Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  Donald noted that through most of its history, narrative culture has been oral, and that the development of writing as an external symbolic storage system is an essential precondition for the emergence of theoretic culture. Though the earliest writing seems to have been largely utilitarian, keeping accounts of income and outgo in temple and palace economies, when writing was used for extended texts, those texts were more apt to be narrative than theoretic or even quasi-theoretic. They recorded, but did not replace, spoken language. Writing was meant to be read aloud (silent reading is a quite recent development) often because most people, even royalty, remained illiterate and needed scribes to tell them what was written. In short, though writing was a precondition for theoretic culture, and widespread literacy in a society does produce significant cultural change, oral culture has survived as an indispensable supplement to literacy.

  We have noted that face-to-face culture always involves the body, even if only slight wariness about strangers in public places. Human interaction is often physical: we have noted the common ritual of the handshake, but a pat on the back, a hug, or a kiss imply increasing degrees of intimacy. Spoken language is embedded in mimetic, enactive culture. Walter Ong has noted that the spoken word “has a high somatic content.” He writes: “The oral word, as we have noted, never exists in a simply verbal context, as a written word does. Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential, situation, which always engages the body. Bodily activity beyond mere vocalization is not adventitious or contrived in oral communication, but is natural and even inevitable. In oral verbalization, particularly public verbalization, absolute motionlessness is itself a powerful gesture.“39 Not only the right gesture, but the spoken word, is essential in many rituals. In a wedding it is the exchange of “I do” that makes the ritual effective. The words of consecration are equally indispensable for a valid Eucharist.

  The special significance of the spoken word in religious life long after the advent of writing is indicated by the widespread emphasis on memorization and recitation, sometimes involving the body, as in the forward-and-backward rocking of the torso in Hassidic Jewish prayer. The value attached to the spoken word could lead to a suspicion of writing, as though the highest truths could only be communicated orally-Plato’s Seventh Letter is perhaps the most famous expression of this qualm. Certain traditions-Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Buddhist-have insisted on oral transmission of texts over extended periods even after writing was well known. None of this should make us doubt the importance of the written word; it should only make us aware that orality and literacy have always overlapped, and that the full cultural impact of literacy is quite recent. Nor do I want to equate narrativity with orality, even though narrative was long embedded in oral language. Once written down, narratives could more easily be perused and compared, thus increasing the possibility of critical reflection.

  The axial age occurred in still largely oral cultures, with only incipient literacy and only the beginnings of theoretic reflection, yet radical conclusions, more radical than those of Akhenaten, emerged in each case. One last time, before turning to the cases, we may ask, how did this happen?

  Eric Weil, in an interesting contribution to the 1975 Daedalus issue on the axial age, asked whether breakthroughs are related to breakdowns, whether breakdowns might not be the necessary condition for breakthroughs.40 Breakthroughs involve not only a critical reassessment of what has been handed down, but also a new understanding of the nature of reality, a conception of truth against which the falsity of the world can be judged, and a claim that that truth is universal, not merely local. Why would anyone in a secure and settled society be tempted to make such radical reassessments? Weil’s argument is that periods of severe social stress which raise doubts about the adequacy of the existing understanding of reality, in other words, serious breakdowns, may be the necessary predecessors of cultural breakthroughs. Necessary but not sufficient: “Unfortunately for those who crave general explanations, breakdowns in history are extremely common; breakthroughs extremely rare.”’ He suggests it was the threat of the Persians to the kind of city that the Greeks thought necessary for human life that may have stimulated the Greek breakthrough; the pressure of Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia on the ancient Israelites that made them seek a transcendent cause; and possibly similar disruptions in ancient China and India that lay behind the axial innovations there. The negative cases, however, are many. One of the most puzzling is the Phoenicians, who suffered from pressures from the great empires at the same time Israel, their linguistic cousin, did, and later, in Carthage, faced a lifeand-death struggle with Rome. Yet this remarkably versatile, economically innovative, highly literate culture experienced no breakthrough, unless, and this is highly unlikely, all evidence of such a breakthrough has been lost.

  Weil reminds us of another point: those responsible for the most radical innovations were seldom successful. In the short run they usually failed: think of Jeremiah, Socrates, Confucius, Jesus. Buddhism finally disappeared in India, the Buddha’s home ground. Jaspers sums it up starkly: “The Axial Period too ended in failure. History went on.“42 So breakthroughs were not only preceded by breakdowns, they were followed by breakdowns. History indeed. The insights, however, at least the ones we know of, survived. The very failures that followed them stimulated repeated efforts to recover the initial insights, to realize the so far unrealized possibilities. It is this that has given such dynamism to the axial traditions. But important though these traditions are to us, and Weil reminds us that any talk of an axial age is culturally autobiographical-the axial age is axial because of what it has meant to us43-these traditions give us no grounds for triumphalism. The failures have been many and it is hard to gauge the successes. It is hard to say that we today, particularly today, are living up to the insights of the great axial prophets and sages. But it is time to take a closer look.

  ANCIENT ISRAEL

  Although everyone who has seriously discussed the axial age has included ancient Israel as an axial case, it is clear that theory, if we define it narrowly as “thinking about thinking,” was not an Israelite concern. The wisdom tradition, already present in archaic Mesopotamia and Egypt, was well developed in Israel, but only incipiently engaged in logical argument as compared, say, to Greek philosophy. Nonetheless, ancient Israel clearly meets the standard for which we argued in the introductory section if we remember the importance of external memory, the preoccupation with and criticism of texts, and the conscious evaluation of alternative grounds for religious and ethical practice. To use Momigliano’s language, as cited above, the texts that were being put together in ancient Israel did indeed contain “new models of reality” that operated as “a criticism of, and alternative to, the prevailing models.” Though these new models were still usually expressed in narrative form, they involved such fundamental rethinking of religious and political assumptions that they had a powerful theoretic dimension. It will be our task here to see how exactly these new models came into existence.

  From the point of view of a modern historical approach, the data concerning ancient Israel, and the scholarly interpretations of the data, are very nearly baffling. What we have to work with is essentially the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, with some archaeological evidence and some appearance of Israel in the archives of neighboring societies, but, in the end, it is the Bible that is the primary source. The problem is that after 200 years of intensive scholarship there is still only weak and contested consensus on such elementary facts as the dating of various biblical texts. Much of the Bible presents itself as history-not, of course, in the modern sense of critical historiography but as a more or less continuous narrative extending from the creation to the fifth century BCE. But every page of that narrative serves some religious purpose and can only be of use for the reconstruction of “what really happened” by the most painstaking scholarly analysis, if at all. And the “if at all” is not a minor addendum: one tendency in contemporary biblical scholar
ship is to say that we will never know what really happened and that we must deal with the Bible as it is, namely a collection of stories, some of which may have some connection with actual individuals who lived in ancient Israel, but we don’t know what. This is not an escape open to me. My comparative historical undertaking requires that I give some historical reality to the data or not use it at all. My strategy is to follow as far as possible some reputable scholars, while putting aside after careful consideration the views of others, and to use my common sociological sense of what is probable and what is not probable when the scholarly guidance is conflicting.

  What I have found has been in many ways surprising to me, and, though not surprising to experts in the field, may be surprising to readers of this book. Some scholars believe that the entire history of Israel was created out of whole cloth in the Persian period (538 BCE to 333 BCE) or even in the Hellenistic period (333 BCE to 165 BCE) 44 It seems apparent to me that we know very little indeed about the premonarchical history of Israel, with only a little evidence for late-premonarchical society. This means that the five books of Moses-the Pentateuch or the Torah-is folktale, legend, and epic, created or, at best, elaborated from the sketchiest of fragments, in the monarchical period or later. The transition from tribal to monarchical society as described in judges through 1 Kings, seems to me in outline plausible, though in detail often dubious. To one raised on the idea that what made Israel different from its predecessors was that it was based on history, not myth, it has come as a shock that the single most central figure in the Hebrew Bible, Moses, has no more historicity than Agamemnon or Aeneas.45 But that the epicthe story of Moses, the Exodus, and the revelation at Sinai-was given its present form in the monarchy, perhaps in the seventh century, many centuries after the supposed events to be sure, seems much more likely to me than the so-called minimalist scenario that it was the product of an even much later date.

  The reason I can’t believe the so-called minimalist scenario is that I see no reason why the inhabitants of a small colonial province under Persian or Greek rule would have any need to create the history of the united, then divided, then obliterated monarchy, or the Moses/Exodus epic either. The issue that almost the entire Hebrew Bible deals with is the issue of God and king, the central issue of archaic society, in a couple of marginal kingdoms under tremendous strain in the tumultuous mid-first millennium BCE. To be sure the Babylonian exile gave rise to an enormous sense of loss, but I fail to understand the depth of that feeling if nothing at all had really been lost, if the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were largely fictions of the Persian or Hellenistic periods. I am thus inclined to go with a quite modified traditional chronology rather than with the radical revisionists. I am aware that what I am calling a “modified traditional chronology” will still seem quite radical to many readers.

  A condensed chronology may help the reader follow the discussion:

  Even though some traditions, particularly in the book of judges, may go back to the premonarchical period, only one particular text, written in the oldest Hebrew in the Bible, namely the song of Deborah (Judges 5), may possibly be dated to the premonarchical era. 4’ Nonetheless, even if memories of a premonarchical past were recorded only in monarchical or later times, the fact that such memories play such a prominent role in the Hebrew Bible is itself of great significance. In ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt the divine creation of order out of preexisting chaos involved integrally the institution of kingship. Although we know from archaeological evidence that there was in both cases a long period of premonarchical development, that fact has been elided from the cultural memory. Of course the Israelite monarchy was a latecomer-monarchy in Mesopotamia and Egypt was thousands of years old by the time of Saul, David, and Solomon. Still, that the premonarchical period-remembered, elaborated, or invented-should have had such a prominent role in Israel (the first seven books of the Bible are concerned with it) requires an explanation. Several plausible explanations have been given: (1) premonarchical stories were used to legitimate the monarchy; (2) premonarchical stories were used to criticize the monarchy; (3) after the fall of the monarchy, premonarchical stories were used to assure the Israelites that they could continue to exist after the monarchy as they had before it 47 There is probably some truth in all these explanations.

  Given that every motive for “remembering” the premonarchical period was tendentious, it is hard, even with the help of archaeology, to say very much about premonarchical society. If there were a people called Israel in the hill country of northern Palestine in the late thirteenth century, as the victory stele of Pharaoh Merneptah indicates, it was of marginal importance, as it never appeared again in Egyptian (or any other) records in the premonarchical period.`*8 In all likelihood it was only one of several groups of inhabitants, of various origins, among whom a collective identity formed only gradually-Judah, for example, not being a part of Israel until the time of David. Although the power of New Kingdom Egypt in Palestine was in steep decline after 1200 BCE, sporadic efforts to defend trade routes from highland raiders led to Egyptian incursions involving occasional deportation of Palestinians to Egypt 49 Memories of such deportees who managed to return may have provided the nucleus of the Exodus/Moses narrative, though beyond the fact that Moses is an Egyptian name, there is little evidence to go on. But that we have any of Moses’s own words, much less that the enormous corpus of laws contained in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy were literally delivered by Moses, is believed by almost no scholars today. Yet the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, has been at the heart of Jewish worship for over 2,000 years. Where did it come from and how did it attain its centrality? These are not easy questions to answer, if we can answer them at all, but even trying to answer them may lead us closer to what we most need to know.

  Let us start by shifting from the opening books of the Bible-however central they are, they are not historical in the modern sense of the term-to what we can say with at least a little historical confidence about early Israelite society. If we can use the books of Judges and 1 Samuel to give us some sense of what late premonarchical society was like, we can say that the term “Israel” perhaps applied to a collection of hill peoples in central and northern Palestine, organized mainly by kinship into lineages, clans, and tribes. Although the idea that there were twelve tribes is a fiction-even in the Bible the lists of the twelve vary considerably-and we don’t know exactly of what a tribe consisted, there were no stable structures above the tribal level. Several tribes might unite under a charismatic war leader, such as Gideon or Jephthah, when threatened by neighboring peoples, but these alliances did not survive the crisis, nor was the relation between “Israelite” tribes entirely free of conflict. I put the term Israelite in quotes because there is little ground for asserting a strong ethnic identity in the premonarchical period. In language and culture the Israelites were virtually indistinguishable from their “Canaanite” neighbors. The isolated appearance of the term “Israel” in the Merneptah Stele of 1208 BCE tells us little or nothing about continuity or identity. Indeed, we might almost say that the Israelites were Canaanites who lived in the hills, and Canaanites were Canaanites who lived in the lowlands and along the coast (the Phoenicians are often identified as “Canaanites”), or maybe it would be best to call them all simply Western Semites.

  Alexander Joffe, arguing entirely from archaeological data, suggests that the period from roughly 1200 to 1000 BCE, in what he calls the Levant, saw the collapse not only of the Egyptian and Hittite empires that had previously contested the area, but of many local city states organized around a palace economy, the Phoenician cities being virtually the only ones able to maintain continuity through this period. In a pattern seen earlier of cyclical urbanization and ruralization, the decline of cities was concomitant with a significant increase in settlements in the hill country, where agriculture and herding were combined. Joffe believes that these growing hill settlements were not the product of significant in-migration, though po
pulations in the ancient Near East were seldom without a variety of forms of movement, but were composed mainly of indigenous “Canaanites.“50 By the beginning of the tenth century BCE, he notes, the revival of urban settlements, either the recovery of old towns or the establishment of new ones, was well under way, but rural settlements were numerous enough and strong enough to play a part in subsequent political development: “The emergence of a rural component, with strong networks of connections, also created for the first time in the Southern Levant a meaningful social counterbalance to the power of cities. The Iron Age is the uneasy fusion of both urban and rural, where loci of politics, economics and culture are in constant tension.””

  But surely Israel was characterized by a distinct religion, long before the monarchy-think of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, much less Moses. For decades the idea of religious distinctiveness in early Israel has steadily eroded. Yahweh, it seems, is not the original God of Israel, but a latecomer, arriving from, of all places, Edom, and generally identified with the south: not only Edom but Midian, Paran, Seir, and Sinai (Judges 5:4; Habakkuk 3:3; Psalm 68:8, 17).52 The original God of Israel was El, not Yahweh, as is evident in the patriarchal narratives: the name Isra-el means “El rules,” not “Yahweh rules”-that would be Isra-yahu.53 Or maybe not El, the personal name of the old urban Canaanite high god, but el, the generic West Semitic term for god, spirit, or ancestor. Perhaps in Genesis 32, Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok was wrestling with a tribal “powerful being,” not the transcendent God, nor the convenient later resolution of the problem, an angel.

  If in premonarchical times even tribes were not clearly defined, the real focus of piety was on the family and the lineage. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of family religion, not only in ancient Israel but throughout the ancient Near East. Families worshipped ancestors (also called elim, plural of el) and local gods, the “gods of the fathers,” or “household gods,” who might be represented by images, as in the case of the teraphim of Laban, stolen by Rachel (Genesis 31:30-35). Karel van der Toorn has usefully characterized this early religion: