The Great Shift
Page 23
Here Josephus goes out of his way to say what the biblical text clearly does not, that God knew all along that Cain had murdered Abel. In fact, Josephus prepares the ground for this assertion of divine knowledge even in his description of Abel. He says that Abel believed that God was indeed “present at his every action”—hence, it would seem, omnipresent.* Of course, the biblical story contains no evidence of Abel entertaining such a belief, but Josephus, troubled as all ancient interpreters were by God’s question “Where is your brother Abel?” has resolved to make a virtue of a necessity and turn divine omniscience into the whole point of the story. So he goes on to assert—again, without any support from the biblical text—that God was “aware of the deed” even before He asked Cain where Abel was.
But if so, why did God ask this question at all? Josephus’s answer is that God wanted to rattle Cain with “persistent, inquisitive meddling” until Cain blurted out his true feelings, that he was not his brother’s “babysitter” (in Josephus’s Greek, his paidagōgos— the household slave charged with taking the master’s children to school), nor his phulax, a guardian or protector. A reader of Josephus might object that there is no “persistent, inquisitive meddling” in the story, but Josephus has a clever explanation for this as well. He understands Cain’s answer to God’s question, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” to be two answers, the second quite separate in time from the first. He theorizes that God must have followed up Cain’s first answer, “I do not know,” with further questions: “Come on, Cain. You must have some idea where he is! I mean, I always used to see you two guys together, Cain and Abel, Cain and Abel. And now: just Cain. Where did Abel go?” Josephus reasons that this must have been what happened, since Cain would never have had to give the second answer unless the first had proved insufficient. So finally, unable to stand up to God’s “persistent, inquisitive meddling,” he blurted out his true disdain for Abel—and God then charged him with the murder.
A New Remoteness
If omniscience and omnipresence seemed to go together, it was ultimately the latter that proved the more important. In essence, God could no longer be conceived as having a body, or indeed as having any sort of physical being at all. He was just everywhere all the time.41 And this was to have the most profound effect on how people encountered God from this point on.
The new model of a bodiless, omnipresent deity might seem to be a kind of return to the great Outside, that all-embracing, all-powerful Being who had dwarfed the little humans back in the Garden—but one ought not to be too hasty. There is certainly no evidence that the existence of such a being is hardwired into the human brain (as some recent, misguided writers have claimed),42 and in any case, the new, three-omnied model was significantly different from the great Outside. The undifferentiated Outside was just what its name implied, with everything lumped together: all that we mean by God, plus cricket-song and cold snaps, lakeside sunrise and gnawing hunger and the warm west wind, all of these undifferentiated and endlessly moving in and through the little human beings. By contrast, the three-omnied God had no physical existence at all, hence no confusion of being; He was always right there, but on an altogether different plane. And since He was everywhere, He was also nowhere, at least not in the old way, poised on the other side of the curtain. Of course He still spoke to prophets and sages, and humans still spoke to Him—no longer as real interlocutors, but as humans conversing with a living Being who was absolutely everywhere all around, as close as the little humans’ own lips or the tips of their fingers, but stretching to the farthest outreaches of the world. Here the divine Outside existed in a wholly new register, endlessly present but truly inconceivable.
This may sound like the answer, however schematic in form, to the question with which we began this book, namely: What happened to the God of Old and His direct encounters? But there are still some things missing, things that are of the most vital importance to our theme.
10
A Sacred Agreement at Sinai
LAWS THAT COME FROM GOD; PREROGATIVES OF A DIVINE SOVEREIGN; LAWS IN ISRAEL’S EARLY HISTORY
In the biblical account, the covenant at Mount Sinai marked the beginning of God’s connection to one particular people, Israel. But why did it take the particular form that it did—and how did that form come to represent an entirely different sort of encounter with God?
We saw in the previous chapter some of the changes that took place in Israel’s encounter with God, as He went from being the people’s main God to being its only God, and then to being the God of the whole world, indeed, the three-omnied God of post-biblical times. But an important element in this story is missing. In the account of God’s meeting with the people of Israel at Mount Sinai, something happened that went on to define the nature of His future connection with them. This encounter took place, according to the book of Exodus, three months after the Israelites had left Egypt and crossed the Red Sea on their way into Canaan. They came to Mount Sinai (location unknown to this day) and there God, enfolded “in a thick cloud,” proclaimed the Ten Commandments. The question is: Why would He do that?
A Divine Lawgiver
To be sure, this was the beginning of God’s connection to the people of Israel, and of Israel’s acceptance of Him as its God. But why should this event have involved the Ten Commandments, or commandments of any kind? God could have just said: “From now on, you’re my people and I’m your God.” Why make this new reality conditioned on a set of laws (and these ten laws in particular)? This is not an idle question, and the answer seems to reveal something basic about the very nature of God in ancient Israelite religion. He is of course represented as a heavenly king,1 but more particularly, as a divine lawgiver. Elsewhere in the ancient Near East, the gods were champions of justice, but the actual laws were typically promulgated by a human king: the laws of King Ur-Namma in ancient Sumer (who ruled from 2112 to 2095 BCE), the laws of Hammurabi in Babylon (ca. 1750 BCE), and so forth.2 In ancient Israel, it was God who created the laws, communicating them (according to the Pentateuch) to Moses, who then passed them on to the people. As a lawgiver, He was quite alone: there is no instance in the whole Hebrew Bible of a flesh-and-blood Israelite king issuing laws on his own initiative.3 Examining the moment in the biblical narrative when God’s kingship over Israel first began can thus reveal something important about the original significance of His first laws, the Ten Commandments:
The LORD called to him [Moses] from the mountain, saying, “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I carried you on eagle’s wings and brought you to Me. And now, if you obey Me and keep [the laws of] My covenant, then you will become My treasured possession from among all peoples, for the whole land is Mine. And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites. (Exod 19:3–6)4
A “covenant” is just a bit of English legalese for a binding agreement of some sort. What God is saying to Moses here is that if the people of Israel agree to abide by the provisions of this covenant, then He will adopt them as His “treasured possession.”5 He certainly had other choices, He goes on to imply: Israel is being singled out “from among all peoples, since the whole land is Mine.” But this still leaves unexplained the necessity for concluding a formal agreement along with its attached laws, the Ten Commandments. Why was there a covenant at all?
Vassal Treaties
Part of the answer, according to many scholars, has been provided by archaeological finds from the ancient Hittite capital city of Hattuša, now located in the town of Bogazköy in north central Turkey. In the Bronze Age, the Hittites ruled over a vast empire that reached southward to include much of the territory of present-day Syria. In this empire’s ancient capital archaeologists unearthed a huge library of some ten thousand inscribed clay tablets, many of them dealing with foreign relations and other matters of state. Starting in the 1930s, a number of Hittite treaties were published, and it was not long before these attracted the attentio
n of biblical scholars. The reason was that they had a familiar ring.
The Hittite treaties are known as suzerainty treaties or vassal treaties because they cover relations between the emperor (or suzerain) and his various vassal states.6 Like all sorts of other documents—wedding invitations, business letters, UN resolutions—the treaties acquired a fairly standard format. They begin with the self-identification of the suzerain: “These are the words of the Sun-god [that is, the monarch], King So-and-so.” This is followed by a lengthy historical prologue,7 in which the suzerain reviews all he has done for the vassal (sometimes starting with his or his forebears having conquered the vassal’s land and put a puppet on the vassal state’s throne). The next section contains the treaty’s stipulations, prominently including the requirement that the vassals pledge their undying loyalty to the suzerain and vice versa. This was extremely important to the suzerain: his main concern was that the vassal state remain faithful to him and not try to strike a better deal with another emperor down the road. The suzerain would thus say things like this to his vassal:
I have now made you swear an oath to (me,) the King of Hatti, and to the land of Hatti, and to my sons and grandsons. Observe the oath and the authority of the King. I . . . will protect you, Tuppi-Teššub . . . [But if] you commit [. . .] and at a time when the King of Egypt [is hostile to me, you] secretly [send] your messenger to him [or you otherwise become hostile] to the King of Hatti [and cast] off the authority of the King of Hatti and become a subject of the King of Egypt, you, Tuppi-Teššub, will have transgressed this oath . . . Whoever is [my] enemy shall be your enemy. [Whoever is my friend] shall be your friend.8
Another treaty similarly demands:
You shall be at peace with my friend and hostile to my enemy. If the King of Hatti goes [to war] against the land of Ḫanigalbat,* or Egypt, or Babylonia, or the land of Alshi—whatever lands that are located near the borders of [your] land which are hostile to the King of Hatti . . . [when the King] goes out to attack them, [if you] do not mobilize wholeheartedly with infantry [and chariotry] and do not fight [wholeheartedly], you will have violated the oath.9
In short, these treaties almost always specified that the vassal state’s leader will never leave the suzerain’s “protection” or otherwise break faith with him.10 There were further demands: payment of annual tribute, refraining from attacking another vassal of the suzerain, and so forth. The treaty also included the requirement that the text of the agreement be placed in the vassal’s sanctuary and that it be read out in public at regular intervals. The treaty then ended with a long list of the gods and goddesses who acted as witnesses to its enactment, followed by a detailing of the (divinely authorized) curses that would befall any vassal state that failed to uphold the treaty’s conditions, as well as the blessings that would accompany its faithful adherence.
When biblical scholars became aware of the ancient suzerainty treaties, starting in the 1950s, they were struck by some of the resemblances between them and the Ten Commandments.11 Thus, the fact that the Ten Commandments start with the brief sentence “I am the LORD your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt, the place of bondage” seemed to tally with the first two elements of the Hittite treaty formula, the “self-identification of the speaker” and the “historical prologue” (though this prologue is considerably shorter than in the Hittite treaties). More important, however, was the first commandment per se, “You shall have no other gods beside Me,”* which seemed to parallel the demand in Hittite (and later, Assyrian) suzerainty treaties that the vassal remain faithful to the suzerain and not form any alliance with another nation. We have seen that exclusive worship of one deity was a rather unusual requirement for an ancient Near Eastern god to make. But this very fact may help explain why the treaty form was used: it was a way of presenting God as a kind of divine suzerain who was simply demanding what any suzerain regularly demanded of his subjects, exclusive loyalty.
Other provisions of the treaty format are lacking in the Ten Commandments as presented in Exodus chapter 20, but they are found elsewhere. In particular, scholars pointed out that the overall format of the book of Deuteronomy seems to match closely that of the suzerain treaty, starting with the self-identification of the suzerain (Deut 1:1–5), a lengthy historical prologue (1:6–3:29), and treaty stipulations (all the laws of Deut 4:1–26:19, including, of course, the demand not to worship “the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the host of heaven” in 4:19 and following); these are followed by the provision for the deposit of the document (Deut 27:1–26), and a section of blessings and curses (Deut 28:1–68). (Since Deuteronomy is a “treaty” between God and Israel, there is no section of divine witnesses). An equally remarkable set of resemblances is found in a third biblical text, chapter 24 of the book of Joshua, where virtually all of the Hittite treaty elements appear to be present, even the “divine witnesses” provision, which is hinted at when, at the very end, Joshua points to a certain stone, “which, since it heard all the words that the LORD spoke to us, it will be a witness against you if you break faith with the LORD your God” (Josh 24:27).
A Religion of Laws?
Given all this, it is difficult not to accept the idea that there is some connection between these ancient suzerainty treaties and the various biblical texts cited, though some intermediate channels of influence may remain undiscovered.12 Israel’s God was indeed like a conquering suzerain—first and foremost because He demanded absolute loyalty and the avoidance of any foreign entanglements; but He was also a bit like a conquistador in the sense that, while originally connected to southern and/or eastern sites like Sinai,13 He now “annexed” the people of Israel and the far-off territory of Canaan to which they were headed. In fact, He moved there Himself. True, He didn’t intend to do so at first. It was only Moses’ pleading that persuaded him to abandon the “mountain of God” [or: “of the gods”] and accompany His newly acquired favorite all the way into Canaan.*
Moses said to the LORD, “Look, You are telling me to take this people up [to Canaan], but You haven’t told me who You are going to send along with me. And You [just] said that You know me by name, and [said to me] “You have found favor in My eyes.” So now, if I indeed have found favor in Your eyes, let me know Your ways so that I may obey You—so that I will [continue to] find favor in Your eyes, and You will consider this nation as Your people.” And He said: “I will send my Presence [literally, “My Face,” apparently, some kind of angel or divine hypostasis]* with you, but I Myself will be leaving you.” And he said to Him: “If Your Presence is not going, please do not make us leave this place. But how can it truly be demonstrated that I have found favor in Your eyes—I and Your people—unless You Yourself go along with us? In this way I and Your people will be clearly differentiated from all the other people on this earth.” And the LORD said to Moses, “I will do even this thing that you have said, because you have indeed found favor in My eyes, and I know you by name.” (Exod 33:12–17)
So it was that the deity named YHWH followed the Israelites from His former home to take up residence in Canaan.14 Thus, in both its aspects (the demand of exclusive loyalty as well as God’s suzerain-like act of annexation), the suzerainty treaty form well captured the precise nature of Israel’s relationship with its God. And, while the prohibition of worshiping other deities was foremost, the other laws of this covenant would go on to shape the life of every Israelite—keeping the Sabbath, honoring parents, and all the other commandments of the Decalogue.
Interestingly, however, this does not seem to have happened all at once. In fact, quite the opposite appears to have been the case: for a long time, keeping divinely established laws was a notion hardly mentioned. Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and other early figures all offered sacrifices to God, but there is no indication that there were any rules governing how or what to sacrifice. The same is true of other things,15 indeed, of most of the Ten Commandments. To be sure, there were some biblical rules: Cain is punished for murdering his brother; Joseph knows
that sleeping with his master’s wife would be “a sin against God” (Gen 39:9). But these and other rules are of the sort found in almost every society. There is little hint in these early narratives of what Israel’s religion would later become.
One might say that this is just the point: these narratives describe the state of things before the great revelation of divine law at Mount Sinai. But things don’t seem to have changed much after that episode. Who in the period of the Judges, which followed the great Sinai revelation, ever mentions those laws? Not Gideon or Deborah or Samson or any other Israelite leader in the period of the Judges. Did any of these people keep the Sabbath? King David lived even after their time,16 yet he seems to have gone about his life without ever referring to the laws of Sinai or showing any awareness of them. Even when he commits his great sin—having relations with another man’s wife and then arranging for the man to be killed in battle—neither he nor the biblical narrator make any reference to the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery and murder, though these are hardly obscure. Indeed, when the prophet Nathan comes to rebuke David after this incident, he presents his rebuke in the form of a parable, as if he had to convince David that what he had done was wrong. Why didn’t Nathan just say: “David, you have violated two of the most important laws in Israel, enshrined in the Ten Commandments; God will surely punish you for this”?