History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

individual responsibility sank into their hearts, the Jews began to celebrate too the New Year in memory of the creation, and the Day of ...

In exile the Jews, deprived of a state, became a nomocracy–voluntarily submitting to rule by a Law which could only be enforced by consent. Nothing like this had occurred before in 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; exactly the same pattern would return again under the Hasmoneans and under such potentates as Herod the Great. 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 po...

There are times when the Bible seems to suggest that the whole aim of righteousness is to overturn existing, man-made, order:

The Jews were the yeast, producing decomposition of the existing order, the chemical agent of change in society–so how could they be order and society itself?

From this point forward, therefore, we note the existence of an Exile and a diaspora mentality among the Jews.

Jeremiah’s view that there was a positive virtue in the Exile until the day of perfect purity dawned.

In short, the new covenant, which may be said to have inaugurated Judaism officially and legally, was based not upon revelation or preaching but on a written text. That meant an official, authorized, accurate and verified version.

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.

second division of the Bible, Prophets, in Hebrew Nevi’im. These in turn consist of ‘Former Prophets’ and ‘Later Prophets’. The former consist of the mainly narrative and historical works, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, and the latter the writings of the prophetic orators, themselves divided into two sections, the three major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel–the term signifying length, not importance–and the twelve minor ones, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi.

The Jews had two unique characteristics as ancient

writers. They were the first to create consequential, substantial and interpretative history.

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.

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.

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’.

The Jews were not interested and did not believe in impersonal forces.

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.

Hence the second unique characteristic of ancient Jewish literature: the verbal presentation of the human personality in all its range and complexity.

Job, after all, is asking the fundamental question which has puzzled all men, and especially those of strong faith: why does God do these terrible things to us? Job was a text for antiquity and it is a text for modernity, a text especially for that chosen and battered people, the Jews; a text, above all, for the Holocaust.

As a work of moral theology, the book is a failure because the author, like everyone else, is baffled by the problem of theodicy.

What the author of Job is saying is that there are 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 diff...

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 Jews were to find wisdom through obedience to God, and teach humanity to do likewise. They were to overthrow the existing, physical, worldly order, and replace it by the moral order.

Within the obscurity and confusion of Job, therefore, we have yet another statement of the divine role of the Jews to overturn the existing order and the worldly way of seeing things.

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.

Canonization also discouraged the writing of history.

But if one effect of canonization was to curb the creativity of Jewish sacred literature, another was enormously to increase the knowledge and impact of the approved texts on the Jewish population. The books, having been authorized and copiously reproduced and distributed, were now systematically taught.

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.

This had another important consequence. With the sacred literature digested into a canon, and the canon systematically taught from a central focus, Judaism became far more homogeneous. And it was homogeneity with a pronounced puritanical and fundamentalist flavour. In the history of the Jews, the rigorists tend to win.

The canon and the synagogue became instruments of this rigour,

The process, which occurs again and again in Jewish history, can be seen in two ways: as the pearl of purified Judaism

emerging from the rotten oyster of the world and worldliness; or as the extremists imposing exclusivi...

The Jews made converts. They were beginning to be a proselytizing force.

Syria and Palestine were areas of intense Greek settlement and rapid Hellenization of their existing inhabitants.

Book of Jonah, which, despite its absurdities and confusions, is really a plea to extend toleration and friendship to foreigners.

Many of the better-educated Jews found Greek culture profoundly attractive.

the writer of Ecclesiastes, shows himself torn between new foreign ideas and his inherited piety, between the critical spirit and conservatism.

In Palestine, as in other Greek conquests, it was the upper classes, the rich, the senior priests, who were most tempted to ape their new rulers.

Between the isolationists on the one hand and the Hellenizers on the other was a broad group of pious Jews in the tradition of Josiah, Ezekiel and Ezra. Many of them did not object to Greek rule in principle, any more than they had objected to the Persians, since they tended to accept Jeremiah’s arguments that religion and piety flourished more when pagans had to conduct the corrupting business of government.

the Pharisees, who sprang from this tradition.

There had always been a rationalizing element in Mosaic legalism and theology, and this was almost unconsciously reinforced by Greek rationalism. 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’.

Jewish reform party who wanted to force the pace of Hellenization.

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.

Could not the Greek notion of the unified oikumene, world civilization, be married to the Jewish notion of the universal God?

They reread the historical scriptures and tried to deprovincialize them.