Here we see the difficulty of adapting a predominantly peaceful tradition to the realities of imperial rule. Darius shared Zoroaster’s horror of lawless violence. After Cambyses’s death, he had had to suppress rebellions all over the empire. Like any emperor, he had to quash ambitious aristocrats who sought to unseat him. In his inscriptions Darius associated these rebels with the illegitimate kings who had brought war and suffering to the world after the Lie’s assault. But to restore peace and happiness, the “fighting men” whom Zoroaster had wanted to exclude from society were indispensable. The apocalyptic restoration of the world that Zoroaster had predicted at the end of time had been transposed to the present, and Zoroastrian dualism was employed to divide the political world into warring camps. The empire’s structural and martial violence had become the final, absolute good, while everything beyond its borders was barbaric, chaotic, and immoral.134 Darius’s mission was to subdue the rest of the world and purloin its resources in order to make other people “good.” Once all lands had been subjugated, there would be universal peace and an era of frasha, “wonder.”135
Darius’s inscriptions remind us that a religious tradition is never a single, unchanging essence that impels people to act in a uniform way. It is a template that can be modified and altered radically to serve a variety of ends. For Darius, frasha was no longer spiritual harmony but material wealth; he described his palace in Susa as frasha, a foretaste of the redeemed, reunited world.136 Inscriptions listed the gold, silver, precious woods, ivory, and marble brought in tribute from every region of the empire, explaining that after the Lie’s assault, these riches had been scattered all over the world but had now been reassembled in one place, as the Wise Lord had originally intended. The magnificent Apadama relief in Persepolis depicted a procession of the delegates of conquered peoples from far-flung lands duly bringing their tribute to Susa. The ethical vision of Zoroaster, victim of violence and theft on the Caucasian steppes, had been originally inspired by the shocking aggression of the Sanskrit raiders; now that vision had been used to sacralize organized martial violence and imperial extortion.
The Judeans who returned from Babylon in 539 BCE found their homeland a desolate place and had to contend with the hostility of the foreigners who had been drafted into the country by the Babylonians. They also faced the resentment of those Judeans who had not been deported and were now strangers to the returnees who had been born into an entirely different culture. When they finally rebuilt their temple, Persian Judea became a temple state governed by a Jewish priestly aristocracy in the name of Persia. The writings of these priestly aristocrats have been preserved in parts of the Pentateuch and the two books of Chronicles, which rewrote the strident history of the Deuteronomists and attempted to adapt ancient Israelite traditions to these new circumstances.137 These scriptures reflect the exiles’ concern that everything stay in its proper place. In Babylon the Judeans had preserved their national identity by living apart from the local people; now the priests insisted that to be “holy” (qaddosh) was to be “separate; other.”
Yet unlike the Deuteronomist scriptures, which had demonized the foreigner and yearned to eliminate him, these priestly texts, drawing on exactly the same stories and legends, had developed a remarkably inclusive vision. Again, we see the impossibility of describing any religious tradition as a single unchanging essence that will always inspire violence. The priests insisted that the “otherness” of every single creature was sacred and must be respected and honored. In the priestly Law of Freedom, therefore, nothing could be enslaved or owned, not even the land.138 Instead of seeking to exterminate the ger, the “resident alien,” as the Deuteronomists had insisted, the true Israelite must learn to love him: “If a stranger lives with you in your land do not molest him. You must treat him as one of your own people and love him as yourselves. For you were strangers in Egypt.”139 These priests had arrived at the Golden Rule: the experience of living as a minority in Egypt and Babylonia should teach Israelites to appreciate the pain that these uprooted foreigners might be feeling in Judah. The command to “love” was not about sentiment: hesed meant “loyalty” and was used in Middle Eastern treaties when former enemies agreed to be helpful and trustworthy and give each other practical support.140 This was not an unrealistically utopian ideal but an ethic within everybody’s reach.
To temper the harsh rejectionism of the Deuteronomists, the priestly historians included moving stories of reconciliation. The estranged brothers Jacob and Esau finally see the “face of God” in each other.141 The Chroniclers show Moses refraining from retaliation when the king of Edom refused to grant the Israelites safe passage through his territory during their journey to the Promised Land.142 The most famous of these priestly writings is the creation story that opens the Hebrew Bible. The biblical redactors placed this priestly creation story before the earlier eighth-century tale of Yahweh’s creating a garden for Adam and Eve and their fall from grace. This priestly version extracted all the violence from the traditional Middle Eastern cosmogony. Instead of fighting a battle and slaying a monster, the god of Israel simply uttered words of command when he ordered the cosmos. On the last day of creation, he “saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good.”143 This god had no enemies: he blessed every one of his creatures, even his old enemy Leviathan.
This principled benevolence is all the more remarkable when we consider that the community of exiles was under almost constant attack by hostile groups in Judea. When Nehemiah, dispatched from the Persian court to supervise the rebuilding of Jerusalem, was overseeing the restoration of the city wall, each of the laborers “did his work with one hand while gripping his weapon with the other.”144 The priestly writers could not afford to be antiwar but they seem troubled by military violence. They deleted some of the most belligerent episodes in the Deuteronomist history and brushed over Joshua’s conquests. They told the stories of David’s chivalric warfare but omitted his grim order to kill the blind and lame in Jerusalem, and it was the Chronicler who explained that David was forbidden to build the temple because he had shed too much blood. They also recorded a story about a military campaign against the Midianites, who had enticed the Israelites into idolatry.145 There was no doubt that it was a just cause, and the Israelite armies behaved in perfect accordance with Deuteronomist law: the priests led the troops into battle, and the soldiers killed the Midianite kings, set fire to their town, and condemned to death both the married women who had tempted the Israelites and the boys who would grow up to be warriors. But even though they had “cleansed” Israel, they had been tainted by this righteous bloodshed. “You must camp for seven days outside the camp,” Moses told the returning warriors: “Purify yourselves, you and your prisoners.”146
In one remarkable story, the Chronicler condemned the savagery of the Kingdom of Israel in a war against an idolatrous Judean king, even though Yahweh himself had sanctioned the campaign. Israelite troops had killed 120,000 Judean soldiers and marched 200,000 Judean prisoners back to Samaria in triumph. Yet the prophet Oded greeted these conquering heroes with a blistering rebuke:
You have slaughtered with such fury as reaches to heaven. And now you propose to reduce these children of Judah and Jerusalem to being your serving men and women! And are you not all the while the ones who are guilty before Yahweh your God? Now listen to me—release the prisoners you have taken of your brothers, for the fierce anger of Yahweh hangs over you.147
The troops immediately released the captives and relinquished all their booty; specially appointed officials “saw to the relief of the prisoners. From the booty, they clothed all those of them who were naked; they gave them clothing and sandals, and provided them with food, drink and shelter. They mounted all those who were infirm on donkeys, and took them back to their kinsmen in Jericho.”148 These priests were probably monotheists; in Babylonia, paganism had lost its allure for the exiles. The prophet who had hailed Cyrus as the messiah also uttered the first fully monotheistic statement in
the Bible: “Am I not Yahweh?” he makes the God of Israel demand repeatedly. “There is no other god beside me.”149 Yet the monotheism of these priests had not made them intolerant, bloodthirsty, or cruel; rather, the reverse is true.
Other postexilic prophets were more aggressive. Inspired by Darius’s ideology, they looked forward to a “day of wonder” when Yahweh would rule the entire world and there would be no mercy for nations who resisted: “Their flesh will moulder while they are still standing on their feet; their eyes will rot in their sockets; their tongues will rot in their mouths.”150 They imagined Israel’s former enemies processing meekly each year to Jerusalem, the new Susa, bearing rich gifts and tribute.151 Others had fantasies of the Israelites who had been deported by Assyria being carried tenderly home,152 while their former oppressors prostrated themselves before them and kissed their feet.153 One prophet had a vision of Yahweh’s glory shining over Jerusalem, the center of a redeemed world and a haven of peace—yet a peace achieved only by ruthless repression.
These prophets may have been inspired by the new monotheism. It seems that a strong monarchy often generates the cult of a supreme deity, creator of the political and natural order. A century or more of experiencing the strong rule of such monarchs as Nebuchadnezzar and Darius may have led to the desire to make Yahweh as powerful as they. It is a fine example of the “embeddedness” of religion and politics, which works two ways: not only does religion affect policy, but politics can shape theology. Yet these prophets were also surely motivated by that all-too-human desire to see their enemies suffer as they had—an impulse that the Golden Rule had been designed to modify. They would not be the last to adapt the aggressive ideology of the ruling power to their own traditions and, in so doing, distort them. In this case Yahweh, originally the fierce opponent of the violence and cruelty of empire, had been transformed into an arch imperialist.
Part Two
KEEPING THE PEACE
5
Jesus: Not of This World?
Jesus of Nazareth was born in the reign of the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus (r. 30 BCE—14 CE), when all the world was at peace.1 Under Roman rule, a large group of nations, some of them former imperial powers, were able for a significant period to coexist without fighting one another for resources and territory—a remarkable achievement.2 Romans made the three claims that characterize any successful imperial ideology: they had been specially blessed by the gods; in their dualist vision, all other peoples were “barbarians” with whom it was impossible to deal on equal terms; and their mission was to bring the benefits of civilization and peace to the rest of the world. But the Pax Romana was enforced pitilessly.3 Rome’s fully professional army became the most efficient killing machine the world had ever seen.4 Any resistance at all justified wholesale massacre. When they took a city, said the Greek historian Polybius, their policy was “to kill everyone they met and spare no one”—not even the animals.5 After the Roman conquest of Britain, the Scottish leader Calgacus reported that the island had become a wasteland: “The uttermost parts of Britain are laid bare; there are no other tribes to come; nothing but sea and cliffs and more deadly Romans … To plunder, butcher and ravage—these things they falsely name empire.”6
Polybius understood that the purpose of this savagery was “to strike terror” in the subject nations.7 It usually worked, but it took the Romans nearly two hundred years to tame the Jews of Palestine, who had ousted an imperial power before and believed they could do it again. After Alexander the Great had defeated the Persian Empire in 333 BCE, Judea had been absorbed into the Ptolemid and Seleucid Empires of his “successors” (diadochoi). Most of these rulers did not interfere in the personal lives of their subjects. But in 175 BCE the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV attempted a drastic reform of the temple cult and banned Jewish dietary laws, circumcision, and Sabbath observance. The Hasmonean priestly family, led by Judas Maccabeus, had led a rebellion and managed not only to wrest Judea and Jerusalem from Seleucid control but even to establish a small empire by conquering Idumaea, Samaria, and Galilee.8
These events inspired a new apocalyptic spirituality without which it is impossible to understand the early Christian movement. Crucial to this mind-set was the perennial philosophy: events on earth were an apokalupsis, an “unveiling” that revealed what was simultaneously happening in the heavenly world. As they struggled to make sense of current events, the authors of these new scriptures believed that while the Maccabees were fighting the Seleucids, Michael and his angels were battling the demonic powers that supported Antiochus.9 The book of Daniel, a historical novella composed during the Maccabean wars, was set in Babylonia during the Jewish exile. At its center was the Judean prophet Daniel’s vision of four terrifying beasts, representing the empires of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and finally, Antiochus’s Seleucid Empire, the most destructive of all. But then, “coming on the clouds of heaven,” Daniel saw “one like the son of man” representing the Maccabees. Unlike the four bestial empires, their rule would be just and humane, and God would give them “an eternal sovereignty which shall never pass away.”10
Once they had achieved imperial rule, alas, the Hasmoneans’ piety was unable to sustain the brute realities of political dominance, and they became as cruel and tyrannical as the Seleucids. At the end of the second century BCE, a number of new sects sought a more authentically Jewish alternative; Christianity would later share some of their enthusiasms. To initiate their disciples, all these sects set up systems of instruction that became the closest thing to an educational establishment in Jewish society. Both the Qumran sect and the Essenes—two distinct groups that are often erroneously identified—were attracted toward an ethical community life: meals were eaten together, ritual purity and cleanliness were stressed, and goods were held in common. Both were critical of the Jerusalem temple cult, which, they believed, the Hasmoneans had corrupted. Indeed, the Qumran commune beside the Dead Sea regarded itself as an alternative temple: on the cosmic plane, the children of light would soon defeat the sons of darkness, and God would build another temple and inaugurate a new world order. The Pharisees were also committed to an exact and punctilious observance of the biblical law. We know very little about them at this date, however, even though they would become the most influential of these new groups. Some Pharisees led armed revolts against the Hasmoneans but finally concluded that the people would be better off under foreign rule. In 64 BCE, therefore, as the Hasmonean excesses had become intolerable, the Pharisees sent a delegation to Rome requesting that the empire depose the regime.
The following year the Roman warlord Pompey invaded Jerusalem, killing twelve thousand Jews and enslaving thousands more. Not surprisingly, most Jews hated Roman rule, but no empire can survive unless it is able to co-opt at least some of the local population. The Romans ruled Palestine through the priestly aristocracy in Jerusalem, but they also created a puppet king, Herod, a prince of Idumea and a recent convert to Judaism. Herod built magnificent fortifications, palaces, and theaters throughout the country in the Hellenistic style and on the coast constructed Caesarea, an entirely new city, in honor of Augustus. His masterpiece, however, was a magnificent new temple for Yahweh in Jerusalem, flanked significantly by the Antonia fortress, manned by Roman troops. A cruel ruler, with his own army and secret police, Herod was extremely unpopular. The Jews of Palestine were therefore ruled by two aristocracies: the Herodians and the Sadducees, the Jewish priestly nobility. Both collected taxes, so Jews bore a double tax burden.11
Like all agrarian ruling classes, both aristocracies employed an order of dependent retainers, who in return for extending their masters’ influence among the common people enjoyed higher social status and a share in the surplus.12 They included the publicans, or tax farmers, who in the Roman Empire were obliged to pass on a fixed sum to the colonial government but were allowed to retain the difference between that and what they managed to extort from the peasants. As a result, they gained a certain independence, but as is apparent in the g
ospels, they were hated by the common people.13 The “scribes and Pharisees” of the gospels were another group of retainers who interpreted the Torah, Jewish custumal law, in a way that supported the regime.14 Not all Pharisees assumed this role, however. Most concentrated on the stringent observance of the Torah and the development of what would become rabbinic exegesis, and did not ally themselves too closely with the nobility. Had they done so, they would not have retained their popularity with the people. Indeed, so great was the esteem in which they were held that any Jew who hoped for a political career had to study civil law with the Pharisees. Josephus, the first-century-CE Jewish historian, for example, probably became a disciple of the Pharisees to acquire the legal education that qualified him for public life, although he may never have become a full member of the sect.15
Once colonized, a people often depends heavily on their religious practices, over which they still have some control and which recall a time when they had the dignity of freedom. In the Jewish case, hostility toward their rulers tended to reach new heights during the important temple festivals, which spoke explosively to the Jews’ political subjugation: Passover commemorated Israel’s liberation from Egypt’s imperial control; Pentecost celebrated the revelation of the Torah, a divine law that superseded all imperial edicts; and the harvest festival of Weeks was a reminder that the land and its produce belonged to Yahweh and not the Romans. This simmering discontent erupted in 4 BCE, when Herod was on his deathbed. He had recently installed in the temple a large golden eagle, symbol of imperial Rome, and Judas and Matthias, two of the most respected Torah teachers, denounced it as an offensive challenge to Yahweh’s kingship.16 In a well-planned protest, forty of their students climbed onto the temple roof, hacked the eagle to pieces, and then courageously awaited the attack of Herod’s soldiers.17 Galvanized by fury, Herod rose from his bed and sentenced the students and their teachers to death, before dying in agony himself two days later.18
Fields of Blood Page 16