History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Writing a history of the Jews is almost like writing a history of the world, but from a highly peculiar angle of vision. It is world history seen from the viewpoint of a learned and intelligent victim.

No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny. At a very early stage in their collective existence they believed they had detected a divine scheme for the human race, of which their own society was to be a pilot.

It also illustrates the curious ambivalence of the Jews towards the possession and occupation of land. No race has maintained over so long a period so emotional an attachment to a particular corner of the earth’s surface. But none has shown so strong and persistent an instinct to migrate, such courage and skill in pulling up and replanting its roots. It is a curious fact that, for more than three-quarters of their existence as a race, a majority of Jews have always lived outside the land they call their own. They do so today. Hebron is the site of their first recorded acquisition of land. Chapter 23 of the Book of Genesis describes how Abraham, after the death of his wife Sarah, decided to purchase the Cave of Machpelah and the lands which surrounded it, as a burying-place for her and ultimately for himself.

From the early decades of the nineteenth century, a new and increasingly professional ‘critical’ approach, the work mainly of German scholars, dismissed the Old Testament as a historical record and classified large parts of it as religious myth. The first five books of the Bible, or Pentateuch, were now presented as orally transmitted legend from various Hebrew tribes which reached written form only after the Exile, in the second half of the first millennium BC. These legends, the argument ran, were carefully edited, conflated and adapted to provide historical justification and divine sanction for the religious beliefs, practices and rituals of the post-Exilic Israelite establishment. The individuals described in the early books were not real people but mythical heroes or composite figures denoting entire tribes.

Under the influence of Hegel and his scholarly followers, Jewish and Christian revelation, as presented in the Bible, was reinterpreted as a determinist sociological development from primitive tribal superstition to sophisticated urban ecclesiology.

These and other theories necessarily discarded all Biblical history before the Book of Judges as wholly or chiefly fiction, and Judges itself as a medley of fiction and fact. Israelite history, it was argued, does not acquire a substantial basis of truth until the age of Saul and David, when the Biblical text begins to reflect the reality of court histories and records.

The work of W. F. Albright and Kathleen Kenyon in particular has given us renewed confidence in the actual existence of places and events described in the early Old Testament books.8 Equally important, the discovery of contemporary archives from the third and second millennia BC has thrown new light on hitherto obscure Biblical passages.

The Jews are thus the only people in the world today who possess a historical record, however obscure in places, which allows them to trace their origins back into very remote times. The Jews who worked the Bible into something approaching its present shape evidently thought that their race, though founded by Abraham, could trace forebears even further and called the ultimate human progenitor Adam.

What strikes one about the Jewish description of creation and early man, compared with pagan cosmogonies, is the lack of interest in the mechanics of how the world and its creatures came into existence, which led the Egyptian and Mesopotamian narrators into such weird contortions. The Jews simply assume the pre-existence of an omnipotent God, who acts but is never described or characterized, and so has the force and invisibility of nature itself: it is significant that the first chapter of Genesis, unlike any other cosmogony of antiquity, fits perfectly well, in essence, with modern scientific explanations of the origin of the universe, not least the ‘Big Bang’ theory.

the first truly historical episode in the Bible, the description of the Flood in Genesis 6. There can now be no doubt that some kind of huge inundation did occur in Mesopotamia.

He found an alluvial deposit of 8 feet which he dated 4000 to 3500 BC. At Shuruppak he came across another impressive alluvial deposit, and an 18-inch one at a similar stratum at Kish. But these datings, and Ur’s, did not match.12 Surveying the various sites which had been explored by the early 1960s, Sir Max Mallowan concluded that there had, indeed, been a giant flood.13 Then in 1965 the British Museum made a further discovery in its deposits: two tablets, referring to the Flood, written in the Babylonian city of Sippar in the reign of King Ammisaduqa, 1646–1626 BC.

The importance of this last discovery was that it enables us to focus on the figure of Noah himself. For it relates how the god, having created mankind, regretted it and decided to drown it by flood; but Enki, the water-god, revealed the catastrophic plan to a certain priest-king called Ziusudra, who built a boat and so survived.14 Ziusudra was undoubtedly a real person, king of the south Babylonian city of Shuruppak about 2900 BC, in which capacity he figures in the earliest column of the Sumerian king-list. At the site of Shuruppak itself there is evidence of a phenomenal flood, though the dating does not correspond with Woolley’s flood at Ur.15 The saviour-figure of Ziusudra, presented in the Bible as Noah, thus provides the first independent confirmation of the actual existence of a Biblical personage.

Noah, unlike Ziusudra, is a moral figure, anchored firmly in the scheme of values which the Book of Genesis identifies from the very beginning. Moreover, whereas the Gilgamesh story recounts isolated episodes lacking a unifying moral and historical context, the Jewish version sees each event as involving moral issues and, collectively, bearing witness to a providential design. It is the difference between secular and religious literature and between the writing of mere folklore and conscious, determinist history. Moreover, not only is Noah the first real man in Jewish history: his story foreshadows important elements in Jewish religion. There is the Jewish god’s obsession with detail, in the construction and loading of the ark.

The passages dealing with the Flood also contain the first mention of a covenant and the earliest reference to the land of Canaan.16 But these themes recur far more emphatically when we progress through the post-diluvian king-lists and reach the patriarchs.

But there is no reason at all to doubt that Abraham came from Ur, as the Bible states, and this already tells us a lot about him, thanks to the work of Woolley and his successors. To begin with, it associates him with an important city, not the desert. Hegelians like Wellhausen and his school, with their notion of determinist progression from primitive to sophisticated, from desert to city, saw the Hebrews originally as pastoralists of the simplest kind. But the Ur Woolley excavated had a comparatively high level of culture.

In Genesis, antediluvian datings are, of course, schematic rather than actual but genealogies are not to be despised, any more than the other early king-lists of antiquity.

The evidence suggests that the Genesis patriarch narratives belong to the period between Ur-Nammu and Hammurabi, the outside limits being 2100–1550 BC, that is the Middle Bronze Age. They certainly cannot be later, in the Late Bronze Age, because that would date them to the Egyptian empire of the New Kingdom, and the patriarchal sections make no mention of an Egyptian imperial presence in Canaan.

Nuzi tablet also provides an instance of the binding power of the oral disposition of property, in the form of a death-bed blessing – thus illuminating the remarkable scene in Genesis 27, when Jacob and his mother Rebecca conspire to deceive his father, Isaac, and get his dying nomination as heir.

All this Genesis material dealing with the problems of immigration, of water-wells and contracts and birthrights, is fascinating because it places the patriarchs so firmly in their historical setting, and testifies to the Bible’s great antiquity and authenticity. But it is mingled with two other types of material which constitute the real purpose of the Bible narratives: the depiction of individuals, the ancestors of the people, in a moral context and, still more important, the origin and development of their collective relationship with God.

Still more remarkable is the attention devoted to women, the leading role they often play, their vivacity and emotional power. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, is the first person in history recorded as laughing.

Certainly, the Song of Deborah, which constitutes Chapter 5 of the Book of Judges, with its multitude of feminine images and its triumphant vindication of female strength and courage, must be the lyrical work of a woman.

These early Bible records testify to the creative role played by women in the shaping of Hebrew society, to their intellectual and emotional strength, and to their high seriousness.

We can dismiss Wellhausen’s Hegelian notions of the Jews, symbolized by Abraham, moving out of their primitive desert background. Abraham was a man familiar with cities, complex legal concepts, and religious ideas which, for their day, were sophisticated. The great Jewish historian Salo Baron sees him as a proto-monotheist, coming from a centre whose flourishing moon-cult was becoming a crude form of monotheism.

Abraham may perhaps be most accurately described as a henotheist: a believer in a sole God, attached to a particular people, who none the less recognized the attachment of other races to their own gods. With this qualification, he is the founder of the Hebrew religious culture, since he inaugurates its two salient characteristics: the covenant with God and the donation of The Land.

Abraham is commanded to do something not only cruel in itself but contrary to the repudiation of human sacrifice which is part of the bedrock of Hebrew ethics and all subsequent forms of Judaeo-Christian worship. Great Jewish philosophers have struggled to make the story conform to Jewish ethics.

Abraham, as we know from contemporary archives, came from a legal background where it was mandatory to seal a contract or covenant with an animal sacrifice. The covenant with God was of such transcendent enormity that it demanded something more: a sacrifice of the best-loved in the fullest sense, though as the subject of the sacrifice was a human being, it was made abortive, thereby remaining valid-but formal and ritualistic rather than actual. Isaac was chosen as the offering not only because he was Abraham’s most precious possession but because he was a special gift of God’s, under the covenant, and remained God’s like all the rest-of his gifts to man. This underlines the whole purpose of sacrifice, a symbolic reminder that everything man possesses comes from God and is returnable to him.

We are now close to the notion of an elect nation. The Old Testament, it is important to grasp, is not primarily about justice as an abstract concept. It is about God’s justice, which manifests itself by God’s acts of choice.

Abraham is a just man too, but there is no suggestion that God chose him because he was the only one, or in any sense because of his merits. The Bible is not a work of reason, it is a work of history, dealing with what are to us mysterious and even inexplicable events. It is concerned with the momentous choices which it pleased God to make.

The sages believed that God gave generously of his creation, but retained (as it were) the freehold of everything and a special, possessive relationship with selected elements.

The Holy One, blessed be He, created days, and took to Himself the Sabbath; He created the months, and took to Himself the festivals; He created the years, and chose for Himself the Sabbatical Year; He created the Sabbatical years, and chose for Himself the Jubilee Year; He created the nations, and chose for Himself Israel.

both gifts are leasehold, not freehold: the Jews are chosen, the land is theirs, by grace and favour, always revocable.

The implication, here and in later passages, is that the election of Israel can never be revoked, though it can be suspended by human disobedience. As the Lord’s promise is irrevocable, the land will ultimately revert to Israel even if she loses it for a time.50 The notion of the Promised Land is peculiar to Israelite religion and, for the Israelites and the Jews later, it was the most important single element in it. It is significant that the Jews made the five early books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, into the core of their Torah or belief, because they dealt with the Law, the promise of the land, and its fulfilment. The later books, despite all their brilliance and comprehensibility, never acquired the same central significance.

‘Hebrews’ is unsatisfactory, though it is often necessary to use it, for the term Habiru, from which it presumably derives, described more a way of life than a specific racial group. Moreover, it was pejorative. ‘Hebrew’ does indeed occur in the Pentateuch, meaning ‘the children of Israel’, but only when used by the Egyptians or by the Israelites themselves in the presence of Egyptians. From about the second century BC, when it was so used by Ben Sira, ‘Hebrew’ was applied to the language of the Bible, and to all subsequent works written in this language. As such it gradually lost its pejorative overtone, so that both to Jews themselves and to sympathetic gentiles, it sometimes seemed preferable to ‘Jew’ as a racial term.

But the ancestors of the Jews never by choice called themselves Hebrews. When they became conscious of a national identity, the term they used, normative in the Bible, is Israelites or children of Israel, and it is this which gives Jacob his main significance.

The term ‘Israel’ may mean he who fights Gods, he who fights for God, he whom God fights, or whom God rules, the upright one of God, or God is upright. There is no agreement.

Jacob–Israel was also the father of the twelve tribes which in theory composed it. These tribes, Reuben, Simeon (Levi), Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Ephraim and Manasseh,

all these West Semitic groups moving into Canaan had common origins and were interrelated; they shared memories, traditions and revered ancestors.

the beginning of the Book of Exodus, seems to suggest that the nation as a whole went down into Egypt. But this is misleading. It is quite clear that even in Jacob’s time many of the Habiru or Hebrews, whom we must now call Israelites, were beginning to settle permanently in Canaan, and even to acquire territory by force.

That a large number of the Israelites remained in Canaan is certain, and there is external confirmation that they were active and warlike.

So far as we know, in fact, the Israelite–Hebrews were in control of Shechem throughout the time their brethren were in Egyptian bondage.

The point is important, since the continuous existence of a sizeable Israelite population in Palestine throughout the period between the original Abrahamite arrival and the return from Egypt makes the Biblical Book of Exodus, which clearly describes only a part of the race, and the conquest narrated in the Book of Joshua, far more credible.62 The Israelites in Egypt always knew they had a homeland to return to, where part of the population was their natural ally; and this fifth column within the land, in turn, made the attempt to seize Canaan by a wandering band less of a forlorn venture. So the sojourn in and Exodus from Egypt, and the desert wanderings that followed, involved only part of the Israelite nation.

Before they went to Egypt, the Israelites were a small folk almost like any other, though they had a cherished promise of greatness. After they returned, they were a people with a purpose, a programme and a message to the world.

But there is no doubt about his historicity. Indeed, some of the more romantic episodes in his life have echoes in Egyptian literature. His attempted seduction by Potiphar’s wife, who in her fury at her rejection by him resorts to slander and has him thrown into prison, occurs in an ancient Egyptian narrative called The Tale of the Two Brothers, which first reached written form in a papyrus manuscript dated 1225 BC.

Indeed there is pretty convincing evidence that the period of Egyptian oppression, which finally drove the Israelites to revolt and escape, occurred towards the last quarter of the second millennium BC, and almost certainly in the reign of the famous Rameses II (1304–1237 BC).

But it is not probable that the exodus itself took place in Rameses’ reign. It seems more likely that the Israelites broke out under his successor, Merneptah.

This is the first non-Biblical reference to Israel. Taken in conjunction with other evidence, such as calculations based on I Kings 6:1 and Judges 11:26,69 we can be reasonably sure that the Exodus occurred in the thirteenth century BC and had been completed by about 1225 BC.

The stories of the plagues of Egypt, and the other wonders and miracles which preceded the Israelite break-out, have so dominated our reading of Exodus that we sometimes lose sight of the sheer physical fact of the successful revolt and escape of a slave-people, the only one recorded in antiquity. It became an overwhelming memory for the Israelites who participated in it. For those who heard, and later read, about it, the Exodus gradually replaced the creation itself as the central, determining event in Jewish history. Something happened, at the frontiers of Egypt, that persuaded the eye-witnesses that God had intervened directly and decisively in their fate. The way it was related and set down convinced subsequent generations that this unique demonstration of God’s mightiness on their behalf was the most remarkable event in the whole history of nations. Despite intensive investigations over many years, we really have no idea where the hand of the Lord saved Israel from pharaoh’s army.70 The critical phrase is ‘at the sea of reeds’ or ‘at the sea’. This could mean one of the salt lakes, or the northern end of the Suez Gulf, or even the top of the Gulf of Aqaba; another alternative is the Serbonian Sea (Lake Sirbonis) in northern Sinai, which in effect is a lagoon of the Mediterranean.71 What we do know is that the frontier was heavily defended in places and policed throughout. The episode which saved the Israelites from pharaoh’s fury, and which they saw as divine redempti...

Moses is the fulcrum-figure in Jewish history, the hinge around which it all turns. If Abraham was the ancestor of the race, Moses was the essentially creative force, the moulder of the people; under him and through him, they became a distinctive people, with a future as a nation. He was a Jewish archetype, like Joseph, but quite different and far more formidable. He was a prophet and a leader; a man of decisive actions and electric presence, capable of huge wrath and ruthless resolve; but also a man of intense spirituality, loving solitary communion with himself and God in the remote countryside, seeing visions and epiphanies and apocalypses; and yet not a hermit or anchorite but an active spiritual force in the world, hating injustice, fervently seeking to create a Utopia, a man who not only acted as intermediary between God and man but sought to translate the most intense idealism into practical statesmanship, and noble concepts into details of everyday life. Above all, he was a lawmaker and judge, the engineer of a mighty framework to enclose in a structure of rectitude every aspect of public and private conduct – a totalitarian of the spirit.

Yet it is important to note that Moses, though an outsize figure, was in no sense a superhuman one. Jewish writers and sages, fighting against the strong tendency in antiquity to deify founder-figures, often went out of their way to stress the human weaknesses and failings of Moses. But there was no need; it is all in the record. Perhaps the most convincing aspect of the Biblical presentation is the way in which it shows Moses as hesitant and uncertain almost to the point of cowardice, mistaken, wrong-headed, foolish, irritable and, what is still more remarkable, bitterly conscious of his shortcomings. It is very rare indeed for a great man to confess: ‘I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.’73 Lack of articulation is about the last disqualification a lawgiver and statesman will admit. Still more striking are the images of Moses as an isolated, rather desperate and inefficient figure, struggling with the burdens of a huge role he has reluctantly accepted but grimly seeks to discharge.

Because of his position, he had to keep up a brave front of omniscience; because he had to keep his fissiparous horde together, he was obliged to thunder confidently, even when unsure, and to display publicly a relentlessness he did not feel in his heart. So his image was stern, his watchword ‘Let the Law bend the mountain.’ There is no doubt truth in the early aggadic tradition that Aaron was more popular than his far greater brother: when Aaron died, everyone wept, but when Moses died only the menfolk mourned.