History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny.

Abraham’s wife, Sarah, is the first person in history recorded as laughing. When, as an old woman, she is told she will bear the much wanted son, she did not believe it but ‘laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?’ (Genesis 18:12): her laughter is bitter-sweet, sad, ironic, even cynical, a foretaste of so much Jewish laughter through the ages. When the son, Isaac, was born, however, ‘Sarah said, God hath made me to laugh, so that all who hear will laugh with me’–and her laughter is joyful and triumphant, communicating her delight to us over the distance of four millennia.

The Bible shows most leaders born without place or power but raised to it by their own efforts, themselves the product of acts of divine grace.63 The Bible sees a peculiar virtue in powerlessness, appropriate to a people which has seldom possessed power, and suffered much from its exercise; but it also sees virtue in achievement, and achievement as the sign of virtue, especially of those once weak and lowly.

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.

How great can be seen by considering the Egyptian world-view which the Israelites rejected. The Egyptians were extraordinarily skilful in using their hands and they had impeccable visual taste, but their intellectual notions were archaic in the extreme. They found it difficult or impossible to grasp general concepts. They had little sense of cumulative, as opposed to repetitive, time, and so no true grasp of history. The notion of linear progress was incomprehensible to them. Their conceptual distinctions between life and death, between the human, animal and vegetable worlds, were fragile and insecure. Their beliefs had more in common with the cyclical and animistic religions of the orient and Africa than anything we are accustomed to call religion in the West.

The day of rest is one of the great Jewish contributions to the comfort and joy of mankind. But it was a holy day as well as a rest-day, being increasingly associated in the minds of the people with the belief in the elect nation of God,

Looking back from 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.

These characters are placed firmly in a consistent ethical setting. But there is not merely good and evil in these historical moralities; there is every shade of conduct, and above all pathos, intense sadness, human love in all its complexity–emotions never before set down in words by man. There is too a veneration for abstract institutions, a sense of national choices and constitutional issues.

Such sects were the most extreme monotheists and iconoclasts. They tended to drift into semi-nomad life on the fringe of the desert, a featureless place conducive to strict monotheism. It was from such a background that the greatest of all Jewish sectarian heresies was to spring–Islam.

To be influential, a prophet had to avoid the extremes of sectarianism and remain in touch with the mainstream of Israelite life.

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.

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.

A separate palace was built for his chief wife, the Egyptian, since she kept her own pagan faith: ‘My wife shall not dwell in the house of David King of Israel, because the places are holy, whereunto the Ark of the Lord hath come.’

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.

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 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.

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.

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.’

‘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.

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.

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.

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.’

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 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.

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.