Among the first group of the elite forced into Babylonian exile in 597 BC was a senior and learned priest called Ezekiel. His wife had died during the last siege of the city, and he lived and died in lonely exile, on the Chebar Canal near Babylon.1 Sitting on its banks, in bitterness and despair, he experienced a divine vision: ‘a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire enfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire’.2 This was the first of a series of intense visual experiences, unique in the Bible for the violent colours and dazzling light which Ezekiel saw and set down, ransacking his vocabulary for words with which to describe them: the colours are of topaz, sapphires, rubies, the light is flashing and radiant, it sparkles and glitters and blinds and burns in its fiery heat. His long book is confused and confusing, with dream-like sequences and terrifying images, threats, curses and violence. He is one of the greatest writers in the Bible, and one of the most popular, in his own time and since. But he surrounds himself in mysteries and enigmas, almost against his will. Why, he asks, do I always have to talk in riddles?
Yet in essence this weird and passionate man had a firm and powerful message to deliver: the only salvation was through religious purity. States and empires and thrones did not matter in the long run. They would perish through God’s power. What mattered was the creature God had created in his image: man. Ezekiel describes how God took him to a valley which was full of bones, and asked him: ‘Son of Man, can these bones live?’ Then, before his terrified gaze, the bones begin to rattle and shake and come together: God puts on them sinews, flesh and skin, and finally he breathes into them, ‘and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceeding great army’.3 The Christians were later to interpret this fearsome scene as an image of the Resurrection of the dead, but to Ezekiel and his audience it was a sign of the resurrection of Israel, though of an Israel closer to and more dependent on God then ever before, each man and woman created by God, each individually responsible to him, each committed from birth to the lifelong obedience of his laws. If Jeremiah was the first Jew, it was Ezekiel and his visions which gave the dynamic impulse to the formulation of Judaism.
The Exile necessarily meant a break with the tribal past. Indeed, ten of the tribes had already disappeared. Ezekiel insisted, like Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, that the calamities which befell the Jews were the direct and inescapable result of sinful breach of the Law. But whereas earlier histories and prophecies had dwelt on the sense of collective guilt, and attributed to kings and leaders the wickedness which had brought down divine wrath on all, the exiled Jews now had no one to blame but their individual selves. God, wrote Ezekiel, no longer punished people collectively for the sin of a leader, or the present generation for the faults of their ancestors. ‘As I live,’ God insisted thunderously, the old Israelite saying, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge’, was no longer true. It was obsolete, to be discarded. ‘Behold, all souls are mine,’ God told Ezekiel, and each was individually responsible to him: ‘the soul that sinneth, it shall die’.4 The idea of the individual had always, of course, been present in Mosaic religion, since it was inherent in the belief that each man and woman was created in God’s image. It had been powerfully reinforced by the sayings of Isaiah. With Ezekiel it became paramount, and thereafter individual accountability became of the very essence of the Jewish religion.
Many consequences flowed from this paramountcy. Between 734 and 581 BC there were six distinct deportations of the Israelites, and more fled voluntarily to Egypt and other parts of the Near East. From this time onwards, a majority of Jews would always live outside the Promised Land. Thus scattered, leaderless, without a state or any of the normal supportive apparatus provided by their own government, the Jews were forced to find alternative means to preserve their special identity. So they turned to their writings–their laws, and the records of their past. From this time we hear more of the scribes. Hitherto, they had simply been secretaries, like Baruch, writing down the words of the great. Now they became an important caste, setting down in writing oral traditions, copying precious scrolls brought from the ruined Temple, ordering, editing and rationalizing the Jewish archives. For a time indeed they were more important than the priests, who had no temple to underline their glory and indispensability. The exile was conducive to scribal effort. The Jews were reasonably treated in Babylon. Tablets found near the Ishtar Gate of the ancient city list rations doled out to captives, including ‘Yauchin, king of the land of Yahud’–this is Jehoiakim. Some of the Jews became merchants. The first success stories of the diaspora were told. Mercantile wealth financed the scribal effort, and the work of keeping the Jews in their faith. If the individual was responsible for obeying the Law, he must know what the Law is. So it must not merely be set down and copied, but taught.
Hence it was during the Exile that ordinary Jews were first disciplined into the regular practice of their religion. Circumcision, which distinguished them ineffaceably from the surrounding pagans, was insisted upon rigorously, and the act became a ceremony and so part of the Jewish life-cycle and liturgy. The concept of the Sabbath, strongly reinforced by what they learned from Babylonian astronomy, became the focus of the Jewish week, and ‘Shabbetai’ was the most popular new name invented during the Exile. The Jewish year was now for the first time punctuated by the regular feasts: Passover celebrated the founding of the Jewish nation; Pentecost the giving of the laws, that is the founding of their religion; Tabernacles, the wanderings in the desert where nation and religion were brought together; and, as the consciousness of individual responsibility sank into their hearts, the Jews began to celebrate too the New Year in memory of the creation, and the Day of Atonement in anticipation of judgment. Again, Babylonian science and calendrical skills helped to regularize and institutionalize this annual religious framework. It was in exile that the rules of faith began to seem all-important: rules of purity, of cleanliness, of diet. The laws were now studied, read aloud, memorized. It is probably from this time that we get the Deuteronomic injunction: ‘These commandments which I give you this day are to be kept in your heart; you shall repeat them to your sons, and speak of them indoors and out of doors, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on the hand and wear them as a phylactery on the forehead; write them up on the doorposts of your homes and of your gates.’5 In exile the Jews, deprived of a state, became a nomocracy–voluntarily submitting to rule by a Law which could only be enforced by consent. Nothing like this had occurred before in history.
The Exile was short in the sense that it lasted only half a century after the final fall of Judah. Yet its creative force was overwhelming. We come here to an important point about Jewish history. As we have already noted, there is an inherent conflict between the religion and the state of Israel. In religious terms, there have been four great formative periods in Jewish history: under Abraham, under Moses, during and shortly after the Exile, and after the destruction of the Second Temple. The first two produced the religion of Yahweh, the second two developed and refined it into Judaism itself. But in none of these periods did the Jews possess an independent state, though it is true that, during the Mosaic period, they were not actually ruled by anyone else.
Conversely, it is also notable that when the Israelites, and later the Jews, achieved settled and prosperous self-government, they found it extraordinarily difficult to keep their religion pure and incorrupt. The decay set in rapidly after the conquest of Joshua; it again appeared under Solomon, and was repeated in both northern and southern kingdoms, especially under rich and powerful kings and when times were good; exactly the same pattern would return again under the Hasmoneans and under such potentates as Herod the Great. In self-government and prosperity, the Jews always seemed drawn to neighbouring religions, whether Canaanite, Philistine-Phoenician or Greek. Only in adversity did they cling resolutely to their principles and develop their extraordinary powers of religious imagination, their originality, their clarity and their zeal. Perhaps, then, they were better off without a state of their own, more likely to obey the law and fear God when others had the duties and temptations of ruling them. Jeremiah was the first to perceive the possibility that powerlessness and goodness were somehow linked, and that alien rule could be preferable to self-rule. He comes close to the notion that the state itself was inherently evil.
These ideas had deep roots in Israelite history, going back to the Nazarites and Rechabites. They were inherent in Yahwehism itself, since God, not man, is the ruler. There are times when the Bible seems to suggest that the whole aim of righteousness is to overturn existing, man-made, order: ‘Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill laid low.’6 In Chapter 2 of the First Book of Samuel, his mother Hannah sings a triumphant hymn to subversion in the name of God, to divine revolution: ‘He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes’;7 and the Virgin Mary was later to echo the same theme in the Magnificat. The Jews were the yeast, producing decomposition of the existing order, the chemical agent of change in society–so how could they be order and society itself?8
From this point forward, therefore, we note the existence of an Exile and a diaspora mentality among the Jews. The Babylonian empire was soon replaced by the alliance of Persians and Medes created by Cyrus the Great, who had no wish whatever to keep the Jews in custody. But many of them, perhaps the majority, preferred to remain in Babylon, which became a great centre of Jewish culture for 1,500 years. Other Jewish communities settled in Egypt, not just across the border, as Jeremiah did, but as far down the Nile as the island of Elephantine, near the First Cataract: there, among other documents, a papyrus letter has survived in which the Jewish community request permission to rebuild their temple.9 Even among those who did return to Judah, there was an exile-minded element, who took Jeremiah’s view that there was a positive virtue in the Exile until the day of perfect purity dawned. They lived on the desert fringe and saw themselves as internal exiles, in what they called ‘The Land of Damascus’, a symbol of deportation, where Yahweh had his sanctuary; they waited for God’s good time, when a star and a holy leader would take them back to Jerusalem. These exilics were descendants of the Rechabites and precursors of the Qumran sect.10
Indeed, it may be that the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, was himself the instigator of the Return. The faith of the Persian ruling class was ethical and universalistic, unlike the intolerant, narrow nationalism of the earlier imperial powers. Cyrus himself was a Zoroastrian, believing in one, eternal, beneficent being, ‘Creator of all things through the holy spirit’.11 Under Cyrus, the Persians developed a radically different imperial religious policy to the Assyrians and Babylonians. They were happy to respect the religious beliefs of subject peoples, provided these were compatible with acceptance of their own authority. Indeed Cyrus seems to have regarded it as a religious duty to reverse the wicked deportations and temple-destructions of his predecessors. In the Cyrus-cylinder, discovered in the palace ruins of Babylon in the nineteenth century and now in the British Museum, he stated his policy: ‘I am Cyrus, the king of the world…. Marduk, the great god, rejoices at my pious acts…. I gathered all their people and led them back to their abodes…and the gods…at the order of Marduk, the great lord, I had them installed in joy in their sanctuaries…. May all the gods whom I have led back to their cities [pray daily] for the length of my days.’12 According to Deutero-Isaiah, edited about this time, it was the Lord who commanded this restoration by Cyrus, whom it calls ‘the Lord’s anointed’.13 In the Book of Ezra the Scribe, recounting the return, Cyrus says to the Babylonian Jews: ‘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 his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel.’14
Despite Cyrus’ support and command, the first return in 538, under Shenazar, son of the former King Jehoiakim, was a failure, for the poor Jews who had been left behind, the am ha-arez, resisted it, and in conjunction with Samaritans, Edomites and Arabs, prevented the settlers building walls. A second effort, with the full backing of Cyrus’ son Darius, was made in 520 BC, under an official leader Zeurubbabel, whose authority as a descendant of David was reinforced by his appointment as Persian Governor of Judah. The Bible records that 42,360 exiles returned with him, including a large number of priests and scribes. This was the entry on to the Jerusalem scene of the new Jewish orthodoxy, revolving round a single, centralized temple and its lawful worship. Work on the Temple began immediately. It was built in a more humble style than Solomon’s, as Haggai 2:2 makes clear, though cedars from Lebanon were again used. The Samaritans and other Jews regarded as heretical were not allowed to take part in the work: ‘You have nothing to do with us,’ they were told.15 Perhaps because of the exclusiveness of the returning exiles, their colony did not flourish. In 458 BC it was reinforced by a third wave, led by Ezra, a priest and scribe of great learning and authority, who tried and failed to sort out the legal problems caused by heterodoxy, intermarriage and disputed ownership of land. Finally, in 445 BC, Ezra was joined by a powerful contingent headed by a leading Jew and prominent Persian official called Nehemiah, who was given the governorship of Judah and the authority to build it into an independent political unit within the empire.16
This fourth wave at last succeeded in stabilizing the settlement, chiefly because Nehemiah, a man of action as well as a diplomat and statesman, rebuilt with commendable speed the walls of Jerusalem and so created a secure enclave from which the work of resettlement could be directed. He described how he did it in his memories, a brilliant example of Jewish historical writing. We are told of the first survey of the ruined walls in secret by night; the honours-list of those who took part and what they built; the desperate attempts of Arabs, Ammonites and others to prevent the work; its continuation under armed guard–‘For the builders, everyone had his sword girded by his side, and so builded’17–and the return into the city each night (‘none of us put off our clothes, saving that everyone put them off for washing’) and the triumphant finish. Nehemiah says the business was done in fifty-two days. The rebuilt city was smaller than Solomon’s, it was poor and to begin with it was sparsely populated. ‘The city is wide and large’, wrote Nehemiah, ‘but the people within it were few and no houses had been built.’ But families, chosen by lot, were brought in from all over Judah. Nehemiah’s energy and resourcefulness were to be an inspiration when Palestine was again resettled by Jewish activists in the twentieth century. But with the completion of his work, a sudden calm and a complete silence descends.
The years 400-200 BC are the lost centuries of Jewish history. There were no great events or calamities they chose to record. Perhaps they were happy. The Jews certainly seem to have liked the Persians the best of all their rulers. They never revolted against them; on the contrary, Jewish mercenaries helped the Persians to put down Egyptian rebellion. The Jews were free to practise their religion at home in Judah, or anywhere else in the Persian empire, and Jewish settlements were soon to be found over a vast area: an echo of this diaspora is the Book of Tobit, set in Media in about the fifth century BC. Another is the collection of 650 cuneiform business documents, written between 455 and 403 BC in the city of Nippur, near where Ezekiel lived: 8 per cent of the names in these texts are Jewish.18 Two Jewish family archives have survived from the Elephantine colony, and cast light on life and religion there.19 Most of the Jews in the diaspora we hear about seem to have done well and practised their religion faithfully. Moreover, it was the religion of the new orthodoxy: Judaism.
The two hundred lost years, indeed, though silent were not unproductive. They saw the emergence of the Old Testament more or less as we know it. This was made necessary by the nature of the new Judaic version of the Israelite faith which Nehemiah and Ezra established in rebuilt Jerusalem. Chapter 8 of the Book of Nehemiah describes how all the citizens assembled near the watergate to hear a series of readings from ‘the book of the law of Moses’. They were conducted by Ezra the Scribe, standing ‘upon a pulpit of wood, which they had made for the purpose’. In the light of the readings, which caused intense emotion, a new and solemn covenant was made, signed and pledged by everyone, men and women, their sons and daughters, who considered themselves orthodox, ‘everyone having knowledge, and everyone having understanding’.20
In short, the new covenant, which may be said to have inaugurated Judaism officially and legally, was based not upon revelation or preaching but on a written text. That meant an official, authorized, accurate and verified version. And that, in turn, meant sorting through, selecting and editing the vast literature of history, politics and religion the Jews had already accumulated. They had been literate at a very early stage in their history. The Book of Judges tells us that when Gideon was in Succoth he grabbed hold of a young lad and questioned him about the place, and the lad wrote down for him the names of all the local landowners and elders, ‘threescore and seventeen men’.21 It is likely that most of the farmers could read a little.22 In the towns, the level of literacy was high and a large number of people were authors of a kind, setting down tales they had heard or their own adventures and experiences, both spiritual and secular. Hundreds of prophets had their sayings put down. The number of histories and chronicles was immense. The people of Israel were not great craftsmen, or painters, or architects. But writing was their national habit, almost their obsession. They probably produced, in sheer quantity, the greatest literature of antiquity, of which the Old Testament is only a small fragment.
However, the Jews saw literature as a didactic activity, with a collective purpose. It was not an act of personal self-indulgence. Most of the books of the Bible are ascribed individual authorship, but the Jews themselves awarded communal sanction and authority to the books which met their approval. The core of their literature was always public, subject to social control. Josephus, in his apologia for the Jewish faith, Contra Apionem, describes this approach:
With us it is not open to everybody to write the records…. The prophets alone had the privilege, obtaining the knowledge of the most remote and ancient history through the inspiration which they owed to God, and committing to writing a clear account of the events of their own time just as they occurred…. We do not possess myriads of inconsistent books, conflicting with one another. Our books, those which are justly accredited, are twenty-two in number, and contain the record of all time.23
By ‘justly accredited’, Josephus meant ‘canonical’. The word canon is very ancient, the Sumerian for ‘reed’, whence it acquired its sense of straight or upright; to the Greeks it meant a rule, boundary or standard. The Jews were the first to apply it to religious texts. For them it meant divine pronouncements of unquestioned authority or divinely inspired prophetic writings. Hence each book, to be accepted in the canon, had to possess a recognized true prophet as its accredited author.24 The canon began to emerge when the first five or Mosaic books, the Pentateuch, which later became known to Jews as the Torah, reached written form. In its most primitive version, the Pentateuch probably dates from the time of Samuel, but in the form we possess it the text is a compilation of five and possibly more elements: a southern source, referring to God as Yahweh, and going back to the original Mosaic writings; a northern source, calling God ‘Elohim’, also of great antiquity; Deuteronomy, or parts of it, the ‘lost’ book found in the Temple at the time of Joshua’s reforms; and two separate, additional codes, known to scholars as the Priestly Code and the Holiness Code and both dating from times when religious worship had become more formalized and the priestly caste strictly disciplined.
The Pentateuch is not, therefore, a homogeneous work. But neither is it, as some scholars in the German critical tradition have argued, a deliberate falsification by post-Exilic priests, seeking to foist their self-interested religious beliefs on the people by attributing them to Moses and his age. We must not allow the academic prejudices bred by Hegelian ideology, anti-clericalism, anti-Semitism and nineteenth-century intellectual fashions to distort our view of these texts. All the internal evidence shows that those who set down and conflated these writings, and the scribes who copied them when the canon was assembled after the return from Exile, believed absolutely in the divine inspiration of the ancient texts and transcribed them with veneration and the highest possible standards of accuracy, including many passages which they manifestly did not understand. Indeed, the Pentateuch text twice gives solemn admonitions, from God himself, against tampering: ‘Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish aught from it.’25
All the evidence suggests that copyists, or scribes–the word in Hebrew is sofer–were highly professional and took their duties with great seriousness. The word is first used in the ancient Song of Deborah, and we soon hear of hereditary scribal corporations, what the First Book of Chronicles calls ‘families of scribes’.26 Their most honourable duty was to preserve the canon in all its holy integrity. They began with the Mosaic texts which, for convenience, were transcribed on to five separate scrolls: hence its name (though Pentateuch itself is Greek, as are the individual names of the books). To these were added the second division of the Bible, Prophets, in Hebrew Nevi’im. These in turn consist of ‘Former Prophets’ and ‘Later Prophets’. The former consist of the mainly narrative and historical works, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, and the latter the writings of the prophetic orators, themselves divided into two sections, the three major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel–the term signifying length, not importance–and the twelve minor ones, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. Then there are the works of the third division, the Ketuvim or ‘writings’, often known as the Hagiographa. This consists of the Psalms, the Proverbs, the Book of Job, the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah and the two books of Chronicles.
The tripartite division does not reflect a deliberate classification so much as historical development. As public readings became an integral part of Jewish services, so more texts were added, and the scribes duly copied them. The Pentateuch or Torah was canonized as early as 622 BC. Other books were added gradually, the process being complete by about 300 BC. Other than the Torah, we do not know the criteria by which the canon was compiled. But popular taste, as well as priestly and scholarly judgment, appears to have played a part. The five scrolls known as the Megillot, or Canticles, were read in public at the great feasts, the Song of Solomon at Passover, Ruth at Pentecost, Ecclesiastes at Tabernacles, Esther at Purim and Lamentations at the feast of the Destruction of Jerusalem. They became popular in consequence, and that is why they were included in the canon. Apart from its association with a great king, the Song of Solomon is evidently an anthology of love poems, and there is no intrinsic reason for its inclusion. Rabbinical tradition says that at the Council of Jamnia or Jabneh, in the early Christian era, when the canon was finally determined, the Rabbi Akiva said: ‘For in all the world there is nothing to equal the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.’ But he then added, as a warning: ‘He who, for the sake of entertainment, sings the song as though it were a profane song, will have no place in the next world.’27
Inclusion in the canon was the only certain way of ensuring that a work of literature survived, for in antiquity, unless a manuscript was constantly recopied, it tended to vanish without trace within a generation or so. The families of the scribes, then, ensured the survival of the Bible texts for a thousand years or more, and in due course they were succeeded by families of masoretes or scribal scholars who specialized in the writing, spelling and accenting of Bible texts. It was they who produced the official Jewish canonical version, known as the Masoretic text.
There is, however, more than one canon, and therefore more than one ancient text. The Samaritans, having been cut off from Judah in the middle of the first millennium BC, preserved only the five Mosaic books, since they were not allowed to take part in the canonization of later writings, and therefore did not recognize them. Then there is the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, which was compiled by members of the Jewish diaspora at Alexandria during the Hellenistic period. This included all the books of the Hebrew Bible, but grouped them differently, and it also included books of the Apocrypha and pseudepigraphs, such as I Esdras, the so-called Wisdom of Solomon, the Wisdom of Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus, Judith, Tobit, Baruch and the books of the Maccabees, all of them rejected by the Jews of Jerusalem as impure or dangerous. In addition, we now have the scrolls preserved and copied by the Qumran sect and found in caves near the Dead Sea.
The Dead Sea Scrolls testify, on the whole, to the accuracy with which the Bible was copied through the ages, though many mistakes and variations occurred. The Samaritans claimed that their text went back to Abishua, great-grandson of Aaron, and it is clearly very old and remarkably uncorrupt as a rule, though in places it reflects Samaritan, as opposed to Jewish, traditions. It differs from the Masoretic text of the Pentateuch in about 6,000 instances, and on these it agrees with the Septuagint version in about 1,900. There are also variations in the Masoretic texts. Of the earliest surviving texts, the Karaite Synagogue in Cairo has a codex, a bound book, of the prophets, which was copied in 895 AD by Ben Asher, head of one of the most famous Masoretic families. The complete Asher text, on which the family worked for five generations, was copied in about 1010 by a Masorete called Samuel ben Jacob, and this is now in Leningrad. Another famous Masoretic text, by the Ben Naphtali family, survives in a copy dated 1105, known as the Reuchlin Codex, and now in Karlsruhe. The earliest surviving Christian version is the fourth-century AD Codex Vaticanus in the Vatican, the incomplete fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus and the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, the last two both in the British Museum. There is also a Syriac version in a manuscript dated 464 AD. The oldest Biblical manuscripts of all, however, are those found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947-8, which include Hebrew fragments of all the twenty-four books of the canon, except Esther, and the entire text of Isaiah, plus some fragments of the Septuagint.28 It is quite possible that more early texts will be discovered, both in the Judaean Desert and in Egypt, and clearly the search for perfect texts will continue until the end of time.
The attention which the Bible has received, in the search for the true text, in exegesis, hermeneutics and commentary, exceeds by far that devoted to any other work of literature. Nor is this interest disproportionate, because it has been the most influential of all books. The Jews had two unique characteristics as ancient writers. They were the first to create consequential, substantial and interpretative history. It has been argued that they learned the art of history from the Hittites, another historically minded people, but it is obvious that they were fascinated by their past from very early times. They knew they were a special people who had not simply evolved from an unrecorded past but had been brought into existence, for certain definite purposes, by a specific series of divine acts. They saw it as their collective business to determine, record, comment and reflect upon these acts. No other people has ever shown, particularly at that remote time, so strong a compulsion to explore their origins. The Bible gives constant examples of the probing historical spirit: why, for instance, was there a heap of stones before the city gate at Ai? What was the meaning of the twelve stones at Gilgal?29 This passion for aetiology, the quest for explanations, broadened into a more general habit of seeing the present and future in terms of the past. The Jews wanted to know about themselves and their destiny. They wanted to know about God and his intentions and wishes. Since God, in their theology, was the sole cause of all events–as Amos put it, ‘Does evil befall a city unless Yahweh wills it?’–and thus the author of history, and since they were the chosen actors in his vast dramas, the record and study of historical events was the key to the understanding of both God and man.
Hence the Jews were above all historians, and the Bible is essentially a historical work from start to finish. The Jews developed the power to write terse and dramatic historical narrative half a millennium before the Greeks, and because they constantly added to their historical records they developed a deep sense of historical perspective which the Greeks never attained. In the portrayal of character, too, the Biblical historians achieved a degree of perception and portraiture which even the best Greek and Roman historians could never manage. There is nothing in Thucydides to equal the masterly presentation of King David, composed evidently by an eye-witness at his court. The Bible abounds in sharply etched characters, often minor figures brought into vivid focus by a single phrase. But the stress on the actors never obscures the steady progression of the great human-divine drama. The Jews, like all good historians, kept a balance between biography and narrative. Most of the books of the Bible have a historical framework, all related to the wider framework, which might be entitled ‘A history of God in his relations to man’. But even those which do not have a clear historical intention, even the poetry, such as the Psalms, contain constant historical allusions, so that the march of destiny, proceeding inexorably from creation to ‘the end of days’, is always heard in the background.
Ancient Jewish history is both intensely divine and intensely humanist. History was made by God, operating independently or through man. The Jews were not interested and did not believe in impersonal forces. They were less curious about the physics of creation than any other literate race of antiquity. They turned their back on nature and discounted its manifestations except in so far as they reflected the divine-human drama. The notion of vast geographical or economic forces determining history was quite alien to them. There is much natural description in the Bible, some of astonishing beauty, but it is stage-scenery for the historical play, a mere backdrop for the characters. The Bible is vibrant because it is entirely about living creatures; and since God, though living, cannot be described or even imagined, the attention is directed relentlessly on man and woman.
Hence the second unique characteristic of ancient Jewish literature: the verbal presentation of the human personality in all its range and complexity. The Jews were the first race to find words to express the deepest human emotions, especially the feelings produced by bodily or mental suffering, anxiety, spiritual despair and desolation, and the remedies for these evils produced by human ingenuity–hope, resolution, confidence in divine assistance, the consciousness of innocence or righteousness, penitence, sorrow and humility. About forty-four of the short poems, or psalms, included in the 150 in the canonical Book of Psalms, fall into this category.30 Some are masterpieces, which find echoes in hearts in all ages and places: Psalm 22 crying for help. Psalm 23 with its simple trust, 39 the epitome of unease, 51 pleading for mercy, 91 the great poem of assurance and comfort, 90, 103, 104 celebrating the power and majesty of the Creator and the bonds between God and man, and 130, 137 and 139 plumbing the depths of human misery and bringing messages of hope.
Jewish penetration of the human psyche found one expression in these passionate poems, but it was also reflected in vast quantities of popular philosophy, some of which made its way into the canon. Here the Jews were less singular, for proverbs and wise sayings were written down in the ancient Near East from the third millennium on, especially in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and some of this wisdom literature achieved international status. The Jews were certainly familiar with the famous Egyptian classic, The Wisdom of Amenope, since part of it was directly borrowed in the Book of Proverbs.31 However, wisdom texts produced by the Jews are of an altogether higher standard than their precursors and models, being both more observant of human nature and more ethically consistent. Ecclesiastes, written by the Koheleth or ‘convenor’, is a scintillating work, quite without equal in the ancient world. Its cool, sceptical tone, verging at times towards cynicism, and contrasting so strongly with the passionate earnestness of the psalms, illustrates the extraordinary range of Jewish literature, with which the Greeks alone could compete.
Yet not even the Greeks produced a document–it is hard to know in what category to place it–so mysterious and harrowing as the Book of Job. This great essay in theodicy and the problem of evil has fascinated and baffled both scholars and ordinary people for more than two millennia. Carlyle called it ‘one of the grandest things ever written with pen’ and of all the books of the Bible it has most influenced other writers. But no one knows what it is, where it comes from or when it was written. There are over 100 words in it which occur nowhere else and it obviously raised insuperable difficulties for the ancient translators and scribes. Some scholars think it comes from Edom–but we know very little about the Edomite tongue. Others have suggested Haran, near Damascus. There are slight parallels in Babylonian literature. As long ago as the fourth century AD, the Christian scholar Theodore of Mopsuestia argued that it derived from Greek drama. It has also been presented as a translation from the Arabic. The variety of origins and influences produced testify, in a paradoxical way, to its universality. For Job, after all, is asking the fundamental question which has puzzled all men, and especially those of strong faith: why does God do these terrible things to us? Job was a text for antiquity and it is a text for modernity, a text especially for that chosen and battered people, the Jews; a text, above all, for the Holocaust.32
Job is a formidable work of Hebrew literature. With the only exception of Isaiah, no work in the Bible is written at such a sustained level of powerful eloquence. That is befitting for its subject, the justice of God. As a work of moral theology, the book is a failure because the author, like everyone else, is baffled by the problem of theodicy. But in failing, he broadens the issue and poses certain questions about the universe and the way man ought to see it. Job is crammed with natural history in poetic form. It presents a fascinating catalogue of organic, cosmic and meteorological phenomena. In Chapter 28, for instance, there is an extraordinary description of mining in the ancient world. Through this image, a view is presented of the almost unlimited scientific and technological potential of the human race, and this is then contrasted with man’s incorrigibly weak moral capacities. What the author of Job is saying is that there are two orders in creation–the physical and the moral order. To understand and master the physical order of the world is not enough: man must come to accept and abide by the moral order, and to do this he must acquire the secret of Wisdom, and this knowledge is something of an altogether different kind from, say, mining technology. Wisdom came to man, as Job dimly perceived, not by trying to penetrate God’s reasoning and motives in inflicting pain, but only through obedience, the true foundation of the moral order: ‘And he said to man: “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom: and to depart from evil is understanding.” ’
The point was made again by Ben Sira in Chapter 24 of his poem about wisdom, the Ecclesiasticus, where he says that, after the Fall, God conceived a new plan and gave this secret of his a dwelling-place in Israel.33 The Jews were to find wisdom through obedience to God, and teach humanity to do likewise. They were to overthrow the existing, physical, worldly order, and replace it by the moral order. Again, the point was echoed powerfully and paradoxically by the heretic Jew, St Paul, in the dramatic opening to his First Epistle to the Corinthians, when he quotes the Lord, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent’; and he adds, ‘Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men…[therefore] God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.’34 Within the obscurity and confusion of Job, therefore, we have yet another statement of the divine role of the Jews to overturn the existing order and the worldly way of seeing things.
Job, then, was part of the Jewish philosophical mainstream: and that mainstream was now a powerful torrent. The transformation of Judaism into the first ‘religion of the Book’ took two centuries. Before 400 BC there is no hint of a canon. By 200 BC, it was there. Of course the canon was not yet complete and final. But it was beginning to solidify fast. This had several consequences. In the first place, additions were discouraged. Prophecy, and prophets, fell into disrepute. There is a reference in the First Book of Maccabees to ‘the day when prophets ceased to appear’.35 Those who tried to prophesy were dismissed as false. When Simon Maccabeus was made leader, his term of office was declared to be indefinite ‘until a true prophet shall appear’. The Book of Zechariah has a tirade against prophets: ‘if a man continues to prophesy, his parents, his own father and mother, will say to him: “You shall lie no longer, for you have spoken falsely in the name of the Lord”.’ Prophets were ‘schooled in lust’.36 The Jewish philosopher Ben Sira, writing a little after 200 BC, boasted, ‘I will again pour out doctrine like prophecy and bequeath it to future generations.’37 But the Jews did not add him to the canon; Daniel, writing a little later (c. 168-165 BC), was also excluded. Canonization also discouraged the writing of history. It did not kill the Jewish passion completely. There were some tremendous flare-ups to come–the Books of the Maccabees, the work of Josephus, for example. But the great dynamic was running down, and when the canon was finally sanctified early in the Christian era, Jewish history, one of the glories of antiquity, would cease for a millennium and a half.
But if one effect of canonization was to curb the creativity of Jewish sacred literature, another was enormously to increase the knowledge and impact of the approved texts on the Jewish population. The books, having been authorized and copiously reproduced and distributed, were now systematically taught. The Jews began to be a schooled people, as indeed their divine role as priests to the nations demanded. A new and quite revolutionary institution in the history of religion appeared: the synagogue–prototype of the church, the chapel and the mosque–where the Bible was systematically read and taught. Such places may have existed even before the Exile, as a result of Josiah’s reform; they certainly matured during the Exile years, when the Jewish elite had no Temple; and on the Return, when all religious activity was rigorously centralized in the Jerusalem Temple, and provincial temples and high places finally disappeared, synagogues took over and taught the Temple orthodoxy which the canonical Bible encapsulated.38
This had another important consequence. With the sacred literature digested into a canon, and the canon systematically taught from a central focus, Judaism became far more homogeneous. And it was homogeneity with a pronounced puritanical and fundamentalist flavour. In the history of the Jews, the rigorists tend to win. It was Moses, the stern legal purist, who imposed his religion of Yahweh on the other tribal groups. It was the rigorists who again won at the time of Josiah’s reform. It was rigorous Judah, not compromising Israel, which survived the assault of the empires; and it was the rigorist community of Babylon, returning from Exile, which imposed its will on all Jews, excluding many, forcing many others to conform. The canon and the synagogue became instruments of this rigour, and it was to win many more victories. The process, which occurs again and again in Jewish history, can be seen in two ways: as the pearl of purified Judaism emerging from the rotten oyster of the world and worldliness; or as the extremists imposing exclusivity and fanaticism on the rest.
But however it is seen, this rigorizing tendency in Judaism posed increasing problems both for the Jews themselves and for their neighbours. Under the benevolent rule of the Persians, who received nothing but praise in the Jewish texts, the Jews began to recover and flourish. Ezra says that 42,360 Jews, plus 7,337 male and female servants and 200 ‘singing men and singing women’, returned from the Exile. The total population of refound Judah could not have been more than 70,000. Yet by the third century BC, the population of Jerusalem alone was 120,000.39 With their strong religious sense and respect for law, the Jews were disciplined and hardworking. They spread into territories bordering on Judah, particularly Galilee, Transjordan and the coast. The diaspora widened steadily. The Jews made converts. They were beginning to be a proselytizing force. All the same, they were a small people in an age of empires, an uncompromising religious-cultural unit in a big, bruising world.
The problems began to manifest themselves from 332 BC, when Alexander of Macedon cracked the Persian empire like a rotten egg. This was the first true European invasion of Asia. In the third and most of the second millennia BC, the continental cleavage did not exist: the sea was a binding force for what was to a great extent a common international culture. But then followed the barbarian anarchy of the twelfth-eleventh centuries BC and a long Dark Age. When the world re-emerged into Iron Age civilization, the East-West division began to appear, and from the western side of it emerged one of the most powerful cultural forces the world has ever seen: the civilization of the polis, the Greek city-state.
The Greeks bred a continuing surplus population. They created a ubiquitous maritime commerce. They planted colonies throughout the Mediterranean. In Alexander’s day they pushed into Asia and Africa, and his successors carved out of his empire sprawling kingdoms: Ptolemy in Egypt, Seleucus in Syria and Mesopotamia, and later Attalus in Anatolia. From 332 to 200 BC the Jews were ruled by the Ptolemies; thereafter by the Seleucids. Among the Jews, their new rulers inspired awe and terror. The Greeks had the fearsome and then-absolute weapon of the phalanx. They built increasingly powerful machines of war, towering siege-engines, huge warships, colossal forts. Daniel gives the Jewish image of Greek militarism: ‘A fourth beast, dreadful and terrifying, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it.’40 The Jews knew all about Greek militarism, for they served the Greeks as mercenaries, as they had served the Persians. Greek military training began in the gymnasium, the primary educational instrument of the polis. But that was not its only function. Its main purpose was to promote Greek culture, as were the other institutions with which each polis was equipped: the stadium, the theatre, the odeum, the lyceum, the agora. The Greeks were superb architects. They were sculptors, poets, musicians, playwrights, philosophers and debaters. They staged marvellous performances. They were excellent traders too. In their wake, the economy boomed; living standards rose. Ecclesiastes laments the craze for wealth under Greek rule. What good, he asks, ever came from piling up immense fortunes?41 Most men, however, felt a lot of good would accrue, if the fortune were theirs. Greek economics and Greek culture both appealed strongly to the less sophisticated societies of the Near East, rather as nineteenth-century Asia and Africa found Western progress irresistible.
So the Greek colonists poured into western Asia, built their cities everywhere, and were joined by locals who wished to share their wealth and way of life. Syria and Palestine were areas of intense Greek settlement and rapid Hellenization of their existing inhabitants. The coast was soon completely Hellenized. The Greek rulers gave polis-style cities, such as Tyre, Sidon, Gaza, Straton’s Tower, Byblos and Tripoli, generous freedoms and privileges, and these in turn set up satellite cities in the interior. There was one at Shechem, another at Marissa in the south, others at Philadelphia (Amman) and Gamal across the Jordan. Soon a ring of such cities, swarming with Greeks and semi-Greeks, surrounded Jewish Samaria and Judah, which were seen as mountainous, rural and backward. The Greek orbit had a number of such queer ‘temple-states’, antique survivors, anachronisms, soon to be swept away by the irresistible modern tide of Hellenic ideas and institutions.
How were the Jews to react to this cultural invasion, which was opportunity, temptation and threat all in one? The answer is that they reacted in different ways. Though the rigorizing tendency triumphed before, during and after the Exile, and sustained itself through the teaching of the canon, there was a countervailing force in the growing stress on the individual conscience we have already noted. Spiritual individualism bred disagreement, and it strengthened the sectarianism which had always been latent, and sometimes active, in Judaism. At one extreme, the coming of the Greeks pushed more fundamentalists into the desert, to join the absolutist groups who kept up the Rechabite and Nazarite traditions, and who regarded Jerusalem as already irredeemably corrupt. The earliest texts found in the Qumran community date from about 250 BC, when the noose of Greek cities around Judah first began to tighten. The idea was to retreat into the wilderness, recapture the pristine Mosaic enthusiasm, then launch back into the cities. Some, like the Essenes, thought this could be done peacefully, by the word, and they preached in villages on the edge of the desert: John the Baptist was later in this tradition. Others, like the Qumran community, put their trust in the sword: organized themselves for war, using a symbolic twelve-tribe structure, and were planning, when a sign brought their wilderness years to an end, to launch a Joshua-like invasion of the urban areas, rather like a guerrilla movement today.42
At the other extreme, there were many Jews, including pious ones, who hated isolationism and the fanatics it bred. They even contributed to the canon, in the shape of the Book of Jonah, which, despite its absurdities and confusions, is really a plea to extend toleration and friendship to foreigners. God ends the book by putting Jonah a rhetorical question: is it not right to be forgiving to Nineveh and its teeming people, ‘that cannot discern between their right hand and their left’ and whose only sin is ignorance?43 This was an adumbration of Christ’s, ‘Forgive them father, for they know not what they do’, and it was an invitation to take the Torah to the stranger, to proselytize. That, certainly, was the view of many, perhaps the majority, of observant Jews in the diaspora. These diaspora Jews learned Greek as a matter of routine to pursue their business. In due course they translated the Scriptures into Greek–the Septuagint–and this was the primary means by which converts, or ‘Judaizers’, were made. In Alexandria, for instance, the Greek gymnasium, originally set up to prevent the Greek colonists from becoming degenerate and embracing local languages and customs, was opened to resident non-Greeks (though not to Egyptians) and the Jews eagerly took advantage of this; later, the Jewish philosopher Philo took it for granted that sons of wealthy Jewish merchants would attend one.44 They Hellenized their names, or used two sets, Hellenic names for journeys and business, Hebrew at religious services and at home.
The same tendency was at work in Palestine Judaism. The Hellenization of Hebrew-Aramaic Jewish names is reflected in inscriptions and graffiti. Many of the better-educated Jews found Greek culture profoundly attractive. The Koheleth, the writer of Ecclesiastes, shows himself torn between new foreign ideas and his inherited piety, between the critical spirit and conservatism. The impact of Hellenization on educated Jews was in many ways similar to the impact of the enlightenment on the eighteenth-century ghetto. It woke the Temple-state from its enchanted sleep. It was a destabilizing force spiritually and, above all, it was a secularizing, materialistic force.45
In Palestine, as in other Greek conquests, it was the upper classes, the rich, the senior priests, who were most tempted to ape their new rulers. It is a common experience of colonies everywhere. Acquiring Greek culture was a passport to first-class citizenship, as later would be baptism. There were some notable Jewish success stories. Just as Joseph had served pharaoh as his minister, so now clever, enterprising Jews rose high in the imperial bureaucracy. A second-century BC text, incorporated in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, tells how Joseph, son of the upper-class Tobias family (his mother was the high-priest’s sister), went to the tax-farming auction held by the Ptolemies in Alexandria: ‘Now it happened that at this time all the principal men and rulers went up out of the cities of Syria and Phoenicia to bid for their taxes; for every year the King sold them to the men of the greatest power in every city.’ Joseph won by accusing his rivals of forming a cartel to lower the price; he held the contract for twenty-two years ‘and brought the Jews from poverty and misery to a better way of life’. Joseph went further than his namesake of pharaoh’s day. He developed into another archetype: the first Jewish banker.46 As such he stood for the Hellenizing principle in second-century BC Judah.
Between the isolationists on the one hand and the Hellenizers on the other was a broad group of pious Jews in the tradition of Josiah, Ezekiel and Ezra. Many of them did not object to Greek rule in principle, any more than they had objected to the Persians, since they tended to accept Jeremiah’s arguments that religion and piety flourished more when pagans had to conduct the corrupting business of government. They were quite willing to pay the conqueror’s taxes provided they were left to practise their religion in peace. Such a policy was later explicitly advocated by the Pharisees, who sprang from this tradition. Up to a point, pious Jews were willing to learn from the Greeks and absorbed a great many more Hellenic ideas than they were prepared to admit. There had always been a rationalizing element in Mosaic legalism and theology, and this was almost unconsciously reinforced by Greek rationalism. That is how the Pharisees created the Oral Law, which was essentially rationalistic, to apply the archaic Mosaic law to the actual world of today. It is significant that their enemies the Sadducees, who stuck rigidly to the written law and would admit no casuistry, said that the logic of the Pharisees would lead to more respect for ‘the book of Homer’ (by which they meant Greek literature) than the ‘holy scriptures’.47
However, any possibility of Greeks and Jews living together in reasonable comfort was destroyed by the rise of a Jewish reform party who wanted to force the pace of Hellenization. This reform movement, about which we know little since its history was written by its triumphant fundamentalist enemies, was strongest among the ruling class of Judah, already half-Hellenized themselves, who wanted to drag the little temple-state into the modern age. Their motives were primarily secular and economic. But among the reformers there were also religious intellectuals whose aims were more elevated–in some respects akin to the Christians of the first century AD. They wanted to improve Judaism, to push it further along the logical road it appeared to be travelling. Universalism is implicit in monotheism. Deutero-Isaiah had made it explicit. In universal monotheism, the Jews had a new and tremendous idea to give to the world. Now the Greeks also had a big, general idea on offer: universalist culture. Alexander had created his empire as an ideal: he wanted to fuse the races and he ‘ordered all men to regard the world as their country…good men as their kin, bad men as foreigners’. Isocrates argued that ‘the designation “Hellene” is no longer a matter of descent but of attitude’; he thought Greeks by education had better titles to citizenship than ‘Greek by birth’.48 Could not the Greek notion of the unified oikumene, world civilization, be married to the Jewish notion of the universal God?
That was the aim of the reformist intellectuals. They reread the historical scriptures and tried to deprovincialize them. Were not Abraham and Moses, these ‘strangers and sojourners’, really great citizens of the world? They embarked on the first Biblical criticism: the Law, as now written, was not very old and certainly did not go back to Moses. They argued that the original laws were far more universalistic. So the reform movement broadened into an attack on the Law, as it was bound to do. The reformers found the Torah full of fables and impossible demands and prohibitions. We know of their attacks from orthodox complaints and curses. Philo denounces those ‘who express their displeasure with the statutes made by their forefathers and incessantly censure the law’; the seers added: ‘Cursed be the man who rears a pig and cursed be those who instruct their sons in Greek wisdom.’49 The reformers did not want to abolish the Law completely but to purge it of those elements which forbade participation in Greek culture–for instance, the ban on nudity, which kept pious Jews out of the gymnasium and stadium–and reduce it to its ethical core, so universalizing it. To promote their ultimate aim of a world religion, they wanted an immediate marriage between the Greek polis and the Jewish moral God.
Unfortunately this was a contradiction in terms. The Greeks were not monotheists but polytheists, and in Egypt they learned syncretism, that is the rationalization of innumerable overlapping deities by banging them together into synthetic polygods. One such mutant was Apollo-Helios-Hermes, the sun-god. They blended their own Dionysiac rites with the Egyptian Isis-cult. Their god of healing, Asclepios, was conflated with the Egyptian Imhotep. Zeus, the senior god, was the same as the Egyptian Ammon, the Persian Ahura-Mazda and, for all they cared, the Jewish Yahweh. That, needless to say, was not at all how pious Jews saw it. The truth, of course, was that the Greek idea of deity was greatly inferior to the Jewish concept of limitless power. The Jews drew an absolute distinction between human and divine. The Greeks constantly elevated the human–they were Promethean–and lowered the divine. To them gods were not much more than revered and successful ancestors; most men sprang from gods. Hence it was not for them a great step to deify a monarch, and they began to do so as soon as they embraced the orient. Why should not a man of destiny undergo apotheosis? Aristotle, Alexander’s tutor, argued in his Politics: ‘If there exists in a state an individual so pre-eminent in virtue that neither the virtue nor the political capacity of all the other citizens is comparable with his…such a man should be rated as a god among men.’ Needless to say, such notions were totally unacceptable to Jews of any kind. Indeed, there was never any possibility of a conflation between Judaism and Greek religion as such; what the reformers wanted was for Judaism to universalize itself by pervading Greek culture; and that meant embracing the polis.
In 175 BC the Jewish reform movement found an enthusiastic but dangerous ally in the new Seleucid monarch, Antiochus Epiphanes. He was anxious to speed up the Hellenization of his dominions as a matter of general policy but also because he thought it would raise tax-revenues–and he was chronically short of money for his wars. He backed the reformers entirely and replaced the orthodox high-priest Onias III by Jason, whose name, a Hellenization of Joshua, proclaimed his party. Jason began the transformation of Jerusalem into a polis, renamed Antiochia, by constructing a gymnasium at the foot of the Temple Mount. The Second Book of Maccabees furiously records that the Temple priests ‘ceased to show any interest in the services of the altar; scorning the Temple and neglecting the sacrifices, they would hurry to take part in the unlawful exercises on the training-ground’.50 The next stage was the diversion of Temple funds away from the endless, expensive sacrifices, and towards such polis activities as international games and dramatic competitions. The high-priest controlled the public funds, since taxes were paid to him, and from him to the tax-farmers (they were all intermarried), and the Temple treasury thus acted as a state deposit bank for the population. The temptation for Antiochus was to put pressure on his Hellenizing allies who controlled the Temple to yield more and more cash to build triremes and war-engines; and he gave way to it. Thus the reformers became identified not only with the occupying power but with oppressive taxes. In 171 BC Antiochus found it necessary to replace Jason as high-priest with the still more pro-Greek Menelaus, and he reinforced Greek power in Jerusalem by building an acropolis-fortress dominating the Temple.51
In 167 the conflict came to a head with the publication of a decree which in effect abolished the Mosaic law as it stood, replacing it with secular law, and downgrading the Temple into an ecumenical place of worship. This meant introducing the statue of an interdenominational god whose Greek name, Olympian Zeus, the rigorist Jews scrambled into ‘The Abomination of Desolation’. It is unlikely that Antiochus himself was the sponsor of this decree. He was not interested in Judaism and it was most unusual for a Greek government to stamp on a particular cult. The evidence suggests that the initiative came from the extreme Jewish reformers, led by Menelaus, who thought that such a drastic move was the only way to end, once and for all, the obscurantism and absurdity of the Law and Temple worship. It was not so much a desecration of the Temple by paganism as a display of militant rationalism, rather like the anti-Christian shows put on by republican deists in Revolutionary France. There is a rabbinical tale of how Miriam, who came from the same priestly family as Menelaus and had married a Seleucid officer, stormed into the Temple and ‘struck against the corner of the altar with her sandal and said to it “Wolf, wolf, you have squandered the riches of Israel.”’52
But both the Greeks and Menelaus himself overestimated his support. His activities in the Temple provoked an uproar. The priests were divided. The scribes sided with his orthodox opponents. So did most pious Jews or hasidim. There was one large category of Jews the reformers might have had on their side. This was the am ha-arez, the ordinary poor people of the land. They had been the principal victims when, after the return of the Judaic elite from Exile, Ezra had imposed religious rigour, with the full power of the Persian empire behind him. He had drawn a condescending distinction between the God-fearing, righteous ‘people of the Exile’, the bnei hagolah, and the am ha-arez, who were scarcely Jews at all, since in many cases, in his view, they were born of invalid marriages. He had not scrupled to punish them severely.53 Since then, being mostly illiterate and ignorant of the Law, they had been treated as second-class citizens, or pushed out altogether. They would have been the first to benefit if the rigorists had lost and the Law had been rationalized. But how could the reformers, who were essentially a party of the well-to-do and the placemen, appeal over the heads of the rigorists to the common people? And how, in particular, could they hope to do so successfully when they were identified with high taxes, from which the poor suffered most? There were no answers to these questions, and so an opportunity to place universalism on a popular basis was missed.
Instead, Menelaus sought to impose reform from above, by state power. To make the decree effective, it was not enough to halt the old Temple sacrifices–that was welcome to many. The pious Jews had also to be forced to make symbolic sacrifices in the new way, on altars they regarded as pagan. The hasidim brushed aside the reformers’ argument that these rituals signified the ubiquity of the one God, who could not be penned into a particular place of human fabrication; to the pious, there was no difference between the new universalism and the old Baal-worship, condemned so many times in their scriptures. So they refused to bow, and they were prepared to die for it. The reformers were forced to make martyrs, such as the ninety-year-old Eleazar, described as ‘one of the principal scribes’, who was beaten to death; or the seven brothers, whose gruesome slaughter is described in the Second Book of Maccabees. It is from this date, indeed, that the concept of religious martyrdom appears, and the writings of the Maccabees, in which the sufferings of the faithful were fed into the propaganda of religious purity and Jewish nationalism, contain the first martyrologies.
Hence it was not the reformers but the rigorists who were able to appeal to the deep-rooted Biblical instinct to overturn the existing order, and transform a religious dispute into a revolt against the occupying power. Like most anti-colonial struggles, it began not with an assault on the garrison but with the murder of a local supporter of the regime. In the town of Modin in the Judean foothills 6 miles east of Lydda, a Jewish reformer, who was superintending the new official ceremony, was slaughtered by Matthias Hasmon, head of an old priestly family from the Temple ‘Watch of Jehoiarib’. The old man’s five sons, led by Judas the Maccabee, or ‘Hammer’, then launched a guerrilla campaign against Seleucid garrisons and their Jewish supporters. In two years, 166-164 BC, they drove all the Greeks out of the area around Jerusalem. In the city itself they penned reformers and Seleucids alike in the Acra, and purged the Temple of its sacrileges, rededicating it to Yahweh at a solemn service in December 164 BC, an event the Jews still celebrate at the Feast of Hanukkah, or Purification.
The Seleucids, who had a multitude of troubles of their own, including the rising power of Rome, responded rather as modern colonial powers did in the mid-twentieth century, oscillating between fierce repression and increasing dollops of self-rule, to which the insurgent nationalists responded by demanding more. In 162 BC Epiphanes’ son and successor, Antiochus v, turned on Menelaus, ‘the man to blame for all the trouble’, who had, in the words of Josephus, ‘persuaded his father to compel the Jews to give up their traditional worship of God’, and executed him.54 The Hasmonean family responded in 161 BC by signing an alliance with Rome, in which they were treated as the ruling family of an independent state. In 152 BC the Seleucids abandoned their attempt to Hellenize Judah by force and recognized Jonathan, now head of the family, as high-priest, an office the Hasmoneans were to hold for 115 years. In 142 they virtually recognized Judaean independence by exempting it from taxation, so that Simon Maccabee, who had succeeded his brother as high-priest, became ethnarch and ruler: ‘And the people of Israel began to engross their documents and contracts, “In the year one of Simon, great high-priest, military commissioner, and leader of the Jews”.’55 Thus Israel became independent again after 440 years, though it was not until the following year that the desperate reform Jews in the Acra were finally starved into surrender and expelled. Then the Hasmoneans entered the fortress, ‘carrying palms, to the sound of harps, cymbals and zithers, chanting hymns and canticles, since a great enemy had been crushed and thrown out of Israel’.56
In this upsurge of nationalist sentiment, the religious issues had been pushed into the background. But the long struggle for independence from Greek universalism left an indelible mark on the Judaic character. There were thirty-four bitter and murderous years between the attack on the Law and the final expulsion of the reformers from the Acra. The zeal and intensity of the assault on the Law aroused a corresponding zeal for the Law, narrowing the vision of the Jewish leadership and pushing them ever more deeply into a Torah-centred religion.57 With their failure, the reformers discredited the notion of reform itself, or even any discussion of the nature and direction of the Jewish religion. Such talk was henceforth denounced in all the official texts as nothing less than total apostasy and collaboration with the foreign oppression, so that it became difficult for moderates of any kind, or internationally minded preachers who looked beyond the narrow enclave of Orthodox Judaism, to get a hearing. The Hasmoneans spoke for a deeply reactionary spirit within Judaism. Their strength lay in atavism and superstition, drawn from the remote Israelite past of taboo and brutal physical intervention by the deity. Henceforth, any external tampering with the Temple and its sanctuaries instantly roused up a ferocious Jerusalem mob of religious extremists swollen by the excited rabble. The mob now became an important part of the Jerusalem scene, making the city, and so Judea as a whole, extremely difficult to govern by anyone–Greeks or Hellenizers, Romans or their tetrarchs, not least the Jews themselves.
Against this background of intellectual terror by the religious mob, the secular spirit and intellectual freedom which flourished in the Greek gymnasia and academies was banished from Jewish centres of learning. In their battle against Greek education, pious Jews began, from the end of the second century BC, to develop a national system of education. To the old scribal schools were gradually added a network of local schools where, in theory at least, all Jewish boys were taught the Torah.58 This development was of great importance in the spread and consolidation of the synagogue, in the birth of Pharisaism as a movement rooted in popular education, and eventually in the rise of the rabbinate. The education provided in these schools was entirely religious, rejecting any form of knowledge outside the Law. But at least these schools taught the Law in a relatively humane spirit. They followed ancient traditions inspired by an obscure text in Deuteronomy, ‘put it in their mouths’,59 that God had given Moses, in addition to the written Law, an Oral Law, by which learned elders could interpret and supplement the sacred commands. The practice of the Oral Law made it possible for the Mosaic code to be adapted to changing conditions and administered in a realistic manner.
By contrast, the Temple priests, dominated by the Sadducees, or descendants of Zadok, the great high-priest from Davidic times, insisted that all law must be written and unchanged. They had their own additional text, called the Book of Decrees, which laid down a system of punishment: who were to be stoned, who burned, who beheaded, who strangled. But this was written and sacred: they would not admit that oral teaching could subject the Law to a process of creative development. With their rigid adherence to the Mosaic inheritance, their concept of the Temple as the sole source and centre of Judaic government, and their own hereditary position in its functions, the Sadducees were naturally allies of the new Hasmonean high-priests, even though the latter had no strict title to this position by descent. The Sadducees soon became identified with Hasmonean rule in a rigid system of Temple administration, in which the hereditary high-priest performed the functions of a secular ruler, and a committee of elders, the Sanhedrin, discharged his religious-legal duties. To mark the supremacy of the Temple, Simon Maccabee not only smashed the walls of the Acra into rubble but went on (according to Josephus) ‘to level the very hill on which the citadel had stood, so that the Temple might be higher than it’.
Simon was the last of the Maccabee brothers. The Maccabees were brave, desperate, fanatical, strong-minded and violent men. They saw themselves as reliving the Book of Joshua, reconquering the Promised Land from the pagans, with the Lord at their elbow. They lived by the sword and died by it in a spirit of ruthless piety. Most of them met violent ends. Simon was no exception, being treacherously murdered by the Ptolemies, along with two of his sons. Simon was a man of blood, but honourable in his fashion, not self-seeking. Despite his triumphant installation as high-priest and ethnarch, he retained the spirit of the religious guerrilla leader; he had the charisma of heroic piety.
Simon’s third son, John Hyrcanus, who succeeded him and reigned 134-104 BC, was quite different: a ruler by birth. He issued his own coins, stamped ‘Jehohanan the High-Priest and the Community of the Jews’, and his son Alexander Jannaeus, 103-76 BC, actually called himself ‘Jonathan the King’ on his coinage. The recreation of the state and kingdom, originally and ostensibly on a basis of pure religious fundamentalism–the defence of the faith–rapidly revived all the inherent problems of the earlier monarchy, and in particular the irresolvable conflict between the aims and methods of the state and the nature of the Jewish religion. This conflict is reflected in the personal history of the Hasmoneans themselves, and the story of their rise and fall is a memorable study in hubris. They began as the avengers of martyrs; they ended as religious oppressors themselves. They came to power at the head of an eager guerrilla band; they ended surrounded by mercenaries. Their kingdom, founded in faith, dissolved in impiety.
John Hyrcanus was imbued with the fundamentalist notion that it was God’s will he should restore the Davidic kingdom. He was the first Jew to seek military inspiration and geopolitical guidance from the ancient historical texts of the Bible, telescoping the books of Joshua and Samuel. He accepted as literal truth that the whole of Palestine was the divine inheritance of the Jewish nation, and that it was not merely his right but his duty to conquer it. To do this he created a modern army of mercenaries. Moreover, the conquest, like Joshua’s, had to extirpate foreign cults and heterodox sects, and if necessary slaughter those who clung to them. John’s army trampled down Samaria and razed the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim. He stormed, after a year’s siege, the city of Samaria itself, and ‘he demolished it entirely, and brought streams to it to drown it, for he dug ditches to turn it into floods and water-meadows; he even took away the very marks which showed a city had ever been there’.60 In the same way he pillaged and burned the Greek city of Scythopolis. John’s wars of fire and sword were marked by massacres of city populations whose only crime was that they were Greek-speaking. The province of Idumaea was conquered and the inhabitants of its two main cities, Adora and Marissa, were forcibly converted to Judaism or slaughtered if they refused.