Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  Every one that is turbulent is bound by King Merneptah.8

  This does not prove that Merneptah was the Pharaoh of the Exodus; it proves little except that Egyptian armies had again ravaged Palestine. We cannot tell when the Jews entered Egypt, nor whether they came to it as freemen or as slaves.* We may take it as likely that the immigrants were at first a modest number,11 and that the many thousands of Jews in Egypt in Moses’ time were the consequence of a high birth rate; as in all periods, “the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew.”12 The story of the “bondage” in Egypt, of the use of the Jews as slaves in great construction enterprises, their rebellion and escape—or emigration—to Asia, has many internal signs of essential truth, mingled, of course, with supernatural interpolations customary in all the historical writing of the ancient East. Even the story of Moses must not be rejected offhand; it is astonishing, however, that no mention is made of him by either Amos or Isaiah, whose preaching appears to have preceded by a century the composition of the Pentateuch.†

  When Moses led the Jews to Mt. Sinai he was merely following the route laid down by Egyptian turquoise-hunting expeditions for a thousand years before him. The account of the forty years’ wandering in the desert, once looked upon as incredible, now seems reasonable enough in a traditionally nomadic people; and the conquest of Canaan was but one more instance of a hungry nomad horde falling upon a settled community. The conquerors killed as many as they could, and married the rest. Slaughter was unconfined, and (to follow the text) was divinely ordained and enjoyed;19 Gideon, in capturing two cities, slew 120,000 men; only in the annals of the Assyrians do we meet again with such hearty killing, or easy counting. Occasionally, we are told, “the land rested from war.”20 Moses had been a patient statesman, but Joshua was only a plain, blunt warrior; Moses had ruled bloodlessly by inventing interviews with God, but Joshua ruled by the second law of nature—that the superior killer survives. In this realistic and unsentimental fashion the Jews took their Promised Land.

  II. SOLOMON IN ALL HIS GLORY

  Race—Appearance—Language—Organization—Judges and kings—Saul—David—Solomon—His wealth—The Temple—Rise of the social problem in Israel

  Of their racial origin we can only say vaguely that they were Semites, not sharply distinct or different from the other Semites of western Asia; it was their history that made them, not they who made their history. At their very first appearance they are already a mixture of many stocksonly by the most unbelievable virtue could a “pure” race have existed among the thousand ethnic cross-currents of the Near East. But the Jews were the pures of all, for they intermarried only very reluctantly with other peoples. Hence they have maintained their type with astonishing tenacity; the Hebrew prisoners on the Egyptian and Assyrian reliefs, despite the prejudices of the artist, are recognizably like the Jews of our own time: there, too, are the long and curved Hittite nose,* the projecting cheek-bones, the curly hair and beard; though one cannot see, under the Egyptian caricature, the scrawny toughness of body, the subtlety and obstinacy of spirit, that have characterized the Semites from the “stiff-necked” followers of Moses to the inscrutable Bedouins and tradesmen of today. In the early years of their conquest they dressed in simple tunics, low-crowned hats or turban-like caps, and easy-going sandals; as wealth came they covered their feet with leather shoes, and their tunics with fringed kaftans. Their women, who were among the most beautiful of antiquity,† painted their cheeks and their eyes, wore all the jewelry they could get, and adopted to the best of their ability the newest styles from Babylon, Nineveh, Damascus or Tyre.21

  Hebrew was among the most majestically sonorous of all the languages of the earth. Despite its gutturals, it was full of masculine music; Renan described it as “a quiver full of arrows, a trumpet of brasses crashing through the air.”22 It did not differ much from the speech of the Phoenicians or the Moabites. The Jews used an alphabet akin to the Phoenician;23 some scholars believe it to be the oldest alphabet known.23a They did not bother to write vowels, leaving these for the sense to fill in; even today the Hebrew vowels are mere points adorning the consonants.

  The invaders never formed a united nation, but remained for a long time as twelve more or less independent tribes, organized and ruled on the principles not of the state but of the patriarchal family. The oldest head of each family group participated in a council of elders which was the last court of law and justice in the tribe, and which coöperated with the leaders of other tribes only under the compulsion of dire emergency. The family was the most convenient economic unit in tilling the fields and tending the flocks; this was the source of its strength, its authority, and its political power. A measure of family communism softened the rigors of paternal discipline, and created memories to which the prophets harked back disconsolately in more individualistic days. For when, under Solomon, industry came to the towns, and made the individual the new economic unit of production, the authority of the family weakened, even as today, and the inherent order of Jewish life decayed.

  The “judges” to whom the tribes occasionally gave a united obedience were not magistrates, but chieftains or warriors—even when they were priests.24 “In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”25 This incredibly Jeffersonian condition gave way under the needs of war; the threat of domination by the Philistines brought a temporary unity to the tribes, and persuaded them to appoint a king whose authority over them should be continuous. The prophet Samuel warned them against certain disadvantages in rule by one man:

  And Samuel said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint them captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep, and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

  Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay, but we shall have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.26

  Their first king, Saul, gave them good and evil instructively: fought their battles bravely, lived simply on his own estate at Gileah, pursued young David with murderous attentions, and was beheaded in flight from the Philistines. The Jews learned, then, at the first opportunity, that wars of succession are among the appanages of monarchy. Unless the little epic of Saul, Jonathan and David is merely a masterpiece of literary creation* (for there is no contemporary mention of these personalities outside the Bible), this first king, after a bloody interlude, was succeeded by David, heroic slayer of Goliath, tender lover of Jonathan and many maidens, half-naked dancer of wild dances,28 seductive player of the harp, sweet singer of marvelous songs, and able king of the Jews for almost forty years. Here, so early in literature, is a character fully drawn, real with all the contradictory passions of a living soul: as ruthless as his time, his tribe and his god, and yet as ready to pardon his enemies as Caesar was, or Christ; putting captives to death wholesale, like any Assyrian monarch; charging his son Solomon to “bring down to the grave with blood” the “hoar head” of old Shimei who had cursed him many years before;29 taking Uriah’s wife into his harem incontinently, and sending Uriah into the front line of battle to get rid of him;30 accepting Nathan’s rebuke humbly, but keeping the lovely Bathsheba none the less; forgiving Saul al
most seventy times seven, merely taking his shield when he might have taken his life; sparing and supporting Mephibosheth, a possible pretender to his throne; pardoning his ungrateful son Absalom, who had been caught in armed rebellion, and bitterly mourning that son’s death in treasonable battle against his father (“O my son Absalom! my son, my son, Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”)31—this is an authentic man, of full and varied elements, bearing within him all the vestiges of barbarism, and all the promise of civilization.

  On coming to the throne Solomon, for his peace of mind, slew all rival claimants. This did not disturb Yahveh, who, taking a liking to the young king, promised him wisdom beyond all men before or after him.32 Perhaps Solomon deserves his reputation; for not only did he combine in his own life the epicurean enjoyment of every pleasure and luxury with a stoic fulfillment of all his obligations as a king,† but he taught his people the values of law and order, and lured them from discord and war to industry and peace. He lived up to his name,‡ for during his long reign Jerusalem, which David had made the capital, took advantage of this unwonted quiet, and increased and multiplied its wealth. Originally the city§ had been built around a well; then it had been turned into a fortress because of its exalted position above the plain; now, though it was not on the main lines of trade, it became one of the busiest markets of the Near East. By maintaining the good relations that David had established with King Hiram of Tyre, Solomon encouraged Phoenician merchants to direct their caravans through Palestine, and developed a profitable exchange of agricultural products from Israel for the manufactured articles of Tyre and Sidon. He built a fleet of mercantile vessels on the Red Sea, and persuaded Hiram to use this new route, instead of Egypt, in trading with Arabia and Africa.34 It was probably in Arabia that Solomon mined the gold and precious stones of “Ophir”;35 probably from Arabia that the Queen of “Sheba” came to seek his friendship, and perhaps his aid.36 We are told that “the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred three score and six talents of gold”;37 and though this could not compare with the revenues of Babylon, Nineveh or Tyre, it lifted Solomon to a place among the richest potentates of his time.*

  Some of this wealth he used for his private pleasure. He indulged particularly his hobby for collecting concubines—though historians undramatically reduce his “seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines” to sixty and eighty.39 Perhaps by some of these marriages he wished to strengthen his friendship with Egypt and Phoenicia; perhaps, like Rameses II, he was animated with a eugenic passion for transmitting his superior abilities. But most of his revenues went to the strengthening of his government and the beautification of his capital. He repaired the citadel around which the city had been built; he raised forts and stationed garrisons at strategic points of his realm to discourage both invasion and revolt. He divided his kingdom, for administrative purposes, into twelve districts which deliberately crossed the tribal boundaries; by this plan he hoped to lessen the clannish separatism of the tribes, and to weld them into one people. He failed, and Judea failed with him. To finance his government he organized expeditions to mine precious metals, and to import luxuries and strange delicacies—e.g., “ivory, apes and peacocks”40—which could be sold to the growing bourgeoisie at high prices; he levied tolls upon all caravans passing through Palestine; he put a poll tax upon all his subject peoples, required contributions from every district except his own, and reserved to the state a monopoly of the trade in yarn, horses and chariots.41 Josephus assures us that Solomon “made silver as plentiful in Jerusalem as stones in the street.”42 Finally he resolved to adorn the city with a new temple for Yahveh and a new palace for himself.

  We gather some sense of the turbulence of Jewish life from the fact that before this time there had been, apparently, no temple at all in Judea, not even in Jerusalem; the people had sacrificed to Yahveh in local sanctuaries or on crude altars in the hills.43 Solomon called the more substantial burghers together, announced his plans for a temple, pledged to it great quantities of gold, silver, brass, iron, wood and precious stones from his own stores, and gently suggested that the temple would welcome contributions from the citizens. If we may believe the chronicler, they pledged for his use five thousand gold talents, ten thousand silver talents, and as much iron and brass as he might need; “and they with whom precious stones were found gave them to the treasure of the house of the Lord.”44 The site chosen was on a hill; the walls of the Temple rose, like the Parthenon, continuously from the rocky slopes.* The design was in the style that the Phoenicians had adopted from Egypt, with decorative ideas from Assyria and Babylon. The Temple was not a church, but a quadrangular enclosure composed of several buildings. The main structure was of modest dimensions—about one hundred and twenty-four feet in length, fifty-five in breadth, and fifty-two in height; half the length of the Parthenon, a quarter of the length of Chartres.46 The Hebrews who came from all Judea to contribute to the Temple, and later to worship in it, forgivably looked upon it as one of the wonders of the world; they had not seen the immensely greater temples of Thebes, Babylon and Nineveh. Before the main structure rose a “porch” some one hundred and eighty feet high, overlaid with gold. Gold was spread lavishly about, if we may credit our sole authority: on the beams of the main ceiling, on the posts, the doors and the walls, on the candelabra, the lamps, the snuffers, the spoons, the censers, and “a hundred basins of gold.” Precious stones were inlaid here and there, and two gold-plated cherubim guarded the Ark of the Covenant.47 The walls were of great square stones; the ceiling, posts and doors were of carved cedar and olive wood. Most of the building materials were brought from Phoenicia, and most of the skilled work was done by artisans imported from Sidon and Tyre.48 The unskilled labor was herded together by a ruthless corvée of 150,000 men, after the fashion of the time.49

  So for seven years the Temple rose, to provide for four centuries a lordly home for Yahveh. Then for thirteen years more the artisans and people labored to build a much larger edifice, for Solomon and his harem. Merely one wing of it—“the house of the forest of Lebanon”—was four times as large as the Temple.50 The walls of the main building were made of immense stone blocks fifteen feet in length, and were ornamented with statuary, reliefs and paintings in the Assyrian style. The palace contained halls for the royal reception of distinguished visitors, apartments for the King, separate quarters for the more important wives, and an arsenal as the final basis of government. Not a stone of the gigantic edifice survives, and its site is unknown.51

  Having established his kingdom, Solomon settled down to enjoy it. As his reign proceeded he paid less and less attention to religion and frequented his harem rather more than the Temple. The Biblical chroniclers reproach him bitterly for his gallantry in building altars to the exotic deities of his foreign wives, and cannot forgive his philosophical—or perhaps political—impartiality to the gods. The people admired his wisdom, but suspected in it a certain centripetal quality; the Temple and the palace had cost them much gold and blood, and were not more popular with them than the Pyramids had been with the workingmen of Egypt. The upkeep of these establishments required considerable taxation, and few governments have made taxation popular. When he died Israel was exhausted, and a discontented proletariat had been created whose labor found no steady employment, and whose sufferings were to transform the warlike cult of Yahveh into the almost socialistic religion of the prophets.

  III. THE GOD OF HOSTS

  Polytheism—Yahveh—Henotheism—Character of the Hebrew religion—The idea of sin—Sacrifice—Circumcision—The priesthood—Strange gods

  Next to the promulgation of the “Book of Law,” the building of the Temple was the most important event in the epic of the Jews. It not only gave Yahveh a home, but it gave Judea a spiritual center and capital, a vehicle of tradition, a memory to serve as a pillar of fire through centuries of wandering over the earth. And it played its part in lifting the Hebrew religion from a primitive poly
theism to a faith intense and intolerant, but none the less one of the creative creeds of history.

  As they first entered the historic scene the Jews were nomad Bedouins who feared the djinns of the air, and worshiped rocks, cattle, sheep, and the spirits of caves and hills.52 The cult of the bull, the sheep and the lamb was not neglected; Moses could never quite win his flock from adoration of the Golden Calf, for the Egyptian worship of the bull was still fresh in their memories, and Yahveh was for a long time symbolized in that ferocious vegetarian. In Exodus (xxxii, 25-28) we read how the Jews indulged in a naked dance before the Golden Calf, and how Moses and the Levites—or priestly class—slew three thousand of them in punishment of their idolatry.* Of serpent worship there are countless traces in early Jewish history, from the serpent images found in the oldest ruins,54 to the brazen serpent made by Moses and worshiped in the Temple until the time of Hezekiah (ca. 720 B.C.).55 As among so many peoples, the snake seemed sacred to the Jews, partly as a phallic symbol of virility, partly as typifying wisdom, subtlety and eternity—literally because of its ability to make both ends meet.56 Baal, symbolized in conical upright stones much like the linga of the Hindus, was venerated by some, of the Hebrews as the male principle of reproduction, the husband of the land that he fertilized.57 Just as primitive polytheism survived in the worship of angels and saints, and in the teraphim, or portable idols, that served as household gods,58 so the magical notions rife in the early cults persisted to a late day despite the protests of prophets and priests. The people seem to have looked upon Moses and Aaron as magicians,59 and to have patronized professional diviners and sorcerers. Divination was sought at times by shaking dice (Urim and Thummim) out of a box (ephod)—a ritual still used to ascertain the will of the gods. It is to the credit of the priests that they opposed these practices, and preached an exclusive reliance on the magic of sacrifice, prayer and contributions.