History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  The lesson was needed, for the end of the First Commonwealth was in sight. Three years before Jeremiah preached his Temple sermon, the Assyrian empire suddenly collapsed and the new power of Babylon moved into the vacuum it left. In 605 BC, Babylon won the decisive battle of Karchemish, destroying the army of Egypt, the ‘broken reed’. Jerusalem fell in 597 BC, the Babylonian Chronicle, now in the British Museum, noting: ‘In the seventh year, in the month of Kislev, [Nebuchudnezzar] mustered his troops, and having marched to the land of Hatti, besieged the city of Judah, and on the second day of the month of Adar took the city and captured the king. He appointed therein a king of his own choice, received its heavy tribute and sent [them] to Babylon.’ This gives us the exact date, 16 March. The Second Book of Kings adds that the King of Judah, Jehoiakim, was taken to Babylon with ‘all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and all the smiths’; none remained, except ‘the poorest people of the land’. The gold vessels in the Temple were likewise ‘cut in pieces’ and carried off.227

  Nor was this the end of Judah’s sorrows. Under Zedekiah, the Israelite governor the Babylonians had appointed, and who had sworn fealty to them, the city rose up, and was again besieged. In 1935 the archaeologist J. L. Starkey excavated the gatehouse at Lachish and found there inscribed ostraca now known as the Lachish Letters. They date from the autumn of 589 BC, are dispatches from an outpost to a Lachish staff officer, and cover the last phase of Jerusalem’s freedom. One has a reference to ‘a prophet’, perhaps Jeremiah himself. Another states that Jerusalem, Lachish and Azekah are the only Israelite enclaves left. In 587/6, Jerusalem’s walls were breached and the starving city surrendered. In an appalling scene, Zedekiah’s children were murdered in front of him, and when he had witnessed this dreadful sight, his eyes were put out, standard punishment for a vassal who broke his oath. The Temple was torn down, the walls demolished, the great city houses wrecked and the old town of Millo, dating back from before David’s conquest, slid into the ravine.228

  There was, however, one vital difference between the Babylonian conquest of Judah and the Assyrian descent on the north. The Babylonians were much less ruthless. They did not colonize. No strange tribes were moved in from the east, to cover the Promised Land with pagan shrines. The poor people, the am ha-arez, were left without leaders but they could cling to their religion after a fashion. Moreover, the Benjaminites, who seem to have submitted in 588 BC, were not exiled, and their cities of Gibeon, Mizpah and Bethel were left intact. All the same, there was a great scattering of the nation. It was a diaspora as well as an exile, for many fled north, to Samaria, or to Edom and Moab. Some went into Egypt. Among them was Jeremiah himself. He had behaved with great obstinacy and courage in the final days of Jerusalem, insisting that resistance was useless and that Nebuchudnezzar was the agent of the Lord, sent to punish Judah for its wickedness. So they put him under arrest. After the fall of the city, he wished to remain there and share the life of the poor; but a group of the citizens dragged him with them and settled across the Egyptian border, where he continued, in great old age, to denounce the sins which had brought on the Lord’s vengeance, and to put his faith in a ‘remnant’, a ‘small number’ who would see his words justified by history. There his voice faded into silence, the first Jew.229

  PART TWO

  Judaism

  Among the first group of the elite forced into Babylonian exile in 597 BC was a senior and learned priest called Ezekiel. His wife had died during the last siege of the city, and he lived and died in lonely exile, on the Chebar Canal near Babylon.1 Sitting on its banks, in bitterness and despair, he experienced a divine vision: ‘a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire enfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire’.2 This was the first of a series of intense visual experiences, unique in the Bible for the violent colours and dazzling light which Ezekiel saw and set down, ransacking his vocabulary for words with which to describe them: the colours are of topaz, sapphires, rubies, the light is flashing and radiant, it sparkles and glitters and blinds and burns in its fiery heat. His long book is confused and confusing, with dream-like sequences and terrifying images, threats, curses and violence. He is one of the greatest writers in the Bible, and one of the most popular, in his own time and since. But he surrounds himself in mysteries and enigmas, almost against his will. Why, he asks, do I always have to talk in riddles?

  Yet in essence this weird and passionate man had a firm and powerful message to deliver: the only salvation was through religious purity. States and empires and thrones did not matter in the long run. They would perish through God’s power. What mattered was the creature God had created in his image: man. Ezekiel describes how God took him to a valley which was full of bones, and asked him: ‘Son of Man, can these bones live?’ Then, before his terrified gaze, the bones begin to rattle and shake and come together: God puts on them sinews, flesh and skin, and finally he breathes into them, ‘and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceeding great army’.3 The Christians were later to interpret this fearsome scene as an image of the Resurrection of the dead, but to Ezekiel and his audience it was a sign of the resurrection of Israel, though of an Israel closer to and more dependent on God then ever before, each man and woman created by God, each individually responsible to him, each committed from birth to the lifelong obedience of his laws. If Jeremiah was the first Jew, it was Ezekiel and his visions which gave the dynamic impulse to the formulation of Judaism.

  The Exile necessarily meant a break with the tribal past. Indeed, ten of the tribes had already disappeared. Ezekiel insisted, like Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, that the calamities which befell the Jews were the direct and inescapable result of sinful breach of the Law. But whereas earlier histories and prophecies had dwelt on the sense of collective guilt, and attributed to kings and leaders the wickedness which had brought down divine wrath on all, the exiled Jews now had no one to blame but their individual selves. God, wrote Ezekiel, no longer punished people collectively for the sin of a leader, or the present generation for the faults of their ancestors. ‘As I live,’ God insisted thunderously, the old Israelite saying, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge’, was no longer true. It was obsolete, to be discarded. ‘Behold, all souls are mine,’ God told Ezekiel, and each was individually responsible to him: ‘the soul that sinneth, it shall die’.4 The idea of the individual had always, of course, been present in Mosaic religion, since it was inherent in the belief that each man and woman was created in God’s image. It had been powerfully reinforced by the sayings of Isaiah. With Ezekiel it became paramount, and thereafter individual accountability became of the very essence of the Jewish religion.

  Many consequences flowed from this paramountcy. Between 734 and 581 BC there were six distinct deportations of the Israelites, and more fled voluntarily to Egypt and other parts of the Near East. From this time onwards, a majority of Jews would always live outside the Promised Land. Thus scattered, leaderless, without a state or any of the normal supportive apparatus provided by their own government, the Jews were forced to find alternative means to preserve their special identity. So they turned to their writings—their laws, and the records of their past. From this time we hear more of the scribes. Hitherto, they had simply been secretaries, like Baruch, writing down the words of the great. Now they became an important caste, setting down in writing oral traditions, copying precious scrolls brought from the ruined Temple, ordering, editing and rationalizing the Jewish archives. For a time indeed they were more important than the priests, who had no temple to underline their glory and indispensability. The exile was conducive to scribal effort. The Jews were reasonably treated in Babylon. Tablets found near the Ishtar Gate of the ancient city list rations doled out to captives, including ‘Yauchin, king of the land of Yahud’—this is Jehoiakim. Some of the Jews became
merchants. The first success stories of the diaspora were told. Mercantile wealth financed the scribal effort, and the work of keeping the Jews in their faith. If the individual was responsible for obeying the Law, he must know what the Law is. So it must not merely be set down and copied, but taught.

  Hence it was during the Exile that ordinary Jews were first disciplined into the regular practice of their religion. Circumcision, which distinguished them ineffaceably from the surrounding pagans, was insisted upon rigorously, and the act became a ceremony and so part of the Jewish life-cycle and liturgy. The concept of the Sabbath, strongly reinforced by what they learned from Babylonian astronomy, became the focus of the Jewish week, and ‘Shabbetai’ was the most popular new name invented during the Exile. The Jewish year was now for the first time punctuated by the regular feasts: Passover celebrated the founding of the Jewish nation; Pentecost the giving of the laws, that is the founding of their religion; Tabernacles, the wanderings in the desert where nation and religion were brought together; and, as the consciousness of individual responsibility sank into their hearts, the Jews began to celebrate too the New Year in memory of the creation, and the Day of Atonement in anticipation of judgment. Again, Babylonian science and calendrical skills helped to regularize and institutionalize this annual religious framework. It was in exile that the rules of faith began to seem all-important: rules of purity, of cleanliness, of diet. The laws were now studied, read aloud, memorized. It is probably from this time that we get the Deuteronomic injunction: ‘These commandments which I give you this day are to be kept in your heart; you shall repeat them to your sons, and speak of them indoors and out of doors, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on the hand and wear them as a phylactery on the forehead; write them up on the doorposts of your homes and of your gates.’5 In exile the Jews, deprived of a state, became a nomocracy—voluntarily submitting to rule by a Law which could only be enforced by consent. Nothing like this had occurred before in history.

  The Exile was short in the sense that it lasted only half a century after the final fall of Judah. Yet its creative force was overwhelming. We come here to an important point about Jewish history. As we have already noted, there is an inherent conflict between the religion and the state of Israel. In religious terms, there have been four great formative periods in Jewish history: under Abraham, under Moses, during and shortly after the Exile, and after the destruction of the Second Temple. The first two produced the religion of Yahweh, the second two developed and refined it into Judaism itself. But in none of these periods did the Jews possess an independent state, though it is true that, during the Mosaic period, they were not actually ruled by anyone else.

  Conversely, it is also notable that when the Israelites, and later the Jews, achieved settled and prosperous self-government, they found it extraordinarily difficult to keep their religion pure and incorrupt. The decay set in rapidly after the conquest of Joshua; it again appeared under Solomon, and was repeated in both northern and southern kingdoms, especially under rich and powerful kings and when times were good; exactly the same pattern would return again under the Hasmoneans and under such potentates as Herod the Great. In self-government and prosperity, the Jews always seemed drawn to neighbouring religions, whether Canaanite, Philistine-Phoenician or Greek. Only in adversity did they cling resolutely to their principles and develop their extraordinary powers of religious imagination, their originality, their clarity and their zeal. Perhaps, then, they were better off without a state of their own, more likely to obey the law and fear God when others had the duties and temptations of ruling them. Jeremiah was the first to perceive the possibility that powerlessness and goodness were somehow linked, and that alien rule could be preferable to self-rule. He comes close to the notion that the state itself was inherently evil.

  These ideas had deep roots in Israelite history, going back to the Nazarites and Rechabites. They were inherent in Yahwehism itself, since God, not man, is the ruler. There are times when the Bible seems to suggest that the whole aim of righteousness is to overturn existing, man-made, order: ‘Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill laid low.’6 In Chapter 2 of the First Book of Samuel, his mother Hannah sings a triumphant hymn to subversion in the name of God, to divine revolution: ‘He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes’;7 and the Virgin Mary was later to echo the same theme in the Magnificat. The Jews were the yeast, producing decomposition of the existing order, the chemical agent of change in society—so how could they be order and society itself?8

  From this point forward, therefore, we note the existence of an Exile and a diaspora mentality among the Jews. The Babylonian empire was soon replaced by the alliance of Persians and Medes created by Cyrus the Great, who had no wish whatever to keep the Jews in custody. But many of them, perhaps the majority, preferred to remain in Babylon, which became a great centre of Jewish culture for 1,500 years. Other Jewish communities settled in Egypt, not just across the border, as Jeremiah did, but as far down the Nile as the island of Elephantine, near the First Cataract: there, among other documents, a papyrus letter has survived in which the Jewish community request permission to rebuild their temple.9 Even among those who did return to Judah, there was an exile-minded element, who took Jeremiah’s view that there was a positive virtue in the Exile until the day of perfect purity dawned. They lived on the desert fringe and saw themselves as internal exiles, in what they called ‘The Land of Damascus’, a symbol of deportation, where Yahweh had his sanctuary; they waited for God’s good time, when a star and a holy leader would take them back to Jerusalem. These exilics were descendants of the Rechabites and precursors of the Qumran sect.10

  Indeed, it may be that the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, was himself the instigator of the Return. The faith of the Persian ruling class was ethical and universalistic, unlike the intolerant, narrow nationalism of the earlier imperial powers. Cyrus himself was a Zoroastrian, believing in one, eternal, beneficent being, ‘Creator of all things through the holy spirit’.11 Under Cyrus, the Persians developed a radically different imperial religious policy to the Assyrians and Babylonians. They were happy to respect the religious beliefs of subject peoples, provided these were compatible with acceptance of their own authority. Indeed Cyrus seems to have regarded it as a religious duty to reverse the wicked deportations and temple-destructions of his predecessors. In the Cyrus-cylinder, discovered in the palace ruins of Babylon in the nineteenth century and now in the British Museum, he stated his policy: ‘I am Cyrus, the king of the world…. Marduk, the great god, rejoices at my pious acts…. I gathered all their people and led them back to their abodes…and the gods…at the order of Marduk, the great lord, I had them installed in joy in their sanctuaries…. May all the gods whom I have led back to their cities [pray daily] for the length of my days.’12 According to Deutero-Isaiah, edited about this time, it was the Lord who commanded this restoration by Cyrus, whom it calls ‘the Lord’s anointed’.13 In the Book of Ezra the Scribe, recounting the return, Cyrus says to the Babylonian Jews: ‘The Lord, the God of Heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel.’14

  Despite Cyrus’ support and command, the first return in 538, under Shenazar, son of the former King Jehoiakim, was a failure, for the poor Jews who had been left behind, the am ha-arez, resisted it, and in conjunction with Samaritans, Edomites and Arabs, prevented the settlers building walls. A second effort, with the full backing of Cyrus’ son Darius, was made in 520 BC, under an official leader Zeurubbabel, whose authority as a descendant of David was reinforced by his appointment as Persian Governor of Judah. The Bible records that 42,360 exiles returned with him, including a large number of priests and scribes. This was the entry on to the Jerusalem scene of th
e new Jewish orthodoxy, revolving round a single, centralized temple and its lawful worship. Work on the Temple began immediately. It was built in a more humble style than Solomon’s, as Haggai 2:2 makes clear, though cedars from Lebanon were again used. The Samaritans and other Jews regarded as heretical were not allowed to take part in the work: ‘You have nothing to do with us,’ they were told.15 Perhaps because of the exclusiveness of the returning exiles, their colony did not flourish. In 458 BC it was reinforced by a third wave, led by Ezra, a priest and scribe of great learning and authority, who tried and failed to sort out the legal problems caused by heterodoxy, intermarriage and disputed ownership of land. Finally, in 445 BC, Ezra was joined by a powerful contingent headed by a leading Jew and prominent Persian official called Nehemiah, who was given the governorship of Judah and the authority to build it into an independent political unit within the empire.16

  This fourth wave at last succeeded in stabilizing the settlement, chiefly because Nehemiah, a man of action as well as a diplomat and statesman, rebuilt with commendable speed the walls of Jerusalem and so created a secure enclave from which the work of resettlement could be directed. He described how he did it in his memories, a brilliant example of Jewish historical writing. We are told of the first survey of the ruined walls in secret by night; the honours-list of those who took part and what they built; the desperate attempts of Arabs, Ammonites and others to prevent the work; its continuation under armed guard—‘For the builders, everyone had his sword girded by his side, and so builded’17—and the return into the city each night (‘none of us put off our clothes, saving that everyone put them off for washing’) and the triumphant finish. Nehemiah says the business was done in fifty-two days. The rebuilt city was smaller than Solomon’s, it was poor and to begin with it was sparsely populated. ‘The city is wide and large’, wrote Nehemiah, ‘but the people within it were few and no houses had been built.’ But families, chosen by lot, were brought in from all over Judah. Nehemiah’s energy and resourcefulness were to be an inspiration when Palestine was again resettled by Jewish activists in the twentieth century. But with the completion of his work, a sudden calm and a complete silence descends.