History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Josephus says he invented the very word ‘law’, then unknown in Greek, and was the first legislator in world history.77 Philo accused both philosophers and lawgivers of plundering or copying his ideas, Heraclitus and Plato being the chief culprits.78 Still more striking is the assertion of the pagan writer Numenius of Apamea (second century AD) that Plato was just a Moses who spoke Greek.79 The ancient writers were not merely convinced of Moses’ existence: they saw him as one of the formative figures of world history.

Wherever else Moses got his ideas, whether religious or legal (and the two, of course, were inseparable in his mind), it was certainly not Egypt. Indeed the work of Moses can be seen as a total repudiation of everything that ancient Egypt stood for. As with Abraham’s migration from Ur and Haran to Canaan, we must not assume that the Israelite exodus from Egypt was dictated purely by economic motives. This was not just an escape from hardship. There are indeed hints in the Bible that the hardships were endurable; Moses’ horde often hankered for ‘the flesh-pots of Egypt’. Life in Egypt, throughout the second millennium BC, was more gracious (as a general rule) than in any other part of the ancient Near East. The motive for the Exodus was political, certainly. The Israelites in Egypt were a large and awkward minority, and a growing one. The opening of Exodus has pharaoh say ‘to his people’ that the Israelites are becoming ‘more and mightier than we: come, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply’.83 Egyptian fear of Israelite numbers was the principal motive for their oppression, which was specifically designed to reduce their ranks. Pharaonic slavery was, in a sinister way, a distant adumbration of Hitler’s slave-labour programme and even of his Holocaust: there are disturbing parallels. So the Exodus was an act of political separation and resistance; but it was also, and above all, a religious act. For the Israelites were distinct, and were seen and feared by the Eg...

Moses (and, much later, Ezekiel, transmitter of the law reforms) was a prophet, not a king, and a divine medium, not a sovereign legislator. Hence, in his code there is no distinction between the religious and the secular – all are one – or between civil, criminal and moral law.88

All crimes are sins, just as all sins are crimes.

The Mosaic code is God-oriented. For instance, in other codes, a husband may pardon an adulterous wife and her lover. The Mosaic code, by contrast, insists both must be put to death.89 Again, whereas the other codes include the royal right to pardon even in capital cases, the Bible provides no such remedy.

In Mosaic theology, man is made in God’s image, and so his life is not just valuable, it is sacred. To kill a man is an offence against God so grievous that the ultimate punishment, the forfeiture of life, must follow; money is not enough. The horrific fact of execution thus underscores the sanctity of human life. Under Mosaic law, then, many men and women met their deaths whom the secular codes of surrounding societies would have simply permitted to compensate their victims or their victims’ families. But the converse is also true, as a result of the same axiom. Whereas other codes provided the death penalty for offences against property, such as looting during a fire, breaking into a house, serious trespass by night, or theft of a wife, in the Mosaic law no property offence is capital. Human life is too sacred where the rights of property alone are violated.

The core of the Mosaic code was the Decalogue, the statements of God related by Moses (Deuteronomy 5:6–18) and entitled ‘the ten words or utterances’

Thus the Decalogue is merely the heart of an elaborate system of divine laws set out in the books of Exodus, Deuteronomy and Numbers. In late antiquity, Judaic scholars organized the laws into 613 commandments, consisting of 248 mandatory commandments and 365 prohibitions.

The Mosaic laws were very strict in sexual matters.

The Israelites seem to have derived some of their dietary laws from the Egyptians,

What is also unique, and already in Mosaic times possessing a long history, is the Israelite stress on circumcision.

For those ancient societies which practised it, this was its function, and it was performed around the age of thirteen. But Moses’ son was circumcised at birth by his mother Zipporah (Exodus 4:24–6), and the ceremonial removal of the foreskin on the eighth day after birth was then enshrined in the Mosaic legislation (Leviticus 12:3). Thus the Israelites divorced the rite from its link to male puberty and, in accordance with their already marked tendency to historicize custom, made it an indelible symbol of an historic covenant and membership of a chosen people.102 They kept up the tradition, going back to Abraham, that ancient flint knives must be used.103 The law of circumcision was retained, long after all other early societies had abandoned it, as an indelible sign of the unity between the people and their beliefs.

The Sabbath was the other great and ancient institution which differentiated the Israelites from other peoples, and was also the seed of future unpopularity. The idea seems to have been derived from Babylonian astronomy, but its rationale in the Books of Exodus and Deuteronomy is variously stated as commemorating God’s rest after creation, the liberation of Israel from Egyptian slavery and the humanitarian need to give labourers, especially slaves and beasts of burden, some respite.

In a sense, it is the central element, for monotheism is itself a rationalization. If supernatural, unearthly power exists, how can it be, as it were, radiated from woods and springs, rivers and rocks? If the motions of the sun and moon and stars can be predicted and measured, and thus obey regular laws, how can they be the source of unnatural authority, since they too are plainly part of nature? Whence, then, comes the power? Just as man learns to lord it over nature, animal and inanimate, must not divine power, a fortiori, be living and personal? And if God lives, how can his power be arbitrarily and unequally divided into a pantheon of deities? The idea of a limited god is a contradiction. Once the process of reason is applied to divinity, the idea of a sole, omnipotent and personal God, who being infinitely superior to man in power, and therefore virtue, is consistently guided in his actions by systematic ethical principles, follows as a matter of course.

the perspective of the twentieth century, we see Judaism as the most conservative of religions. But in its origins it was the most revolutionary. Ethical monotheism began the process whereby the world-picture of antiquity was destroyed.

The Israelites thus attributed a far greater power and distance to God than any other religion of antiquity.

Indeed, the Mosaic code is a code not only of obligations and prohibitions but also, in embryonic form, of rights. It is more: it is a primitive declaration of equality. Not only is man, as a category, created in God’s image; all individual men are also created in God’s image. In this sense they are all equal. Nor is this equality notional; it is real in one all-important sense. All Israelites are equal before God, and therefore equal before his law. Justice is for all, irrespective of other inequalities which may exist. All kinds of privileges are implicit and explicit in the Mosaic code, but on essentials it does not distinguish between varieties of the faithful.

The fact that God ruled meant that in practice his law ruled. And since all were equally subject to the law, the system was the first to embody the double merits of the rule of law and equality before the law.

We do not know where Moses’ Mount Sinai was. It may have been a still-active volcano. The present monastery of Sinai has always been a Christian site; it goes back certainly to the fourth century AD, and perhaps to about 200 years before. But even that was 1,450 years after Moses came down from the mountain. It is likely that, after the Israelites settled in Canaan, the Mosaic Sinai remained a pilgrimage site for generations. But the tradition eventually lapsed and the site fell out of memory, and it is most improbable that the early Christians went to the right place.

With their long experience of being strangers and sojourners, for the Israelites their exodus from Egypt and their wanderings in the desert and mountain country of Sinai were nothing new.

‘The religious and ethnic power of perseverance, rather than the political power of expansion and conquest, became the corner-stone of Jewish belief and practice.’

Thus Joshua began and to a great extent completed the conquest of Canaan. He may not have commanded all the Israelites, at any rate at the beginning. Nor did he conduct a full-scale invasion. Much of the settlement was a process of infiltration, or reinforcement of affiliated tribes who, as we have seen, already held such towns as Shechem.

The tales in the books of Judges and Samuel are not just short stories. They are history. Indeed, in the books of Samuel they are beginning to be great history. There is in Israelite–Jewish literature of this period none of the aimlessness of pagan myth and chronicle. The narrative is set down with an overwhelming purpose, to tell the story, both elevating and minatory, of a people’s relationship with God, and because the purpose is so serious, the story must be accurate – that is, the writer must believe in it, in his heart. So it is history, and since it deals with the evolution of institutions, as well as war and conquest, it is peculiarly instructive history to us.

But those that survive, especially the two books of Samuel and the two books of Kings, are history on the grand scale, among the greatest works of all antiquity. They incorporate in places material from the royal archives, such as lists of government officials, provincial governors and even the menus of the royal kitchens.150 From these times it is possible to establish synchronisms between the king-lists given in the Bible and non-Biblical sources such as the Egyptian pharaoh canons and Assyrian limmu or eponym lists. These enable us to make accurate datings. In the early monarchical period the margin of error may be ten years or so, but later we get virtually absolute dates. Thus we can be fairly sure that Saul was killed about 1005 BC, that David reigned until c. 966, and that Solomon died in either 926 or 925 BC.

What emerges from the record is that though the Israelites turned to kingship in response to the threat of annihilation by Philistine power, they did so with great reluctance, and through the medium of an earlier institution, the prophetship.

Among the mercenaries Saul had recruited was David; it was his policy: ‘When Saul saw any strong man, or any valiant man, he took him unto him.’163 But the Bible text, as it stands, confuses two distinct layers of David’s military career. He was originally a shepherd, descended from the humble and enchanting Ruth the Moabitess. When first picked to serve, he knew nothing of arms. He girded on sword and armour ‘and tried in vain to go for he was not used to them’.164 He used a more primitive weapon, the sling, to achieve his first great exploit, the killing of the Philistine strongman, Goliath.

The truth seems to be that David served Saul at different periods but his professional military training came as a mercenary under the Philistines themselves.

Partly as a Philistine commander, partly as an opposition leader to the blundering Saul, he built up a group of professional knights and soldiers who swore fealty to him, were attached to him personally and expected to be rewarded with land. This was the force which enabled him to become King of Judah after Saul’s death.

It is important to grasp that David’s kingdom was not, initially at least, a co-ordinated nation, but two separate national entities each of which had a separate contract with him personally.

David became the most successful and popular king Israel ever had, the archetype king and ruler, so that for more than 2,000 years after his death Jews saw his reign as a golden age.

David established a national and religious capital which was also his personal conquest. The Israelites had never been able to take Jerusalem in over 200 years, though it was the most strategically important city of the interior: ‘And as for the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the children of Judah could not drive them out: but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Judah unto this day.’ Jerusalem controlled the main north–south route in the interior; more, it was the natural junction between north and south. The failure to take it was one of the most important reasons why two separate groupings of the Israelites emerged – what later became known as the Kingdom of Israel in the north, and the Kingdom of Judah in the south.

He repaired the walls and the terracing or Millo, occupied the citadel, or Zion as it was called, built a barracks for his ‘mighty men’, a palace for himself, and purchased from the last ruler of the city the land on which a central shrine for the entire Israelite people could be erected.

It was inherent in Israelite law even at this stage that, although everyone had responsibilities and duties to society as a whole, society – or its representative, the king, or the state – could under no circumstances possess unlimited authority over the individual. Only God could do that. The Jews, unlike the Greeks and later the Romans, did not recognize such concepts as city, state, community as abstracts with legal personalities and rights and privileges. You could commit sins against man, and of course against God; and these sins were crimes; but there was no such thing as a crime/sin against the state.171 This raises a central dilemma about Israelite, later Judaic, religion and its relationship with temporal power. The dilemma can be stated quite simply: could the two institutions coexist, without one fatally weakening the other? If the demands of religion were enforced, the state would have too little power to function. On the other hand, if the state were allowed to evolve normally, according to its nature, it would absorb part of the essence of the religion to itself, and sterilize it. Each had an inherent tendency to be parasitical upon the other. If the Israelites tried to survive simply as a religious community, without a state, they would sooner or later be attacked, scattered and absorbed into the local paganisms. Thus the worship of Yahweh would succumb to external assault. That, of course, was what nearly happened during the Philistine invasion, and would h...

The episode was characteristic of his hesitation and ambivalence in building up the state at the expense of the faith. Solomon had no such scruples. On the basis of the census returns he divided the country into twelve tax districts and imposed a further levy to provide supplies for his chariot-cities and other royal depots.

He expanded trade by marrying daughters of all the neighbouring princes, with the slogan ‘trade follows the bride’. He ‘made affinity with Pharaoh King of Egypt’ by marrying his daughter

What is clear is that Solomon’s Temple, in its size and magnificence, and in its location within the fortified walls of a royal upper city or acropolis, had very little to do with the pure religion of Yahweh which Moses brought out of the wilderness. The Jews later came to see Solomon’s Temple as an essential part of the early faith, but that is not how it must have appeared at the time to pious men beyond the royal circle. Like the corvée, the tax-districts, the chariots, it was new, and in many ways simply copied from the more advanced pagan cultures of the Mediterranean coast or the Nile Valley. Was not Solomon embracing paganism, along with his foreign wives, his centralized monarchy and his ruthless ways with the old tribes? Was not his Temple an idolatrous place where objects were worshipped?

In strict Israelite belief, the Ark was simply a repository of God’s commandments. It was not a cult-object to be worshipped. Yet they were confused on this point,

Solomon took advantage of this confusion to push forward his religious reform in the direction of royal absolutism, in which the king controlled the sole shrine where God could be effectively worshipped. In Chapter 8 of the First Book of Kings, Solomon emphasized that God was in the Temple: ‘I have surely built thee an house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide in for ever.’ But Solomon was not a pure pagan, as this would imply, for if so he would not have bothered to exclude his pagan wife from the sacred area. He understood the theology of his religion, for he asked: ‘But will indeed God dwell on the earth? Behold the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?’ He effected a compromise between his state needs, and his understanding of Israelite monotheism, by supposing not a physical but a symbolic presence of the Almighty:

But, at the time, the notion of a central, royal temple was objectionable to many Israelite purists. They formed the first of the many separatist sects the religion of Yahweh was to breed, the Rechabites.189 Many northerners, too, resented the concentration of the religion in Jerusalem and its royal Temple, for the priesthood which served it soon put forward absolutist demands, claiming that only their ceremonies were valid, and that the older shrines and temples, the high places, and the altars venerated since patriarchal times, were nests of heterodoxy and wickedness. These assertions ultimately prevailed and became Biblical orthodoxy. But at the time they met resistance in the north.

This hostility to Solomon’s religious changes combined with his absolutist ways and exactions to make the united kingdom his father had constructed untenable in the long run. Solomon’s craft and success held it together, but there were signs of strain even during his last years. To Israelites for whom the past was very real, the forced-labour system was particularly odious because it reminded them of the Egyptian servitude. Their freedom and their religion were inseparable in their minds. By concentrating the cult in Jerusalem, Solomon downgraded northern shrines such as Shechem, associated with Abraham, and Bethel, with Jacob. To the northerners, then, Solomon and his line were increasingly seen as spiritual destroyers as well as secular oppressors. Hence when Solomon died in 925/6 BC, the northerners refused his successor, Rehoboam, a united coronation in Jerusalem, and insisted he go north to Shechem to be crowned their king.

In these circumstances, the prophets re-emerged to voice the social conscience. Like Samuel, they were uneasy about the whole institution of monarchy, perceiving it as inherently incompatible with the democratic theocracy. Under the House of Omri, the prophetic tradition was suddenly reinvigorated in the north by the astonishing figure of Elijah. He came from an unidentified place called Tishbe, in Gilead east of the Jordan, right on the fringes of the desert. He was a Rechabite, a member of that ultra-austere, wild and fundamentalist sect,

Like nearly all Jewish heroes, he came from the poor and spoke for them.

It is evident that Elijah could rouse a mass following, especially in time of hardship, when no rain fell. He was a formidable public preacher.

Despite this triumphant vindication, Elijah was unable himself to eradicate paganism, or destroy the. House of Omri, though he predicted its downfall. He was a lone figure, a charismatic man capable of swaying a huge crowd but not one to build up a party or a court faction. He stood for the individual conscience, perhaps the first man in Jewish history to do so; God spoke to him not in the thunder of the Mosaic era, but in ‘a still, small voice’. In his cursing of Ahab’s line over the killing of Naboth, he upheld the principle that a king’s behaviour should be no different from a private man’s: it must be guided by moral principle. Politics was about right, not might.

This ferocious religious purge may have re-established the official, sole worship of Yahweh for a time, but it did not resolve the perennial conflict between the need to maintain religious orthodoxy – to keep the people together – and the need to conform to the world – to keep the state in existence. Jehu, as was foreseeable, was soon behaving in as arbitrary a manner as the House of Omri; indeed, virtually all the kings of Israel broke with the religious purists sooner or later. To preserve his power, a king, or so it seemed, had to do things that a true follower of Yahweh could not countenance.

Thus the first great mass tragedy in Jewish history took place. It was, too, a tragedy unrelieved by ultimate rebirth. The holocaust-dispersion of the northern people of Israel was final: In taking their last, forced journey into Assyria, the ten tribes of the north moved out of history and into myth. They lived in later Jewish legend, but in reality they were simply assimilated into the surrounding Aramaean population, losing their faith and their language; and the spread of Aramaic westwards, as the common language of the Assyrian empire, helped to conceal their evanescence. In Samaria, Israelite peasants and artisans remained, and intermarried with the new settlers. Chapter 17 of the Second Book of Kings, which records these melancholy events, says that while the exiled elite in Assyria still worshipped Yahweh, they sent back one of their priests to live in Bethel and instruct the leaderless people.

The fall and dispersal of the northern kingdom, and the intermarriage of the remnant with aliens, was used to deny the Samaritans their original Israelite heritage. From this point onwards, their claim to be part of the chosen people, and to inhabit the Promised Land in full righteousness of possession, was never again acknowledged by the Jews. Yet the north left a legacy to the south, which was to provide the germ of the new phase of the religion of Yahweh, flowering in the south during the last days of old Jerusalem. When Samaria fell, some literate refugees escaped the deportations and came south, where they were received and resettled in Jerusalem. One of them brought with him the writings of an obscure prophet called Hosea, which were then put into shape by a southern hand.204 Hosea had been prophesying and writing on the eve of the destruction of the northern kingdom. He was the first Israelite to perceive clearly that military and political failure was an inevitable punishment visited on the chosen people by God because of their paganism and moral failings. In a brilliantly written and often poetic text, he predicted the fall of Samaria.

This remarkable message, in which for the first time an Israelite thinker seems to envisage a religion of the heart, divorced from a particular state and organized society, was received in a Judah which was terrified by the collapse of its northern neighbour and feared a similar fate. Judah was poorer than the north, more rural, less dominated by military power-politics and closer to the roots of Yahweh-worship,

Hosea had written of the power of love and called for a change in men’s hearts. A younger contemporary of his, a southerner, carried these ideas further. Isaiah lived at the time when the northern kingdom was under sentence of death. Unlike most of the heroic figures in the Bible, he was not born poor: according to the tradition of the Babylonian Talmud, he was the nephew of King Amaziah of Judah.215 But his ideas were populist or democratic. He put no faith in armies and walls, kings and magnificent temples. His work marks the point at which the Israelite religion began to spiritualize itself, to move from a specific location in space and time on to the universalist plane. It is divided into two parts: Chapters 1 to 39 deal with his life and prophesyings in the period 740–700 BC; Chapters 44–66, or Deutero-Isaiah, date from much later, and the historical connection between the two is not clear, though the development of the ideas is logical enough. Isaiah was not only the most remarkable of the prophets, he was by far the greatest writer in the Old Testament. He was evidently a magnificent preacher, but it is likely he set his words down in writing. They certainly achieved written form very early and remained among the most popular of all the holy writings: among the texts found at Qumran after the Second World War was a leather scroll, 23 feet long, giving the whole of Isaiah in fifty columns of Hebrew, the best preserved and longest ancient manuscript of the Bible we po...

This means a moral change of heart, an internal reform for both individuals and the community. Social justice must be the aim. Men must cease to pursue wealth as the main aim in life: