From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  Eventually, by another of these inversions, which are the trademark of Judaism, after the birth of Christianity, Talmudic rabbinism adopted by imitation the belief in the immortality of the soul, but in a restrictive form: only Jews have a divine soul, the soul of Gentiles being “equivalent to that of animals” (Midrasch Schir Haschirim). If “God created the akums [non-Jews] in the form of men” rather than beasts, says the Talmud, it is “in honor of the Jews. The akums were created only to serve the Jews day and night without being able to leave their service. It would not be appropriate for a Jew to be served by an animal; instead, it should be by an animal with a human form” (Sepher Midrasch Talpioth).87 There were always Jewish scholars to defend the immortality of the soul in a less polemical form, but they still borrowed it from Christianity. Here is what Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz said of one of them, Joseph Albo, a native of Soria in Spain in the first half of the fifteenth century: “It is a remarkable fact that Albo, who thought that he was developing his religio-philosophical system exclusively in the native spirit of Judaism, placed at its head a principle of indubitably Christian origin; so powerfully do surroundings affect even those who exert themselves to throw off such influence. The religious philosopher of Soria propounded as his fundamental idea that salvation was the whole aim of man in this life, and that Judaism strongly emphasized this aspect of religion.” On the other hand, Albo is fully Jewish when he gives obedience to 613 religious prescriptions as a recipe for eternal happiness.88

  Finally, when in the eighteenth century Moses Mendelssohn defended belief in the immortality of the soul—a necessary condition for the elevation of humanity according to him—he would in no way rely on the Jewish tradition. Instead he produced a dialogue in the style of Plato, entitled Phaedo or the Immortality of the Soul (1767).

  Biblical versus Heroic Cultures

  One of the most important aspects of man’s relationship to his dead is hero worship. No better definition has been given of the hero than Lewis Farnell’s: “The hero in the Greek religious sense is a person whose virtue, influence, or personality was so powerful in his lifetime or through the peculiar circumstances of his death that his spirit after death is regarded as of supernatural power, claiming to be reverenced and propitiated.”89 Basically, a hero is a man to whom a community acknowledges its debt, and worshipping the hero is the way it pays off its debt. There are as many types of heroes as types of debts. A heroic cult can be born directly from popular fervor or from an official institution, such as the oracle of Delphi in Greece or the Senate in Rome.

  Greece is the heroic civilization par excellence. Heroic cults can be traced back to the birth of the polis in the eighth century. They persisted during the Hellenistic period and continued thereafter.90 At the time the Gospels were written, Carla Antonaccio writes, Greece was “saturated with heroes.”91 And it was not just Greece: the divinized dead exist in all traditional cultures, and certainly throughout the Mediterranean.

  Heroes embody their societies’ contradictions and traumas, and open the way for transcending them. Every heroic legend affirms human freedom in its dialectical relationship with divine power. Heroism is a humanism insofar as it glorifies the man who surpasses his limits, transgresses the established human rules, and sometimes even goes so far as to defy the gods. That is why the heroic is intimately linked to the tragic. But heroism is also the affirmation of the presence of the divine in the human, which is why the heroic paradigm is the cloth from which myth is woven. By the will of the gods, the hero has escaped death-as-annihilation, and various versions of his legend present different narrative representations of that victory: resurrection (he “wakes up” after falling “asleep”); transfiguration (his body is supernaturally transformed); or simply ascension (he is miraculously transported to the hereafter). The mythic vision is always paradoxical, since it affirms that the dead are alive.

  The heroic ideology implies that certain beings are not only the children of their parents, but also possess something extra, a supplement of soul, that comes to them from a special bond with divinity. This bond is often understood as adoptive: the hero is the twice-born man whose second birth is by the grace of a god. But the legendary process, working backwards, often brings the miraculous back to the conception of the hero. His connection with the divinity, which distinguishes him from ordinary men, is then imagined as genetic: it is the god himself who conceived the hero with a mortal. The term “son of god” thus becomes a synonym of “demigod” in Greek mythography since Hesiod. Myth-making can go one step further and make the hero a god temporarily descended among men.

  Quite logically, the Hebrew Bible ignores the religious concept of the immortal hero, with a single exception: Elijah, who is seen by his disciple Elisha carried in a “chariot of fire drawn by horses of fire” and “ascending to the heavens in a whirlwind,” to never reappear again (2 Kings 2:11). But the classical motif of the hero transfigured by death, resplendent with light, is here clearly atrophied, a mere fossil or residue of heroic ideology covered by biblical antiheroism.

  We also find traces of a belief in immortality in the mention of a cult on Samuel’s tomb, to which Saul resorts, in order to have the prophet’s ghost “rise from the earth” and “disclose the future” (1 Samuel 28:3–19). This episode recalls Ulysses conjuring up the spirit of the clairvoyant Tiresias in the Odyssey (Song XI). But the biblical author has covered this story with reprobation: not only has Saul already been condemned by Yahweh at this stage, but the priestess attached to the tomb of Samuel (pejoratively termed a sorceress) only bends to his demand against her will.

  It is significant that both Elijah and Samuel are heroes from the northern kingdom of Israel. The tomb of Samuel in Shiloh was a famous place of worship and pilgrimage. All the burial places of the judges mentioned in the book of Judges, whose references hint at their importance as religious sanctuaries, are also located in the North.92 Samaria also hosts Joseph’s tomb, as well as the well of Jacob known to Jesus (John 4:6), located precisely where Jacob’s bones were buried according to Joshua 24:32. This is evidence that before the usurpation of Israel’s cultural heritage by the Yahwist priests of Judea, the people of Israel worshiped their heroic dead, and that such rites still survived in the North despite prohibition by the Jerusalem priesthood.

  There are also in the Bible residual stories of heroes being conceived by gods. The most obvious case is the nephilim of Genesis 6, those giants conceived by the “sons of the gods” with the “daughters of men.” Who are “the heroes of the past, those famous men”? This passage is evidently an echo of the “fortunate heroes” mentioned by Hesiod in Works and Days (172). What is therefore significant is that the passage seems written expressly to deny their immortality, since Yahweh reacts to these hybrid unions by proclaiming: “My spirit cannot be indefinitely responsible for human beings, who are only flesh; let the time allowed each be a hundred and twenty years” (6:3).

  The biblical redactors integrated other legendary narratives of supernaturally conceived heroes, but they did so in a demythologized and satirical fashion. One example is the story of Samson—another hero of the North—a sort of Hercules capable of defeating a thousand men with the “jawbone of a donkey” (Judges 15:15). An “angel of Yahweh” announces to Samson’s future mother, the wife of Manoah: “You are barren and have had no child, but you are going to conceive and give birth to a son.” The wife goes to find her husband to tell him of this visit from a “man of God […] who looked like the Angel of God, so majestic was he.” Suspicious as any husband would be in such circumstances, Manoah asks to see the stranger, and when his wife, visited again, calls him to introduce him to her visitor, Manoah asks him: “Are you the man who spoke to this woman?” (“speaking” sounds like a euphemism). Manoah then invites him to share a meal, “for Manoah did not know that this was the Angel of Yahweh” (13:3–15).

  The conception of Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah, is strangely similar. Ag
ain, it is hard to resist the impression that we are dealing here with a parody of Greek nativities of demigods. Abraham is sitting near his tent in the middle of the day when he saw a noble man and his two companions standing by. He greets them respectfully: “‘My lord,’ he said, ‘if I find favour with you, please do not pass your servant by. Let me have a little water brought, and you can wash your feet and have a rest under the tree. Let me fetch a little bread and you can refresh yourselves before going further, now that you have come in your servant’s direction.’ They replied, ‘Do as you say.’ Abraham hurried to the tent and said to Sarah, ‘Quick, knead three measures of our best flour and make loaves.’ Then, running to the herd, Abraham took a fine and tender calf and gave it to the servant, who hurried to prepare it. Then taking curds, milk and the calf which had been prepared, he laid all before them, and they ate while he remained standing near them under the tree. ‘Where is your wife Sarah?’ they asked him. ‘She is in the tent,’ he replied. Then his guest said, ‘I shall come back to you next year, and then your wife Sarah will have a son’” (Genesis 18:1–10).

  We see here Abraham offering hospitality to a powerful man, and the man proposing to return the favor by conceiving with Sarah a son for Abraham, knowing the couple to be sterile. Such a reading is not far-fetched, since a little further, Judah asks his son Onan to sleep with his sister-in-law Tamar “to maintain your brother’s line” (Genesis 38:8). It is only later in Isaac’s conception story that the guest is identified with Yahweh, and his companions with “angels” (malachim): “Yahweh treated Sarah as he had said, and did what he had promised her. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time God had promised” (21:1–2).

  Meanwhile, the very same two “angels” were sent to Sodom and received hospitality from Lot, Abraham’s nephew. Hearing of it, “the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people without exception” wanted to seize them, saying to Lot: “Send them out to us so that we can have intercourse with them” (19:4–5). To which Lot answered: “Look, I have two daughters who are virgins. I am ready to send them out to you, for you to treat as you please, but do nothing to these men since they are now under the protection of my roof” (19:8). It is hard to decide whether we should read this story as an obscene parody of the belief in angels and spirits. It is strange in any case that the heroic motif of the fertile union of a god with a mortal is associated with a story of angels targeted for sodomy.

  In conclusion, the biblical scribes strongly disliked the heroic ideology that grants the noble dead a blessed immortality and a role in enhancing the welfare of their community. Yahwist religion erased this ideology from ancient legends, but not to the point of making it undetectable by historical criticism. Contrary to a widespread idea, the denial of the individual soul in the Hebrew Bible is not an archaism dating back to a stage when men had not yet developed this concept. On the contrary, it is a revolutionary ideology, aggressively set against a universal belief that is probably as old as humanity, judging by funerary archeology. Critical analysis of the biblical legends proves that the Yahwist editors deliberately eliminated every notion of heroic immortality from the traditions that they appropriated from the ancient kingdom of Israel. This is easily seen in the account of Abel’s death, when Yahweh says to Cain, “Listen! Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10). Spilled blood crying for vengeance is metaphorical, but the metaphor is not the product of poetic skill; rather, it is a distortion of the common motif of the murdered soul crying for vengeance. Abel has no soul, no eternal spirit; his blood is all that is left of him. Therefore, it must be his blood that cries out.

  Biblical antiheroism is profoundly antihumanist. The heroic imagination, while admitting the communion of the human with the divine, grants man great freedom in relation to the gods. Heroes are the authors of their own accomplishments, whether as warriors, conquerors, legislators, builders, or simply thinkers. But the Moses of Exodus, the perfect man according to Yahwism, takes no initiative; he merely repeats slavishly what Yahweh tells him (like Abraham, who does not object to the divine order to sacrifice his son). Far from drawing from his own wisdom the laws that he gives to his people, Moses contents himself with receiving them from Yahweh already engraved in stone. (His only contribution, in fact, is to break the tablets).

  The materialism inherent in Judaism has profound consequences in Jewish mentality. Among these consequences, Karl Marx identifies the immoderate pursuit of financial power: “Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man—and turns them into commodities.”93 By their perfection of usury, which has now resulted in the transformation of money into debt and its complete dematerialization, Jews have somehow endowed money with a virtually supernatural power. It is as if the spiritual world in which the Jew does not believe has been replaced by a spiritual world of his own making: a spiritualization of matter that is actually an inverted spiritual world, since instead of linking man to heaven, it chains him to earth. Jewish political adviser Jacques Attali, who credits the Jewish people with making money “the single and universal instrument of exchange, just as he makes his God the unique and universal instrument of transcendence,” also points out that in Hebrew, “currency” (DaMim) is the same word as “blood” (DaM, plural DaMim), and rejoices in this “dangerous and luminous proximity.”94

  The Eternal People

  The heroic ideology implies that man, at his best, is not merely the fruit of his parents; his soul is partly extragenetic. Blood and soul are different things. But Judaism sacralizes genetics above everything else. An so it is the entire chosen people, acting “as one man” (Judges 20:1), who is somehow heroized in the Bible. It is significant that the name “Israel” is both that of a person (Jacob) and of the people who descend from him.

  The Hebrew Bible binds the individual to his collective racial origin rather than to his personal spiritual destiny. The immortality that is denied the individual is reinvested entirely on the collective: only the people is eternal. (“I instituted an eternal people” Isaiah 44:7). This is why endogamy assumes the character of a sacred law, the transgression of which merits death. “There is in the fate of the race, as in the Semitic character, a fixedness, a stability, an immortality that strike the mind,” writes Isaac Kadmi-Cohen in Nomads: An Essay on the Jewish Soul (1929). The author describes Judaism (more generally “Semitic religions”) as “the spiritualization that deifies the race, jus sanguinis [blood law].” Through Yahweh, therefore, it is the people who are deified: “Thus divinity in Judaism is contained in the exaltation of the entity represented by the race … It is therefore in this exclusive love, in this jealousy, one might say, of the race that the deep meaning of Semitism is concentrated and that its ideal character appears.”95

  Through the beginning of the twentieth century, many Jewish thinkers likewise understood Judaism as a kind of tribal soul. The American rabbi Harry Waton, writing in his A Program for Jews and Humanity in 1939, summarized this analysis quite well: “Jehovah differs from all other gods. All other gods dwell in heaven. For this reason, all other religions are concerned about heaven, and they promise all reward in heaven after death. For this reason, all other religions negate the earth and the material world and are indifferent to the well-being and progress of mankind on this earth. But Jehovah comes down from heaven to dwell on this earth and to embody himself in mankind. For this reason, Judaism concerns itself only about this earth and promises all reward right here on this earth.” “Hebrew religion, in fact, was intensely materialistic and it is precisely this that gave it persistent and effective reality.” “The Bible speaks of an immortality right here on earth. In what consists this immortality? It consists in this : the soul continues to live and function through the children and grandchildren and the people descending from them. Hence, when a man dies, his soul is gathered to his people. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and all the rest continue to li
ve in the Jewish people, and in due time they will live in the whole human race. This was the immortality of the Jewish people, and it was known to the Jews all the time.” “The Jews that have a deeper understanding of Judaism know that the only immortality there is for the Jew is the immortality in the Jewish people. Each Jew continues to live in the Jewish people, and he will continue to live so long as the Jewish people will live.”96

  The purity of blood, that is, of lineage, is the great preoccupation of Deuteronomic legislators and historians. It has been pointed out that blood plays the same role with the ancient Hebrews as language among the Greeks. For the Greeks, the archetypal figure of the foreigner is the barbarian, an onomatopoeia designating those whose language is incomprehensible; whereas in biblical history, apart from the history of the Tower of Babel, everyone seems to speak the same language. There is almost no mention of any interpreters. The only exception is when Aaron makes himself the interpreter of Moses to his people; but he does this not because Moses, brought up in the royal palace, does not speak Hebrew, but only because he is “slow and hesitant of speech” (Exodus 4:10).97 Today, even if language has taken on a specific identity function in modern Israel, it is always blood that prevails.