By Terry Liddle
In God’s Shadow: Politics In The Hebrew Bible, Michael Walzer, 232 pages hardback, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-18044-2.
This is a book about a book, and not just any book! The Sepher Torah (Old Testament) remains a Holy Book for three religions. True the Jews set more store by the Biblical commentaries of the Talmud, the Christians by the New Testament, and the Muslims by the Koran, but the Old Testament remains an important weapon in the armoury of religious ideology and the machinations of priesthood.
Michael Walzer is not a theologian, he admits he has only a schoolboy’s knowledge of ancient Hebrew and a layman’s understanding of the history and archaeology of the ancient world. He is a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and his aim is to examine the ideas about politics, the understandings of government and law that are expressed in the Hebrew bible.
Israel, he tells us, was founded twice once as a kin group and once as a nation. Both times there were alleged covenants with the god YHWH. Yet the stories of these events were written long after the events not as history but as religious propaganda. The story of the covenant of Abraham with YHWH is an obvious explanation for the replacement of human sacrifice with animal sacrifice much of which was appropriated by the Levite priesthood.
Walzer accepts that many Jews were in exile in Egypt although not actually employed as slave labourers building the treasure houses of the ruling class. He accepts they were led out by Moses and Aaron and after wandering in the desert set about conquering and stealing the land of their more advanced Canaanite neighbours in the process forging another covenant with YHWH. They were led by a mysterious religious artefact, the Ark of the Covenant supposedly containing the commandments given to Moses, which equally mysteriously vanished just as later the Christian Holy Grail would vanish.
Archaeology suggests they were marginalised Canaanites who coalesced into twelve tribes and whose priesthood adopted the faith of YHWH. Moses allegedly the faith of what was a Kenite mountain and thunder god when he wed into the tribe in the Land of Midian, Yet the use of the plural Elohim in the first lines of Genesis suggests the Jews were originally polytheists.
This is understandable considering the local goddess cults were more fun and far more sexy than the rather austere worship of YHWH. In Kabbalah there is a female figure, the Shekinah, who sits on the right hand of God. And in song the Sabbath is depicted as a bride eagerly awaiting the coming of her husband.
For three hundred years the Jews were ruled by those mysterious figures the Judges, the Bible names twelve of them. Walzer writes that the whole of the Jewish intelligentsia, such as it was, was engaged in arguing about the law. In practice they were deciding what the content of the Sinai covenant should be and also legitimising their own role. Ultimately the Law, like everything else, was God’s. But with anything that in origin is really human there are contradictions and the Talmud refers to the contradictory works of Hillel and Shami as both being “the words of the living God.”
After the prophet Samuel the failing of the rule of the Judges became obvious and the Jews adopted a monarchy which eventually split into two rival kingdoms, Israel and Judea. These two kingdoms not only fought threatening foreign powers but often fought each other. The Jewish nation had been founded on the genocide of seven Canaanite nations, monotheism being a convenient ideological excuse for this. Polytheism was far more tolerant and multicentric. Now the Jews often found themselves conquered by more powerful, more technically advanced nations, many of them vanishing into the dominant population. Ten of the twelve tribes vanished as did the dynasty of the David kings. Jesus may well have laid claim to this, if he existed at all.
As Walzer points out the Old Testament starts out as the history of a very dysfunctional family. The struggle continued except that now it is a struggle for a royal inheritance. The common people fade into the distance.
The Bible has much to say about kingcraft and priestcraft but nothing about democracy or a republic, common terms in ancient Greek politics Not surprisingly Messianism, the hope for future redemption in which a messiah plays a leading role, became popular among the subjugated masses. Jesus either deliberately adopted or was painted into this role. In comparison to the Jewish savages, the Greeks were miles ahead! In political and philosophical terms we owe far more to them than to the Jews of antiquity.
One may think all this is very ancient history but the past, even the past of a savage tribe of genocide! killers, affects the present. The British monarchy is obviously based on that of ancient Judea which in turn borrowed from the more civilised Egypt. The monarch doubles as head of church and state and on coronation is anointed with oil, the monarchy still commands the armed forces, the Prince of Wales is circumcised according to Jewish ritual and the monarch rules by the Grace of God and is defender of the faith. And there are strong links between Masonry, which sees its roots in the construction of the Temple by Solomon, and the monarchy. And Queen Victoria was a British Israelite, she thought the Anglo-Saxons were descended from a lost tribe.
As humanity emerged from the long dark night of the Middle Ages, the ideas of religious and monarchical hegemony began to be challenged. Foremost among those doing this important work of demystification and enlightenment was Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, works still full of meaning for today’s troubled world.
Marxist historians have written about ancient Egypt and Greece. It is high time their incisive dialectical analysis, the materialist conception of history, was fully applied to the ancient Middle East.