The bible tells us that the Hebrews (as well as everyone else)were worshipping a whole passel of gods. It was the terrorism of Moses that kept them in line. It was not uncommon for the biblical heroes to worship other gods.
If you would accept that Moses was doing God's will. Why would you not accept that, say,any modern person was doing so? If you do not evaluate the messenger claims of a person by how their behaviour and motives comports with a rational and logical conception of a loving God, then would method do you use to evaluate such claims?
It is claimed tha Hermes was a (true) messenger of the gods. This seems to be to be a much more evidentiary claim than that Moses was. All peoples of history had messengers from one god or another. (EDIT9 not referring to Hermes, here!)Why should the Mayan conceptions be given a lesser treatment than Moses. They were far more accomplished in mathematitics and astronomy than the desert Hebrews, even though the Egyptian, Moses, was obviously highly educated. I find the religions invented in N. America to be more respectful of of a global humanity than I do those of the Middle East.
Although I find the literature about Hermes much more pleasant than that about Moses the Egyptian, I am not impressed with claims made that either were Divine messengers of a just and loving God. I would be very uncomfortable thinking that God, for instance, thinks that tossing around the blood of birds will cure leposy. Although this type of belief as been well documented in the modern era by cultural anthropologists. It seems to be disappearing however, as science and reason poke their fingers into the depths of the jungle preserved in our minds. Ladies and Gentleman...MOSES
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"Before there was a Bible, before there were any people called "Jews", there were the Hebrews. The name was originally habiru, meaning "wanderer". These were nomads, roaming the trade routes of the ancient Middle East. We now refer to "Semitic" peoples, but in the Egyptian writings of thirty centuries ago, the term habiru was nothing to do with race. Just as the term "peasant" can be used of a Chinese peasant or a French peasant, "wanderer" or "traveller" is only descriptive. The term was also used contemptuously, settled people often regarding the habiru with suspicion, like English villagers considering gypsies as a potential menace.
Many of these travellers followed an arc known as the Fertile Crescent. To travel this route today, you would start in southern Iraq, follow the river Euphrates north-west into Syria, and then go down through Lebanon and Israel to the Sinai peninsula and northern Egypt.
Eighteen centuries before Jesus, most of this same route was taken by a man called Abraham. He started from the ancient city of Ur in Babylonia. Ur had been established centuries before when the same area was known as Sumer, the location of the earliest known civilisation. Passing through northern Arabia, south of Assyria, his route went northwards to Haran in northern Mesopotamia and then southwards, probably through Phoenicia, to the land then known as Canaan.
It was the descendants of the family of this man who became the cultural and religious group which we now refer to as "Hebrews". A few generations after Abraham, moved on from Canaan by famine, one group, headed by Joseph, went down to Egypt. It was Joseph's father, Jacob, who was first called "Israel" (meaning "he struggles with God"), his descendants being called Israelites.
The texts of what Christians call the Old Testament - not written down until perhaps eight centuries later - tell us that Joseph was given great status and authority in the service of the Pharaoh. There may be some exaggeration here, the pride of a relatively insignificant group of foreigners emphasising favourable details in the passing on of the stories by word of mouth over the generations.
Whatever Joseph's privileges or position may have been, when a new Pharaoh came to power, his favourable treatment became a thing of the past. The Israelites became slaves.
After telling us this, much of the early part of the Old Testament is then dominated by the hugely significant figure of Moses, the great leader who led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and back to Canaan. There is the famous story of the baby in the basket among the reeds, saved from the drowning of Israelite boy-children ordered by the Pharaoh. However, this is just a story hijacked by the Hebrews and revealing their distant Mesopotamian origins. The story was originally told of King Sargon, who founded the kingdom of Akkad, north of Sumer, in about 2300 BCE. He was supposed to have been brought up by a gardener who found his cradle drifting in the river Euphrates. The Hebrews even copied the detail that the basket was coated with pitch (Exodus 2.3). The detail does not travel well: pitch was a common commodity in Mesopotamia, but it would have been rare in ancient Egypt.
Interestingly, Moses is an Egyptian name. The name Rameses, for example, is linguistically the same name prefixed by the name of the sun-god Ra. Moses was such a great figure that the truth about his role and character are lost to us. By the time his story was written down, the historical Moses had been smothered by myth - visiting plagues on the Egyptians, turning rods into snakes, parting the waters of the Red Sea, living to be 120 years old, and being on intimate conversational terms with God himself.
It would in fact be very difficult, not to mention unreasonable, to say any more about the story of the Hebrews while trying to leave out the concept of God. To suggest a separation of "religion" and "history" in modern conceptual terms would have been meaningless to them. As far as they were concerned, God was at work in the events of the world, and they were his people. Abraham was said to have migrated from Mesopotamia to Canaan because God told him to. The Israelites were released from slavery in Egypt through the power of God, acting through his servant, Moses.
Moses is said to have brought the laws of God, including the famous Ten Commandments of Exodus chapter 20, down from Mount Sinai. This is yet another story hijacked by the Hebrews from their origins in the culture of Mesopotamia.
The use of the term "hijacked" is deliberate - not to be negative, but to encourage some readers to become more objective. I could have used a less emotive term, and talked about the story being "absorbed" or "adapted". However, in Western societies there is often exaggerated respect for the Bible. It is a collection of old documents, but it is widely and uncritically regarded as more accurate and trustworthy than the stories and documents originating in other cultures. It is acceptable to regard such other cultural traditions as "mythological", as the expression of primitive people groping towards an understanding of their place in the universe; but even the non-Christian is likely to believe that something in "the Bible" is somehow more "authentic" or "historical".
So, what are the roots of the Mount Sinai/Ten Commandments story? In the 18th century BCE, King Hammurabi of Babylon was shown receiving his laws from his god at the top of a ziggurat, the mountain-shaped temples of the plains of Mesopotamia. This is not a coincidental resemblance to a story from an unconnected part of the world, such as ancient China. It is reasonable to think that the similarity of this much older story at least implies that it influenced the creation of the tales of Moses.
In addition to this, the structure and subject matter of much of the law in the Old Testament, which consists of much more than just "the Ten Commandments", is frequently very similar to the written legal codes of ancient Sumer. However, there still seems to be something special about the codes of the Old Testament. Where the Sumerian codes placed the emphasis on the protection of property, the laws of Moses gave more significance to conduct and behaviour. They told a man how to live, how to treat his neighbour, to care for the widowed and the poor.
The people of Israel were told that they were obliged to obey the commandments of their God, but this was not just an order. They were also told that this was one side of an agreement, a Covenant. In return for their obedience and loyalty, God would reward them. He would help them oppose their enemies; he would take away sickness and infertility; and he would establish them in the land he had promised to Abraham.
This idea of a Covenant with God was a concept of staggering genius, one of the great ideas of all time. It probably originated with Moses himself. I am not being cynical here and accusing him of having "deliberately created" this idea in some manipulative sense. This would be a naive projection of modern thought processes on to the ancient world. In that world, a genius did not have any of our concepts enabling him to separate conscious and subconscious processes, or to distinguish unconscious creativity and dreams from voices or messages "from God".
The idea of the Covenant gave the Hebrews, and perhaps mankind, things of great value. Rather than being simply helpless victims of circumstance, it taught them that to some extent their destiny was in their own hands. Like a primitive form of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, it said that if they did the right things, they would get desirable results.
The Hebrews had pride. God had created man in his own image, supreme over all other creatures. In the teachings attributed to God, they also had a bedrock of right and justice. Any human authorities, even kings, would never be able to just please themselves in future. Any laws created by men, any conduct of men, could be judged by these ultimate standards, tested to see whether they reflected the will of God.
On the other hand, the Covenant reinforces religious thinking, with its closed logic that can never lose an argument. If King David was a brilliant success, this was clearly a consequence of God's power. If there was a drastic decline in the fortunes of the Hebrews, this was because they had been disobedient and God was holding back on stacking the deck in their favour. This rather neatly seems to avoid, to some extent, the "problem of evil" which later generations of Christians would agonise over, which is that if God is incapable of preventing evil he can not be all-powerful; but if he is capable of intervening but he chooses not to, then surely he is not being good. The old Hebrew god was harder than this, and had not yet become the God of love.
Another powerful characteristic of the stories of the Hebrews is a sense of dissatisfaction with the present. There is a yearning for what was lost and can never be regained, and a looking forward to a better tomorrow. In the past there is always a garden of Eden; ahead there is a Promised Land. We are in slavery, we are in exile, we are guilty; we have lost our homeland, we deserve to suffer for our sin and disobedience; but ahead there is a Kingdom of God. Arguably this has given us modern culture, but no doubt we pay the price for it. Perhaps our possibilities of scientific and technological progress and social development could never have been created with roots in one of the great Eastern religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, in whose wisdom lies a fatalistic understanding that the Present is the only reality we ever have.
Whatever their profound subsequent effects on global culture, we must not lose sight of the fact that these early Hebrews were not highly sophisticated philosophers, or theologians with a hot-line to the One Almighty God. They were a primitive tribe, one among many, all with their own gods. Their rite of circumcising all male children could easily have been a substitute for human sacrifices performed in a distant barbaric past.
They believed in many gods for a long time, even when told they should worship only one. Look at the very first of the Ten Commandments: "You shall have no other gods before me." (Ex. 20.3)
Obviously, the existence of other gods was not doubted at the time - only the right to worship them. Centuries later, even when their religious thinking had evolved and it was starting to be argued that their God was the only God (rather than just an alternative), the prophet Jeremiah said accusingly:
"You have as many gods as you have towns, O Judah; and the altars you have set up to burn incense to that shameful god Baal are as many as the streets of Jerusalem." (Jer. 11.13)
However, the cult of the Hebrews adopted two distinctive and significant features at an early stage. These provided a powerful foundation for later thinkers to transcend the idea of local and tribal deities, so that they could think in terms of one universal God.
These features were that their god was invisible, and that his name was so holy that it should never be pronounced. This god was not only fierce and jealous and all-powerful; he could not be limited by any kind of artistic or sculptural representation of him. If it was forbidden to make a graven image of him, it would become easier to think of him as without limit or location.
The holy name of God was represented in the Hebrew sacred writings by four letters equivalent to JHVH or YHWH (called the Tetragrammaton in Greek). This was probably pronounced "Yahweh" in Hebrew. I say "probably" because its actual pronunciation, being forbidden, has not passed down to us. When reading their texts, they would substitute a term such as "The Lord" or "God", rather than commit the terrible sin of saying the holy name. In Elizabethan England they took the vowels from "Adonai" ("The Lord") and put them into the consonants JHVH to give us the incorrect pronunciation "Jahovah".
Returning to the story of Moses, the trouble with leading the Israelites out of slavery and telling them they could have Canaan is that this land of milk and honey was not just sitting there, devoid of inhabitants, waiting for their arrival. It did not occur to Yahweh to have a quiet word with the locals and suggest they pack their bags and emigrate. The Hebrews quite probably formed an alliance with other nomadic tribes in order to conquer the land. The fighting started under Moses and continued under Joshua after Moses had died. There is archaeological evidence of destruction in the cities of Canaan in the 13th century BCE (as well as the stories in the Old Testament, of course).
The invading Hebrews were culturally more primitive than the Canaanites. They copied their building techniques and took over their script. The multiplicity of gods, the imported Yahweh competing with locally established deities, created generations of religious conflict. These other gods are deeply embedded within the Hebrew traditions. Quite apart from Biblical references (as above) to the Canaanite god Baal (which also means "Lord"), Mount Zion is Canaanite for "the seat of a god", and even such apparently thoroughly "Jewish" names as Solomon and Jerusalem contain the name "Solom" - the Canaanite god of the evening star.
The next problem for the settlers was the invasion of the Philistines, who may have originated from Crete. They were formidable opponents, making enough of an impact on the area that we can still think of it by their name, "Palestine". The Philistines had superior weapons and technology, and it was from them that the Hebrews learned the use of iron. The Hebrew words for "helmet" and "knife", for example, both have Philistine roots.
Apparently the old tribal politics were not up to the task of dealing with the invasion, and it was this challenge which caused the Hebrews to require not only assistance from the Phoenicians but also the leadership of military kings. The first two kings were Saul and his successor David. The Philistines, defeated after much bloodshed, were largely absorbed into King David's kingdom around 1000 BCE. It was in David's time that the city of Jerusalem became the capital of the kingdom of Israel.
One united Hebrew state under a king as successful and admired as David - the reality would not last, but the vision would haunt the Jewish imagination for centuries, another dream of a lost ideal. Yet David's successes were outshone by those of his son and successor, Solomon. Solomon was a king of conquest and military expeditions, a man of energy and vision, and of international status in times of prosperity.
It was Solomon who was responsible for the construction of the first great Temple to God in Jerusalem. It was built in about 959 BCE on Mount Moriah on the north-eastern side of the city, opposite the Mount of Olives. Solomon's Temple would remain intact for well over three hundred years.
After Solomon died in 935 BCE, the Jewish state split into two. The northern kingdom, with its capital at Samaria, was the one known as Israel. Jerusalem and the Temple now belonged to the southern kingdom of Judah.
The beginning of the age of Hebrew kings was also the beginning of the age of the prophets. "Prophet" is an unfortunate term, as we associate it with foretelling the future. In Hebrew they were called nabi'im, mouthpieces of God. Far from being "priests" of some authorised religious set-up, they could be ordinary uncouth countrymen. Convinced that the king or the people were going wrong, straying from the commandments of Yahweh or following heathen gods, the role of these fearsome preachers was religious, moral and political all at once.
It is a staggeringly courageous concept. As long as they could convince people, presumably by a combination of personal conviction and forceful personality, that God was speaking through them, then a peasant could denounce moral lapses and criticise a monarch, without fear of having his head chopped off for audacity.
The importance of their role can not be exaggerated. The first Hebrew kings, Saul and David, were actually anointed by the prophet Samuel. This demonstrated that they had been chosen by God, but also meant that they were still subservient to his authority. The king was known as the "anointed one" of God, or in Hebrew, the Mashiah or Messiah.
Attacking social injustice, proclaiming ethical and moral standards, warning of the perils of disobedience, the prophets were of central importance to the evolution of the cult of Yahweh. They gave a sense of hope for the future and strengthened the sense of national identity. They were pivotal in the development of a harsh and primitive tribal god into a God who was merciful as well as just, who was morally demanding but also willing to accept the repentant sinner.
After Samuel, the next great prophet was Elijah, who, like all great figures in those days, was credited with the ability to perform miracles. He was critical of Ahab, a king of Israel who had turned to the worship of Baal. Elijah was said to have vanished up to heaven in a flaming chariot, carried on a whirlwind.
The rise of a strong Hebrew state had only been possible at a time of decline of great imperial powers in Egypt and the Middle East, who would otherwise have wished to interfere with their territorial ambitions and to dominate the area themselves. In the course of time, other empires rose and conquered. First there were the Assyrians, who destroyed Israel in 721 BCE, deporting thousands of the Hebrews, scattering them far and wide across their empire.
Judah was left intact, apparently not sufficiently desired by or threatening to the Assyrians. Their reprieve outlived the Assyrian empire itself, but they were attacked by their imperial successors, the Babylonians. The Hebrews rebelled against their domination, but in 587 BCE the walls of Jerusalem and the Temple itself were razed to the ground by the Babylonian armies.
King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, who reigned from 604 to 562 BCE, copied the Assyrian technique of consolidating a conquest by massive relocations of subjugated peoples. Thousands of the Hebrews were carried away to Babylon, six hundred miles from their homeland. This was the first great Dispersion, or (in Greek) Diaspora. The experiences and the attitudes of these people during this great Exile were crucial in the formation of the religion of Judaism from the cult of Yahweh. It was only from this time that they were first referred to as "Jews", the people of Judah. The name itself means "praise":
"...when she gave birth to a son she said, 'This time I will praise the Lord.' So she named him Judah..." (Gen. 29.35)
Although they seemed to have lost everything, the leaders of the community held on to the traditions they had inherited, and did not turn away from their God, Yahweh. The disaster was blamed on the Jews themselves. Their God had not let them down; they had let their God down. They had not obeyed his Will, and so they were being severely punished for their sins.
The prophets played a vital role in holding the people together and explaining the meaning of events. Ezekiel told them that if they were determined to understand and follow the will of God, he would restore their fortunes. As Israel had been delivered out of Ur and out of Egypt, she would be delivered out of Babylon. God was powerful enough to do anything he wanted. They would return to Jerusalem and their Temple would be rebuilt. The covenant would be renewed; he would be their God, and they would be his people.
Even more important to our story is a prophet whose name we do not even know. Scholars tell us that the last 26 chapters of the Book of Isaiah were not part of the original document, but were added later. They therefore refer to the prophet responsible for these pronouncements as Deutero-Isaiah, or the Second Isaiah. We shall return to these writings, as they were of great significance for the early Christians centuries later, but their initial significance was in providing comfort and encouragement to the Jews by telling them not to despair, for they were promised a glorious future.
There is usually a feeling of exclusivity or separation about a great religion - they have the truth, others do not. In fact there are none which have been truly separated from outside influences. Around this time, despite the attitude in theory of rejecting everything that originated from heathen gods, Judaism was changing, becoming something it had never been before. New religious concepts were being absorbed from their environment. From the Persian religion of Zoroaster, their imaginations would be captured by exciting ideas about a divine judgement, about heaven and hell, and about a cosmic war between the powers of light and darkness.
For most primitive peoples, the rituals of their religion were centred around sacred sites, sometimes with statues or images of the gods. It is quite true that, in Jerusalem, the Jews had had the Temple and the priesthood. Nevertheless, they had never allowed images of Yahweh; and because they had come to believe that he was not only invisible but universal, they were liberated from the restriction of locality. If God was everywhere, he could be worshipped anywhere. Just as the concept of Israel itself now became an ideal, rather than a political entity or just a place, then Judaism would exist in the heart and soul wherever there was a Jew.
The Babylonian Jews established the institution of the synagogue. They did not need a priest; all they needed was ten adult male Jews and a room for a meeting place. The synagogue became so important as the focus of Jewish community life in the Hellenistic (Greek) world of later centuries that we know this institution by its Greek name rather than by a Hebrew word. It simply means a "bringing together", and originally referred to the group themselves. It would be some centuries before the term would be applied to a building in which the meeting took place.
The synagogue would meet for prayer and worship on the Sabbath day, their traditional weekly day of rest from work. They would discuss and arrange community matters, such as help for those in unfortunate circumstances, and they would conduct the rituals of weddings and circumcisions.
Perhaps most important of all, the synagogue became a centre for study and instruction in the traditions and stories of their nation. Not only did this maintain and reinforce their sense of identity as a people, it also turned them into a much more law- and text-orientated people. If they had to win back the power and approval of God, and obtain the promised future, then it became vital to study in great detail what were said to be the requirements of God, and to maintain his laws precisely and conscientiously. The most skilled teachers became known as scribes, or doctors of the Law.
Far from home, the exiles set about nothing less than the creation of an ultimate literature, not just the history of the Jews but everything that God had revealed to them of his nature and purpose, and everything that he wanted them to do. Their history, their poetry and their beliefs, much of which had been passed down orally for centuries, were now edited and refined and combined into the sacred texts.
At a later stage, the idea of "editing" part of "the Bible" would be completely unacceptable to the religious mind. At this stage, there was no Bible, just a growing collection of separate documents. The "Old Testament" would not be completed and put together for about another four hundred years. By that time, the vitality and creativity of the writings during the Exile were regarded as divine inspiration, and the texts had become holy writings, the unalterable word of God.
We noted earlier that storytellers of the Middle East would absorb tales from their environment. The emotional impact or meaning and significance of the story were the important reasons for using it, not some modern critical sense of historical authenticity. By this time, the Jews had a rich history and many stories and traditions to draw upon. They recorded two different legends of the creation of the world, now found in chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis. They gave us the story of the Garden of Eden, and of Noah's Ark, both stories originating from the language or conditions of Mesopotamia. "Eden" is Sumerian for "flatland", and probably referred originally to the smooth plains between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates; the same area that was subject to many terrible floods when those rivers overflowed their banks. It would have seemed to the primitive locals like the drowning of the world and the wrath of the gods, even though the disaster would have had no impact on other people only a hundred miles away.
Analysis of literary style has revealed a unity between certain of the books of the Old Testament. Scholars can tell that the same group of authors and editors worked on the first four books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. Another set that can be grouped together are Deuteronomy, Joshua and Kings; and a further three-volume set consists of the books of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah.
Collectively, the sacred texts became known as the Law and the Prophets. Deuteronomy became dislodged from the other two volumes in its "set" and was attached to the first four books. All five books together became known in Hebrew as the Torah, and later in Greek as the Pentateuch. "Torah" originally meant instruction by divine revelation, but it is usually translated simply as "Law". The authorship of the Torah was traditionally attributed to Moses himself, despite the fact that Deuteronomy tells of his death and burial.
It was a common practice in the ancient world for the actual author to remain invisible, and for the writing to be given authority by a claim that it originated from a great historical or legendary figure. Similarly, the authorship of the Psalms was attributed to King David himself. This practice, we shall need to remember, was still current when the New Testament documents were being written.
The scriptures other than the Torah were collectively referred to as The Prophets, although they consisted not only of the stories and pronouncements of prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, but also of the historical documents Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. The five volumes of the Law were completed soon after the return from the Exile, but other documents continued to be produced.
All aspects of the everyday life of a Jew were supposed to be governed by the Law. Generations of scribes would be involved in intense study of the scriptures, resolving any contradictions, explaining applications to particular situations, interpreting the requirements of God. A modern legal system will have the meaning of the words of legislation, the Statutes, applied through the interpretation of experts in the wording of judgements forming the precedents of Case Law. Similarly, the doctors of the Law would debate meanings and arrive at teachings to be passed on to their disciples. In time it was held that this oral tradition also stretched back through the generations of master and disciple to Moses himself.
In the earliest traditions, the Law was harsh and demanding. There were many crimes attracting the death sentence. "Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death", we are told at Exodus 21.17. A "stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him" should be stoned to death by the men of the town, according to Deuteronomy 21.18-21.
However, this was also a law of social responsibility, of justice and mercy; a law which, despite its sternness, also contained tolerance and the seeds of loving not only your neighbour, but even your enemy:
"If you come across your enemy's ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to take it back to him." (Ex. 23.4)
"Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt." (Ex. 23.9)
"If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink." (Proverbs 25.21)
As the Assyrians had given way to the Babylonians, so the Babylonians in their turn gave way to the conquering Persians under King Cyrus the Great. Babylon fell in 539 BCE. Judah became a Persian province and Cyrus appointed a commissioner, Sheshbazzar, to rule there. Cyrus also allowed exiled people to return to their homelands. The exiled Jews went home to Jerusalem. Cyrus even gave orders for the rebuilding of their Temple.
Led home by Zerubbabel, who was the grandson of Judah's last king, Jehoiachin, the Jews could only blame the change in their fortunes on their God. Cyrus, their liberator, was even presented by Deutero-Isaiah as the instrument of the Lord, as his "anointed" (Isa. 45.1). Cyrus, not even a Jew, was a "Messiah". It would only be a later generation that would start reserving this term for a descendant of David and leader of the Jews." |
