, or not even that: it was an idea that had no place in the rational universe.

  That view of history isn’t unique to the Greeks. Ancient Babylonians believed that “past, present, and future were all part of one continuous stream of events in heaven and earth. . . . Gods and men continued ad infinitum.”14 In Native American cultures, reality itself was circular: “Sacred hoops and medicine wheels, in their seamless curvature, represent the cyclical, no-beginning, no-end, turn-and-turn-again, ‘mythic’ view of reality of Native American peoples.”15 Hinduism sees history as circular; Buddhism sees time as “without beginning and without end . . . the uniqueness of each moment essential to the notion of history is not clearly expressed in Buddhism.”16

  In this view, the gods are not interested in history; they may intervene, but only for their own purposes, and often in conflict with one another. In The Iliad, the gods routinely intervene to save their favorites, and even take sides in the war based on their own interests. But those interests are variable and unpredictable. The Trojan War takes on little historic importance—it generates no progress, nor do the gods ever evidence any intent to do so.

  The Bible takes a different view. The Bible immediately sets God in the context of a time-bound history: God exists outside of time, but He is intimately involved in creating progress. The Jewish creation story notes that God intervenes day by day to create new levels of complexity in the material world, and then He rests.

  When God intervenes in the world, it is to better the lot of mankind, or to teach lessons. God inserts Himself in history by preserving Noah and his family; He restrains himself from stopping history ever again by destroying His creatures, no matter their choices.17 God manifests Himself to Abraham to send the first monotheist on a journey to a place Abraham doesn’t know—and God then makes a covenant with Abraham to build him up into a great and mighty nation, connected with a particular parcel of land: Israel. God chooses Abraham. He chooses Isaac. He chooses Jacob. And then He chooses the people of Israel to act as exemplars of morality across history—to spread His word, with Moses as His prophet. “You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own,” God states in Leviticus 20:26.

  The story of history is the story of God’s romance with His chosen nation: His decision to take that nation out of slavery and bring it forth into freedom, and to use that nation as a vehicle for the transmission of His message. “Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?”18

  But the plot has twists and turns. The story of humanity is a story of the
romance between an honorable God and a straying nation—a nation that knows better, but must learn and relearn to love God once more, and a God who occasionally turns away His face but waits patiently for His people to return to Him.

  With each relearning comes progress, a movement toward that historical finish line. We are all part of the great drama of history. History gives us a place. It gives us a rationale. We may live as individuals, but we are part of the tapestry of time, and even if our thread comes to an inglorious end, God weaves with us.

  History, in short, can progress. It can progress because God cares about us as individuals, and because He is invested in our history. And the eventual culmination of history will come with the universal recognition of God and His handiwork, with the Jews as the treasured jewel shining forth light from Jerusalem. As historian Paul Johnson writes:

  No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny. At a very early stage in their collective existence they believed they had detected a divine scheme for the human race, of which their own society was to be a pilot. They worked out their role in immense detail. They clung to it with heroic persistence in the face of savage suffering. . . . The Jewish vision became the prototype for many similar grand designs for humanity, both divine and man-made. The Jews, therefore, stand right at the centre of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose.19

  THE MOST IMPORTANT VERSE IN HUMAN HISTORY

  Polytheism left little room for the individual to make his way in the world.

  This wasn’t true for rulers, who were ranked among the gods themselves. They had freedom of action, being made in the image of the gods. In ancient Egypt, beginning with the Fourth Dynasty (2613 BCE), Egyptian rulers were honored with the title “Son of Ra”—Ra being the foremost Egyptian god.20 In Mesopotamia, the tradition of kings declaring themselves divine began with Naram-Sin of Akkad in the twenty-third century BCE. Self-deification continued intermittently for centuries, all the way down to Augustus, who was declared a god upon his death in Rome in 14 CE.21 The spark of the divine invested in great leaders allowed them freedom of action. Hammurabi, for example, describes himself this way at the outset of his code: “When Marduk sent me to rule over men, to give the protection of right to the land, I did right and righteousness in . . . , and brought about the well-being of the oppressed.”22 Epic heroes of the ancient myths are identified with the gods; commoners never even appear in these narratives.