History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Isaiah’s second theme is repentance. Provided there is a change of heart, the Lord is always forgiving. ‘Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.’ What God wants from man is a recognition and a reciprocation of his holiness

Isaiah not only wrote but preached in the Temple. He was not, however, talking of a religion of official cult, of endless sacrifices and priestly ceremonies, but of an ethical religion of the heart: he was reaching over the heads of the priests to the people. A strong talmudic tradition says that he was murdered in the reign of the idol-worshipping King Manasseh; but he was not welcome to the orthodox priesthood, the Temple establishment, either.

The Suffering Servant echoes Isaiah’s own voice and fate, and the two parts of the book have a unity even though as much as two centuries separate their written composition. What, as a whole, the Book of Isaiah does is to mark a notable maturing of the religion of Yahweh. It is now concerned with justice and with judgment: judgment of nations and judgment of the individual soul. In Deutero-Isaiah in particular, the stress is on the individual as the bearer of faith, outside the claims of tribe, race, nation. Not just Elijah, but each and all of us has the ‘still, small voice’ of conscience. It is all part of the discovery of the individual, a giant step forward in human self-knowledge. The Greeks would soon be pushing in the same direction, but the Israelites, or as we shall soon call them, the Jews, were the forerunners. Moreover, unlike the Greeks, the Israelites, under the inspiration of Isaiah, were moving towards a pure monotheism. There are many passages in the earlier parts of the Bible where Yahweh is seen not so much as the sole God but as the most powerful one, who can act in other gods’ territories.221 In Deutero-Isaiah, however, the existence of other gods is denied, not just in practice but in ideological theory: ‘I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.’222 Moreover, it is now stated clearly that God is universal, ubiquitous and omnipotent. God is the motivating force, and the sole motivating force, throughout history. He created the ...

That the message of Isaiah penetrated into the people’s consciousness before the fall of Jerusalem we cannot doubt. But in the last decades before the catastrophe, his powerful voice was joined by another living one, less poetic but equally penetrating. We know more about Jeremiah than any other of the pre-Exilic writers because he dictated his sermons and autobiography to his scribal pupil, Baruch.224 His life was closely interwoven with the tragic history of his country. He was a Benjaminite, of a priestly family, from a village just north-east of Jerusalem. He began preaching in 627, in the tradition of Hosea and to some extent of Isaiah. He saw the nation as woefully sinful, hastening to its doom: ‘This people hath a revolting and a rebellious heart.’ He had no time, like Hosea, for the religious establishment, whether priests, scribes, ‘wise men’ or temple prophets: ‘The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so: and what will ye do in the end thereof?’225 He saw the great pro-Temple religious reform, under Josiah, as a total failure, and soon after the death of the king, in 609 BC, he went to the Temple and preached a furious sermon, saying so. As a result he was very nearly killed and forbidden to go near the Temple quarter. His own village, even his family, turned against him.

But what his contemporaries missed was the other part of his message, the reasons for hope. For Jeremiah was saying that the destruction of the kingdom did not matter. Israel was still the chosen of the Lord. It could perform the mission given to it by God just as well in exile and dispersal as within the confines of its petty nation-state. Israel’s link with the Lord would survive defeat because it was intangible and therefore indestructible. Jeremiah was not preaching despair; on the contrary, he was preparing his fellow Israelites to meet despair, and overcome it. He was trying to teach them how to become Jews: to submit to conquering power and accommodate themselves to it, to make the best of adversity, and to cherish the long-term certainty of God’s justice in their hearts.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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;

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.

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:

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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 physic 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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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, Asdepios, 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.

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.

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.

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 Aera, 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.

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.

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.

It is from this time we first hear of the Perushim or Pharisees, ‘those who separated themselves’, a religious party which repudiated the royal religious establishment, with its high-priest, Sadducee aristocrats and the Sanhedrin, and placed religious observance before Jewish nationalism.

The death of Herod the Great, then, effectively ended the last phase of stable Jewish rule in Palestine until the mid-twentieth century.

But most of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern peoples prospered under Roman rule and judged it to be far preferable to anything else they were likely to get. This was the view of the six million or more Jews in the diaspora, who never gave the authorities any trouble, except once in Alexandria under the impact of events in Palestine. It is likely that even in the Jewish homeland many, perhaps most, Jews did not see the Romans as oppressors or enemies of religion. But a substantial minority in Palestine became irreconcilable to the kittim (Romans) and from time to time were prepared to risk the ferocious penalties which inexorably followed violent defiance.

typical work, by a Jew called Jason of Cyrene, originally in five volumes, survives in an epitome called the Second Book of Maccabees. Though employing all the rhetorical devices of Greek prose, it is an anti-Greek diatribe as well as an inflammatory martyrology. Even more important than the martyr stories was the new literary device of apocalyptic, which from Maccabee times filled the vacuum in Jewish consciousness left by the decline of prophecy. The word means ‘revelation’. Apocalyptic texts attempt to convey mysteries beyond the bounds of normal human knowledge or experience, often using the names of dead prophets to add authenticity. From the second century BC onwards, again under the stress of the Maccabee crisis, they concentrate overwhelmingly on eschatological themes: they carry the Jewish obsession with history into the future and predict what will happen at ‘the end of days’, when God winds up the historical period and mankind enters the era of summation. This moment will be characterized by great cosmic convulsions, the final battle of Armageddon and, as one of the Qumran scrolls puts it, ‘the heavenly host will give forth in great voice, the foundations of the world will be shaken, and a war of the mighty ones of the heavens will spread throughout the world’.72 These events are characterized by extreme violence, by absolute divisions between good (pious Jews) and evil (Greeks, later Romans) and by hints of imminence. Of these works the most influential was the...

The idea of judgment at death and immortality on the basis of merit had been developed in Egypt more than a millennium before. It was not Jewish, because it was not in the Torah, and the Sadducees, who stuck to their texts, seemed to have denied the afterlife completely. But the idea was embryonic in Isaiah, and the Pharisees eagerly seized upon this aspect of apocalypse because it appealed to their strong sense of ethical justice. There might be no earthly answer to the problem of theodicy, as Job had shown; but if there were no justice in this world, there would certainly be justice in the next, when the righteous would be rewarded by the divine judge, and the wicked sentenced. The idea of a final judgment fitted neatly into the whole Judaic concept of the rule of law.

The Jewish doctrine of the Messiah had its origins in the belief that King David had been anointed by the Lord, so that he and his descendants would reign over Israel to the end of time and would exercise dominion over alien peoples.81 After the fall of the kingdom, this belief had been transformed into a prophetic expectation that the rule of the House of David would be miraculously restored.82 On top of this was grafted the Isaiac description of this future king as the dispenser of justice, and this was perhaps the most important element in the belief because Isaiah seems to have been the most widely read and admired, as it was certainly the most beautifully written, of all the Bible books.

The messianic doctrine, being of complex and even contradictory origins, created great confusion in the minds of the Jews. But most of them seem to have assumed that the Messiah would be a political-military leader and that his coming would inaugurate a physical, earthly state.

When Herod the Great heard that the Messiah or Christ was born, he reacted with violence as if to a threat to his dynasty. Any Jew who listened to a man making messianic claims would take it for granted he had some kind of political and military programme. The Roman government, the Jewish Sanhedrin, the Sadducees and even the Pharisees assumed that a Messiah would make changes in the existing order, of which they were all part. The poor people of Judaea and Galilee would also believe that a Messiah preaching fundamental changes would be talking not, or not only, in spiritual and metaphysical terms, but of the realities of power – government, taxes, justice. Now it is obvious from the evidence we have that Jesus of Nazareth conformed to none of these messianic patterns. He was not a Jewish nationalist. On the contrary, he was a Jewish universalist.

His father, a carpenter, died before Jesus was baptized, in 28/29 AD.

Two of Jesus’ brothers, Judah and Simon, had Hebrew names but two others, James (in Hebrew Jacob) and Joses (in Hebrew Joseph), did not; and Jesus was the Greek form of the Hebrew Joshua. The family claimed descent from David, and it may have been predominantly conformist, since the New Testament hints at family tensions created by Jesus’ teaching. After his death, however, the family accepted his mission. His brother James became head of the sect in Jerusalem and, after James’ martyrdom by the Sadducees, Jesus’ cousin Simon succeeded;

though he was personally connected with the Baptist sect, he was in essentials one of the Hakamim, the pious Jews who moved in the world. He was closer to the Pharisees than to any other group. This statement is liable to be misleading, since Jesus openly criticized the Pharisees,

On the first point, Jesus clearly sided with those who regarded the Temple as an obstacle to the general spread of holiness, since the concentration on the physical building, with its hierarchies, privileges (mostly hereditary) and wealth, was a form of separation from the people – a wall built against them. Jesus used the Temple as a preaching forum; but so had others who had opposed it, notably Isaiah and Jeremiah. The idea that the Jews could do without the Temple was not new. On the contrary, it was very old, and it could be argued that the true Jewish religion, long before the Temple was built, was universalistic and unlocated. Jesus, like many other pious Jews, saw holiness spreading to the whole people through the elementary schools and synagogues.