The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  The Israelites who had been deported to Babylon in 597 were not badly treated. They lived together in communities in the capital or in new settlements beside the canal and were allowed a degree of autonomy. But they were shocked, bewildered, and angry. Some wanted to pay the Babylonians back in kind and dreamed of dashing their children’s heads against a rock.49 Others felt that Yahweh had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Marduk and was no longer worthy of their loyalty. How could they possibly worship a god who had no cult and no temple?50 But five years after his deportation, a young priest called Ezekiel had a terrifying vision of Yahweh’s “glory” beside the Chebar Canal.51 It was a bewildering theophany, since it was impossible to make out anything clearly in the stormy obscurity of thunder, lightning, smoke, and wind. The trauma of exile had smashed the neat, rationalistic God of the Deuteronomists. Ezekiel’s vision left him stunned for a whole week. But one thing seemed clear. God had chosen to leave Jerusalem and take up residence with the exiles. Henceforth they must live as though the “glory” previously enshrined in the temple was indeed in their midst.

  But how could they do this? A small circle of exiled priests began to construct an answer, reinterpreting old symbols and stories to build an entirely new spirituality. Scholars call this priestly layer of the Bible “P”: its most important sources were the Holiness Code (a miscellaneous collection of seventh-century laws)52 and the Tabernacle Document, the centerpiece of P’s narrative, which described the tent that the Israelites had built in the wilderness to house the divine presence.53 With these and other ancient oral traditions, P compiled the two legal books of Leviticus and Numbers, which reversed the aggressive theology of the Deuteronomists by creating a series of rituals based on the experience of exile and estrangement. P also added material to the JED narrative, so that it became a story of one tragic migration after another: the expulsion from Eden, the wanderings of Cain, the dispersal of humanity after the rebellion at Babel, the departure of Abraham from Mesopotamia, the tribes’ flight to Egypt, and the forty years in the wilderness. In P’s revised chronicle, the climax of the Exodus was no longer the bestowal of the Torah but the gift of the divine presence in the “Tent of Meeting.” God had brought his people into the Sinai desert precisely in order “to dwell (shakan), myself, in their midst.”54 The verb shakan had originally meant “to lead the life of a nomadic tent-dweller;” God would now “tent” with his wandering people wherever in the world they happened to be.55 Instead of ending the story with Joshua’s brutal conquest, P left the Israelites on the border of the Promised Land.56 Israel was not a people because the Israelites lived in a particular country, but because they lived in the presence of a God who accompanied them wherever they happened to be. Their present exile was simply the latest instance of the tragic uprooting that had given Israel special insight into the nature of the divine.

  P made a startling legal innovation. The exiles would create a sense of the divine presence by living as if they were priests serving in the Jerusalem temple. Hitherto the laity had never been expected to observe the ceremonial laws, purity regulations, and dietary rules of the temple personnel.57 But now the exiles had become a nation of priests and must live as if God were dwelling in their midst, thus ritually creating an invisible, symbolic temple. There was a profound link between exile and holiness. God had told the Israelites that he was kaddosh (“holy”), a word that literally meant “separate,” “other;” God was radically different from ordinary, mundane reality. Now the exiles must become kaddosh too.58 The legislation crafted by P was based on the principle of sacred segregation. In Leviticus, Yahweh issued detailed directions about sacrifice, diet, and social, sexual, and cultic life to differentiate the exiles from their Babylonian captors. By replicating the condition of otherness, the exiles would symbolically relocate to the realm of holiness where God was. God would “walk about” in their midst, as he had once walked with Adam in the cool of the evening.59 Babylon would become the new Eden because the rituals of separation would heal the long estrangement from the divine.

  But holiness also had a strong ethical component, because it involved absolute respect for the sacred “otherness” of every single creature. Even though they kept themselves apart, Israelites must not despise the foreigner: “If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him. You must treat him like one of your own people and love him as yourselves, for you were strangers in Egypt.”60 It was a law based on empathy and compassion, the ability to feel with the other. The experience of one’s own pain must lead to an appreciation of other people’s suffering. When P spoke of “love” he did not mean emotional tenderness. This was a law code, its language as technical and reticent as any legal ruling. In Middle Eastern treaties, to “love” meant to be helpful and loyal and to give practical support. Earlier biblical authors had commanded the Israelites to confine tribal loyalty (hesed) to their fellow Jews, but this was not true of P, whose purity regulations are remarkable in that other people are never regarded as contaminating.61 The foreigner was not to be shunned but loved. Impurity came only from yourself, not from your enemies.

  P insisted that Israelites must honor all life. Death was the great contaminator. It was an insult to come into the presence of the living God without undergoing a simple ritual of purification after coming into contact with the death of one of his creatures. In the dietary laws forbidding the eating of “unclean” animals, P developed a modified version of the Indian ideal of ahimsa. Like other ancient peoples, the Israelites did not regard the ritual slaughter of animals as killing; sacrifice was universally held to give the beast posthumous existence, and it was usually forbidden to eat an animal that had not been ritually consecrated in this way. P permitted the Israelites to sacrifice and consume only domestic animals from their own flocks. These were the “pure” or “clean” animals, which were members of the community; during their lifetime they must be allowed to rest on the Sabbath, and nobody could harm them in any way.62

  But the “unclean” animals—dogs, deer, and other wild creatures— must not be killed at all; it was forbidden to trap, exploit, or eat them under any circumstances.63 This was not because they were “dirty.” It was perfectly all right to touch them while they were alive. They became unclean only after death.64 The law that forbade contact with a dead animal’s corpse protected it: because the carcass could not be skinned or dismembered, it was not worthwhile to hunt or trap it. For the same reasons, those animals classed as “abominations” (sheqqets) must be avoided only when they were dead. These tiny “swarming creatures” were vulnerable and should inspire compassion; because they were prolific and “teemed,” they enjoyed God’s blessing, so it was an “abomination” to harm them.65 God had blessed the unclean animals on the day of creation, and had saved pure and impure animals during the Flood. To damage any one of them was an affront to his holiness.

  This is the context in which we should read P’s most famous work, the creation hymn in the first chapter of Genesis. Like all ancient cosmogonies, its purpose was primarily therapeutic. In Babylon, the Israelites would have been painfully aware of the magnificent New Year rituals in Esagila that celebrated Marduk’s victory over Tiamat. P’s cosmogony is, first, a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion that would have been balm to the exiles’ bruised spirits. Marduk may have appeared to defeat Yahweh, but in reality Yahweh was far more powerful. Like all ancient cosmogonies, this was no creation ex nihilo. Elohim simply brings order to preexistent chaos, “when earth was wild and waste (tohu va bohu), darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit hovering over the face of the waters.”66 The Ocean would immediately have recalled Tiamat, but instead of being a frightening goddess, it was merely the raw material of the universe. The sun, moon, and stars were not deities but functionaries, timekeepers that brought light to the earth.67 The “great sea-serpents” were no longer threatening adversaries like Yam or Lotan but simply God’s creatures. He did not have to slaughter or split them in two, and at the
end of the day, he blessed them.68 Marduk’s victory had to be reactivated every year in order to make the cosmos viable, but Yahweh finished his creative work in a mere six days and was able to rest on the seventh.

  This was a nonviolent cosmogony. When P’s first audience heard the opening words “At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,” they would have expected a story of fearsome battles. But P surprised them: there was no fighting, no killing. Unlike Marduk, Elohim did not have to fight to the death to create an ordered cosmos; instead he simply issued a series of commands: “Let there be light!” “Let the earth sprout forth with sprouting growth!” “Let there be lights in the dome of the heavens, to separate the day from the night” and each time, without any struggle at all, “it was so.”69 Yahweh had no competition and was the sole power in the universe.70 But there was no stridency in P’s polemic. On the last day of his creation, Elohim “saw everything that he had made and here: it was exceedingly good.”71 P knew that some of the exiles routinely cursed the Babylonians, but, he implied, this was not the way to go because God had blessed everything that he had made. Everybody should be like Elohim, resting calmly on the Sabbath and blessing all his creatures without exception—even, perhaps, the Babylonians.

  This was emphatically not intended as a literal account of the physical origins of life. P was saying something much more relevant to the exiles. If J’s creation story had been a myth of Solomon’s temple, P’s was the myth of the virtual temple he was encouraging the exiles to build by means of the new rituals of separation. Yahweh’s creation of the cosmos had been an important theme in the cult of Solomon’s temple, and in the Near East a temple was widely regarded as a symbolic replica of the cosmos. Temple building thus enabled human beings to participate in the gods’ ordering of the universe. With this in mind, P’s creation hymn was deliberately linked to his elaborate description of the construction of the tent shrine.72 After God has issued his very detailed instructions for the tabernacle, we have a laborious and repetitive description of Moses carrying them out, point by point. At each stage, Moses “saw all the work” and “blessed” the people, just as Yahweh had “seen” all he had made and “blessed” it at the end of each day of creation. The sanctuary was built on the first day of the first month of the year; Bezalel, its architect, was blessed by the “rushing-spirit” of God that had brooded over the primal waters, and both the creation hymn and the Tabernacle Document emphasized the importance of the Sabbath rest.73 The temple, the Israelites’ replica of the divinely ordered cosmos, was in ruins; their world had been annihilated, but they could build a symbolic temple in the wilderness of exile that brought order to their dislocated lives. This would restore them to the intimacy of Eden, because an Israelite temple symbolized the original harmony before adam had ruined the world.

  But P’s creation myth was not the last word on the subject and nobody was required to “believe” it to the exclusion of all others. Alternative cosmogonies continued to flourish in Israel. Toward the end of their seventy-year exile in Babylonia, an anonymous prophet, usually known as Second Isaiah, revised the old tales of Yahweh fighting a sea monster in order to bring “comfort” to his people.74 And again, he told his creation story therapeutically, not as a factual cosmogony but to throw light on the hidden meaning of history. At the beginning of time, Yahweh had slaughtered his enemies, splitting the cosmic Sea in two and drying up the waters of the great Abyss, just as he had parted the Egyptian sea “to make the seabed a road for the redeemed to cross.”75 Now he would end the exile and bring the deportees home.76 It is in Second Isaiah that we find the first unequivocal statement of monotheism in the Bible. “I am Yahweh unrivalled,” God announces proudly. “There is no other god besides me.”77 But this was a far cry from P’s ahimsa. Second Isaiah imagined Yahweh marching aggressively through the world like the divine warrior of early Israelite tradition.78 The strident insistence on a single symbol of the divine was linked once again with a blatant projection of the national will and the destruction of its enemies. Yahweh has nothing but contempt for other deities: “You are nothing,” he tells the gods of the goyim, “and your works are nothingness.”79 All the gentiles would be “destroyed and brought to nothing,” scattered like chaff on the wind. Even those foreign rulers who helped Israel would fall prostrate before the Israelites, licking the dust at their feet.80

  Yet these fierce oracles are interspersed in the extant text with four songs that are redolent of compassion, nonviolence, and universal concern, sung by an individual who called himself Yahweh’s servant.81 We do not know who he was, but these songs clearly represented an ideal active in the exiled community that was very different from Second Isaiah’s aggressive monotheism. The servant’s task was to establish justice throughout the world, not by force but by a nonviolent, compassionate campaign:

  He does not cry out or shout aloud

  Or make his voice heard in the street.

  He does not break the crushed reed

  Nor quench the wavering flame.82

  When attacked, the servant turns the other cheek and refuses to retaliate. 83 Despised and rejected, he will eventually be “lifted up, exalted, rise to great height,” and the people will realize that his serene resignation has healed them. 84 He will become, Yahweh promises, “the light to the nations, so that my salvation will reach to the ends of the earth.” 85

  Second Isaiah’s predictions were fulfilled. When Cyrus, king of Persia, conquered the Babylonian empire, he gave all deportees the option of returning to their homelands. Most of the Jewish exiles had acclimatized to life in the Diaspora and decided to stay in Babylonia, but in 530 a party of Jews made the decision to return home, and ten years later, after many trials and tribulations, they rebuilt the temple. The return was difficult: the Second Temple failed to live up to the fabled glories of Solomon’s, and the returning exiles had to contend with opposition from their pagan neighbors as well as from those Israelites who had not been deported and found the new religious ideas of the Golah, the community of exiles, alien and exclusive.

  The Hebrew Bible was almost complete: preaching tolerance and respect for difference on the one hand and a strident chauvinism on the other, it was a difficult document to decipher, and it is not clear that at this stage it had any official religious significance or that it was used in the cult. A transitional figure was Ezra, a scribe in the Persian court who had “set his heart to investigate the Torah of Yahweh and to do and teach the law and ordinance in Israel.” 86 In about 398, the Persian king sent him to Jerusalem with a mandate to enforce the Torah of Moses as the law of the land. 87 The Persians were reviewing the legal systems of the subject peoples to make sure that they were compatible with imperial security, and Ezra had probably worked out a satisfactory modus vivendi between Mosaic and Persian jurisprudence.

  When he arrived in Jerusalem, Ezra was horrified to find that instead of maintaining the separation that P had prescribed, some of the people had actually taken foreign wives. On New Year’s Day, Ezra brought the Torah to the square in front of the Water Gate and read it aloud, “translating and giving the sense, so that the people understood what was read,” while Levites, lower-ranking priests, circulated among the crowds, supplementing his commentary88. We cannot be sure of his text, but whatever it was, it reduced the people to tears. They had clearly never heard it before and were dismayed by these unfamiliar demands. Read “neat,” as it were, scripture could be daunting and alarming. “Do not weep!” Ezra insisted. It was the month of Sukkoth, and the law commanded Israelites to spend these weeks in special “booths” (sukkoth) in memory of their ancestors’ forty years in the Sinai wilderness. Again, this was a novel instruction: the First Temple rituals had celebrated Sukkoth very differently. At once, the people rushed into the hills to pick branches of olive, myrtle, pine, and palm, and leafy shelters mushroomed all over the city. There was a festive atmosphere as the people assembled each evening to hear Ezra’s exposition.

  But
later Ezra held a more somber assembly in the square in front of the new temple, during which the people stood shivering as the torrential winter rains deluged the city and they heard Ezra commanding them to send away their foreign wives. 89 Membership in Israel was now confined to the Golah and to those who submitted to the Torah, the official law of the land. Ezra had interpreted the scriptures in an exclusive manner, emphasizing the duty of separation but neglecting P’s equally stringent demand that Israelites treat the stranger with “love” and respect. The Bible consists of many contradictory texts, so our reading is always selective. Tragically, however, a selective reading of scripture to enforce a particular point of view or marginalize others would be a constant temptation for monotheists.

  Ezra’s reading, accompanied as it was by his own running commentary, also made it clear that the Torah required interpretation. This is the first time we hear of these miscellaneous texts being treated as scripture with binding force. Ezra’s presentation at the Water Gate marked the beginning of classical Judaism, a religion that focuses not merely on the reception and preservation of revelation but on its constant reinterpretation.90 When he had expounded the text, Ezra did not merely recite the Torah given to Moses in the distant past but created something new and unexpected. The biblical writers had worked in the same way, making radical revisions to the texts and traditions they had inherited. In classical Judaism, revelation would never be something that had happened once and for all time, but an ongoing process that could never end, because there was always something fresh to be discovered. If it was simply read like any other text, the Torah could be disturbing. It must be heard in the context of rituals, like those of Sukkoth, which separated it from ordinary life and put the audience in a different frame of mind. And in any reading of the Torah, the commentary was as important as the text itself. The Jews had discovered that religious discourse was essentially interpretive. Ezra had not swallowed the text gullibly but had “set his heart to investigate (li-drosh)” it. Jewish exegesis would be called midrash, which derives from the verb darash, “to search,” “investigate,” “to go in pursuit of something” as yet undiscovered. Midrash would become a new ritual evoking the divine and would always retain connotations of dedication, emotional involvement, and expectant inquiry.91