History of the Jews (13 page)

Despite this triumphant vindication, Elijah was unable himself to eradicate paganism, or destroy the House of Omri, though he predicted its downfall. He was a lone figure, a charismatic man capable of swaying a huge crowd but not one to build up a party or a court faction. He stood for the individual conscience, perhaps the first man in Jewish history to do so; God spoke to him not in the thunder of the Mosaic era, but in ‘a still, small voice’. In his cursing of Ahab’s line over the killing of Naboth, he upheld the principle that a king’s behaviour should be no different from a private man’s: it must be guided by moral principle. Politics was about right, not might. But Elijah, though the first prophetic leader of the opposition, was not a politician. Much of his life he was a hunted fugitive. His last days were spent in the wilderness. Chapter 2 of the Second Book of Kings tells how he anointed his successor, Elisha, before being swept up in a whirlwind and mounting to heaven in a chariot of fire, leaving behind, for his heir to don, his sacral mantle.

Elisha was of a different cast, however. The Bible narrative shows him performing remarkable acts: when mocked by ‘little children’ (or possibly teenage roughs) near Bethel, he summoned two she-bears from the wood, which tore to pieces no less than forty-two of the delinquents.
¹⁹⁶
But Elisha did not operate alone. He created an
organized following, a college of prophets, and he worked with elements in the secular establishment to obtain the religious reforms Elijah had demanded. Ahab had maintained and enlarged Solomon’s chariot cities in the north. He and his successors had a large professional army, a source of both strength and weakness. Among the successful chariot generals was Jehu, son of Nimshi, who ‘driveth furiously’. Elisha engaged in a religious-military conspiracy with Jehu, had him anointed the future king and thus set in motion one of the bloodiest coups in history.
¹⁹⁷
Jehu had Jezebel thrown out of the window of her palace by her eunuchs, ‘and some of her blood was sprinkled on the walls, and on the horses; and he trod her underfoot’. Ahab’s seventy sons were decapitated and piled ‘in two heaps at the entering-in of the gate’. Jehu massacred Ahab’s entire royal house, ‘and all his great men, and his kinsfolk, and his priests, until he left him none remaining’. He then assembled and slaughtered all the priests of Baal, ‘And they brake down the image of Baal, and brake down the house of Baal, and made it a draught house unto this day.’
¹⁹⁸

This ferocious religious purge may have re-established the official, sole worship of Yahweh for a time, but it did not resolve the perennial conflict between the need to maintain religious orthodoxy—to keep the people together—and the need to conform to the world—to keep the state in existence. Jehu, as was foreseeable, was soon behaving in as arbitrary a manner as the House of Omri; indeed, virtually all the kings of Israel broke with the religious purists sooner or later. To preserve his power, a king, or so it seemed, had to do things that a true follower of Yahweh could not countenance. The episode of Naboth’s vineyard was a case in point, a symbol of the spiritual-secular conflict. There is a famous passage in which God inspires Elijah to say to Ahab, ‘Hast thou killed, and also taken possession?’; and Ahab answers, ‘Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?’
¹⁹⁹
Merely replacing Ahab’s sons by Jehu and his sons did not solve the problem. It is restated, in a rather different form, in the eighth-century Book of Amos. This book is contemporary with Hesiod’s
Works and Days
in post-Homeric Greece, and shows a similar concern for abstract justice, though in the case of Amos it is associated directly with the worship of Yahweh. He was a southerner from Judah, a dresser of sycamore trees, who came north to Israel to preach social justice. He was at pains to point out that he was not a prophet by birth and belonged to no college: just a simple working man who saw the truth. He protested about the elaborate ceremonies conducted by the priests at the northern shrine of Bethel, which he said were a mockery when the poor were downtrodden and starving. He has God saying: ‘I hate, I despise your
feast-days…. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.’
²⁰⁰
Amaziah, the head priest of Bethel, objected strongly to Amos’ activities. The shrine, he argued, was the king’s chapel, part of the king’s court; the duties of the priests were to uphold the state religion with due decorum, and it was not part of them to play politics and interfere in economic processes. He said to Amos: ‘O thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there.’ To the king, he complained that Amos had, in effect, raised a conspiracy against him in the royal precincts, adding—in a significant phrase—‘the land is not able to bear all his words’.
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The debate was, and indeed is, important. The later Jewish seers, and in their turn most Christian moral theologians, endorsed Amos’ view. The Talmud laid down: ‘The commandment of righteousness outweighs all the commandments put together.’
²⁰²
But the Talmudists did not have the responsibility of holding the state together; that was all in the past and they could now afford the luxury of moral absolutism. In Amaziah’s day, however, a compromise between the secular and spiritual authorities was essential if the state was to survive at all. If prophets from the south were allowed to go around stirring up class warfare in the name of God, the community would be fatally weakened and at the mercy of its external enemies, who would wipe out the worship of Yahweh altogether. That was what he meant when he said that the land could not bear Amos’ bitter words.

Throughout the ninth century the power of Assyria had been growing. The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser shows that, even in Jehu’s day, Israel had been forced to pay tribute. For a time Israel bought the Assyrians off, or formed coalitions of other small states to halt their advance. But in 745
BC
the cruel Tiglath-pileser
III
ascended the Assyrian throne and turned his warlike race into a nation of imperialists. He inaugurated a policy of mass deportation in conquered territories. In 740 his annals record: ‘As for Menahem [King of Israel] terror overwhelmed him…he fled and submitted to me…silver, coloured woollen garments, linen garments…I received as his tribute.’ In 734 he broke through to the coast, then advanced down it to ‘the Brook of Egypt’. All the elite, the rich, merchants, craftsmen, soldiers, were transported to Assyria and resettled there; in their place were established Chaldean and Aramaean tribesmen from Babylonia. Then Tiglath pushed inland. Stricken internally by religious and social divisions, the northern kingdom of Israel was in no condition to resist. In 733-4, Tiglath-
pileser conquered Galilee and Transjordan, leaving only Samaria. Tiglath died in 727, but his successor, Shalmaneser
V
, took Samaria in the winter of 722-1 and the following year his successor, Sargon
II
, completed the destruction of the northern kingdom, removing the entire elite and sending in colonists: ‘I besieged and captured Samaria,’ Sargon records in the Annals of Khorsabad, ‘carrying off 27,290 of the people who dwelt therein.’ The Second Book of Kings echoes mournfully: ‘So Israel was carried out of their own land to Assyria unto this day…. And the King of Assyria brought down men from Babylon, and from Cuthat, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel: and they possessed Samaria and dwelt in the cities thereof.’
²⁰³
There is abundant confirmation of the catastrophe in the archaeological record. At Samaria, the royal quarter was totally destroyed. Megiddo was levelled and new, Assyrian-type buildings set up on the rubble. The walls of Hazor were torn down. Shechem disappeared completely. So did Tirzah.

Thus the first great mass tragedy in Jewish history took place. It was, too, a tragedy unrelieved by ultimate rebirth. The holocaust-dispersion of the northern people of Israel was final. In taking their last, forced journey into Assyria, the ten tribes of the north moved out of history and into myth. They lived in later Jewish legend, but in reality they were simply assimilated into the surrounding Aramaean population, losing their faith and their language; and the spread of Aramaic westwards, as the common language of the Assyrian empire, helped to conceal their evanescence. In Samaria, Israelite peasants and artisans remained, and intermarried with the new settlers. Chapter 17 of the Second Book of Kings, which records these melancholy events, says that while the exiled elite in Assyria still worshipped Yahweh, they sent back one of their priests to live in Bethel and instruct the leaderless people. But it adds: ‘Howbeit every nation made gods of their own, and put them into the houses of the high places which the Samaritans had made,’ and it then paints a fearful picture of the confused paganism into which the northern kingdom collapsed. The way in which the north had worshipped Yahweh had always been suspect in Judah. This doubt about northern orthodoxy reflected the division of the Israelites which took place at the time of the entry into Egypt, and which was never really healed after the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan. In the eyes of Jerusalem and its priests, the northerners had always mingled with the pagans. The fall and dispersal of the northern kingdom, and the intermarriage of the
remnant with aliens, was used to deny the Samaritans their original Israelite heritage. From this point onwards, their claim to be part of the chosen people, and to inhabit the Promised Land in full righteousness of possession, was never again acknowledged by the Jews.

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.’
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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.’
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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.