by Paul Johnson
Yet the north left a legacy to the south, which was to provide the germ of the new phase of the religion of Yahweh, flowering in the south during the last days of old Jerusalem. When Samaria fell, some literate refugees escaped the deportations and came south, where they were received and resettled in Jerusalem. One of them brought with him the writings of an obscure prophet called Hosea, which were then put into shape by a southern hand.204 Hosea had been prophesying and writing on the eve of the destruction of the northern kingdom. He was the first Israelite to perceive clearly that military and political failure was an inevitable punishment visited on the chosen people by God because of their paganism and moral failings. In a brilliantly written and often poetic text, he predicted the fall of Samaria. God would break in pieces their idols: ‘For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.’ And to all the sinful worshippers of Yahweh he warns: ‘Ye have ploughed wickedness, ye have reaped iniquity.’205
Hosea is a mysterious figure, and in some ways his writing is among the most impenetrable in the whole Bible. His tone is often dark and pessimistic. He had the power, which was to become characteristic of so many Jewish writers, to convey the sense of having suffered, yet to have retained an inextinguishable spark of hope. He may have been a reformed drinker and womanizer. He laments: ‘Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart.’206 Sexuality in particular arouses his intense loathing. He says that God told him to marry the whore Gomer, and have children by her—Gomer standing both for the ritual prostitutes of the pagan temples and for Israel herself, who left her true husband, Yahweh, to fornicate with Baal. He denounces all the institutions of the north: indeed he thinks the north should never have existed at all, since Israel and Judah were properly one. Political solutions were useless; Jehu’s purge was wicked. The organized priesthood was a scandal: ‘as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests murder in the way by consent: for they commit lewdness’. The colleges of prophets, at the royal shrines and elsewhere, were no better: ‘the prophet also shall fall with thee in the night…the prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad’.207
So Israel with its existing institutions was doomed, and would be carried away into exile. But in the long run this did not matter. For God loved his people. He punished, but he forgave: ‘he hath smited, and he will bind us up’. Then, in a strikingly prophetic phrase, he adds: ‘in the third day he shall raise us up, and we shall live in his sight’.208 What mattered was not material preparation, but a change in human hearts. It was love for God, the response to God’s love for us, which would ensure Israel’s redemption, and enable a purged and purified ‘remnant’ to carry the faith into the future.
This remarkable message, in which for the first time an Israelite thinker seems to envisage a religion of the heart, divorced from a particular state and organized society, was received in a Judah which was terrified by the collapse of its northern neighbour and feared a similar fate. Judah was poorer than the north, more rural, less dominated by military power-politics and closer to the roots of Yahweh-worship, though both the Bible narrative and the excavation of Jerusalem in 1961-7 provide evidence of backsliding into paganism. The ordinary people of the land, the am ha-arez, were important there. They made their first appearance in history in 840 BC, when they overthrew the despotic queen-widow Athaliah, who seized the throne and introduced Baal-worship into the Temple. The Second Book of Kings makes clear that, in the constitutional restoration which followed, the notion of the theocratic democracy was revived. For it was a man of religion, Jehoiada, who led the popular uprising, and he insisted that the people should be recognized as a political and constitutional force: ‘And Jehoiada made a covenant between the Lord and the king and the people, that they should be the Lord’s people; between the king also and the people.’209 In no other country in the Near East at that time, or even in Greece for long after, could such a novel arrangement have been drawn up. Indeed, as the shadows of imperialism fell on Judah too, the am ha-arez was given the specific right to elect the king if the succession to the throne was in doubt.
When Israel fell, Hezekiah King of Judah, whose professional army was meagre and much inferior to the old chariot-army of the north, used the support of the am ha-arez to refortify Jerusalem by building a new wall on the western ridge: he ‘set to work resolutely and built up all the wall that was broken down, and raised towers upon it, and outside it he built another wall’. He also prepared against an Assyrian siege by driving through the Siloam Tunnel, which took the water from the Gihon spring into a cistern cut into the rock, a channel then carrying the overflow into the Kedron Brook. The town had access to this vast cistern without besiegers being aware of the arrangement. This too is described in the Bible,210 and was strikingly confirmed when the tunnel was explored in 1867-70. A contemporary inscription, recording the completion of the work in Hebrew, was found on the walls:
This is the story of the boring through: while [the tunnellers lifted] the pick, each towards his fellow, and whilst three cubits [yet remained] to be bored through, [there was heard] the voice of a man calling his fellow, for there was a split in the rock on the right hand and on [the left hand]. And of the day of the boring through, the tunnellers struck, each in the direction of his fellow, pick against pick. And the water started to flow from the source to the pool, twelve hundred cubits.211
Jerusalem did, in fact, survive a fierce siege, by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, in 701 BC. The instrument of salvation was not so much the new walls and cistern, as a violent outbreak of bubonic plague, carried by mice, which struck the Assyrian camp, to which the Greek historian Herodotus later referred. In the Second Book of Kings it is seen as miraculous: ‘And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning behold, they were all dead corpses.’212 The rulers of Judah also sought safety in various alliances, with small neighbouring states, and even with vast, feeble Egypt, ‘the broken reed’, on which, as the Assyrians sneered, ‘if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it’.213
Increasingly, however, the rulers and peoples of Judah began to link their ultimate political and military fate with their current theology and moral behaviour. The notion seems to have spread that the people could only be saved by faith and works. But the concept of a religious solution for the national problem of survival-the very opposite of the idea which drove Israel into kingship at the time of the Philistine invasion-itself drove Judah in two divergent directions. How could Yahweh most effectively be appeased? The priests of the Jerusalem Temple argued that it could only be done by destroying, once and for all, the suspect cultic practices of the old high places and provincial temples, and concentrating worship solely in Jerusalem, where orthodoxy could be maintained in all its purity. The process was accelerated in 622 BC when, during repairs to the Temple, Hilkiah the high-priest found a book of ancient writings, perhaps the original text of the Pentateuch, perhaps just the Book of Deuteronomy, giving the covenant between God and Israel and culminating in the terrifying curses of Chapter 28. This discovery created panic, for it seemed to confirm Hosea’s prophetic warnings and suggested that the fate of the north was about to be visited on the south. The king, Josiah, ‘rent his clothes’ and ordered a total reform of the cult. All images were destroyed, the high places closed down, pagan, heterodox and heretic priests were massacred, and the fundamentalist reform culminated in a solemn national celebration of the Passover, of a kind never before staged in Jerusalem.214 Hence, by a curious paradox, the chief beneficiary of this return to the roots of the nation’s religious past was the Jerusalem Temple, introduced as a quasi-pagan innovation by Solomon. The power of its priests increased sharply, and it became the national—or at any rate the official—arbiter of all religious truth.
But in this doom-laden period, a second and unofficial line of thought began to express itself. It pointed to salvation in quite
a different direction, which was eventually found to be the true one. Hosea had written of the power of love and called for a change in men’s hearts. A younger contemporary of his, a southerner, carried these ideas further. Isaiah lived at the time when the northern kingdom was under sentence of death. Unlike most of the heroic figures in the Bible, he was not born poor: according to the tradition of the Babylonian Talmud, he was the nephew of King Amaziah of Judah.215 But his ideas were populist or democratic. He put no faith in armies and walls, kings and magnificent temples. His work marks the point at which the Israelite religion began to spiritualize itself, to move from a specific location in space and time on to the universalist plane. It is divided into two parts: Chapters 1 to 39 deal with his life and prophesyings in the period 740-700 BC; Chapters 44-66, or Deutero-Isaiah, date from much later, and the historical connection between the two is not clear, though the development of the ideas is logical enough.
Isaiah was not only the most remarkable of the prophets, he was by far the greatest writer in the Old Testament. He was evidently a magnificent preacher, but it is likely he set his words down in writing. They certainly achieved written form very early and remained among the most popular of all the holy writings: among the texts found at Qumran after the Second World War was a leather scroll, 23 feet long, giving the whole of Isaiah in fifty columns of Hebrew, the best preserved and longest ancient manuscript of the Bible we possess.216 The early Jews loved his sparkling prose with its brilliant images, many of which have since passed into the literature of all civilized nations. But more important than the language was the thought: Isaiah was pushing humanity towards new moral discoveries.
All the themes of Isaiah are interrelated. Like Hosea, he is concerned to warn of catastrophe. ‘Watchman, what of the night?’ he asks, ‘Watchman, what of the night?’ Foolish men take no notice: they say: ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’ Or they put their trust in fortifications and alliances. Instead they should obey the Lord’s command: ‘Set thy house in order.’ This means a moral change of heart, an internal reform for both individuals and the community. Social justice must be the aim. Men must cease to pursue wealth as the main aim in life: ‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place.’ God will not tolerate the oppression of the weak. He demands: ‘What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor, saith the Lord God of hosts.’217
Isaiah’s second theme is repentance. Provided there is a change of heart, the Lord is always forgiving. ‘Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.’ What God wants from man is a recognition and a reciprocation of his holiness—‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory’—and Isaiah imagines the angels touching men’s lips with a coal of fire to burn away sin. And when sinful man changes his heart, and seeks not wealth and power but holiness, Isaiah introduces his third theme: the idea of an age of peace, when men ‘shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’ In this age of peace, ‘the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose’.218
Isaiah, however, is not simply preaching a new system of ethics. Coming from an historically minded people, he sees the will of God, cause and effect, sin and repentance, proceeding in a definite linear direction. He provides a vision of the future, and it is a vision peopled with distinct personages. At this point he introduces his fourth theme: the idea not just of a collective turning from sin, but of a specific saviour-figure: ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’ This special babe shall be an agent in the age of peace: ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.’ But he will also be a great ruler: ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.’219
Isaiah not only wrote but preached in the Temple. He was not, however, talking of a religion of official cult, of endless sacrifices and priestly ceremonies, but of an ethical religion of the heart: he was reaching over the heads of the priests to the people. A strong talmudic tradition says that he was murdered in the reign of the idol-worshipping King Manasseh; but he was not welcome to the orthodox priesthood, the Temple establishment, either. Martyrdom was the theme beginning to emerge more and more insistently in Israelite writing. In the second part of Isaiah, a new character emerges, who seems to be linked to the saviour-figure of the first: the Suffering Servant, who carries the sins of the whole community and, by his sacrifice, purges them, and who also personifies and directs to a triumphant conclusion the mission of the nation.220 The Suffering Servant echoes Isaiah’s own voice and fate, and the two parts of the book have a unity even though as much as two centuries separate their written composition. What, as a whole, the Book of Isaiah does is to mark a notable maturing of the religion of Yahweh. It is now concerned with justice and with judgment: judgment of nations and judgment of the individual soul. In Deutero-Isaiah in particular, the stress is on the individual as the bearer of faith, outside the claims of tribe, race, nation. Not just Elijah, but each and all of us has the ‘still, small voice’ of conscience. It is all part of the discovery of the individual, a giant step forward in human self-knowledge. The Greeks would soon be pushing in the same direction, but the Israelites, or as we shall soon call them, the Jews, were the forerunners.
Moreover, unlike the Greeks, the Israelites, under the inspiration of Isaiah, were moving towards a pure monotheism. There are many passages in the earlier parts of the Bible where Yahweh is seen not so much as the sole God but as the most powerful one, who can act in other gods’ territories.221 In Deutero-Isaiah, however, the existence of other gods is denied, not just in practice but in ideological theory: ‘I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.’222 Moreover, it is now stated clearly that God is universal, ubiquitous and omnipotent. God is the motivating force, and the sole motivating force, throughout history. He created the universe; he directs it; he will end it. Israel is part of his plan, but then so is everyone else. So if the Assyrians strike, they do so at his command; and if the Babylonians carry the nation off into exile, that is God’s will too. The wilderness religion of Moses is beginning to mature into a sophisticated world faith, to which all humanity can turn for answers.223
That the message of Isaiah penetrated into the people’s consciousness before the fall of Jerusalem we cannot doubt. But in the last decades before the catastrophe, his powerful voice was joined by another living one, less poetic but equally penetrating. We know more about Jeremiah than any other of the pre-Exilic writers because he dictated his sermons and autobiography to his scribal pupil, Baruch.224 His life was closely interwoven with the tragic history of his country. He was a Benjaminite, of a priestly family, from a village just north-east of Jerusalem. He began preaching in 627, in the tradition of Hosea and to some extent of Isaiah. He saw the nation as woefully sinful, hastening to its doom: ‘This people hath a revolting and a rebellious heart.’ He had no time, like Hosea, for the religious establishment, whether priests, scribes, ‘wise men’ or temple prophets: ‘The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so: and what will ye do in the end thereof?’225 He saw the great pro-Temple religious reform, under Josiah, as a total failure, and soon after the death of the king, in 609 BC, he went to the Temple and preached a furious sermon, saying so. As a result he was very nearly killed and forbidden to go near the Temple quarter. His own village, even his family, turned against him. He could not or would not marry. In his isolation and loneliness, he exhibits signs in his writings of paranoia, as we would call it: ‘Cu
rsed be the day wherein I was born,’ he writes. And again: ‘Why is my pain perpetual, my wound incurable?’ He felt he was surrounded by enemies who ‘devised devices against me’, and that ‘I was like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter.’226 There was some truth in this: not only was Jeremiah forbidden to preach but his writings were burned.
This unpopularity was understandable. For at a time when the ‘Foe from the North’, as he put it, Nebuchadnezzar and his army, grew ever more menacing, and all in the kingdom were striving to find some way out of the disaster, Jeremiah appeared to be preaching defeatism. He said the people and their rulers were themselves the authors of their danger through their wickedness. The enemy was merely the instrument of God’s wrath, and was thus bound to prevail. This seemed like black fatalism: hence the notion of the ‘Jeremiad’. But what his contemporaries missed was the other part of his message, the reasons for hope. For Jeremiah was saying that the destruction of the kingdom did not matter. Israel was still the chosen of the Lord. It could perform the mission given to it by God just as well in exile and dispersal as within the confines of its petty nation-state. Israel’s link with the Lord would survive defeat because it was intangible and therefore indestructible. Jeremiah was not preaching despair; on the contrary, he was preparing his fellow Israelites to meet despair, and overcome it. He was trying to teach them how to become Jews: to submit to conquering power and accommodate themselves to it, to make the best of adversity, and to cherish the long-term certainty of God’s justice in their hearts.
