Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (11 page)

The time of the Judges and then of David and Solomon had coincided with weakness in Egypt and an Assyrian monarchy which was preoccupied in another direction; these circumstances may have afforded opportunity for the brief success of the united kingdom of Israel. From the mid-eighth century, the Mesopotamian empire of Assyria was ready to intervene more actively in Palestine/Israel, enjoying a third phase in a long history of military success which now spread its power from the Persian Gulf to the frontiers of Egypt. To judge by the inscriptions and imagery of their victory monuments, the Assyrians delighted in the use of terror and punitive sadism to seal their military success. The rise of this horrifying new threat to the north inevitably affected Israel, the northern kingdom, more than Judah. As both the Bible and Assyrian records confirm, Israel suffered frontal assault and destruction by the Assyrians around 722 BCE; thousands of its people were exiled and its political organization disappeared for ever.
²¹
That left the kingdom of Judah standing alone, delivered from total conquest because the Assyrians were distracted by revolts elsewhere, a historical accident which the biblical chroniclers naturally interpreted in terms of divine deliverance. Judah survived for another century and a half, but once more Palestine/Israel had become the object of land-grabbing by external powers and, apart from the century-long interlude of the Hasmonean regime from 167 BCE (see pp. 65-71), that has been the case until modern times. This new reality would have a major impact on Judaism.

The gathering crisis for the two kingdoms in the ninth and eighth centuries reinforced the role in Jewish culture and society of figures who presented themselves as mouthpieces of Yahweh, carrying urgent messages for his people: the prophets. The modern meaning of the word 'prophecy', relating it to the future, may mislead; in Greek,
propheteia
means the gift of interpreting the will of the gods. As ancient Middle Eastern archives rediscovered from the nineteenth century onwards have revealed, Israel was not the only ancient society in the region in which prophets played a major role: long before, in the eighteenth century BCE, they can be found in the Mesopotamian Babylonian kingdom of Mari, and they also appear among the Jews' then contemporary enemy Assyria. Yet the peculiar circumstances of Israel's history and the consequent preservation of documents by and about the Israelite prophets conspire to give them a special and enduring place first in the history of Judaism, then of Christianity.
²²
The prophets' primary job was to talk about the present, not the future, and there had been such prophets in Israel before this period - yet apparently not so ready as the new generation to confront people of power. Some prophetic concerns were now with external enemies: various threats to Jewish existence from the succession of great powers, provoking generally all-too-accurate prophetic warnings of imminent danger - one might consider such warnings as contributions to foreign policy debate. Yet prophets just as much feared internal enemies who would betray Yahweh and contaminate his worship by promoting inappropriate sacred places, or by stressing the theme of fertility so prominent in the widely flourishing cult of the fertility god Baal and in Canaanite worship generally. A classic conflict of the mid-ninth century was that with Queen Jezebel, a Phoenician princess who brought the worship of Baal with her on her marriage to King Ahab of Israel. She had to face the wrath of the prophet Elijah, whose name ('Yahweh is my God') economically encapsulated his agenda. In one of Elijah's clashes with Ahab and Jezebel, Yahweh dramatically ended a long drought, showing that Elijah's God could see off any fertility god if he so chose. Both Elijah and Jezebel in their confrontations indulged in massacres of prophets who adhered to the other side, the casualties reputedly running into hundreds.
²³

While only a few remnants of the pronouncements of Elijah or his fellow prophets of the ninth century survive embedded in later stories, the biblical record of eighth-century prophets (Amos, Hosea, Micah, the first Isaiah) probably represents the earliest sustained sequences in the Hebrew scriptures in something like their original form: these are impassioned, individual voices, not a careful editorial compilation from patches of earlier prose. Because there is so little surviving precedent, it is difficult to be certain how much of what they said was new or innovative, but the desperate nature of their times would suggest that they did bring a new message for the people of Yahweh. The prophets say much about their call to prophecy, which was not a career choice but generally associated with tension and trauma. So Amos is torn away from his prosperous Judaean farm to go north into hostile territory, still hotly denying that he is really a prophet, and Hosea finds that his wretched marriage shows him something of the faithlessness of Israel, to the extent that he will even say that the Lord ordered him to embark on this matrimonial disaster.
²⁴

The voice of these prophets is the singular 'I', but it is a very different singularity from the purposeful whimsicality of Diogenes in later Athens (see pp. 29-30). They speak of their loneliness and express their sense ofbitter distance from the official religion of their day. They even attack the Temple cult of Jerusalem, although the first of a series of prophets known as Isaiah is contradictory on this, both condemning the Temple and its sacrificial routine, and also finding an intense spiritual experience of Yahweh amid its ceremonies.
²⁵
Such inconsistency is less important than the common feature of such prophecy: rather than attacking individuals, it indicts all society. Previous prophets, especially those at the royal Court, had been employed to curse foreigners and invoke peace for the nation. The eighth-century prophets had scant message of peace for Israel. If any consolation could be offered, it was in the survival of no more than a few. So the first Isaiah, against the dire background of Assyrian attacks on Judah in the later eighth century, imitated Elijah by enacting prophecy in a name and called his child Shear-jashub, 'A remnant shall return'.
²⁶

By all the rules of ancient statecraft, the fact of external threat and eventual conquest should have erased Israel's national identity and religion, as sooner or later it repeatedly erased every other national identity created by a state structure in the Middle East. Uniquely in Israel, this was not the case. The nation's commitment to Yahweh, probably forged out of very miscellaneous materials, survived the destruction first of the northern kingdom and then finally, in 586 BCE, of the southern kingdom as well. This achievement owed much to the insights of the prophets of Judah and Israel. Either through their individual genius or through divine revelation, the eighth-century prophets understood the international situation, with its constant threats of annihilation by Assyrian military might, and perceived that the only thing which could save their people from long-term annihilation was that obedience to Yahweh for which Elijah and his fellow prophets had fought in the previous century. And Yahweh was powerful enough to decide the course of history - occasionally these prophets were prepared to proclaim that he was lord of universal history and of nations beyond their own. It was an astonishing claim for this people who were apparently helpless before the great empires of their day:

... many peoples shall come, and say:

'Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD [Yahweh],
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths'.

For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
²⁷

The prophets were not the only people who contributed to the refashioning of the national cult during the eighth century. After the destruction of the northern kingdom, the people of Judah brooded on the recent catastrophe and on how to defend what was left. Their fierce debate about the future was played out in an appeal to the past - in fact, a large-scale reinterpretation and invention of the past. What we know of the story can be gleaned through the history written by the winners in the struggle, preserved for us in the second Books of Kings and Chronicles. The kingdom's political turbulence culminated in a coup d'etat which around 640 BCE killed King Amon of Judah and installed his young son Josiah as a puppet ruler. As the boy grew up, his energy and zeal were harnessed to push forward a reform programme which, in the way of such innovations in the ancient world, was presented as the rediscovery of a venerable document: a code of law, attributed to Moses himself. With impeccable timing, this set out regulations, particularly for sacrifice, which had not been applicable at the time of the Exodus from Egypt, but which were judged extremely relevant to the age of Josiah. In its present developed form, the law code is to be found in the Pentateuch as the Book of Deuteronomy (this name 'second law' was provided by Greek translators of the Hebrew scriptures). Significantly the place of its discovery was the Temple in Jerusalem, and the lucky find was made by the High Priest of the Temple.
²⁸

Throughout the Deuteronomic Code, there is an emphasis on the pure worship of Yahweh alone, and it orders its devout readers to be savage to those within Israel who might suggest religious deviations - even the closest of relatives and friends, even one's own son or wife: '[Y]our hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.'
²⁹
It also emphasizes the idea of 'covenant', a treaty: Yahweh has made a covenant with his people and it is up to them to keep its conditions. In the more developed vision of this idea, texts written later than this period such as those incorporated in the Book of Genesis would emphasize that Abraham was the first to receive the covenant and had been told to ensure that his male descendants were circumcised as a sign of their faithfulness to it, but Deuteronomy concentrates on the covenant as it was made with Moses, when God gave Ten Commandments on Mount Horeb (Sinai) as the centrepiece of an intricate set of laws.
³⁰
There were more laws to come in a period much later than Josiah's reign, but they were likewise back-projected to the time of Moses. For the moment, the Deuteronomic reform was no doubt encouraged by the fact that Josiah's innovations coincided with a decline in Assyrian power: surely a sign of divine favour.
³¹

The angry, precise legislative programme of the Deuteronomic party extended beyond the book itself into a wholesale rewriting of Jewish history. In an operation of remarkable scholarly and literary creativity which probably involved many collaborators working over several decades, older documents were edited and incorporated into a series of books (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Jeremiah) which carefully told the story of Israel's triumphs and tragedies in relation to its faithfulness to Yahweh. The coherence of this literature can be detected not merely in its deployment of that central notion, but even in the language idioms which it uses. This remarkable programme was given practical expression in the gleeful destruction of cultic objects and of any sacred places within Judah which might rival the Jerusalem Temple, but besides a drastic simplification of the Jewish sacred landscape, the reform achieved something unusual in the religions of the time. In much the same era that Homer's epics began taking on their own particular significance as the central works of literature for all Greeks, the Jews likewise began to focus their religious identity on the contents of a book. Probably to start with, there was only one copy of the Deuteronomic Code for consultation and solemn public recitation, but together with the literature that it inspired, it was an increasingly indispensable point of reference for the religion of Yahweh. That proved to be of huge importance when a new catastrophe befell the Jews.

The southern kingdom had managed to withstand assaults from the Assyrians. If this had been more by luck than judgement, that is not how the historians in the Deuteronomic tradition saw matters; it was the result of faithfulness to God's commands. The luck, however, did not last - or the faithfulness faltered. As Assyrian power collapsed at the end of the seventh century BCE, it was replaced by a new Middle Eastern power, based in Babylon, showing a fierce pride in the previous empire which had ruled from that city long before. The Babylonians, in alliance with other powers, sacked the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, in 612 BCE. It was not many years before Judah found itself overwhelmed by Babylonian armies, and after its last king rebelled against subject status, around 586 BCE the Babylonians sacked the already shattered city, destroyed the Temple and carried off many people from Judah to exile in Babylon. Those exiled are likely to have been community leaders; those left behind were apparently mostly of little account. The exiles were not allowed to return until Babylon itself was conquered by the Persian ruler Cyrus in 539. Not all Jews did go home then, and many formed a community in Babylon which for centuries continued to be one of the most important centres of Judaism outside the homeland.

THE EXILE AND AFTER

This renewed catastrophe was a key event in the history of the people of Israel. Maybe if the exile in Babylon had lasted more than half a century, the impetus to preserve and enhance a Jewish identity might have been lost, but as it was the exiles who returned were able to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem; it was reconsecrated in 516 BCE. There could be no independent native monarchy now, for the rebuilding was thanks to the generous spirit of the new conqueror Cyrus and his successors. So the Temple and its priesthood became the absolute centre of Jewish identity, as well as being the only significant institution in Jerusalem, and remained so for the next half-millennium. Those who rebuilt the Temple were helped by the exiles who had remained in Babylon, but by contrast and significantly, they refused help from local people who had not been deported in this or previous disasters, and who may have also included exiles whom the Babylonians had brought to Palestine from elsewhere. The exiles and their descendants continued to feel condescension or hostility to these others as 'the people of the land', a people who had not shared in the sufferings of God's chosen people - had not sat by the waters of Babylon and wept remembering Zion.
³²
Many of these despised people built a rival temple on Mount Gerizim in the central Palestinian territory known as Samaria, and hence they were called Samaritans (a word of contempt to Jews); in very reduced numbers, they still live round their sacred mountain now. Much later, Jesus told a characteristically provocative story about a Samaritan who was kinder than any of the representatives of Jewish respectable society, and one Gospel writer also portrays Jesus as having mightily impressed the Samaritan community after a friendly and candid encounter with one of their women.
³³