The Gifts of the Jews

by Thomas Cahill

  There is nothing neat about the Bible. As the record of one “family” over the course of two millennia—millennia that are now two to four millennia distant from us—the Bible harbors all the mess and contrariness of human life. It is possible, therefore, to interpret the sprawling data contained within its covers in many different ways. We can say, with certain feminist critics, that what we have here is a collection of old husbands’ tales, myths invented by a primitive patriarchy to glorify itself. But to say this we must ignore the later, personalist material, such as the Book of Ruth, and refuse to consider that the Bible is a kind of documentary record of the evolution of a sensibility, an evolution that began in the primeval worldview of Sumer. We can say that the Bible represents a revolution in which the original Earth goddess was supplanted by newly aggressive warrior males and their heavenly projections of themselves, but this hypothesis is itself a projection, a sort of feminist wish fulfillment without substantial confirmation in the archaeological record. Our best evidence suggests strongly that the aboriginal great god was always “in heaven”—that is, as completely Other as human imagination could make him—and that, because he acted on earthly life as the seed-giver, he was imagined as male.

  We can force the evidence, as Joseph Campbell did, and say that all religions are cyclical, mythical, and ahistorical—and just who do the Jews think they are, pretending that their religion is based on history and therefore unique? But this sort of argument is what logicians have always called “begging the question,” the logical fallacy that assumes as a given the very thing that must be proved. All religions are cyclical, mythical, and without reference to history as we have come to understand it—all religions except the Judeo-Christian stream in which Western consciousness took life.

  We can read the Bible (as do postmodernists) as a jumble of unrelated texts, given a false and superficial unity by redactors of the exilic period and later. But this is to ignore not only the powerful emotional and spiritual effect that much of the Bible has on readers, even on readers who would rather not be so moved, but also its cumulative impact on whole societies. The Bible’s great moments—the thunderous “lekhlekha” spoken to Avram, the secret Name of God revealed to cowering Moshe, Miryam’s song on the far shore, God’s Ten Words, David’s Good Shepherd, Isaiah’s Holy Mountain—are hard to brush aside as merely human expressions with no relationship to the deepest meanings of our own individual lives. Nor can we imagine the great liberation movements of modern history without reference to the Bible. Without the Bible we would never have known the abolitionist movement, the prison-reform movement, the antiwar movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the movements of indigenous and dispossessed peoples for their human rights, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, the Solidarity movement in Poland, the free-speech and pro-democracy movements in such Far Eastern countries as South Korea, the Philippines, and even China. These movements of modern times have all employed the language of the Bible; and it is even impossible to understand their great heroes and heroines—people like Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Mother Jones, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Helder Cámara, Oscar Romero, Rigoberta Menchú, Corazon Aquino, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Charity Kaluki Ngilu, Harry Wu—without recourse to the Bible.

  Beyond these movements, which have commonly taken the Book of Exodus as their blueprint, are other forces that have shaped our world, such as capitalism, communism, and democracy. Capitalism and communism are both bastard children of the Bible, for both are processive faiths, modeled on biblical faith and demanding of their adherents that they always hold in their hearts a belief in the future and keep before their eyes the vision of a better tomorrow, whether that tomorrow contains a larger gross domestic product or a workers’ paradise. Neither ideology could have risen in the cyclical East, in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, or Shinto. But because capitalism and communism are processive faiths without God, each is a form of madness—a fantasy without a guarantee. Democracy, in contrast, grows directly out of the Israelite vision of individuals, subjects of value because they are images of God, each with a unique and personal destiny. There is no way that it could ever have been “self-evident that all men are created equal” without the intervention of the Jews.

  If it is possible to read the Bible as a hodgepodge with only a superficial unity, it is also possible to read it as a tremendous literary whole. This is the tack taken so dazzlingly by Jack Miles in God: A Biography, in which God is seen as a developing literary character. In quite a different way, it is also the tack taken by biblical literalists, whether Jewish or Christian, who see the Bible as a kind of “handbook to life” that tells them everything they need to know. To me, at least, the most satisfying way to read the Bible is to see it as a collection of varied documents, each showing us the same revelation at different stages of development but capable of bringing us at last to a processive, personalist faith in a completely mysterious God. As Martin Buber pointed out so beautifully, it is in saying “Thou” to God that I can at last say “I” and it is in saying “I-Thou” that other “thou’s” become real.

  We are the undeserving recipients of this history of the Jews, this long, excessive, miraculous development of ethical monotheism without which our ideas of equality and personalism are unlikely ever to have come into being and surely would never have matured in the way that they have. This was the necessary evolution. But since it cannot be proven that God exists, it can hardly be shown that he spoke to Avraham, Moshe, or Isaiah. Each reader must decide if the Voice that spoke to the patriarchs and prophets speaks to him, too. If it does, there is no question of needing proof, any more than we require proof of anyone we believe in. For in the last analysis, one does not believe that God exists, as one believes that Timbuktu or the constellation Andromeda exists. One believes in God, as one believes in a friend—or one believes nothing. So, in the sense that this whole business depends on faith in God, each reader must be left to wrestle with his own, her own doubts and beliefs.

  But it can be demonstrated, as I hope I have done, that the belief system we have come to call Judaism is the origin of the processive worldview, the worldview to which all Western people subscribe, a worldview that has now taken hold in many (and, to some extent, all) non-Western societies. This “processive worldview” is regularly referred to in history, literature, philosophy, religion, and theology texts and regularly contrasted with its opposite, the “cyclical worldview,” but it is seldom explained; and an otherwise well-informed humanities or social sciences student may pass through an entire degree program without ever coming to understand the meaning of these terms and their radical consequences.

  In a cyclical world, there are neither beginnings nor ends. But for us, time had a beginning, whether it was the first words of God in the Book of Genesis, when “in the beginning God created heaven and earth,” or the Big Bang of modern science, a concept that would not have been possible without the Jews. Time, which had a beginning, must also have an end. What will it be? In the Torah we learn that God is working his purposes in history and will effect its end, but in the Prophets we learn that our choices will also affect this end, that our inner disposition toward our fellow human beings will make an enormous difference in the way this end appears to us.

  Unbelievers might wish to stop for a moment and consider how completely God—this Jewish God of justice and compassion—undergirds all our values and that it is just possible that human effort without this God is doomed to certain failure. Humanity’s most extravagant dreams are articulated by the Jewish prophets. In Isaiah’s vision, true faith is no longer confined to one nation, but “all the nations” stream to the House of YHWH “that he may teach us his ways” and that we may learn to “beat [our] swords into plowshares.” All who share this outrageous dream of universal brotherhood, peace, and justice, who dream the dreams and see the visions of the great prophets, must bring themselves to contemplate the possibility that without God there is no ju
stice.

  But those who claim to believe in God must contemplate a prospect no less unsettling. Throughout our Western world, though shaped by this Jewish matrix, the cry of the poor so often goes unheard. The prophets harangued Israel and Judah unceasingly about the powerless and marginalized, the overlooked widows, orphans, and “sojourners in our midst,” who are still with us today as single mothers, hungry children, arid helpless immigrants, wraiths invisible in our prosperous societies. Throughout the world, half of all children go to bed hungry each night and one in seven of God’s children is facing starvation. Before such statistics, believers should never forget Dostoevsky’s assertion that the suffering of children is the greatest proof against the existence of God; and we must ever contemplate the awful Day of YHWH, the coming destruction of our wealth and security, the razing even of the bastions of our faith, the Temple leveled and YHWH gone.

  For without justice, there is no God.

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  As in the first volume in this series, I would like to give the reader not an exhaustive bibliography of everything I consulted (which, given the vastness of studies on the Bible and the ancient Near East, would dangerously increase the size of this small book) but a sense of which studies I found most valuable. The passkey to all this literature is The Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York, 1992), of which I was the happy publisher but for the content of which I can claim no responsibility. Its six massive volumes, ranging to every subject imaginable, make it the philosophers’ stone of contemporary biblical studies. Whatever you don’t know, you can learn about here. Each of the major entries gives the reader a tour of all the modern scholarship on a particular subject, as well as a guide to the many migraine-inducing scholarly controversies and, most important, a complete bibliography.

  Though I cannot recommend the ABD too highly, it often gives the nonexpert far more than he wants, sometimes in impenetrable academese. Fortunately, a marvelous alternative is at hand—The Oxford Companion to the Bible, which, like all the Oxford Companions, gives the ordinary reader just what he needs to know without fuss and feathers. The Jerome Biblical Commentary, the work of a group of American Catholic scholars, is also highly regarded. Other excellent sources of information for the non-specialist are the back issues of Bible Review and Biblical Archaeology Review. Both publications are edited by the legendary Hershel Shanks, who performs the daunting service of encouraging scholars of renown to write in a popular vein.

  INTRODUCTION

  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).

  I: THE TEMPLE IN THE MOONLIGHT

  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).

  II: THE JOURNEY IN THE DARK

  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 “YHWH” 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 YHWH 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.