The Gifts of the Jews

by Thomas Cahill

  Isaiah’s first prophecies have all the well-wrought balance of literature:

  My beloved had a vineyard

  on a fertile hillside.

  He dug it, cleared it of stones,

  and planted it with red grapes.

  In the middle he built a tower,

  he hewed a press there too.

  He expected it to yield fine grapes:

  wild grapes were all it yielded.

  “And now, citizens of Jerusalem and people of Judah,

  I ask you to judge between me and my vineyard.

  What more could I have done for my vineyard

  that I have not done?

  Why, when I expected it to yield fine grapes,

  has it yielded wild ones?

  “Very well, I shall tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard:

  I shall take away its hedge, for it to be grazed on,

  and knock down its wall, for it to be trampled on.

  I shall let it go to waste, unpruned, undug,

  overgrown by brambles and thorn-bushes,

  and I shall command the clouds to rain no rain on it.”

  Now, the vineyard of YHWH Sabaoth is the House of Israel,

  and the people of Judah the plant he cherished.

  He expected fair judgment, but found injustice,

  uprightness, but found cries of distress.

  If the mild young prophet’s first utterances are a little erudite and indirect, he soon learns to put his literary gift at the service of a stark message, cursing the uncaring people of Judah, “who call what is bad, good, and what is good, bad, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness.” Like Amos, he rails against their injustice toward the poor and vulnerable and against their religious hypocrisy, but he does it with unmistakable style. There are probably more well-known quotations from Isaiah than from any other book of the Hebrew Bible except the Psalms: “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib.… Come now, let us reason together … though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.… They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.… What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor? … the bread of adversity and the water of affliction.”

  As Amos and Hosea had threatened Israel, Isaiah threatens the dreadful Day of YHWH upon Judah, but his promise of a remnant to be saved is imbued with poetic power that they could never have matched:

  The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light:

  they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.…

  For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given:

  and the government shall be upon his shoulder:

  and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God,

  The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

  And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse,

  and a Branch shall grow out of his roots:

  And the spirit of YHWH shall rest upon him,

  the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

  the spirit of counsel and might,

  the spirit of knowledge and of fear of YHWH.

  But before these decidedly messianic prophecies can come to pass, the Day of YHWH must be endured, after which the Jews will stop relying on tyrants:

  the remnant of Israel and the survivors of the House of Yaakov

  will stop relying on the man who strikes them

  and will truly rely on YHWH,

  the Holy One of Israel.

  A remnant will return, the remnant of Yaakov,

  to the mighty God.

  Israel, though your people are like the sand of the sea,

  only a remnant of them will return.

  At last, the Peaceable Kingdom shall be theirs:

  The wolf … shall dwell with the lamb,

  and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;

  and the calf and the young lion and the fading together;

  and a little child shall lead them.…

  They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain:

  for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD,

  as the waters cover the sea.

  Though Isaiah’s oracles will be preserved by his followers, they fall on deaf ears, as had the prophecies of Amos and Hosea. Isaiah’s contemporaries are neither terrified nor thrilled by the condemnations and comforts he offers them. Though Judah has the good fortune to see two reforming monarchs—Hezekiah and Josiah—ascend the throne in a hundred-year period, it also has the misfortune to be governed by two of the worst of all the Davidic dynasty, Ahaz and Manasseh. Isaiah was an adviser to Hezekiah (715–687) and, according to legend, was sawn in two by Manasseh (687–642).

  The reforming monarchs attempted to cleanse the cult of YHWH from odious Canaanite admixtures, permitting worship of the only God only in the Temple and demolishing the old sanctuaries and high places, long-tolerated venues for a syncretistic practice of Canaanite paganism and the religion of YHWH. But Ahaz and Manasseh not only tolerated the Canaanite gods but went further than any of the earlier kings of Israel and Judah (except perhaps Ahab) by offering children to Moloch, the horrible child-devouring god whose cult was practiced in the smoke-filled Valley of Hinnom2 south of Jerusalem, where perpetual fires were stoked by ash-streaked priests, always ready to throw a fresh and quivering victim into the flames.

  The prophet Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah’s, makes reference to this charred horror when he imagines an idle devotee asking himself how best to worship God: should he sacrifice his own child so that his petition may be answered to his satisfaction?

  “Wherewith shall I come before the LORD,

  and bow myself before the high God?

  shall I come before him with burnt offerings,

  with calves of a year old?

  “Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,

  or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?

  shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,

  the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

  Micah abhors such musings, which draw on this mixed tradition of Canaanite and Israelite religions but miss the point of everything:

  He has already shown you what is right:

  and what does the LORD require of you,

  but to do justice,

  love mercy,

  and walk humbly with your God?

  For the prophets, there is a profound link between idol worship and injustice. Baal and Astarte and Moloch are the gods of human desires: they can bestow power and riches, prestige and victory, and can be wheedled into doing so by some rigmarole or other, some offering. But our God is the God of heaven and earth, who has told us that the only acceptable offering is justice like his justice: to treat others fairly and compassionately and never to stoop to the cruelty that these quid pro quo transactions can entail—things as hideous as the sacrifice of children. The religion of YHWH has come a long way from the Binding of Yitzhak; and it is corning close to establishing a new axiom by dividing the population in two: the rich are the idolators and sacrificers of children, the poor are the righteous. But the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah can only delay, not turn aside, the Day of YHWH, made inevitable by the chronic apostasy of the Judean remnant of the Chosen People and by the painful inequalities in their society, growing ever more acute since the days of Solomon.

  In the second half of the seventh century, during the reign of Josiah, when the Books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings were set down, there rose Jeremiah, the prophet of God’s judgment, who, speaking on behalf of YHWH, might well be called the prophet of the last chance: “ ‘Amend your behavior and your actions and I will let you stay in this place. Do not put your faith in delusive words, such as: “This is YHWH’S sanctuary, YHWH’S sanctuary, YHWH’S sanctuary!” But if you really amen
d your behavior and your actions, if you really treat one another fairly, if you do not exploit the stranger, the orphan and the widow, if you do not shed innocent blood in this place and if you do not follow other gods, to your own ruin, then I shall let you stay in this place, in the country I gave for ever to your ancestors of old.’ ”

  In Judah it was long believed that the promises made to David concerning eternal Jerusalem and the presence of YHWH above the ark in his Temple would shield Judah—unlike the northern kingdom—from ultimate catastrophe. Jeremiah predicts the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple and the departure of YHWH. He is very precise about what will happen: Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, which has now eclipsed Assyria in the power politics of Mesopotamia, will descend with all his forces on the people of Judah, leveling their city and Temple and reducing “the whole country to ruin and desolation.” Seventy years of enslavement in Babylon will follow.

  This is exactly what does happen, but not before Jeremiah is imprisoned as a traitor for speaking against the state. When he is “liberated” by Nebuchadnezzar’s men after they have taken the city, they assume he is on their side and allow him to choose between exile in Babylon with the rest of the Judean upper crust or remaining behind with the scattered Judean peasants. Jeremiah chooses to remain. Jerusalem is torched, its walls leveled, its Temple pulled down, the ark lost forever, YHWH vanished. Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, is made to witness the execution of his sons, the last thing he will ever see. Following the carnage, his eyes are put out and he is taken in chains to Babylon, where he will die. Jeremiah will die in Egypt, after having been forced there by well-intentioned friends.

  Nevertheless, as Jeremiah prophesied in God’s words:

  “Watch, I shall bring them back

  from the land of the north

  and gather them in from the ends of the earth.”

  God’s people will no longer be the proud nobles of Israel and Judah but the marginalized and powerless—the blind, the lame, and the pregnant:

  “With them, the blind and the lame,

  women with child, women in labor,

  all together: a mighty throng will return here!

  In tears they will return,

  in prayer I shall lead them.

  I shall guide them to streams of water,

  by a smooth path where they will not stumble.

  “Set up your signposts,

  raise yourself landmarks,

  fix your mind on the road,

  the way by which you went.

  Come home, Virgin of Israel,

  come home to these towns of yours.

  How long will you hesitate,

  rebellious daughter?

  For YHWH is creating something new on earth:

  the Woman sets out to find her Husband again.”

  Is this what it will take for the faithless bride to turn to her husband? Gone is the city and the Temple, gone everything that gave the Jews (for that is who they now are) their false security. Is God gone, too, or is he in this terrible exile in pagan Babylon teaching them something new—“creating something new on earth”?

  By the rivers of Babylon

  we sat and wept,

  when we remembered Zion.

  They sat by the Euphrates and Tigris, the very rivers where their story began, sat and wept and meditated on their fate. The prophets, they now knew, had told the truth, had been the spokesmen for God—and it is at this point that prophecy, which had always meant divine inspiration, comes to mean prediction: the true prophet is the one who sees the future implicit in the present; and his authenticity is confirmed when his prophecy comes true. God did not want their sacrifices, their national shrines, their outward show. He was not interested in guaranteeing their political power: he had shown them most painfully that this was of no interest to him. What on earth was this about?

  To appreciate how unprepared the Jews were to pursue this line of thinking, one must take a quick look around the ancient world of the early sixth century. Religion then was about sacrifice. All peoples placated their gods in public temples, associated with kingship. The identity of god-king-priests-people was visible and unmistakable. There was no other way. If their God had destroyed their identity, what more could he possibly want from them? It was in the midst of this conundrum that the unheeded words of the prophets came back to them. God wanted something other than blood and smoke, buildings and citadels. He wanted justice, mercy, humility. He wanted what was invisible. He wanted their hearts—not the outside, but the inside.

  There is no way of exaggerating how strange a thought this was. The Jews thought as did all other ancient peoples—of houses and fields, flocks and herds, gold and silver. The word which falls so easily from our lips—spiritual—had no ready counterpart in the ancient world. YHWH was spirit, of course, and completely unlike other gods because he was invisible and could not be represented in art. But this was precisely what had always given his people so much trouble, and they longed to depict him as other gods were depicted by their people. The closest they could come to imagining spirit was mach—wind, breath—the only invisible thing that was real, real because you could see its effects. Ruach YHWH sometimes descended on leaders, prophets, priests, and kings, for the sake of directing the people. But the people? The people had no ruach, God did not descend on them.

  But men and women had the breath of life, which when they died escaped their bodies as mysteriously as YHWH had abandoned his Temple. There was in every human being an “inside,” which the Jews had never steadily adverted to before. Could God possibly mean that each of them was to be a king, a prophet, a priest in his own right? Was this what God had meant when he said at Sinai that he would make them “a kingdom of priests, a holy nation”? Would he make them a nation of the spirit, a nation without the trappings of a nation? It was to this “inside” realm that the prophet Ezekiel, who accompanied the people into exile, was referring when he said in God’s name of the coming restoration: “I shall give them a single heart and I shall put a new spirit in them; I shall remove the heart of stone from their bodies and give them a heart of flesh.” Could it be that this inside—where “the still, small voice” that spoke to Elijah resided—was the real Temple of God? The ark was lost and the Tablets of the Testimony were gone, but had not God promised through the words of Jeremiah yet a new covenant in which his Law would be written “on their hearts”? And when God told them, also through Jeremiah, to “fix your mind on the road,” was he speaking of a journey of the spirit?

  Those who first thought these thoughts must have felt that a great thunderclap had shaken them to their roots. They could now look back over the whole of their history—from the call of Avraham to journey into the wilderness, to the call of Moshe to lead the people from slavery to freedom, to the anointing of David, the king who sang “I,” to the prophets who warned them that nothing they had yet done was enough for God—they could look back and see that God had been leading them all along, from one insight to another, and telling them a story, “something new on earth,” the story of themselves.

  Little is known about the Jews in their exile. The biblical authors are as loathe to describe Babylon as they were to describe Sumer and Egypt. But in the course of their sojourns in various corners of the ancient world, some Jewish refugees, relying on the trading skills they had developed during the monarchy, made new fortunes and became reluctant to leave their new homes. The period of exile, therefore, marks the beginning of the Jewish diaspora, a period that has never yet come to an end. When the Babylonians are defeated by the Persians, the Persian king Cyrus issues an edict—in 538, almost exactly seventy years after the prophecy of Jeremiah—allowing the Jews to depart. A small group return to their ancestral home, and more will follow in the years to come.

  The people who return to Zion are not the people who were taken away many years before. A new generation, more cosmopolitan in outlook, coming from many of the cultural centers of the ancient world, they arrive to ek
e out a difficult existence in a land that had been laid waste. They also arrive with books, books that accompanied them into exile and books written while in exile. During the exile or soon after the return, the Torah reached its final form, entwining the oral literatures of Judah and Israel with the concerns of contemporary priests and scribes who, in a time that was out of joint, needed to emphasize continuity and security, which they did through the elaboration of ritual prescriptions, laws, and genealogies, adding all these to the final text.

  But the lightning of the prophets and the trauma of the exile must also be absorbed. Sowing their devastated land, replanting their ruined vineyards, the people of the remnant wonder what Jeremiah meant when he said: “Look, the days are coming, YHWH declares, when I shall sow the House of Israel and the House of Judah with the seed both of people and of cattle. And as I once watched over them to uproot, to knock down, to overthrow, destroy and bring disaster, so now I shall watch over them to build and to plant, YHWH declares. In those days people will no longer say: ‘The fathers have eaten unripe grapes; the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ But each will die for his own guilt. Everyone who eats unripe grapes will have his own teeth set on edge.” The metaphor of the sour grapes: it means, of course, what it says—that each will be responsible for his own sin. No more retribution generation upon generation. The individual is responsible, not the tribe. As with the spiritualization of the journey and of religious obligation, the idea of the individual—the single spirit—begins to take hold, an idea that makes its way with great difficulty into this world of groups, tribes, and nations, in which all identity and validation comes only from solidarity with a larger entity.

  A new literature begins to emerge. Some of it, borrowing from the literatures the Jews came to know in exile, is more like the worldly “wisdom” literature of the rest of the ancient world than like the Torah and the Prophets; and in the later books of the Bible like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes we sometimes encounter a cynicism that Gilgamesh would have been comfortable with but that would have appalled Moshe and disgusted Amos. But the cultural distance that the Jews have achieved from their own ancient literature also enables them to read it with more penetrating insight. Reflecting on the Psalms and prophecies and only now beginning to understand them, they finally pose the unasked question: why must the just man suffer? For if sin and retribution are upon the individual, what is the meaning of unmerited suffering? In the figure of Job, the good man who suffers without sin, they pose their question. But the question has no answer, only: “The LORD gives and the LORD takes away: Blessed be the Name of the LORD.” They have reached that mysterious core of human life where one heart in pain speaks to another—and the other can respond in sympathy but without an answer. If there is a reason, it is a reason beyond reason.