From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  From time to time the people rebel against this devastating logic. After the capture of Jerusalem by Babylon, Judean refugees in Egypt, suddenly freed from the Levitical yoke, decide to worship Ishtar, the “Queen of Heaven,” saying that it was perhaps for having neglected her that their country had been ravaged. This provokes the wrath of Jeremiah, who, in the name of Yahweh, threatens them with extermination (Jeremiah 44). Likewise, doubts gnaw at some communities after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE, as evidenced by the Jewish literature of this period: “The world which was made on account of us abides; but we, on account of whom it was made, vanish,” some complain in The Apocalypse of Baruch (14:19). Or: “If, as you say, you created the world for us, why do not we have what is ours?” (IV Ezra 6:59). Many Jews of Alexandria, Ephesus, and Rome rushed through the exit door offered by Christianity.

  The history of the Jews, of course, cannot be reduced to a struggle between the elites and the people; the people are divided, sometimes to the point of civil war, while the elite is ever-changing and subject to rivalries. Nonetheless, the tension between an elite legislating forever in the name of God, and a refractory people, is the fundamental dialectic tension in Jewish history because it is the heart of Jewish collective memory preserved in the Bible. It is inscribed in Jewishness, and internalized by the Jewish community to this day. Every Jew is constantly pressed to identify with the ruling elites, yet resists these elites to some extent. Since biblical times, common sense often prevails among the Jews known as “assimilationists”—the internal enemies of Yahwism. But the mobilizing power of the Yahwist ideology tirelessly triumphs, and with each disaster or threat of disaster, the people lets itself be convinced en masse to retreat into its mental fortress. The few dissenting voices are stigmatized as emanating from Jews contaminated by “self-hatred.”

  Endogamy and Monotheism

  When two peoples become neighbors, they face a choice between war and marriage. In the ancient world, marriage required the mutual adoption of each other’s gods, or at least their cohabitation in the same household. To marry a woman of another people not only binds one to her relatives, but to her gods as well. This does not pose a problem to the extent that the gods are social beings who tolerate each other. But the god of the Hebrews is a jealous god, who tolerates no other. Yahweh therefore always imposes the choice of war. The command of strict endogamy is justified in the Bible by strict monotheism, and foreign women are held primarily responsible for the apostasy of their husbands; worse, they transmit their gods and religious rites to their children. At the first conquest of Canaan, it was forbidden to marry one’s children to the natives, “for your son would be seduced from following me into serving other gods; the wrath of Yahweh would blaze out against you and he would instantly destroy you” (Deuteronomy 7:3–4). To prevent religious contagion, Moses orders, in the name of Yahweh, the extermination of all living beings without distinction in certain conquered towns “so that they may not teach you to do all the detestable things which they do to honor their gods” (20:18). Similarly, during the return from the Exile, on learning that the “survivors” had resorted to the abomination of mixed marriages, and that “the holy race has been contaminated by the people of the country,” Ezra makes them promise to “send away all the foreign wives and their children” (Ezra 9:2; 10:3).

  Since the alliance between Yahweh and his chosen people is comparable to a marriage, mixed marriages and foreign cults are both considered forms of adultery or prostitution. To worship other gods is like having sex with a foreigner. To dramatize this idea, the prophet Hosea marries a prostitute, “as Yahweh loves the Israelites although they turn to other gods” (Hosea 3:1). Conversely, as Niels Lemche writes, “Intermingling with foreign women means playing with foreign gods, which is the same as breaking the covenant relationship.”71 Keeping the blood pure of any foreign influence is the core of the covenant with Yahweh. When some Hebrews take wives from Moab, it is described, in biblical terms, as: “The people gave themselves over to prostitution with Moabite women. These invited them to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down before their gods” (Numbers 25:1–2). Moses/Yahweh orders the impalement of the chiefs of the guilty tribes, then the extermination of all Midianites, with the exception of “young girls who have never slept with a man, and keep them for yourselves” (31:18). For the prohibition of intermarriage does not apply to rape and sexual slavery; the well-known principle that Jewishness is transmitted by the mother was originally prescribed to keep the bastards of these unions from polluting the community.

  For a king to marry a foreign princess is a political act that seals an alliance between the kingdoms. Even this is condemned by Yahwists scribes, although in the case of Solomon, the sentence is ambiguous since the seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines attributed to this fictional king, which make him the world champion in all categories, are a sign of his vast influence. However, his foreign wives, “who offered incense and sacrifice to their gods” (1 Kings 11:8), were held responsible for the decline of Solomon and his kingdom when he was old. “His wives swayed his heart to other gods” (11:4), including “Astarte the goddess of the Sidonians, Chemosh the god of Moab, Milcom the god of the Ammonites” (11:33). Similarly, the king of Israel, Ahab son of Omri, is the most despised of the northern kings because he took to wife Jezebel, a Phoenician princess and worshiper of Baal. Under her influence, Ahab “proceeded to serve Baal and worship him. He erected an altar to him in the temple of Baal which he built in Samaria. Ahab also put up a sacred pole [an Ashera] and committed other crimes as well, provoking the anger of Yahweh, god of Israel, more than all the kings of Israel his predecessors” (1 Kings 16:31–33).

  The command of endogamy is so highly valued in the Bible that it even trumps the prohibition of incest as understood by most cultures. Abraham marries his half-sister Sarah, his father’s daughter (and prefers her son to that of his concubine). This allows him, when he goes to Egypt, to pretend that his wife is his sister, so the Pharaoh can requisition her as a concubine, offering Abraham in exchange “flocks, oxen, donkeys, men and women slaves, she-donkeys and camels” (Genesis 12:16). Abraham renews the strategy in the land of Negev. When the king Abimelech learns the truth and confronts Abraham, who responds: “Anyway, she really is my sister, my father’s daughter though not my mother’s, besides being my wife.” Then Abimelech gave back to Abraham his wife, together with “sheep, cattle, men and women slaves” (20:12–14).

  This second narrative suffers from improbability insofar as Sara is already old. It is actually a duplicate of the same story told later about Isaac, whose young wife Rebecca was coveted by the same Abimelech, thinking she was Isaac’s sister. Seeing through a window “Isaac caressing Rebekah,” Abimelech accuses Isaac of misleading him: “What a thing to do to us! One of the people might easily have slept with your wife. We should have incurred guilt, thanks to you” (26:10). It is hard to resist the impression that Isaac, in imitation of his father, uses his wife to extract from these highly moral Philistines a ransom as a debt of honor. The scheme is not unlike the story of Esther, a secret Jew and niece—as well as wife according to some readings—of the influential Jew Mordecai, who uses her to favorably dispose the Persian king toward the Jewish community.

  Isaac is less endogamous than his father Abraham, whose marriage to a half-sister remains an isolated case. Isaac receives an Egyptian wife in his youth, but his heirs are the children he will have with Rebecca, the daughter of his cousin Bethuel (whose mother, Milcah, had married his uncle Nahor, according to Genesis 11:29). Rebecca, horrified at the idea that her son Jacob should marry outside of the family, sends him to her brother Laban so he can marry one of Laban’s daughters, i.e., his cousin. Jacob marries both Leah and Rachel (Genesis 28). The case of Esau, Jacob’s older brother, appears similar: He offends his parents by marrying two Hittite women (“These were a bitter disappointment to Isaac and Rebekah” 26:35), then b
roadens his efforts and takes to wife his cousin Mahalath, the daughter of his uncle Ishmael (28:9). However, Ishmael is himself of impure lineage, being the son of Abraham and his Egyptian handmaid Hagar. So Esau is excluded from the chosen people and is the ancestor of the Edomites (Genesis 36). This genealogy can only have been invented by a caste of Babylonian exiles carrying inbreeding to an extreme. At the time of the Second Temple that followed their return, marriages between uncle and niece were highly valued, especially among families of priests, who were obsessed with the purity of their blood.

  Endogamy is also a characteristic feature of Jewish novels written in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Let us recall how Tobiah, the son of Tobit, marries his “closest relative,” the daughter of his uncle. The angel Raphael informs him that her father Raguel “has no right whatever to refuse you or to betroth her to anyone else. That would be asking for death, as prescribed in the Book of Moses, once he is aware that kinship gives you the pre-eminent right to marry his daughter” (Tobit 6:13).

  The puritan revolution of the Maccabees emphasized strict endogamy and, in keeping with Deuteronomic tradition, viewed intermarriage as idolatry. The Book of Jubilees, a book of the Hasmonean period, proclaims: “And if there is any man who wishes in Israel to give his daughter or his sister to any man who is of the seed of the Gentiles he shall surely die, and they shall stone him with stones; for he has wrought shame in Israel; and they shall burn the woman with fire, because she has dishonored the name of the house of her father, and she shall be rooted out of Yisrael” (30:7).

  It is true that during that same period, Judaism experienced a period of expansion during which many people were converted. In 125 BCE John Hyrcanus conquered the land of Edom and, according to Flavius Josephus, “subdued all the Edomites, and permitted them to stay in that country, if they would circumcise their genitals, and make use of the laws of the Jews; […] at which time therefore this befell them, that they were hereafter no other than Jews” (Jewish Antiquities XIII.9). His son Aristobulus, nicknamed Philhellene, annexed Galilee in 104 BCE, then occupied mostly by Itureans, uniting Itureans to Edomites “by the bond of the circumcision of their genitals” (XIII.11). Alexander Jannaeus, brother and heir of Aristobulus, was less successful in his attempt to convert the Hellenistic cities of Samaria, Gaza, and Pela in Transjordan; so he “slew the inhabitants of Gaza; yet they were not of cowardly hearts, but opposed those that came to slay them, and slew as many of the Jews” (XIII.13). These policies of forced conversions came from Hellenized rulers viewed as “godless” by contemporary pious Jews. Moreover, they did not contradict the principle of inbreeding, because the converted Jews were still considered second-class, while native Jewish society remained hostile to their marital integration, especially among the elites.

  Modern Jewish historians writing for Gentiles have spread the idea that ancient Judaism was a proselytizing faith, but this idea is based on a misinterpretation of the data. Ancient Jewish chronicles have not retained the name of even a single missionary, and Jewish literature on the conversion of the Gentiles is limited to the one that will take place at the end of time, when the world will recognize the superiority of the Jews. The evidence does, however, confirm the existence of “Judaizers” who approached Jewish communities and attended their meetings; all belonged to the elite, so that if they were to marry within the Jewish community, they would play a particular role. Yet even this practice was condemned by Orthodox rabbis. At the end of the second century, Rabbi Hiyya the Great comments: “Do not have faith in a proselyte until twenty-four generations have passed, because the inherent evil is still within him.”72

  Chapter 3

  THE PRINCE OF THIS WORLD

  “I shall shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations will flow in, and I shall fill this Temple with glory, says Yahweh Sabaoth. Mine is the silver, mine the gold! Yahweh Sabaoth declares.”

  Haggai 2:7–8

  Death and Culture in the Antique World

  The Bible is a collection of disparate, stylistically varied texts from various epochs. Consequently, the biblical notions concerning the fate of the deceased in the hereafter are multiple, heterogeneous, and generally difficult to reconcile. There is nevertheless a fundamental Yahwist conception, of which the others are only deviations: the Hebrew Bible does not grant man any form of afterlife worthy of the name: man is dust and returns to dust (Genesis 3:19). “My spirit cannot be indefinitely responsible for human beings, who are only flesh” (Genesis 6:3). Yahweh has nothing to do with the dead “whom you remember no more, cut off as they are from your protection” (Psalms 88:5). Genesis 2:7 plays on the semantic link between man, adam, and earth, adamah : “Elohim shaped adam, dust of adamah.”

  Admittedly this denial of the afterlife in Yahwist literature is not absolute: there is Sheol. The Bible uses this term to designate a dark and damp region underground, where the dead, good as well as bad, subsist only as impotent shadows in an unconscious sleep. While Sheol represents a subterranean place, it is above all a negative concept that approaches the idea of nothingness (unthinkable by definition); death in Sheol is virtual annihilation. In fact, the term appears only five times in the Pentateuch: four times in Genesis, as a conventional name for death,73 and once in Numbers, concerning Korah and two hundred and fifty notables, “renowned men” who rebelled against the authority of Moses and Aaron: “The ground split apart under their feet, the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them, their families, all Korah’s people and all their property. They went down alive to Sheol with all their belongings. The earth closed over them and they disappeared in the middle of the community” (Numbers 16:31–33). The term here has only a narrative function, since no subterranean afterlife is granted to these men after their living burial.

  Some will object that the Torah has two terms to designate the immortal spirit: nephesh and ruah. This is a misunderstanding. The Hebrew word nephesh is translated in the Septuagint by the Greek psyche, and in English by “soul.” But in reality it designates a “living being,” that is to say, a body that life has not yet left; it sometimes translates simply as “life.” The term is intimately related to blood in the food prohibitions of Leviticus 17. “According to the primeval Jewish view,” writes Jewish historian Josef Kastein, “the blood was the seat of the soul,” which is why it is forbidden to consume the blood of animals. The Hebrew word ruah, translated as pneuma in the Septuagint, and generally as “spirit” in English, means “wind,” “breath,” “respiration,” and thus also designates life. Thus there is no notion of immortal soul in the formula of Genesis 2:7: “Yahweh God shaped man from the soil of the ground and blew the breath of life [ruah] into his nostrils, and man became a living being [nephesh].”

  The metaphysical materialism of the biblical worldview is overlooked or denied by Reform Judaism, and mentioning it is now considered bad manners. But such was not the case a century ago, when Sigmund Freud wrote in Moses and Monotheism (1939) about the Egyptians: “No other people of antiquity has done so much to deny death, has made such careful provision for an after-life […]. The early Jewish religion, on the other hand, had entirely relinquished immortality; the possibility of an existence after death was never mentioned in any place.”74

  From the Egyptian point of view, such a denial of life after death makes Yahwism an anti-Osirian religion, that is to say, a Sethian anti-religion. To understand this, we must consider the details of the death and resurrection of Osiris, related by Plutarch. Osiris is the first king of Egypt. Scheming to take his place, his younger brother Seth discreetly takes the measure of his body and commands the making of a sumptuously decorated coffin. Through deceit he induces Osiris to lie down, closes the lid, seals it with lead, and throws the coffin into the Nile, which carries Osiris as far as the Mediterranean. Isis, aided by her sister Nephthys, goes in search of her husband’s coffin. After many attempts, she discovers the body, which she brings back to Egypt and hides. Seth discove
rs the hiding place and cuts the body into fourteen pieces, which he disseminates throughout the land of Egypt. The faithful Isis then transforms herself into a kite and sets off in search of the scattered limbs of her husband. She finds all the pieces except one: his virile member, which had been eaten by fish. Isis makes a simulacrum to replace it, reconstitutes the body, and brings it back to life through lamentations and prayers.

  The story of Osiris is a funerary myth; it conveys a vision of the destiny of man after death. Seth is the personification of death in its destructive corporeal aspect, while Osiris is the personification of the spiritual victory over death. As the first king and first death in history, Osiris is also the king of the dead. Each Pharaoh inherits his destiny and, when he dies, becomes Osiris, king of the Other World, even as his son inherits the royal throne on earth, corresponding to the role of Horus. In texts carved on the inner walls of the pyramids, which are nothing more than gigantic and sophisticated burial mounds, the divinities of the Egyptian pantheon are grouped around their sovereign, Osiris, to assist him in his new life in the grave. The dead pharaoh inherits royalty in the Other World: “May you rise up, protected and provided for like a god, equipped with the attributes of Osiris on the throne of the First of the Occidentals, to do what he did among the glorified, imperishable stars.”75