The patron of the new regime was the Yellow Emperor. All empires need theater and pageantry, and the Han rituals gave a new twist to the ancient Shang complex of sacrifice, hunting, and warfare.120 In autumn, the season for military campaigning, the emperor held a ceremonial hunt in the royal parks, which teemed with every kind of animal, to provide meat for the temple sacrifice. A few weeks later there were military reviews in the capital to show off the skills of elite troops and help maintain the martial competence of the min, who manned the imperial armies. At the end of winter there were hunting contests in the parks. These rituals, designed to impress visiting dignitaries, all recalled the Yellow Emperor and his animal troops. Men and animals fought as equal combatants, just as they had at the beginning of time before the sage kings separated them. There were football matches in which players kicked the ball from one side of the field to the other, to reproduce the alternation of yin and yang in the seasonal cycle. “Kickball deals with the power of circumstances in the military. It is a means to train warriors and recognize who have talent,” explained the historian Liu Xiang (77–6 BCE). “It is said that it was created by the Yellow Emperor.”121 Like the Yellow Emperor, Han rulers would use religious rituals in an attempt to take the bestial savagery out of warfare so that it became humane.
At the start of his reign, Liu Bang had commissioned the Confucian ritualists (ru) to devise a court ceremonial, and when it was performed for the first time, the emperor exclaimed: “Now I realize the nobility of being a Son of Heaven!”122 The ru slowly gained ground at court, and as the memory of the Qin trauma faded, there was a growing desire for more solid moral guidance.123 In 136 BCE the court scholar Dong Zhongshu (179–104) suggested to Emperor Wu (r. 140–87) that there were too many competing schools and recommended that the six classical Confucian texts become the official state teaching. The emperor agreed: Confucianism supported the family; its emphasis on cultural history would forge a cultural identity; and state education would create an elite class that could counter the enduring appeal of the old aristocracy. But Wu did not make the mistake of the First Emperor. In the Chinese Empire there would be no sectarian intolerance: the Chinese would continue to see merit in all the schools that could supplement one another. Thus, however diametrically opposed the two schools might be, there would be a Legalist-Confucian coalition: the state still needed Legalist pragmatism, but the ru would temper Fajia despotism.
In 124 BCE Wu founded the Imperial Academy, and for over two thousand years all Chinese state officials would be trained in a predominantly Confucian ideology, which presented the rulers as Sons of Heaven governing by moral charisma. This gave the regime spiritual legitimacy and became the ethos of the civil administration. Like all agrarian rulers, however, the Han controlled their empire by systemic and martial violence, exploiting the peasantry, killing rebels, and conquering new territory. The emperors depended on the army (wu), and in the newly conquered territories the magistrates summarily expropriated the land, deposed existing landlords, and seized between 50 and 100 percent of the peasants’ surplus. Like any premodern ruler, the emperor had to maintain himself in a state of exception as the “one man” to whom ordinary rules did not apply. At a moment’s notice, therefore, he could order an execution, and nobody dared object. Such irrational and spontaneous acts of violence were an essential part of the mystique that held his subjects in thrall.124
Thus while the ruler and the military lived by the “extraordinary,” the Confucians promoted the predictable, routinized orthodoxy of wen, the civil order based on benevolence (ren), culture, and rational persuasion. They performed the invaluable task of convincing the public that the emperor really had their interests at heart. They were not mere lackeys—many of the ru were executed for reminding the emperor too forcibly of his moral duty—but their power was limited. When Dong Zhongshu objected that the imperial usurpation of land caused immense misery, Emperor Wu seemed to agree, but ultimately Dong had to compromise, settling for a moderate limitation of land tenure.125 The fact was that while the administrators and bureaucrats championed Confucianism, the rulers themselves preferred the Legalists, who despised the Confucians as impractical idealists; in their view, King Zhao of Qin had said it all: “The ru are no use in running a state.”
In 81 BCE, in a series of debates about the monopoly of salt and iron, the Legalists argued that the uncontrolled, private “free enterprise” advocated by the ru was wholly impractical.126 The Confucians were nothing but a bunch of impoverished losers:
See them now present us with nothing and consider it substance, with “emptiness” and call it plenty! In their coarse gowns and cheap sandals they walk gravely along, sunk in meditation as though they had lost something. These are not men who can do great deeds and win fame. They do not even rise above the vulgar masses.127
The ru could therefore only bear witness to an alternative society. The word ru is related etymologically to ruo (“mild”), but some modern scholars argue that it meant “weakling” and was first used in the sixth century to describe the impoverished shi who had eked out a meager living by teaching.128 In imperial China, Confucians were political “softies,” economically and institutionally weak.129 They could keep the benevolent Confucian alternative alive and make it a presence in the heart of government, but they would always lack the “teeth” to push their policies through.
That was the Confucian dilemma—similar to the impasse that Ashoka had encountered on the Indian subcontinent. Empire depended on force and intimidation, because the aristocrats and the masses had to be held in check. Even if he had wanted to, Emperor Wu could not afford to rule entirely by ren. The Chinese Empire had been achieved by warfare, wholesale slaughter, and the annihilation of one state after another; it retained its power by military expansion and internal oppression and developed religious mythologies and rituals to sacralize these arrangements. Was there a realistic alternative? The Warring States period had shown what happened when ambitious rulers with new weapons and large armies competed against one another pitilessly for dominance, devastating the countryside and terrorizing the population in the process. Contemplating this chronic warfare, Mencius had longed for a king who would rule “all under Heaven” and bring peace to the great plain of China. The ruler who had been powerful enough to achieve this was the First Emperor.
a In this chapter, I have used the Pinyin method of Romanizing the Chinese script; I have given the Wade-Giles version as an alternative in cases when this form may be more familiar to a Western audience.
b Tao Te Ching in the Wade-Giles system.
4
The Hebrew Dilemma
When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they probably did not fall into a state of original sin, as Saint Augustine believed, but into an agrarian economy.1 Man (adam) had been created from the soil (adamah), which in the Garden of Eden was watered by a simple spring. Adam and his wife were free agents, living a life of idyllic liberty, cultivating the garden at their leisure, and enjoying the companionship of their god, Yahweh. But because of a single act of disobedience, Yahweh condemned them both to a life sentence of hard agricultural labor:
Accursed be the soil because of you! With suffering shall you get your food from it every day of your life. It shall yield you brambles and thistles, and you shall eat wild plants. With sweat on your brow shall you eat your bread, until you return to the soil as you were taken from it. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.2
Instead of peacefully nurturing the soil as its master, Adam had become its slave. From the very beginning, the Hebrew Bible strikes a different note from most of the texts we have considered so far. Its heroes were not members of an aristocratic elite; Adam and Eve had been relegated to mere field hands, scratching a miserable subsistence from the blighted land.
Adam had two sons: Cain, the farmer, and Abel, the herdsman—the traditional enemy of the agrarian state. Both dutifully brought offerings to Yahweh, who somewhat perversely rejected Ca
in’s sacrifice but accepted Abel’s. Baffled and furious, Cain lured his brother into the family plot and killed him, his arable land becoming a field of blood that cried out to Yahweh for vengeance. “Damned be you from the soil, which opened up its mouth to receive your brother’s blood!”3 Yahweh cried. Henceforth Cain would wander in the land of Nod as an outcast and fugitive. From the start, the Hebrew Bible condemns the violence at the heart of the agrarian state. It is Cain, the first murderer, who builds the world’s first city, and one of his descendants is Tubal the Smith (Kayin), “ancestor of all metal-workers in bronze and iron,” who crafts its weapons.4 Immediately after the murder, when Yahweh asks Cain, “Where is your brother, Abel?” he replies, “Am I my brother’s guardian?”5 Urban civilization denied that relationship with and responsibility for all other human beings that is embedded in human nature.
The Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, did not reach its final form until about the fourth century BCE. For the historians, poets, prophets, priests, and lawyers of Israel, it became the organizing narrative around which they constructed their worldview. Over the centuries, they would change that story and embroider it, adding or reinterpreting events in order to address the particular challenges of their own time. This story began in about 1750 BCE, when Yahweh commanded Abraham, Israel’s ancestor, to turn his back on the agrarian society and culture of Mesopotamia and settle in Canaan, where he, his son Isaac, and his grandson Jacob would live as simple herdsmen. Yahweh promised that their descendants would one day possess this land and become a nation as numerous as the sands on the seashore.6 But Jacob and his twelve sons (founders of the tribes of Israel) were forced by famine to leave Canaan and migrate to Egypt. At first they prospered, but eventually the Egyptians enslaved them, and they languished in serfdom until about 1250 BCE, when Yahweh brought them out of Egypt under Moses’s leadership. For forty years the Israelites wandered in the Sinai wilderness before reaching the Canaanite border, where Moses died, but his lieutenant, Joshua, led the Israelites to victory in the Promised Land, destroying all the Canaanite cities and killing their inhabitants.
The archaeological record, however, does not confirm this story. There is no evidence of the mass destruction described in the book of Joshua and no indication of a powerful foreign invasion.7 But this narrative was not written to satisfy a modern historian; it is a national epic that helped Israel create a cultural identity distinct from her neighbors. When we first hear of Israel in a nonbiblical source, coastal Canaan was still a province of the Egyptian Empire. A stele dating from c. 1201 mentions “Israel” as one of the rebellious peoples defeated by Pharaoh Merneptah’s army in the Canaanite highlands, where a network of simple villages stretched from lower Galilee in the north to Beersheba in the south. Many scholars believe that their inhabitants were the first Israelites.8
During the twelfth century, a crisis that had long been brewing in the Mediterranean accelerated, perhaps occasioned by sudden climate change. We have no record of what happened to wipe out the region’s empires and destroy the local economies. But by 1130 BCE, it was all over: the Hittite capital in Mitanni was in ruins, the Canaanite ports of Ugarit, Megiddo, and Hazor had been destroyed; and desperate, dispossessed peoples roamed through the region. It had taken Egypt over a century to relinquish its hold over its foreign provinces. The fact that Pharaoh Merneptah himself had been forced to fight a campaign in the highlands at the turn of the century suggests that even by this early date the Egyptian governors of the Canaanite city-states were no longer able to control the countryside and needed reinforcements from home. During this lengthy, turbulent process, one city-state after another collapsed.9 There is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest that these cities were destroyed by a single conqueror. After the Egyptians had left, there may have been conflict between the city elites and the villages or rivalries among the urban nobility. But it was during this period of decline that settlements began to appear in the highlands, pioneered perhaps by refugees fleeing the chaos of the disintegrating cities. One of the very few ways in which peasants could act to better their lot was simply to decamp when circumstances became intolerable, leave their land, and become fiscal fugitives.10 At a time of such political chaos, the Israelite peasants had a rare opportunity to make an exodus from these failing cities and establish an independent society, without fear of aristocratic retaliation. Advances in technology had only recently made it possible to settle in this difficult terrain, but by the early twelfth century, it seems that the highland villages already housed some eighty thousand people.
If these settlers were indeed the first Israelites, some must have been native to Canaan, though they may have been joined by migrants from the south who brought Yahweh, a god of the Sinai region, with them. Others—notably the tribe of Joseph—may even have come from Egypt. But those Canaanites who had lived under Egyptian rule in the coastal city-states of Palestine would also have felt that in a very real sense they had “come out of Egypt.” The Bible acknowledges that Israel was made up of diverse peoples bound together in a covenant agreement,11 and its epic story suggests that the early Israelites had made a principled decision to turn their backs on the oppressive agrarian state. Their houses in the highland villages were modest and uniform, and there were no palaces or public buildings: this seems to have been an egalitarian society that may have reverted to tribal organization to create a social alternative to the conventionally stratified state.12
The final redaction of the Pentateuch occurred after the Israelites had suffered the destruction of their own kingdom by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE and had been deported to Babylonia. The biblical epic is not simply a religious document but also an essay in political philosophy: how could a small nation retain its freedom and integrity in a world dominated by ruthless imperial powers?13 When they defected from the Canaanite city-states, Israelites had developed an ideology that directly countered the systemic violence of agrarian society. Israel must not be “like the other nations.” Their hostility to “Canaanites” was, therefore, every bit as much political as it was religious.14 The settlers seem to have devised laws to ensure that instead of being appropriated by an aristocracy, land remained in the possession of the extended family; that interest-free loans to needy Israelites were obligatory; that wages were paid promptly; that contract servitude was restricted; and that there was special provision for the socially vulnerable—orphans, widows, and foreigners.15
Later, Jews, Christians, and Muslims would all make the biblical god a symbol of absolute transcendence, similar to Brahman or Nirvana.16 In the Pentateuch, however, Yahweh is a war god, not unlike Indra or Marduk but with one important difference. Like Indra, Yahweh had once fought chaos dragons to order the universe, notably a sea monster called Leviathan,17 but in the Pentateuch he fights earthly empires to establish a people rather than a cosmos. Moreover, Yahweh is the intransigent enemy of agrarian civilization. The story of the tower of Babel is a thinly veiled critique of Babylon.18 Intoxicated by fantasies of world conquest, its rulers were determined that the whole of humanity live in a single state with a common language; they believed that their ziggurat could reach heaven itself. Incensed by this imperial hubris, Yahweh reduced the entire political edifice to “confusion” (babel).19 Immediately after this incident, he ordered Abraham to leave Ur, at this date one of the most important Mesopotamian city-states.20 Yahweh insisted that the three patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—exchange the stratified tyranny of urban living for the freedom and equality of the herdsman’s life. But the plan was flawed: again and again the land that Yahweh had selected for the patriarchs failed to sustain them.21
This was the Hebrew dilemma: Yahweh insisted that his people abandon the agrarian state, but time and again they found that they could not live without it.22 To escape starvation, Abraham had to take temporary refuge in Egypt.23 His son Isaac had to abandon pastoral life and take up farming during a famine but became so successful that he was attacked by predatory neighbo
ring kings.24 Finally, when “famine had grown severe throughout the world,” Jacob was forced to send ten of his sons to Egypt to buy grain. To their astonishment, they met their long-lost brother Joseph in Pharaoh’s court.25
As a boy, Joseph—Jacob’s favorite son—had dreams of agrarian tyranny that he foolishly described to his brothers: “We were binding sheaves in the countryside, and my sheaf, it seemed, stood upright; then I saw your sheaves gather round and bow to my sheaf.”26 The brothers were so incensed that they stuttered in fury: “Would you be king, yes, king over us?”27 Such fantasies of monarchy violated everything the family stood for, and Jacob took the boy to task: “Are all of us, then, myself, your mother and your brothers to come and bow to the ground before you?”28 But he continued to indulge Joseph, until, driven beyond endurance, his brothers had him sold into slavery in Egypt, telling their father he had been killed by a wild beast. Yet after a traumatic beginning, Joseph, a natural agrarian, cheerfully abandoned the pastoral ethos and assimilated to aristocratic life with spectacular success. He got a job in Pharaoh’s court, took an Egyptian wife, and even called his first son Manasseh—“He-Who-Makes-Me-Forget,” meaning “God has made-me-forget … my entire father’s house.”29 As vizier of Egypt, Joseph saved the country from starvation: warned by a dream of impending agricultural blight, he commandeered the harvest for seven years, sending fixed rations to the cities and storing the surplus, so that when the famine struck, Egypt had grain to spare.30 But Joseph had also turned Egypt into a house of bondage, because all the hard-pressed Egyptians who had been forced to sell their estates to Pharaoh in return for grain were reduced to serfdom.31 Joseph saved the lives of his family when hunger forced them to seek refuge in Egypt, but they too would lose their freedom since Pharaoh would forbid them to leave.32
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