Which brings us back to the point about why the exodus matters to the emergence of monotheism: Monotheism prevailed, but if the exodus had not happened, monotheism would have developed either (1) later, or (2) completely differently, or (3) it might never have happened at all.
CHAPTER SIX
THE MYSTERY OF JUDAH
Love Your Neighbor as Yourself
THE EXODUS: ETHICAL CONSEQUENCES
So: if there was an exodus from Egypt, just of Levites, who later merged with the Israelites, this was a crucial event in the formation of monotheism. But there is more. Much more, I think. The exodus not only gave birth to theological consequences. It also had ethical consequences.
“Love your neighbor as yourself.”1 One of the most famous lines from the Bible. Impressive. Fascinating. Inspiring. Capable of a thousand interpretations and raising ten thousand questions. It appears in a text from the kingdom of Judah. I trace this text to the time of King Hezekiah of Judah, around 700 BCE. Many of my colleagues in biblical scholarship ascribe it to a later period, the post-exile period of the fifth century or later.2 We differ on the time but not on the geography. It is a product of Judah, written after the Assyrians had conquered and eliminated the other kingdom, Israel, from the map. As we shall see, though, the idea in Judah comes down from a long chain of texts and events. It was a remarkable proposition to come out of ancient Judah, which was embedded in the ancient Near Eastern world of wars, slavery, class and ethnic divisions, discriminations of all kinds. In the Christian New Testament it was clear enough to Jesus that he made it one of the two essential commandments. Together with loving one’s God, he said, “There is no other commandment greater than these.”3
But:
There has been a claim for a while now that turns this famous idea on its head. The claim is that the verse means only to love one’s fellow Jews or Israelites as oneself, that the word for “neighbor” there means only a member of one’s own group. Inclusive? No. It is actually exclusive. Is there anything to this claim? Come with me back to ancient Egypt and Israel.
EQUAL TREATMENT OF ALIENS
We have examined the likelihood that the exodus from Egypt was historical but that it involved only the Levites. The Levites were the ones with the Egyptian names, Egyptian cultural elements in their ark, their Tabernacle, and circumcision. Only the Levite sources develop the idea that the world did not know Yahweh’s name until He first revealed it to Moses. The Levites are not mentioned among the people of Israel in the Song of Deborah, and all of Israel is not mentioned among those leaving Egypt in the Song of Miriam. In that song, the people who leave Egypt come to the sacred mountain where the sanctuary is located.
And we saw one more thing: all three Levite sources of the Torah (known in critical Bible scholarship as E, P, and D) command fair treatment of aliens. Just, equal treatment of aliens. Foreigners. Outsiders. Not members of the group. It is not a small point. In these Levite sources it comes up fifty-two times. And how often does the non-Levite source, J, mention it? None. The first occurrence of the word “torah” in the Torah is: “There shall be one torah for the citizen and for the alien who resides among you” (Exodus 12:49, from the Levite source P). According to the Levites, in Israel every week was Be Kind to Aliens Week.
One of the things that has impressed me through my years of study of the Hebrew Bible was this repeated concern for aliens. Fifty-two times? How many things are mentioned in the Five Books of Moses fifty-two times?4 What was the reason for this? We might say that it was a matter of geography. We observed earlier that Israel lay at the point where Africa, Asia, and Europe meet. People of all backgrounds regularly passed through there. So we can imagine a nation at that fulcrum of the trade route having a policy of welcome to all those valuable aliens. Still, not all countries that have wanted trade in history have made this emphasis. There had to be something more. Israel’s own witness, over and over, in all three Levite sources, rather gives this reason:
And you shall not persecute an alien, and you shall not oppress him, because you were aliens in the land of Egypt.
(Exodus 22:20)
And you shall not oppress an alien—since you know the alien’s soul, because you were aliens in the land of Egypt.
(Exodus 23:9)
. . . you shall not persecute him. The alien who resides with you shall be to you like a citizen of yours, and you shall love him as yourself, because you were aliens in the land of Egypt.
(Leviticus 19:33–34)
So you shall love the alien, because you were aliens in the land of Egypt.
(Deuteronomy 10:19)
You shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were an alien in his land.
(Deuteronomy 23:8)
You shall not bend judgment of an alien. . . . You shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and Yahweh, your God, redeemed you from there. On account of this, I command you to do this thing.
(Deuteronomy 24:17–18)
Why, according to these sources, should we be good to aliens? Because we know how it feels. We know the alien’s soul. So we shall not persecute foreigners, we shall not abhor them, we shall not oppress them, we shall not judge them unfairly, we shall treat them the same as we treat ourselves, we shall love them.
Indeed, one of the possible meanings of the word Levi itself in Hebrew is “alien.” As I said in Chapter 2, William Propp makes a strong case on the etymology of the word levi in his commentary on Exodus, that its most probable meaning is an “attached person” in the sense of resident alien.5 The Levites were attached resident aliens during their stay in Egypt, and they were attached resident aliens after their arrival among the Israelite population. There they were not one of the original union of tribes. Thus the Song of Deborah does not include them. But after they were adopted and assimilated into Israel and Judah, the Bible’s authors added them into their national history. They were seen as kin, descended from a man named Levi, who was the brother of the ancestors of the tribes. But the Levites’ experience as aliens was deeply embedded in them. Hence the concentration on aliens in every Levite source. And—remember this—we do not find it anywhere else in the laws of the ancient Near Eastern world. As we quoted in Chapter 2:
This is an emphasis unique to the Hebrew law codes.6
In the whole ancient Near East, in all those lands, through several millennia, we have found fifty-two references to equal treatment of aliens, and all fifty-two are in the first five books of the Bible—and only in the Levite sources of those five books!
Now the point of the textual and archaeological evidence that I gave was not just whether the exodus was historical or not. I argued that the merger of Yahweh, the God of the Levites, with El, the God of the Israelites back in the land, was crucial to the very formation of monotheism. If Israel had chosen to worship them as two separate gods, the history of Judaism and Christianity and Islam would be entirely different. And the point that I want to make now is likewise broader than just that the exodus, in some form, was historical. In addition to the theological consequences, I now want to recognize that there were also these ethical consequences. The experience of being aliens, of being oppressed, apparently led Israel’s clergy and teachers, the Levite priests, to say, “You must never do that.”
WAR
We all know that there are harsh passages toward others in the Bible as well: dispossess the Canaanites, destroy Jericho, etc. But, as I said earlier, the evidence in the ground indicates that most of that (the Conquest) never happened. Likewise in the case of the destruction of the Midianites, as I described in Chapter 4, this was a story in the Priestly (P) source written as a polemic against any connection between Moses and Midian. It is a polemical story in literature, not a history of anything that actually happened. At the time that the Priestly author wrote the instruction to kill the Midianites, there were not any Midianites in the region. The Midianite league had disappeared at least four hundred years earlier.7 As we saw in Chapter 2, it was an attested practice in tha
t ancient world to claim to have wiped out one’s enemies when no such massacre had actually occurred. King Merneptah of Egypt did it. King Mesha of Moab did it. And, so there is no misunderstanding, the purpose of bringing up those parallels is not to say that it was all right to do it. It is rather to recognize that, even in what are possibly the worst passages about warfare in the Bible, the stories do not correspond to any facts of history. They are the words of an author writing about imagined events of a period centuries before his own time. And, even then, they are laws of war only against specific peoples: Canaanites, Amalekites, and Midianites, none of whom exist anymore. So they do not apply to anyone on earth. The biblical laws concerning war in general, against all other nations, for all the usual political and economic reasons that nations go to war, such as wars of defense or territory, do not include the elements that we find shocking about those specific cases. (See examples below.)
Now one can respond that even if these are just fictional stories they are still in the Bible, after all, and can therefore be regarded as approving of such devastating warfare. That is a fair point to raise. I would just add this caution: when people cherry-pick the most offensive passages in the Bible in order to show that it is bad, they have every right to point to those passages, but they should acknowledge that they are cherry-picking, and they should pay due recognition to the larger—vastly larger—ongoing attitude toward aliens and foreigners. In far more laws and cases, the principle of treatment of aliens is positive. Besides the outright cases above, it is expressed in specific rules of how to relate to others in general: Do not rape a captured woman in war (Deuteronomy 21:10ff). Do not abhor an Edomite (Deuteronomy 23:8). If you happen upon your enemy’s ox or donkey straying, bring it back to him. If you see the donkey of someone who hates you sagging under its burden, and you would hold back from helping him: you shall help him (Exodus 23:4–5). The Bible permits a violent response to those who threaten Israel’s existence, but it still requires that in a siege during war Israel must offer the besieged city peace first, and it forbids a massacre if they surrender. And if they do not surrender, women and children can be captured but may not be killed.8 It is still war, the worst thing in the world, and one cannot deny its presence in some of the texts, but we should at minimum recognize that the biblical laws of conventional war are different from the horrible scenes of the fictional holy wars that people often cite in criticism of the Bible’s story. Remarkably, the biblical texts do not advocate persecution of pagans for being pagans. Pagan worship is forbidden only to the Israelites and Jews themselves. Biblical texts taught that pagans were wrong, that their beliefs in the gods and goddesses were mistaken, that Israel’s Canaanite predecessors in the land had committed moral offenses that, the texts claimed, had polluted the land in earlier times.9 But at the same time biblical religion was remarkably ecumenical in respecting others’ rights to their continued beliefs in the gods. A Greek could worship Zeus, and a Canaanite could worship the Baal, as long as they did not try to convert the Israelites or Jews to that worship. The story of Elijah and the execution of the 450 prophets of Baal at Carmel, for example, does not require or advocate going out and killing all prophets of the Baal. The story presents this episode as a singular event in a context of a struggle to stop Queen Jezebel’s effort to bring the Baal worship into Israel. We do not have to like, agree with, or make up excuses for a story that has blood spilled in an early battle of miracles for monotheism. We have to understand why the author of such a story presented that moment as so dire that he there, and only there, in his writings could conceive of a massacre in that revolution.10 Our world literature is filled with such stories. What we can do, hopefully, is to learn from them—and change.
ALL THE FAMILIES OF THE EARTH WILL BE BLESSED
People sometimes have thought that monotheism promoted exclusivism, prejudice: if there is only one God, and it is our God, then others must be wrong, foolish, in need of correction. But there is another side to this as well: the birth of monotheism was paralleled with the birth of love of neighbors, even alien neighbors. The exodus led both to monotheism and to the exceptional attitude toward others. Still, as I said at the beginning, some have claimed that the famous verse “Love your neighbor as yourself” means only to love one’s fellow Jews or Israelites as oneself. Not all-inclusive, they say. It is actually narrowly selective. These writers not only misunderstand the Hebrew word for “neighbor.” They miss the entire context of fifty-two references to love and treat even aliens as oneself.
The very fact that the Bible’s sources start off with the creation of the earth and all of humankind instead of starting with Israel itself is also part of this context. As I asked in Chapter 3, if any of us were asked to write a history of the United States, would we start by saying, “Well, first there was the Big Bang, and then . . .”? The biblical authors saw Israel’s destiny as being to bring good to all those foreign nations and peoples—to the earth. This is not a minor point. It appears in God’s first words to Abraham, and again in God’s first words to Isaac, and again in God’s first words to Jacob: your descendants’ purpose is to be that
all the families of the earth will be blessed through you.
(Genesis 12:3; 26:2–4; 28:10–14)
It appears again in God’s words to Abraham following the near-sacrifice of his son Isaac (Genesis 22:18). In some of these verses the text says all the families of the earth will be blessed, and in some it says all the nations of the earth will be blessed. So both on the large scale and the small, the message is explicit that the purpose of the divine relationship with Abraham is, in some way, to benefit everyone. That fact is all the more unusual because in the Bible the deity is rarely depicted as giving reasons for His actions or His commandments. (When you are an omnipotent being, you should not have to explain yourself all the time.) But this case is a most notable exception. Right from the beginning, God tells Abraham and Isaac and Jacob what this is going to be all about. Their descendants’ task is to care about everyone and to try to bring blessings to them.
Because of a quirk of Biblical Hebrew grammar, some readers have taken these words to mean that all the nations or families “will bless themselves” through Abraham’s descendants rather than “be blessed” through them. So they understand the passages to mean that people from many families and nations will bless their children saying, “May you be like Abraham.”11 This understanding is not necessarily wrong. The Hebrew verb occurs in these verses in two different conjugations.12 Both of these conjugations in Biblical Hebrew can be sometimes passive and sometimes reflexive. If we take them as passives in these particular verses, then they mean “the nations (or families) of the earth will be blessed through you.” If we take them as reflexives, then they mean “may the nations (or families) of the earth bless themselves through you.” The grammar allows for either, but to my mind the former is more profound, and it fits better with the context: it follows upon the creation of all humans, and then, most especially, it comes immediately after the story of the tower of Babylon. As we recall, that story, in Genesis 11, culminates in the formation of the different nations, spread around the earth according to their different languages. And then the very next chapter begins with God’s first appearance to Abraham and expressing the aim that Abraham’s descendants’ destiny is to be a source of blessing to all of those many peoples. The Bible’s message, repeated all those times, seems direct: you are not in this just for yourself.
YOU SHALL LOVE HIM (THE ALIEN) AS YOURSELF
Which brings us back to our opening question. Does “Love your neighbor as yourself” refer only to loving your fellow Jews/Israelites? When the text already directs every Israelite to love aliens as oneself, what would be the point of saying to love only Israelites—and in the very same chapter!13 My friend the biblical scholar Jacob Milgrom, of blessed memory, wrote that it is precisely because the love of the alien is specifically mentioned there that love of “neighbor” must mean just a fellow Israelite.14 I see h
is point, but it would have been more likely if the verse about love of aliens came first in the text. But it comes after we have already had the instruction to love the neighbor as oneself, so it can just as well be a specification for anyone who would have thought that love of neighbor did not include loving others as well. Did the authors think that such specifications were necessary? We know that they did because they added it fifty-two times in the Torah! And, in any case, Milgrom and I would both recognize that the bottom line is that one is supposed to love both, alien and neighbor, whether they overlap or not.
So from where did that idea come, that the Hebrew word for neighbor in this verse, means only a member of one’s own group? As we saw in the case of Moses’ “heavy mouth” in Chapter 4, when we want to check the meaning of a biblical term, the first step is to look at other places where it occurs in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew word for neighbor here is rē‘a. Now the first occurrence of rē‘a is in the story of the tower of Babel (Babylon), the Bible’s story of the origin of different nations and languages. It involves every person on earth:
and they said each to his rē‘a . . .
(Genesis 11:3)
That is, the term refers to every human, without any distinctions by group. Now one might say, though, that the word might still refer only to members of one’s own group because, at this point in this story, all humans are in fact still members of a single group. So let us go to the next occurrence of the word. In the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis, Judah has a rē‘a named Hirah the Adullamite.15 Hirah is a Canaanite! He comes from the (then) Canaanite city of Adullam. He cannot be a member of Judah’s clan because, at this point in the story, that clan, the Israelites, consists only of Jacob and his children and any grandchildren.
The Exodus Page 17