by Peter Watson
In Chapters Four and Five we saw how several of the biblical narratives are paralleled in earlier Babylonian literature: the child in the bulrushes, for example, or the flood, in which one chosen couple build a boat into which they put a pair of each species of animal. But perhaps the most perplexing thing about the Hebrew scriptures is the fact that they give two contradictory stories about the Creation. In the early chapters of Genesis, God creates the world in six days and rests on the seventh. He separates light from dark, heaven from earth, makes the sun and stars shine, then introduces trees and grass, before birds, sea creatures, and land animals. He creates humans in his own image, and divides them into men and women. They are set to rule over the animals and to eat fruits and herbs: ‘the first creation is vegetarian’.28 Later on in Genesis, however, there is a second account of the Creation. Here God creates man from the dust on the ground (in Hebrew ’adamah). This creation is specifically male and in this account man exists before other living things, such as vegetation. It is only when God notices that man is alone that he creates animals and brings them to man so they can be named. He creates woman out of one of man’s ribs, and she is called wo-man (‘out of man’).29 The two versions are very different and have always puzzled scholars. In the seventeenth century, as was mentioned in the Prologue, Isaac La Peyrère suggested that the first creation applied to non-Jewish people, and the second to Adam’s particular race. This explained all sorts of anomalies, such as the fact that there were people in the Arctic and the Americas, places not mentioned in the Bible, and which the age of discovery had revealed. It wasn’t until 1711 that a German minister, H. B. Witter, suggested that the truth was more prosaic: the creation accounts in Genesis were written by two separate people, and at different times.30 A similar division exists in the accounts of how the ancient Hebrews arrived in the promised land. One account has the descendants of Abraham going to Egypt and then being led by Moses, via the wilderness, into Canaan. In the other account, the land is settled from the east, with no mention of Egypt. There are several other inconsistencies, but such disparities are a common feature of other religions too.
The inconsistency is (partly) explained by arguing that there are two principal sources for the early books of the bible, what are called E, or Elohist, after the name he used for God, and J, for Yahwist (partly explained because one would have expected a later editor to have ironed out the differences). E is regarded as the earlier source, though the material derived from E is less than from J. At times, J seems to be responding to E. These early sources date mainly from the eighth century BC, though some scholars prefer the tenth. It is the J source that refers to a special relationship between God and the Jews, but there is no mention of a covenant concerning the land. This is why the covenant is thought to be a later invention of the sixth century when, during exile, the Jews became aware of Zoroastrian beliefs in Babylon.31 The third author of the Torah is known as P, for ‘Priestly’, who (perhaps; some scholars doubt it) pulled E and J together but also added his own material, mainly the laws for rituals and tithes. P also used Elohim, not Yahweh.32
In later years, after the exile, responsibility for the accuracy of the Tanakh lay in the hands of masoretes, families of scribal scholars whose job it was to copy faithfully the ancient texts. This is why the canonical scriptures became known as the Masoretic Text. We have some idea of how the scriptures varied in antiquity following the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, where out of 800 scrolls, 200 are biblical books. We know now, for instance, that the form of the Torah used by the Samaritans, a northern tribe, most of whom had not gone into exile, varies from the Masoretic Text in, roughly speaking, 6,000 instances. Of these, the Samaritan text agrees with the Septuagint version in 1,900 instances.33 An example will show how important–and revealing–editorial control can be. In the Hebrew language, which has consonants but no fully expressed vowels, there was always the possibility of confusion. For the most part, Hebrew words are formed from three-letter roots, which can be built up in different directions, to create families of words that refer to similar things. This makes Hebrew very efficient in some contexts–one word will be enough where three or four would be needed in English or French. But confusion is easy. Consider, for example, the well-known story of David and Goliath. During their famous encounter, Goliath wore armour, including a helmet. Archaeological discoveries have shown that helmets of the period included a protruding strip of metal that would have covered the warrior’s nose and brow. How it is possible, then, that a stone from David’s sling could have hit Goliath’s forehead and disabled him? One plausible answer lies in the fact that the Hebrew for forehead, metzach, could easily have been confused with mitzchah, meaning greaves–leg armour, not unlike cricket pads in principle. Both come from the same root: m-tz-ch. If David had thrown his stone in such a way that it lodged between Goliath’s greaves and his flesh, so that he was unable to bend his knee, he could have been knocked off balance, allowing David to tower above him, and kill him.34
The Neviim, or books of the prophets, are divided into the former prophets, such as Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which are mainly narrative in construction, and the latter prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, which were covered in Chapter 5. Ben Sira, writing around 180 BC, makes mention of ‘twelve prophets’; so this section of the Tanakh must have been settled by then.35 The Ketuvim are comprised mainly of ‘wisdom literature’ and poetical works–Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the book of Job. They are much later works than the other sections and may have joined the canon only because, in the mid-second century BC, when the Jews were being persecuted by Antiochus Epiphanes, a successor of Alexander the Great, he tried to impose Greek ways and to destroy the Hebrews’ scriptures. In response, the Ketuvim were accepted by Jews as part of their canon. In the opening to Ben Sira’s Ecclesiasticus (a book that became part of the Apocrypha, and not to be confused with Ecclesiastes) he mentions three separate types of writing: the Law, the Prophets and ‘other books’. Since Ecclesiasticus was translated into Greek around 132 BC (by the author’s grandson), we may take it that the canon was more or less formed by then.36 Just how ‘official’ this canon was is open to doubt. The Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, discovered after the Second World War, are a large and very varied group, which in itself suggests that there was a great range of scriptures available, some of them very different from the Masoretic Text. By the time Jesus was alive, though there was ‘a’ canon of writings, there is no reason to suppose that this was ‘exclusive’, and that other revered texts were not in widespread use.37
The Septuagint–the Greek version of the Tanakh–is a case in point. In the third century BC, King Ptolemy Philadelphus, of Alexandria (285–247 BC), had the best library in the world. (Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, and based on Aristotle’s principles for planning the ideal city, was built on a spit of land between the sea and a lake and was as near as practicable to the westernmost mouth of the Nile. A Greek city in Egypt, it became filled with palaces and temples and a great library, which soon made it ‘the intellectual and cultural capital of the world’.38) However, the king was told by his librarian, Demetrius, that he lacked five important books: the Torah. Accordingly, Ptolemy Philadelphus approached Eleazar, high priest in Jerusalem, who made seventy scholars available, to translate the Hebrew books into Greek. Without being aware of it, these seventy scholars each produced identical translations. A more probable chronology is that Hebrew, as a spoken language, began to die out during exile, to be replaced by Aramaic (the language of Jesus) as the spoken tongue. Gradually, Hebrew became a literary language (like medieval Latin) and, among the Hellenised Jews in Alexandria, the need arose for a Greek version of their Bible. The Torah may have been translated into Greek as early as the fifth/fourth century BC. What interests us here, apart from the fantastic nature of the translation legend, is the fact that the Septuagint comprised all the books of the Old Testament that we use (but in a different order), plus the Apocrypha and
the Pseudepigrapha.39
The books in the Apocrypha include Ecclesiasticus, Judith, the first and second book of Maccabees, Tobit, and Wisdom. In Jerusalem they were not seen as divinely inspired, though they had a kind of second-rate authority. In Alexandria, they were accepted as part of the canon, though there too they were regarded as less important.40 The Pseudepigrapha are so-called because it was the practice of the time to attribute what were in fact anonymous writings to famous figures from the past. For example, the Wisdom of Solomon was written down long after its ‘author’ was dead. The book of Jubilees describes the history of the world from the Creation to the Jews’ wanderings in Sinai and adds such details as the names of Adam’s children, following on from Cain, Abel and Seth. Other books provide extra details about the Exodus.41 But most of all the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha show how ideas were developing in Judaism in the years before Jesus was born. The idea of Satan emerges, the resurrection of the body is distinguished from the resurrection of the soul, and ideas about rewards and punishments beyond the grave emerge. ‘Sheol’, the underworld where hitherto the dead dwelt, in some discomfort, is now divided into two compartments, a form of heaven for the righteous and what was in effect hell for the unrighteous. These ideas may also have been first encountered when the Israelites were in exile among Zoroastrians in Babylon.42
It is worth noting, once more, how different the Hebrew scriptures were from Greek literature, produced at more or less the same time. In particular, the Tanakh was narrow in outlook. As Robin Lane Fox has observed, there is no detailed concern with politics, or with the great forces–economic, scientific, even geographic–that shape the world. Certain comparisons highlight this difference. For example, the Song of Deborah in the Old Testament is, like Aeschylus’ The Persians, an examination of the impact of defeat in war on the enemy’s royal women. The Hebrew scriptures are a victory ode, they gloat over the changed circumstances of the women with the words: ‘So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord.’ In contrast, Aeschylus’ tragedy shows sympathy for the women: the gods may have fought on the side of Greece but that doesn’t stop their enemies being treated as full human beings in their own right.43
An even bigger gulf existed between the history of Herodotus and Thucydides and the Hebrew scriptures. Herodotus does allow for miracles and Thucydides sees ‘the hand of fate’ behind events; however, whereas the Greeks researched their books, visited actual sites and interrogated eyewitnesses where they could, and whereas they regarded men as responsible for their actions, in both victory and defeat and, in Thucydides’ case certainly, allowed little or no role for the gods, the Hebrew Bible is almost the exact opposite. The writings are anonymous, they show no signs of research–no one has travelled to see anything for themselves, or made any attempt to compare the Hebrew stories with outside, independent authorities. The Hebrew scriptures aim to tell the entire history of the world, since creation, treating distant events in much the same way as more recent happenings. The Genesis narrative (but less so the later books) is full of fantastic dates, never queried, unlike Thucydides, say, who was well aware of local calendars and how they differed from one another. The main point of the Old Testament is the Hebrews’ relation with their God. It is a much more closed, inward-looking narrative. Several authors have made the point that the first time Judaism was used as a specific term was in the second book of Maccabees, written around 120 BC, to contrast the Jewish way of life with that of Hellenism.44 What is unquestionably moving about the Tanakh, however, is its focus on ordinary people faced with great questions. ‘The Jews were the first race to find words to express the deepest human emotions, especially the feelings produced by bodily or mental suffering, anxiety, spiritual despair and desolation…’45 Some of the texts were ‘borrowed’ from earlier writings. Proverbs, for instance, was taken in disguised form from an Egyptian work, The Wisdom of Amenope. But throughout the Hebrew Bible there is the feeling of a small people living in God’s shadow, ‘which means, in effect, living for a large amount of time in ignorance of the divine will. Inevitably perhaps, this means it is about dealing with misfortune, often unforeseen and undeserved misfortune.’46 Is any scripture as poignant, tragic and extraordinary as the book of Job? In its concern with evil it is not quite so unique as is sometimes made out. Job appears to have been written between 600 and 200 BC, by which time the problem of evil had been discussed in other Near Eastern literature.47 Where Job is special is in two aspects. For a start, there are more than a hundred words in it that occur nowhere else. How the early translators dealt with his predicament has always baffled philologists. But the book’s true originality surely lies in its examination of the idea of the unjust God. At one level the book is about ignorance and suffering. At the outset, Job is ignorant of the wager God has had with Satan: will Job, as his suffering multiplies, abandon his God? Although we, the reader, know about the wager, while Job does not, this does not necessarily mean that we know God’s motives any better. The book is really about ignorance as much as it is about evil: what we know, what we think we know, what–in the end–we can know.48 What is the place of faith in a world where God is unjust? Who are we to question God’s motives?
After exile, the changed character of Judaism, as a religion of the book, had two important consequences, each very different from the other. Concentration on a canon made the Israelites a relatively narrow people (though there were exceptions, like Philo and Josephus). This may well have made them inflexible, unwilling to adapt, with momentous–not to say disastrous–consequences. On the other hand, a religion of the book almost by definition promoted literacy and a respect for scholarship that stood them in good stead. A respect for the written word–the law in particular–was also a civilising factor, giving the Jews a pronounced collective sense of purpose. Scholarship surrounding the scriptures led to the introduction of a new entity in Judaism: the synagogue, where the book was taught and studied in detail. Synagogue is at root a Greek word. It means simply a place where people gather together, and this too suggests that it developed during exile. In Babylon, the Jews may well have gathered together in each other’s homes, on the newly-instituted Sabbath, to read (to begin with) the relevant parts of the Torah. This practice was certainly in place by the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, though the earliest synagogue we know about was in Alexandria, where the remains have been dated to the time of Ptolemy III (246–221 BC).49
The problem for the Jews was that, despite the success of their religion (as they saw it), their central political predicament had changed hardly at all. They were still a small people, uncompromisingly religious, surrounded by greater powers. From the time of Alexander the Great onwards, Palestine and the Middle East were ruled variously by Macedonians, the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria. Each of these–and this is the crucial factor–was Hellenistic in outlook, and Israel became surrounded by cities, poleis, where, instead of the synagogue and Temple (as was true of Jerusalem), the gymnasium, the theatre, the lyceum, the agora and the odeum were the main cultural institutions. This was the situation in Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Tripoli and as a result the towns of Samaria and Judaea were regarded as backwaters. This cultural division succeeded only in driving the more orthodox Jews back on themselves. Many retreated to the desert, in search of a ritual purity which they felt was unobtainable in cities, even Jerusalem. At the same time, however, there were many other Jews, often the better educated ones, who found Hellenistic culture more varied and better balanced than their own. At root, this meant that, for the Jews, Hellenisation, in Paul Johnson’s words, ‘was a destabilising force spiritually and, above all, it was a secularising, a materialistic force’.50 This combustible mix ignited in 175 BC, when there was a new Seleucid ruler, Antiochus Epiphanes, referred to earlier (page157). Prior to this date, there had been some attempts to reform orthodox Judaism. The Hellenism that existed throughout the Middle East promoted trade and, in general, the relaxation of religious differences. The Greeks had a different idea of
divinity as compared with the Jews. ‘To the Hellenistic imagination the gods are like ourselves, only more beautiful, and descend to earth in order to teach men reason and the laws of harmony.’51 In line with this, the Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians were prepared to amalgamate their gods–for example, Apollo-Helios-Hermes, the sun god.52
For orthodox Jews, however, this was pagan barbarism at its very worst and it was confirmed when Antiochus Epiphanes began a series of measures designed to promote Hellenisation and aid the reformers among the Hebrews in Israel. He dismissed the orthodox high priest, substituting a reformer, he changed the city’s name, to Antiocha, he built a gymnasium near the Temple and took some of the Temple funds to pay for Hellenistic activities, such as athletic games (which, remember, were themselves religious ceremonies of a sort). Finally, in 167 BC, he abolished Mosaic law, replaced it with Greek secular law, at the same time demoting the Temple so that it became merely a place of ecumenical worship. This was a move too far for the Hasidim (= pious). They refused to accept these changes and they opposed Antiochus with a new tactic: religious martyrdom. For a quarter of a century, there was bitter religious conflict which resulted, for the time being, in victory for the Hasidim. Not only did the Jews win back their independence, including their religious independence, but the idea of reform was also discredited. From that time on, ‘The temple was more sacrosanct than ever, fierce adherence to the Torah was reinforced and Judaism turned in on itself and away from the Greek world. The mob now became an important part of the Jerusalem scene, making the city, and Judaea as a whole, extremely difficult to govern by anyone…The intellectual freedom that characterised Greece and the Greek world was unknown in Palestine, where a national system of local schools was installed in which all boys–and only boys–were taught the Torah and nothing else. All other forms of knowledge were rejected.’53
