by N. T. Wright
Why did it happen? The prophets made it clear. It was because Israel sinned. That was the deal God established in the first place: “Now that I’ve rescued you, stay loyal to me and you’ll live in the land. Turn away from me, worship other gods, and I’ll kick you out.” Just like Adam and Eve in the Garden.
But, as Saul’s father would no doubt explain Sabbath by Sabbath, the goyim were still a threat. They still ran the world their own way. They didn’t believe in Israel’s God. They had invented a thousand little gods of their own; and they went to and fro, this way and that, trying to pay them all off, doing their best to placate them. And the more you read the old stories, the more you would see how the goyim would try to pull loyal Jews away from the Name, from the One God. And “we”—by which Saul’s father wouldn’t just mean “we Jews” but “we perushim, we Pharisees”—“we have to know the Torah, we have to say the loyalty prayer, we have to stay pure. And we must be ready to act when the time comes.”
Young Saul knows precisely what this means. He knows the freedom story, the Five Books. Reading through these ancestral traditions, turning them over and over in his mind, he would find long passages where nothing much happens: regulations for sacrifices, lists of names, detailed law codes. These passages are powerful in themselves. Once you get to know and love them, they have a kind of incantatory quality. But a boy wants action, and suddenly here it is.
First there is the strange story of Balaam.1 As the people of Israel come near the end of their journey through the wilderness, they arrive at the territory of Moab, on the east bank of the Jordan. They are within sight of the promised land. This is bad news for Balak, the king of Moab. He hires Balaam, a soothsayer, to curse Israel. At first Balaam refuses, but the promised reward eats into his soul, and he gets on his donkey to go and comply. The donkey, however, sees what Balaam does not. The angel of the Lord stands in the way, drawn sword in hand; the donkey swerves off the road, lies down, and refuses to go on. Balaam loses his temper and beats the poor animal, whereupon it speaks to him with a human voice. Balaam’s eyes are opened, and he recognizes his lucky escape. So, instead of cursing the Israelites, he blesses them—much, of course, to Balak’s annoyance.
It’s a great story, almost worthy of Grimms’ fairy tales. But the real thrust of the story, the point Saul’s tradition celebrates, is yet to come. It focuses on an incident that will spark a youthful vocation. And it offers a promise that echoes another, more ancient promise that Paul the Apostle will make central to his theology.
It begins with Balaam’s problem: no curse, no fee. Well, perhaps there was another way. Send in the girls. Plenty of the Israelite men, tired of desert wandering and strict sexual morality, were only too happy to take a Moabite girlfriend—which meant not only disloyalty to the One God and his Torah (as well as to their own wives), but also worshipping Moabite deities and following their practices. Idolatry and immorality went together, as they always did. Israel was supposed to be the One Bride of the One God, in an unbreakable marriage bond. Breaking human marriage bonds was a sign and symptom of the breaking of the divine covenant.
What happened next shaped the imagination of many generations. Things got out of control. The people were running wild. A plague broke out—heaven-sent retribution, it seemed—but they didn’t care. One man brought his Moabite girl into his tent, in full view of Moses and everybody else.2 That did it. Phinehas, one of Aaron’s sons, took a spear, followed the man into the tent, found the pair already in the act, and killed them both with a single thrust.
That was the defining moment of “zeal.” It had immediate results: the plague stopped; the rebellion was over. And Phinehas, the hero of “zeal” from then on, received the remarkable promise of a perpetual personal covenant. His family would be priests forever.
One of the old psalms, referring delicately to the incident (the psalm says only, “Phinehas intervened” or possibly “Phinehas interceded”), has a turn of phrase indicating this everlasting covenant established between God and Phinehas. “Phinehas intervened,” says the song, “and that has been reckoned to him as righteousness.”3 The Hebrew word for “righteousness,” tzedaqah, indicates a relationship: a committed, covenanted relationship. “God reckoned it (Phinehas’s zealous action) as righteousness” means that this action was the hallmark of the covenant between God and his family: a covenant of perpetual priesthood. Zeal was the outward badge of the unbreakable relationship.
Young Saul would have known the sentence anyway, because it is what Genesis says about Abraham. God made sweeping but seemingly impossible promises to Abraham. Abraham believed them, and then and there God took him into a covenant, a binding agreement. Genesis sums this up with the same phrase: “And the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness”4 Abraham’s faith, in other words, was the hallmark of the covenant that God established with him. It was the sign, the badge, of his covenant membership. The resonances between Abraham and Phinehas are obvious to anyone who knows the texts well, but this isn’t just a matter of our saying so. The two passages occur in close proximity in one of the primary “zeal” texts of Saul’s day, 1 Maccabees.5 We imagine the young boy, eager for God and the law, storing all this away for future reference. He will be zealous for God and Torah. Perhaps God will use him as part of the great moment of covenant renewal. “It was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Nobody could have guessed at the further meanings that key sentence would acquire in the new world that lay just around the corner.
Saul of Tarsus grew up knowing this story. We imagine the young boy, knowing well enough how the goyim on the streets of Tarsus behaved, simultaneously repelled and fascinated by the thought of God’s people carrying on like that, and then simultaneously excited and challenged by the thought of Phinehas’s zeal. Sex and violence grab the imagination. When Paul the Apostle describes himself in his earlier life as being consumed with zeal for his ancestral traditions, he was looking back on the Phinehas-shaped motivation of his youth.
Phinehas, though, wasn’t the only role model for “zeal.” The other principal one is found in the books of Kings, and we imagine young Saul devouring those stories as well. After the great days of David and Solomon things had gone from bad to worse. Most of the Israelites had started to worship Baal, a Canaanite fertility god. Like worshipping the Moabite divinities, Baal worship took certain practices for granted: fertility rituals, naturally, and then child sacrifice, the latter perhaps dealing with the results of the former. Step forward the prophet Elijah.6 He lured the Baal worshippers into a contest that Israel’s God won, and he had the whole lot killed. Once again, great zeal and a great victory.
Later traditions couple Elijah with Moses when it comes to prophetic status. But when it comes to “zeal,” as in 1 Maccabees 2, Elijah is coupled with Phinehas. When these later traditions see things that way, they are not simply celebrating ancient memories. They are calling a new generation to meet new challenges. When Paul the Apostle refers to his earlier “zeal,” we catch the echoes of Elijah as well as of Phinehas. And, as we shall see, the Elijah story has its own darker side as well.
Putting Phinehas and Elijah together explains a good deal of the violent zeal to which Paul later confesses. But there was an extra element pushing him in the same direction. Folk memory, kept fresh through the winter festival Hanukkah, celebrated the zealous acts of Judas Maccabaeus (“Judah the Hammer”) two centuries before Saul’s day. The Syrian megalomaniacal king Antiochus Epiphanes (the word “Epiphanes” means “the divine manifestation”) tried to do to the Jewish nation what, as Saul’s father would remind him, the goyim always tried to do—choke the life out of the Jewish people and overthrow once and for all their perverse and antisocial belief in the One God. Only in this way could Antiochus turn the Jews into docile members of his own empire. So, with massively superior military force, he desecrated the Jerusalem Temple itself, establishing pagan worship and customs on the site. What were the Jewish people to do?
Many of them were prepared t
o compromise (just like their ancestors in the wilderness, Saul would have reflected). They went along with the new regime. But one family, like Phinehas, decided to act. The books of the Maccabees tell of zeal for Israel’s God, zeal for God’s Torah, zeal for the purity of Israel, and all of it rooted in the story that stretched back to Abraham and included Phinehas and Elijah among its key moments.7 If this was Israel’s story, this is how a loyal Israelite should now behave when faced with the same problem. Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers went to work, a little revolutionary group against the powerful pagan empire. Against all probability, they succeeded. They beat off the Syrians, reconsecrated the Temple, and established, for a century or so, an independent Jewish state. Zeal worked. It demonstrated utter loyalty to the One God. It brought freedom. And for those who suffered or died in the struggle, a new vision of the future shimmered on the horizon: resurrection. The One God would make a new world, and he would raise his people, particularly his loyal and zealous people, to new bodily life in that new creation.8 Zeal would have its ultimate reward in the kingdom of God, on earth as in heaven.
These stories would have resonated powerfully in Saul’s devout Jewish home. The Jewish communities in Turkey and in many other parts of the Roman Empire lived relatively peacefully alongside their goyische neighbors. But they could never tell when the goyim would try it again or what diabolical means they might find to undermine the covenant loyalty the Jews owed to the One God. They had to be ready. Saul came from a family who knew what that meant. It meant Ioudaïsmos: as we saw, not a “religion” called “Judaism” in the modern Western sense, a system of piety and morality, but the active propagation of the ancestral way of life, defending it against external attacks and internal corruption and urging the traditions of the Torah upon other Jews, especially when they seemed to be compromising.
That was the air breathed by the young Saul, growing up in the early years of the Common Era. The best guess has him a little younger than Jesus of Nazareth; a birth date in the first decade of what we now call the first century is as good as we can get. As for his family, we find later that he has a sister and a nephew living in Jerusalem; there may well have been more relatives there, although Tarsus was probably still the family home. Anyway, it was to Jerusalem that he went, most likely in his teens, his head full of Torah and his heart full of zeal. Shema Yisrael, Adhonai Elohenu, Adhonai Echad. One God, whose never-to-be-spoken Name was replaced in the great prayer by Adhonai, which went into the ubiquitous Greek as Kyrios. One God, One Torah; One Lord, One People, called to utter loyalty. And with that loyalty went the one hope, the Passover hope—freedom, especially freedom from the rule of foreigners. A whole new world, with Israel rescued from danger once and for all. A new creation. A new Eden.
This wasn’t just a dream. This was the right time for it all to happen. We don’t know whether the synagogues in Tarsus would have taught young Saul the hidden secrets inside the prophetic writings, secrets about how he could tell when the One God would act, secrets about how he might even experience the vision of this God for himself, patterns of prayer and meditation through which one might gain a glimpse of the heavenly realities, an advance sight of what was to come one day. It was all there in scripture if one only knew not only where to look, but how to look. There were teachers in Jerusalem who would leave the zealous young student in no doubt about all this. Saul would pick up, either at home or in Jerusalem or both, the increasing excitement as people searched the prophetic writings, particularly the book of Daniel, finding plenty of hints that the time was now ripe and plenty of suggestions as to how they might pray their own way into that future.
Paul’s teacher in Jerusalem would have made sure he was steeped in the ancestral traditions. Gamaliel was one of the greatest rabbis of the period. Under his guidance, Saul would have studied the scriptures themselves, of course, and also the unwritten Torah, the steadily accumulating discussions of finer points that would grow as oral tradition and be codified nearly two hundred years later in the Mishnah. But among the many different interpretations of the Torah at that time, there was a divide that was getting wider and wider and that would result, over the next century, in two radically different beliefs about what loyalty would mean at such a time of crisis. Saul was shaped as a young man by these debates. The side he took was not the side advocated by his great teacher.
Gamaliel, at least as portrayed in Acts, advocated the policy of “live and let live.” If people wanted to follow this man Jesus, they could do so.9 If this new movement was from God, it would prosper; if not, it would fall by its own weight. If the Romans wanted to run the world, so be it. Jews would study and practice the Torah by themselves. This, broadly speaking, had been the teaching of Hillel, a leading rabbi of the previous generation.
But all the signs are that Gamaliel’s bright young pupil from Tarsus wasn’t satisfied with this approach. His “zeal” would have placed him in the opposing school, following Hillel’s rival Shammai, who maintained that if God was going to establish his reign on earth as in heaven, then those who were zealous for God and Torah would have to say their prayers, sharpen their swords, and get ready for action. Action against the wicked pagans; yes, when the time was right. Action against renegade or compromising Jews: yes indeed, that too. Remember Phinehas. Later Jewish traditions insisted that there was a sharp break between the Hillelites and the Shammaites, but that reflects (among other things) the bitter times around the two great crises, the Roman-Jewish war of AD 66–70 and the Bar-Kochba rebellion of AD 132–35, not to mention the tense, uneasy years in between. In Saul’s day it was much more feasible for different views to be debated, for a student to disagree with a teacher. Gamaliel believed in living and letting live. Saul believed in zeal.
I thought of the young Saul of Tarsus in November 1995, when the then prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by a student called Yigal Amir. Rabin had taken part in the Oslo Accords, working out agreements toward peace with the Palestinian leadership. In 1994 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with his political rival Shimon Peres and with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. He also signed a peace treaty with Jordan. All this was too much for hard-line Israelis, who saw his actions as hopelessly compromising national identity and security. The news media described the assassin as a “law student,” but in Europe and America that phrase carries a meaning different from the one it has in Israel today and the one it would have had in the days of Saul of Tarsus. Amir was not studying to be an attorney in a Western-style court. He was a zealous Torah student. His action on November 4, 1995, was, so he claimed at his trial, in accordance with Jewish law. He is still serving his life sentence and has never expressed regret for his actions. The late twentieth century is obviously very different from the early first century, but “zeal” has remained a constant.
As I watched the television broadcasts that November afternoon, my mind shuttled back and forth between modern Jerusalem and the Jerusalem of Saul’s day. In that earlier Jerusalem a young man called Stephen had been stoned to death—illegally, since under Roman rule only the Romans could carry out the death penalty. Saul of Tarsus, a zealous young Torah student, had been there, watching, taking it all in, looking after the coats of the men throwing rocks, who were ceremonially cleansing the city of the poison that Stephen had been uttering.
What was that poison? It had to do with the Temple, which meant it had to do with God himself. The Jerusalem Temple was “the house,” or “the place”: the place where Israel’s God had promised to put his name, his presence, his glory, the place the One God had promised to defend. The place where heaven and earth met, where they were linked, where they enjoyed a glorious though highly dangerous commerce. The place where, a year or two before, a Galilean self-styled prophet not much older than Saul himself had caused a stir with a symbolic demonstration. That had seemed, at the time, to have been intended as a warning of divine judgment: Israel’s God would use the pagan nations to destroy Israel’s most cherished
symbol. By Saul’s reckoning, of course, that was totally out of order. Everybody knew that it would be the other way around, that the One God would judge the wicked pagans and vindicate his people, Israel. In any case, the authorities had caught up with the demonstrating prophet, handed him over to the Roman authorities, and seen him killed in the most shameful way imaginable, making it clear once and for all that he was a blaspheming imposter. Whoever heard of a crucified Messiah?
But now the followers of this Jesus were claiming that he had been raised from the dead. They were talking as if heaven and earth were somehow joined together in him, in this crazy, dangerous, deluded man! They were speaking as if, by comparison with this Jesus, the ancient institutions of Israel were on a lower footing. The Temple itself, Stephen was saying, was only a temporary expedient. God was doing a new thing. And, yes, the present generation was under judgment for rejecting Jesus and his message. Stephen, on trial for his life, made matters worse. “Look!” he shouted. “I can see heaven opened, and the son of man standing at God’s right hand!”10 Heaven and earth open to one another, and this Jesus holding them together in prayer? Blasphemy! The court had heard enough. Stephen was rushed out of the city and crushed to death under a hail of rocks. Saul approved. This was the kind of action the Torah required. This was what “zeal” was supposed to look like.
From that moment, the young man saw what had to be done. Several of the Jesus-followers had left Jerusalem in a hurry after Stephen’s death, frightened of more violence, but they had continued to spread the poison. Wherever they went, they established groups, little revolutionary cells, and propagated this new teaching, putting Jesus in the center of the picture and displacing the ancient Israelite symbols, up to and including the Temple itself. From Saul’s point of view, if the compromisers in the old biblical stories had been bad, this was worse. This could set back the coming kingdom. This could call down further divine wrath upon Israel.