Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  The Sixth Commandment was a counsel of perfection; nowhere is there so much killing as in the Old Testament; its chapters oscillate between slaughter and compensatory reproduction. Tribal quarrels, internal factions and hereditary vendettas broke the monotony of intermittent peace.176 Despite a magnificent verse about ploughshares and pruninghooks, the Prophets were not pacifists, and the priests—if we may judge from the speeches which they put into the mouth of Yahveh—were almost as fond of war as of preaching. Among nineteen kings of Israel eight were assassinated.177 Captured cities were usually destroyed, the males put to the sword, and the soil deliberately ruined—in the fashion of the times.178 Perhaps the figures exaggerate the killing; it is unbelievable that, entirely without modern inventions, “the children of Israel slew of the Syrians one hundred thousand footmen in one day.”179 Belief in themselves as the chosen people180 intensified the pride natural in a nation conscious of superior abilities; it accentuated their disposition to segregate themselves maritally and mentally from other peoples, and deprived them of the international perspective that their descendants were to attain. But they had in high degree the virtues of their qualities. Their violence came of unmanageable vitality, their separatism came of their piety, their quarrelsomeness and querulousness came of a passionate sensitivity that produced the greatest literature of the Near East; their racial pride was the indispensable prop of their courage through centuries of suffering. Men are what they have had to be.

  The Seventh Commandment recognized marriage as the basis of the family, as the Fifth had recognized the family as the basis of society; and it offered to marriage all the support of religion. It said nothing about sex relations before marriage, but other regulations laid upon the bride the obligation, under pain of death by stoning, to prove her virginity on the day of her marriage.181 Nevertheless prostitution was common and pederasty apparently survived the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.182 As the Law did not seem to prohibit relations with foreign harlots, Syrian, Moabite, Midianite and other “strange women” flourished along the highways, where they lived in booths and tents, and combined the trades of peddler and prostitute. Solomon, who had no violent prejudices in these matters, relaxed the laws that had kept such women out of Jerusalem; in time they multiplied so rapidly there that in the days of the Maccabees the Temple itself was described by an indignant reformer as full of fornication and harlotry.183

  Love affairs probably occurred, for there was much tenderness between the sexes; “Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed unto him but a few days for the love he had to her.”184 But love played a very small rôle in the choice of mates. Before the Exile marriage was completely secular, arranged by the parents, or by the suitor with the parents of the bride. Vestiges of capture-marriage are found in the Old Testament; Yahveh approves of it in war;185 and the elders, on the occasion of a shortage of women, “commanded the children of Benjamin, saying, Go and lie in wait in the vineyards; and see and behold if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in dances; then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife of the daughters of Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin.”186 But this was exceptional; usually the marriage was by purchase; Jacob purchased Leah and Rachel by his toil, the gentle Ruth was quite simply bought by Boaz, and the prophet Hosea regretted exceedingly that he had given fifty shekels for his wife.187 The word for wife, beulah, meant owned.187a The father of the bride reciprocated by giving his daughter a dowry—an institution admirably adapted to diminish the socially disruptive gap between the sexual and the economic maturity of children in an urban civilization.

  If the man was well-to-do, he might practise polygamy; if the wife was barren, like Sarah, she might encourage her husband to take a concubine. The purpose of these arrangements was prolific reproduction; it was taken as a matter of course that after Rachel and Leah had given Jacob all the children they were capable of bearing, they should offer him their maids, who would also bear him children.188 A woman was not allowed to remain idle in this matter of reproduction; if a husband died, his brother, however many wives he might already have, was obliged to marry her; or, if the husband had no brother, the obligation fell upon his nearest surviving male kin.189 Since private property was the core of Jewish economy, the double standard prevailed: the man might have many wives, but the woman was confined to one man. Adultery meant relations with a woman who had been bought and paid for by another man; it was a violation of the law of property, and was punished with death for both parties.190 Fornication was forbidden to women, but was looked upon as a venial offense in men.191 Divorce was free to the man, but extremely difficult for the woman, until Talmudic days.193 The husband does not seem to have abused his privileges unduly; he is pictured to us, all in all, as zealously devoted to his wife and his children. And though love did not determine marriage, it often flowered out of it. “Isaac took Rebecca, and she became his wife; and he loved her; and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.”194 Probably in no other people outside of the Far East has family life reached so high a level as among the Jews.

  The Eighth Commandment sanctified private property,* and bound it up with religion and the family as one of the three bases of Hebrew society. Property was almost entirely in land; until the days of Solomon there was little industry beyond that of the potter and the smith. Even agriculture was not completely developed; the bulk of the population devoted itself to rearing sheep and cattle, and tending the vine, the olive and the fig. They lived in tents rather than houses, in order to move more easily to fresh pastures. In time their growing economic surplus generated trade, and the Jewish merchants, by their tenacity and their skill, began to flourish in Damascus, Tyre and Sidon, and in the precincts of the Temple itself. There was no coinage till near the time of the Captivity, but gold and silver, weighed in each transaction, became a medium of exchange, and bankers appeared in great numbers to finance commerce and enterprise. It was nothing strange that these “money-lenders” should use the courts of the Temple; it was a custom general in the Near East, and survives there in many places to this day.196 Yahveh beamed upon the growing power of the Hebrew financiers; “thou shalt lend unto many nations,” he said, “but thou shalt not borrow”197—a generous philosophy that has made great fortunes, though it has not seemed, in our century, to be divinely inspired.

  As in the other countries of the Near East, war captives and convicts were used as slaves, and hundreds of thousands of them toiled in cutting timber and transporting materials for such public works as Solomon’s Temple and palace. But the owner had no power of life and death over his slaves, and the slave might acquire property and buy his liberty.198 Men could be sold as bondservants for unpaid debts, or could sell their children in their place; and this continued to the days of Christ.199 These typical institutions of the Near East were mitigated in Judea by generous charity, and a vigorous campaign, by priest and prophet, against exploitation. The Code laid it down hopefully that “ye shall not oppress one another”;200 it asked that Hebrew bondservants should be released, and debts among Jews canceled, every seventh year;201 and when this was found too idealistic for the masters, the Law proclaimed the institution of the Jubilee, by which, every fifty years, all slaves and debtors should be freed. “And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a Jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.”202

  We have no evidence that this fine edict was obeyed, but we must give credit to the priests for leaving no lesson in charity untaught. “If there be among you a poor man of one of thy brethren, . . . thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need”; and “take thou no usury” (i.e., interest) “of him.”203 The Sabbath rest was to be extended to every employee, even to animals; stray sheaves and fruits were to be left in the fields and orchards for the poor to glean.204 And though these charitie
s were largely for fellow Jews, “the stranger in the gates” was also to be treated with kindness; the sojourner was to be sheltered and fed, and dealt with honorably. At all times the Jews were bidden to remember that they, too, had once been homeless, even bondservants, in a foreign land.

  The Ninth Commandment, by demanding absolute honesty of witnesses, put the prop of religion under the whole structure of Jewish law. An oath was to be a religious ceremony: not merely was a man, in swearing, to place his hand on the genitals of him to whom he swore, as in the old custom;205 he was now to be taking God himself as his witness and his judge. False witnesses, according to the Code, were to receive the same punishment that their testimony had sought to bring upon their victims.206 Religious law was the sole law of Israel; the priests and the temples were the judges and the courts; and those who refused to accept the decision of the priests were to be put to death.207 Ordeal by the drinking of poisonous water was prescribed in certain cases of doubtful guilt.208 There was no other than religious machinery for enforcing the law; it had to be left to personal conscience, and public opinion. Minor crimes might be atoned for by confession and compensation.209 Capital punishment was decreed, by Yahveh’s instructions, for murder, kidnaping, idolatry, adultery, striking or cursing a parent, stealing a slave, or “lying with a beast,” but not for the killing of a servant;210 and “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”211 Yahveh was quite satisfied to have the individual take the law into his own hands in case of murder: “The revenger of blood, himself shall slay the murderer; when he meeteth him, he shall slay him.”212 Certain cities, however, were to be set apart, to which a criminal might flee, and in which the avenger must stay his revenge.213 In general the principle of punishment was the lex talionis: “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, stripe for stripe”214—we trust that this was a counsel of perfection, never quite realized. The Mosaic Code, though written down at least fifteen hundred years later, shows no advance, in criminal legislation, upon the Code of Hammurabi; in legal organization it shows an archaic retrogression to primitive ecclesiastical control.

  The Tenth Commandment reveals how clearly woman was conceived under the rubric of property. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.”215 Nevertheless, it was an admirable precept; could men follow it, half the fever and anxiety of our life would be removed. Strange to say, the greatest of the commandments is not listed among the Ten, though it is part of the “Law.” It occurs in Leviticus, xix, 18, lost amid “a repetition of sundry laws,” and reads very simply: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

  In general it was a lofty code, sharing its defects with its age, and rising to virtues characteristically its own. We must remember that it was only a law—indeed, only a “priestly Utopia”216—rather than a description of Jewish life; like other codes, it was honored plentifully in the breach, and won new praise with every violation. But its influence upon the conduct of the people was at least as great as that of most legal or moral codes. It gave to the Jews, through the two thousand years of wandering which they were soon to begin, a “portable Fatherland,” as Heine was to call it, an intangible and spirtual state; it kept them united despite every dispersion, proud despite every defeat, and brought them across the centuries to our own time, a strong and apparently indestructible people.

  VII. THE LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE BIBLE

  History—Fiction—Poetry—The Psalms—The Song of Songs—Proverbs—Job—The idea of immortality—The pessimism of Ecclesiastes—The advent of Alexander

  The Old Testament is not only law; it is history, poetry and philosophy of the highest order. After making every deduction for primitive legend and pious fraud, after admitting that the historical books are not quite as accurate or as ancient as our forefathers supposed, we find in them, nevertheless, not merely some of the oldest historical writing known to us, but some of the best. The books of Judges, Samuel and Kings may, as some scholars believe,217 have been put together hastily during Or shortly after the Exile to collect and preserve the national traditions of a scattered and broken people; nevertheless the stories of Saul, David and Solomon are immeasurably finer in structure and style than the other historical writing of the ancient Near East. Even Genesis, if we read it with some understanding of the function of legend, is (barring its genealogies) an admirable story, told without frill or ornament, with simplicity, vividness and force. And in a sense we have here not mere history, but philosophy of history; this is the first recorded effort of man to reduce the multiplicity of past events to a measure of unity by seeking in them some pervading purpose and significance, some law of sequence and causation, some illumination for the present and the future. The conception of history promulgated by the Prophets and the priestly authors of the Pentateuch survived a thousand years of Greece and Rome to become the world-view of European thinkers from Boethius to Bossuet.

  Midway between the history and the poetry are the fascinating romances of the Bible. There is nothing more perfect in the realm of prose than the story of Ruth; only less excellent are the tales of Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, Joseph and Benjamin, Samson and Delilah, Esther, Judith and Daniel. The poetical literature begins with the “Song of Moses” (Exod. xv) and the “Song of Deborah” (Judges v), and reaches finally to the heights of the Psalms. The “penitential” hymns of the Babylonians had prepared for these, and perhaps had given them material as well as form; Ikhnaton’s ode to the sun seems to have contributed to Psalm CIV; and the majority of the Psalms, instead of being the impressively united work of David, are probably the compositions of several poets writing long after the Captivity, probably in the third century before Christ.218 But all this is as irrelevant as the name or sources of Shakespeare; what matters is that the Psalms are at the head of the world’s lyric poetry. They were not meant to be read at a sitting, or in a Higher Critic’s mood; they are at their best as expressing moments of pious ecstasy and stimulating faith. They are marred for us by bitter imprecations, tiresome “groanings” and complaints, and endless adulation of a Yahveh who, with all his “lovingkindness,” “longsuffering” and “compassion,” pours “smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth” (VIII), promises that “the wicked shall be turned into hell” (IX), laps up flattery,* and threatens to “cut off all flattering lips” (XII). The Psalms are full of military ardor, hardly Christian, but very Pilgrim. Some of them, however, are jewels of tenderness, or cameos of humility. “Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity. . . . As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more” (XXIX, CIII). In these songs we feel the antistrophic rhythm of ancient Oriental poetry, and almost hear the voices of majestic choirs in alternate answering. No poetry has ever excelled this in revealing metaphor or living imagery; never has religious feeling been more intensely or vividly expressed. These poems touch us more deeply than any lyric of love; they move even the sceptical soul, for they give passionate form to the final longing of the developed mind—for some perfection to which it may dedicate its striving. Here and there, in the King James’ Version, are pithy phrases that have become almost words in our language—“out of the mouths of babes” (VIII), “the apple of the eye” (XVII), “put not your trust in princes” (CXLVI); and everywhere, in the original, are similes that have never been surpassed: “The rising sun is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race” (XIX). We can only imagine what majesty and beauty must clothe these songs in the sonorous language of their origin.*

  When, beside these Psalms, we place in contrast the “Song of Solomon,” we get a glimpse of that sensual and terrestrial element in Jewish life which the Old Testament, written almost entirely by prophets and p
riests, has perhaps concealed from us—just as Ecclesiastes reveals a scepticism not otherwise discernible in the carefully selected and edited literature of the ancient Jews. This strangely amorous composition is an open field for surmise: it may be a collection of songs of Babylonian origin, celebrating the love of Ishtar and Tammuz; it may be (since it contains words borrowed from the Greek) the work of several Hebrew Anacreons touched by the Hellenistic spirit that entered Judea with Alexander; or (since the lovers address each other as brother and sister in the Egyptian manner) it may be a flower of Alexandrian Jewry, plucked by some quite emancipated soul from the banks of the Nile. In any case its presence in the Bible is a charming mystery: by what winking—or hoodwinking—of the theologians did these songs of lusty passion find room between Isaiah and the Preacher?