History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

regard idols of wood or stone or bronze as gods in themselves. They saw the image as a practical means whereby the ordinary, simple worshipper can visualize the divinity and achieve spiritual communion with him.

There is a further contradiction. How can man be made in God’s image, if the image of God is unimaginable, and therefore forbidden? Yet the idea of man as conceived in the divine image is as central to the religion as the ban on idols.

His body is a leasehold; he is answerable to God for what he does to and with it.

the Mosaic code is a code not only of obligations and prohibitions but also, in embryonic form, of rights.

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.

All Israelites are equal before God, and therefore equal before his law. Justice is for all, irrespective of oth...

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.

In the age of Moses, then, the Israelites were strengthening and confirming a tendency we have already noted to be subversive of the existing order. They were a servile people, who rose up against their Egyptian master, the most ancient and autocratic monarchy in the world. They fled into the desert, and received their laws in mass popular assembly, not in some long-established city but on the bare mountainside from a wild leader who did not even call himself a king.

Later, in a dramatic passage, Deutero-Isaiah was to express the Jewish exaltation of powerlessness in the person of the Suffering Servant of the Lord, who in the end is victorious;

Palestine, though small, is a country of great variety, broken up into forty different geographical and climatic units.135 That is what helps to give the land its extraordinary fascination and beauty. But it also tended to perpetuate tribal divisions and impede unity. The Israelite tradition, already strongly entrenched, of equality, communal discussion, acrimonious debate and argument, made them hostile to the idea of a centralized state, with heavy taxes to pay for a standing army of professionals. They preferred tribal levies serving without pay.

what the Book of Judges does convey is much more important. First it illuminates the essentially democratic and meritocratic nature of Israelite society. It is a book of charismatic heroes, most

whom are low-born, obtaining advancement through their own energy and abilities, which are brought out by divine favour and nomination.

Not only poor, left-handed men, but even women rose to heroism and so to command. Deborah, another figure from the oasis-country, was a fiery religious mystic, who prophesied and sang.

the point which the Book of Judges makes again and again, that the Lord and society are often served by semi-criminal types, outlaws and misfits, who become by their exploits folk-heroes and then in time religious heroes. Israel was by its religious nature a puritanical society, but it is remarkable how often the Lord turns to sinners or responds generously when they turn to him.

This raises the second point about the period. The Israelites were enlarging the imaginative gifts we have already noticed, and seen from this point of view Judges is one of the greatest collections of short stories in the whole of world literature.

There is also a feature of the Bible which we notice here for the first time: the superfluous but unforgettable detail.

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,

the Book of Judges, naïve though it is in some ways, is in another an essay on constitutional development, for it shows how the Israelites were obliged by harsh facts to modify their democratic theocracy to the extent of establishing limited kingship.

So at many shrines priests and guilds of prophets worked side by side, and there was no necessary conflict between them. But almost from the beginning the prophets set more store on the content as opposed to the forms of religion, thus inaugurating one of the great themes of Jewish, and indeed world, history.

just as the priests tended to slip into mechanistic religion, so the prophets might drift into sectarianism. Indeed Samuel, like Samson, belonged to the sect of the Nazarites, wild-looking men with uncut hair and few clothes.

The Nazarites had much in common with the ultra-strict and ferocious Rechabites, who engaged in massacres of backsliders when opportunity offered.

To be influential, a prophet had to avoid the extremes of sectarianism and remain

in touch with the mainstream of Israelite life. His greatest single function was to act as intermediary between God and people, and to do that he must mingle with the masses. When Samuel matured, he acted as a judge, travelling all over the country.

He was willing to anoint Saul as a charismatic leader or nagid, by pouring oil on his head, but hesitated to make him melek or hereditary king, which implied the right to summon the tribal levy.

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 was none the less a great king, and for

three reasons. First he conflated the regal and the sacerdotal role in a way which was never possible for Saul.

He seems to have transformed a throne created by brutal military necessity into a glittering institution which combined religious sanction, oriental luxury and new standards of culture.

Secondly, David’s position as king-priest seemed to have received divine blessing since his purely military achievements were unrivalled.

In a sense this burgeoning little Israelite empire was dependent on an accident of history. The empire to the south, Egypt, had receded; the empires to the east, of Assyria and Babylon, had not yet matured. In this vacuum, David’s kingdom flourished.

He was an internationalist whereas earlier Israelite leaders had all been narrow regionalists.

Thirdly, David established a national and religious capital which was also his personal conquest.

Only ‘the King and his men’–the professional household troops, not the tribal levies–were used, thus ensuring that David could claim that the city was a personal

conquest.

the citadel, or Zion

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.

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 have happened had the Israelites not turned to the secular salvation of kingship and a united state.

On the other hand, if kingship and state became permanent, their inevitable characteristics and needs would encroach upon the religion, and the worship of Yahweh would succumb to internal corruption. The dilemma was unresolved throughout the First and Second Commonwealths; it remains unresolved in Israel today.

One solution was for the Israelites to adopt kingship and the state only in times of great peril, as during the Philistine invasion. The evidence suggests that David would have liked to adopt this, but came to think it impractical. To defend his people and their faith, to make both secure from their external foes, he had not only to create a kingdom-state but immobilize its surrounding peoples. This meant he had to found and consolidate the ...

It is

significant that he established hereditary kingship without endorsing primogeniture.

The son he chose, Solomon, was not an active general but a scholar-judge, in the Mosaic tradition, the only one of the sons capable of discharging the religious duties of kingship which David evidently felt essential to preserve the Israelite constitutional balance.

It was also significant that David, while transferring the Ark to Jerusalem to give his capital’s status religious sanction, did not build a grandiose temple, associated with his crown and royal line, to house it. The Ark was a humble piece of religious furniture which originally contained the covenant itself. It was dear to the Israelites, reminding them of their lowly origins, and standing for the pristine orthodoxy and purity of their theocratic creed.

The likelihood is that he did not wish to change the nature and balance within the Israelite religion, and he felt that a central royal temple would do exactly that.

In the old days, the Ark had been the physical focus of Israelite worship. It was a symbol of theocratic democracy. Once they settled in Canaan, the Israelites gave thanks and sacrificed at ‘high places’, open altars on hills and mountains; or at more elaborate historic

shrines, where roofed buildings or temple...

They ensured some element of decentralization to the Israelite cult, as well as continuity with the past–for all these temple-shrines had important associations for those who worshipped at them.

That, he added, was the only way the

throne would survive–by ensuring that the law in its plenitude and strictness balanced the demands of the new state.

Solomon was a secular person: