History of the Jews
Page 13
The years 400-200 BC are the lost centuries of Jewish history. There were no great events or calamities they chose to record. Perhaps they were happy. The Jews certainly seem to have liked the Persians the best of all their rulers. They never revolted against them; on the contrary, Jewish mercenaries helped the Persians to put down Egyptian rebellion. The Jews were free to practise their religion at home in Judah, or anywhere else in the Persian empire, and Jewish settlements were soon to be found over a vast area: an echo of this diaspora is the Book of Tobit, set in Media in about the fifth century BC. Another is the collection of 650 cuneiform business documents, written between 455 and 403 BC in the city of Nippur, near where Ezekiel lived: 8 per cent of the names in these texts are Jewish.18 Two Jewish family archives have survived from the Elephantine colony, and cast light on life and religion there.19 Most of the Jews in the diaspora we hear about seem to have done well and practised their religion faithfully. Moreover, it was the religion of the new orthodoxy: Judaism.
The two hundred lost years, indeed, though silent were not unproductive. They saw the emergence of the Old Testament more or less as we know it. This was made necessary by the nature of the new Judaic version of the Israelite faith which Nehemiah and Ezra established in rebuilt Jerusalem. Chapter 8 of the Book of Nehemiah describes how all the citizens assembled near the watergate to hear a series of readings from ‘the book of the law of Moses’. They were conducted by Ezra the Scribe, standing ‘upon a pulpit of wood, which they had made for the purpose’. In the light of the readings, which caused intense emotion, a new and solemn covenant was made, signed and pledged by everyone, men and women, their sons and daughters, who considered themselves orthodox, ‘everyone having knowledge, and everyone having understanding’.20
In short, the new covenant, which may be said to have inaugurated Judaism officially and legally, was based not upon revelation or preaching but on a written text. That meant an official, authorized, accurate and verified version. And that, in turn, meant sorting through, selecting and editing the vast literature of history, politics and religion the Jews had already accumulated. They had been literate at a very early stage in their history. The Book of Judges tells us that when Gideon was in Succoth he grabbed hold of a young lad and questioned him about the place, and the lad wrote down for him the names of all the local landowners and elders, ‘threescore and seventeen men’.21 It is likely that most of the farmers could read a little.22 In the towns, the level of literacy was high and a large number of people were authors of a kind, setting down tales they had heard or their own adventures and experiences, both spiritual and secular. Hundreds of prophets had their sayings put down. The number of histories and chronicles was immense. The people of Israel were not great craftsmen, or painters, or architects. But writing was their national habit, almost their obsession. They probably produced, in sheer quantity, the greatest literature of antiquity, of which the Old Testament is only a small fragment.
However, the Jews saw literature as a didactic activity, with a collective purpose. It was not an act of personal self-indulgence. Most of the books of the Bible are ascribed individual authorship, but the Jews themselves awarded communal sanction and authority to the books which met their approval. The core of their literature was always public, subject to social control. Josephus, in his apologia for the Jewish faith, Contra Apionem, describes this approach:
With us it is not open to everybody to write the records…. The prophets alone had the privilege, obtaining the knowledge of the most remote and ancient history through the inspiration which they owed to God, and committing to writing a clear account of the events of their own time just as they occurred…. We do not possess myriads of inconsistent books, conflicting with one another. Our books, those which are justly accredited, are twenty-two in number, and contain the record of all time.23
By ‘justly accredited’, Josephus meant ‘canonical’. The word canon is very ancient, the Sumerian for ‘reed’, whence it acquired its sense of straight or upright; to the Greeks it meant a rule, boundary or standard. The Jews were the first to apply it to religious texts. For them it meant divine pronouncements of unquestioned authority or divinely inspired prophetic writings. Hence each book, to be accepted in the canon, had to possess a recognized true prophet as its accredited author.24 The canon began to emerge when the first five or Mosaic books, the Pentateuch, which later became known to Jews as the Torah, reached written form. In its most primitive version, the Pentateuch probably dates from the time of Samuel, but in the form we possess it the text is a compilation of five and possibly more elements: a southern source, referring to God as Yahweh, and going back to the original Mosaic writings; a northern source, calling God ‘Elohim’, also of great antiquity; Deuteronomy, or parts of it, the ‘lost’ book found in the Temple at the time of Joshua’s reforms; and two separate, additional codes, known to scholars as the Priestly Code and the Holiness Code and both dating from times when religious worship had become more formalized and the priestly caste strictly disciplined.
The Pentateuch is not, therefore, a homogeneous work. But neither is it, as some scholars in the German critical tradition have argued, a deliberate falsification by post-Exilic priests, seeking to foist their self-interested religious beliefs on the people by attributing them to Moses and his age. We must not allow the academic prejudices bred by Hegelian ideology, anti-clericalism, anti-Semitism and nineteenth-century intellectual fashions to distort our view of these texts. All the internal evidence shows that those who set down and conflated these writings, and the scribes who copied them when the canon was assembled after the return from Exile, believed absolutely in the divine inspiration of the ancient texts and transcribed them with veneration and the highest possible standards of accuracy, including many passages which they manifestly did not understand. Indeed, the Pentateuch text twice gives solemn admonitions, from God himself, against tampering: ‘Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish aught from it.’25
All the evidence suggests that copyists, or scribes—the word in Hebrew is sofer—were highly professional and took their duties with great seriousness. The word is first used in the ancient Song of Deborah, and we soon hear of hereditary scribal corporations, what the First Book of Chronicles calls ‘families of scribes’.26 Their most honourable duty was to preserve the canon in all its holy integrity. They began with the Mosaic texts which, for convenience, were transcribed on to five separate scrolls: hence its name (though Pentateuch itself is Greek, as are the individual names of the books). To these were added the second division of the Bible, Prophets, in Hebrew Nevi’im. These in turn consist of ‘Former Prophets’ and ‘Later Prophets’. The former consist of the mainly narrative and historical works, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, and the latter the writings of the prophetic orators, themselves divided into two sections, the three major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel—the term signifying length, not importance—and the twelve minor ones, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. Then there are the works of the third division, the Ketuvim or ‘writings’, often known as the Hagiographa. This consists of the Psalms, the Proverbs, the Book of Job, the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah and the two books of Chronicles.
The tripartite division does not reflect a deliberate classification so much as historical development. As public readings became an integral part of Jewish services, so more texts were added, and the scribes duly copied them. The Pentateuch or Torah was canonized as early as 622 BC. Other books were added gradually, the process being complete by about 300 BC. Other than the Torah, we do not know the criteria by which the canon was compiled. But popular taste, as well as priestly and scholarly judgment, appears to have played a part. The five scrolls known as the Megillot, or Canticles, were read in public at the great feasts, the Song of Solomon at Passover, Ruth at Pentecost, Ecclesiastes at Tabernacles, Esther at Pur
im and Lamentations at the feast of the Destruction of Jerusalem. They became popular in consequence, and that is why they were included in the canon. Apart from its association with a great king, the Song of Solomon is evidently an anthology of love poems, and there is no intrinsic reason for its inclusion. Rabbinical tradition says that at the Council of Jamnia or Jabneh, in the early Christian era, when the canon was finally determined, the Rabbi Akiva said: ‘For in all the world there is nothing to equal the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.’ But he then added, as a warning: ‘He who, for the sake of entertainment, sings the song as though it were a profane song, will have no place in the next world.’27
Inclusion in the canon was the only certain way of ensuring that a work of literature survived, for in antiquity, unless a manuscript was constantly recopied, it tended to vanish without trace within a generation or so. The families of the scribes, then, ensured the survival of the Bible texts for a thousand years or more, and in due course they were succeeded by families of masoretes or scribal scholars who specialized in the writing, spelling and accenting of Bible texts. It was they who produced the official Jewish canonical version, known as the Masoretic text.
There is, however, more than one canon, and therefore more than one ancient text. The Samaritans, having been cut off from Judah in the middle of the first millennium BC, preserved only the five Mosaic books, since they were not allowed to take part in the canonization of later writings, and therefore did not recognize them. Then there is the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, which was compiled by members of the Jewish diaspora at Alexandria during the Hellenistic period. This included all the books of the Hebrew Bible, but grouped them differently, and it also included books of the Apocrypha and pseudepigraphs, such as I Esdras, the so-called Wisdom of Solomon, the Wisdom of Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus, Judith, Tobit, Baruch and the books of the Maccabees, all of them rejected by the Jews of Jerusalem as impure or dangerous. In addition, we now have the scrolls preserved and copied by the Qumran sect and found in caves near the Dead Sea.
The Dead Sea Scrolls testify, on the whole, to the accuracy with which the Bible was copied through the ages, though many mistakes and variations occurred. The Samaritans claimed that their text went back to Abishua, great-grandson of Aaron, and it is clearly very old and remarkably uncorrupt as a rule, though in places it reflects Samaritan, as opposed to Jewish, traditions. It differs from the Masoretic text of the Pentateuch in about 6,000 instances, and on these it agrees with the Septuagint version in about 1,900. There are also variations in the Masoretic texts. Of the earliest surviving texts, the Karaite Synagogue in Cairo has a codex, a bound book, of the prophets, which was copied in 895 AD by Ben Asher, head of one of the most famous Masoretic families. The complete Asher text, on which the family worked for five generations, was copied in about 1010 by a Masorete called Samuel ben Jacob, and this is now in Leningrad. Another famous Masoretic text, by the Ben Naphtali family, survives in a copy dated 1105, known as the Reuchlin Codex, and now in Karlsruhe. The earliest surviving Christian version is the fourth-century AD Codex Vaticanus in the Vatican, the incomplete fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus and the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, the last two both in the British Museum. There is also a Syriac version in a manuscript dated 464 AD. The oldest Biblical manuscripts of all, however, are those found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947-8, which include Hebrew fragments of all the twenty-four books of the canon, except Esther, and the entire text of Isaiah, plus some fragments of the Septuagint.28 It is quite possible that more early texts will be discovered, both in the Judaean Desert and in Egypt, and clearly the search for perfect texts will continue until the end of time.
The attention which the Bible has received, in the search for the true text, in exegesis, hermeneutics and commentary, exceeds by far that devoted to any other work of literature. Nor is this interest disproportionate, because it has been the most influential of all books. The Jews had two unique characteristics as ancient writers. They were the first to create consequential, substantial and interpretative history. It has been argued that they learned the art of history from the Hittites, another historically minded people, but it is obvious that they were fascinated by their past from very early times. They knew they were a special people who had not simply evolved from an unrecorded past but had been brought into existence, for certain definite purposes, by a specific series of divine acts. They saw it as their collective business to determine, record, comment and reflect upon these acts. No other people has ever shown, particularly at that remote time, so strong a compulsion to explore their origins. The Bible gives constant examples of the probing historical spirit: why, for instance, was there a heap of stones before the city gate at Ai? What was the meaning of the twelve stones at Gilgal?29 This passion for aetiology, the quest for explanations, broadened into a more general habit of seeing the present and future in terms of the past. The Jews wanted to know about themselves and their destiny. They wanted to know about God and his intentions and wishes. Since God, in their theology, was the sole cause of all events—as Amos put it, ‘Does evil befall a city unless Yahweh wills it?’—and thus the author of history, and since they were the chosen actors in his vast dramas, the record and study of historical events was the key to the understanding of both God and man.
Hence the Jews were above all historians, and the Bible is essentially a historical work from start to finish. The Jews developed the power to write terse and dramatic historical narrative half a millennium before the Greeks, and because they constantly added to their historical records they developed a deep sense of historical perspective which the Greeks never attained. In the portrayal of character, too, the Biblical historians achieved a degree of perception and portraiture which even the best Greek and Roman historians could never manage. There is nothing in Thucydides to equal the masterly presentation of King David, composed evidently by an eye-witness at his court. The Bible abounds in sharply etched characters, often minor figures brought into vivid focus by a single phrase. But the stress on the actors never obscures the steady progression of the great human-divine drama. The Jews, like all good historians, kept a balance between biography and narrative. Most of the books of the Bible have a historical framework, all related to the wider framework, which might be entitled ‘A history of God in his relations to man’. But even those which do not have a clear historical intention, even the poetry, such as the Psalms, contain constant historical allusions, so that the march of destiny, proceeding inexorably from creation to ‘the end of days’, is always heard in the background.
Ancient Jewish history is both intensely divine and intensely humanist. History was made by God, operating independently or through man. The Jews were not interested and did not believe in impersonal forces. They were less curious about the physics of creation than any other literate race of antiquity. They turned their back on nature and discounted its manifestations except in so far as they reflected the divine-human drama. The notion of vast geographical or economic forces determining history was quite alien to them. There is much natural description in the Bible, some of astonishing beauty, but it is stage-scenery for the historical play, a mere backdrop for the characters. The Bible is vibrant because it is entirely about living creatures; and since God, though living, cannot be described or even imagined, the attention is directed relentlessly on man and woman.
Hence the second unique characteristic of ancient Jewish literature: the verbal presentation of the human personality in all its range and complexity. The Jews were the first race to find words to express the deepest human emotions, especially the feelings produced by bodily or mental suffering, anxiety, spiritual despair and desolation, and the remedies for these evils produced by human ingenuity—hope, resolution, confidence in divine assistance, the consciousness of innocence or righteousness, penitence, sorrow and humility. About forty-four of the short poems, or psalms, inclu
ded in the 150 in the canonical Book of Psalms, fall into this category.30 Some are masterpieces, which find echoes in hearts in all ages and places: Psalm 22 crying for help. Psalm 23 with its simple trust, 39 the epitome of unease, 51 pleading for mercy, 91 the great poem of assurance and comfort, 90, 103, 104 celebrating the power and majesty of the Creator and the bonds between God and man, and 130, 137 and 139 plumbing the depths of human misery and bringing messages of hope.
Jewish penetration of the human psyche found one expression in these passionate poems, but it was also reflected in vast quantities of popular philosophy, some of which made its way into the canon. Here the Jews were less singular, for proverbs and wise sayings were written down in the ancient Near East from the third millennium on, especially in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and some of this wisdom literature achieved international status. The Jews were certainly familiar with the famous Egyptian classic, The Wisdom of Amenope, since part of it was directly borrowed in the Book of Proverbs.31 However, wisdom texts produced by the Jews are of an altogether higher standard than their precursors and models, being both more observant of human nature and more ethically consistent. Ecclesiastes, written by the Koheleth or ‘convenor’, is a scintillating work, quite without equal in the ancient world. Its cool, sceptical tone, verging at times towards cynicism, and contrasting so strongly with the passionate earnestness of the psalms, illustrates the extraordinary range of Jewish literature, with which the Greeks alone could compete.