History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

the Biblical literature associated with Solomon, the wise sayings and the voluptuous poetry of the ‘Song of Solomon’, though fine of their kind, are much closer to the other ancient Near Eastern writings of the period; they lack Israelite-Jewish transcendentalism and God-awareness.

reputation for wisdom was based on a willingness to be ruthless.

he introduced the corvée or forced labour, which was applied to Canaanite areas and to the northern part of the kingdom–Judah itself being exempt. As a form of national service, forced labour was less honourable than serving in the levy, and more arduous; therefore, more resented.

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.

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.

Like the House of David, the northern House of

Omri became centralist and imitated the political and cultic patterns of successful neighbouring states.

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.

Elisha did not operate alone. He created an organized following, a college of prophets, and he worked with elements in the secular establishment to obtain the religious reforms Elijah had demanded.

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.

To preserve his power, a king, or so it seemed, had to do things that a true follower of Yahweh could not countenance.

spiritual-secular conflict.

Book of Amos.

He was a southerner from Judah, a dresser of sycamore trees, who came north to Israel to preach social justice. He was at pains to point out that he was not a prophet by birth and belonged to no college: just a simple working man who saw the truth. He protested about the elaborate ceremonies

conducted by the priests at the northern shrine of Bethel, which he said were a mockery when the poor were downtrodden and starving.

Amaziah, the head priest of Bethel, objected strongly to Amos’ activities. The shrine, he argued, was the king’s chapel, part of the king’s court; the duties of the priests were to uphold the state religion with due decorum, and it was not part of them to play politics and interfere in economic processes.

In Amaziah’s day, however, a compromise between the secular and spiritual authorities was essential if the state was to survive at all. If prophets from the south were allowed to go around stirring up class warfare in the name of God, the community would be fatally weakened and at the mercy of its external enemies, who would wipe out the worship of Yahweh altogether. That was what he meant when he said that the land could not bear Amos’ bitter words.

obscure prophet called Hosea,

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.

shall raise us up, and we shall live in his sight’.208 What mattered was not material preparation, but a change in human hearts. It was love for God, the response to God’s love for us, which would ensure Israel’s redemption,

a religion of the heart, divorced from a particular state and organized society,

ordinary people of the land, the am ha-arez,

Increasingly, however, the rulers and peoples of Judah began to link their ultimate political and military fate with their current theology and moral behaviour. The notion seems to have spread that the people could only be saved by faith and works.

How could Yahweh most effectively be appeased? The priests of the Jerusalem Temple argued that it could only be done by destroying, once and for all, the suspect cultic practices of the old high places and provincial temples, and concentrating worship solely in Jerusalem, where orthodoxy could be maintained in all its purity.

by a curious paradox, the chief beneficiary of this return to the roots of the nation’s religious past was the Jerusalem Temple, introduced as a quasi-pagan innovation by Solomon.

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

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.

the themes of Isaiah are interrelated.

a moral change of heart, an internal reform for both individuals and the community. Social justice must be the aim.

Isaiah’s second theme is repentance.

Isaiah introduces his third theme: the idea of an age of peace, when men ‘shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’

fourth theme: the idea not just of a collective turning from sin, but of a specific saviour-figure:

he was reaching over the heads of the priests to the people.

the Suffering Servant, who carries the sins of the whole community and, by his sacrifice, purges them, and who also personifies and directs to a triumphant conclusion the mission of the nation.

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.

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.

The wilderness religion of Moses is beginning to mature into a sophisticated world faith, to which all humanity can turn for answers.

Jeremiah

Jeremiah appeared to be preaching defeatism. He said the people and their rulers were themselves the authors of their danger through their wickedness. The enemy was merely the instrument of God’s wrath, and was thus bound to prevail. This seemed like black fatalism: hence the notion of the ‘Jeremiad’. 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.

The Babylonians were much less ruthless. They did not colonize. No strange tribes were moved in from the east, to cover the Promised Land with pagan shrines.

Ezekiel.

in essence this weird and passionate man had a firm and powerful message to deliver: the only salvation was through religious purity.

If Jeremiah was the first Jew, it was Ezekiel and his visions which gave the dynamic impulse to the formulation of Judaism.

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 told Ezekiel, and each was individually responsible to him: ‘the soul that sinneth, it shall die’.4 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.

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.

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