The Faith of a Heretic

The Old Testament

Until the nineteenth century, it was customary to consider the Old Testament as if it did not have any historical or literary background: it was studied as the revelation of God, as an absolute beginning, completely self-sufficient. In the eighteenth century, the sustained criticism of the Enlightenment led to a gradual decrease in respect for the Hebrew Scriptures, and interest in them diminished, too. But it was only after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, in 1859, that an altogether new approach to the Old Testament was widely accepted: an evolutionary approach that first broke down the unquestioned barrier between the Bible and its background, and eventually all but drowned the Bible in its background until no distinctive feature at all was perceived any more.

A hundred years after the concept of evolution first gained wide currency, it has become easy to recognize the foolishness of some of the excesses perpetrated in its name. Some of these excesses actually antedate Darwin, but spread like wildfire as soon as they could feed on his ideas.

As far as any background is concerned, the crucial point that should never be forgotten in the history of ideas can be put into a single sentence: one may have been influenced profoundly by others and yet be strikingly original and even revolutionary.

What makes the study of history fascinating is, among other things, the perception of discontinuity in the context of continuity. The historically ignorant believe in absolute novelty; those with a smattering of history are apt to believe in no novelty at all: they are blinded by the discovery of similarities. Beyond that, however, lies the discovery of small, but sometimes crucial, differences.

Ancient Israel was deeply influenced by two older civilizations—probably the two oldest civilizations on the earth, excepting that of the so-called Cro-Magnon men who perished 20,000 years ago, leaving superb drawings of animals on the walls of some caves in southern France and northern Spain. The first two civilizations that seem to be continuous with subsequent cultures are probably those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, which can be traced back approximately to 4000 B.C.

The Old Testament emphasizes the relation of Israel to both cultures. It places the Garden of Eden near, if not in, Mesopotamia; it speaks of the Tower of Babel; and it relates that Abraham, the ancestor of Israel, was born and brought up in Ur of the Chaldeans. After leaving his native Mesopotamia, Abraham is said to have traveled widely in what later became the land of Israel, and he is also said to have visited Egypt. His grandson, Jacob, who was named Israel after his nocturnal struggle with an angel whom he defied, saying, “I will not let you go unless you bless me,” is said to have migrated to Egypt with his children and his children’s children. And the Bible relates that the children of Israel remained in Egypt for several generations before Moses, a Hebrew versed in the wisdom of Egypt, led them out of the land of slavery into the desert of Sinai where he gave them laws and precepts that set them apart from all the nations of the world. That was probably in the thirteenth century B.C., and the name of Israel is encountered—for the first time, as far as present records go—in an Egyptian inscription of the thirteenth century in which Merneptah, who was probably the Pharaoh of the Exodus, boasts of having destroyed Israel forever.

In the next generation the Hebrews began their conquest of the promised land where they were to live almost 700 years, midway between Egypt and Mesopotamia. After that period of time, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylonia, sacked Jerusalem and led a large portion of the Jews into the so-called Babylonian exile, from which they were liberated by the Persians in 538 B.C. At that time, many of them returned to Israel and rebuilt their temple in Jerusalem—which was eventually destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70.

That ancient Israel was deeply influenced by Egypt and the various Mesopotamian cultures, from the Sumerians down to the Babylonians and Assyrians, should therefore have been taken for granted long before archaeological discoveries and detailed comparisons left no doubt about it. But in fact it had not been taken for granted during the many centuries in which the approach to Scripture was theological and super naturalistic rather than naturalistic and historical. The discovery of the historical background of ancient Israel was therefore accompanied by a militant sense of opposition to what had previously been believed, and—as often happens in such cases—it was pushed to utterly absurd extremes: it became the fashion to deny all originality to the Old Testament. This view is easily as fantastic as the assumption of earlier times that there was no connection at all between the Hebrew Scriptures and the cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The civilization of ancient Egypt is not only as old but also easily as remarkable as any the world has seen. If we date its approximate beginning around 4000 B.C. we find that it endured for about 4000 years. The gigantic step pyramid at Saqqara, the world’s first large stone structure, whose originality, verve, and power are still fascinating to behold, and the slightly later, still vaster pyramids at Giza were as old when the Parthenon and the other temples on the Acropolis in Athens were built as the Parthenon is today; but in Egypt magnificent temples were still built centuries after the completion of the Parthenon. Admirable paintings and sculptures were produced in Egypt over a period of more than 3000 years.

If we compare Egypt with Israel, what strikes us first of all is the great difference: in many ways, ancient Israel might well be understood as the diametric opposite of ancient Egypt. In Egypt, sculpture and painting flourished; in Israel, both were expressly prohibited—according to tradition, by Moses himself. In Egypt, man’s concern with the life after death was as intense as it ever was anywhere: the pyramids were tombs; the finest paintings and many of the most remarkable sculptures were found in the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, across the Nile from Luxor and Karnak, hundreds of miles upstream from Giza and Saqqara; and the treasures found in the tomb of Tutankhamen, a relatively insignificant king, give us some idea of the contents of other tombs which were robbed thousands of years ago. In ancient Israel, we find no concern with the afterlife whatsoever: for Moses, death is the end; and it is only in the very latest passages of the Old Testament, in Hellenistic times, that we find a few intimations of immortality. In Egypt, we find a profusion of gods, many of them half human, half animal; in Israel, we find none of all that: Moses expressly repudiates all belief in many gods.

These three differences are not only obvious: they far outweigh any similarities. For all that, there are continuities. First, we find in Egypt, albeit restricted to a special class, a love of learning and respect for wisdom. Here the difference in similarity was expressed in a single imperative by Moses: “You shall be unto me a kingdom of priests.” And again: “You shall be holy.” Not one class but all. Every man is called upon to make something of himself. Perhaps this was the most revolutionary idea of world history. In the countries to which the Old Testament has spoken either directly or by way of Luther’s revival of the call for “the priesthood of all believers,” this idea may appear to be a commonplace; elsewhere—for example, in Egypt, not only in Moses’ time but also in Luther’s and ours—one can appreciate the revolutionary impact of these words.

Secondly, we find in Egyptian architecture and sculpture an embodiment of the sublime that has never been surpassed. In parts of the Old Testament this sublimity has been transmuted into prose and poetry. This point does not depend on any ambiguity of “sublime.” The similarity is genuine and deep and could be circumscribed in other words. Perhaps nowhere else in the ancient world, and nowhere at all except under the influence of the Hebrew Bible, do we encounter such a fusion of austere simplicity and overwhelming power. (The King James Bible and the Douay Version, with their more ornate and baroque flair for magnificence and rhetoric, are misleading in this respect.)

There remains one similarity which, since its relatively recent discovery, has attracted far more attention than any other: in the fourteenth century B.C., perhaps a hundred years before the Exodus, there was a monotheistic Pharaoh in the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt, Ikhnaton. After ascending to the throne as Amenophis IV, he renounced and forbade the worship of Amon and the other gods, changed his name to Ikhnaton, insisted that only Aton should be worshiped, and moved the capital to what today is known as Tel-el-Amarna—the place where some remarkable sculptures and reliefs and a fine hymn to Aton were unearthed by Ludwig Borchardt around 1900, almost 3300 years later. The notion that the Hebrews might have acquired their monotheism from the heretical Pharaoh was too intriguing not to have been taken up by at least a few writers, of whom Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and himself a Jew, is by far the best known. He was not deterred by the established fact that Ikhnaton’s innovations barely survived his early death and were ruthlessly suppressed long before the end of the fourteenth century: indeed, the very name of Aton was scratched out on all accessible works of the period. Freud speculated that, for this very reason, a surviving adherent of the Aton cult might have found himself forced to leave Egypt and, if he wanted adherents, to turn to another people. Freud himself thought of his work on this subject, Moses and Monotheism, as perhaps no more than “a historical novel”; and the details of his argument do not stand up. But the possibility of an influence certainly remains.

There is also the possibility that Ikhnaton derived his monotheism from the Hebrews whose presence in Egypt at that time is claimed by the Bible and admitted by Freud and most scholars. But no such influence, one way or the other, is demonstrable.

Again the difference in similarity should not be overlooked. Ikhnaton’s monotheism consists of a quantitative reduction of traditional polytheism: of the many traditional gods he recognizes only one, Aton, the sun. It is the sun that awakens all life and that alone deserves worship. In the Five Books of Moses, any worship of the sun is scorned. The word used for the sun, shemesh, is written just like the word for servant, shamash (the vowels not being written); and in the creation story in Genesis the sun is created together with the moon to serve man as an instrument that makes possible the calculation of days, months, and years.

Hebrew monotheism cannot be understood as a quantitative reduction of any traditional polytheism or as an exclusive declaration of loyalty to one of the established gods: all the established gods of the nations are set aside, and the whole lot of them is considered beneath comparison with God, who not only does not happen to be identified with the sun but who is not at all an object in this world. No object in this world deserves worship: not the sun and moon and stars, which Plato, many centuries later, still considered divine; not the Pharaoh nor any other human being; nor any animal. Only God who is utterly unlike anything in the world. Man alone, according to the First Book of Moses, is made in God’s image and breathes his spirit. And that means every man and every woman, not just some king, emperor, or hero, or one family or people only.

On reflection, all this appears so different from the religion of Ikhnaton that no likelihood at all remains that Hebrew monotheism was derived from the worship of Aton. Moreover, it is “debatable”—as Professor John Wilson has noted in his preface to Ikhnaton’s famous hymn to Aton in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament—whether the Amarna religion can really be “called monotheistic.” For only the Pharaoh and his family worshiped Aton, while the courtiers worshiped Ikhnaton himself. Incidentally, “the great majority of Egyptians was ignorant of or hostile to the new faith” (369).

Finally, few Pharaohs, if any, were so possessed with the desire to make images of the things in this world, from reliefs of the disk of the sun to the beautiful birds and flowers found on the floor of the Pharaoh’s palace and the magnificent sculptured likenesses of the Pharaoh and his family and the men at his court, which now grace the museums of Cairo and Berlin.

Our archaeological discoveries in Egypt leave the originality of the religion of Moses as stunning as it ever seemed. The experience of Egypt may have awakened the Hebrews to a haunting sense of the sublime, to dissatisfaction with the ephemeral, to respect for learning—and to a lasting revulsion against any concern with the afterlife, against polytheism, and against idolatry and any form at all of sculpture.

We must leave open the possibility that faith in the God of Abraham antedated the sojourn in Egypt. What the Bible claims, and what we have no good reason to doubt, is that the Hebrew religion was hammered out in response to the experience of Egypt—not by way of accepting the religion of Egypt but rather as an enduring reply to it.

Several generations before the Hebrews went to Egypt, Abraham is said to have come from Mesopotamia, and around 1900 it was fashionable in some quarters to juxtapose Bibel und Babel—to cite the title of an essay of that time—and to deny the originality of the Bible. One of the motifs in the birth story of Moses is encountered earlier in a story about a Mesopotamian king, Sargon; and the story of Noah and the flood bears some marked similarities to the far earlier Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Such literary influences are undeniable, but, if one stops to think about them, of rather limited importance. Nobody would think of denying the originality of Shakespeare, Goethe, or Sophocles on similar grounds. What matters is how such motifs are utilized.

Far more interesting is the question whether the so-called Law of Moses was significantly influenced by the Code of Hammurabi. Hammurabi was a king of Babylonia, probably from 1728–1686 B.C. He may be the man referred to in Genesis 14 as “Amraphel, king of Shinar.” His law code was discovered in the winter of 1901–2 in the course of excavations at Susa (the Shushan of Esther and Daniel) in southern Persia, where an Elamite raider had taken the diorite stela about the twelfth century B.C. The stela, topped by a bas-relief showing Hammurabi with the sun god Shamash, was found by French archaeologists who took it to the Louvre in Paris.

The code is not the earliest code of laws known to us, but in its preservation and comprehensiveness it has no equal of comparable antiquity, save only the Law of Moses, which is younger. Hammurabi’s laws are framed by a poetic prologue and epilogue and deal with the following matters: accusations, witnesses, and judges; theft and robbery; a military feudal system; field, garden, and house; tradesmen and female wine sellers; articles left with another person for safekeeping; family relationships; injuries; ships; rents; and slaves. In this central portion there are no digressions, and the arrangement is far more systematic than in the comparable sections of the Five Books of Moses. This, added to the many parallels in detail, led early scholars to underestimate the striking originality of the Mosaic legislation. Confronted with such an unusually significant and unexpected discovery, these scholars could scarcely have been expected to react differently; and the tremendous influence of the Code of Hammurabi on the Law of Moses cannot be doubted. Indeed, Hammurabi and his successors succeeded in extending the influence of Babylonia as far as Palestine, and the cultural hegemony of Babylonia outlasted its political dominion. It would therefore be tedious to catalogue parallels or, for that matter, minor differences. Are there any major differences? Do we find any radically new point of departure in the Mosaic legislation?

The two central principles of Hammurabi’s code are, first, ius talionis (the conception that justice in criminal cases consists in precise retaliation) and, secondly, that the law is a respecter of persons and that different standards must be applied to people of different social status. Both of these principles are anathema to most contemporary penologists, and retaliation is widely considered all but synonymous with the Law of Moses. The arguments of T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, and other apologists for ius talionis notwithstanding, both of these principles have a common presupposition: they distinguish insufficiently between human beings and material objects. And the crucial difference between the Code of Hammurabi and the Law of Moses is that in the latter the unique worth of man as such is proclaimed and implicit—for the first time in human history.

The Code of Hammurabi recognizes three classes of people: an aristocracy, commoners, and slaves. Accordingly, it generally provides three kinds of punishment, depending, for example, on whether an injury has been inflicted on a member of the aristocracy, a commoner, or a slave. The slave is considered less as a human being than as a piece of property; and so are the sons and daughters even of a noble. The way in which the principle of retaliation is applied suggests that the body of the noble himself, too, is considered as essentially a material object.

Here are a few illustrations, accompanied in each case by a contrast with the Law of Moses. The man who has destroyed an eye or broken a bone of another man’s slave has to pay one half his value: he merely has to compensate the owner for the damage done to his property. In the same vein, there is no penalty whatsoever for destroying an eye or breaking a bone of one’s own slave. This should be compared with Exodus 21:20 and 21:26 ff., here the man who as much as breaks a tooth of his own slave must let him go free for his tooth. In the Law of Moses, the slave is first of all a human being and has to be treated as such.

According to the Code of Hammurabi, if a man either helps a fugitive slave “escape through the city gate” or harbors him in his house “and has not brought him forth at the summons of the police, that householder shall be put to death” (15 ff.). Compare this with Deuteronomy 23:15 f.: “You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you; he shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place which he shall choose within one of your towns, where it pleases him best: you shall not oppress him.”

In the Law of Moses, being a slave is an accidental condition. This is further emphasized by constant reminders that the children of Israel had been slaves in Egypt themselves and should therefore know how it feels to be a slave. On the Sabbath the slave, too, should rest, and every Sabbath thus becomes a celebration of the brotherhood and equality of men.

The contrast in this respect between Hammurabi and Moses is most neatly illustrated by Hammurabi’s last law (282): “If a male slave has said to his master, ‘You are not my master,’ his master shall prove him to be his slave and cut off his ear.” In Exodus 21 we find a faint but, no doubt, deliberate echo of this law—an echo that seems designed to bring out the deep difference between the two legislations: “When you buy a Hebrew servant, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing…. But if the servant plainly says, ‘… I will not go out free’ … his master shall bore his ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him for life.”

Hammurabi considers a man’s children, too, not as human beings in their own right but as his property. If a man strikes the daughter of another man, “if that woman has died, they shall put his daughter to death” (210). A man’s daughter may thus be put to death merely to impose a severe fine on the father. The fine becomes less severe if the woman killed in the first instance was the daughter of a commoner (one-half mina of silver); and if she was a slave, the fine is still lower (one-third mina).

To such provisions there is no parallel in the Law of Moses, which insists, with striking originality, that there is only one God and that all men alike are made in his image and therefore altogether incommensurable with things or money.

The law of talion, to be sure, appears in the Law of Moses, too, but in an almost polemical manner. The Mosaic phrase, “an eye for an eye,” might be said to conceal a revaluation of Hammurabi’s values. Consider the three Old Testament passages in which the phrase occurs, and the first two will make plain the new spirit, while the third brings out an interesting continuity.

The first occurrence of “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth” is in Exodus 21, where it is immediately followed by the provision already cited: “If he knocks out his servant’s or his maid’s tooth, he shall let them go free for the tooth’s sake.” This provision shows immediately what is amply borne out by the entire Law of Moses, that the principle of retaliation was never applied mechanically and in accordance with the letter of the phrase. Rather, the emphasis was on the spirit; to wit, that an injury is an injury and that the law is no respecter of persons. Or, to put it positively, the words of the ancient, pre-Mosaic law of talion are employed to announce the new principle of equality before the law.

This interpretation is corroborated by the second Biblical passage in which the phrase occurs, in Leviticus 24, where the ancient formula is followed by this declaration: “You shall have one law for the stranger and for the native; for I am the Lord your God.”

The third passage, finally, in Deuteronomy 19, echoes and expands a similar law in the Code of Hammurabi: “If a malicious witness rises against any man to speak evil of him … the judges shall inquire diligently, and if the witness … has accused his brother falsely, then you shall do to him as he had meant to do to his brother; so you shall purge the evil from your midst. And the rest shall hear, and fear, and shall never again commit any such evil in your midst. Your eye shall not pity: it shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” In Hammurabi’s similar law, there is no reference to the intention of the witness: the man who accuses another of murder and then cannot prove his charge is put to death.

It is customary today to decry “an eye for an eye” as the epitome of legal barbarism. But to arrive at a judicious evaluation one should compare this last application of the ancient principle with, say, public morality in the United States of America during the decade after the Second World War: does it manifest higher moral standards when a United States senator who advised one of his colleagues to accuse as many people as possible to increase his chances of making at least some of his accusations stick was widely admired for his exemplary honesty and integrity?¹

Until quite recently, the idea of retaliation was all but inseparable from the Western sense of justice. Jesus’ counsel to love one’s enemies is on an entirely different plane: it is a maxim for personal relations, on a level with the Mosaic injunction, “If you meet your enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, you shall bring it back to him” (Exodus 23:4; cf. also verse 5 and many similar passages). In personal relations Hammurabi did not advocate retaliation either; and in their law courts Christian countries have not distinguished themselves from non-Christian countries by renouncing the principle, “life for life,” or the underlying conception of retaliation.

It is only in recent times that modern penologists have moved away from the whole conception of retaliation to advocate a penal system based on the primacy of reform. And it is instructive that so many Christian writers have opposed this recent development, which is associated mainly with stubbornly un-Christian thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and George Bernard Shaw, who emphasized the inefficiency of retaliation; with Friedrich Nietzsche, whose Zarathustra says, in his discourse “On the Tarantulas,” “that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hopes”; and with Albert Camus, who tried to show in his “Reflections on the Guillotine” that “capital punishment … has always been a religious punishment” and is irreconcilable with humanism. A generation earlier, Shaw had pointed out in his Preface to Major Barbara that “the only editor in England who renounces punishment as radically wrong, also repudiates Christianity.”

Pope Pius XII put the matter very clearly in 1953, in a manner that also shows its relevance to the discussion of retribution in Section 43. He took issue with those “modern theories” which “fail to consider expiation of the crime committed … as the most important function of the punishment.” Against them he cited Matthew 16:27 and Romans 2:6 and 13:4, concluding: “The function of protection disappears completely in the after-life. The Omnipotent and All-Knowing Creator can always prevent the repetition of a crime by the interior moral conversion of the delinquent. But the supreme Judge, in His last Judgment, applies uniquely the principle of retribution. This, then, must be of great importance” (117 f.).

To return to Hammurabi, the most striking parallel to the Law of Moses is not to be found in his legislation but in the prologue and epilogue where Hammurabi declares that he is giving his laws “in order that the strong might not oppress the weak, and that justice might be dealt the orphan and the widow.”

The conceptions of God and of man in the Old Testament differ sharply from those current in Egypt and Mesopotamia: they are distinctive, novel, and original, and they have exerted a decisive influence on Western thought.

What distinguishes the God of the Old Testament from the gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Rigveda, the Iliad, and the Edda is not by any means adequately suggested by the one word “monotheism.” The difference is not merely quantitative: the gods of Homer are far more similar to human beings than they are to the God of the Old Testament. Unlike the gods of polytheism, and unlike the god Aton of Pharaoh Ikhnaton, the God of ancient Israel is altogether separate from the world which he made, and he did not make it in human fashion, either after a fight with rival gods, demons, or dragons, or after a struggle with recalcitrant material, but in a manner as unique as he is himself—by saying, “Let there be.” He is not an object among objects but the sovereign subject who engages in the pure unimpeded activity of speech.

He cannot be seen—he cannot be made the passive object of vision—but he speaks to man, actively. It is not possible to make an image of him: one cannot make an image of one who is essentially not an object. Nor does anything in nature represent or resemble him, unless it were man who is made in his image and who breathes his spirit.

This relation of God to man is of the essence of the religion of the Old Testament. This religion is not metaphysical, not speculative, not mythical: it does not concern itself with the nature of God as he may be, as it were, in himself; it does not speculate about his activities before the creation of the world or, quite generally, insofar as they do not affect man; it does not relate myths about his private life. The religion of the Old Testament is concerned with God only as a Thou, only as related to man, only as addressing man and as addressable by man. His deeds are a subject of concern and related only insofar as they constitute an address to man. Of other deeds, nothing is said: God is not an object of interest, study, or entertainment.

The conception of this God and his relation to man leads to a revolutionary new conception of man. Neither man in general nor any kind or race of men is a brother or cousin of the apes that so closely resemble him, or of any other animal or object in nature: having been created in the image of a God who transcends nature, and breathing his spirit, man is raised out of nature and endowed with a supra-natural dignity.

This dignity is not restricted to one man, one family, or one people, but a quality of man as such: for all men are descended from a single couple—from Adam and Eve and, again, after the flood, from Noah and his wife. Thus all men are brothers.

Two of the three great ideas of the French Revolution are readily traced back to the Old Testament: equality and fraternity. What of the third idea: liberty? At least implicitly, this idea, too, is central in the Old Testament. Having been created in the image of God, no man is merely an object or should be treated merely as an object; every man has a supra-natural dignity; all men are brothers. It would seem to follow that no man should treat another man as a slave and deprive him of his liberty.

Logic is the weak side of history, and it sometimes takes centuries before apparently obvious implications are realized. American history furnishes a ready example with its noble declaration, in 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” When these words were proclaimed to the world—and their Biblical inspiration meets the eye—their author was a slaveholder, and the country on whose behalf he was speaking was one of the few civilized countries left in which slavery was still legal. It is a long and arduous road indeed that leads from pride in such a principle to its full realization, effectively guaranteed by law.

That the implications of the Biblical conception of man regarding slavery were grasped at least to some extent even in Old Testament times is plain from the passages cited by way of contrast with the Code of Hammurabi. Since there is no Hebrew word for “slave” other than ewed, which means “servant,” it is not an easy thing to say whether some form of slavery persisted through most of the time covered by the Old Testament or not. In theory at least, the institution of the Sabbath, on which the slave, or servant, was to rest, too, and the Sabbath year, in which any Hebrew slave was to go free (unless he wanted so badly to remain a slave that he subjected himself to the previously mentioned ceremony of having one ear pierced), and the institution of the Jubilee, every fiftieth year, in which non-Hebrew slaves, too, may have been meant to go free, would seem to have gone far toward abolishing slavery. That inhumanity nevertheless found frequent expression is obvious, but no other sacred scripture contains books that speak out against social injustice as eloquently, unequivocally, and sensitively as the books of Moses and some of the prophets.

In the religion of the Old Testament a keen social conscience is central. This is one of the distinctive features that set the Old Testament apart, quite radically, from the New Testament and the Koran, from the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita, from the Tao-Teh-Ching and the Dhamma-pada. And in the Old Testament this social conscience is by no means unrelated to the belief in God; rather, it is the most significant implication of this belief.

In the third Book of Moses, Chapter 19, we read: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason with your neighbor, lest you bear sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” And again: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

Malachi, the prophet, cries out: “Have we not all one father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another?” (2:10). And Job says: “If I have rejected the right of my manservant or my maidservant, when they contended with me; what then shall I do when God rises up? When he makes inquiry, what shall I answer him? Did not he who made me in the womb make him? And did not one fashion us in the womb?” (31:13–15).

One of the most important points about God and man in the Old Testament involves the person of Moses. The so-called “higher critics” of the Old Testament, who dominated the field for almost a century, beginning in the early second half of the nineteenth century, claimed that monotheism had developed very slowly and that it did not attain full purity until the time of the prophets.

This whole question is very involved, and one cannot do justice to it in passing. What needs to be shown is that the presuppositions of the “higher criticism” are untenable, that it contains a crucial self-contradiction, and that its methods are extremely unsound. Having tried to show this in detail in Chapter X of my Critique, I can refer interested readers to that book, and come to the point at issue in the present context.

There is ample evidence in the Old Testament—and its authors actually make a point of the fact—that the superstitions and even the idols of neighboring nations often gained a foothold in ancient Israel. No claim whatever is made that all the people from the time of Moses on were pure and dedicated monotheists or that their behavior came up to the highest moral standards. On the contrary, the Old Testament records Moses’ epic struggle with his stiff-necked people; and Judges, Kings, and the books of the prophets relate the sequel, which is essentially similar. It took time before the whole people rose, even in theory, to the height of Moses’ vision; and, of course, the people never became a nation of Moseses.

Two things, however, are extremely striking. First, in spite of occasional appearances of idolatry, beginning with the golden calf, the theory that objects in this world are gods and merit worship never seems to have gained ground. One gets the impression that some of the people sometimes fell into the habits of the nations among whom they lived and thoughtlessly adopted their practices. What the prophets attack is this unthinking, stupid inconsistency, never a rival creed, and least of all any belief that the traditional religion of Israel either contains or is indifferent to such ideas as, say, that the sun and moon are gods. This fact suggests most strongly that the monotheism of Israel was not derived from that of Ikhnaton, and that it was not arrived at gradually by way of a slow process of exclusion.

The second point is even more striking. In India, the Jina and the Buddha, founders of two new religions in the sixth century B.C., came to be worshiped later by their followers. In China, Confucius and Lao-tze came to be deified. To the non-Christian, Jesus seems to represent a parallel case. In Greece, the heroes of the past were held to have been sired by a god or to have been born of goddesses, and the dividing line between gods and men became fluid. In Egypt, the Pharaoh was considered divine.

In Israel, no man was ever worshiped or accorded even semidivine status. This is one of the most extraordinary facts about the religion of the Old Testament and by far the most important reason for the Jews’ refusal to accept Christianity and the New Testament.

It is extraordinary that the prophets never had to raise their voices against any cult of Moses or the patriarchs. One explanation, theoretically possible but incompatible with the evidence, would be that Moses never lived and was merely the fiction of a later age. But not one of the prophets makes the slightest claim to be an innovator: all remind the people of what they have long known and rebuke them for unthinkingly betraying standards and ideas long accepted. And there is no first prophet: before Amos came Elisha and Elijah and Micaiah and whole groups of prophets—Kings is full of them—and, before them, Nathan; and, before him, Samuel; and so forth. Yet there is not the slightest evidence that any one of them was the creator of the religion of ancient Israel or even a man who radically changed it. Everything points back at least to the time of Moses.

Why, then, was Moses never deified or worshiped—unlike Lao-tze, Confucius, and the Buddha and the Jina, and the Pharaohs of Egypt? The most obvious explanation is that he himself impressed his people with the firm idea that no human being is divine in any sense in which the rest of mankind isn’t.

Being a stiff-necked and critical people, they may have been quite willing to believe that he was not a god, that no Jew is a god, and certainly no Gentile. But it seems clear that Moses himself was unequivocal on this point—as, indeed, the Buddha was, too—and that Moses, unlike the Buddha, succeeded in imprinting it forever in the minds of his followers.

It could not have been hard for a man in his position to suggest to at least some of his most ardent followers that he himself was in some sense divine and without flaw. On the contrary, the image he created of himself was that of a human being, wearing himself out in the service of God and Israel, trying against all odds to wed his people to his God, modest, patient, hard to anger, magnificent in his wrath, but completely unresentful, capable of the deepest suffering, the quintessence of devotion—human to the core.

He went away to die alone, lest any man should know his grave to worship there or attach any value to his mortal body. Having seen Egypt, he knew better than the Buddha how prone men are to such superstitions. Going off to die alone, he might have left his people with the image of a mystery, with the idea of some supernatural transfiguration, with the thought that he did not die but went up to heaven—with the notion that he was immortal and divine. He might have created the suspicion that, when his mission was accomplished, he returned to heaven. Instead he created an enduring image of humanity: he left his people with the thought that, being human and imperfect, he was not allowed to enter the promised land, but that he went up on the mountain to see it before he died.

The Jews have been so faithful to his spirit that they have not only never worshiped him but, alas, have never pitted him against the other great men of the world by way of asking who compared with Moses. To be sure, after relating the story of his death, they added: “There has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses.” But they have not confronted the world with this man to stake out a claim for him. One speaks of Jesus, the Buddha, and Socrates, perhaps also of Francis of Assisi, but one does not ask: Does not Moses belong with them? Was he perhaps, man for man, simply as a human being, more attractive, greater, more humane?

What the Jews have presented to the world has not been Moses or any individual, but their ideas about God and man. It is a measure of Moses’ greatness that one cannot but imagine that he would have approved wholeheartedly. It would have broken his heart if he had thought that his followers would build temples to him, make images of him, or elevate him into heaven. That he has never been deified is one of the most significant facts about the ideas of God and man in the Old Testament.

The troublesome question remains how the elaborate ritual law of the last four Books of Moses is related to Moses. Traditional Judaism has assumed, as have Jesus, Paul, and traditional Christianity, that these laws were given by Moses. Goethe even suggested that the Ten Commandments did not derive from Moses, while a more ritualistic set of ten commandments, which he found in Exodus 34, did. Many of the “higher critics” agreed with Goethe: the admission that a sublime morality was taught by Moses in the thirteenth century B.C. would have been fatal to their evolutionary construction of the Old Testament. The morality they admired they ascribed to the great pre-exilic prophets, whom we shall consider shortly. The detailed ritual law they assigned to the post-exilic period; for, in brief, it does not seem at all plausible to assign it to the years in the desert, long before there was any real state, not to speak of a settled agricultural community, which seems to be presupposed by these laws. Moreover, neither the historical nor the prophetic books of the Old Testament seem to presuppose all of this legislation.

The reasons for dissociating Moses from the highly intricate ritual law are to my mind almost conclusive and establish an overwhelming probability. The reasons, on the other hand, for not ascribing to him the Ten Commandments or the moral principles traditionally associated with him strike me as utterly implausible; indeed, one is generally not confronted with any reasons at all, but merely with the presupposition that sublime moral ideas must be late. This assumption is surely false. Quite typically, we encounter a supreme moral challenge at the beginning of a new religion; and, more often than not, this is later subjected to compromise and dilution rather than improvement. Confucius and Lao-tze, the Buddha and Jesus furnish examples in this vein. If it should be objected that none of them stand at the beginning of a new civilization and that all four of them draw on past developments, the same consideration applies to Moses.

For all that, the problem remains whether Moses really tried to impress a high morality on his people. So far, it has merely been suggested that he well might have; that this cannot be ruled out a priori; and that, if he did, there would be many parallels in the history of religion. The question we must ask now can be expressed in Job’s words: “If it is not he, who then is it?” Somebody must have originated this morality. The Bible critics answer: the prophets.

We are asked in effect to believe that, in the eighth century, Amos and Hosea, independent of each other and without the least awareness of their originality—in fact, emphatically disclaiming any originality—came up all at once with the same moral demands. These were echoed almost immediately by Isaiah and Micah who, rather oddly, also seemed to think that their people had long been told what they were reminding them of, and that it was truly shameful and inexcusable that Israel should have forgotten, or rather failed to live up to, these ancient standards.

The point here is not merely that the prophets must have known better whether their moral standards were original with them than any “higher critic” could. After the Exile, the practice of ascribing books to ancient authors to heighten the prestige of the works became common; and there are excellent reasons for considering Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Daniel cases in point. It might therefore be asked whether the prophets might not have employed the same ruse, pretending that ideas original with them were ancient. There are at least two good answers to this.

The first of these may sound subjective and intuitive to anyone who has not read the great pre-exilic prophets, but it may well be conclusive for anyone who has: the indignation of these men is inseparable from their unquestioning conviction that Israel has betrayed, violated, broken the faith with norms known since the Exodus from Egypt. The second answer has already been given: the whole phenomenon of pre-exilic prophecy, of the almost simultaneous appearance, independently of each other, of men appealing to the same standards of morality, can hardly be explained if we are to suppose that these standards were original with them. It can be explained by considering Moses one of humanity’s greatest teachers. That this does not deprive the prophets of their glory will be seen as soon as we come to consider them in detail. (Cf. also my Critique, § 90: “Religion and Progress.”)

At this point it will suffice to cite a single passage from Jeremiah:

I did not speak to your fathers, and I did not command them on the day that I led them out of the land of Egypt, about burnt offerings and sacrifices. But this is what I commanded them: Listen to my voice, and I shall be God for you, and you shall be a people for me; and walk in all the way that I command you, that it may be well with you…. From the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt to this day, I sent to you all my servants the prophets, day upon day; yet they did not listen to me, or incline their ear, but stiffened their neck. (7:22 ff.)

It is widely supposed that the conception of the chosen people is diametrically at odds with the humanistic strain in the Old Testament, and what has so far been pointed out is often altogether ignored or at the very least held to represent a relatively minor motif. It has become fashionable to ignore whatever in the New Testament may seem unedifying, especially the many passages on hell and eternal torment, while emphasizing out of all proportion whatever in the Old Testament is questionable from a moral point of view.

Plainly, the Old Testament, written over a period of a thousand years and containing history and poetry as well as proverbs and laws and stories, is not in its entirety a book of moral instruction. It contains, for example the Book of Joshua, which relates the conquest of Palestine and ascribes to God the command to slaughter “both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword.” But to find the spirit of the religion of the Old Testament in Joshua is like finding the distinctive genius of America in the men who slaughtered the Indians. Many nations have their Joshuas, and the chance to make a unique contribution to humanity has often been bought with the sword: the genius of a people shows itself in what is done later to realize this costly opportunity. Survival in this wicked world may be a crime that has to be redeemed by subsequent achievements.

In the Old Testament itself, the idea of the chosen people is not offered by way of justifying lower moral standards, as if it were claimed that, being chosen, one need not live up to standards intended only for the mass of men. On the contrary, the conception of the chosen people is inseparably linked with the twin ideas of a task and of an especially demanding law.

In two definitive passages, Amos, the first prophet to compose poetic speeches that were committed to writing, proclaims: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities” (3:2). And: “Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? says the Lord. Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Crete, and the Syrians from Kir? Behold, the eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from the surface of the ground; except that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, says the Lord” (9:7–8). Not utterly; for, as Isaiah puts it a little later when he names his son Shear-jashub: a remnant shall return—that is the meaning of the name. What matters is not the glory of the people: most of them, almost generation after generation, shall be destroyed. What matters is the task: maintaining and spreading what has been revealed to them, namely, the belief in God and the morality that goes with it. And that is why a remnant shall return, lest the flame be extinguished entirely.

This theme runs through the books of the ancient Hebrew prophets—and, beyond that, through most of the Old Testament. The original structure of the Hebrew Bible has been deliberately changed in the Christian version of it, which ends with the prophets. The Hebrew Bible has three parts. The first consists of the Five Books of Moses. The second part is the Prophets, divided, in turn, into two parts: the first part is historical and comprises the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings; the second and central part consists of the prophets proper—that is, of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve. Some of the Twelve are easily as impressive as Ezekiel, but their books are far shorter than those of the Big Three. The last part comprises the so-called Scriptures: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles. The Hebrew Bible ends with the end of the Babylonian exile, when a remnant returned to Jerusalem; and the last words are the words of Cyrus, King of Persia: “The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him. Let him go up.”

Christianity had no use for this conclusion when it put together its canon, over a hundred years after the destruction of the second temple in A.D. 70—a destruction it had come to view as a definitive punishment for the Jews’ alleged rejection of Jesus. So they defied chronology and put the prophets at the end of the Old Testament. In this manner, the prophets ceased to appear as the central portion of the Hebrew Scriptures and became the transition from the Old to the New; and instead of the last sentence of the Hebrew Bible, which pronounced a blessing and a promise, one got this conclusion: “Lest I come and smite the land with a curse.”

The supra-nationalistic, cosmopolitan, humanistic motif runs through the Hebrew Bible from the creation to the words of the King of Persia who, in the Hebrew view, is an instrument of God. The culmination of this motif may be found in the vision of the messianic kingdom, which will be considered shortly. But it is also noteworthy that two whole books of the Old Testament are given over all but completely to this motif: Ruth and Jonah.

The point of the Book of Ruth cannot be fully grasped if it is forgotten that she is a Moabitess, and that the feeling of ancient Israel about Moab is epitomized in the story in Genesis which relates that Moab was born to one of Lot’s daughters after she had made her father drunk and spent the night with him. The point of the Book of Ruth is that Ruth, the Moabitess, became the great-grandmother of King David, the national hero. If there were any racist-minded jingoists in ancient Israel, this book must have shocked them rather more than the claim that George Washington or Robert E. Lee had a Negro great-grandmother would shock a DAR in Georgia. Immediately, the question arises what special merits and re-suiting dispensation made it possible for Ruth to become a member of the chosen people. But the answer is that the conception of the chosen people is not racial but spiritual. No dispensation was needed, no ritual, no baptism. Ruth simply said to the mother of her deceased Hebrew husband: “Where you go, I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God; where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if even death parts me from you.” These unprompted words were sufficient. No more is said. No further problem is even acknowledged.

In the Book of Jonah we are confronted not with a woman from Moab but with Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrians, who destroyed Samaria and the kingdom of Israel, who led the ten northern tribes into an exile from which they were never to return, and who came within a hair’s breadth of capturing Jerusalem and destroying the southern kingdom, too. How the design of the Assyrian king was frustrated unexpectedly is the theme of one of Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, “The Destruction of Sennacherib.”

In the Bible, Jonah is sent to Nineveh to prophesy its imminent destruction as a punishment for its wickedness. He refuses, flees on a ship, is brought back in the belly of a great fish, and finally goes and utters his prophecy. Then the people of Nineveh repent, and God forgives them. They do not become Jews. They are not circumcised or baptized. They simply repent. That is enough. God decides not to destroy Nineveh. Jonah, displeased, protests that this is what he foresaw in the first place: “I knew that thou art a gracious God and merciful.” That is why Jonah fled. Why now must he bear the humiliation of having been forced to make a prophecy and then to see it refuted by the event? “It is better for me to die than to live.” But God replies, after a short humorous episode: “Should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” Joshua is not unique: the lore of the nations abounds in men more or less like him. But in what other book of sacred scriptures do we find a book like Jonah?

It might be supposed that, if the foregoing analysis is right, the Jews would surely have endeavored to make proselytes, converting others to their own religion. And they did. An odd reference to this well-established fact is found in one of Jesus’ most extreme denunciations of the Pharisees, in the Gospel according to Matthew: “You traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte” (23:15). Soon after Jesus’ time, the Romans, provoked by the Jews’ refusal to accept their pagan rule, first destroyed Jerusalem and then, when the Jews rebelled rather than accept the presence of an image of the emperor as god in the place of their former temple, the Romans, among other things, put an end to any further missionary activities by the Jews. Later the Christian church of Rome continued this ban, and again and again surpassed in ferocity anything the Romans had done by way of persecuting the remnant of Jewry. Still later, Luther urged the German princes to burn all synagogues and to drive all Jews out of the country. Gradually, the Jews became resigned, as Christians came to be under Hitler, to the ethos of standing fast, clinging to their religion without surrendering on any point of substance and, of course, without making proselytes.

This ethos was beautifully formulated by the Lutheran pastor Niemöller in a sermon delivered less than two weeks before the Nazis arrested him. He chose as his text the words of Jesus: “You are the salt of the earth.” And he told his listeners, who, defying all threats by the government, crowded his church to hear him, that it was their task to keep themselves pure, lest the salt lose its savor: in their present situation this advice made no sense whatsoever; but that should not concern them; that was God’s concern. Their task was to hold out, and someday God might find some use for his salt.

To reproach the Jews for not making more proselytes is like reproaching Niemöller for not making more proselytes in those days before his arrest. When it was feasible, the Jews made proselytes—in the Roman empire, among the Cazars in the Crimea, and elsewhere. But it is harder to persuade men to submit to circumcision than it is to baptize them; it is harder to convert to the law than to trust in grace; and those who demand works will always make fewer converts than those who stress faith and the remission of sins.

The influence of Old Testament ideas concerning the state has been second only to that of the ancient Hebrew conceptions of God and man. The three main points can be made briefly. They concern the origin of the state, the value of the state, and the vision of an ideal society.

Regarding the origin of the state, the first thing to note is that, according to the Old Testament, the state has an origin within history and is not the natural condition of man. The Hebrew Bible believes in the priority of the individual. This point is made twice: first, in Genesis where we find man in Paradise, without any state; then again in the Book of Judges in which we encounter this refrain, which also concludes the book: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

The condition portrayed in the doubtless very early Book of Judges is one of attenuated anarchy. Only under foreign attack, or when foreign oppression becomes too severe, do the tribes rally now and then under a charismatic leader who, after his military triumphs, enjoys such prestige that the people come to him to arbitrate what differences may arise between them. Such men, and occasionally also women, like Deborah, are called judges and fill the otherwise vacant spot of a ruler until they die. Then the people relapse into their former state, approximating anarchy, until their enemies get the better of them and another leader rises and eventually becomes their judge.

Against this background, we find highly explicit doubts about the value of the state in the Old Testament. In the Book of Judges itself we encounter a fable whose prime intent is clearly antimo-narchical, and this point was not lost on such close students of the Old Testament as Cromwell and Milton. But in the twelfth century B.C., to which this fable takes us back, there were no republics, and the issue revolves around the people’s desire to form a state “like all the nations.”

Abimelech, one of the sons of Jerubbaal, one of the judges, went out after his father’s death and said to the people of Shechem: “Which is better for you, that all seventy of the sons of Jerubbaal rule over you, or that one rule over you?” And eventually “he slew his brothers the sons of Jerubbaal, seventy men, upon one stone; but Jotham, the youngest son of Jerubbaal, was left; for he hid himself.”

Jerubbaal had not confined himself to a single wife, any more than Jacob, or David, or Moses, who married a second, Ethiopian wife—and his brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam, were severely punished by God for reproaching him. But that aspect of the Old Testament has had scarcely any influence on the history of Europe and America—except, of course, for the early Mormons—while the following fable has had more influence.

Jotham came out of hiding and told the people of Shechem his memorable fable: “The trees once went forth to anoint a king over them; and they said to the olive tree, ‘Reign over us.’ But the olive tree said to them, ‘Shall I leave my fatness, by which God and men are honored, and go to sway over the trees?’ And the trees said to the fig tree, ‘Come you, and reign over us.’ But the fig tree said to them, ‘Shall I leave my sweetness and my good fruit, and go to sway over the trees?’ And the trees said to the vine, ‘Come you, and reign over us.’ But the vine said to them, ‘Shall I leave my wine which cheers God and men, and go to sway over the trees?’ Then all the trees said to the bramble, ‘Come you, and reign over us.’ And the bramble said to the trees, ‘If in good faith you are anointing me king over you, then come and take refuge in my shade; but if not, let fire come out of the bramble and devour the cedars of Lebanon.’”

Jotham ran away and was heard from no more, but his fable, in Judges 9, has reverberated through history. (Abimelech was killed in a battle, three years later, when he tried to take a tower “and a certain woman threw an upper millstone upon Abimelech’s head, and crushed his skull. Then he called hastily to the young man his armor-bearer, and said to him: Draw your sword and kill me, lest men say of me, ‘A woman killed him.’ And his young man thrust him through, and he died.”)

The point of the fable is clearly that nobody but an unproductive parasite would wish to be king in the first place, and that any people is better off without a king than with such a tyrant. This view is almost as far removed as possible from any belief in the divine right of kings. But the First Book of Samuel goes even further.

Samuel was a judge for a long time, and when he became old he made his sons judges. But his sons accepted bribes and perverted justice. Then the elders of Israel assembled and said to Samuel: “Behold, you are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways; now appoint for us a king to govern us like all the nations.” In its context, this request seems understandable enough, though it is hardly surprising that it displeased Samuel, and that “Samuel prayed to the Lord.” It is the following lines that go beyond even Jotham’s fable: “And the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.’”

Here—and not only in this passage—the earlier, premonarchic condition of Israel is idealized: it was not anarchy but the kingship of God. The institution of human kings, on the other hand, and the establishment of a state after the model of “all the nations,” is considered as a betrayal of God.

God’s answer to Samuel continues: “According to all the deeds which they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you. Now then, listen to their voice; only, you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.” The Bible relates further that Samuel told the people what God had told him, and that he offered them this picture of human kingship:

These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots, and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your menservants and maidservants, and the best of your young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will be his servants.

The fable of Jotham and Chapter 8 of First Samuel are extreme, and the rest of the Old Testament does not deny all value whatsoever to the state or to kingship. But the Old Testament consistently denies any claim of the supremacy of the state in human affairs or of the superiority of kings as such. Above the state and king and any government there is a higher moral law by which states, kings, governments, and any laws that they enact are to be judged. The influence of this idea can hardly be overestimated.

The quintessence of this higher law was condensed into a classical sentence by the prophet Micah, in the eighth century B.C.: “He has told you, man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you: only to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” (6:8). Amos and Hosea had made much the same points, insisting passionately on their social implications.

Unlike most representatives of religion in other civilizations, the prophets were not concerned about religious ritual. Their demands and their social criticism were moral. Indeed, the concern about ritual was one of the things they persistently denounced in the name of the overriding importance of social justice. Micah introduces his bold summary of what God demands with four rhetorical questions: “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” And then, as a bold antithesis, he proclaims the words cited above. What is wanted is not any ritual at all, but justice, mercy, and humility.

Amos, a little earlier, had been, if possible, still more explicit: “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream” (5:21 ff.).

In the name of him “who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out upon the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name,” Amos denounces those who “trample upon the poor and take from him exactions of wheat” and those “who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and turn aside the needy” (5:8 ff.).

Isaiah, Micah’s great contemporary, cries out:

What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?

says the Lord;

I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams

and the fat of fed beasts;

I do not delight in the blood of bulls,

or of lambs, or of he-goats.

When you come to appear before me,

who requires of you this trampling of my courts?

Bring no more vain offerings;

incense is an abomination to me….

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;

cease to do evil,

learn to do good;

seek justice,

abolish oppression;

defend the orphan,

plead for the widow. (Chapter 1)

The kings, too, are judged by the same standards, and no man, however admired, is exempt from judgment by the standards of this higher law. Indeed, the Old Testament goes out of its way to emphasize that the greatest national heroes had their faults. Jacob, who was renamed Israel and, according to tradition, gave his name to his children and children’s children, is no exception; nor is Moses; nor David; nor Solomon. The Hebrew Bible excels in its unforgettable portrayals of human greatness, but it never fails to stop this side of idolatry.

A hundred years before Amos, Elijah applied the same standards to King Ahab, and about 1000 B.C. the prophet Nathan applied them to David, after the king had asked Joab, his general, to place Uriah, the Hittite, in an exposed place where he might get killed, so the king would be free to marry Uriah’s beautiful wife, Bathsheba.

The law that asserted against the norms current in the ancient world, “You shall have one law for the stranger and for the native; for I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 24:22), would not brook any exception on behalf of kings or nobles. And it tells us a great deal about ancient Israel that the Law of Moses should include the injunction: “You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great” (Leviticus 19:15; cf. Exodus 23:3). The first part of that law would not have occurred to many legislators.

We are ready for the Old Testament conception of an ideal society. Much of what should be said about this has by now been said: both in the Five Books of Moses and in the Prophets we constantly encounter the vision of a society in which the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger are treated with special consideration; a society in which justice rolls down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream; a society based on justice, mercy, and humility. It is perhaps more often recognized that this ideal permeates the prophetic books than it is admitted, as it ought to be, that the Five Books of Moses are inspired by the same vision and seek to implement it with a wealth of detailed legislation.

What the prophets add is the great vision of the messianic kingdom which is found in both Isaiah 2 and Micah 4:

It shall come to pass in the latter days

that the mountain of the house of the Lord

shall be established as the highest of the mountains,

and shall be raised up above the hills;

and all the nations shall flow to it,

and many peoples shall come, and say:

Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

to the house of the God of Jacob;

that he may teach us his ways

and we may walk in his paths.

For out of Zion shall go forth the Torah,

and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

He shall judge between the nations

and shall decide for many peoples;

and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war any more.

In Micah, two further verses follow:

But they shall sit every man

under his vine and under his fig tree,

and none shall make them afraid;

for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

For all the peoples walk

each in the name of its god,

but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God

for ever and ever.

What distinguishes this conception from myths of a golden age among the Greeks and among other people is that the prophets stress the abolition of war and the establishment of a peaceful international community—and that they envisage this in the future and not, as other nations who spoke of golden ages, in the distant past. On paper these differences may seem small, the more so because the vision of the prophets has become a commonplace in the twentieth century. It is hard to do justice to the originality of men who, in the eighth century B.C., untutored by the horrors of two world wars with poison gas and atom bombs, and without the frightening prospect of still more fearful weapons of destruction, insisted that war is evil and must some day be abolished, and that all peoples must learn to dwell together in peace.

In retrospect we may say that they merely spelled out explicitly what was implicit in the Old Testament conception of God and man. There is nothing wrong with putting it that way, provided we remember how long it has taken the mass of men to perceive the very same implication.

One implication of almost everything that has been quoted here from the Old Testament, and quite especially of the commandments, “You shall be holy” (Leviticus 19:2) and “You shall be to me a kingdom of priests” (Exodus 19:6), is that man is called upon to raise his stature; that no man is a mere machine or instrument. We are called upon to be more than animals; we are summoned to freedom—whether it makes us happy or not.

Aldous Huxley created a deliberately nightmarish Utopia in Brave New World (1932). His point was that we are on the best way toward creating a society of happy imbeciles, and that we might yet achieve a society in which everybody would be happy at a slightly subhuman level. Would anything be wrong with that? Many of us hope and think that, human nature being what it is, freedom and the fullest possible development of man’s creative powers, in a society based on justice, mercy, and humility, would promote the greatest possible happiness. This faith is obviously influenced by the Old Testament. But suppose that it were possible to ensure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number either by having recourse to a few injustices or by reducing man’s creative powers, whether by drugs that reduced men to blissful imbecility or by operations that reduced their intelligence. What then?

Those of us who feel that happiness, however important, is not the ultimate consideration and that it would be an impermissible betrayal to sell our birthright for a mess of bliss are probably haunted by the challenge of the Hebrew Bible. Here a voice was raised that has aroused a large portion of mankind, albeit a distinct minority, from their pre-Israelitic slumber.

¹ So serious a charge should not be left at the level of insinuation. In his “Letter from Washington” in The New Yorker of April 22, 1950, Richard Rovere wrote, in part: “These things have been accompanied by a sophisticated callousness and mischief-making that is probably most strikingly symbolized by Senator Robert A. Taft’s advice to Senator McCarthy, given several weeks ago, to go on making his accusations, in the hope that ‘if one case doesn’t work out, another one may.’ The temper of the period can be gauged not only by the fact that this remark has received almost no censure in the press and none at all in Congress but also by the fact that Senator Taft, who has always enjoyed a formidable and by no means undeserved reputation for fairness and probity, found it possible to make it in the first place.”

A fuller treatment may be found in William S. “White’s The Taft Story, in the chapter on “The Sad, Worst Period.” White’s political orientation is very different from Rovere’s, and his biography is informed by an enormous sympathy for Taft. His evaluation of Taft’s attitude toward McCarthy, however, is well summed up by the chapter heading. (See especially 84–86, 193, and 219 f.)

Since Taft is the only senator in American history to have been honored with a huge public monument in Washington, D.C., comparable to those erected in honor of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, this little footnote memorial seems appropriate—not as a posthumous indictment but as an invitation to reflect on different standards of public morality. For the monument does not honor his very dubious judgment—his isolationism during the early part of the Second World War or his assurance right after the war that, if only the OPA were abolished, prices would come down—but his supposedly exemplary integrity.