History of the Jews (7 page)

The Decalogue was the basis of the covenant with God, first made by Abraham, renewed by Jacob and now renewed again, in a solemn and public manner, by Moses and the entire people. Modern research shows that the Mosaic covenant, set out briefly in Exodus 19-24 and again more elaborately in the Book of Deuteronomy, follows the form of an ancient Near Eastern treaty, such as those drawn up by the Hittites. It has a historical prolegomenon, setting out the purpose, followed by the nature of the undertaking, the divine witnesses, benefits and curses, the text and the deposit of the tablets on which it is written.
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But the Mosaic covenant is unique in being, not a treaty between states, but a God-people alliance. In it, in effect, the ancient Israelite society merged its interests with God’s and accepted Him, in return for protection and prosperity, as a totalitarian ruler whose wishes governed every aspect of their lives. Thus the Decalogue is merely the heart of an elaborate system of divine laws set out in the books of Exodus, Deuteronomy and Numbers. In late antiquity, Judaic scholars organized the laws into 613 commandments, consisting of 248 mandatory commandments and 365 prohibitions.
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This Mosaic legal material covers an immense variety of subjects. By no means all of it dates from Moses’ time, let alone in the form it has come down to us. Some of it deals with settled agriculture, for instance, and must date from the period after the conquest of Canaan. It is conjectured that this was simply taken over from Canaanite law, ultimately of Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Hittite origin.
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But the Israelites were already becoming a very legal-minded people, quite capable of innovation, or of transforming the notions they found around them so thoroughly as to constitute novelty. The old theory that the mass of the Mosaic material derives from post-Exilic times can now be dismissed. The technical book of Leviticus, highly ritualistic and providing the legal basis for organized religious and civic life among the Israelites, fits in very well with what we know of the political history of the Israelites in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries
BC
. The same can be said for Deuteronomy, which is a popular presentation for a general audience of the priestly writings in Leviticus. The material concerns such matters as diet, medicine, rudimentary science and professional practice, as well as law. Much of it is highly original but all of it is consistent with non-Biblical material, covering similar topics, which was composed in the Near East in the Late Bronze Age, or had already been circulating for centuries.

But though in some ways the Israelites of Moses’ time were typical of their age, certain marked characteristics were emerging. The Mosaic laws were very strict in sexual matters. For instance, the Ugaritic laws, revealed in the Ras Shamra tablets, permitted fornication, adultery, bestiality and incest in certain circumstances.
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The Hittites would allow some forms of bestiality (though not incest). The Egyptians regarded consanguinity as relatively unimportant. The Israelites, by contrast, banned all irregular forms of sex, and they had a list of forbidden degrees of marriage, including affinity as well as consanguinity.
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The Israelites seem to have derived some of their dietary laws from the Egyptians, but there were many differences. Israelites, like Egyptians, were forbidden creatures from the sea which had no fins or scales. Pious Egyptians, however, were not supposed to eat fish at all. On the other hand they could, and did, eat many kinds of water-fowl, which the Israelites were forbidden. But they, like the Egyptians, could eat doves, pigeons, geese and other domestic fowl, partridges and quail. There seems to have been some kind of crude scientific basis, rather than pure superstition, for most of the Mosaic rules. Predatory and carnivorous animals were regarded as risky, and forbidden; ‘clean’ animals were, on the whole, exclusively vegetarian, cloven-footed and ruminant—moufflon, antelope, roebuck, ibex, fallow-deer and gazelle. Swine were forbidden because they were dangerous when eaten undercooked, harbouring parasitic organisms. The Israelites would not touch raptors or vultures either. They classified the camel as unclean because it was valuable. What is more difficult to understand is why they banned hares and coneys.

Israelite laws on hygiene usually followed Egyptian practice. There is a great deal of medical lore in the Mosaic material, and much of this also comes from Egypt, which had a medical tradition going back at least to Imhotep, around 2650
BC
. Four of the most important Egyptian medical papyri, even in the copies we possess, were earlier than or contemporary with the Mosaic era. Medical empiricism was often enacted in ancient legal codes of the second millennium
BC
—in the law of Hammurabi, for instance, written about 500 years before
Moses’ day. But the famous section in the Bible dealing with leprosy, which sets down the diagnostic and therapeutic duties of a special category of priests, is unique.

What is also unique, and already in Mosaic times possessing a long history, is the Israelite stress on circumcision. This practice was not used among the Canaanites or Philistines, or the Assyrians and Babylonians. The Edomites, Moabites and Ammonites used it, and so did the Egyptians. But none of these societies attached transcendent importance to the custom, and one has the impression it was generally dying out in the second millennium
BC
. This in itself attests the antiquity of the Israelite custom, which is first mentioned as being performed by Abraham as part of his original covenant. The great French scholar, Père de Vaux, believed that the Israelites first used it as an initiation rite before marriage.
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For those ancient societies which practised it, this was its function, and it was performed around the age of thirteen. But Moses’ son was circumcised at birth by his mother Zipporah (Exodus 4:24-6), and the ceremonial removal of the foreskin on the eighth day after birth was then enshrined in the Mosaic legislation (Leviticus 12:3). Thus the Israelites divorced the rite from its link to male puberty and, in accordance with their already marked tendency to historicize custom, made it an indelible symbol of an historic covenant and membership of a chosen people.
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They kept up the tradition, going back to Abraham, that ancient flint knives must be used.
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The law of circumcision was retained, long after all other early societies had abandoned it, as an indelible sign of the unity between the people and their beliefs. It was not just, as Tacitus was to sneer, to make Jews different. But of course it did this too, and was another element added to the growing pattern of anti-Semitism.
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The Sabbath was the other great and ancient institution which differentiated the Israelites from other peoples, and was also the seed of future unpopularity. The idea seems to have been derived from Babylonian astronomy, but its rationale in the Books of Exodus and Deuteronomy is variously stated as commemorating God’s rest after creation, the liberation of Israel from Egyptian slavery and the humanitarian need to give labourers, especially slaves and beasts of burden, some respite. The day of rest is one of the great Jewish contributions to the comfort and joy of mankind. But it was a holy day as well as a rest-day, being increasingly associated in the minds of the people with the belief in the elect nation of God, so that eventually Ezekiel has God present it as designed to differentiate Jews from others: ‘Moreover also I gave them my sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord that sanctify
them.’
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So this, too, became an element in the belief of other peoples that the Jews held aloof from the rest of humanity.

The Israelites were already in the process of becoming very distinctive, and in certain critical respects they were spiritually in advance of their age. But they were still a primitive people by the standards of advanced societies in 1250
BC
. Even in their spirituality they retained many backward elements, and continued to do so for centuries. Indeed, being both historically minded and legalistic, they were inclined to formalize and cling to old superstitions. There were many taboos, for instance, concerning sex, blood and battle.
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Belief in magic was ubiquitous and institutionalized. Moses not only talked to God face to face and presided over stupendous miracles, he also performed magic tricks. Staffs and rods which turned into snakes, the vulgar commonplace of ancient Near Eastern magic, were part of Israelite religion too, and sanctified from the age of Moses and Aaron onward. The earlier prophets, at least, were expected to perform, and often wore the magician’s apparatus. We read of charismatic cloaks or mantles, as worn by Elijah and inherited by Elisha. Zedekiah made himself a pair of magic iron horns.
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Samson illustrated the belief that hair was a locus of power, and this was reflected in ritual tonsure.
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Prophets practised ecstasy states and may have used incense and narcotics to produce impressive effects.
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In one book of the Bible alone the performances recorded include a magnet trick, a water trick, imposing disease, curing it, an antidote to poison, a bringing-back to life, causing lightning to strike, expanding an oil jar and feeding a multitude.
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All the same the Israelites were the first people to bring their reason systematically to bear on religious questions. From Moses’ day onwards, and throughout their history, rationalism was a central element in Jewish belief. In a sense, it is
the
central element, for monotheism is itself a rationalization. If supernatural, unearthly power exists, how can it be, as it were, radiated from woods and springs, rivers and rocks? If the motions of the sun and moon and stars can be predicted and measured, and thus obey regular laws, how can they be the source of unnatural authority, since they too are plainly part of nature? Whence, then, comes the power? Just as man learns to lord it over nature, animal and inanimate, must not divine power,
a fortiori
, be living and personal? And if God lives, how can his power be arbitrarily and unequally divided into a pantheon of deities? The idea of a limited god is a contradiction. Once the process of reason is applied to divinity, the idea of a sole, omnipotent and personal God, who being infinitely superior to man in power, and therefore virtue, is
consistently guided in his actions by systematic ethical principles, follows as a matter of course. Looking back from the perspective of the twentieth century, we see Judaism as the most conservative of religions. But in its origins it was the most revolutionary. Ethical monotheism began the process whereby the world-picture of antiquity was destroyed.

Granted the concept of a sole, omnipotent God, the Israelites rightly deduced that he could not be, as the pagan gods were, part of the world, or even the whole; he was not one of the forces which sustained the universe, or even all of them. His dimensions were infinitely greater: the entire universe was his mere creation. The Israelites thus attributed a far greater power and distance to God than any other religion of antiquity. God is the cause of all things, from earthquakes to political and military disasters. There is no other source of power, demons being God-activated; divinity is indivisible, unique, single. And, since God is not merely bigger than the world, but infinitely bigger, the idea of representing him is absurd.
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It stands to reason, then, that to try to make an image of him is insulting. The Israelite ban on images, though not the oldest part of their religion, is very ancient and emerged soon after the cult of monotheism became established. It became the fiery symbol of the religion’s puritan fundamentalists, the aspect they found most difficult to impose on the nation as a whole, the most obvious, visible difference between the Israelite religion and all others, and the dogma the rest of the world most resented, since it meant that strict israelites, and later Jews, could not honour their gods. It was closely linked not just to Israelite exclusiveness but to aggression, since they were told not merely to forswear images but destroy them:

 

You shall tear down their altars, and break their pillars, and cut down their Asherim (for you shall worship no other God, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a Jealous God), lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and when you play the harlot after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and one invites you, you eat of his sacrifice, and you take of their daughters for your sons, and their daughters play the harlot after their gods and make your sons play the harlot after their gods.

 

This passage from Exodus reflects a terrible fear and fanaticism.
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Moreover, the Israelites were wrong to suppose—if they did suppose—that the use of images was a form of religious infantilism. Most Near Eastern religions of antiquity did not regard idols of wood or stone or bronze as gods in themselves. They saw the image as a practical means whereby the ordinary, simple worshipper can visual
ize the divinity and achieve spiritual communion with him. This has always been the Roman Catholic justification for the use of images, not just of God but of saints. In moving from paganism, the Israelites were clearly right to insist on a greater intellectualization of the deity, a move towards the abstract. It was part of their religious revolution. But intellectualization is difficult, and the Israelites themselves did not despise visual aids, albeit verbal images. The Bible abounds with anthropomorphism of the deity.

There is a further contradiction. How can man be made in God’s image, if the image of God is unimaginable, and therefore forbidden? Yet the idea of man as conceived in the divine image is as central to the religion as the ban on idols. In a way, it is the foundation of its morality, being an enormously comprehensive principle.
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As man is in God’s image, he belongs to God; the concept helps man to grasp that he does not possess real and permanent ownership even over himself, let alone over anything else he receives from God’s bounty. His body is a leasehold; he is answerable to God for what he does to and with it. But the principle also means that the body—man—must be treated with respect and even dignity. Man has inalienable rights. Indeed, the Mosaic code is a code not only of obligations and prohibitions but also, in embryonic form, of rights.