Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  In 745 Tiglath-pileser III abolished the system of vassalage and incorporated all the conquered peoples directly into the Assyrian state. At the merest hint of dissent, the entire ruling class would be deported and replaced by people from other parts of his empire. The army left a trail of desolation in its wake, and the countryside was deserted as peasants took refuge in the towns. When King Hosea refused to pay tribute in 722, Shalmeneser III simply wiped the Kingdom of Israel off the map and deported its aristocracy. Because of its isolated position, Judah survived until the turn of the century, when Sennacherib’s army besieged Jerusalem. The Assyrian army was finally forced to withdraw, possibly because it was smitten by disease, but Lachish, Judah’s second city, was razed to the ground and the countryside devastated.93 King Manasseh (r. 687–642) was determined to keep on the right side of Assyria, and Judah enjoyed peace and prosperity during his long reign.94 Manasseh rebuilt rural shrines to Baal and brought an effigy of Asherah, the Canaanite mother goddess, into Yahweh’s temple; he also set up statues of the divine horses of the sun in the temple, which may have been emblems of Ashur.95 Few of Manasseh’s subjects objected since, as archaeologists have discovered, many of them had similar effigies in their own homes.96

  During the reign of Manasseh’s grandson Josiah (640–609), however, a group of prophets, priests, and scribes attempted a far-reaching reform. By this time, Assyria was in decline: Pharaoh Psammetichus had forced the Assyrian army to withdraw from the Levant, and Josiah technically became his vassal. But Egypt was occupied elsewhere, and Judah enjoyed a brief period of de facto independence. In 622 Josiah began extensive repairs in Solomon’s temple, emblem of Judah’s golden age, perhaps as an assertion of national pride. Yet Judeans could not forget the fate of the Kingdom of Israel. Surrounded by huge predatory empires, with Babylon now becoming the dominant power in Mesopotamia, how could Judah hope to survive? Fear of annihilation and the experience of state violence often radicalize a religious tradition. Zoroaster had been a victim of excessive aggression, and this violence had introduced an apocalyptic ferocity into his initially peaceable alternative to the belligerent cult of Indra. Now, in seventh-century Judah, reformers who dreamed of independence but were terrified by the aggression of the great imperial powers brought a wholly new intransigence into the cult of Yahweh.97

  During the construction work in the temple, the high priest, one of the leading reformers, made a momentous discovery: “I have found the book of the law [sefer torah] in the temple of Yahweh,” he announced.98 Until this point, there was no tradition of a written text given on Mount Sinai; in fact, until the eighth century reading and writing had little place in the religious life of Israel. In the early biblical traditions Moses imparted Yahweh’s teachings orally.99 Yet the reformers claimed that the scroll they had discovered had been dictated to Moses by Yahweh himself.100 Tragically, this precious document had been lost, but now that they had recovered this “second law” (Greek: deuteronomion) that supplemented Yahweh’s verbal teaching on Mount Sinai, the people of Judah could make a new start and perhaps save their nation from total destruction. So authoritative was the past in an agrarian state that it was quite customary for people who were promoting an innovative idea to attribute it to an iconic historical figure. The reformers believed that at this time of grave danger, they were speaking for Moses and put forward their own teachings in the speech they make Moses deliver, shortly before his death, in the book of Deuteronomy.

  For the very first time, these reformers insisted that Yahweh demanded exclusive devotion. “Listen, Israel,” Moses tells his people, “Yahweh is our god, Yahweh alone!”101 He had not only emphatically forbidden Israelites to worship any other god but had also commanded them to wipe out the indigenous peoples of the Promised Land:

  You must lay them under ban. You must make no covenant with them nor show them any pity. You must not marry with them … for this would turn away your son from following me to serving other gods and the anger of Yahweh would blaze out against you and soon destroy you. Instead, deal with them like this: tear down their altars, smash their standing-stones, cut down their sacred poles, and set fire to their idols.102

  Because they had lost this “second law” recorded by Moses, Israelites had been ignorant of his command; they had condoned the cult of other gods, married Canaanites, and made treaties with them. No wonder Yahweh’s anger had “blazed out” against the northern kingdom. Moses, the reformers insisted, had warned the Israelites what would happen. “Yahweh will scatter you among the peoples, from one end of the earth to the other.… In the morning you will say, ‘how I wish it were evening!’ and in the evening, ‘how I wish it were morning!’ Such terror will grip your heart, such sights your eyes will see.”103 When the scroll was read aloud to Josiah, its teachings were so startling that the king burst into tears, crying: “Great indeed must be the anger of Yahweh, blazing out against us.”104

  It is difficult for us today to realize how strange this insistence on cultic exclusivity would have been in the seventh century BCE. Our reading of the Hebrew Bible has been influenced by two and a half thousand years of monotheistic teaching. But Josiah, of course, had never heard of the First Commandment—“Thou shalt not have strange gods before my presence”—which the reformers would place at the top of the Decalogue. It pointedly condemned Manasseh’s introduction of the effigies of “strange gods” into the temple where Yahweh’s “presence” (shechinah) was enthroned in the Holy of Holies. But pagan icons had been perfectly acceptable there since Solomon’s time. Despite the campaigns of such prophets as Elijah, who had urged the people to worship Yahweh alone, most of the population of the two kingdoms had never doubted the efficacy of such gods as Baal, Anat, or Asherah. The prophet Hosea’s oracles showed how popular the cult of Baal had been in the northern kingdom during the eighth century, and the reformers themselves knew that Israelites “offered sacrifice to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations and the whole array of heaven.”105 There would be great resistance to monotheism. Thirty years after Josiah’s death, Israelites were still devotees of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, and Yahweh’s temple was once again full of “the idols of the house of Israel.”106 For many it seemed unnatural and perverse to ignore such a divine resource. The reformers knew that they were asking Judeans to relinquish beloved and familiar sanctities and embark on a lonely, painful severance from the mythical and cultural consciousness of the Middle East.

  Josiah was completely convinced by the sefer torah and at once inaugurated a violent orgy of destruction, eradicating the cultic paraphernalia introduced by Manasseh, burning the effigies of Baal and Asherah, abolishing the rural shrines, pulling down the house of sacred male prostitutes and the Assyrian horses. In the old territories of the Kingdom of Israel, he was even more ruthless, not only demolishing the ancient temples of Yahweh in Bethel and Samaria but slaughtering the priests of the rural shrines and contaminating their altars.107 This fanatical aggression was a new and tragic development, which excoriated sacred symbols that had been central to both the temple cult and the piety of individual Israelites.108 A tradition often develops a violent strain in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive imperialism; fearing annihilation by an external foe, people attack an “enemy within.” The reformers now regarded the Canaanite cults that Israelites had long enjoyed as “detestable” and “loathsome”; they insisted that any Israelite who participated in them must be hunted down mercilessly.109 “You must not give way to him, nor listen to him, you must show him no pity,” Moses had commanded; “You must not spare him, and you must not conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him.”110 An Israelite town guilty of this idolatry must be put under the “ban,” burned to the ground, and its inhabitants slaughtered.111

  This was all so novel that in order to justify these innovations, the Deuteronomists literally had to rewrite history. They began a massive editorial revision of the texts in the royal archives that would one day become the Hebrew Bible, changing the word
ing and import of earlier law codes and introducing new legislation that endorsed their proposals. They recast the history of Israel, adding fresh material to the older narratives of the Pentateuch and giving Moses a prominence that he may not have had in some of the earlier traditions. The climax of the Exodus story was no longer a theophany but the gift of the Ten Commandments and the sefer torah. Drawing on earlier sagas, now lost to us, the reformers put together a history of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah that became the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, which “proved” that the idolatrous iniquity of the northern kingdom had been the cause of its destruction. When they described Joshua’s conquests, they depicted him slaughtering the local population of the Promised Land and devastating their cities like an Assyrian general. They transformed the ancient myth of the ban so that it became an expression of God’s justice and a literal rather than a fictional story of attempted genocide. Their history culminated in the reign of Josiah, the new Moses who would liberate Israel from Pharaoh once again, a king who was even greater than David.112 This strident theology left an indelible trace on the Hebrew Bible; many of the writings so frequently quoted to prove the ineradicable aggression and intolerance of “monotheism” were either composed or recast by these reformers.

  Yet the Deuteronomist reform was never implemented. Josiah’s bid for independence ended in 609 BCE, when he was killed in a skirmish with Pharaoh Neco. The new Babylonian empire replaced Assyria and competed with Egypt for control of the Middle East. For a few years Judah dodged between these great powers, but eventually, after an uprising in Judah in 597, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, deported eight thousand Judean aristocrats, soldiers, and skilled artisans.113 Ten years later he destroyed the temple, razed Jerusalem to the ground, and deported five thousand more Judeans, leaving only the lower classes in the devastated land. In Babylonia the Judean exiles were reasonably well treated. Some lived in the capital; others were housed in undeveloped areas near the new canals and could, to an extent, manage their own affairs.114 But exile is a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation. In Judah the deportees had been the elite class; now they had no political rights, and some even had to work in the corvée.115 But then it seemed that Yahweh was about to liberate his people again. This time the exodus would not be led by a prophet but would be instigated by a new imperial power.

  In 559 BCE Cyrus, a minor member of the Persian Achaemenid family, became king of Anshan in southern Iran.116 Twenty years later, after a series of spectacular victories in Media, Anatolia, and Asia Minor, he invaded the Babylonian empire and astonishingly, without fighting a single battle, was greeted by the population as a liberator. Cyrus was now the master of the largest empire the world had yet seen. At its fullest extent, it would control the whole of the eastern Mediterranean, from what is now Libya and Turkey in the west to Afghanistan in the east. For centuries to come, any ruler who aspired to world rule would try to replicate Cyrus’s achievement.117 But he was not only a pivotal figure in the politics of the region: he also modeled a more benign form of empire.

  Cyrus’s victory proclamation claimed that when he arrived in Babylonia, “all the people … of Sumer and Akkad, nobles and governors, bowed down before him and kissed his feet, rejoicing over his kingship, and their faces shone.”118 Why such enthusiasm for a foreign invader? Ten years earlier, shortly after Cyrus had conquered Media, the Babylonian author of the poem “The Dream of Nabonidus” had given him a divine role.119 Media had been a threat to Babylon, and Marduk, the poet said, had appeared in a dream to Nabonidus (r. 556–539), the last Babylonian king, to assure him that he was still controlling events and had chosen Cyrus to solve the Median problem. But ten years later the Babylonian Empire was in decline. Nabonidus, engaged in conquests abroad, had been absent from Babylon for several years and had incurred the wrath of the priesthood by failing to perform the Akitu ritual. During this ceremony all Babylonian kings had to swear not “to rain blows on the cheeks of the protected citizen,” but Nabonidus had imposed forced labor on the freemen of the empire. Disaffected priests announced that the gods had abrogated his rule and abandoned the city. When Cyrus marched on Babylonia, these priests almost certainly helped him to write his victory speech, which explained that when the people of Babylon had cried out in anguish to Marduk, the god had chosen Cyrus as their champion:

  He took the hand of Cyrus, king of the city of Anshan, and called him by name, proclaiming him aloud for the kingship over all of everything.… He ordered that he should go to Babylon. He had him take the road to [Babylon], and like a friend and companion, he walked at his side.… He had him enter without fighting or battle, right into Shuanna; he saved his city Babylon from hardship. He handed over to him Nabonidus, the king who did not fear him.120

  Ritual and mythology, crucial as they were to kingship, did not always endorse state tyranny. Nabonidus was in effect deposed by the priestly establishment for his excessive violence and oppression.

  Cyrus’s vast multilingual and multicultural empire needed a different mode of government, one that respected the traditional rights of the conquered peoples and their religious and cultural traditions. Instead of humiliating and deporting his new subjects, and tearing down their temples and desecrating the effigies of their gods as the Assyrians and Babylonians had done, Cyrus announced a wholly new policy, preserved in the Cyrus Cylinder, now in the British Museum. Cyrus, it claimed, had arrived in Babylonia as the harbinger of peace rather than of war; he had abolished the corvée, repatriated all the peoples who had been deported by Nebuchadnezzar, and promised to rebuild their national temples. An anonymous Judean exile in Babylonia therefore hailed Cyrus as the messhiah, the man “anointed” by Yahweh to end Israel’s exile.121 This prophet, of course, was convinced that it was not Marduk but Yahweh who had taken Cyrus by the hand and shattered the bronze gates of Babylon. “It is for the sake of my servant Jacob, of Israel, my chosen one, that I have called you by your name, conferring a title, though you do not know me,” Yahweh had told Cyrus.122 A new era was at hand, in which the earth would be restored to its primal perfection. “Let every valley be filled in, every mountain laid low,” cried the prophet, clearly influenced by the Zoroastrian traditions of his Persian messiah, “let every cliff become a plain, and the ridges a valley.”123

  Most of the Judean exiles chose to stay in Babylonia, and many acculturated successfully.124 According to the Bible, more than forty thousand of them chose to return to Judea with the liturgical utensils confiscated by Nebuchadnezzar, determined to rebuild Yahweh’s temple in the devastated city of Jerusalem. The Persians’ decision to allow the deportees to return home and rebuild their temples was enlightened and sensible: they believed it would strengthen their empire, since gods ought to be worshipped in their own countries, and it would win the gratitude of the subject peoples. As a result of this benign policy, the Middle East enjoyed a period of relative stability for some two hundred years.

  But the Pax Persiana still depended on military force and taxes extorted from the subject races. Cyrus made a point of mentioning the unparalleled might of his army; as he and Marduk marched on Babylon, “his vast troops whose number, like the water in the river, could not be counted, were marching fully armed at his side.”125 His victory proclamation also noted the tributary system that Cyrus had enforced: at Marduk’s “exalted command, all kings who sit on thrones, from every quarter, from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea, those who inhabit remote districts and the kings of the land of Amurru who live in tents, all of them, brought their weighty tribute into Shuanna and kissed my feet.”126 Even the most peaceable empire required sustained military aggression and massive expropriation of resources from the populations it conquered. If imperial officials and soldiers felt any moral qualms about this, it would sap the empire’s energy; but if they could be convinced that these policies would ultimately benefit everyone, they would find them more palatable.127

  In the inscriptions of Darius I, who came to the Persian throne after
the death of Cyrus’s son Cambyses in 522 BCE, we find a combination of three themes that would recur in the ideology of all successful empires: a dualistic worldview that pits the good of empire against evildoers who oppose it; a doctrine of election that sees the ruler as a divine agent; and a mission to save the world.128 Darius’s political philosophy was strongly influenced by Zoroastrianism, skillfully adapted to sacralize the imperial project.129 A large number of the royal inscriptions that have survived in the Persian heartland of the empire referred to the Zoroastrian creation myth.130 They describe Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord who had appeared to Zoroaster, ordering the cosmos in four stages, creating successively earth, sky, humanity, and finally “happiness” (shiyati), which consisted of peace, security, truth, and abundant food.131 At first there had been only one ruler, one people, and one language.132 But after the assault of the Hostile Spirit (“the Lie”), humanity split into competing groups, governed by people who called themselves kings. There was war, bloodshed, and disorder for centuries. Then, on September 29, 522, Darius ascended the throne, and the Wise Lord inaugurated the fifth and final stage of creation: Darius would unite the world and restore the original happiness of mankind by creating a worldwide empire.133