Not in God's Name
Page 20
The argument of this chapter is that the Bible addresses this issue directly and with great originality. It does so in Genesis 6–11, by way of two famous stories: the Flood and the Tower of Babel.
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The Bible is explicit about the failings of the generation of the Flood. The people were wicked, violent, and ‘every inclination of the thoughts of their heart was only evil all the time’ (Gen. 6:5). This is the language of systemic moral failure.
The mood at the beginning of the story of Babel seems, by contrast, almost idyllic. ‘The entire earth had one language and a common speech’ (11:1). Unity seems to prevail. The builders are intent on construction, not destruction. It is far from clear what their sin was. Yet from the Bible’s point of view Babel represents another serious wrong turn, because immediately thereafter God summons Abraham to begin an entirely new chapter in the religious story of humankind.
In fact, the stories of the Flood and Babel are precisely matched accounts of the two great alternatives: identity without universality and universality without identity. The best account of the Flood, though he does not refer to it explicitly, was given by the man who laid the foundations of modern politics, Thomas Hobbes, in his classic Leviathan (1651). Before there were political institutions, said Hobbes, human beings were in a ‘state of nature’. They were individuals or small groups. Lacking a stable ruler, an effective government and enforceable laws, people were in a state of permanent and violent chaos – ‘a war of every man against every man’ – as they competed for scarce resources. There was ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death’. That is precisely the Bible’s description of life before the Flood. When there is no overarching rule of law, the world is filled with violence.
The story of Babel explores the opposite reality. It has usually been misunderstood. The conventional reading is that it is an etiological tale explaining how humankind, which originally had ‘one language and a common speech’, came to be divided into many languages. This reading is plausible but wrong. The reason is that the previous chapter, Genesis 10, has already described the division of humanity into seventy nations, ‘each with its own language’ (Gen. 10:5). The only way the conventional reading makes sense is if Genesis 10 and 11 are not in the correct chronological sequence.2 There is, though, no reason to suppose this at all.
To the contrary, the unity of language at the beginning of chapter 11 was not natural but imposed. It is describing the practice of the world’s first empires. We have historical evidence dating back to the neo-Assyrians that conquerors imposed their own language on the peoples they defeated. One inscription of the time records that Ashurbanipal II ‘made the totality of all peoples speak one speech’. A cylinder inscription of Sargon II says, ‘Populations of the four quarters of the world with strange tongues and incompatible speech…whom I had taken as booty at the command of Ashur my lord by the might of my sceptre, I caused to accept a single voice.’3 The neo-Assyrians asserted their supremacy by insisting that their language was the only one to be used by the nations and populations they had defeated. Babel is a critique of imperialism.
There is even a subtle hint of this in the parallelism of language between the builders of Babel and the Pharaoh who enslaved the Israelites. In Babel they said, ‘Come, [hava] let us build ourselves a city and a tower…lest [pen] we be scattered over the face of the earth’ (Gen. 11:4). In Egypt Pharaoh said, ‘Come, [hava] let us deal wisely with them, lest [pen] they increase…’ (Exod. 1:10). These are the only places in the entire Hebrew Bible where the locution ‘Come, let us…lest’ occurs. The connection is too pronounced to be accidental. Babel, like Egypt, represents an empire that subjugates entire populations at the cost of their distinct identities and liberties. If the Flood is about freedom without order, Babel and Egypt are about order without freedom.
The story the Bible is telling is this: Genesis 10 describes the division of humanity into seventy nations and seventy languages. Genesis 11 tells of how one imperial power conquered smaller nations, imposing its language and culture on them, thus directly contravening God’s wish that humans should respect the integrity of each nation and each individual. When at the end of the Babel story God ‘confuses the language’ of the builders, he is not creating a new state of affairs but restoring the old.
Interpreted thus, the stories of the Flood and the Tower of Babel are not just historical narratives. Together they constitute a philosophical statement about identity and violence. The Flood is what happens when there are Us and Them and no overarching law to keep the peace. The result is anarchy and violence. Babel is what happens when people attempt to impose a universal order, forcing Them to become Us. The result is imperialism and the loss of liberty. Recall Samuel Huntington’s words at the heading of this chapter: ‘Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous…Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism.’ When a single culture is imposed on all, suppressing the diversity of languages and traditions, this is an assault on our God-given differences. As the Qur’an (49:13) puts it, ‘O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise each other).’
So the Flood and the Tower of Babel between them define the fundamental human dilemma. We are different. We are tribal. And tribes clash. The result is the violence that, in the Flood, almost destroyed humankind. But eliminate difference by imposing a single culture, religious or secular, on all, and the result is tyranny and oppression. The Hebrew Bible is a unique attempt to find a way out of the dilemma by showing how the unity of God can co-exist with the diversity of humankind.
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Diversity is what gives colour and texture to our life on earth. Art, architecture, music, stories, celebrations, food, drink, dance: all of these are particular. None of them is an abstract universal. The late Sidney Morganbesser was a philosophy professor at Columbia University with a wonderful sense of humour. (Shortly before dying, he asked another philosopher, ‘Why is God making me suffer so much? – Just because I don’t believe in him?’) He once took his students to a restaurant and ordered soup. ‘Which soup,’ asked the waiter, ‘chicken, carrot or borsht?’ ‘None of those,’ he replied, ‘just soup.’ The waiter, not being a philosopher, gave up. Morganbesser’s point is that you can’t drink soup in the abstract, you can’t speak a language that is universal, and you can’t have an identity that says, ‘I’m just a human being.’ Some ancient Greeks thought that, but that was because they did not regard non-Greeks as fully human. Identity is plural. That constitutes the inescapable diversity of humankind.
How then do we avoid the violence that comes when different groups meet and clash? The answer proposed by the Bible is that something transcends our differences. That something is God, and he has set his image on each of us. That is why every life is sacred and each life is like a universe. The unity of God asks us to respect the stranger, the outsider, the alien, because even though he or she is not in our image – their ethnicity, faith or culture is not ours – nonetheless they are in God’s image.
So God is universal. But our relationship with him is particular. The Hebrew Bible expresses this in the two primary words by which it refers to God: Elokim (E) and Hashem (called by Bible scholars J). Elokim is God in his universality. In Genesis, Elokim speaks to Abimelech, king of Gerar (Gen. 20:3). Joseph, declining the advances of Potiphar’s wife, says, ‘Should I sin against Elokim?’ (39:9). Pharaoh, appointing Joseph, says, ‘Can we find anyone like this man, one in whom is the spirit of Elokim?’ (41:38). Morality in general is described as ‘fear of Elokim’ (20:11). Elokim is a purely universal term that applies to people’s relationship with God, whether they are inside or outside the covenant with Abraham.
Hashem, by contrast, is particular. It is what God is called in the context of the Abrahamic and later Mosaic covenant. It is a proper name, not a gen
eric noun. It is the language of intimacy and relationship. When the Bible wants to describe what Martin Buber called an I–Thou relationship, it uses the word Hashem.
That is why Genesis describes two covenants, the first with Noah and all humankind, the second with Abraham and his children, who are not all humankind, just one particular people within it. The covenant with Noah (Gen. 9) uses the word Elokim throughout, while the covenant with Abraham uses the word Hashem (15:18; 17:1–2). The Noah covenant expresses the unity of God and the shared dignity and responsibility of humankind. The Abrahamic covenant expresses the particularity of our relationship with God, which has to do with our specific identity, history, language and literature. The result is that in the Bible there is both a morality that applies to everyone, insider and outsider alike, and an ethic, that is, a specific code of conduct that frames relationships within the group. To use the language of contemporary philosophy, morality is thin (abstract, general) while ethics is thick (full of local texture and specificity).
The morality that applies to everyone, according to the Hebrew Bible, is justice, fairness and the avoidance of causing harm. That was the first thing Abraham was to teach his children: ‘to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just’. Justice, fairness and the avoidance of harm are what we owe everyone, Jew and Gentile, believer and atheist, friend and stranger, fellow countryman and foreigner.
The ethic that applies within the covenantal community involves thicker concepts such as sanctity, reverence, loyalty and respect. It is an ethic of the holy, not just the good. It is also an ethic of what the French revolutionaries called fraternity. The Bible often says things like, ‘If your brother is destitute…’ It applies the language of kin to the group. The Abrahamic covenant is not just a kinship group. It is not a matter of biological descent only. There is conversion. Ruth, heroine of the book that bears her name, was not ethnically Jewish. She was a Moabite. But she became part of the covenant community and great-grandmother of David, Israel’s greatest king. So when the Bible uses the language of family it does so metaphorically. But it is a strong metaphor. Jews feel responsible for one another as if they were a single extended family.
So the Hebrew Bible combines the two fundamentally different elements of the moral/ethical life. There is justice, and there is love. Justice is universal. Love is particular. Justice must be detached, impartial, applied equally to all. Love plays no part in it. If I decide in favour of the plaintiff because he is a family member or a friend, that is not justice but the perversion of justice. Love, on the other hand, is utterly particular. Read the wonderful biblical duet The Song of Songs, and you will hear how lover and beloved talk endlessly about what they find beautiful in the other: hair, neck, forehead, feet. There is nothing universal here at all. It is about what Wallace Stevens called ‘the particulars of rapture’. It follows that Elokim, God as universal, is God-as-justice. Hashem, God as particular, is God-as-love.
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We can now understand why, after Babel and the attempt to impose by force a single language on a diverse population, God chooses Abraham and tells him to leave home and travel to a place where he will be a stranger and outsider: different. Noah and his covenant represent universality and justice. Abraham and his descendants represent particularity and love.
The Noah covenant is the Bible’s universal code, the basic infrastructure of a just social order. The Noahide laws, as understood by Judaism’s sages, set out the broad parameters of a decent society: respect for God, human life, the family, property, animal welfare and the rule of law.4 These principles are general, not specific: thin, not thick. They apply to everyone in virtue of the fact that they are in the image of God, therefore worthy of dignity and respect. They are universal rules of what today we would call responsibilities and rights.
But they apply to what we have in common, not what makes us different. So the Bible moves on from the universal to the particular – the narrative of Abraham and Sarah and the children of Israel as they journey through time and space to the Promised Land. This is a story of what it is to live closely and continuously under the sovereignty and tutelage of God. It is a story not of justice only, but also and essentially of love.
There is no implication that Abraham’s or the Israelites’ is the only story. To the contrary, as Amos 9:7 says: ‘Are not you Israelites the same to me as the Cushites? – declares the Lord – Did I not bring Israel up from Egypt, the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Arameans from Kir?’ God is active in the history of other nations. He sends a prophet, Jonah, to Israel’s enemy, Assyria, to persuade them to repent and be saved from catastrophe. Isaiah even foresees a day when God will do for Israel’s other great enemy, Egypt, what he did for the Israelites against Egypt itself – rescue them from oppression:
In that day there will be an altar to the Lord in the heart of Egypt…When they cry out to the Lord because of their oppressors, he will send them a savior and mighty one, and he will rescue them. So the Lord will make Himself known to the Egyptians…In that day there will be an altar in the midst of the land of Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will go to Egypt and the Egyptians to Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together. In that day Israel will be the third, along with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing on the earth. The Lord of hosts will bless them, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my inheritance.’ (Isa. 19:19–25)
Nor is there any intimation in the Bible that Abraham’s family have a monopoly of virtue. One of the heroines of the Exodus, without whom there would have been no Moses, was Pharaoh’s daughter. Rahab, who shelters Joshua’s spies, is a prostitute from Jericho (Josh. 2). Jael, the heroine who saves Israel from Sisera, is a Kenite (Judg. 4). Uriah, whose faithfulness to David contrasts so sharply with David’s faithlessness to him, is a Hittite (2 Sam. 11). Job, the Bible’s most conspicuous example of a wholly righteous man, is not an Israelite.
Moses repeatedly criticises the Israelites, telling them, ‘It is not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart that you are going to take possession of the land’ (Deut. 9:5). This note is sustained to the end of the prophetic age. Malachi, last of the prophets, says, ‘From the rising of the sun to its setting, my name is great among the nations…but you profane it’ (Mal. 1:11–12).
This is a point of immense consequence. A chosen people is the opposite of a master race, first, because it is not a race but a covenant; second, because it exists to serve God, not to master others.5 A master race worships itself; a chosen people worships something beyond itself. A master race values power; a chosen people cares for the powerless. A master race believes it has rights; a chosen people knows only that it has responsibilities. The key virtues of a master race are pride, honour and fame. The key virtue of a chosen people is humility. A master race produces monumental buildings, triumphal inscriptions and a literature of self-congratulation. Israel, to a degree unique in history, produced a literature of almost uninterrupted self-criticism.
Why then Isaac, not Ishmael? Why Jacob, not Esau? Because Ishmael and Esau are strong, resourceful people who survive by their own skill and dexterity. The people of the covenant are to be witnesses in themselves to something beyond themselves. Isaac and Jacob are not strong. They are favoured by their mothers, not their fathers. They are the younger, not the elder. The patriarchs are given two blessings by God: they will have many children and a land. Yet Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel are all infertile. The patriarchs never acquire the land. Abraham has to beg for permission to buy a cave in which to bury his wife. Isaac is threatened by the local population when he reopens his father’s wells. Jacob has to pay a hundred pieces of silver to buy land on which to pitch his tent.
Moses, the man of God’s word, is the one who says, ‘I am not a man of words…I am slow of speech and tongue’ (Exod. 4:10). Israel was to be the people whose strength is not its own, as Moses was the man whose words were not his own. It was to become the people whose existenc
e ran contrary to nature. It was small. Its land, a strategic location between empires, would always be vulnerable to conquest. Unlike the Nile delta or the Tigris-Euphrates valley, it had no natural water supply and would be constantly dependent on rain. Its people would find themselves looking up to the sky rather than down to the earth. It preserved in its collective memory no sense of being at home as of right (‘You are merely strangers and temporary residents with me’, Lev. 25:23). The children of Israel would always be dependent on forces beyond themselves. A chosen people is not a master race but its opposite: a servant community. That is why Jewry has always been attacked by – because its existence is an affront to – those who see themselves as a master race, an imperial power, or sole guardians of God’s truth.
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We now understand the powerful idea implicit in the structuring of the Genesis narrative. It begins with universal archetypes – Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, the Flood, the covenant with Noah and the critique of Babel – and only then turns to the particularity of the Abrahamic covenant to tell us that our common humanity precedes our religious differences. Any religion that dehumanises others merely because their faith is different has misunderstood the God of Abraham.
Jews became the test-case of this truth. They were different: monotheists in a pagan age, then non-Christians in a Christian Europe. Today they are the most conspicuous non-Muslims in an Islamic Middle East. The fate of Jewry through the ages has been the clearest indicator of whether a culture, faith or empire has been willing to accord dignity or rights to the one-who-is-not-like-them. The story that tells of how God bestowed his love on the weak, the few, the vulnerable and the different is what makes the Hebrew Bible the great narrative of hope in Western civilisation.