Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (10 page)

Genesis and the four books that follow are traditionally known as the Pentateuch ('five scrolls'), because, beginning with the final chapters in Genesis, they share a theme which is the tale of this new upheaval: Israel's journey into Egypt and subsequent liberation to travel once more north-eastwards. The journey to Egypt led to some 430 years during which the descendants of Israel and Joseph lived under the rule of the Egyptian Pharaohs. While the narrative passes over those four centuries in complete silence, there follows a richly detailed saga of mass migration or 'Exodus' out of Egypt, with the aim of seizing the land of Canaan promised by Israel's God to the Patriarchs of the Book of Genesis. In the course of this Exodus, God provides formidably precise sets of regulations for everyday life and also for furnishing and running a temple - a temple which in the event did not rise in Israel for another couple of centuries. Once more, there are problems in relating this disjointed account to much evidence in external history or archaeology. Yet at the heart of the Egypt and Exodus story is something which no subsequent Israelite fantasist would have wished to make up, because it is an embarrassment: the hero and leader of the Exodus, the man presented as writing the Pentateuch itself, has a name which is not only non-Jewish but actually Egyptian: Moses.
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Moses's name is therefore a clue to connect a people who ended up in the land of Canaan/Israel/Palestine with a mass movement of people out of Egypt. Maybe the Egyptian migrants were only a small part of that later population, who then contributed their story of exodus to the greater identity of the people, whom we can now meet in their Promised Land in the Books of Joshua and Judges.

The Book of Judges at last provides stories which begin to sit more robustly and extensively amid conventional historical and archaeological evidence, and that evidence fits into the period 1200-1050 BCE. The Israel revealed in this biblical text is not yet a monarchy but a confederation of peoples ruled by 'Judges', leaders in peace and war who are portrayed as being individually chosen by God, but who do not rule in hereditary succession. Israel is engaged in constant struggle with other peoples of the land, and in fact never finally dislodges them all, a rueful and realistic underlying theme within the book. The writer of Judges is much concerned with a threat to the Children of Israel from one of these peoples, the Philistines. Philistines in fact bequeathed their name to the land and therefore built into the word 'Palestine' is a reminiscence of Israel's enemies. But the Philistines also performed a service to Israel, because they securely date the Book of Judges by their presence in its narrative. Sources discovered by modern archaeologists reveal that the Philistines did not just fight Israel but also came into frequent conflict with the Egyptian Empire. Consequently they left abundant traces in Egyptian records, which show the Philistines came over the sea from the west and occupied the coastal zone of Palestine between 1200 and 1050, as part of the same widespread disruption which had destroyed Mycenae (see p. 20).

Victorian archaeologists discovered the first known non-biblical mention of 'Israel', in an inscription on a stone victory monument created for the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah in 1216 BCE. In the course of his (possibly overblown) account of a successful military campaign in Canaan, listing his achievements there, he claims that 'Israel is laid waste, its seed is not'. Significantly the Pharaoh's inscription uses a different set of hieroglyphic conventions for 'Israel' from those which describe specific cities in Canaan and this suggests that 'Israel' is not conceived of as a place but as a people. Yet in the minds of the Egyptian monument-reading public, this people is clearly expected to be associated with 'seed', or grain. So we could conclude that 'Israel' was then known as a people of farmers perhaps scattered throughout the wider territory of Canaan, but that already they possessed a common name which could identify them.
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The Book of Judges consistently tells Israel's story in reference to the one God, who called the people of Israel (with intermittent success) to be faithful to his commands. This probably reflects the reality that Israel's identity stemmed from their religion: maybe religion is all they had to unite them, rather than ethnicity or common origins.

From an early period, the Children of Israel were also called 'Hebrews' - usually (even in the Tanakh itself) by those who did not think much of them. The word is well authenticated beyond the Bible; it appears as '
Habiru
' in a wide variety of times and places from Egypt to Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). What is striking about these other references is that they seem to concern a social rather than an ethnic grouping, and their context invariably suggests people who were uprooted and on the edges of other societies, people of little account except for their nuisance value.
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That is a plausible origin for the peoples who gathered as 'Israel' under the rule of the Judges in the land of Canaan/Israel. They were those who had been marginalized: nomads, semi-nomads, the dispossessed who now began to find ways of settling down and building new lives. While such people were not unique to this area, something remarkable seems to have happened to the groups of
Habiru
who massed in Canaan from the late thirteenth century BCE, whether from Egypt or elsewhere: they constructed a new identity, sealed by a God who was not necessarily to be associated with older establishments or older shrines. It would be natural for the worshippers of this God to begin a long process of refashioning a patchwork of ancient stories from their varied previous homes into a plausible single story of common ancestors, among whom may be numbered Abram/Abraham and Jacob/Israel. It was significant that these Patriarchs had experienced their God changing their names. Perhaps the
Habiru
felt that this was what was happening to them: God was giving them a new identity.

And who was this God? Here some of the Pentateuch's references to the religion of the Patriarchs and of Moses are fascinating precisely because they do not all seem to be the result of later fabrication: they are untidy and anomalous, preserved out of respect for their antiquity despite their inconvenience. There is, for instance, a curious silence: only one mention of priesthood in Genesis, despite Israel's later institution of an elaborate priesthood, and that reference is very puzzling and untypical (the appearance of Melchizedek, who appears to be a Canaanite high priest, in Genesis 14).
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Altars are built which seem to have little connection with any idea of sacrifice, despite Israel's later careful provision for sacrifice in a temple (for instance, Genesis 12.7-9; 13.18; 26.25). There is frequent and uninhibited mention of sacred trees and stones, which do not figure in later Jewish cultic practice. Most interesting is a series of references to gods associated with particular Patriarchs. So we have the 'Fear' of Isaac the son of Abraham (Genesis 31.53), the 'Mighty One' of Jacob (Genesis 49.24) and perhaps the 'Shield' of Abraham (Genesis 15.1). At Genesis 31.53 a dispute involving Jacob is settled by appealing to the judgement of the disputing parties' respective personal gods, the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor, with Jacob sealing the deal with an oath to the Fear of his father, Isaac.
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When contrasting the religions of the Greeks and the Jews (see pp. 23-4), we noted the moment when Moses found that a bush burning in the desert gave him a revelation about these personal gods. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, speaking in the bush, called himself by a single name that is not a name, 'I will be who I will be', which is an explanation of a name used thousands of times throughout the Hebrew scripture,
Yahweh
.
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By itself, the story gives no reason to suppose that these personal gods had previously been linked by a single name. In effect the story tells of the recognition of a new god, and that point is underlined on a further occasion when God says to Moses about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that 'by my name [Yahweh] I did not make myself known to them'.
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What more likely than that such a dramatic change was indeed the result of personal revelation (personal inspiration, if you prefer), either to Moses or to someone else? This was a God whose cult was not tied to a particular sacred place, unlike the old Canaanite cults in the land which the Israelites sought to conquer in the time of the Judges. Instead this God revealed his identity in the context of individual human lives, in all their changeability and battles with the divine - to wanderers like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses.
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Around such a personal god, who announced a new identity for himself, the dispossessed, the migrants, the
Habiru
, could themselves find comfort and a new identity.

It has been worth exploring this first historic appearance of Israel and Yahweh in some detail, because it is likely to have been the source of the unique flexibility, adaptability and capacity to develop which became the characteristic of Judaism into the early Christian era and then became an inheritance for Christians and Muslims as well. Over the next century the circumstances of Israel changed dramatically, so that towards the end of the eleventh century BCE a judge and successful military campaigner named Saul took on the trappings of monarchy familiar in other contemporary kingdoms. The development was not universally popular in Israel, as can be seen from the ambiguities and discrepancies in the accounts of the change preserved in the Books of Samuel: they contain a sour note about kingship which, many centuries later, was destined to help some Christians become republicans.
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In any case, Saul's rule was overthrown by a charismatic young courtier, David, who greatly extended the power of the kingdom and seized for the first time for Israel the strategically important city of Jerusalem, which now embarked on its career as one of the most resonant names in world history.

It is likely to have been an astute political move for the usurper-king to choose this city as a new capital in an effort to head off jealousy between rival groupings in Israel. It was a natural political consequence that he lent respectability to his venture by relocating in Jerusalem a cultic symbol of Yahweh, a sacred wooden chest known as the Ark of the Covenant. This has attracted much subsequent speculation and fascination in both Judaism and Christianity, partly because we have no reliable notion of what the chest originally contained, but principally because of its subsequent mysterious and undatable disappearance.
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The Ethiopian Christian Church later made its own heroic if implausible effort to solve the problem (see pp. 243-4). King David has remained the greatest hero in the history of Israel; to him was ascribed authorship of all the 150 songs or liturgical hymns which have become welded into a single book as the psalms, even though many of them are patently of much later date. In the first century CE it was important for the early Christians to establish that their Anointed One Jesus had an actual family kinship with the ancient hero, allowing Jesus to be called 'Son of David' (see pp. 78-82).
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It was the work of David's actual son, King Solomon, to build a temple in the newly conquered Jerusalem, to be a fitting home for the Ark of the Covenant. This temple began to outdo any rival sacred cultic sites created or inherited by the religion of Yahweh, and it produced much of the psalmody later attributed to Solomon's father; elaborate music was a prominent feature of the new cultic observance which was now created in Jerusalem.

During the long reign of Solomon (
c
. 970-
c
. 930 BCE) the kingdom of Israel reached its greatest extent, and it might even have been seen as a regional power, a status which later biblical writers living in less glorious days did nothing to diminish. In the many bad times that followed, there was deep nostalgia for this brief brilliant flourish of Israel's power and a longing for it to return. Around the turn of the first millennium BCE, therefore, Israel acquired much of the potential profile of later Judaism. These thousand years of Jewish history between David and Jesus Christ the 'Son of David' are also effectively the first millennium of Christian history, for that span of time established key notions which would shape Christian thinking and imagery: for instance, the central importance of the kingdom of God's chosen one David and of the Temple in Jerusalem. There took shape a history of divinely foreordained salvation for the Jewish people, shot through with retribution for their constant backsliding and misunderstanding of God's purposes. From a different perspective, the same history is a story of a struggle to establish that Yahweh was one supreme God, with neither effective rivals nor companions (for instance, a female consort).
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The literature of the Hebrew scriptures was produced by the victors in that struggle, although the editors of it were often too respectful of the ancient texts which they had inherited entirely to eliminate rival voices. We have already met examples of this respectful preservation in the text of the Book of Genesis (see pp. 54-5).

Solomon's empire quickly split on his death into two kingdoms, southern Judah and northern Israel, whose union had even in David's time appeared fragile; the bitterness of the rift led to constant warfare of varying intensity between them. It must have been a grave disappointment for those who had seen the Davidic monarchy as the culmination of Yahweh's purposes. While Judah kept the Solomonic capital of Jerusalem with its Temple, the kings of Israel had to retreat to the northern city of Samaria. With their control of the strategic pass of Megiddo, they were more exposed to the commerce and activities of great powers to the south and north, so they were more cosmopolitan and more inclined to take an interest in other cultures and religions than were the rather introverted rulers of Judah, who resentfully guarded their Jerusalem Temple for Yahweh. Nevertheless both kingdoms produced kings prepared to experiment with the gods of more powerful people who might be allies or overlords.