Our perception of peoples and nations Is a political view of human society. This is easily illustrated by an ironic anomaly of early Israelite history. In II Kings, the legendary founder of the northern kingdom of Israel, and builder of its capital, Samaria, was an Israelite general, Omri. Assyrian texts refer to ancient historical Israel as Bit Humri, the ‘House of Omri’. Omri also shows up in the famous Mesha inscription as a personification of Israel’s army, occupying Moab. The names given to this founding king and eponymous ancestor of historical Israel are obvious versions of the well-known Arabic name Omar. That this not only surprises us, but will be seen by many as unacceptable if not wrong, is reflective of our perception of both ethnicity and nation as fundamental and implicit aspects of ancient societies. The concept of ethnicity, however, is a fiction, created by writers. It is a product of literature, of history-writing. As it is commonly used today, it distorts the past far more than it informs.
Nevertheless, words such as ethné and goyim1 clearly reflect an ancient perspective, if not an ancient historical reality. The early Greek collector of many of the stories of Asia, Herodotus, uses this term and even defines it for us. For Herodotus, the five elements of an ethnos are: a people united, a common language, a defining religion, a land of their own, and a common past and future goal. These same five elements form the essential themes that are developed in the biblical narrative. Quite clearly, the goal of the biblical narrative is to present Israel as a people. One could say that the story is ethnographic rather than historiographic in intention. That is to say, it is not writing a history, but rather defining a contemporary society as a people. It is creating a reality by creating a past for a society that identifies itself theologically with the ‘new Israel’. The biblical narrative is not the origin story of a nation like other nations. That is denied over and over again. It is an origin story of a people opposed to the nations of this world: a ‘people of God’
It is not enough, however, simply to correct our own historical understanding of the past, which affects the understanding of ancient Israel as a people. We must also consider the Bible’s theology that is critical of the past Israel that it presents. The Bible understands old Israel as lost Israel. In this judgement, the Bible also questions the appropriateness of seeing that ancient Israel – and for that matter ancient Judah as well – as the ‘people of God’ that the Bible had created for heuristic purposes. The Bible is here emphatically not this ancient people’s book.
The biblical origin stories centre themselves in the coherence of a people, comparable to that defined by Herodotus, in its land, with its own language, religion and history. Historians, however, have concentrated on asserting an originating unity for the same people, which they believe must have first bound an historical Israel together as a people. They have used, for the most part, a rationalized paraphrase of one or other of the biblical narratives of Genesis–II Kings regarding each of these five unities. This issue of ethnicity runs through the very heart of the current academic debate over the early history of the south Levant and biblical origins. The ethnic character of the discussion of Israel’s origins, and indeed of the entire question of Israel’s earliest history, has marked the academic discussion since the nineteenth century.
The region of Palestine as a whole is centred on the eastern Mediterranean shoreline. It is defined by the fertile Mediterranean climatic area of the southern Levant on both sides of the Jordan rift. It includes highlands, intersected by low-lying valleys. It also includes large areas of steppe land, found especially in the south and east where the region joins the Arabian and Sinai deserts. There is little coherence in the region as a whole. Geographically, it is best understood as the southern fringe of Syria. Among its many names in early records are Upper Retenu and Kinahhi (‘Canaan’) found in Egyptian texts. The region has been known as Palestine since the Assyrian period. This same name was used by the sixth-century Greek writer Herodotus, and is commonly used during the Roman period. In modern times, the name Palestine was used throughout the British mandate period. Since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and especially since Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, the names Israel and Land of Israel have competed with Palestine. In more recent times, both names, Israel and Palestine, have become viable from the perspective of different historical and political claims by modern Israelis and Palestinians. These are frequently used to refer to different parts of the larger region.
Both economically and geographically, the southern Levant is Herodotus’ Palestine: Syria’s southern fringe. It has neither an integrity nor a unity of its own. The region’s Mediterranean economy, with its regionally determined primary specializations in grain agriculture, herding, horticulture and viniculture, fosters a differentiation and separation of the population into many small groups. These distinguish themselves both politically and in terms of sedentarization. The geographical fragmentation of the landscape, moreover, promotes local autonomies in small towns and local clusters of villages and encampments. Since the Bronze Age, this regional character supported a patronage form of society centred on small autonomous burghs. These fortress towns provided Palestine’s many small enclaves with both markets and defence. Region-wide political domination, when it has existed at all in the south Levant, has ever been imperial and external.
The politicization of geography and history that is so apparent today, as different political goals dictate very specific understandings of the past, might help us to be sensitive to the relative nature of the histories we create. Neither the history of ancient Israel nor of ancient Judah that historians write today is or should be the Bible’s history. Nor is the history of Israel the same as the history of the region of southern Syria that is called Eretz Israel in so many texts of the Bible. Israel’s ancient history is only a very limited part of the history of this greater region. It involves the region of the central highlands north of Jerusalem and south of the Jezreel valley, during the ninth and eighth centuries. No one has yet written the history of this Israel for periods later than the Assyrian takeover of the region. This history is different from the many related, but nevertheless separate and distinct histories of judah, the Jezreel, the Giiead, the Galilee, the Negev, the Shephelah, the Jordan valley, Phoenicia, Philistia, Ammon, Moab, Edom, and many others. Most of these histories have only recently begun to be written. All of them have long been overshadowed by the imaginary history of the Israel of theology.
These hidden histories have been bypassed by the common usage of our field. We usually do justice to the Stone Age, but the Bronze Age is often described in terms of an introduction to a history of ‘earliest Israel’. The past twenty-five years, which have seen this biblically oriented history of Israel deconstructed step by step, have been a willing prisoner of what I think of as a ‘watershed’ mentality. We are perfectly ready to accept that the Bible’s ‘earliest’ periods were not historical, and as evidence has accumulated we have reluctantly accepted that ever more recent periods were similarly unhistorical. The period before the flood was the very first to become unhistorical. Then came the patriarchs, the Mosaic period, the conquest and the period of the Judges. However, we have been loath to make such judgements. Period after period has been tenaciously retained as valid history until proven entirely impossible. As soon as we find anything at all that can be linked with historical evidence, we stop being critical. We have insisted that the biblical narrative be historical. While we can accept the most rigorous of methods for that part of our history that comes before the watershed, as soon as we cross over into the area we think of as a known past, we quickly resort to the fundamentalism of our childhood.
There is a problem with the question of historicity. I cannot imagine what a biblical text would look like that was judged to be ‘historically reliable’. One of the problems with dealing with the traditional histories of the ancient world is that we can only identify the degrees of their unreliability. The razor’s edge of a question like historicity identifies fiction, not history. In spite of being trained to use this tool critically, most historians who claim to talk about the ‘history of Israel’, are really offering us one or other paraphrase of an ancient story. To pay so much attention to biblical views of the past, or for that matter to views like those of Josephus, is a serious error. We all know that the world an author reflects is the one he knows. If we want to write sound and critical history, we need to concentrate on what is implied in a text about that world. Traditional histories are themselves remains of the past. As such, they are data, not evidence. If we see our goal as reconstructing the past, we are pursuing an impossible dream. The past does not and can no longer exist. Archaeological materials and texts – remnants of the past – do exist. When we write history today, we attempt to explain, understand and describe these fragments of the past. History is interpretation of data that exists now. This is why we cannot write history without evidence. It is also why what we write is so fragmented and partial. We are ignorant of most of the past. And that is the beginning of wisdom in history-writing.
The history we create will vary greatly from period to period depending on the data we have available. In the Late Bronze Age, for example, literary texts might easily dominate in our history and encourage us toward writing intellectual history. For this, we are grateful to the collections of poetry from the ancient town of Ugarit on Syria’s coast. If we are interested in the developments of societies, and especially in cultural and economic history, then material remains from archaeology, and information drawn from geography, climate studies, soils research and the like, provide us with indispensable primary evidence for writing our history. If, on the other hand, we are dealing with the Hellenistic or Greco-Roman periods, biblical texts, intertestamental literature and the scrolls from the Dead Sea become paramount for understanding an ancient literary and intellectual world. These written materials will provide us with our primary sources.
The central motifs of an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ Israel are linked together in the single dominant metaphor of biblical philosophy: the theology of the way. Old Israel walked in the way of the godless, but the new Israel fears God trusts in Yahweh, loves the torah. This metaphor is most exciting in Isaiah’s poetry and most systematically developed in the Book of Psalms.
The Book of Psalms is a large collection of poetic texts presented as 150 songs. It is not the only such collection. Among the Dead Sea scrolls we find a number of others, sometimes arranged by themes: wisdom songs, songs with which to exorcise demons, messianic psalms, etc. Our biblical collection, with its songs of praise, its songs of David and Asaph, its pilgrimage songs and laments, seems to have originally come from just such smaller collections. There is no great difference between the songs collected in the scrolls and those we find in the Bible. Nor is there any significant difference between the biblical and the non-biblical songs found at Qumran: neither in the way they were composed, and collected, nor in the way they were used and interpreted. In fact, it is quite clear that the process of song collection and writing, which created our biblical book, was not yet complete when the Dead Sea scrolls were written.
The biblical book has five parts to it, each dedicated to ‘the eternal praise of Yahweh’. The collection closes appropriately with five songs of praise: Alleluia songs. More than two dozen other songs begin or close with such words of praise: ‘Alleluia!’ ‘My life, praise Yahweh!’ ‘Yahweh be praised!’ or the like. Clearly, not only is this book of songs collected with the theme of praising God defined as their purpose, but many of the psalms collected were written to express celebration. It is also interesting – and very important for understanding the Psalms – that the use of this motif of praise has the secondary function of drawing together diverse themes and discussions, and interpreting them collectively as a form of praising God. We have good reason to argue that the book as a whole as it now exists in the Bible was understood as a book of songs of praise. It is a psalm book of a group, a community, a society that finds itself identified as those who are addressed by the reiterated exhortation, ‘Praise God!’
This intensive hortatory allows us to speak of a voice of these songs and of a coherent audience that is implicit in them. There is hardly a song in the Psalter that sings with a different voice or in a different context. This coherence in the voice of the Psalms is emphasized when we look at the implicit author’s reflections on the past. This is not a voice from the cult of old Israel of the ninth or eighth centuries BCE, or of Judah’s of the eighth or seventh century. It is also hardly the voice of a temple community that so many scholars once imagined to have existed in the fictional Jerusalem of Ezra or Nehemiah of the Persian period. This voice that calls on its audience to praise God calls forth images not of an older and earlier Israel, but specifically of the Israel we meet in the Bible. The songs don’t refer to a past; they are sung within the context of tradition present. The community’s self-understanding implicit in these songs is that of the descendants of Israel, the ‘children of Israel’. They stand in the path of the ‘true Israel’, whose truth and reality is not conceived either historically or ethnically. Rather, it is rooted in theological and philosophical reflection on the tradition, which is understood increasingly metaphorically. The many references to the temple, to the king and to the acts of God in the past are not references within the community’s memory, but to the community’s tradition, which is literary. On the evidence provided by the Psalms themselves, their collective authors know no more about their ‘past’as children of Israel than we do merely from reading the literature that has survived.
If we wish to define the community that is implicit in the creation of a book like the Bible’s Psalter, it helps to turn again to the Dead Sea scrolls. Although we can not yet identify these scrolls with a particular settlement such as Qumran, or with a particular group such as the Essenes, the similarities of the unique psalms of these scrolls to biblical psalms strongly suggest that a community comparable to that implied by the Bible also developed these texts. A similar perspective is also implied in New Testament texts. This is not to say that the communities implied by the three groups of texts – the Psalter, the psalms of the Dead Sea scrolls and the New Testament – were identical, nor that there were any specific number of such historical communities. What is implied is a common sectarian theological perspective. And we have no reason to believe that the sectarian characteristics of these three different communities were originally competitive with each other. They all, however, stand against what might be called the community of the ‘old testament’, namely that faithless lost people of Israel’s old covenant which Yahweh had long ago destroyed. This metaphorical ‘old testament’ is neither a text nor a people that ever existed. It is a negative theological concept; a literary metaphor.
The common sectarian language of the biblical Psalter, the Dead Sea scrolls and the New Testament, creates a polarity and contrast between the ‘path of truth’ and the ‘way of fools’. There is neither compromise nor confusion between knowledge and ignorance. The whole of this literature is impregnated with such sectarianism and with its implicit rejection of old Israel’s ‘godless path’. Such sectarianism is implicit whenever and wherever the tradition gives expression to its piety. Nowhere is this clearer than in the wisdom poetry of Psalms 1 and 2, which together introduce the theological substance of the Psalter. The very opening verses of the Psalter are painted in the black and white of this sectarian pietism;
Happy is the one who does not walk in the counsel of evildoers nor stand in the way of the godless, who does not sit in the seat of those who mock. He rejoices in, Yahweh’s torah and loves the tradition day and night. He is like a tree, planted close to the water’s canal. It gives fruit on time and its leaves never fall. Everything he does, succeeds. (Ps 1: 1–3)
The stark sectarian contrast between the counsel of evil and the love of torah which identifies the singer of the Psalms is also taken up in the Book of Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 17; 5–8, a close variant of this same ‘Lego-block’ of tradition is used to describe ancient Judah headed for destruction and exile:
Cursed be he who trusts in men and seeks strength among mortals, whose heart turns away from Yahweh. He is like a bush in the desert, blind to any happiness that comes. He will live in the hard desert, on the salt flats where none can live. Blessed is he that trusts in Yahweh and finds refuge in him. He is like a tree, planted close to the water’s canal, which sends its roots into the stream. He has no need to fear the summer’s heat when it comes. Its leaves are green. It has no fear of the year of drought and never ceases to bear fruit.
In both our texts, those who trust in the human are cursed; those who trust God are blessed. The tree living from the water is ever green, ever bearing. In Jeremiah it stands in contrast to the desert fate of a bush without water. This desert motif is particularly interesting as it echoes a motif of Genesis 1: 2’s ‘shapeless and empty nothingness’ that existed before the creation. In Jeremiah 4: 23–26, this was interpreted as the desert of Israel’s exile. The ever-bearing tree is echoed in the great passage of Job 14; 7–9. The fate of humans is compared to the hope of a tree. Job gives expression to the Bible’s systematic contrast between the death-bringing ‘acts of men’ which lead to nothingness, and the creative ‘acts of God’ which create new life for a new Israel:
For a tree there is hope. If it is chopped down, it can live again. It never stops setting new shoots even when its roots are old in the ground and the stump dies. It grows once more. As soon as it finds water, it sprouts branches like a new-planted tree.
The passage in Job continues with its psalm-like contrast; ‘A person, however, dies and it is over for him . . . a human being lies down, and does not rise again’, etc. The poetry of the philosophical traditions, that we find in the Psalms and Job, establish principles, while the prophets apply them to the story tradition. The discussion as a whole is surprisingly unified. The same contrast is established between the divine and the human. The creation story of Genesis 1 is the prime metaphor. Good is that which God alone does. That is true reality. Those who understand walk in God’s ways. What mankind does, stands in stark contrast. The way of mankind is the way of fools and the godless. That path had led to ancient Israel’s destruction and death. This contrast is set as a philosophical principle in Psalm 1’s introduction.
The metaphor of contrasting ways of life, which sets this philosophical perspective, is hardly unique to the Bible. It is a firmly established principle in ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature, from at least the beginning of the second millennium BCE. In the Bible, we find a fixed and established contrast between a way of life that is evil and does not succeed, and a path that is good. This way is happy or blessed. The path of the godless is the way of flesh, the way of pain, of evil. It is the way of one’s own thoughts, of mankind, of violence, of sinners, of fools and the like. The way of Yahweh is the path of the spirit, of joy, innocence, piety and wisdom, of righteousness, peace and goodness, truth, holiness, humility and life, the way of Zion. This is the way of David and of Solomon. Both of these contrasting clusters of motifs are firmly fixed. They do not cross over the metaphor’s black and white division of good and evil. The path of evil implies the way of sinners, the godless and the way of mankind, just as God’s way is precisely the way of the spirit and of philosophy. One can in fact say that ‘the way of mankind’ is never ‘God’s way’ as a philosophical principle. Although the language varies considerably and many motifs are used, there is but a single perception of reality that all give voice to. Such perception constantly presents the adherent to such a philosophy with the exclusive choice of either/or. It is a sectarian, and implicitly fanatic, demand for decision and choice. One is either for or against God: for or against the tradition.
The recognition of this theological context of the Book of Psalms suggests that they are interpreted by their collectors within a context of education and pietism. Such intellectually oriented traditions as this theology of the way is clearly expressed in the Psalms’ concentration on the place of the torah: the ‘teaching’ or the ‘tradition’. One ‘finds joy in Yahweh’s torah; one loves the tradition day and night’. One commits oneself to torah study without limit. This too sets the tradition in contrast to old Israel and gives expression to the new. Joshua 1: 8 offers us a story variant of the psalmist’s principle:
Keep this book of torah always on your lips; love it day and night. Do carefully all that is written in it; it will be for your good and you will find success in it.
Matthew’s gospel gives this theology of the way a place of honour in Jesus’ teaching in the context of his sermon on the mount in Matthew 5: 3–12. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs,’ etc. Matthew lists eight positive ways of our early tradition, before closing with a threefold negative way as contrasting response:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men scorn you, speak evil and lie about you for my sake. Rejoice, be happy, for your reward is great in heaven. This is the way they persecuted the prophets before you.
Luke’s gospel (6: 20–26) offers yet another variant, with, however, a careful balance of four positive and four negative ways. A fragmented text from Qumran (4QBeatitudes) gives a similar eight-fold list, with contrasting positive and negative ways. One finds the love of torah likened to a man’s love for his wife.
The New Testament is quite explicit about its participation in the Bible’s theology of the way. This is clear from Matthew 11’s story about John the Baptist, where Jesus, citing Isaiah, describes John as ‘more than a prophet. He is the one about whom it is written: “I send my angel before you; he will prepare your path,” ’ Throughout the whole of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’ way is God’s way. The story had begun with John’s question: ‘Are you the one who is to come?’ Matthew has Jesus answer by giving six signs of the theology of the way, and has him close with a warning hint of the negative; ‘The blind see. The lame walk. Lepers are clean. The deaf hear. The dead rise and the good news is announced to the poor. May he be happy who is not offended by me.’
At the close of the story in 11: 16–17, Matthew offers a dramatic parable which, like Jeremiah, interprets this theology in terms of a theatrical presentation of Israel’s fall. ‘This generation’ in Matthew’s eyes, goes the way of old Israel:
With what should I compare this generation? Children, sitting in the square shouting to each other: we played the flute for you but you wouldn’t dance; we sang a song of mourning, but you did not weep.
There are many nuances and variants to the ‘way of truth and righteousness’. The most dominant are those that deal with the great and beloved teacher. The richness of this well-known figure encourages us to recognize its important pedagogical role. The Psalms offer the theology of the way in a context of pietism: in pious songs of praise and reflective prayer. Stories and legends about the beloved teacher mark this context as educational and scholarly. Such literary dramatizations present the either/or demands of the theology of the way in the form of philosophers or ‘teachers of righteousness’. Such are Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes, Jesus Ben Sira in Sirach, or the anonymous ‘teacher of righteousness’in the Dead Sea scrolls. We also have the teachers of the torah: Moses, Joshua, Ezra and Jesus, and teachers of the covenant renewed such as Josiah, Ezra and Jesus. All, in one form or another, teach the way of truth and torah.
Moses – whose torah is described as the teaching of God – is certainly the best example among these figures in the Bible in its expression of the theology of the way. This is precisely because his teaching is never his own. He plays a dumbling’s role. He can’t talk. He doesn’t want to lead. He breaks the tablets of the Ten Commandments in his anger and he is disobedient. That is, he is only a human being. His teachings are God’s. In a contrasting manner, Ezra, in the Book of Ezra 7–8, is portrayed as a learned scribe, a peat teacher and judge who instructs the whole nation in ‘the torah of the God of heaven’. Ezra is another Moses in the manner of Exodus 18: the idealistic representative of the oral torah. In contrast, Nehemith 9’s story of the new Israel receiving the torah, portrays an Ezra who reads the torah to the people. This is the written torah. In the paraphrase given of his reading it is clear that it is the Pentateuch as torah that is the object of the narrative. Such historicization or dramatization of the role of teacher, as we find in the Moses and Ezra traditions, has led to a story development that is quite comparable in its size and importance to the development of the stories of Samuel and Kings. These stories give the theology of the way both positive and negative illustration. King Saul, who was a good king in his own eyes, failed in one thing; doing the divine will. He is placed in contrast to the new messiah, David, who, praying on the Mount of Olives in II Samuel 15, represents the pious in his prayer that not his but God’s will be done. Throughout the whole of Kings, the contrast between the path of Yahweh and the way of the ungodly dominates: Solomon and his wives, Ahab and Elijah. The entire fate of Israel is reduced to an illustration of the evil ‘way of Jeroboam’.
The role of the beloved teacher easily gives way to a close variant: the teacher as founder of a community of the new Israel. Ezra and Jesus are certainly the Bible’s best-known examples of such figures, but the pattern is already set by Moses with Israel at Sinai. It is found again in Joshua’s role as the first teacher of the way of the torah in Joshua 1: 7–9. It belongs closely linked to the motifs of leaving the desert, returning from exile, coming to the promised land and entering ‘God’s kingdom’. Outside of the Bible, the Damascus Covenant’s ‘teacher of righteousness’ is a figure who has saved the repentant remnant from destruction to found, like Ezra, a new Israel He is the teacher who leads the people along ‘the path of God’s heart’:
When he [i.e., God] remembered the covenant of the very first, he saved a remnant for Israel and did not deliver them up for destruction. And at the moment of wrath, three hundred and ninety years after having delivered them up into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, he visited and caused to sprout from Israel and from Aaron a shoot of the planting, in order to possess his land and to become fat with the good things of his soil. And they realized their sin and knew that they were guilty men; but they were like blind persons and like those who pope for the path over twenty years. And God appraised their deeds, because they sought him with a perfect heart and raised up for them a Teacher of Righteousness, in order to direct them in the path of his heart.1
The manner in which this figure of beloved teacher becomes romanticized and idealized follows a form of dramatizing narrative. Focus on the teacher as model becomes a form of hagiogtaphy and imitatio. One can walk in the path of righteousness and troth through listening to the teacher: through obedience and discipleship. This follows much the pattern of the Psalter’s use of David. Such commentary brings us quickly from literary to historical contexts. Increasingly and rapidly, the societies that read and studied such traditions and that identified such pietism as their own model themselves on the literary images of the traditions themselves. This takes on the form of a way of life.
The love of the torah urged by Psalm 1, and its close variant in the opening of the Book of Joshua, support two distinct clusters of motifs around a metaphor of a tree planted by a canal. The tree is lovingly cultivated. It lives and bears fruit. The tree is well cared for. It stand in its Eden with Yahweh as its divine gardener. Echoes of the paradise story, with its tree of life in the centre of the garden, from which life-giving water springs and flows to the four rivers of the world, are heard throughout the Bible’s variants on this metaphor.
Psalm 92: 12–14, clearly echoing the songs of the beloved’s garden that we find in the Song of Songs, also shares in this literary cluster surrounding the tree of life, ‘The righteous thrive like the palm tree, and grow great as the cedars of Lebanon. They are planted in Yahweh’s temple; they thrive in the courtyard of our God. Even in old age,2 they bear fruit and are fresh and green.’ In Psalm 52; 8, the singer himself sings with the voice of this metaphorical tree: ‘I am as the green olive tree in God’s house; I trust in God’s eternal steadfastness.’
That these are not isolated metaphors, but an intellectually coherent cluster of motifs, reflective of an implicit theological discussion, becomes very clear when we notice the various forms that illustrations of the via negativa take. We find ourself in a coherent world of contrasting images. The barren desert is contrasted with the cultivated garden. The well-watered, fruitful tree is compared with the motifs of dried chaff and wilderness bush. The way of God and the way of men: all images of life and renewal of life are alternatives to death. We see this already in these same Psalms, 52 and 92. just before the lines bearing the metaphors of the good tree are sung in both these psalms, we find their contrasting motifs. In spite of the fact that the stanza in Psalm 52: 2–4 speaks explicitly of people who talk about and plan evil, verse 5 makes it clear that the singer’s implicit metaphor of the tree with its cultivated land/desert contrast is central: ‘God will destroy you forever and drive you out of your tent; he mill pull you out from the living land by the roots.’ Similarly, Psalm 92: 6 complains of the lack of understanding of Yahweh’s enemies. This intellectual image of the way of the godless nevertheless calls up an analogue of a plant that quickly sprouts and blooms, only to be destroyed forever (92: 7).
This form of theological reading of the tradition, while lending itself much to historicizing a sectarian understanding of the world in the stories of ancient Israel, also finds its expression in provocative discourse. It easily shows itself as a form of preaching, becoming a practical theology. The reading of the tradition calls the audience to a way of life to be lived out. New Testament examples of this are abundant, giving expression to the metaphor of the teacher as ‘the way, the truth and the light’. This urges those who see themselves as his students to follow his example. The stories themselves rest on the already long-established function of so many of the older biblical variants in this discussion. Isaiah 6: 8–13 gives us an excellent example of such use of the tradition. It is the prophet’s voice we hear when the scene opens:
I heard the voice of my lord say: ‘Whom should I send? Who will tale the message for us?’ I answered: ‘Here am I; send me.’ So he told me: ‘Go and say to this people: “You shall hear and hear but not comprehend; you will see and see but not imagine.” Cover this people’s heart with fat, make their ears heavy and close their eyes, so that they cannot see with their eyes, hear with their ears or comprehend with their heart, that they repent that he might heal them.’ I asked: ‘How long, lord?’ and he answered: ‘Until the cities lie deserted, without inhabitants: houses without people, and the earth has become a desert. Yahweh will be rid of the people, and the land will be empty, abandoned. If a tenth part should remain; that too will be rooted out: as when a terebinth or an oak is felled, there remains but a stump. It is that stump that is holy seed.’
Notice the technique used in creating this prophetic scene. Implicit in the opening is a mythological context, as in the opening of Job’s book. A divine assembly lies at a heavenly distance from the world of men, with the divine ‘master’ playing the role of anti-teacher, deliberating how he is to prevent his teachings being followed on earth. Here too Isaiah plays the role of anti-prophet. He is over-eager: not like the great Jeremiah or Moses, men whose fate is controlled by their God. Isaiah wants to bring the message. Here he is the mirror image of his opposite; Jonah, who fled to sea to escape being given just such an assignment to Nineveh. The same understanding of reality exists in both stories: God is in control; he establishes destiny. Jonah’s role, however, was played out as the one successful prophet in the Bible: his preaching led to Nineveh’s repentance. Isaiah plays a caricature of the prophets of the past. He will preach so that the people do not hear, see or understand; that they do not repent; that they are not saved. Isaiah’s messianic ‘lord’in this scene has total control, like Yahweh of the Exodus story hardening the heart of the pharaoh. The prophet becomes Jeremiah-like in his impatience for Israel’s salvation. He asks, How long? As long as mankind’s alienation from the earth in Genesis, an alienation that ends only in our death when we are reunited with it, for Isaiah’s master responds: when they are all gone: when the land becomes a desert again. A repentant remnant? Even that image of hope is rejected. If a tenth should survive, that too will be destroyed. The tree’s hope, which seemed so promising in Job, becomes a dead stump. It is in such blackness of Job-like despair that the poet Finally allows the impossible irony of divine grace, a ‘holy seed’ to appear.
It is a difficult and certainly dark theology that is presented here. Old Israel – with its prophets – belongs to the way of human understanding. It comes to nothing and is without meaning. All reality is God’s: what he wants, what he does. Isaiah’s people – his Israel and his Jerusalem – are a lost people: marked for death. The text’s perspective is rather that of a new Israel: that which has come out of the past’s ‘dead stump’. The scene is played from the vantage point of philosophy and its function is to understand the past. What the prophet does and what ancient Israel did, repentant and not repentant, is all much the same. The prophet’s message prevents understanding. It was God’s purpose to destroy this people, so that there might be a ‘holy seed’. The motifs gathered here are important: destruction and deportation. There is no repentant remnant here. The image of the desert evokes the totality of Sodom’s destruction. The hopeful metaphor of the tree is handled with a harsh irony. It is on the motif of hopelessness that the poem turns: a tree felled: Isaiah’s dead stump.
Even though Isaiah 10: 18–21 will bring this motif of Israel’s dead stump together with the metaphor of a repentant remnant leading to the new Israel,1 the poet here in Isaiah 6 does not deal either with a motif of survival or with a repentance leading to salvation. The dominant motifs are rather of destiny created, determined by God. They deal with renewal of life and resurrection. The denial of hope is emphatic and necessary. The life of the new Israel is a pure gift. The total destruction of old Israel is required of the metaphor: there is no remnant. Nevertheless, a stump remains. That such a worthless dead ‘remnant’ is declared ‘holy seed’ is intended to astonish. The metaphor functions much in the same way as Hosea 1; 8’s child who is ‘not my people’. It is that hopeless child that hears the words of Hosea 2; 23’s, ‘You are my people. It is this child that will respond “You are my God.” ‘ The centre of interest in this theology of the way is not what happened or didn’t happen to ancient Israel. Ancient Israel is nothing more than a source of powerful metaphors. It is the response to the divine that is the focus and goal of this theology of the way, not a judgement – either historical or theological – about events past. A ‘dead stump’ becomes ’holy seed’just as the desert’s formlessness and emptiness led to creation in Genesis 1; 2. The theme is from death to life. Resurrection lies in the journey of the soul. The poet seeks such metaphorical contradiction with purpose. The metaphorical tree of death in the shadows of the garden story becomes the tree of life. Just so does the poet find his way back to the tree that had been long blocked by the cherubim’s magic sword of Genesis 3. Isaiah is a discursive commentary on the tradition: the tree of death is Israel past. Hope’s tree – the tree of life – has become its dead stump, a worthless remnant, a stump which in Job’s despair of things human sends out shoots of new life: ‘it never stops sending out new shoots’ (fob 14: 7–9). Where is Job’s tree’s hope? Not in the tree. In Isaiah the tree has been chopped down by the Assyrians, in Jeremiah by the Babylonian army. But even so, hope springs new. The roots seek water and water brings life. In this pious metaphor of divine mercy, hope resides in adhering to the ‘path of God’. No stump is dead. As soon as the water of divine grace reaches the roots, just so quickly does the tree become as a ‘new-planted tree’, which in Jeremiah certainly is the self-understanding of a new Israel.
The poem in Job 14: 7–15 works this same metaphor, and finds a comparable resolution. The harshness of human life is expressed in the Figure of the suffering Job who attempts to plead his case before his silent God. Such a life is worse than death: ‘Would that you would hide me in death’s realm, that I might be safe until your anger passes. Set a limit and then remember me again!’ Job remarks: ‘There is hope for a tree.’ But for a person? In just a few phrases Job’s author creates a picture of the saving renewal of life, a resurrection on the basis of the ever-new hope that every tree’s dead stump has. Like Jeremiah’s Israel, he would hide until God’s anger passes. Job will trust in a renewal of life. He asks his question clearly, unequivocally: ‘Can one who is dead live again?’ In this characterization. Job’s character takes on new possibilities as pietism’s model of patience: ‘I will endure . . . . till my redemption comes.’ There is hope for one who holds to the path of Yahweh. Just such texts express the theology that forms the foundation of a variety of dramatic forms and historicizations.
Expressions and motifs used to describe the way of evil fill out and deepen the theme of new life and resurrection. In contrast to the qualities of life given by the tree standing by the water, Psalm 1’s introduction to the Psalter offers us the image of chaff, which surfaces once again in the well-known metaphor of separating the wheat from the chaff. ‘The godless are like chaff that the wind blows away.’ Those who walk in the way of the torah stand fast; while those who walk in the path of the godless are blown away by the spirit.
A very interesting dramatic form of this motif can be found in Psalm 35: 4–6, which is presented as sung by David:
Let those who seek my life be put to scorn and dishonour; let them who plan evil against me be set back and shamed. Let them be like chaff in the wind: with Yahweh’s messenger driving them off. May their path be dark and slippery with the angel of Yahweh in pursuit!
As is so typical of the use of the figure of David in the Old Testament, pietism’s image of the godless as chaff in the divine wind takes on mythological shape. Yahweh’s messenger plays out a role of saving deliverer of the pious and of scourge of the impious. This is a role that we will see below taken up in Psalms 2 and 8 by a mythological David as messiah. Here, it is David’s opening prayer in Psalm 35 that opens the poetic imagination to metaphorical battle: ‘Fight, Yahweh against those who would fight against me; go to war with them, who pursue me with war.’ Yet, even here, the poem remains as a dramatization of a personal religious struggle: ‘Tell my soul: “I am your salvation.” ’
While Psalm 35 has given the metaphor a context within the traditions of David’s wars of both story and mythology, a variant form of dramatization of this same block of tradition is given in Jeremiah 23: 12. Here, it is the enemy that takes shape in the story of the fate Jeremiah declares for godless prophets and priests: ‘May their path be slippery; may they stumble in the dark where they shall fall.’
We can also see a double variation of this same pietistic form of turning proverbs into story, and giving ‘enemies’ of God imaginative forms in the poem collected in Job 21: 17–26. In verse 18 the poet sings of the godless as ‘straw before the wind; as chaff that the spirit drives away’. As chapter 14 had questioned the hope of resurrection, implied in the metaphor of a tree, Job 20–21 questions the truth of the theology of the way. This concerns the destiny of the godless. First, Zophar instructs Job in the wisdom of this theology. In doing so, the text reflects the rhetoric of both the prophets and the Psalms:
You know that it has always been so, since humanity was first placed on earth, that the celebration of the godless is short, and their happiness but for a moment. . . He will Wow away like a dream, never to be found; he will fly like a vision of the night. .. Heaven will expose his guilt. The earth will rise against him, livers will sweep his ‘house’away; taking it away on the day of wrath. This is the inheritance that God has dealt out for the godless. This is the fate that God has determined for him. Job 20: 4–5, 8, 27–29)
The author has Job respond with his small question challenging the established pietism of his peers and their understanding of the divine:
Why are the godless allowed to live? Even when they grow old, they are strong and healthy . . . they are not struck down by the rod of God . . . they live out their days in happiness . . . How often does the lamp of the godless go out?. . . How often do they really become like straw before the wind, like chaff which the wind blows away? Job 21: 7, 9, 13, 17, 18)
Job questions the theological establishment here. It is Zophar who gives Yoke to the typical use of this metaphor in the Bible. The Psalms describe the enemies of God, of David and of pietism. Jeremiah describes Israel and Jerusalem past as godless and doomed to destruction. In doing so, both offer the established troths of theology. Job, however, disputes such confidence, and his challenge to pietistic faith, in answer to his friend Zophar’s reiteration of this theology, underlines the lie of his friend’s dogmatism; ‘How empty is the comfort you bring me; how false your answer.’ Job 21: 34) The Bible’s theology is not a theology of truths. It is a way of critical reflection. It is learning and discourse. In the Book of Job, which opens with Yahweh betting with Satan about whether Job walks in the way of God or not, this discourse reaches a critical high point.
The use of biblical narrative to give dramatic form to this piety rarely allows the lure of story to blind the discussion to its real context in this larger philosophical discourse. This becomes particularly clear when we look at the way Hosea mixes his metaphors about the godless as ephemeral with the motifs both of morning dew and chaff in the wind. Hosea 13: 2–3 brings it into his description of old Israel’s Ephraim;
They go on to sin more and more; they make images of gods for themselves, idols of silver: the work of clever men . . . They sacrifice humans, they kiss calves: therefore they will be like the morning dew, like the early, fleeting dew, which like chaff is blown from the threshing floor.
The dread implications of the threshing floor as expressive of divine wrath are unavoidable. This is the second time that Hosea takes up this cluster of motifs. In 6; 4–5. Hosea has used it to describe the basis for Yahweh’s decisive rejection of the Israel and judah of the past:
What am I to do with you, Ephraim? What am I to do with you, Judah? Your loyalty is like the morning dew, like the early, fleeting dew. Therefore 1 will cut them down, with the prophets: kill them with nay own words. My judgement will be on them as light.
The intellectual implications of this conunentary on Judah and Ephraim’s promised destruction should not be missed. It is not a reference to nations of the past, but to current text and tradition. Not Assyrian and Babylonian swords, but the intellectual weapons of words punish such faithlessness. There is no deportation from the land threatened; nor is a foreign exile the people’s fate. Ephraim and Judah are to be alienated from their destiny in history’s light.
A large cluster of motifs is implicated here, as we are brought back to the positive metaphors of light and water, linked to life and resurrection. It is the contrasting despairing judgement on Ephraim and Judah that carries implications of a variation on Job’s critique. This passage of Hosea is given as a response to the opening verses of chapter 6, offering us pietism’s confident voice. Ephraim and Judah play the roles of Job’s friends:
Let us return to Yahweh. He has ripped us that he might heal us; he has struck us that he might heal us. He will give us life after two days; raise us up after three, that we might live in his presence. Let us know Yahweh; let us try to know him. He rises as surely as the morning dawn. He will come to us like the showers, like the rain that waters the earth. (Hosea 6: 1–3)
Shall Ephraim and Judah have their hope that Job, Jeremiah and the Psalms have promised in their metaphor of the tree, in the promise of Isaiah’s holy seed? Where is the stream on whose bank Psalm 1’s tree of life stands? With the Book of Job, Hosea stands on the critical side of this discussion. It rejects Ephraim’s and Judah’s hubris and confidence of living in God’s presence. Hosea stands not only with Job here, but, with its motif of repentence, in agreement also with Jonah (2: 9–10), Psalm 71: 20 and I Samuel 2: 6. Salvation comes from Yahweh, and as he wishes it. Hosea returns us to the central biblical perception of the divine: that his will is everything. It is the prayer of David and of Jesus on the Mount of Olives; it is Jonah s prayer in the belly of the whale; it is Hannah’s prayer. This is nothing to give one confidence. There is no security, no certainty here.
Certainly, the one text most playful and full of fantasy, among the many that deal with the theme of new life and resurrection, is the comic story of Ezekiel’s macabre journey to the valley of death that we find in Ezekiel 37: 1–14. The hand of Yahweh takes Ezekiel to a valley that is full of bones. He shows Ezekiel ail around. All these huge number of bones are dried out, and so Yahweh puts Job’s question to Ezekiel: ‘Can these bones live?’ Ezekiel answers, quite appropriately if also ironically, that only God can answer that question, Yahweh then orders Ezekiel to prophesy to these bones:
‘You dried-up bones, hear Yahweh’s word! So says Yahweh, my lord, to these bones: “I give you the breath of life. So, live. I put sinews on you. I cover you with flesh. I cover you with skin and give you life’s breath, so that you will be alive. This I do that you might understand that I am Yahweh.” ’ I prophesied as I had been ordered, and while I prophesied, there was a rustling sound and the bones came together . . . (Ez. 37: 4–7)
After the bones come to life and stand there as a great army, Yahweh explains to Ezekiel that these bones had been the people of Israel who had said: ‘our bones are dried up; our hope is swallowed; it is all up with us.’ (Ez. 37; 11) He then orders Ezekiel to prophesy again:
‘So says Yahweh’s God: “My people, I open your graves and lead you from them to bring you to the land of Israel. In this way, you will understand that I am Yahweh . . . I will give you my spirit and you will live, and I will let you live in the land . . .” ’ (Ez. 37: 12–14)
This is the breath of Yahweh of the garden story which makes the clay figure of a human into a living creature (Gen. 2: 7). It is the divine spirit of Psalm 104: 29–30: ‘When you take away your breath they die and become dust again; when you send your spirit, you create life and make the world new again.’ When the author has Yahweh explain that he brings Israel, his people, from its grave, he is echoing the same motif of a more historicized variant of a return from exile from the previous chapter (36; 24): ‘I will draw you from the nations and collect you from all the lands. I will bring you to your own country.’ The bringing together of these two variants in Ezekiel clearly demonstrates the tradition’s understanding of the return from exile as resurrection. In the same way, the renewal of life in the new Israel is expressed through the metaphor of a newborn child. Israel that was dead lives again.
This metaphor is put to pietism’s purpose in terms of the theology of the way in Psalm 30, where resurrection becomes the leitmotif of the entire psalm. This is the explicit declaration of verse 3: ‘You brought me from the realm of the dead; you let me live, that I not go down to the grave.’ The psalm, offering some eighteen different variants of this motif, could well be called ‘the resurrection psalm’.
I’d like to close our discussion of resurrection texts in the Old Testament with reference to the Book of Daniel 12: 1–3. This passage clarifies the metaphor by bringing a dehistoricized understanding of the exile together with the either/or demands of the theology of the way:
At that time, Michael, the great prince will arise, who will stand by the people. It will be a rime of trouble, such as there has not been since there had been a nation. At that time, your people will be saved: all who are inscribed in the book. Many of those who sleep in the ground, will waken, some till eternal life and some to shame and to eternal horror. The wise will shine with the brilliance of heaven’s firmament and those who led many to righteousness [will shine] like stars forever and always.
The inclusion of the mythological prince Michael, the watcher over the people,1 marks this variant as entirely unhistorical and metaphorical. This is also clear from the pedagogically interpretive verse 3 granting eternal life to those who teach others. The story’s separation, however, of those who are to awaken to eternal life from those who face eternal horror and scorn presents Psalm 1’s divisive choice. A total commitment to the torah stands opposed to the way of the ungodly as an ontological principle. Again and again, the biblical texts demonstrate the inescapable sectarian character of their language and imagery. In doing so, they tell us much of the social context of the Bible’s composers and those that maintained it as their tradition. It seems appropriate now to address the concrete historical contexts for the development of such sectarian societies in ancient Palestine.
We have not one history of Palestine to write. There are a dozen or more histories along the southern fringe of greater Syria. In no period does this become more apparent than in the Late Bronze to Iron II transition period, from the late thirteenth to early ninth century BCE. The entire region suffers economic crisis, periodically intensified by droughts, collapse of trade and changes in imperial and political support systems. Some regions suffer major immigration, especially from the Aegean and from coastal Anatolia, and a long process of assimilation. Other regions become seriously depopulated and are threatened with demographic collapse as towns and villages are abandoned. Some areas undergo a shift towards more drought-resistant economies, and even desedentarization as large numbers seem to turn to pastoralism. Still other regions experience an influx of refugees who found new settlements. These bring with them demands for land-clearing and terrace-building. While no region remains unchanged, each region has its own timetable and specific histories of stress, imperial support, collapse or recovery. Of the many geographically distinct regions of Palestine, it can be said that no two of them witnessed a common history of transition from the end of the Late Bronze Age until the Iron Age proper. Neighbouring regions affected only a sub-region’s periphery. AH of this suggests a small-region orientation of the people at the beginning of the Assyrian period. If one must speak of ethnicities at this early period – and I do not think we can – we must speak of some dozens of groups within western Palestine alone.
The intrusion of imperial politics into the region, however, and the establishment of Assyrian authority with its support of some of the larger forms of political patronage in Palestine in towns such as Gaza, Ashqelon, Laehish, Jerusalem, Gezer, Samaria, Akko, Beth Shan, Hazor, Dan and elsewhere, did not support population integration or the development of national autonomy. It rather worked actively against integration. The nature of competition between Palestine’s many lesser patrons effectively prevented any single region from developing an indigenous threat to Assyrian interests. Tyre, Damascus and Samaria competed for the Jezreel; Tyre and Damascus for the Galilee; Ammon and Israel for the Gilead; Jerusalem and Lachish for Judea, etc.
The widely used Assyrian policies of deportation and population resettlement, inherited and used in turn by the Babylonians, Persians and Macedonians, systematically fragmented the Palestinian infrastructure. Such policies destroyed both the continuity and the coherence of regional associations. Even the propaganda of ‘policies of return’, had this effect, creating foreign colonies entirely dependent on imperial patronage for their legitimacy. Witness the destruction of the Jewish temple belonging to the military colony at Elephantine by the local population of ‘Egyptians’, as well as the biblical traditions of rejection and conflict between those identified as ‘returnees’ and groups identified as Samaritans or ‘people of the land’.
The period in Palestine from the ninth to the fifth centuries BCE hardly promoted the development of any durable and regionally coherent population. Region-wide coherence was undermined severely by the traditional political structures of the Levant. Not only did imperial forms of despotism maintain a balance of competing regional powers, but local systems of patronage prevented the accumulation of power locally except in forms of coalitions among traditional competitors. Both loyalties and military potential were fragmented. This is apparent in the proliferation of fortifications around most of Palestine’s small towns. In the Persian period we have the imperial province of Yehud, but that was no more reflective of a people than other Persian provinces. This is no less true of Samaria. Any constructs of ethnic or cultural unity must at least begin with evidence, and here, the texts from the Jewish colony of Elephantine may prove more important for Jerusalem’s history in this period than anachronistic biblical ones.
Texts do not give direct evidence for the construction of a history of any world of the past asserted by their authors, but rather for the history and perspective of the authors’ own world as implied in the texts’ projections. This world is rather Greco-Roman than Hellenistic. We should be dating not traditions but the historical contexts of texts. These are first known from Qumran in the second century BCE, in contexts which clearly show that the formation of biblical books is still in process. No Bible as such existed in the Hellenistic period, only some very specific texts and collections of them. The analysis and interpretation of these texts is our primary historical source for understanding Hellenism in Asia. The intellectual worlds of the Old and New Testament text-traditions hold a common perception, distinguishable at most as older and younger contemporary witnesses of a common tradition.
The biblical tradition does not offer a representation of the past so much as it presents the understanding and meaning that the biblical authors’ contemporaries attributed to the past. The history of Palestine, which we have traced from at least the late Neolithic period, reflects a continuity of the people of Palestine. Historically, if we are to ask where the people who wrote the Bible come from, we should first point to this Neolithic period when the early villagers and farmers of Palestine adopted and developed the Semitic language and established their own version of a Mediterranean economy. The social and cultural continuities of Palestine’s population from that time are marked and unequivocal. We see them in the material remains and particularly in the styles of pottery from cooking pots and storage jars, as well as in the later developments of lamps and common ware. We find them in the structures of the economy, the political structures of patronage, the types of settlement, even the continuity of the trade routes. The establishment of the empire, first with the Assyrians, which was to continue until modern times, changed few of these structures. The development of religious beliefs was also progressive, involving as much a reinterpretation of the old as an mtroduction of the new. The foundations of biblical thought were centred in an inclusive monotheism, which was based on a reinterpretation of Palestine’s religious past. The characteristic of the Bible as collected tradition confirms continuities it created. Judaism and Christianity, though themselves later than the writings taken up in the Bible, clearly understood themselves as heirs to this intellectual tradition. As Judaism gave way to the dominance of Christianity in the Byzantine period in the course of the fourth century ce» and when both Christianity and Judaism gave place to Islam in the seventh, changes took place in the religious thoughts of the population, but such changes were both developmental and incremental. Even the great displacements of the twentieth century, leading to the establishment of the state of Israel, have been understood in terms of return. They are spoken of in the language of continuity.
From such a perspective, one must say that Palestine’s population has ever set a high price on its continuity. Even the disruptions of imperial population policies had been reinterpreted in favour of continuities. Indigency was given the immigrants as their birthright. Historical continuities were also in fact great. Although deportation and exile, and subsequent changes of identity and self-understanding, have been the fate of many during the history of this region, continuity has played a countervailing role. The state of Israel ceased to be in the year 722 BCE» but the people and many of the villages and towns of Israel continued and the historical continuities of this highland population with the medieval and modern Samaritan communities around Ntblus can be confirmed through continuities of the agricultural population in the Shechem valley and elsewhere in the central highlands. Economic and cultural continuity can be traced back to the Early Bronze Age. One must not imagine the Assyrians creating a tabula rasa of the highlands in 722, They had a territory to administer and to draw taxes from. While the genetic mix of the population must have been substantially altered by these changes, many remained in the region and provided the language, culture, religion and way of life for the varied ‘returnees’ who were brought to the land from Arabia, Elam and Syria. Not all went into exile; nor did all go to Egypt. The archaeological continuities are marked, as are the continuities of language, culture, religion and way of life. ‘Race’in the modern discriminatory sense is not an issue during this period. The year 586 BCE disrupted and changed political life in Jerusalem. That was politics. The lives of most people were picked up again and continued along old lines. The end of Palestine’s regional states brought the population into an imperial context. National identity with the formation of ethnicity had failed.
The primary referent of the Bible’s fictive, familial and ethnic unity is not reflected in the narratives of patriarchs, judges or kings. These are all stories about old Israel. The primary identification is found rather in the stories, songs and metaphors of ‘exodus’ of ‘wilderness’ of ‘exile’ and ‘return’. These centre on the motif of the benei Yisrael as the ‘people of God’, as Yahweh’s ‘first-born’and as his ‘inheritance’. These stories all are solidly rooted in the self-defining, grand epochal line of a God without a home or a people searching for a people without a home or a God. It is in this metaphor that we find the foundation and matrix for the ethnographic metaphor of all Israel. This metaphor gives voice to the ‘new Israel’ with its centre in Yahweh’s temple of the ‘new Jerusalem’. This is an identity that is formed from the perspective of the sectarian theology of the way.
In the biblical discourse about the presence of the divine, the multiplicity of divine names, epithets, art and symbol become transformed. The Bible offers an interpretation of the divine as a coherent reality of the heavens. It also interprets the diverse characteristics that are found reflected in human traditions as false and distorting. It is in this restructuring of tradition that the implied authorial voices of the Bible are most clearly debating the ‘new Israel’. To apply this biblical view to the Iron Age is anachronistic. The Yahweh of history is as different from the Bible’s Yahweh, as the Israel of history is different from the Bible’s new Israel.
The question of Yahweh’s historicity is quickly clarified with reference to the Yahweh of history, which we reviewed already in chapter 7 above. The earliest known references to Yahweh come up in the form of a toponym in Egyptian texts of the fourteenth to thirteenth century BCE and we have considerable historical evidence for a plurality of Yahwehs from the Iron Age. We know a Yihu or Yau of Nebo. We also know of the Yahwehs of Teman and of Samaria, and we possibly have pictures of them from Kuntillat Ajred, a ruin in the northern Sinai. These references to Yahweh could well imply the existence of cult places or temples to the deity. We also have many personal names with a Yah, Yau or Yahu divine element in them. These have a considerable geographic spread in the West Semitic world. Such names include the royal names Azriyau and Yau/Ilubidi in far north Hamat in Syria. Such well-known evidence reflects a number of societies that variously identified such central divine functions as fertility and weather with a deity whose name was Yahweh. Ba ’al and Hadad are better-known names for this same divine function among West Semites.
We find Yahweh also in later periods: from Yahw in Elephantine of the Persian period to the Yao mentioned in the writings of Philo of Byblos. Nor is the god Ieuw of northern Syria, mentioned by Eusebius, to be ignored. In the Persian period, we find coins with Yahweh’s image and symbols. In this same and in the following Hellenistic periods, we find Yahweh temples at Elephantine, Jerusalem, Arad, Samaria (near Mount Gerizim), Leontopolis, Araq el-Amir and Cyrenaica. Temples known from excavations, such as the Iron Age altar at Arad and the Hellenistic reconstruction at Beersheva, are also claimed as Yahwist, but only on the strength of assumed similarities to a biblical Yahweh.
Our problem of historicity is not entirely resolved by a comparison of the Bible’s theological reinterpretation of Yah web with the historical Yahweh of Palestine. Just as the historicity of the Bible’s literary perceptions of Yahweh is largely anachronistic, and is hardly confirmed by any Yahweh of history, early or late, so the literarily and traditionally derived perceptions of early Judaism have departed from any known historical reality. They too are anachronistic.
Although the name Judea is a geographical term occurring in Assyrian period texts, referring to the highlands south of Jerusalem, in the Persian period the name is political. It is the name of the Persian province. The Assyrians’ name for the southern highlands, Jauddáa, and the Persians’ imperial name, Yehud, were no more reflective of a people than were any of the other names for regions of the empire. Moreover, the geographical spread of people referred to as Yehudim is so great that it would be rash to assume that this name refers to their place of origin. Nor should we continue to understand this term as ethnographic, without evidence. By the beginning of the rabbinic period in the second century ce, the term yehudim is clearly religiously descriptive, and neither ethnic nor geographic, Folk-etiologically, the term yehudim has been associated with the divine name Yahu. It defines Yehudim as adherents of Yahu, It is this religious association that seems most constant in the spread of the use of the name Yehudim in the Roman empire.
Already in the Elephantine texts, the name Yehud seems to have been used for t definable group of people who were called ‘Jews’, It is not understood in a geographical sense, but in the context of the religious affiliation of some of the people in this military colony in Egypt. The word Yehudim might be understood as a self-identification centred in a religious relationship with the god Yahweh. These ‘Jews’ are not residents of Judea, Nor is it likely that they originally came from Judea rather than some other region of the south Levant. They are members of a religious association of those who centre their lives in Yahweh. These texts are well worth looking at more closely.
Yedoniah, a priest of the military colony at Elephantine in Egypt, sent a letter, dated to 407 BCE, on behalf of his fellow priests and the ‘Jews’, the citizens of Elephantine, to the governor of Judea. He asked administrative permission to rebuild their temple, dedicated to the god Yaho, which had been destroyed by ‘Egyptians’. Yedoniah also refers to an explanatory letter they had already sent to the sons of Sanballat, the governor of Samaria, and to an earlier – never answered – letter to the high priest in Jerusalem, Yedoniah accuses the priests of the temple of Khnub of conspiracy in the templets destruction, which had been carried out by troops from the fortress of Syene.
Yedoniah claims that the temple and military colony of the Jews had been in Elephantine since pre-Persian times. He obviously claims religious ties between the Elephantine temple and the temple community and ‘Jews’ of Jerusalem. This sentiment is perhaps not reciprocated. Although some scholars have argued somewhat inconsequently that Elephantine’s Jews must have come from Israel rather than Judah because of the non-observance of Josiah’s reforms and cult-centralization in Jerusalem, they are correct in their assumption that the term ‘Jews’ here makes no implicit reference to a place of origin in Yehud. Reference to place of origin in the letters from Elephantine seems rather to be the function of the term ‘Aramaean’, which is used in contrast to ‘Egyptian’ in the texts. That the ‘Jews’ of Elephantine are likely originally from the south Levant may be judged from the dominance of West Semitic, and especially Yahwist-theophoric, personal names. There are also many Hebraisms in the Aramaic of these texts. The implied use of the Hebrew language, however, does not alone signify any specific ethnicity or ideology. Moreover, the other West Semitic deities supported by this Jewish prrison – Yaho, Ishumbethel and Anathbethel – reflect broader Syrian, and probably south Syrian origins.
Other deities – of international origin – are honoured by Elephantine’s Jews. An oath is sworn to the goddess Sati; and greetings are given in the name of Bel and Nabu, Shamash and Nergal, Yaho and Khnub. The nexus of religion and family makes it difficult to conclude that the ‘Jewish’religious associations of the Elephantine community, suggested by their names and that of their deity, are to be translated with any confidence in terms of ethnicity. Ethnicity is difficult enough to identify in the best of circumstances. Far from the relative homogeneity of a provincial homeland, émigrés are, ethnically speaking, notoriously promiscuous.
Mibtahiah, daughter of Mahseiah the son of Yedoniah (Yahwist names all), is a wonderful example for understanding Jewish associations in the diaspora. Her grandfather Yedoniah is described as an Aramaean, or Syrian of Syene. Her father, Mahseiah, in another text, is described as a ‘Jew’. Obviously this is a term that does not exclude one also being an Aramaean. In a contract for Mibtahiah’s third marriage, her father is described, like his father before him, as an Aramaean of Syene. Mibtahiah’s first husband has a Yahwist name, Yezanaiah, as well as a Yahwist patronym; ben Uriah. Her second husband, however, bears an Egyptian name, Pi’ with an Egyptian patronym: Phy, who was a builder in the fortress of Syene. Her third husband, also a builder, bears the Egyptian name Ashor, with the Egyptian patronym, Seho. He later adopts the common Hebrew name Nathan. Whether this was done for family or for religious reasons is a moot point.
In biblical traditions, Yehud is identified with Judea and variously constructed as the region controlled by a small temple society centred in Jerusalem which lies just north of Judea. It is undoubtedly in this Persian period that Jerusalem first becomes identified as the city of the Jews, of the Yehudim, but it is not clear that this has any geographical significance in the biblical texts. The personal name Yehudah also occurs first during this period, and is found in the Bible both as the eponymous ancestor of the biblical tribe of Yehudah, and as a cue-name for the one who in Judges conquers the highlands of Yehudah. The self-understanding implied of a religious Judaism (as in the texts from Elephantine) is found in the authorial voice of biblical texts such as the Book of Psalms. These texts look back upon ancient Israel as lost. They create a ‘new Israel’ centred in the study of the torah, given to them by the long forgotten God of Israel past. Like Israel’s troops in the story of Joshua 24, they reject the past to choose a new way, the way of Yahweh. This is also the perspective of the stories in Josephus about John Hyrcanus. He is seen as re-establishing a new Israel throughout the newly conquered lands of Palestine.
It is interesting that the concept of Eretz Yisrael, the ‘land of Israel’ in these stories is established not through ethnic identification, but through religious conversion. This is again the understanding of a ‘true’ – not an ethnic – Israel that is given to the founding figure in the Damascus Covenant: the ‘teacher of righteousness’. We have seen that this language reflects a sectarian perspective. The true Israel is understood to refer to those who hold to the way of truth. In just such a context, Josephus presents the Pharisees as Jews for the ‘new Israel’. In contrast, the Hasmonean-anchored Sadducees are presented as adhering to the old Israel and to the temple. However, the historically indistinguishable sadiqim (‘the righteous’) stand solidly in just such a sectarian-defined path of righteousness as the ‘new Israel’. This is a profoundly theological, not an ethnic definition. It is, moreover, a perception and self-understanding that must force the historian to avoid speaking of Judaism and Israel as a historical people at all, except in this very religiously defining sense as a people of God. Jews, Idumeans, Galileans and Samaritans, as well as Essenes and Pharisees, the writers of the gospels as well as the early rabbis of the Talmud, all understood themselves with the self-defining term benei Yisrael. The gospels – with all of their seemingly anti-Semitic abuse of the term ‘Jew’ – are thoroughly ‘Jewish’ works that are centred in this same sectarian and biblical view of the ‘new Israel’. They see Judaism, as do the rabbis, from a religious perspective.
In book 12 of his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus recounts an aetiology of the Jews of Egypt from deportations under Ptolemy ‘from the mountains of Judea and from the places about Jerusalem, Samaria and near Mount Gerizim’. These he describes as ‘two groups’ – nevertheless Jews all – who dispute about whether they should send their tribute to Jerusalem or to Samaria (Ant. 12.1.1), The interesting issue is not that Josephus might know anything at all about these people in Egypt. His story presents the diaspora Jews as simultaneously of disparate origins and loyalties, and as nevertheless functioning as a single community. In the next chapter, in a context associated with his variant of the Letter of Aristeas, Josephus presents a tradition of Ptolemy Philadelphus having set free 120,000 people from Jerusalem. They had been enslaved and brought to Egypt (Ant. 12.2.1–3). Again, the interesting question is not one of historicity. The important question is rather whether Josephus’ aetiological motif of a deportation ‘from Jerusalem’ is not based on his understanding of ‘Jew’. The use of the term for these people in Egypt rests on their religious affiliations, rather than either geography or origins. This religious association may also be behind the Persian use of the name Yehud as a reference to the province of Jerusalem rather than to the highland region of Judea to the South.
Josephus’ implicit association in these texts of Samaritans with his diaspora Jerusalemites is an important text to remember when we read some of his more polemical descriptions of Samaritans in an unrelated effort to define them as non-Jews. For example, in Antiquities 12.5.5, Josephus presents the Samaritans as (falsely) claiming that their observance of the sabbath and properly performed sacrifices on Gerizim derived from their ‘forefathers’. Josephus tries to refute these Samaritan claims. He argues that not only were Samaritans in fact not Jews, they were Sidonians. They themselves, he asserts, had affirmed that they were ‘alien from their nation and their [that is Judaism’s] customs’ and had even asked that the name of their temple be changed to the ‘Temple of Jupiter Heilenius’. Such a statement, however, holds implicit a Samaritan self-understanding that ‘their nation and their custom’ can be seen as Jewish. Josephus further accuses them of perversely trying to obtain a remission of taxes by claims of descent from, Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh, and by claims of observing the Jubilee year. They assert, argues Josephus, ‘that they were [really] Hebrews but [only] had the name Sidonians’ (Ant. 11.8.6). Josephus presents them as liars, claiming to be Jews when it suits them and then claiming to be Medes and Persians, and – in the very same context (!) – as being ‘Sidonians living in Shechem’ (Ant. 12.5.5).
Josephus, of course, ignores his own explanation given in the speech of Aristeas in Antiquities 12.2.4f., that Yahweh was identical with Jupiter Heilenius, and that such a renaming of the Samaritan temple hardly involves apostasy. Also implicit in Josephus’slander of the Samaritans is that they understood themselves as Hebrews, observed the sabbath, the Jubilee year, proper sacrifice and maintained themselves as the benei Yisrael whatever the truth of the claim that they were Sidonians, Medes or Persians might be. That they were not in fact alien to the tradition is also obvious. Josephus reports that people who had been accused in Jerusalem of breaking the sabbath or food taboos took refuge with the Samaritans. However, he describes them as having done so by pleading that they had been originally falsely accused. Implicitly, Josephus’ witness here is evidence that the Samaritans upheld the tradition (Ant 11.8.7).
We find that Egyptians are Jews, Syrians are Jews, Samaritans are Jews, Josephus refers to ‘Jews throughout the inhabitable earth, and those that worshipped God, even of Asia and Europe’. The specifics themselves are impressive: he refers to Jews as having been carried captive beyond the Euphrates. Citing Sttabo, he speaks of a large portion of Alexandria taken up by Jews, of Jews living in many of the cities of Egypt, as well as in Cyrene and Cyprus. He describes Jews as controlling Cleopatra’s army (Ant. 13.10.4 and 14.7.2). Their great power in Egypt he explains by their having been themselves originally Egyptian. He writes in connection with a revolt in Cyrene, of ‘our people, of whom the habitable earth is full’ and of Jews in every city. ‘It is hard,’he writes, ‘to find a place . . . that has not admitted this tribe of men and is not possessed by them’. He also speaks of the Jews of the diaspora much in the manner of Philo: model citizens of the empire. He tells of many nations, imitating the Jews and, having learned from them, supporting ‘peat bodies of these Jews’, and becoming prosperous using their laws.1 This picture of the ‘Jews’ of the diaspora is matched by his description of the ‘Jewish’ cities of Palestine at the time of Alexander, including the cities of the Transjordan, of Idumea, Phoenicia and even ‘the principal cities of Syria’.
In these descriptions of Josephus, his understanding of ‘Jews’ in the diaspora is determined by his wish to describe Judaism as comprising all who believe in the almighty God. Even his more limited description of the followers of Jesus, among whom he includes both those he calls Jews and Gentiles, forms part of his comprehension of Judaism (Ant 18.3.3).
While Josephus has trouble in recognizing any among the growing adherents of monotheism as not having been Jews, Philo, in making uncompromising distinctions between Hellenists and orientalists, mikes sharp and uncompromising rejections. For Philo, the Jew of Alexandria, it is ‘we Greeks’who stand in the path of truth, over against the Barbarians. It is however ‘we Jews’, the descendants of the Hebraioi who stand over against the Egyptians. Jews stand against the godlessness of the ethné. Any argument against understanding early Judaism as an ethnic group or nation could hardly be stronger than Philo’s own.
Philo’s perception stands solidly within the context of the biblical theology of the way. He pits the way of the godly – those who are committed to a life dedicated to the torah – against the way of the ungodly. He presents his perception of the Jew and of Judaism clearly within the context of the ‘new Israel’, He historictzes the godlessness of the biblical tradition’s ‘old Israel’with reference to the uncivilized nations of the Orient of his own time, Philo’s Hstorieization of such ideological metaphors is fully comparable to what we have seen of Josephus’ literary techniques. Chronicles gives Hezekiah’s reform a rhetorical balance with the use of a three-fold Samaritan ancestry: Ephraim, Manasseh and Asher. With this same literary manner, Josephus presents the Samaritans (whom he identifies as being Sidonians as well as Persians and Medes) as claiming descent from the tribes of Joseph, Manasseh and Ephraim, Similarly, Josephus elsewhere identifies Judaism itself in terms of the three-fold literary division of Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. Such efforts to historicize essentially literary concepts and metaphors are commonplace throughout our literature of Judaism. Only a Weberian sociology would derive a description of ancient society from these literary fictions. Whether they are found in the New Testament, in Philo or in Josephus, they reflect a literary world not an historical one.
In ignoring the literary character of biblical stories and traditions, whether of the Old or of the New Testament, we have ignored the collector’s world in which the traditions were first interpreted. We ignore the author’s world, centred in the religious sectarianism of true faith over against a false faith of the past. This sectarianism is not a religion of reform, but one of transformation and reinterpretation. In closing the Book of Kings, the tradition rejected that past world of kings and men, and with it that Jerusalem of old Israel with its temple that had been built by men’s hands. The New Israel comes out of the desert, out of exile. The land is the empty land of Nehemiah 1–4 and of Leviticus 26, It is Jeremiah 4: 23’s tohu wa bohu. It is I Maccabees 1: 37’s variant of creatio ex nihilo. The New Israel begins at the creation. It is a celebration not of an ancient nation but of new life. Ancient Israel – from the garden story of humanity’s search for wisdom to the end of God’s patience in II Kings – belongs not to the creation’s acts of God, but rather to the acts and to the world of men, where Jerusalem with its walls and its tower was indeed Genesis 11’s Babylon. This Babylon is the Jerusalem where the kings of Pavid’s house, Yahweh’s messiahs all, had done what was right only in their own eyes.
If Judaism is to be defined, as is common in recent scholarship, as the people who established and formed a revival of religion in the context of the Yahweh temple community of Jerusalem, such as we find in the narrative traditions of Ezra and Nehemiah, we have a double problem historiographically. First, we must assert the scholarly definition of the exclusiveness of the Jerusalem temple’s claim.: an assertion that has no historical or literary warrant. Such an assertion would involve historians in an anachronistic defence of the Jerusalem cult’s legitimacy and orthodoxy, against such literary constructs as the ‘people of the land’ and the Samaritans of Ezra and Nehemiah. Second, historians would need to ignore the historical communities who were associated with the many other Yahweh temples and cults. While this problem might be solved by a ‘many Judaisms’ approach, this approach does not solve the theological and historical problem that rabbinic Jerusalem of the post-temple period is hardly to be understood as heir to any such temple Judaism.
Judaism of the rabbis is only with great difficulty perceived as an historical and social reality of any period prior to the second century CE. It has no centre and it has no unity in any earlier period. On one hand, what is understood as ‘Judaism’ reaches out centrifugally, embracing the whole of the classical world’s monotheistic inclusiveness. On the other hand, ‘Judaism’ refers to religious and philosophical traditions, all of which share the common structure and self-understanding of the theology of the way. Such an ideology, when called upon to supply the modus vivendi of a practical life – a lived way of a community – falls victim to its structural weakness. It ends by supporting a hermeneutic perversion of its own self-understanding; forcing the exclusion of all and everything that distracts one from the path of truth and from one’s dedication to the torah.
If the Jewish temple had ever held the centre of Judaism – as, for example, has been frequently argued in reference to the Hasmoneans, to John Hyrcanus’Josianic efforts to force conversions to Judaism, and to various historicized New Testament versions of a Jerusalem of Jesus’ time – that role came to it definitively only as a direct result of the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. It is at that time that the role of the temple, as expressing the divine presence on earth, was recast in the form of the metaphor of a future and heavenly Jerusalem. It was not the rabbis’ torah Judaism, centring itself on the spiritual heart of the tradition, that fell heir to the temple tradition. Rabbinic Jerusalem is hardly well defined as a religion in any strict sense of the word, any more than are the Tanakh traditions from which it springs. It is hardly like other religions of the ancient world, centred as they were on cults and sacrifices and the service of the gods. All such traditions are – as in Philo – transposed and reinterpreted in philosophical terms.
The central issue at stake historically is best defined as that which the hypothesis of ‘multiple Judaisms’ attempts to solve. The argument is quite elegant. It also provides a seemingly secure halfway house for the collapsing scholarship that has focused on issues of the historicity of our written traditions. These many Judaisms living in this essentially metaphorical world are the Judaisms of Elephantine, as well as of the many variant historical forms of benei Yisrael Judaism that dotted the Palestinian landscape and the shores of the Mediterranean. They include the Shomronim of Samaria, as well as the Samaritans and Jews of Josephus and the Hellenist Jews of Philo in far-off Alexandria. Among such Judaisms surely belong the Zadokites and the Nazirites, the Essenes, the Sadducees and the Pharisees.
These multiples of Judaism, however, are all caught in the warp of modernist scholarship. One and all, they are essentially literary Judaisms, whose self-identities have been defined by tradition. We also find here the Judaisms that have been defined merely by scholars as Jewish: that is, those hypothetical groups of Jews living in various hypothetical societies and communities implied by the quite varied ‘sectarians’ of the Damascus Covenant, the Dead Sea scrolls, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, and indeed of the many variable Old Testament traditions, such as Ezra, Nehemiah, Deuteronomy, Exodus and Ben Sira, as well as by the voice of the gospels and the letters of Paul.
The basis of this conception of many Judaisms, however, is literary rather than historical. These multiple Judaisms are fictive entities. They reflect varieties of ideologies, identifiable only in limited ways with any people who lived in the ancient world other than the authors who created them. They are multiple not on the basis of communities, or on the basis of regional differentiations or chronology, though they have certainly been influenced by such variables. They distinguish themselves from each other according to literary patterns of perceiving. They represent one or other variant of the defining motifs of the ‘new Israel’ and of the ‘new Jerusalem’, of the ‘way of righteousness’, and the ‘way of the torah’
Historically, however, we have a decidedly different taxonomy – one in which the terms Jewish and Judaism are hugely anachronistic, having merely a referential and accidental quality, not a defining one. In this taxonomy, no coherent unity pertains other than those shared intellectual features common to an interrelated geographical area. Here we find people living in Judaea, Idumaea, Shechem and Samaria and its region, the Galilee and the cities of Palestine, together with associated populations in the Transjordan, Phoenicia, Syria and Alexandria, Here we find the many West Semites of Egyptian military colonies such as that of Elephantine and Herontopolis. We have any number of religiously comparable groups, including the members of the synagogues of the great cities of the empire from Rome to Babylon. We have people belonging to assemblies that, rejecting the distinction of Jew and Gentile, saw themselves nevertheless in concepts of a ‘new Israel’. In such an historical taxonomy we find not only priests and official cult functionaries of the various Yahweh temples, or even adherents and supporters of the temples as such, but members of a variety of associations, religious and philosophical These are the people who wrote and who supported the writing of the literature. They wrote in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. They wrote books we today think of as Jewish: the many anonymous and often pseudonymous works of the Tanakh; the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea scrolls, the gospels and epistles, as well as the works of such authors as Josephus, Philo of Alexandria and Philo of Byblos. For such people, the terms ‘Jew’, ‘Jewish’, and ‘Judaism’ are historically highly equivocal.
Rather than replacing the history of the south Levant during the Hellenistic period with a paraphrase of First or Second Maccabees, we need to write a history for the whole of this region. Our history should be more than a history of Judea and Samaria. We need to think more about Philistia, Phoenicia and the Decapolis. We also need to think about the towns of the lowlands and of the coast. We must especially think of Beth Shan and the towns of the Jezreel, and we mustn’t forget the Galilee. If the Bible remains our focus, we can no longer neglect the great intellectual centres of Alexandria and Babylon as we have. We might also think of religious ideas and the writings of texts during the Greco-Roman period more as an intellectual and philosophical movement within Hellenism itself than as a reactionary religious movement of Palestine’s least Hellenized ‘Jews’. Were the temples of Jerusalem, Samaria, Elephantine, Leontopolis and Beersheva expressions of religious coherence? Or did they reflect some of the many factions, each with its own political and religious aspirations? If Judaism were a religion that had its central originative core in the temple cult of Jerusalem, it could not be Samaritan; and not only not Samaritan, it could not even be ‘Judean’ understood ethnically or geographically. Similarly, if kingship continued to be an epitomizing factor of patronage, what was the significant factor of Idumean power in Judea: especially regarding their Herodian patron’s relationship to Jerusalem’s temple? Certainly many early texts – such as the sectarian literature in the Dead Sea scrolls – do not see the temple as the core of their religion, though they recognize its political and cultic value. Similarly, Elephantine’s texts indicate that the Jerusalem temple and the Samaritan temple are both important non-monopolistic centres of their understanding of ‘Judaism’. And how do the groups of Galileans fit in? If Idumeans and Galileans can be understood as Yehudim, what of the people of the Transjordan from Philadelphia to Damascus?
Could all who adhered to such a religion understand themselves as ‘Jews’? Or, like the Samaritans, as benei Yisrael? The early Greek translation of the Bible is associated with the ‘Jews’ of Alexandria. Were such Jews transported to Egypt from Alexander’s Samaria? Or were they ‘Jews’ because of their biblical faith? And where did the Jews of the later Jerusalem Talmud come from; those ‘Jews’ centred in the schools and synagogues of Tiberias and Zevad? This is to say nothing about the Jews of Acco, of Byblos and of the diaspora throughout the Roman empire. What does it mean to be a Jew in Palestine – or indeed in the diaspora – under the Roman empire? Why is it that the rabbinic traditions of the Talmud – arguably reflecting traditions of the second to fourth centuries CE – know so little of the immense world of the Jewish diaspora: a Judaism that was: so wholly Hellenized and Greek-speaking? And how was this international culture – so well reflected In the Septuagint and in many of the pseudepigraphie traditions – eventually lost to the Jewish world? Lest we be distracted by such questions, what were the non-rabbinic components of the complex region of the Syrian fringe in the Greco-Roman period? Are they to be understood as non-Jewish, anachronistically identifying Judaism as a product of the later Mishmah? What hidden historical societies does the Bible give voice to? Is the Bible itself expressive of Judaism or is it an anonymous voice for an entire region’s intellectual tradition?
If we are to have a critical history, we must deal with the anachronisms we have created. Are the biblical books themselves a product of ancient Judaism? Does the continuity between the Bible and Judaism reflect a chronologically linear development, or is it an aspect of rationalistic anachronism, ideologically motivated. Is such hypothetical continuity asserted? Does Judaism’s claim to the Bible obey the same imperative as Christianity’s claim to the New Testament and the Septuagint, namely, by theological necessity? Historically, the Bible, and the books that make it up are products of the whole south Levant’s world-view. Those who identified with it as their own tradition were those who emerged in the course of the first or perhaps better early second century CE as Samaritans, Jews and Christians. They were both Greeks and Hebrews. They were both indigenous and people of the diaspora. While all would identify their own heritage with the land ‘of the Jews’, this was a religious assertion, not a statement of historical fact. Just such associations to Judaism were created in Egypt, in Babylon, and in all of the great cities of the Greco-Roman world.
After Jerusalem was destroyed by Roman troops in 70 CE people picked up their lives and continued, and they did so again after Bar Kochba’s revolt in the second century. When the vast majority of Palestine became Christian during the Byzantine period, no large numbers were driven out. The Jewish presence in Jerusalem does not end with either 70 or 135, but rather what ended was Jerusalem’s and its people’s self-understanding as Jewish. Though in the fourth century Monophysites were driven eastward ideologically, the indigenous population continued with a transformed understanding of itself and its religion. Similarly, in the seventh century, when the vast majority in Palestine became Muslim, few were driven from the land. Though many churches became mosques, the indigenous population continued with a transformed understanding of itself and its religion.
Today, the Jewish/Christian dichotomy dominates much of our perspective on early Judaism. This is an anachronistic distortion from the second century CE, and deeply sectarian in its essence. The dichotomy rests on a structural flaw within the biblical traditions themselves. It manipulates and historicizes the theology of the way, from, which Judaism and the Christianity of the second century have taken their departures. It corrupts and distorts the tradition.
1 ‘Peoples’, in Greek and Hebrew.
1 The translation is the author’s revision of F. Garcia–Martinez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated (Brill, Leiden, 1994), p.48.
2 Here we have an echo of the Abraham story (see Gen. 18, especially vv. 11–14), marking the patriarchs as models for the theology of the way.
1 The metaphor of the new Israel as a repentant remnant is clearest in texts of implicit preaching as in Amos 5: 3–4: ‘The town that sends out a thousand men, will bring only a hundred home; that which sends out a hundred will bring only ten back to Israel’s house, Yahweh says this to the house of Israel: “Seek me and you will live!” ’
1Also see Dan. 10: 3–21 and Rev. 12: 7.