by Paul Johnson
Moses was not only the most influential of all the Jews of antiquity before Christ; he was also the only one to make a considerable impact on the ancient world. The Greeks conflated him with their own gods and heroes, especially Hermes and Musaeos; he was credited with inventing Hebrew writing, seen as the prelude to Phoenician script and so of Greek. Eupolemus said he was the first wise man in the history of mankind. Artapanos credited him with organizing the Egyptian system of government and inventing all kinds of warlike and industrial machinery. Aristobulus thought that both Homer and Hesiod drew inspiration from his works, and there was a general view among many ancient writers that mankind as a whole, and Greek civilization in particular, owed much to his ideas.76 Not surprisingly, Jewish writers of antiquity endorsed this tradition of Moses as a leading architect of ancient culture. Josephus says he invented the very word ‘law’, then unknown in Greek, and was the first legislator in world history.77 Philo accused both philosophers and lawgivers of plundering or copying his ideas, Heraclitus and Plato being the chief culprits.78 Still more striking is the assertion of the pagan writer Numenius of Apamea (second century AD) that Plato was just a Moses who spoke Greek.79 The ancient writers were not merely convinced of Moses’ existence: they saw him as one of the formative figures of world history.
But there was also a tendency among pagan writers, from the second half of the first millennium BC, to see Moses as a baleful figure, the creator of a form of religion which was strange, narrow, exclusive and anti-social. Moses is strongly associated with the very earliest stirrings of systematic anti-Semitism. Hecataeus of Abdera (fourth century BC), who wrote a history of Egypt (now lost), accused him of secluding his followers from other men, and encouraging xenophobia. Manetho (c.250 BC) first put about the extraordinarily persistent legend that Moses was not a Jew at all but an Egyptian, a renegade priest of Heliopolis, who commanded the Jews to kill all the Egyptian sacred animals and set up alien rule.80 The notion of the rebellious Egyptian priest, leading a revolt of outcasts including lepers and negroes, became the fundamental matrix of anti-Semitism, the Ur-libel, embroidered and repeated through the centuries with extraordinary persistence. It is reproduced, for instance, twice in anti-Semitic passages in Karl Marx’s letters to Engels.81 It is curious, too, that Sigmund Freud, certainly no anti-Semite, based his last work, Moses and Monotheism, on Manetho’s story that Moses was an Egyptian and a priest, adding the common speculation that his religious ideas were derived from the monotheistic sun-cult of Akhenaten, and much pseudo-factual nonsense of his own.82
Wherever else Moses got his ideas, whether religious or legal (and the two, of course, were inseparable in his mind), it was certainly not Egypt. Indeed the work of Moses can be seen as a total repudiation of everything that ancient Egypt stood for. As with Abraham’s migration from Ur and Haran to Canaan, we must not assume that the Israelite exodus from Egypt was dictated purely by economic motives. This was not just an escape from hardship. There are indeed hints in the Bible that the hardships were endurable; Moses’ horde often hankered for ‘the flesh-pots of Egypt’. Life in Egypt, throughout the second millennium BC, was more gracious (as a general rule) than in any other part of the ancient Near East. The motive for the Exodus was political, certainly. The Israelites in Egypt were a large and awkward minority, and a growing one. The opening of Exodus has pharaoh say ‘to his people’ that the Israelites are becoming ‘more and mightier than we: come, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply’.83 Egyptian fear of Israelite numbers was the principal motive for their oppression, which was specifically designed to reduce their ranks. Pharaonic slavery was, in a sinister way, a distant adumbration of Hitler’s slave-labour programme and even of his Holocaust: there are disturbing parallels.
So the Exodus was an act of political separation and resistance; but it was also, and above all, a religious act. For the Israelites were distinct, and were seen and feared by the Egyptians as distinct, precisely because they rejected the whole weird and teeming pantheon of Egyptian gods, and the entire spirit of Egyptian spirituality, which in its own way was as intense and all-pervasive as the dawning religion of Israel. Just as Abraham felt that religion in Ur had come to an impasse, so the Israelites and their leader Moses, who saw more clearly than the rest, found the world of Egyptian religious belief and practice suffocating, insufferable, odious and evil. To leave was to break out not just of physical slavery but of an airless spiritual prison: the lungs of Israel in Egypt craved for a fiercer oxygen of truth, and a way of life which was purer, freer and more responsible. Egyptian civilization was very ancient and very childish, and the Israelite escape from it was a bid for maturity.
In this maturing process, the Israelites were of course acting, in the long run, not just for themselves, but for the whole of humanity to come. The discovery of monotheism, and not just of monotheism but of a sole, omnipotent God actuated by ethical principles and seeking methodically to impose them on human beings, is one of the great turning-points in history, perhaps the greatest of all. How great can be seen by considering the Egyptian world-view which the Israelites rejected. The Egyptians were extraordinarily skilful in using their hands and they had impeccable visual taste, but their intellectual notions were archaic in the extreme. They found it difficult or impossible to grasp general concepts. They had little sense of cumulative, as opposed to repetitive, time, and so no true grasp of history. The notion of linear progress was incomprehensible to them. Their conceptual distinctions between life and death, between the human, animal and vegetable worlds, were fragile and insecure. Their beliefs had more in common with the cyclical and animistic religions of the orient and Africa than anything we are accustomed to call religion in the West. Heaven and earth were different in degree, not kind, and heaven was ruled through a king in whom the creator was incarnate and of whom pharaoh was the earthly manifestation. Society in both heaven and earth was stable and static and necessarily so, and any form of change was aberrant and evil. It was very characteristic of this static society that it had no sense of impersonal law, and therefore no codified let alone written law at all. The pharaoh was the source and master of the law, his judges-there were courts, of course-sitting vicariously to enact his arbitrary judgments.
The world-view in the Mesopotamian cultures of the third and second millennia BC was very different. It was much more dynamic, but also more confused. They rejected the notion of a single god as the ultimate source of power. Unlike the Egyptians, who were constantly adding new gods to their pantheon if theological difficulties arose, they believed all the leading gods had been created. The community of these gods exercised final authority, chose the head of the pantheon (such as Marduk) and made humans immortal when desirable. Heaven was thus in a continuous state of restlessness, like human society. Indeed, each was a replica of the other, with the ziggurat a connecting link. But the human monarch was not divine-it was rare for Mesopotamian societies at this stage to believe in god-kings—nor was he absolute; he was accountable to the gods.84 The monarch could not enact or dispense law arbitrarily. In fact the individual was protected by cosmic law, which was unalterable.85 Being dynamic, and therefore offering the idea of progress, idea current in ancient Mesopotamian society were much preferable to the dead hand of Egypt. They offered hope, as opposed to the resignation or fatalism of Afro-Asian norms, which Egypt so strikingly exemplified. Whereas the pyramid was the tomb of a dead god-king, the ziggurat-temple was a living bond between earth and heaven. On the other hand, these ideas provided no ethical basis for life, and they led to a great deal of uncertainty as to what the gods stood for or wanted. Their delight and anger was arbitrary and inexplicable. Man was endlessly and blindly seeking to propitiate them by sacrifices.
In one important respect, these Mesopotamian societies, spreading out into the West, were becoming more sophisticated. They were developing forms of scripts far more efficient than the Egyptian hieroglyph and its derivatives, and they rightly saw this invention as a source of pow
er. They believed, therefore, that writing down a law strengthened its force and made it numinous. From the end of the third millennium onwards legal systems grew in density and complexity, and were reflected not only in masses of individual legal documents but in written legal codes, the spread of the Akkadian script and language encouraging rulers to compile their laws in societies as widely separated as Elam and Anatolia, among the Hurrians and the Hittites, at Ugarit and on the Mediterranean littoral.
The earliest version of the Mosaic code, which we presume to have been promulgated about 1250 BC, was thus part of a tradition which was already ancient. The first code, discovered among texts in the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul, dates from about 2050 BC, the work of Ur Nammu, ‘king of Sumer and Akkad’, the Third Dynasty of Ur. This states, among other things, that the god Nanna chose Ur Nammu to rule, and he got rid of dishonest officials and established correct weights and measures. Abraham must have been familiar with its provisions. Another code, which Abraham may have known too, dates from about 1920 BC: two tablets now in the Iraq Museum, from the ancient kingdom of Eshnuna, written in Akkadian, list about sixty property regulations laid down by the god, Tiskpak, and transmitted through the local king. Far more comprehensive are the early nineteenth-century BC tablets, mainly in the University of Pennsylvania, which give the code of King Lipt-Ishrar of Idi, written (like Ur Nammu) in Sumerian; and, most impressive of all, the code of Hammurabi, found in 1901 at Susa, east of Babylon, written in Akkadian on a 6-foot-high diorite slab, now in the Louvre, and dated 1728-1686 BC.86 Other, later law-codes include a Mid-Assyrian set of clay tablets unearthed by German archaeologists in the years before the First World War at Qalat Shergat (ancient Ashur), which probably go back to the fifteenth century BC, and are perhaps the closest in date to the original Mosaic code.87
In collecting and codifying Israeli law, therefore, Moses had ample precedent. He had been brought up at court; he was literate. To set down the law in writing, to have it carved in stone, was part of the liberating act of fleeing from Egypt, where there was no statutory law, to Asia, where it was by now the custom. None the less, though the Mosaic code was in this sense part of a Near Eastern tradition, its divergences from all other ancient codes are so many and so fundamental as to make it something entirely new. Firstly, the other law-codes, though said to be inspired by God, are given and worded by individual kings, such as Hammurabi or Ishtar; they are thus revocable, changeable and essentially secular. By contrast, in the Bible, God alone writes the law—legislation throughout the Pentateuch is all his—and no Israelite king was ever permitted, or even attempted, to formulate a law-code. Moses (and, much later, Ezekiel, transmitter of the law reforms) was a prophet, not a king, and a divine medium, not a sovereign legislator. Hence, in his code there is no distinction between the religious and the secular—all are one—or between civil, criminal and moral law.88
This indivisibility had important practical consequences. In Mosaic legal theory, all breaches of the law offend God. All crimes are sins, just as all sins are crimes. Offences are absolute wrongs, beyond the power of man unaided to pardon or expunge. Making restitution to the offended mortal is not enough; God requires expiation too, and this may involve drastic punishment. Most law-codes of the ancient Near East are property-orientated, people themselves being forms of property whose value can be assessed. The Mosaic code is God-oriented. For instance, in other codes, a husband may pardon an adulterous wife and her lover. The Mosaic code, by contrast, insists both must be put to death.89 Again, whereas the other codes include the royal right to pardon even in capital cases, the Bible provides no such remedy. Indeed, in capital cases it repudiates the notion of ‘rich man’s law’: a murderer, however rich, cannot escape execution by paying money, even if his victim is a mere servant or slave, and there are many other crimes where God’s anger is so great that financial compensation is not enough to appease the divine wrath. Where, however, the intention is not to wound or kill or sin grievously, and the injury is the unintended consequence of mischievous behaviour, God is less offended, and the laws of compensation apply. The offender then ‘shall pay as the judges determine’. This applied, the Mosaic code laid down, in the case where a man strikes a woman and she has a miscarriage, or when death follows a culpable accident, and in all lesser cases, ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot’,90 a much misunderstood passage, which simply means that strict compensation for the injury is due. On the other hand, where the degree of culpability for an injury, though accidental, is criminal, the capital law must take its course. Thus an ox which gores a man to death is simply forfeit, and the owner unpunished; but if he knows his beast is dangerous, and he has failed to take proper measures, and a man is killed in consequence, the owner must suffer capitally.91
This last provision, known as ‘The Law of the Goring Ox’, testifies to the huge importance the Mosaic code attaches to human life. There is a paradox here, as there is in all ethical use of capital punishment. In Mosaic theology, man is made in God’s image, and so his life is not just valuable, it is sacred. To kill a man is an offence against God so grievous that the ultimate punishment, the forfeiture of life, must follow; money is not enough. The horrific fact of execution thus underscores the sanctity of human life. Under Mosaic law, then, many men and women met their deaths whom the secular codes of surrounding societies would have simply permitted to compensate their victims or their victims’ families.
But the converse is also true, as a result of the same axiom. Whereas other codes provided the death penalty for offences against property, such as looting during a fire, breaking into a house, serious trespass by night, or theft of a wife, in the Mosaic law no property offence is capital. Human life is too sacred where the rights of property alone are violated. It also repudiates vicarious punishment: the offences of parents must not be punished by the execution of sons or daughters, or the husband’s crime by the surrender of the wife to prostitution.92 Moreover, not only is human life sacred, the human person (being in God’s image) is precious. Whereas, for instance, the Mid-Assyrian code lists a fierce series of physical punishments, including facial mutilation, castration, impalement and flogging to death, the Mosaic code treats the body with respect. Physical cruelty is reduced to the minimum. Even flogging was limited to forty strokes, and must be carried out ‘before the face’ of the judge, ‘lest, if he should exceed, and beat him above these with many stripes, then thy brother should seem vile unto thee’.93 The fact is, the Mosaic code was far more humane than any other, because, being God-centred, it was automatically man-centred also.
The core of the Mosaic code was the Decalogue, the statements of God related by Moses (Deuteronomy 5:6-18) and entitled ‘the ten words or utterances’ (Deuteronomy 4:13). The supposed original versions of these commands is given in Exodus 20:2-14. There are many unresolved problems and obscurities in the texts. It seems likely that in their original form the commands were simple, even terse, and only later elaborated. The earliest form, as given directly by Moses, has been reconstructed as follows, falling naturally into three groups, one to four covering the relations between God and man, six to ten dealing with relations between men, and the fifth, acting as a bridge between the two, dealing with parents and children. Thus we get: ‘I am YHWH your God; You shall have no other gods besides me; You shall not make yourselves a graven image; You shall not take the name of YHWH in vain; Remember the Sabbath day; Honour your father and your mother; You shall not kill; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not covet.’94 Some of these ethical rules are common to other ancient Near Eastern civilizations: there is, for instance, an Egyptian document known as the ‘Protestations of Guiltlessness’, in which a dead soul, at the final judgment, recites a list of offences not committed.95 But for a comprehensive summary of right conduct to God and man, offered to, accepted by and graven upon the hearts of an entire people, there is nothing in antiquity remotely compa
rable to the Ten Commandments.
The Decalogue was the basis of the covenant with God, first made by Abraham, renewed by Jacob and now renewed again, in a solemn and public manner, by Moses and the entire people. Modern research shows that the Mosaic covenant, set out briefly in Exodus 19-24 and again more elaborately in the Book of Deuteronomy, follows the form of an ancient Near Eastern treaty, such as those drawn up by the Hittites. It has a historical prolegomenon, setting out the purpose, followed by the nature of the undertaking, the divine witnesses, benefits and curses, the text and the deposit of the tablets on which it is written.96 But the Mosaic covenant is unique in being, not a treaty between states, but a God-people alliance. In it, in effect, the ancient Israelite society merged its interests with God’s and accepted Him, in return for protection and prosperity, as a totalitarian ruler whose wishes governed every aspect of their lives. Thus the Decalogue is merely the heart of an elaborate system of divine laws set out in the books of Exodus, Deuteronomy and Numbers. In late antiquity, Judaic scholars organized the laws into 613 commandments, consisting of 248 mandatory commandments and 365 prohibitions.97
This Mosaic legal material covers an immense variety of subjects. By no means all of it dates from Moses’ time, let alone in the form it has come down to us. Some of it deals with settled agriculture, for instance, and must date from the period after the conquest of Canaan. It is conjectured that this was simply taken over from Canaanite law, ultimately of Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Hittite origin.98 But the Israelites were already becoming a very legal-minded people, quite capable of innovation, or of transforming the notions they found around them so thoroughly as to constitute novelty. The old theory that the mass of the Mosaic material derives from post-Exilic times can now be dismissed. The technical book of Leviticus, highly ritualistic and providing the legal basis for organized religious and civic life among the Israelites, fits in very well with what we know of the political history of the Israelites in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC. The same can be said for Deuteronomy, which is a popular presentation for a general audience of the priestly writings in Leviticus. The material concerns such matters as diet, medicine, rudimentary science and professional practice, as well as law. Much of it is highly original but all of it is consistent with non-Biblical material, covering similar topics, which was composed in the Near East in the Late Bronze Age, or had already been circulating for centuries.