Fields of Blood (20 page)

The ru could therefore only bear witness to an alternative society. The word
ru
is related etymologically to
ruo
(“mild”), but some modern scholars argue that it meant “weakling” and was first used in the sixth century to describe the impoverished shi who had eked out a meager living by teaching.
¹²⁸
In imperial China, Confucians were political “softies,” economically and institutionally weak.
¹²⁹
They could keep the benevolent Confucian alternative alive and make it a presence in the heart of government, but they would always lack the “teeth” to push their policies through.

That was the Confucian dilemma—similar to the impasse that
Ashoka had encountered on the Indian subcontinent. Empire depended on force and intimidation, because the aristocrats and the masses had to be held in check. Even if he had wanted to, Emperor Wu could not afford to rule entirely by ren. The Chinese Empire had been achieved by warfare, wholesale slaughter, and the annihilation of one state after another;
it retained its power by military expansion and internal oppression and developed religious mythologies and rituals to sacralize these arrangements. Was there a realistic alternative? The Warring States period had shown what happened when ambitious rulers with new weapons and large armies competed against one another pitilessly for dominance, devastating the countryside and terrorizing the population in the process. Contemplating this chronic warfare,
Mencius had longed for a king who would rule “all under
Heaven” and bring peace to the great plain of China. The ruler who had been powerful enough to achieve this was the First Emperor.

4

W
hen
Adam and
Eve were expelled from the
Garden of Eden, they probably did not fall into a state of
original sin, as Saint
Augustine believed, but into an agrarian economy.
¹
Man (
adam
) had been created from the soil (
adamah
), which in the Garden of Eden was watered by a simple spring. Adam and his wife were free agents, living a life of idyllic liberty, cultivating the garden at their leisure, and enjoying the companionship of their god,
Yahweh. But because of a single act of disobedience, Yahweh condemned them both to a life sentence of hard agricultural labor:

Instead of peacefully nurturing the soil as its master, Adam had become its slave. From the very beginning, the
Hebrew Bible strikes a different note from most of the texts we have considered so far. Its heroes were not members of an aristocratic elite; Adam and Eve had been relegated to mere field hands, scratching a miserable subsistence from the blighted land.

Adam had two sons:
Cain, the farmer, and
Abel, the herdsman—the traditional enemy of the agrarian state. Both dutifully brought offerings to
Yahweh, who somewhat perversely rejected Cain’s sacrifice but accepted Abel’s. Baffled and furious, Cain lured his brother into the family plot and killed him, his arable land becoming a field of blood that cried out to Yahweh for vengeance. “Damned be you from the soil, which opened up its mouth to receive your brother’s blood!”
³
Yahweh cried. Henceforth Cain would wander in the land of Nod as an outcast and fugitive. From the start, the Hebrew Bible condemns the violence at the heart of the agrarian state. It is Cain, the first murderer, who builds the world’s first city, and one of his descendants is
Tubal the Smith (
Kayin
), “ancestor of all metal-workers in bronze and iron,” who crafts its weapons.
⁴
Immediately after the murder, when Yahweh asks Cain, “Where is your brother, Abel?” he replies, “Am I my brother’s guardian?”
⁵
Urban civilization denied that relationship with and responsibility for all other human beings that is embedded in human nature.

The
Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, did not reach its final form until about the fourth century BCE. For the historians, poets, prophets, priests, and lawyers of Israel, it became the organizing narrative around which they constructed their worldview. Over the centuries, they would change that story and embroider it, adding or reinterpreting events in order to address the particular challenges of their own time. This story began in about 1750 BCE, when Yahweh commanded
Abraham, Israel’s ancestor, to turn his back on the agrarian society and culture of Mesopotamia and settle in
Canaan, where he, his son
Isaac, and his grandson
Jacob would live as simple
herdsmen. Yahweh promised that their descendants would one day possess this land and become a nation as numerous as the sands on the seashore.
⁶
But Jacob and his twelve sons (founders of the tribes of Israel) were forced by
famine to leave Canaan and migrate to
Egypt. At first they prospered, but eventually the Egyptians enslaved them, and they languished in serfdom until about 1250 BCE, when Yahweh brought them out of Egypt under
Moses’s leadership. For forty years the
Israelites wandered in the Sinai wilderness before reaching the Canaanite border, where Moses died, but his lieutenant,
Joshua, led the Israelites to victory in the
Promised Land, destroying all the Canaanite cities and killing their inhabitants.

The archaeological record, however, does not confirm this story. There is no evidence of the mass destruction described in the book of
Joshua and no indication of a powerful foreign invasion.
⁷
But this narrative was not written to satisfy a modern historian; it is a national epic that helped Israel create a cultural identity distinct from her neighbors. When we first hear of Israel in a nonbiblical source, coastal Canaan was still a province of the Egyptian Empire. A stele dating from c. 1201 mentions “Israel” as one of the rebellious peoples defeated by Pharaoh
Merneptah’s army in the Canaanite highlands, where a network of simple villages stretched from lower
Galilee in the north to
Beersheba in the south. Many scholars believe that their inhabitants were the first
Israelites.
⁸

During the twelfth century, a crisis that had long been brewing in the Mediterranean accelerated, perhaps occasioned by sudden climate change. We have no record of what happened to wipe out the region’s empires and destroy the local economies. But by 1130 BCE, it was all over: the
Hittite capital in
Mitanni was in ruins, the Canaanite ports of
Ugarit,
Megiddo, and
Hazor had been destroyed; and desperate, dispossessed peoples roamed through the region. It had taken Egypt over a century to relinquish its hold over its foreign provinces. The fact that Pharaoh Merneptah himself had been forced to fight a campaign in the highlands at the turn of the century suggests that even by this early date the Egyptian governors of the Canaanite city-states were no longer able to control the countryside and needed reinforcements from home. During this lengthy, turbulent process, one city-state after another collapsed.
⁹
There is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest that these cities were destroyed by a single conqueror. After the Egyptians had left, there may have been conflict between the city elites and the villages or rivalries among the urban nobility. But it was during this period of decline that settlements began to appear in the highlands, pioneered perhaps by
refugees fleeing the chaos of the disintegrating cities. One of the very few ways in which peasants could act to better their lot was simply to decamp when circumstances became intolerable, leave their land, and become fiscal fugitives.
¹⁰
At a time of such political chaos, the Israelite peasants had a rare opportunity to make an exodus from these failing cities and establish an independent society, without fear of aristocratic retaliation. Advances in technology had only recently made it possible to settle in this difficult terrain, but by the early twelfth century, it seems that the highland villages already housed some eighty thousand people.

If these settlers were indeed the first Israelites, some must have been native to Canaan, though they may have been joined by migrants from
the south who brought
Yahweh, a god of the
Sinai region, with them. Others—notably the tribe of
Joseph—may even have come from Egypt. But those Canaanites who had lived under Egyptian rule in the coastal city-states of
Palestine would also have felt that in a very real sense they had “come out of Egypt.” The Bible acknowledges that Israel was made up of diverse peoples bound together in a covenant agreement,
¹¹
and its epic story suggests that the early
Israelites had made a principled decision to turn their backs on the oppressive agrarian state. Their houses in the highland villages were modest and uniform, and there were no palaces or public buildings: this seems to have been an
egalitarian society that may have reverted to tribal organization to create a social alternative to the conventionally stratified state.
¹²

The final redaction of the
Pentateuch occurred after the Israelites had suffered the destruction of their own kingdom by
Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE and had been deported to Babylonia. The biblical epic is not simply a
religious document but also an essay in political philosophy: how could a small nation retain its freedom and integrity in a world dominated by ruthless
imperial powers?
¹³
When they defected from the Canaanite city-states, Israelites had developed an ideology that directly countered the systemic violence of agrarian society. Israel must not be “like the other nations.” Their hostility to “Canaanites” was, therefore, every bit as much political as it was religious.
¹⁴
The settlers seem to have devised laws to ensure that instead of being appropriated by an aristocracy, land remained in the possession of the extended family; that interest-free loans to needy Israelites were obligatory; that wages were paid promptly; that contract servitude was restricted; and that there was special provision for the socially vulnerable—orphans, widows, and foreigners.
¹⁵

Later, Jews,
Christians, and Muslims would all make the biblical god a symbol of
absolute transcendence, similar to
Brahman or
Nirvana.
¹⁶
In the Pentateuch, however, Yahweh is a war god, not unlike
Indra or
Marduk but with one important difference. Like Indra, Yahweh had once fought chaos dragons to order the universe, notably a sea monster called Leviathan,
¹⁷
but in the Pentateuch he fights earthly
empires to establish a people rather than a cosmos. Moreover, Yahweh is the intransigent enemy of agrarian civilization. The story of the
tower of Babel is a thinly veiled critique of Babylon.
¹⁸
Intoxicated by fantasies of world conquest,
its rulers were determined that the whole of humanity live in a single state with a common language; they believed that their ziggurat could reach heaven itself. Incensed by this
imperial hubris, Yahweh reduced the entire political edifice to “confusion” (
babel
).
¹⁹
Immediately after this incident, he ordered
Abraham to leave Ur, at this date one of the most important Mesopotamian city-states.
²⁰
Yahweh insisted that the three
patriarchs—Abraham,
Isaac, and
Jacob—exchange the stratified tyranny of urban living for the freedom and equality of the herdsman’s life. But the plan was flawed: again and again the land that Yahweh had selected for the patriarchs failed to sustain them.
²¹