Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.* . . . Behold, the Lord God will come with strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him. . . . He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom and shall gently lead those that are with young.

  The prophet then lifts the Messianic hope to a place among the ruling ideas of his people, and describes the “Servant” who will redeem Israel by vicarious sacrifice:

  He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; . . . he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. . . . The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.†134

  Persia, the Second Isaiah predicts, will be the instrument of this liberation. Cyrus is invincible; he will take Babylon, and will free the Jews from their captivity. They will return to Jerusalem and build a new Temple, a new city, a very paradise: “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like a bullock; and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.”135 Perhaps it was the rise of Persia, and the spread of its power, subjecting all the states of the Near East in an imperial unity vaster and better governed than any social organization men had yet known, that suggested to the Prophet the conception of one universal deity. No longer does his god say, like the Yahveh of Moses, “I am the Lord thy God; . . . thou shalt not have strange gods before me”; now it is written: “I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no god besides me.”136 The prophet-poet describes this universal deity in one of the great passages of the Bible:

  Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance? Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance; behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing. All nations before him are as nothing, and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity. To whom, then, will ye liken God, or what likeness will ye compare with him? It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in. Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things.137

  It was a dramatic hour in the history of Israel when at last Cyrus entered Babylon as a world-conqueror, and gave to the exiled Jews full freedom to return to Jerusalem. He disappointed some of the Prophets, and showed his superior civilization, by leaving Babylon and its population unhurt, and offering a sceptical obeisance to its gods. He restored to the Jews what remained in the Babylonian treasury of the gold and silver taken by Nebuchadrezzar from the Temple, and instructed the communities in which the exiles lived to furnish them with funds for their long journey home. The younger Jews were not enthusiastic at this liberation; many of them had sunk strong roots into Babylonian soil, and hesitated to abandon their fertile fields and their flourishing trade for the desolate ruins of the Holy City. It was not until two years after Cyrus’ coming that the first detachment of zealots set out on the long three months’ journey back to the land which their fathers had left half a century before.138

  They found themselves, then as now, not entirely welcome in their ancient home. For meanwhile other Semites had settled there, and had made the soil their own by occupation and toil; and these tribes looked with hatred upon the apparent invaders of what seemed to them their native fields. The returning Jews could not possibly have established themselves had it not been for the strong and friendly empire that protected them. The prince Zerubbabel won permission from the Persian king, Darius I, to rebuild the Temple; and though the immigrants were small in number and resources, and the work was hindered at every step by the attacks and conspiracies of a hostile population, it was carried to completion within some twenty-two years after the return. Slowly Jerusalem became again a Jewish city, and the Temple resounded with the psalms of a rescued remnant resolved to make Judea strong again. It was a great triumph, surpassed only by that which we have seen in our own historic time.

  VI. THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK

  The “Book of the Law”—The composition of the Pentateuch—The myths of “Genesis”—The Mosaic Code—The Ten Commandments—The idea of God—The sabbath—The Jewish family—Estimate of the Mosaic legislation

  To build a military state was impossible, Judea had neither the numbers nor the wealth for such an enterprise. Since some system of order was needed that, while recognizing the sovereignty of Persia, would give the Jews a natural discipline and a national unity, the clergy undertook to provide a theocratic rule based, like Josiah’s, on priestly traditions and laws promulgated as divine commands. About the year 444 B.C. Ezra, a learned priest, called the Jews together in solemn assembly, and read to them, from morn to midday, the “Book of the Law of Moses.” For seven days he and his fellow Levites read from these scrolls; at the end the priests and the leaders of the people pledged themselves to accept this body of legislation as their constitution and their conscience, and to obey it forever.139 From those troubled times till ours that Law has been the central fact in the life of the Jews; and their loyalty to it through all wanderings and tribulations has been one of the impressive phenomena of history.

  What was this “Book of the Law of Moses”? Not quite the same as that “Book of the Covenant” which Josiah had read; for the latter had admitted of being completely read twice in a day, while the other needed a week.140 We can only guess that the larger scroll constituted a substantial part of those first five books of the Old Testament which the Jews call Torah or the Law, and which others call the Pentateuch.141* How, when, and where had these books been written? This is an innocent question which has caused the writing of fifty thousand volumes, and must here be left unanswered in a paragraph.

  The consensus of scholarship is that the oldest elements in the Bible are those distinct and yet similar legends of Genesis which are called “J” and “E” respectively because one speaks of the Creator as Jehovah (Yahveh), while the other speaks of him as Elohim.* It is believed that the Yahvist narrative was written in Judah, the Elohist in Ephraim, and that the two stories fused into one after the fall of Samaria. A third element, known as “D,” and embodying the Deuteronomic Code, is probably by a distinct author or group of authors. A fourth element, “P,” is composed of sections later inserted by the priests; this “Priestly Code” is probably the substance of the “Book of the Law” promulgated by Ezra.142a The four compositions appear to have taken their present form about 300 B.C.143

  These delightful tales of the Creation, the Temptation and the Flood were drawn from a storehouse of Mesopotamian legend as old as 3000 B.C.; we have seen some early forms of them in the course of this history. It is possible that the Jews appropriated some of these myths from Babylonian literature during the Captivity;144 it is more likely that they had adopted them long before, from ancient Semitic and Sumerian sources common to all the Near East. The Persian and the Talmudic forms of the Creation myth represent God as first making a two-sexed being—a male and a female joined at the back like Siamese twins—and then dividing it as an afterthought. We are reminded of a strange sentence in Genesis (v, 2): “Male and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam”: i.e., our first parent was originally both male and female—which seems to have escaped all theologians except Aristophanes.†

  The legend of Paradise appears in almost all folklore—in Egypt, Indi
a, Tibet, Babylonia, Persia, Greece,‡ Polynesia, Mexico, etc.145 Most of these Edens had forbidden trees, and were supplied with serpents or dragons that stole immortality from men, or otherwise poisoned Paradise.147 Both the serpent and the fig were probably phallic symbols; behind the myth is the thought that sex and knowledge destroy innocence and happiness, and are the origin of evil; we shall find this same idea at the end of the Old Testament in Ecclesiastes as here at the beginning. In most of these stories woman was the lovely-evil agent of the serpent or the devil, whether as Eve, or Pandora, or the Poo See of Chinese legend. “All things,” says the Shi-ching, “were at first subject to man, but a woman threw us into slavery. Our misery came not from heaven but from woman; she lost the human race. Ah, unhappy Poo See! Thou kindled the fire that consumes us, and which is every day increasing. . . . The world is lost. Vice overflows all things.”

  Even more universal was the story of the Flood; hardly an ancient people went without it, and hardly a mountain in Asia but had given perch to some water-wearied Noah or Shamash-napishtim.148 Usually these legends were the popular vehicle or allegory of a philosophical judgment or a moral attitude summarizing long racial experience—that sex and knowledge bring more grief than joy, and that human life is periodically threatened by floods,—i.e., ruinous inundations of the great rivers whose waters made possible the earliest known civilizations. To ask whether these stories are true or false, whether they “really happened,” would be to put a trivial and superficial question; their substance, of course, is not the tales they tell but the judgments they convey. Meanwhile it would be unwise not to enjoy their disarming simplicity, and the vivid swiftness of their narratives.

  The books which Josiah and Ezra caused to be read to the people formulated that “Mosaic” Code on which all later Jewish life was to be built. Of this legislation the cautious Sarton writes: “Its importance in the history of institutions and of law cannot be overestimated.”149 It was the most thoroughgoing attempt in history to use religion as a basis of statesmanship, and as a regulator of every detail of life; the Law became, says Renan, “the tightest garment into which life was ever laced.”150 Diet,* medicine, personal, menstrual and natal hygiene, public sanitation, sexual inversion and bestiality152—all are made subjects of divine ordinance and guidance; again we observe how slowly the doctor was differentiated from the priest153—to become in time his greatest enemy. Leviticus (xiii-xv) legislates carefully for the treatment of venereal disease, even to the most definite directions for segregation, disinfection, fumigation and, if necessary, the complete burning of the house in which the disease has run its course.154* “The ancient Hebrews were the founders of prophylaxis,”156 but they seem to have had no surgery beyond circumcision. This rite—common among ancient Egyptians and modern Semites—was not only a sacrifice to God and a compulsion to racial loyalty,† it was a hygienic precaution against sexual uncleanliness.158 Perhaps it was this Code of Cleanliness that helped to preserve the Jews through their long Odyssey of dispersion and suffering.

  For the rest the Code centered about those Ten Commandments (Exodus, xx, 1-17) which were destined to receive the lip-service of half the world.‡ The first laid the foundation of the new theocratic community, which was to rest not upon any civil law, but upon the idea of God; he was the Invisible King who dictated every law and meted out every penalty; and his people were to be called Israel, as meaning the Defenders of God. The Hebrew state was dead, but the Temple remained; the priests of Judea, like the Popes of Rome, would try to restore what the kings had failed to save. Hence the explicitness and reiteration of the First Commandment: heresy or blasphemy must be punished with death, even if the heretic should be one’s closest kin.161 The priestly authors of the Code, like the pious Inquisitors, believed that religious unity was an indispensable condition of social organization and solidarity. It was this intolerance, and their racial pride, that embroiled and preserved the Jews.

  The Second Commandment elevated the national conception of God at the expense of art: no graven images were ever to be made of him. It assumed a high intellectual level among the Jews, for it rejected superstition and anthropomorphism, and—despite the all-too-human quality of the Pentateuch Yahveh—tried to conceive of God as beyond every form and image. It conscripted Hebrew devotion for religion, and left nothing, in ancient days, for science and art; even astronomy was neglected, lest corrupt diviners should multiply, or the stars be worshiped as divinities. In Solomon’s Temple there had been an almost heathen abundance of imagery;163 in the new Temple there was none. The old images had been carried off to Babylon, and apparently had not been returned along with utensils of silver and gold.164 Hence we find no sculpture, painting or bas-relief after the Captivity, and very little before it except under the almost alien Solomon; architecture and music were the only arts that the priests would allow. Song and Temple ritual redeemed the life of the people from gloom; an orchestra of several instruments joined “as one to make one sound” with a great choir of voices to sing the psalms that glorified the Temple and its God.165 “David and all the house of Israel played before the Lord on harps, psalteries, timbrels, cornets and cymbals.”166

  The Third Commandment typified the intense piety of the Jew. Not only would he not “take the name of the Lord God in vain”; he would never pronounce it; even when he came upon the name of Yahveh in his prayers he would substitute for it Adonai—Lord.* Only the Hindus would rival this piety.

  The Fourth Commandment sanctified the weekly day of rest as a Sabbath, and passed it down as one of the strongest institutions of mankind. The name,—and perhaps the custom—came from Babylon; shabattu was applied by the Babylonians to “tabu” days of abstinence and propitiation.168 Besides this weekly holyday there were great festivals—once Canaanite vegetation rites reminiscent of sowing and harvesting, and the cycles of moon and sun: Mazzoth originally celebrated the beginning of the barley harvest; Shabuoth, later called Pentecost, celebrated the end of the wheat harvest; Sukkoth commemorated the vintage; Pesach, or Passover, was the feast of the first fruits of the flock; Rosh-ha-shanah announced the New Year; only later were these festivals adapted to commemorate vital events in the history of the Jews.168a On the first day of the Passover a lamb or kid was sacrificed and eaten, and its blood was sprinkled upon the doors as the portion of the god; later the priests attached this custom to the story of Yahveh’s slaughter of the firstborn of the Egyptians. The lamb was once a totem of a Canaanite clan; the Passover, among the Canaanites, was the oblation of a lamb to the local god.* As we read (Exod., xi) the story of the establishment of the Passover rite, and see the Jews celebrating that same rite steadfastly today, we feel again the venerable antiquity of their worship, and the strength and tenacity of their race.

  The Fifth Commandment sanctified the family, as second only to the Temple in the structure of Jewish society; the ideals then stamped upon the institution marked it throughout medieval and modern European history until our own disintegrative Industrial Revolution. The Hebrew patriarchal family was a vast economic and political organization, composed of the oldest married male, his wives, his unmarried children, his married sons with their wives and children, and perhaps some slaves. The economic basis of the institution was its convenience for cultivating the soil; its political value lay in its providing a system of social order so strong that it made the state—except in war—almost superfluous. The father’s authority was practically unlimited; the land was his, and his children could survive only by obedience to him; he was the state. If he was poor he could sell his daughter, before her puberty, as a bondservant; and though occasionally he condescended to ask her consent, he had full right to dispose of her in marriage as he wished.169 Boys were supposed to be products of the right testicle, girls of the left—which was believed to be smaller and weaker than the right.170 At first marriage was matrilocal; the man had to “leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife” in her clan; but this custom gradually died out after the establish
ment of the monarchy. Yahveh’s instructions to the wife were: “Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Though technically subject, the woman was often a person of high authority and dignity; the history of the Jews shines with such names as Sarah, Rachel, Miriam and Esther; Deborah was one of the judges of Israel,172 and it was the prophetess Huldah whom Josiah consulted about the Book which the priests had found in the Temple.173 The mother of many children was certain of security and honor. For the little nation longed to increase and multiply, feeling, as in Palestine today, its dangerous numerical inferiority to the peoples surrounding it; therefore it exalted motherhood, branded celibacy as a sin and a crime, made marriage compulsory after twenty, even in priests, abhorred marriageable virgins and childless women, and looked upon abortion, infanticide and other means of limiting population as heathen abominations that stank in the nostrils of the Lord.174 “And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die.”175 The perfect wife was one who labored constantly in and about her home, and had no thought except in her husband and her children. The last chapter of Proverbs states the male ideal of woman completely:

  Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens. She considered! a field, and buyeth it; with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms. She perceiveth that her merchandise is good; her candle goeth not out by night. She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff. She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. . . . She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple. Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land. She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant. Strength and honor are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come. She openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. . . . Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates.*