The Gifts of the Jews

by Thomas Cahill

  THE EVOLUTION OF WRITING

  (1) The pictograph in the top row originally represents “star” but also comes to designate “god.” (2) The cleft triangle (which had an even more ancient antecedent, the lozenge or diamond shape) stands for the female genitals but also comes to designate “woman.” (3) Mountains. (4) “Mountain woman,” that is, a Semitic slave girl.

  Pictured above (from left to right) is the evolution of each sign from an original pictograph into a more easily incised symbol, shaped by the strokes of a small wedge-shaped stylus—thus cuneiform (or wedge-shaped) writing.

  In examining these correspondences that primitive man found so obvious, we post-Aristotelians are more likely to be struck by their illogic than by their appositeness. To see with the eyes of primitive society, we must abandon both our logic and our science. “The point,” writes Eliade, “of all these analogies is first of all to unite man with the rhythms and energies of the cosmos, and then to unify the rhythms”—as in the sacred copulation rite—“fuse the centers and finally effect a leap into the transcendent,” what Eliade calls the “primal unity.” The underlying purpose of primitive theology was no different from that of any other human attempt to reach the truth: these people, our distant ancestors, were looking for knowledge that was effective, that could help them achieve prosperity, progeny, and the only immortality available to human beings—assurance that their seed would not die with them. And for the more mystical among them, there was the belief that this knowledge could put them in touch with something beyond themselves. Every rite has its irrational, mystical center, its acme of consecration, its moment out of time; and whether it is the transformation of the bread and wine at Mass, the whirling of the dervish, or the orgasm of Sumer, its purpose is ecstatic union, however fleeting, with transcendent reality, with the ultimate, with what is beyond mutability. For the ancients, such reality was beyond earth, beyond even the moon, beyond all becoming. “Supra lunam sunt aeterna omnia,” wrote Cicero, echoing a most ancient Mediterranean belief in absolutes: “Beyond the moon are all the eternal things.”

  A century or two after the beginning of the second millennium B.C., a family of Ur found wanting this static worldview of heavenly absolutes and earthly corruption. They were Terah’s family, as we read in Genesis, the first book of the Bible:

  Now these are the begettings of Terah:

  Terah begot Avram,1 Nahor and Haran;

  and Haran begot Lot.

  Haran died in the living-presence of Terah his father in the land of his kindred, in Ur of the Chaldeans.

  Avram and Nahor took themselves wives;

  The name of Avram’s wife was Sarai,

  The name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah—daughter of Haran, father of Milcah and father of Yisca.

  Now Sarai was barren, she had no child.

  Terah took Avram his son and Lot son of Haran, his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, wife of Avram his son,

  They set out together from Ur of the Chaldeans, to go to the land of Canaan.

  But when they had come as far as Harran, they settled there.

  And the days of Terah were five years and two hundred years,

  then Terah died,

  in Harran.

  At first glance, this may strike the reader as an unimpressive narrative that, in its plainness and peculiarity (Terah, whoever he was, did not live for more than two centuries), has certain affinities with the narratives of Sumer, if none of their mythological dash. But there are surprising dissimilarities: the careful preserving of the names and lineages of ancient characters—even of women—who were neither gods nor kings; and the importance placed on what appear at least to be exacting genealogical records.

  Terah’s was a family of Semites, long settled at Ur, now “the land of his kindred.” His ancestors, hundreds of years earlier, had been part of the movement of wandering Semitic tribes that had overwhelmed the power of Sumer and been subsequently absorbed by its superior urban culture. The lines quoted here, a translation from the Semitic tongue called Hebrew, are found in Genesis just after the stories of human beginnings—from the Creation to the Flood. But unlike the stories that precede it, this chronicle of Terah’s family sounds not like a fairy tale but like an attempt at real historical narrative; and though, in this written form, it is probably less than three thousand years old, it is the product of an oral tradition that takes us back almost four thousand years, close to the beginning of the second millennium B.C., to the period of Babylonian Sumer’s Golden Age under the aegis of Hammurabi, the world’s first emperor.

  We cannot be sure what these citizens of Ur had in mind when they set out. Probably not much. They traveled northwest along the Euphrates from Ur to Harran, a city also dedicated to the moon, a sister city of Ur and very like it in outlook—San Francisco to Ur’s New York. So their first attempt at relocation may have been only to improve their prospects, and there is some reason to believe that they meant to settle permanently in Harran. For Avram, however, Harran was to be but a stage. What is odd about this passage is the assumption that the family’s ultimate destination is to be “the land of Canaan,” a hinterland of the Semitic tribes, who (at least in Sumerian caricature) ate their meat raw and didn’t even know how to bury their dead. No one whose family was established at Ur would have thought to leave it except for a similar city. So what we may be witnessing here is a migration in the wrong direction, a regression to simpler roots from which the urbanized Semites who had settled in Sumer had been cut off for centuries. But this peculiar migration would change the face of the earth by permanently changing the minds and hearts of human beings.

  In Harran, Terah and his family struck it rich; and it was almost certainly in Harran that a voice spoke to Avram and said:

  “Go-you-forth

  from your land,

  from your kindred,

  from your father’s house,

  to the land that I will let you see.

  I will make a great nation of you

  and will give-you-blessing

  and will make your name great.

  Be a blessing!

  I will bless those who bless you,

  he who curses you, I will damn.

  All the clans of the soil will find blessing through you!”

  So, comments the anonymous narrator, “Avram went.” And with him went Lot, Sarai, “all their gain they had gained and the souls they had made in Harran,” that is, two extended households on the move once more. But in addition to their family members and chattel, they took their Sumerian outlook. However much of a discontinuity with the past this journey would come to represent, Avram, Sarai, and Lot, their families and slaves were people of Sumer and could no more escape the mind-set of their culture than we can escape ours. Something new is happening here; but it is happening as all things new must happen—in the midst of the old, usual, ordinary reality of what was then daily life. “Nova ex veteris,” runs the old Latin paradox. “The new must be born out of the old.”

  For one thing, this family obviously adhered to Sumerian notions of the importance of business; otherwise it would hardly have occurred to the laconic narrator to mention “all their gain they had gained”—all the wealth they had accumulated during their stay in Harran. We know some of the ideas they brought with them—we can almost X-ray their mental baggage—for we can trace Sumerian religious notions in the earliest writings of the descendants of Avram. The voice that spoke to Avram was his patronal god; and in Avram’s mind he may not have been, to begin with, much different from Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh’s patronal god, whose statue Gilgamesh anointed for good luck. There were many gods, but each human being had a guardian spirit—an ancestor or angel—charged with taking special care of him. These little gods, represented by amulets and portable statues, were, like all the gods, essentially familial—gods of the person, the family, the city, the tribe—and were jealous and contentious, like all family members. Even if in a particular situation they were not responsible for
evil (though sometimes they were), in many situations they were powerless to counter evil—and, in any case, human beings were full of evil. “Man behaves badly,” pronounces Ut-napishtim sagely. “Never has a sinless child been born,” warns a favorite Sumerian proverb. The way to success was to satisfy the duties of one’s cult, whatever those might be—which is why Sumerian temples were described with such precision and liturgies (including orgies and sacred couplings) enacted with such attention. It was by just such attention to cultic detail that Ut-napishtim had been found just; and such acts of piety were a Sumerian’s only insurance against the ill will of the gods.

  We have already seen in the Epic of Gilgamesh some of the many mythological elements that would find their echo in the Bible. (The Gilgamesh story was so powerful that it would also influence the Greek stories that Homer would collect into the Odyssey as well as the Arabian Nights of medieval Islam.) As late as the sixth century B.C., in the Jerusalem temple itself, Israelite women would sit and weep for the god Dumuzi (Tammuz in the Bible), which the prophet Ezekiel notes with loathing. (The myth of the dying god casts so long a shadow that even today Tammuz is the name for a month in the Jewish calendar.) The family of Terah no doubt took with them on their journey the stories of Sumer about the long-lived ancients and the ill-tempered gods—such as the story about the jealous goddess Ishtar, who had a sacred “tree of life,” guarded by a serpent, and the story about the ancestral figure whose unique piety enabled him to save a remnant of life in the great flood. And as the family of Terah looked back over their shoulders to the eastern horizon, the last thing they saw of Sumer was the ziggurat of Harran, that bold Sumerian attempt to scale the heavens that would one day become the fabulous, foolish Tower of Babel in Genesis.

  But it is also true that, however “Sumerian” this expedition into the wilderness may have looked to the casual observer, its leader carried with him a brand-new idea. We know Avram was heading to Canaan, but did he? It is certain that the mention of Canaan in the summary account of the begettings and travels of Terah and his family is by way of overview and does not necessarily indicate that this destination was actually known to Avram when he started out. There is no reason to think that Avram knew where he was going or anything more than what his god had told him—that he was to “go forth” (the Hebrew imperative “lekhlekha” has an insistent immediacy that English cannot duplicate) on a journey of no return to “the land that I will” show you, that this god would somehow make of this childless man “a great nation,” and that all humanity would eventually find blessing through him.

  So, “wayyelekh Avram” (“Avram went”)—two of the boldest words in all literature. They signal a complete departure from everything that has gone before in the long evolution of culture and sensibility. Out of Sumer, civilized repository of the predictable, comes a man who does not know where he is going but goes forth into the unknown wilderness under the prompting of his god. Out of Mesopotamia, home of canny, self-serving merchants who use their gods to ensure prosperity and favor, comes a wealthy caravan with no material goal. Out of ancient humanity, which from the dim beginnings of its consciousness has read its eternal verities in the stars, comes a party traveling by no known compass. Out of the human race, which knows in its bones that all its striving must end in death, comes a leader who says he has been given an impossible promise. Out of mortal imagination comes a dream of something new, something better, something yet to happen, something—in the future.

  If we had lived in the second millennium B.C., the millennium of Avram, and could have canvassed all the nations of the earth, what would they have said of Avram’s journey? In most of Africa and Europe, where prehistoric animism was the norm and artists were still carving and painting on stone the heavenly symbols of the Great Wheel of Life and Death, they would have laughed at Avram’s madness and pointed to the heavens, where the life of earth had been plotted from all eternity. His wife is barren as winter, they would say; a man cannot escape his fate. The Egyptians would have shaken their heads in disbelief. “There is none born wise,” they would say, repeating the advice of their most cherished wise men. “Copy the forefathers. Teach him what has been said in the past; then he will set a good example.” The early Greeks might have told Avram the story of Prometheus, whose quest for the fire of the gods ended in personal disaster. Do not overreach, they would advise; come to resignation. In India, he would be told that time is black, irrational, and merciless. Do not set yourself the task of accomplishing something in time, which is only the dominion of suffering. In China, the now anonymous sages whose thoughts would eventually influence the I Ching would caution that there is no purpose in journeys or in any kind of earthly striving; the great thing is to abolish time by escaping from the law of change. The ancestors of the Maya in America would point to their circular calendars, which like those of the Chinese repeat the pattern of years in unvarying succession, and would explain that everything that has been comes around again and that each man’s fate is fixed. On every continent, in every society, Avram would have been given the same advice that wise men as diverse as Heraclitus, Lao-Tsu, and Siddhartha would one day give their followers: do not journey but sit; compose yourself by the river of life, meditate on its ceaseless and meaningless flow—on all that is past or passing or to come—until you have absorbed the pattern and have come to peace with the Great Wheel and with your own death and the death of all things in the corruptible sphere.

  ______

  On reaching Canaan, Avram “passed through the land, as far as the Place of Shekhem”—which would become for Avram’s descendants a sacred space, for Avram “built a slaughter-site there,” a small altar by an oak tree where he could offer animal sacrifices to his god. And here at this resting place, the god for the first time identifies this land as the land of the promise: “I give this land to your seed!” “This land”—the identification is fuzzy; there are no demarcations as yet. But from now on each time the god speaks to Avram over the course of many years, the original promise will gain in concreteness. All the same, during these many years Avram and his people, these sophisticated urbanites, will continue to live without fixed abode or title to any land, will continue to be “sojourners”—which is how they will describe themselves. We may begin to suspect that this benighted troupe of wanderers has been taken in by the force of Avram’s personality and that Avram has been sent on a wild goose chase at the prompting of his own disordered brain.

  For all that, Avram exhibits a sly resourcefulness that we seldom associate with madmen. When famine strikes Canaan, Avram heads for Egypt—“to sojourn there.” But in this even more alien territory, where he must guard not against primitive tribes but against a god-king whom no one can gainsay, Avram hatches a scheme, saying to Sarai his wife:

  “Now here, I know well that you are a woman fair to look at. [One can imagine Sarai enjoying this compliment and then her face falling as—]

  It will be, when the Egyptians see you and say: ‘She is his wife,’

  that they will kill me, but you they will allow to live.

  Pray say that you are my sister

  so that it may go well with me on your account, that I myself may give thanks to you.”

  Sure enough, Pharaoh sticks Sarai in his harem, her “brother” Avram receiving in return “sheep and oxen, donkeys, servants and maids, she-asses and camels.”2 We are never told whether Pharaoh gets around to violating Sarai, nor does the text give any clue to Sarai’s feelings in the matter. But we are told that Avram’s god “plagued Pharaoh with great plagues” and that somehow Pharaoh learns the cause. Avram is brought before the Egyptian king, who utters a memorable “Ma-zot?!” (“What’s this?!”), an almost comic exclamation of frustration often heard in modern Israel. Then, in a turn of phrase not far removed from an old vaudeville routine, Pharaoh sputters:

  “Why did you not tell me that she is your wife?

  Why did you say: ‘She is my sister?’

  So I took her for myse
lf as a wife.

  But now, here is your wife, take her and go!”

  Off goes Avram, brought as quickly as possible to the Egyptian border by Pharaoh’s bouncers, “who escorted him and his wife and all that was his.” These being the last words of this episode, the narrator, who is getting a big kick out of recording the little farce, wants us to know that Avram has not only saved his neck but greatly increased his wealth. Then, just in case we’ve missed the point, he adds at the beginning of the next episode that “Avram traveled up from Egypt” and “was exceedingly heavily laden with livestock, with silver, and with gold.” In the Egyptian anecdote Sarai has served only as a pawn whose feelings are of no account: the point is the nomadic progenitor’s cleverness at the expense of the Egyptian big wig.

  How did powerless Avram, nomadic sojourner in the wilderness of Canaan, ever come in contact with mighty Pharaoh, stationary god-king of Egypt? Almost on the heels of the Egyptian anecdote comes a strangely worded episode that gives us the answer. The famine has passed, and Avram’s nephew Lot is now settled in Sodom, one of the “cities of the plain” that may have stood in what is today the southern basin of the Dead Sea. But Avram, refusing city life, has pitched his tent on the west side of the Jordan “by the Oaks of Mamre.” Word reaches Avram that Lot has been taken prisoner in the course of a war between two leagues of kings, one of Canaanites, the other of Sumerians:

  One who escaped came and told Avram the Hebrew—

  he was dwelling by the Oaks of Mamre the Amorite, brother of Eshcol and brother of Aner,