Readers of the Pentateuch are often confused by the patriarchs’ ethics. None of them are particularly admirable characters: Abraham sold his wife to Pharaoh to save his own skin; Joseph was arrogant and self-centered; and Jacob was shockingly indifferent to the rape of his daughter Dinah. But these are not morality tales. If we read them as political philosophy, things become clearer. Doomed to marginality, Israel would always be vulnerable to more powerful states. Ordered to leave civilization yet unable to survive without it, the patriarchs were in an impossible position. Yet despite his flaws, Abraham still compares favorably with the rulers in this story, who appropriate their subjects’ wives, steal their wells, and rape their daughters with impunity.33 While kings routinely confiscated other people’s possessions, Abraham was always meticulously respectful of property rights. He would not even keep the booty he acquired in a raid he had fought simply to rescue his nephew Lot, who had been kidnapped by four marauding kings.34 His kindness and hospitality to three passing strangers stand in stark contrast to the violence they experienced in civilized Sodom.35 When Yahweh told Abraham that he planned to destroy Sodom, Abraham begged him to spare the city, because unlike rulers who had scant respect for human life, he had a horror of shedding innocent blood.36
When the biblical authors tell us about Jacob on his deathbed blessing his twelve sons and prophesying their future, they are asking what kind of leader is needed to create a viable egalitarian society in such a ruthless world. Jacob rejected Simeon and Levi, whose reckless violence meant that they should never control territory, populations, and armies.37 He predicted that Judah, who could admit and correct his mistakes, would make an ideal ruler.38 But no state could survive without Joseph’s political savvy, so when the Israelites finally escaped from Egypt, they took Joseph’s bones with them to the Promised Land. Then there were occasions when a nation might need Levi’s radicalism, because without the aggressive determination of the Levite Moses, Israel would never have left Egypt.
The book of Exodus depicts Egyptian imperialism as an extreme example of systemic oppression. The pharaohs made the Israelites’ lives “unbearable,” compelling them to “work with clay and with brick, all kinds of work in the fields; [forcing] on them every kind of labour.”39 To stem their rising birthrate, Pharaoh even ordered the midwives to kill all Israelite male babies, but the infant Moses was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter and brought up as an Egyptian aristocrat. One day in instinctive revulsion from state tyranny, Moses, a true son of Levi, killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave.40 He had to flee the country, and Yahweh, who had not revealed himself to Moses the Egyptian aristocrat, first spoke to him when he was working as a shepherd in Midian.41 During the Exodus, Yahweh could liberate Israel only by using the same brutal tactics as any imperial power: terrorizing the population, slaughtering their children, and drowning the entire Egyptian army. Peaceful tactics were of no avail against the martial might of the state. Yahweh divided the Sea of Reeds in two so that the Israelites could cross dry shod as effortlessly as Marduk had slit Tiamat, the primal ocean, in half to create heaven and earth; but instead of an ordered universe, he had brought into being a new nation that would provide an alternative to the aggression of imperial rule.
Yahweh sealed his pact with Israel on Mount Sinai. The earliest sources, dating from the eighth century BCE, do not mention the Ten Commandments being given to Moses on this occasion. Instead, they depict Moses and the elders of Israel experiencing a theophany on the summit of Sinai during which they “gazed upon God” and shared a sacred meal.42 The stone tablets that Moses received, “written with the finger of God,”43 were probably inscribed with Yahweh’s instructions for the construction and accoutrements of the tent-shrine in which he would dwell with Israel in the wilderness.44 The Ten Commandments would be inserted into the story later by seventh-century reformers, who, as we shall see, were also responsible for some of the most violent passages in the Hebrew Bible.
After Moses’s death, it fell to Joshua to conquer the Promised Land. The biblical book of Joshua still contains some ancient material, but this was radically revised by these same reformers, who interpreted it in the light of their peculiarly xenophobic theology. They give the impression that, acting under Yahweh’s orders, Joshua massacred the entire population of Canaan and destroyed their cities. Yet not only is there no archaeological evidence for this wholesale destruction, but the biblical text itself admits that for centuries Israelites coexisted with Canaanites and intermarried with them, and that large swaths of the country remained in Canaanite hands.45 On the basis of the reformers’ work, it is often claimed that monotheism, the belief in a single god, made Israel especially prone to violence. It is assumed that its denial of other gods reveals a rabid intolerance not found in the generous pluralism of paganism.46 But the Israelites were not monotheists at this date and would not begin to be so until the sixth century BCE. Indeed, both the biblical and the archaeological evidence suggests that the beliefs and practices of most early Israelites differed little from those of their Canaanite neighbors.47 There are in fact very few unequivocally monotheistic statements in the Hebrew Bible.48 Even the first of the reformers’ Ten Commandments takes the existence of rival deities for granted and simply forbids Israel to worship them: “You are not to have any other gods before my presence.”49
In the earliest strand of the conquest narratives, Joshua’s violence was associated with an ancient Canaanite custom called the “ban” (herem).50 Before a battle, a military leader would strike a deal with his god: if this deity undertook to give him the city, the commander promised to “devote” (HRM) all valuable loot to his temple and offer the conquered people to him in a human sacrifice.51 Joshua had made such a pact with Yahweh before attacking Jericho, and Yahweh responded by delivering the town to Israel in a spectacular miracle, causing its famous walls to collapse when the priests blew their rams’ horns. Before allowing his troops to storm the city, Joshua explained the terms of the ban and stipulated that no one in the city should be spared, since everybody and everything in the town had been “devoted” to Yahweh. Accordingly, the Israelites “enforced the ban on everything in the town, men and women, young and old, even the oxen and sheep and donkeys, massacring them all.”52 But the ban had been violated when one of the soldiers kept booty for himself, and consequently the Israelites failed to take the town of Ai the following day. After the culprit had been found and executed, the Israelites attacked Ai again, this time successfully, setting fire to the city so that it became a sacrificial pyre and slaughtering anybody who tried to escape: “The number of those who fell that day, men and women together, were twelve thousand, all [the] people of Ai.”53 Finally Joshua hanged the king from a tree, built a monumental cairn over his body, and reduced the city to “a ruin for ever more, a desolate place, even today.”54
Ninth-century inscriptions discovered in Jordan and southern Arabia record conquests that follow this pattern to the letter. They recount the burning of the town, the massacre of its citizens, the hanging of the ruler, and the erection of a cultic memorial claiming that the enemy had been entirely eliminated and the town never rebuilt.55 The ban was not, therefore, the invention of “monotheistic” Israel but was a local pagan practice. One of these inscriptions explains that King Mesha of Moab was commanded by his god Kemosh to take Nebo from King Omri of Israel (r. 885–874). “I seized it and killed every one of [it],” Mesha proclaimed, “seven thousand foreign men, native women, foreign women, concubines—for I devoted it [HRM] to destruction to Ashtur Kemosh.”56 Israel had “utterly perished forever.”57 This was wishful thinking, however, because the Kingdom of Israel would survive for another 150 years. In the same vein, the biblical authors record Yahweh’s decree that Jericho remain a ruin forever, even though it would become a thriving Israelite city. New nations in the Middle East seem to have cultivated the fiction of a conquest that made the land tabula rasa for them.58 The narrative of the “ban,” therefore, was a literary trope that co
uld not be read literally. Secular as well as religious conquerors would later develop similar fictions claiming that the territory they occupied was “unused” and “empty” until they took possession of it.
True to their mandate to create an alternative society, Israelites were reluctant at first to establish a regular state “like the other nations” but seem to have lived in independent chiefdoms without a central government. If they were attacked by their neighbors, a leader or “judge” would rise up and mobilize the entire population against an attack. This is the arrangement we find in the book of Judges, which was also heavily revised by the seventh-century reformers. But over time, without strong rule, Israelites succumbed to moral depravity. One sentence recurs throughout the book: “In those days there was no king in Israel, and every man did as he pleased.”59 We read of a judge who made a human sacrifice of his own daughter;60 a tribe that exterminated an innocent people instead of the enemy assigned them by Yahweh;61 a group of Israelites who gang-raped a woman to death;62 and a civil war in which the tribe of Benjamin was almost exterminated.63 These tales are not held up for our edification; rather, they explore a political and religious quandary. Can our natural proclivity for violence be controlled in a community without a degree of coercion? It appears that the Israelites had won their freedom but lost their souls, and monarchy seemed the only way to restore order. Moreover, the Philistines, who had established a kingdom on the southern coast of Canaan, had become a grave military threat to the tribes. Eventually, the Israelite elders approached their judge Samuel with a shocking request: “Give us a king to rule over us like the other nations.”64
Samuel responded with a remarkable critique of agrarian oppression, which listed the regular exploitation of every premodern civilization:
These will be the rights of the king who is to reign over you. He will take your sons and assign them to his chariotry and cavalry, and they will run in front of his chariot. He will use them as leaders of a thousand and leaders of fifty; he will make them plough his ploughland and harvest his harvest and make his weapons of war and the gear for his chariots. He will also take your daughters as perfumers, cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields, of your vineyards and olive groves, and give them to his officials.… He will take the best of your manservants and maidservants, of your cattle and your donkeys, and make them work for him. He will tithe your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out on account of the king you have chosen for yourselves, but on that day Yahweh will not answer you.65
Unlike most religious traditions that endorsed this system, albeit reluctantly, Israel had utterly rejected its structural violence but failed to establish a viable alternative. Despite their dreams of freedom and equity, Israelites had discovered, time and again, that they could not survive without a strong state.
Saul, Israel’s first king, still ruled as judge and chieftain. But David, who deposed him, would be remembered as Israel’s ideal king, even though he was clearly no paragon. The biblical authors did not express themselves as bluntly as Lord Shang, but they probably understood that saints were not likely to be good rulers. David expanded Israelite territory on the east bank of the Jordan, united the separate regions of Israel in the north and Judah in the south, and conquered the city-state of Jerusalem from the Hittite-Jebusites, which became the capital of his united kingdom. There was no question of putting the Jebusites “under the ban,” however: David adopted the existing Jebusite administration, employed Jebusites in his bureaucracy, and took over the Jebusite standing army—a pragmatism that may have been more typical in Israel than Joshua’s alleged zealotry. David probably did not set up a regular tributary system, however, but taxed only the conquered populations and supplemented his income with booty.66
In this young, hopeful kingdom we find a heroic ethos that has nothing “religious” about it.67 We see it first in the famous account of the young David’s duel with the Philistine giant Goliath. Single combat was one of the hallmarks of chivalric war.68 It gave the warrior a chance to show off his martial skills, and both armies enjoyed watching the clash of champions. Moreover, in Israel’s chivalric code, warriors formed a caste of champions, respected for their valor and expertise even if they were fighting for the enemy.69 Every morning, Goliath would appear before the Israelite lines, challenging one of them to fight him, and when nobody came forward, taunted them for their cowardice. One day the shepherd boy David, armed only with a sling, called Goliath’s bluff, knocked him out with a pebble, and decapitated him. But the heroic champion could also be utterly pitiless in battle. When David’s army arrived outside the walls of Jerusalem, the Jebusites taunted him: “You will not get in here. The blind and lame will hold you off.”70 So in their hearing David ordered his men to kill only “the blind and lame,” a ruthlessness designed to terrify the enemy. The biblical text here is fragmentary and obscure, however, and may have been edited by a redactor who was uncomfortable with this story. One later tradition even claimed that David was forbidden by Yahweh to build a temple in Jerusalem, “since you have shed so much blood on the earth in my presence.” That honor would be reserved for David’s son and successor Solomon, whose name was said to derive from the Hebrew shalom, “peace.”71 But Solomon’s mother, Bathsheba, was a Jebusite, and his name could also have derived from Shalem, the ancient deity of Jerusalem.72
Solomon’s temple was built on the regional model and its furniture showed how thoroughly the cult of Yahweh had accommodated itself to the pagan landscape of the Near East. There was clearly no sectarian intolerance in Israelite Jerusalem. At the temple’s entrance were two Canaanite standing stones (matzevoth) and a massive bronze basin, representing Yam, the sea monster fought by Baal, supported by twelve brazen oxen, common symbols of divinity and fertility.73 The temple rituals too seem to have been influenced by Baal’s cult in neighboring Ugarit.74 The temple was supposed to symbolize Yahweh’s approval of Solomon’s rule.75 There is no reference to his short-lived empire in other sources, but the biblical authors tell us that it extended from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean and was achieved and maintained by force of arms. Solomon had replaced David’s infantry with a chariot army, engaged in lucrative arms deals with neighboring kings, and restored the ancient fortresses of Hazor, Megiddo, and Arad.76 In purely material terms, everything seemed perfect: “Judah and Israel lived in security: each man under his vine and fig tree!”77 Yet this kind of state, maintained by war and taxes, was exactly what Yahweh had always abhorred. Unlike David, Solomon even taxed his Israelite subjects, and his building projects required massive forced labor.78 As well as farming their own plots to produce the surplus that supported the state, peasants also had to serve in the army or the corvée for one month in every three.79
Some biblical redactors tried to argue that Solomon’s empire failed because he had built shrines for the pagan gods of his foreign wives.80 But it is clear that the real problem was its structural violence, which offended deep-rooted Israelite principles. After Solomon’s death a delegation begged his son Rehoboam not to replicate his father’s “harsh tyranny.”81 When Rehoboam contemptuously refused, a mob attacked the manager of the corvée, and ten of the twelve tribes broke away from the empire to form the independent Kingdom of Israel.82
Henceforth the two kingdoms went their separate ways. Situated near important trade routes, the northern Kingdom of Israel prospered, with royal shrines in Bethel and Dan and an elegant capital in Samaria. We know very little about its ideology, because the biblical editors favored the smaller and more isolated Kingdom of Judah. But both probably conformed to local traditions. Like most Middle Eastern kings, the king of Judah was raised to a semidivine “state of exception” during the coronation ritual, when he became Yahweh’s adopted son and a member of the Divine Assembly of gods.83 Like Baal, Yahweh was celebrated as a warrior god who defended his people from their enemies: “When he grows angry he shatters kings, he gives the nations their deserts; smashi
ng their skulls, he heaps the world with corpses.”84 The chief responsibility of the king was to secure and extend his territory, the source of the kingdom’s revenues. He was therefore in a perpetual state of conflict with neighboring monarchs, who had exactly the same goals. Israel and Judah were thus drawn inexorably into the local network of trade, diplomacy, and warfare.
The two kingdoms had emerged when the imperial powers of the region were in eclipse, but during the early eighth century, Assyria was in the ascendant again, its military might forcing weaker kings into vassal status. Yet some of these conquered kingdoms flourished. King Jeroboam II (786–746 BCE) became a trusted Assyrian vassal, and the Kingdom of Israel enjoyed an economic boom. But because the rich became richer and the poor even more impoverished, the king was castigated by the prophet Amos.85 The prophets of Israel kept the old egalitarian ideals of Israel alive. Amos chastised the aristocracy for trampling on the heads of ordinary people, pushing the poor out of their path,86 and cramming their palaces with the fruits of their extortion.87 Yahweh, he warned, was no longer unconditionally on Israel’s side but would use Assyria as his instrument of punishment.88 The Assyrians would invade the kingdom, loot and destroy its palaces and temples.89 Amos imagined Yahweh roaring in rage from his sanctuary at the war crimes committed by the local kingdoms, Israel included.90 In Judah too, the prophet Isaiah inveighed against the exploitation of the poor and the expropriation of peasant land: “Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, and plead for the widow.”91 The dilemma was that this callowness was essential to the agrarian economy and had the kings of Israel and Judah fully implemented these compassionate policies, they would have been easy prey for Assyria.92
Fields of Blood Page 14