The Gifts of the Jews

by Thomas Cahill

  Meanwhile, back on Mount Sinai, Moshe, who now has the Ten Words in written form—“the two tablets of Testimony”3—is told by God that

  “your people

  whom you brought up from the land of Egypt

  has wrought ruin!”

  The Covenant has already been broken—as it were, minutes after it was made. The people are no longer God’s but Moshe’s. God calls them “stiff-necked” (in King James; “hard-necked” in Fox, like the hard-hearted Pharaoh), and he asks Moshe’s leave to destroy them. He will use Moshe alone to “make into a great nation,” as he used Noah after the Flood.

  For the first time (but hardly for the last) God’s chosen representative argues with him:

  “For-what-reason,

  O YHWH,

  should your anger flare out against your people

  whom you brought out of the land of Egypt

  with great power,

  with a strong hand?

  For-what-reason should the Egyptians (be able to) say, yes, say:

  ‘With evil intent he brought them out,

  to kill them in the mountains,

  to destroy them from the face of the soil’?

  Turn away from your flaming anger,

  be sorry for the evil (intended) against your people!

  Recall Avraham, Yitzhak and Yisrael your servants,

  to whom you swore by yourself

  when you spoke to them:

  ‘I will make your seed many

  as the stars of the heavens,

  and all this land which I have promised,

  I will give to your seed,

  that they may inherit (it) for the ages!’ ”

  And YHWH let himself be sorry concerning the evil

  that he had spoken of doing to his people.

  Well, the truth is that YHWH is something of a bull—and he shouldn’t be so surprised that the people have decided to picture him thus. It is obvious that at this period—a period in which this odd little phyla of Semites is ever so gradually evolving from polytheists to monotheists—they are attributing to their favorite God the qualities of other principal Middle Eastern deities: he is a storm god, who appears in heavenly fire and fog and whose angers, like his thunderbolts, are sudden and destructive, fulminating and volcanic (like Vulcan, fire god of the Romans). As we shall see, these depictions of divine wrath will eventually give way to a purer understanding of God, but at this moment we have a snapshot of monotheism in its tadpole stage.

  It should also be noted that God’s portrayal of the Israelites as “stiff-necked” will one day serve as the dominant note in Christian caricatures of Jews. It will be Shylock’s “stiff-necked” and literalist adherence to an outmoded morality of revenge that will enable Shakespeare to cast him in so unfavorable a light. The assumption will be that Jews, because of their moral vision of an unforgiving God, do not forgive but always insist on their “pound of flesh.” It is this supposedly “Jewish” quality that will serve as a fundamental justification for the anti-Jewish attitudes that so infected the Middle Ages—right up to the late modern period, when new theories of racial inferiority made it possible for medieval anti-Hebraism (which was basically a kind of character assassination) to be replaced by the more horrifyingly effective weapon of “scientific” anti-Semitism.

  What is ghoulishly fascinating about the history of Christian depictions of Jews (even as early as the fourth century A.D. in the elegantly vicious sermons of John Chrysostom) is that the people being excoriated are presumed to exhibit the unyielding qualities of God himself—the same God whom Christians claimed to worship and whose sacred scriptures they revered. A good case can be made that medieval anti-Hebraism and its modern offspring anti-Semitism are both forms of God-hatred, masquerading as self-justifying intolerance. The hatred of Christians for Jews may have its ultimate source in hatred of God, a hatred that the hater must carefully keep himself from knowing about. Why would one hate God? To find the answer we probably need look no further than the stark, unyielding Ten.

  Following hard on the revelation of the Ten come interminable series of prescriptions which fill most of the rest of the Torah4 and are understood to this day by observant Jews as the heart of the Torah. They did not issue from Sinai, though the final compilers (in the fifth century B.C., six centuries after the desert theophany) would have us believe so. They have been shoehorned in, gracelessly interrupting the narrative with insertions meant to govern the activities of a people long settled on their land, not the wanderers of Sinai. And their language is the language of lawyers and priests, not storytellers. One prescription, called lex talionis, the law of retaliation (“eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot”), has often been used to demonstrate the harshness of “Old” Testament morality and its commonality with the laws of Sumer—and, in fact, the lex talionis appears in the Code of Hammurabi, many centuries before its repetition here.

  It is true that one finds in the Torah many laws that can only make us wince: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” has been used repeatedly in Western history to get rid of inconvenient old women, as at Salem, Massachusetts; and the commands in Leviticus to execute homosexuals and burn alive both the perpetrator of incest and his victims are unlikely to commend themselves to modern ears. But it is also true that this long-winded, unwieldy compilation of assorted prescriptions represents an overall softening—a humanizing—of the common law of the ancient Middle East, which easily prescribed a hand not for a hand but for the theft of a loaf of bread or for the striking of one’s better and which gave much favor to the rights of the nobility and virtually none to the lower classes. The casual cruelty of other ancient law codes—the cutting off of nose, ears, tongue, lower lip (for kissing another man’s wife), breasts, and testicles—is seldom matched in the Torah. Rather, in the prescriptions of Jewish law we cannot but note a presumption that all people, even slaves, are human and that all human lives are sacred. The constant bias is in favor not of the powerful and their possessions but of the powerless and their poverty; and there is even a frequent enjoinder to sympathy:

  “A sojourner you are not to oppress:

  you yourselves know (well) the feelings of the sojourner,

  for sojourners were you in the land of Egypt.”

  This bias toward the underdog is unique not only in ancient law but in the whole history of law. However faint our sense of justice may be, insofar as it operates at all it is still a Jewish sense of justice.

  The link between the mainstream traditions of the Western world and the traditions of the Jews shows itself at its weakest when we consider the many prescriptions in the Torah that will come to serve as the basis for halakha, the body of Jewish prescriptive law that is meant to govern every aspect of life and that has grown to enormous proportions from the late classical period to the present. A single sentence in Exodus, for instance—“You are not to boil a kid in the milk of its mother,” probably a proscription against cruelty—will become the basis for a large portion of Jewish dietary laws about keeping all meat and fowl separate from all milk and milk-based foods, even to the complication of maintaining two sets of dishes and kitchen implements. Such laws, elaborated from the prescriptions of the Torah, then expanded in the Mishna, the early rabbinic law code of the late second century of our era, then interpreted further in the Talmuds of the early medieval period and reinterpreted further in (often obscurantist) rabbinic commentaries down to our day, have never gained much influence beyond the relatively small circles of observant Jews, never entered the mainstream of Western consciousness and ideas—so they are largely beyond the purview of this book. The endless legal refinements made down the centuries by the rabbis have given the word talmudic the connotation of “differentiating to the point of absurdity.” They have also set Jew against Jew, so that we hear even in our day the invidious charge of the super-Orthodox that more flexible forms of Judaism aren’t Judaism.

  But, even at their most hairsplittingly bizarre, th
ese laws remain testimony to the fact that the Jews were the first people to develop an integrated view of life and its obligations. Rather than imagining the demands of law and the demands of wisdom as discrete realms (as did the Sumerians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks), they imagined that all of life, having come from the Author of life, was to be governed by a single outlook. The material and the spiritual, the intellectual and the moral were one:

  Hearken O Israel:

  YHWH our God, YHWH (is) One!

  The great formula is not that there is one God but that “God is One.” From this insight will flow not only the integrating and universalist propensities of Western philosophy but even the possibility of modern science. For life is not a series of discrete experiences, influenced by diverse forces. We do not live in a fragmented universe, controlled by fickle and warring gods. As Bob Dylan sings:

  Ring them bells, sweet Martha,

  for the poor man’s son.

  Ring them bells so the world will know

  that God is one.

  God and “the poor man’s son” belong together. Because God is One, life is a moral continuum—and reality makes sense.

  Bloodshed follows the orgy of betrayal. Moshe descends from the Mountain, the two tablets of the Ten Words in his hands, hears “the sound of choral-song”—the antiphonal chanting characteristic of ancient liturgy—and sees “the calf and the dancing,” at which

  Moshe’s anger flared up,

  he threw the tablets from his hands

  and smashed them beneath the mountain.

  The Covenant is now literally broken. Moshe melts down the idol and grinds it to powder, which he mixes with water, and forces the Children of Israel to drink the vile mixture. Then, rounding on Aharon, he almost beseeches him to exonerate himself, which Aharon manages dextrously:

  “Let not my lord’s anger flare up!

  You yourself know this people, how set-on-evil it is.

  They said to me: ‘Make us a god who will go before us,

  for Moshe, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt,

  we do not know what has become of him!’

  So I said to them: ‘Who has gold?’

  They broke it off and gave it to me,

  I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.”

  Now when Moshe saw the people: that it had gotten-loose,

  for Aharon had let-it-loose for whispering among their foes,

  Moshe took-up-a-stand at the gate of the camp

  and said:

  “Whoever is for YHWH—to me!

  Thus says YHWH, the God of Israel:

  ‘Put every-man his sword on his thigh,

  proceed and go back-and-forth from gate to gate in the camp,

  and kill

  every-man his brother, every-man his neighbor, every-man his relative!’ ”

  The Sons of Levi did according to Moshe’s words.

  And there fell of the people on that day some three thousand men.

  Is there a way to understand this passage about a God who has hardly finished issuing an absolute command against murder when he delivers the command for a general slaughter? Moshe was leader of a primitive desert tribe, set on open rebellion. There were no courts to appeal to, no law besides the word of YHWH and Moshe’s resolve to enforce it. Had he not allied himself with the sword-wielding sons of Levi, the Exodus story might have ended right here. There are also in this episode hints of later factionalism—of the northern Levitical priests in competition with the Aharonid priesthood, which would come to control the Jerusalem Temple in the south—a rivalry that is retrojected into this narrative. But the slaughter oppresses the reader’s spirit. We can tell ourselves as often as we like that this was a primitive people who needed to be dealt with harshly or that the episode can be explained by later social tensions. We still need to understand why God is enshrined in this narrative as demanding slaughter. There may be no answer, except the answer of Augustine of Hippo: “We are talking about God. Which wonder do you think you understand? If you understand, it is not God.”

  But there are many mysteries in the text of Exodus that do not demand a resort to mystagogy—mysteries that are basically textual. Moshe’s ascents and descents are hard to keep track of; and it is his disappearance into the smoke on the Mountain’s summit for forty days that makes the Israelites desperate and provokes their backsliding. Puzzling (even sometimes exasperating) to a modern reader are the interruptions of the narrative by lengthy later insertions—elaborations of the original Ten; rules for farmers and herders; detailed rubrics for building an ark (or portable cabinet) that will enclose the tablets (Moshe eventually ends up with a second set) and for the “tent of meeting” that will serve as shelter for the ark when Israel is encamped.

  Despite the thinning of their numbers, the Children of Israel do not improve. They lose heart at the least reversal, their complaints are never-ending, their quickness to revolt a constant threat to the whole enterprise. After putting up with their yammering for a couple of years, God decides to make them wander the Sinai for a full forty years before settlement in Canaan, in this way ensuring that the whole generation of Egyptian-bred complainers will die out and be replaced by a more rugged generation, hardened by wilderness trials—born nomads who expect always to journey on, rather than displaced city mice longing for the remembered fleshpots.

  One of the most remarkable features of the Torah narrative—and a feature evidenced in no other ancient literature—is a hypersensitivity to the decisive influence of environment and its ability to shape both conscience and consciousness. Neither Sumer nor Egypt is ever described; from the Bible alone we would know virtually nothing of the first, and of the second mainly that its king was a fool who thought he could withstand the Real God. Any good museum of art can give us a better sense of these ancient societies than does the Bible, which actually sprang from these lush cultural sources. We can walk through an exhibition, admiring the golden statues of the pharaohs and the winged gods of Babylon without the least inclination to incline the head or bow the knee. But the Bible is a believer’s history, not a history of art or culture, and one that was all too close to the temptations of Egypt’s fleshpots and Sumer’s hieratic cruelties. Its authors felt no need to indulge in literary descriptions of civilized luxury, for cult and culture were so wedded in the ancient world that any appreciation of the cultural values of Egypt or Sumer (and, later, Babylon) could only tempt weak and wayward Israelites from the difficult way of the living God to the easy worship of the Golden Calf.

  It is no accident, therefore, that the great revelations of God’s own Name and of his Commandments occur in a mountainous desert, as far from civilization and its contents as possible, in a place as unlike the lush predictabilities and comforts of the Nile and the Euphrates as this earth of ours can offer. If God—the Real God, the One God—was to speak to human beings and if there was any possibility of their hearing him, it could happen only in a place stripped of all cultural reference points, where even nature (which was so imbued with contrary, god-inhabited forces) seemed absent. Only amid inhuman rock and dust could this fallible collection of human beings imagine becoming human in a new way. Only under a sun without pity, on a mountain devoid of life, could the living God break through the cultural filters that normally protect us from him. “YHWH, YHWH,” he thunders at Moshe, the man alone on the Mountain:

  “God,

  showing-mercy, showing-favor,

  long-suffering in anger,

  abundant in loyalty and faithfulness,

  keeping loyalty to the thousandth (generation),

  bearing iniquity, rebellion and sin,

  yet not clearing, clearing (the guilty),

  calling-to-account the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons and upon sons’ sons, to the third and fourth (generation)!”

  This is God’s self-description, the one he would have us remember. He is the God of mercy and forgiveness, the God who never deserts his people, faithful to
the end, patient with all our failings however dismaying, but reminding us that a household—a familial environment, holding three (or sometimes four) generations—cannot escape the sins of the oldest generation; they necessarily infect the atmosphere.

  Moshe, the medium for this revelation, is both God’s representative and the people’s. To God he speaks on the people’s behalf, to the people on God’s behalf. His is a far more difficult calling than that of Avraham, who was almost a Sumerian Odysseus—a man with a mission, all right, but a wily character who seemed up to any challenge. Moshe is a man who does not think highly of himself, who never relies on his own talents, only on God’s word. He was, as Exodus says of him, “the humblest man on earth,” an extraordinary description in a world of boastful heroes. In his humility he has been hollowed out like a reed, so that there is nothing in him—no pride or quirk of personality—to distort God’s message. He can serve, therefore, as an authentic medium, a true channel.