History of the Jews
Page 14
Yet not even the Greeks produced a document—it is hard to know in what category to place it—so mysterious and harrowing as the Book of Job. This great essay in theodicy and the problem of evil has fascinated and baffled both scholars and ordinary people for more than two millennia. Carlyle called it ‘one of the grandest things ever written with pen’ and of all the books of the Bible it has most influenced other writers. But no one knows what it is, where it comes from or when it was written. There are over 100 words in it which occur nowhere else and it obviously raised insuperable difficulties for the ancient translators and scribes. Some scholars think it comes from Edom—but we know very little about the Edomite tongue. Others have suggested Haran, near Damascus. There are slight parallels in Babylonian literature. As long ago as the fourth century AD, the Christian scholar Theodore of Mopsuestia argued that it derived from Greek drama. It has also been presented as a translation from the Arabic. The variety of origins and influences produced testify, in a paradoxical way, to its universality. For Job, after all, is asking the fundamental question which has puzzled all men, and especially those of strong faith: why does God do these terrible things to us? Job was a text for antiquity and it is a text for modernity, a text especially for that chosen and battered people, the Jews; a text, above all, for the Holocaust.32
Job is a formidable work of Hebrew literature. With the only exception of Isaiah, no work in the Bible is written at such a sustained level of powerful eloquence. That is befitting for its subject, the justice of God. As a work of moral theology, the book is a failure because the author, like everyone else, is baffled by the problem of theodicy. But in failing, he broadens the issue and poses certain questions about the universe and the way man ought to see it. Job is crammed with natural history in poetic form. It presents a fascinating catalogue of organic, cosmic and meteorological phenomena. In Chapter 28, for instance, there is an extraordinary description of mining in the ancient world. Through this image, a view is presented of the almost unlimited scientific and technological potential of the human race, and this is then contrasted with man’s incorrigibly weak moral capacities. What the author of Job is saying is that there are two orders in creation—the physical and the moral order. To understand and master the physical order of the world is not enough: man must come to accept and abide by the moral order, and to do this he must acquire the secret of Wisdom, and this knowledge is something of an altogether different kind from, say, mining technology. Wisdom came to man, as Job dimly perceived, not by trying to penetrate God’s reasoning and motives in inflicting pain, but only through obedience, the true foundation of the moral order: ‘And he said to man: “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom: and to depart from evil is understanding.” ’
The point was made again by Ben Sira in Chapter 24 of his poem about wisdom, the Ecclesiasticus, where he says that, after the Fall, God conceived a new plan and gave this secret of his a dwelling-place in Israel.33 The Jews were to find wisdom through obedience to God, and teach humanity to do likewise. They were to overthrow the existing, physical, worldly order, and replace it by the moral order. Again, the point was echoed powerfully and paradoxically by the heretic Jew, St Paul, in the dramatic opening to his First Epistle to the Corinthians, when he quotes the Lord, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent’; and he adds, ‘Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men…[therefore] God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.’34 Within the obscurity and confusion of Job, therefore, we have yet another statement of the divine role of the Jews to overturn the existing order and the worldly way of seeing things.
Job, then, was part of the Jewish philosophical mainstream: and that mainstream was now a powerful torrent. The transformation of Judaism into the first ‘religion of the Book’ took two centuries. Before 400 BC there is no hint of a canon. By 200 BC, it was there. Of course the canon was not yet complete and final. But it was beginning to solidify fast. This had several consequences. In the first place, additions were discouraged. Prophecy, and prophets, fell into disrepute. There is a reference in the First Book of Maccabees to ‘the day when prophets ceased to appear’.35 Those who tried to prophesy were dismissed as false. When Simon Maccabeus was made leader, his term of office was declared to be indefinite ‘until a true prophet shall appear’. The Book of Zechariah has a tirade against prophets: ‘if a man continues to prophesy, his parents, his own father and mother, will say to him: “You shall lie no longer, for you have spoken falsely in the name of the Lord”.’ Prophets were ‘schooled in lust’.36 The Jewish philosopher Ben Sira, writing a little after 200 BC, boasted, ‘I will again pour out doctrine like prophecy and bequeath it to future generations.’37 But the Jews did not add him to the canon; Daniel, writing a little later (c. 168-165 BC), was also excluded. Canonization also discouraged the writing of history. It did not kill the Jewish passion completely. There were some tremendous flare-ups to come—the Books of the Maccabees, the work of Josephus, for example. But the great dynamic was running down, and when the canon was finally sanctified early in the Christian era, Jewish history, one of the glories of antiquity, would cease for a millennium and a half.
But if one effect of canonization was to curb the creativity of Jewish sacred literature, another was enormously to increase the knowledge and impact of the approved texts on the Jewish population. The books, having been authorized and copiously reproduced and distributed, were now systematically taught. The Jews began to be a schooled people, as indeed their divine role as priests to the nations demanded. A new and quite revolutionary institution in the history of religion appeared: the synagogue—prototype of the church, the chapel and the mosque—where the Bible was systematically read and taught. Such places may have existed even before the Exile, as a result of Josiah’s reform; they certainly matured during the Exile years, when the Jewish elite had no Temple; and on the Return, when all religious activity was rigorously centralized in the Jerusalem Temple, and provincial temples and high places finally disappeared, synagogues took over and taught the Temple orthodoxy which the canonical Bible encapsulated.38
This had another important consequence. With the sacred literature digested into a canon, and the canon systematically taught from a central focus, Judaism became far more homogeneous. And it was homogeneity with a pronounced puritanical and fundamentalist flavour. In the history of the Jews, the rigorists tend to win. It was Moses, the stern legal purist, who imposed his religion of Yahweh on the other tribal groups. It was the rigorists who again won at the time of Josiah’s reform. It was rigorous Judah, not compromising Israel, which survived the assault of the empires; and it was the rigorist community of Babylon, returning from Exile, which imposed its will on all Jews, excluding many, forcing many others to conform. The canon and the synagogue became instruments of this rigour, and it was to win many more victories. The process, which occurs again and again in Jewish history, can be seen in two ways: as the pearl of purified Judaism emerging from the rotten oyster of the world and worldliness; or as the extremists imposing exclusivity and fanaticism on the rest.
But however it is seen, this rigorizing tendency in Judaism posed increasing problems both for the Jews themselves and for their neighbours. Under the benevolent rule of the Persians, who received nothing but praise in the Jewish texts, the Jews began to recover and flourish. Ezra says that 42,360 Jews, plus 7,337 male and female servants and 200 ‘singing men and singing women’, returned from the Exile. The total population of refound Judah could not have been more than 70,000. Yet by the third century BC, the population of Jerusalem alone was 120,000.39 With their strong religious sense and respect for law, the Jews were disciplined and hardworking. They spread into territories bordering on Judah, particularly Galilee, Transjordan and the coast. The diaspora widened steadily. The Jews made converts
. They were beginning to be a proselytizing force. All the same, they were a small people in an age of empires, an uncompromising religious-cultural unit in a big, bruising world.
The problems began to manifest themselves from 332 BC, when Alexander of Macedon cracked the Persian empire like a rotten egg. This was the first true European invasion of Asia. In the third and most of the second millennia BC, the continental cleavage did not exist: the sea was a binding force for what was to a great extent a common international culture. But then followed the barbarian anarchy of the twelfth-eleventh centuries BC and a long Dark Age. When the world re-emerged into Iron Age civilization, the East-West division began to appear, and from the western side of it emerged one of the most powerful cultural forces the world has ever seen: the civilization of the polis, the Greek city-state.
The Greeks bred a continuing surplus population. They created a ubiquitous maritime commerce. They planted colonies throughout the Mediterranean. In Alexander’s day they pushed into Asia and Africa, and his successors carved out of his empire sprawling kingdoms: Ptolemy in Egypt, Seleucus in Syria and Mesopotamia, and later Attalus in Anatolia. From 332 to 200 BC the Jews were ruled by the Ptolemies; thereafter by the Seleucids. Among the Jews, their new rulers inspired awe and terror. The Greeks had the fearsome and then-absolute weapon of the phalanx. They built increasingly powerful machines of war, towering siege-engines, huge warships, colossal forts. Daniel gives the Jewish image of Greek militarism: ‘A fourth beast, dreadful and terrifying, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it.’40 The Jews knew all about Greek militarism, for they served the Greeks as mercenaries, as they had served the Persians. Greek military training began in the gymnasium, the primary educational instrument of the polis. But that was not its only function. Its main purpose was to promote Greek culture, as were the other institutions with which each polis was equipped: the stadium, the theatre, the odeum, the lyceum, the agora. The Greeks were superb architects. They were sculptors, poets, musicians, playwrights, philosophers and debaters. They staged marvellous performances. They were excellent traders too. In their wake, the economy boomed; living standards rose. Ecclesiastes laments the craze for wealth under Greek rule. What good, he asks, ever came from piling up immense fortunes?41 Most men, however, felt a lot of good would accrue, if the fortune were theirs. Greek economics and Greek culture both appealed strongly to the less sophisticated societies of the Near East, rather as nineteenth-century Asia and Africa found Western progress irresistible.
So the Greek colonists poured into western Asia, built their cities everywhere, and were joined by locals who wished to share their wealth and way of life. Syria and Palestine were areas of intense Greek settlement and rapid Hellenization of their existing inhabitants. The coast was soon completely Hellenized. The Greek rulers gave polis-style cities, such as Tyre, Sidon, Gaza, Straton’s Tower, Byblos and Tripoli, generous freedoms and privileges, and these in turn set up satellite cities in the interior. There was one at Shechem, another at Marissa in the south, others at Philadelphia (Amman) and Gamal across the Jordan. Soon a ring of such cities, swarming with Greeks and semi-Greeks, surrounded Jewish Samaria and Judah, which were seen as mountainous, rural and backward. The Greek orbit had a number of such queer ‘temple-states’, antique survivors, anachronisms, soon to be swept away by the irresistible modern tide of Hellenic ideas and institutions.
How were the Jews to react to this cultural invasion, which was opportunity, temptation and threat all in one? The answer is that they reacted in different ways. Though the rigorizing tendency triumphed before, during and after the Exile, and sustained itself through the teaching of the canon, there was a countervailing force in the growing stress on the individual conscience we have already noted. Spiritual individualism bred disagreement, and it strengthened the sectarianism which had always been latent, and sometimes active, in Judaism. At one extreme, the coming of the Greeks pushed more fundamentalists into the desert, to join the absolutist groups who kept up the Rechabite and Nazarite traditions, and who regarded Jerusalem as already irredeemably corrupt. The earliest texts found in the Qumran community date from about 250 BC, when the noose of Greek cities around Judah first began to tighten. The idea was to retreat into the wilderness, recapture the pristine Mosaic enthusiasm, then launch back into the cities. Some, like the Essenes, thought this could be done peacefully, by the word, and they preached in villages on the edge of the desert: John the Baptist was later in this tradition. Others, like the Qumran community, put their trust in the sword: organized themselves for war, using a symbolic twelve-tribe structure, and were planning, when a sign brought their wilderness years to an end, to launch a Joshua-like invasion of the urban areas, rather like a guerrilla movement today.42
At the other extreme, there were many Jews, including pious ones, who hated isolationism and the fanatics it bred. They even contributed to the canon, in the shape of the Book of Jonah, which, despite its absurdities and confusions, is really a plea to extend toleration and friendship to foreigners. God ends the book by putting Jonah a rhetorical question: is it not right to be forgiving to Nineveh and its teeming people, ‘that cannot discern between their right hand and their left’ and whose only sin is ignorance?43 This was an adumbration of Christ’s, ‘Forgive them father, for they know not what they do’, and it was an invitation to take the Torah to the stranger, to proselytize. That, certainly, was the view of many, perhaps the majority, of observant Jews in the diaspora. These diaspora Jews learned Greek as a matter of routine to pursue their business. In due course they translated the Scriptures into Greek—the Septuagint—and this was the primary means by which converts, or ‘Judaizers’, were made. In Alexandria, for instance, the Greek gymnasium, originally set up to prevent the Greek colonists from becoming degenerate and embracing local languages and customs, was opened to resident non-Greeks (though not to Egyptians) and the Jews eagerly took advantage of this; later, the Jewish philosopher Philo took it for granted that sons of wealthy Jewish merchants would attend one.44 They Hellenized their names, or used two sets, Hellenic names for journeys and business, Hebrew at religious services and at home.
The same tendency was at work in Palestine Judaism. The Hellenization of Hebrew-Aramaic Jewish names is reflected in inscriptions and graffiti. Many of the better-educated Jews found Greek culture profoundly attractive. The Koheleth, the writer of Ecclesiastes, shows himself torn between new foreign ideas and his inherited piety, between the critical spirit and conservatism. The impact of Hellenization on educated Jews was in many ways similar to the impact of the enlightenment on the eighteenth-century ghetto. It woke the Temple-state from its enchanted sleep. It was a destabilizing force spiritually and, above all, it was a secularizing, materialistic force.45
In Palestine, as in other Greek conquests, it was the upper classes, the rich, the senior priests, who were most tempted to ape their new rulers. It is a common experience of colonies everywhere. Acquiring Greek culture was a passport to first-class citizenship, as later would be baptism. There were some notable Jewish success stories. Just as Joseph had served pharaoh as his minister, so now clever, enterprising Jews rose high in the imperial bureaucracy. A second-century BC text, incorporated in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, tells how Joseph, son of the upper-class Tobias family (his mother was the high-priest’s sister), went to the tax-farming auction held by the Ptolemies in Alexandria: ‘Now it happened that at this time all the principal men and rulers went up out of the cities of Syria and Phoenicia to bid for their taxes; for every year the King sold them to the men of the greatest power in every city.’ Joseph won by accusing his rivals of forming a cartel to lower the price; he held the contract for twenty-two years ‘and brought the Jews from poverty and misery to a better way of life’. Joseph went further than his namesake of pharaoh’s day. He developed into another archetype: the first Jewish banker.46 As such he stood for the Hellenizing principle
in second-century BC Judah.
Between the isolationists on the one hand and the Hellenizers on the other was a broad group of pious Jews in the tradition of Josiah, Ezekiel and Ezra. Many of them did not object to Greek rule in principle, any more than they had objected to the Persians, since they tended to accept Jeremiah’s arguments that religion and piety flourished more when pagans had to conduct the corrupting business of government. They were quite willing to pay the conqueror’s taxes provided they were left to practise their religion in peace. Such a policy was later explicitly advocated by the Pharisees, who sprang from this tradition. Up to a point, pious Jews were willing to learn from the Greeks and absorbed a great many more Hellenic ideas than they were prepared to admit. There had always been a rationalizing element in Mosaic legalism and theology, and this was almost unconsciously reinforced by Greek rationalism. That is how the Pharisees created the Oral Law, which was essentially rationalistic, to apply the archaic Mosaic law to the actual world of today. It is significant that their enemies the Sadducees, who stuck rigidly to the written law and would admit no casuistry, said that the logic of the Pharisees would lead to more respect for ‘the book of Homer’ (by which they meant Greek literature) than the ‘holy scriptures’.47