by Paul Johnson
But though in some ways the Israelites of Moses’ time were typical of their age, certain marked characteristics were emerging. The Mosaic laws were very strict in sexual matters. For instance, the Ugaritic laws, revealed in the Ras Shamra tablets, permitted fornication, adultery, bestiality and incest in certain circumstances.99 The Hittites would allow some forms of bestiality (though not incest). The Egyptians regarded consanguinity as relatively unimportant. The Israelites, by contrast, banned all irregular forms of sex, and they had a list of forbidden degrees of marriage, including affinity as well as consanguinity.100
The Israelites seem to have derived some of their dietary laws from the Egyptians, but there were many differences. Israelites, like Egyptians, were forbidden creatures from the sea which had no fins or scales. Pious Egyptians, however, were not supposed to eat fish at all. On the other hand they could, and did, eat many kinds of water-fowl, which the Israelites were forbidden. But they, like the Egyptians, could eat doves, pigeons, geese and other domestic fowl, partridges and quail. There seems to have been some kind of crude scientific basis, rather than pure superstition, for most of the Mosaic rules. Predatory and carnivorous animals were regarded as risky, and forbidden; ‘clean’ animals were, on the whole, exclusively vegetarian, cloven-footed and ruminant—moufflon, antelope, roebuck, ibex, fallow-deer and gazelle. Swine were forbidden because they were dangerous when eaten undercooked, harbouring parasitic organisms. The Israelites would not touch raptors or vultures either. They classified the camel as unclean because it was valuable. What is more difficult to understand is why they banned hares and coneys.
Israelite laws on hygiene usually followed Egyptian practice. There is a great deal of medical lore in the Mosaic material, and much of this also comes from Egypt, which had a medical tradition going back at least to Imhotep, around 2650 BC. Four of the most important Egyptian medical papyri, even in the copies we possess, were earlier than or contemporary with the Mosaic era. Medical empiricism was often enacted in ancient legal codes of the second millennium BC—in the law of Hammurabi, for instance, written about 500 years before Moses’ day. But the famous section in the Bible dealing with leprosy, which sets down the diagnostic and therapeutic duties of a special category of priests, is unique.
What is also unique, and already in Mosaic times possessing a long history, is the Israelite stress on circumcision. This practice was not used among the Canaanites or Philistines, or the Assyrians and Babylonians. The Edomites, Moabites and Ammonites used it, and so did the Egyptians. But none of these societies attached transcendent importance to the custom, and one has the impression it was generally dying out in the second millennium BC. This in itself attests the antiquity of the Israelite custom, which is first mentioned as being performed by Abraham as part of his original covenant. The great French scholar, Père de Vaux, believed that the Israelites first used it as an initiation rite before marriage.101 For those ancient societies which practised it, this was its function, and it was performed around the age of thirteen. But Moses’ son was circumcised at birth by his mother Zipporah (Exodus 4:24-6), and the ceremonial removal of the foreskin on the eighth day after birth was then enshrined in the Mosaic legislation (Leviticus 12:3). Thus the Israelites divorced the rite from its link to male puberty and, in accordance with their already marked tendency to historicize custom, made it an indelible symbol of an historic covenant and membership of a chosen people.102 They kept up the tradition, going back to Abraham, that ancient flint knives must be used.103 The law of circumcision was retained, long after all other early societies had abandoned it, as an indelible sign of the unity between the people and their beliefs. It was not just, as Tacitus was to sneer, to make Jews different. But of course it did this too, and was another element added to the growing pattern of anti-Semitism.104
The Sabbath was the other great and ancient institution which differentiated the Israelites from other peoples, and was also the seed of future unpopularity. The idea seems to have been derived from Babylonian astronomy, but its rationale in the Books of Exodus and Deuteronomy is variously stated as commemorating God’s rest after creation, the liberation of Israel from Egyptian slavery and the humanitarian need to give labourers, especially slaves and beasts of burden, some respite. The day of rest is one of the great Jewish contributions to the comfort and joy of mankind. But it was a holy day as well as a rest-day, being increasingly associated in the minds of the people with the belief in the elect nation of God, so that eventually Ezekiel has God present it as designed to differentiate Jews from others: ‘Moreover also I gave them my sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord that sanctify them.’105 So this, too, became an element in the belief of other peoples that the Jews held aloof from the rest of humanity.
The Israelites were already in the process of becoming very distinctive, and in certain critical respects they were spiritually in advance of their age. But they were still a primitive people by the standards of advanced societies in 1250 BC. Even in their spirituality they retained many backward elements, and continued to do so for centuries. Indeed, being both historically minded and legalistic, they were inclined to formalize and cling to old superstitions. There were many taboos, for instance, concerning sex, blood and battle.106 Belief in magic was ubiquitous and institutionalized. Moses not only talked to God face to face and presided over stupendous miracles, he also performed magic tricks. Staffs and rods which turned into snakes, the vulgar commonplace of ancient Near Eastern magic, were part of Israelite religion too, and sanctified from the age of Moses and Aaron onward. The earlier prophets, at least, were expected to perform, and often wore the magician’s apparatus. We read of charismatic cloaks or mantles, as worn by Elijah and inherited by Elisha. Zedekiah made himself a pair of magic iron horns.107 Samson illustrated the belief that hair was a locus of power, and this was reflected in ritual tonsure.108 Prophets practised ecstasy states and may have used incense and narcotics to produce impressive effects.109 In one book of the Bible alone the performances recorded include a magnet trick, a water trick, imposing disease, curing it, an antidote to poison, a bringing-back to life, causing lightning to strike, expanding an oil jar and feeding a multitude.110
All the same the Israelites were the first people to bring their reason systematically to bear on religious questions. From Moses’ day onwards, and throughout their history, rationalism was a central element in Jewish belief. In a sense, it is the central element, for monotheism is itself a rationalization. If supernatural, unearthly power exists, how can it be, as it were, radiated from woods and springs, rivers and rocks? If the motions of the sun and moon and stars can be predicted and measured, and thus obey regular laws, how can they be the source of unnatural authority, since they too are plainly part of nature? Whence, then, comes the power? Just as man learns to lord it over nature, animal and inanimate, must not divine power, a fortiori, be living and personal? And if God lives, how can his power be arbitrarily and unequally divided into a pantheon of deities? The idea of a limited god is a contradiction. Once the process of reason is applied to divinity, the idea of a sole, omnipotent and personal God, who being infinitely superior to man in power, and therefore virtue, is consistently guided in his actions by systematic ethical principles, follows as a matter of course. Looking back from the perspective of the twentieth century, we see Judaism as the most conservative of religions. But in its origins it was the most revolutionary. Ethical monotheism began the process whereby the world-picture of antiquity was destroyed.
Granted the concept of a sole, omnipotent God, the Israelites rightly deduced that he could not be, as the pagan gods were, part of the world, or even the whole; he was not one of the forces which sustained the universe, or even all of them. His dimensions were infinitely greater: the entire universe was his mere creation. The Israelites thus attributed a far greater power and distance to God than any other religion of antiquity. God is the cause of all things, from earthquakes to political and mi
litary disasters. There is no other source of power, demons being God-activated; divinity is indivisible, unique, single. And, since God is not merely bigger than the world, but infinitely bigger, the idea of representing him is absurd.111 It stands to reason, then, that to try to make an image of him is insulting. The Israelite ban on images, though not the oldest part of their religion, is very ancient and emerged soon after the cult of monotheism became established. It became the fiery symbol of the religion’s puritan fundamentalists, the aspect they found most difficult to impose on the nation as a whole, the most obvious, visible difference between the Israelite religion and all others, and the dogma the rest of the world most resented, since it meant that strict israelites, and later Jews, could not honour their gods. It was closely linked not just to Israelite exclusiveness but to aggression, since they were told not merely to forswear images but destroy them:
You shall tear down their altars, and break their pillars, and cut down their Asherim (for you shall worship no other God, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a Jealous God), lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and when you play the harlot after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and one invites you, you eat of his sacrifice, and you take of their daughters for your sons, and their daughters play the harlot after their gods and make your sons play the harlot after their gods.
This passage from Exodus reflects a terrible fear and fanaticism.112
Moreover, the Israelites were wrong to suppose—if they did suppose—that the use of images was a form of religious infantilism. Most Near Eastern religions of antiquity did not regard idols of wood or stone or bronze as gods in themselves. They saw the image as a practical means whereby the ordinary, simple worshipper can visualize the divinity and achieve spiritual communion with him. This has always been the Roman Catholic justification for the use of images, not just of God but of saints. In moving from paganism, the Israelites were clearly right to insist on a greater intellectualization of the deity, a move towards the abstract. It was part of their religious revolution. But intellectualization is difficult, and the Israelites themselves did not despise visual aids, albeit verbal images. The Bible abounds with anthropomorphism of the deity.
There is a further contradiction. How can man be made in God’s image, if the image of God is unimaginable, and therefore forbidden? Yet the idea of man as conceived in the divine image is as central to the religion as the ban on idols. In a way, it is the foundation of its morality, being an enormously comprehensive principle.113 As man is in God’s image, he belongs to God; the concept helps man to grasp that he does not possess real and permanent ownership even over himself, let alone over anything else he receives from God’s bounty. His body is a leasehold; he is answerable to God for what he does to and with it. But the principle also means that the body—man—must be treated with respect and even dignity. Man has inalienable rights. Indeed, the Mosaic code is a code not only of obligations and prohibitions but also, in embryonic form, of rights.
It is more: it is a primitive declaration of equality. Not only is man, as a category, created in God’s image; all individual men are also created in God’s image. In this sense they are all equal. Nor is this equality notional; it is real in one all-important sense. All Israelites are equal before God, and therefore equal before his law. Justice is for all, irrespective of other inequalities which may exist. All kinds of privileges are implicit and explicit in the Mosaic code, but on essentials it does not distinguish between varieties of the faithful. All, moreover, shared in accepting the covenant; it was a popular, even a democratic, decision.
Thus the Israelites were creating a new kind of society. Josephus later used the term ‘theocracy’. This he defined as ‘placing all sovereignty in the hands of God’.114 The sages were to call it ‘taking on the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven’.115 The Israelites might have magistrates of one kind or another but their rule was vicarious since God made the law and constantly intervened to ensure it was obeyed. The fact that God ruled meant that in practice his law ruled. And since all were equally subject to the law, the system was the first to embody the double merits of the rule of law and equality before the law. Philo called it ‘democracy’, which he described as ‘the most law-abiding and best of constitutions’. But by democracy he did not mean rule by all the people; he defined it as a form of government which ‘honours equality and has law and justice for its rulers’.116 He might have called the Jewish system, more accurately, ‘democratic theocracy’, because in essence that is what it was.117
In the age of Moses, then, the Israelites were strengthening and confirming a tendency we have already noted to be subversive of the existing order. They were a servile people, who rose up against their Egyptian master, the most ancient and autocratic monarchy in the world. They fled into the desert, and received their laws in mass popular assembly, not in some long-established city but on the bare mountainside from a wild leader who did not even call himself a king. We do not know where Moses’ Mount Sinai was. It may have been a still-active volcano. The present monastery of Sinai has always been a Christian site; it goes back certainly to the fourth century AD, and perhaps to about 200 years before. But even that was 1,450 years after Moses came down from the mountain. It is likely that, after the Israelites settled in Canaan, the Mosaic Sinai remained a pilgrimage site for generations. But the tradition eventually lapsed and the site fell out of memory, and it is most improbable that the early Christians went to the right place. All the same, this dramatic place, with its fierce and terrible beauty, has poetic aptness. It is the right setting for the formative act of a revolutionary people who did not recognize the cities, power and wealth of the day, and who were able to perceive that there is a moral order superior to the order of the world. Later, in a dramatic passage, Deutero-Isaiah was to express the Jewish exaltation of powerlessness in the person of the Suffering Servant of the Lord, who in the end is victorious; and later still, a Jewish sectarian, St Paul, was to ask: ‘Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?’ and to quote the Scriptures: ‘For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.’118 But the spring of this tradition opened at Sinai.119
With their long experience of being strangers and sojourners, for the Israelites their exodus from Egypt and their wanderings in the desert and mountain country of Sinai were nothing new. But this episode, of perhaps half a century, tended to confirm their singularity, their antinomianism, their apartness. It is curious, as the Jewish historian Salo Baron has pointed out, that the God they worshipped, despite his epiphany on Mount Sinai, remained portable, as in Abraham’s days: he dwelt in the Ark, a kind of large, elaborate dog-kennel, or was present in the tabernacle in the tent, or operated through the casting-lots, Urim and Tummin.120 This movable core was present even during the period of the Temple, and the idea that God has no fixed abode was easily resumed after the Temple fell and has been paramount ever since in Judaism. It fits more naturally into the Jewish notion of the universal and ubiquitous but invisible God. It reflects too an extraordinary adaptability in the people, a great skill in putting down roots quickly, pulling them up and re-establishing them elsewhere, an admirable tenacity of purpose irrespective of the setting. As Baron has put it, ‘The religious and ethnic power of perseverance, rather than the political power of expansion and conquest, became the corner-stone of Jewish belief and practice.’121
Nevertheless, it must be stressed again that the Israelites, though inclined to restlessness, were not desert nomads, by origin or inclination. Even their Sinai wanderings were not truly nomadic. The bulk of the Exodus narratives, covering some thirty-seven years, centre on the conquest of Kadesh or Qadesh, which was rich and well-watered and was taken from the settled Amalekites. Some other sites mentioned in Exodus have been tentatively identified. But plotting the wanderings on the map, though often attempted and undoubtedly entertaining, can produce nothing more than conjecture.122 One interesting t
heory is that the Levite tribe, to which Moses himself belonged and which soon claimed the exclusive right to the priesthood, was the first to settle in Kadesh and there elaborated the new religion. The other tribes were already in Canaan. The last to force its way into the Promised Land were the tribe of Joseph, from Egypt, and the Levites of Kadesh, who had been reformed by Moses as an instrument for the fervent worship of Yahweh. Under its dynamic impulse, the new Israelite society came into being, religion being the catalyst.123 It is plausible but undemonstrable.
With the entry into and conquest of Canaan, however, the pattern of historical events begins to clarify as more and more archaeological evidence confirms or illuminates the Biblical record. The Book of Joshua, called after the Israelites’ first great military commander, can now be regarded as essentially an historical account, though with important qualifications. Joshua, son of Nun of the tribe of Ephraim, was Moses’ security chief, acting as his bodyguard at Sinai and commanding the guard of the tent. He established his military reputation during the wanderings in a desperate encounter at Rephidim with a band commanded by the sheikh Amalek. Moses commanded Joshua to ‘go out, fight with Amalek’, while he himself stood ‘on top of the hill with the rod of God in mine hand’. Aaron and Hur held up the old prophet’s hands to encourage the warriors, ‘and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. And Joshua discomfited Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword.’124 Just before his death, Moses transferred the leadership to Joshua and ‘set him over the congregation’ at a solemn public ceremony. This made him a prophet as well as a general: ‘And Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom; for Moses had laid his hands upon him.’125
