The Human Story

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by James C. Davis


  After this account, however, comes a different story. In this account, the taking of the land was slow and piecemeal. This does make sense, because the invaders were a loose confederation. According to this telling, some tribes fought and others simply settled where they could. Many of the Israelites probably began to farm the land, as they had done as slaves in Egypt. (No longer were they nomadic herdsmen, like their Hebrew forebears.)

  Another people settled in the towns on Canaan’s seacoast shortly after the Israelites had entered from the desert. The new arrivals were the Philistines, from whom Palestine would later get its name. Like the Canaanites, the Philistines were more advanced. For example, they could work with iron. Not the Israelites. The Bible tells us that “[No] smith was to be found [in] all the land of Israel…but every one of the Israelites went down to the Philistines [when they were at peace with them] to sharpen his plowshare, his mattock, his axe, or his sickle.”

  Until the Philistines became a danger to them, each tribe of Israelites had a leader, usually a warrior. (But one tribe had a female head who sat beneath a palm and settled their disputes.) However, when they had to fight the Philistines and other enemies, some Israelites concluded that the tribes must now unite beneath a single chief, a warrior king. Others didn’t want one; God, they said, was king.

  Just what happened next is not quite clear because again the Bible offers two conflicting stories. The end result, in any case, was that the Israelites chose a tall young farmer, Saul, as their first king. He quickly proved to be a first-rate fighter. One day he learned that Ammonites, a fighting people from the desert to the east, had invaded the lands of the Israelites. He chopped the oxen he was plowing with in pieces, and he sent a piece to every tribe with a message that “Whoever does not…[join me], so shall it be done to his oxen!” The Israelites gathered in large numbers, marched all night, surprise-attacked in the morning, and crushed the Ammonites.

  The king next struck the greater enemy, the Philistines. He won some battles but his reign began to sour. For one thing, Saul could not quite crush the Philistines, who fought with chariots and iron weapons. Then his chief supporter, Samuel the prophet, turned against him after Saul began to act as if he were a priest as well as king. Worst of all, the king began to lose his mind. He fell into depressions and he lashed out savagely at all around him.

  Another hero rose, a warrior named David. His father was a farmer near Jerusalem, and David as a boy had tended sheep. From what the Bible tells about him, one senses that David may at times have been a bandit leader, and only a marginal Israelite. As Saul’s career collapsed, David’s rose. He married a daughter of Saul, who permitted David to wed her after David had killed two hundred Philistines and given Saul their foreskins. David was also a close friend of Saul’s son, Jonathan. Saul grew jealous of David and afraid as women chanted in the streets, “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” What more could David want, he asked himself, but to be king? He drove the warrior from his court, and for a while David commanded the bodyguard of a Philistine king.

  Saul died as he had lived, in battle. The Philistines, allied possibly with David, overwhelmed the Israelites. They killed the king’s three sons and badly wounded Saul with arrows. Rather than be murdered by his enemies, he held his sword point up and fell upon it.

  Defeated by their enemies, and with their leader dead, the Israelites were deep in trouble. A bloody struggle for the crown began. If the Israelites could not agree upon a king, they risked becoming just a snarl of quarrelsome tribes, easy prey for enemies.

  One man only had the prowess and respect to reunite them. This, of course, was David. Shortly before 1000 B.C., the elders of the tribes anointed him their second king. David made Jerusalem, among the hills, his capital, and he went from triumph on to triumph. He crushed the desert tribes and extended his kingdom north, and he beat the Philistines so badly that they never again were a threat to the Israelites.

  Now that he was king, he had to bind the tribes together. One means to do this, which he often used from early manhood to old age, was to marry women from different tribes and factions. As we said, the first of his wives was Michal, daughter of Saul. Another was the lovely Abigail, whose husband handily dropped dead when David wanted to marry her. Marrying her strengthened his ties to a powerful clan in the south. Driven partly by politics and partly by desire, David gathered twenty wives and concubines.

  Religion was another instrument with which to bond the tribes and build the monarchy. Until the time of David, the Israelites had viewed their pact with God as One-on-one. The pact did not involve the king of course, for they never had a king till Saul, and Saul ran into trouble when he tried to be a priest as well as king. But David partly changed the view that God and man did not require a king as go-between. Probably his victories alone had proved to many that their God approved of kings, and especially of David.

  But David pushed the matter further, beyond merely having God’s approval. As David saw it, he personified the covenant with God. He served not only as king but also as religious leader, and he made Jerusalem both capital and holy city. He may have written (experts disagree) many of the psalms, or sacred songs, that Jews and Christians still recite or sing today. (The most famous of them may reflect his boyhood task of tending sheep: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; he makes me lie down in green pastures….”) David brought to Jerusalem the ancient “ark” that held the tablets with the Ten Commandments God had given Moses. The Bible says that as the ark arrived and a crowd looked on, David leaped and danced and gave to everyone “a cake of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins.”

  When he lay near death, David chose his second son to take his place. He said, “Let Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet…anoint him king over Israel; then blow the trumpet and say, ‘Long live King Solomon!’ ” And so it happened. Solomon was crowned before his father’s death.

  As often happens, the father built the business and the son enjoyed it. Solomon was fortunate to reign when the rulers of both Egypt and Mesopotamia happened to be weak. His little country thrived, and Solomon prospered with it. Whereas David had had 20 wives and concubines, the Bible tells us Solomon had 700 wives (one of them a pharaoh’s daughter) and 300 concubines. Using craftsmen from abroad, he built a splendid temple, or “house of the Lord,” of limestone, cedar, bronze, and gold.

  While his reign was crowned with glory, underneath lay discontent. His people, mostly poor and frugal, found they had a king who sat on an ivory throne, drank from golden vessels, and collected apes and peacocks. He taxed them hard and drafted many men to quarry stone and cut the lumber for the temple.

  After David and Solomon, the kingdom fell apart. The ten tribes north of Jerusalem seethed about the taxes and forced labor. Solomon’s son and successor parleyed with them, but he bungled the discussions. When he tried to force the tribes to follow orders, they stoned his labor boss to death. The king himself was lucky to escape. The northern people formed a kingdom of their own, called Israel. The people in the southern remnant called their tiny kingdom Judah.

  ONE MIGHT SUPPOSE the breakup of the Saul-David-Solomon kingdom meant disaster. But in the short run the tribes’ division introduced their greatest age. Only after they had quarreled and divided did the tribes, teetering between two major civilizations, make their contribution to our fund of great ideas. Until this time the Israelites had seen their god as, yes, a father quick to help his children and concerned about their morals. But they also knew him as a tyrant who demanded sacrifices to him and was pitiless to those who crossed him.

  In the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., men called “prophets” broadened and deepened the Israelites’ religion. They claimed that they revealed the will of God, often in his very words. One of them was Amos, who called himself a shepherd. Amos had the courage to denounce the cruelty and greed of the king of Israel and the upper classes. “They sell the righteous for silver,” he declared, “and the needy fo
r a pair of shoes — they that trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth.” God is not concerned with worship but with decency and justice. Amos quotes him: “Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Amos predicted that both kingdoms, Israel and Judah, would fall.

  Another prophet, Hosea, preached to the people of Israel when they were warring with Assyria, and when four of their kings had been murdered within fourteen years. He used his own experience, a tragic one. He had married a prostitute, and she betrayed and left him. In the same way, Israel had let down God by loving other gods — their version of adultery.

  Israel, Hosea said, would surely feel the wrath of God. Ahead lay anarchy and defeat. “They shall fall by the sword, their little ones shall be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women ripped open.” But just as he, Hosea, forgave his wife and took her back, so God would one day pardon Israel. “They shall return and dwell beneath [God’s] shadow, they shall flourish as a garden; they shall blossom as the vine.”

  Hosea, Amos, and the other prophets gave their listeners a new and different view of God. Yes, he does demand our rites and worship, said the prophets, but not from hypocrites and victimizers of the poor. More than for religious rites he cares how humans live and how they treat each other. The prophet Micah says, “He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

  As early as the time of David, learned Israelites began to write down certain poems and tales that people until then had learned only by word of mouth. And historians now wrote about events they witnessed, like the tragedy of Saul and the victories of David. For a thousand years others added to these writings. Israel’s children couldn’t forge a knife or shape a handsome pot, but some could write like Sophocles or Shakespeare.

  Scholars gathered many of these treasured texts and slowly formed the Bible. Among the jewels were ancient myths, the stories that explained to people who they were and where they came from. All the peoples of the Middle East had myths, which probably originated not in Palestine but in the villages and towns of Mesopotamia, along the Tigris and Euphrates. Ancient tablets found in mounds of rubble near the rivers tell us myths much like the ones that introduce the Bible. They tell how Enlil, the creator, separated Earth from Heaven; and how Enki and his mother fashioned men from clay; and how the mother-goddess nearly killed the water god because he ate forbidden plants in paradise; and how the gods once caused a flood to kill “the seed of mankind” and (apparently, but part of the tablet is missing) warned a pious king to flee aboard an ark.

  The Bible’s writers tell these ancient tales to great effect, and they have stimulated many minds. Consider, for example, the myth of the creation. After God had made a man and woman, Adam and Eve, he gives us human beings our mission: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over…every living thing that moves upon the earth.” During four millennia we humans have discovered in these words a validation of our (so-called) mastery of earth, namely: God ordained it.

  In another Bible myth God punishes the first two humans when they disobey an order. Before he drives them from their paradise he tells them that from that day hence women will give birth in pain, and everyone will have to work to eat. “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.” At the end of their lives Adam and Eve will die and return to the earth from which God had created Adam. “[Y]ou are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

  The editors included in the Bible age-old tales about the patriarchs and how they met with God, and how the Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt. They included tales about the flight, the wandering in the desert, the settling in Canaan, the three kings and the union of the tribes, and the breaking off of Israel from Judah. And they added other writings: prophecies and laws, the Ten Commandments, poems and proverbs, psalms and stories.

  The Bible gave these former nomads, who now were needy peasants in Palestine, what Egyptians and the people by the Tigris and Euphrates lacked: a memory.

  Among the most affecting writings in the Bible is the poem of Job. The Israelites did not invent the tale; Sumerians had told an older version. But some forgotten genius plucked his harp and made the legend sing. The poem concerns a mystery that troubles everyone: if there is a god or other topmost power, why does he or she permit the suffering of those who don’t deserve it?

  As the book begins, Job is wealthy and contented. He has a family (a wife, three daughters, seven sons) and “very many” servants, and possesses many camels, oxen, sheep, and donkeys. He is “blameless and upright,” fears God, and turns away from evil. God decides to find out whether Job can keep his faith if he is stricken with disasters. So messenger after messenger approaches Job to give him awful news. They tell him first that nomads robbed his oxen and his donkeys, then that fire burned up his sheep, then that other nomads took his camels, then that wind blew down his house and killed his sons and daughters.

  Job at first is stoic. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.” Even after God has Satan cover Job with loathsome sores from head to toe, his faith holds up. “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?”

  Finally, however, Job despairs. When his friends arrive to comfort him, he curses the day he was born. He longs for death because “There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest.” His friends and he debate the cause of evil. His friends uphold the customary view, that suffering is punishment for sin. God forgives the sinner who repents, and he emerges from his miseries morally stronger.

  Job is not consoled. He lists the woes that have happened to him and denies that he did wrong. In despair he claims that God destroys a person at a whim, without mercy, while he lets the wicked go unpunished. Job appeals to God to show himself and justify to Job the sorrows in his life.

  And God does appear, speaking from a whirlwind. He spends no time on Job’s afflictions but reminds him of the size and splendor of the earth. He challenges poor Job, if he believes God’s rule is wrong, to quell the force of evil. Does Job pretend to understand the power and purposes of God? At the end of their discussion Job confesses, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” In fact, God really hasn’t answered Job, but the poet wants us to take some comfort in knowing of the immensity of earth and the mystery of God. We cannot limit God’s transcendent purposes with human notions of what’s just and good. As the story ends, God restores Job’s blessings.

  As the Bible started taking shape, the prophets’ gloomy warnings to the kingdoms of the north and south came true. The northern kingdom, Israel, lasted until 721 B.C. In that year the Assyrians, from the Tigris and Euphrates region, defeated it. The conquerors, who were famous for impaling prisoners on stakes, merely scattered Israel’s upper classes through their empire and totally absorbed them. History knows them as the Ten Lost Tribes.

  Little Judah, in the south, survived by paying tribute, but in 586 B.C. the Babylonians, also from the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, conquered it. They burned Jerusalem and drove off many people to Mesopotamia. When the Persians later conquered Babylon they freed these captives, and most returned to Judah. Since the northern tribes of Israel had disappeared, the Judeans — or in English, Jews — were now the only people left who worshipped the God of Abraham and Moses.

  IN JERUSALEM THE Jews rebuilt the Temple, and their learned men completed the assembling of the Bible. But the troubles of their homeland didn’t end. The Greek Seleucids conquered Judah in 198 B.C. They put a statue of the Greek god Zeus inside the Temple. Still later, in 63 B.C., the Romans conquered Judah and attached it to their empire. Under Rome the life of Jews was hard, and many of them left their homeland. In A.D. 66, Jerusalem revolted, but th
e Romans crushed the rising, burned the Temple, and all but razed the city. Two generations later Jews again rebelled, and the Romans crushed them once again. They carried some away as slaves.

  Many other Jews left their homeland. They no longer had a land they called their own, and they scattered all around the Mediterranean and beyond. For nearly two millennia they lived in ghettos, far from other Jews, often badly treated.

  Though scattered, they possessed the book that told their story and explained their faith. This treasure-house of myths and facts, laws and psalms, and poems and prophecies was the product of their former lives as tribal people on the fringes of great civilizations. Now that they were scattered it would help them to retain the learning and the feeling for their past that made them unlike any other folk on earth.

  But that’s not all the Bible would accomplish, since other humans too, not Jews alone, would read it. It added to the human fund of great ideas about the cause of suffering, our duty to the poor, the morality of war, and the purposes of history. And two far-spreading religions would partially adopt the belief, once held by seminomads and lowly farmers, in a single, strict, and watchful god.

 

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