When he has taken the throne of his kingdom, he shall have a copy of the law written for him in the presence of the levitical priests. It shall remain with him and he shall read in it all the days of his life, so that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, diligently observing all the words of this law and these statutes, neither exalting himself above other members of the community nor turning aside from the commandment, either to the right or to the left, so that he and his descendants may reign long over the kingdom in Israel. (Deuteronomy 17:18-20)
Reign long, not forever. That’s it. That’s all Deuteronomy or anything else in the Torah has to say about a king. Not exalt himself above others? One wonders why a king whose sole function is to observe the commandments is needed at all.
If Deuteronomy is reserved about kingship, then it is also reserved about prophecy. On the one hand Moses is exalted above all the prophets to such an extent that Stephen Geller’s term “superprophet” does not seem inappropriate;108 on the other hand, though Deuteronomy says that each generation will have a prophet “like Moses,” the restraints on such later prophets are severe. “Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face,” says Deuteronomy 34:10, echoing Numbers 12:6-8, where God says that he has appeared to other prophets in visions but spoke with Moses face to face. Further, God asserts the finality of the revelation to Moses: “You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you” (Deuteronomy 4:2). So beware the prophet who speaks something other than what Moses has spoken. As to future prophets God has this to say to Moses:
I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command. Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable. But any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak-that prophet shall die. (Deuteronomy 18:18-20)
How can we tell if the word is really from the Lord? “If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord but the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the Lord has not spoken” (Deuteronomy 18:22). One wonders if Deuteronomy would not just as soon leave Moses as the only necessary prophet.
Although the Assyrian references convince me that at least some basic ideas of Deuteronomy date from the seventh century, surely more was added in the exile and even later. What we can know about its context and dating is hypothetical, and it is doubtful that we will ever have anything but more or less plausible hypotheses. What is critical, however, is that we try to understand what Deuteronomy, and by extension the Pentateuch, the Torah, is doing, for that is the heart of all subsequent Jewish piety. If there was an “axial breakthrough” in Israel it is here if anywhere that we will find it. The disastrous international situation was surely the breakdown. What was the breakthrough?
More than any of my sources, Stephen Geller has struggled with this question and it is to him that I will turn for help. Taking off from the inevitable comparison with Greek thought, Geller asserts that though the Hebrew Bible is not “theory,” does not proceed by syllogistic reasoning, still “in some passages, at least, there is an attempt at real intellectual argumentation, however unsystematic its presentation.” He goes on to say:
The problem of interpretation lies in finding a method for uncovering those ideas and arguments that avoids imposing Hellenic concepts of logic anachronistically on the more diffuse structures of biblical thinking, while also translating them into an idiom that we moderns find comfortable … It follows that the tool proper to the understanding is not logical argumentation but literary interpretation, not abstract analysis but concrete exegesis. The result will be less a logos, a theory about God, and more a lexis, a reading of Him and His ways as the biblical thinkers conceived of them, sensitive to the lineaments of the text and proceeding step by step with it.lo9
This Geller does by a close reading of Deuteronomy 4, which he dates, by the way, to the exile, in the decisive chapter of his book, a reading I cannot replicate here. What is fundamental is that the Torah is a covenant between God and his people, constitutive of a new understanding of self and world. But also key is that the covenant is contained in a text, a text that in critical respects supersedes kings, prophets and sages, though not the necessity of interpretation. Deuteronomy 4 makes an extraordinary claim for the text of which it is a part:
See, just as the Lord my God has charged me, I now teach you statutes and ordinances for you to observe in the land that you are about to enter and occupy. You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!” For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is whenever we call to him? And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today? (Deuteronomy 4:5-8)
Such statements lead Geller to say, “the first part of Deuteronomy 4 establishes a new form of religion in which the text is raised to the level of God Himself, in a sense is God.” 110 God is in the Word, and if the people hear the Word and keep it they are in right relation to God, regardless of anything else that is going on in the world.
A religion of the text is a portable religion. For all its preoccupation with the promised land, it is notable that neither in Deuteronomy nor anywhere in the Torah is Jerusalem mentioned. Even when the centralization of sacrifice is commanded, the temple is referred to only as “the place where the Lord your God will choose to put his name.“111 Though “statutes and ordinances” concerning priests and sacrifices are copious in Deuteronomy, one must say that as with kings and prophets, they are treated with restraint. Although the priestly texts of Leviticus and Numbers indicate the presence of God in the tabernacle, Deuteronomy speaks only of his name being there. God, for the Deuteronomists, is always in Heaven; only his Word is at hand. Scholars have long held that the Pentateuch is made up of several strands: the J and E documents that are primarily narrative, and two documentary strands that include large cultic and legal codes together with interpretations of their meaning, P (Priestly) and D (Deuteronomic). It is wrong to consider the Priestly teachings of Leviticus and Numbers as “primitive,” or even as exclusively “cultic,” for in the very midst of Leviticus, the central chapter 19, are the two great ethical commandments: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), and “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). Mary Douglas, drawing on a long line of scholars, has argued that the text of Leviticus, far from being a jumble of unrelated rules, is a great cosmological vision of the right ordering of existence, organized around the living presence of God in the tabernacle. 112
Sacrifice in the tabernacle (in the Pentateuch standing in for the temple) was essential to the Priestly vision as it was the central way in which the people could communicate with its God and remember how near at hand he is. The Priestly strand was far too prominent in the Torah ever to be abandoned, and according to many scholars it was P that gave the Torah its final recension. One of the great prophets, contemporary with Jeremiah but living in Babylon in the early exile, Ezekiel, clearly reflects the Priestly tradition, which would live on as long as the temple survived, and in different forms, was influential in Christianity and in both Jewish and Christian mysticism.113 But D got the last word and found its ultimate triumph in rabbinic Judaism. The great rolling rhetoric of Deuteronomy, the Word of God through Moses himself, became the decisive touchstone for the meaning of the Torah, a book that Jews could take anywhere. The land was never forgotten, but many other Near Eastern peoples would disappear once their land was lost, whereas the Jews could survive and prosper wherever they were as long as they
had the Book and a community to interpret it.
The Axial Turn: Covenant, People, and Person
We have argued that the axial breakthrough in Israel occurred when the relation of God and the Children of Israel was seen as a covenant, as analogous to the old Near Eastern vassal treaty between king and vassal, though having dramatic new meaning because it dispensed with the role of king as mediator. Geller has argued for the paradoxical quality of this affirmation-a text that views God as transcendent and beyond any image has at the same time created a gigantic anthropomorphism, a God deeply concerned with a people. God is shown as king in the very text that hesitates to call God a king. “I argue that it was the creation of a new level of anthropomorphism, derived, for the most part, from royal imagery, but attaining, ultimately, a new picture of a divine personality, that synthesized the conflicting aspects of divinity.” 114
Geller offers a close analysis of the Shema, the Credo of Judaism, Deuteronomy 6:4-5, to substantiate his claim. The Shema, “Hear 0 Israel, The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (one possible translation) has often been taken as the very foundation of Israelite “monotheism,” the positive version of the negative injunction of the first commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3, Although monotheism is at this point in history probably an unavoidable term, it is the burden of Geller’s analysis that God is not an “ism,” not a logical deduction, but is defined in relationship. After going over all the possible grammatical interpretations of the Hebrew, Geller ends up arguing that the first clause (6:4), “Hear, Israel, since Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one (i.e. supreme),” is to be understood in relation to the second clause (6:5), continuing, “thou shalt love Yahweh, thy God [with all your heart (leb), and with all your soul (nepel), and with all your might For the second clause Geller turns to the archaic language of the King James Version to emphasize that even though the assertion in the first clause is collective (“our God’), the command in the second clause is second-person singular, a nuance that “thy” correctly translates but “your,” being both singular and plural in modern English, does not.
Geller’s argument is that, though the relation to God defines Israel as a people, that relationship is also, and critically so, with each Israelite as an individual:
My thesis is that under the guise of declaring God’s oneness, what is also, or really, being demanded is that one achieve unity of the self, both of one’s mind (“heart,” leb) and one’s appetites/emotions/life (nepes), through singular attachment to God. The covenant members must be one, whole with and wholly with God. In other words, monotheism involves not just God but also the personality of the believer. The two unities proceed hand in hand. In fact, the numerical nuance of “one” in the Shema is also true, not only in regard to God, but also to the believer.117
Given our contemporary, and particularly American, proclivity to think that individual and community are in a zero sum relation, we must work hard to see that for the ancient Israelites the relationship between God and people and God and the individual were mutually reinforcing. Nowhere more than in the great resurgence of prophecy at the end of the monarchy, particularly in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, where conflict between individual prophet and reprobate people seems most intense, is it clearer that the prophet is never a “private individual.” The pathos of his situation is that he is a representative of God to the people and of the people to God. His inability to escape from either responsibility led Jeremiah to the terrible outcry, “Cursed be the day/ on which I was born!” (Jeremiah 20:14).
Timothy Polk in The Prophetic Persona gives an instructive analysis of Jeremiah as in his very self an exemplar and a metaphor for the people he is called to try to reach. 118 Perhaps the key term for Jeremiah is “heart” (leb), which we have noted already in the Shema. A rightly ordered heart would be one ruled by love of God. But this is just what the people lack, so God tells Jeremiah to proclaim to the people:
The book of Jeremiah is so full of predictions of disaster that it is sometimes hard to remember that these are warnings that could be heeded, unlikely though that seems. It is therefore worth considering one of the rare passages that balances the curse with the hope of blessing:
For Jeremiah, again and again meeting only misunderstanding and turning away, the truth seems to be, “The heart is deceitful above all things/ and desperately corrupt. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).121 When hope for a return to Yahweh fades in the present, Jeremiah dreams of a future when God himself will change the inconstant hearts of men: “But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33, RSV). A passage that calls to mind the even more vivid image of Ezekiel: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26, RSV).
In Polk’s analysis, Jeremiah is not a great personality who happens to be a prophet; it is just in the demanding role of prophet, demanding because he must speak for both God and people, that Jeremiah comes to know and to be a true person. When the pressure becomes too unbearable, in the great Confessions of Jeremiah, we hear, indeed, the private voice that tells God it is all too hard. Yet it is from God that the strength to continue comes:
It is in the extraordinary role of intercessor that the prophet models the relation to God for all the people.122 After Jeremiah and Ezekiel the prophetic voice is not stilled, but becomes largely anonymous, adding new material to old collections. Perhaps most important is the exilic collection that scholars call “Second Isaiah,” Isaiah 40-55. According to Mark Smith,
This work modifies the old royal theology in many respects. First, the Judean king vanishes from the picture, and in turn Yahweh freely uses the royal means available to exercise the divine will on behalf of Israel. Cyrus the Persian becomes Yahweh’s “anointed” [messiah] in the new divine plan of salvation for Israel and the nations (Isaiah 45:1). Second, Israel itself, instead of the Judean king, becomes the new servant who is to mediate blessing. Israel is the bearer of the old “eternal covenant” (2 Samuel 23:5) now to the nations (Isaiah 55:5).123
Smith’s third point is “monotheism”-that is, as Yahweh is exalted, the existence of other gods is denied, their cults are denounced as the stupid worship of inanimate, man-made objects. “Yahweh is not just the god of Israel (both as land and people), but of all lands and
“Second Isaiah” continued the transformation of the royal theology that the eighth-century Isaiah had begun. What seems to have happened in exilic and postexilic times is that the Deuteronomic and transformed royal theologies were largely merged. The Torah-instruction or law-remains as important as ever, but the note of redemption, the hope of return and recovery, mitigate the unrelieved ferocity of much of the great prophetic writing. It is as though Israel has finally accepted its life as a people whose only king is God-the promise to the house of David will be realized only through divine action in the messianic future. The commandments did not enslave, as Paul at moments thought, but gave Israel a higher law that freed it from ultimate bondage to any earthly law. Judaism, a religion of the book that can survive anywhere on earth, was beginning to emerge.
If in an important sense Deuteronomy, with its transcendent God known above all in his Word, and its conditional covenant calling forever for the people to be faithful to the commandments of the Lord, carried the day, the unconditional covenants were not forgotten. They remained forever as the horizon within which this people lived. God’s promise to Abraham and to Jacob/Israel meant that, in however frightful the situation, God’s love for Israel would not be abandoned. God’s promise to David meant that sometime in the future a truly good way of life would exist on this earth.
Axel Honneth has given us an extremely fruitful analysis of the struggle for recognition as a powerful dynamic in human history,1
21 one that may help us deal with what must always be a problem for non-Jews: Why is Israel and Israel alone the chosen people? Honneth posits the need for recognition as proceeding in three phases. First there is the need for recognition as love, without which there can be no self-confidence. Then there is the need for recognition as justice, without which there can be no self-respect. Then there is the need for recognition as creator of value, without which there can be no self-esteem. Recognition does indeed seem to be at the heart of the Israelite religious dynamic. God’s recognition of this particular people calls in turn for the recognition of God by the people. Only by this mutual recognition, which is first of all the recognition of love, can people and self be constituted. Only God’s initiative made the whole process possible. But the recognition of love must be personal, it cannot be general. God must recognize someone, to begin with, and if from that someone something new comes into being, a people constituted not by loyalty to an earthly ruler but by loyalty to God, that too must be a particular people. Certainly the religion of ancient Israel moved powerfully toward the recognition of justice, and here the beginnings of a larger context, how one treats the aliens, for example, developed. But without the continuing insistence on particularity it is hard to see how the Israelite axial breakthrough could have been preserved.126 It is also well to remember that the particularity of Israel is only relative: the two “universal” religions that emerged from Israelite origins had their own quite particular beginnings that have defined them ever since. Both Christianity and Islam are religions of the book for whom the distinction between believers and unbelievers is hardly unimportant.
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age Page 44