Fields of Blood (22 page)
Authors: Karen Armstrong
True to their mandate to create an alternative society,
Israelites were reluctant at first to establish a regular state “like the other nations” but seem to have lived in independent chiefdoms without a central government. If they were attacked by their neighbors, a leader or “
judge” would rise up and mobilize the entire population against an attack. This is the arrangement we find in the book of Judges, which was also heavily revised by the seventh-century reformers. But over time, without strong rule, Israelites succumbed to moral depravity. One sentence recurs throughout the book: “In those days there was no king in Israel, and every man did as he pleased.”
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We read of a judge who made a human sacrifice of his own daughter;
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a tribe that exterminated an innocent people instead of the enemy assigned them by Yahweh;
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a group of Israelites who gang-raped a woman to death;
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and a civil war in which the tribe of
Benjamin was
almost exterminated.
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These tales are not held up for our edification; rather, they explore a political and
religious quandary. Can our natural proclivity for violence be controlled in a community without a degree of coercion? It appears that the Israelites had won their freedom but lost their souls, and
monarchy seemed the only way to restore order. Moreover, the
Philistines, who had established a kingdom on the southern coast of
Canaan, had become a grave military threat to the tribes. Eventually, the Israelite elders approached their judge
Samuel with a shocking request: “Give us a king to rule over us like the other nations.”
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Samuel responded with a remarkable critique of agrarian oppression, which listed the regular exploitation of every premodern civilization:
These will be the rights of the king who is to reign over you. He will take your sons and assign them to his chariotry and cavalry, and they will run in front of his chariot. He will use them as leaders of a thousand and leaders of fifty; he will make them plough his ploughland and harvest his harvest and make his weapons of war and the gear for his chariots. He will also take your daughters as perfumers, cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields, of your vineyards and olive groves, and give them to his officials.… He will take the best of your manservants and maidservants, of your cattle and your donkeys, and make them work for him. He will tithe your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out on account of the king you have chosen for yourselves, but on that day Yahweh will not answer you.
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Unlike most religious traditions that endorsed this system, albeit reluctantly, Israel had utterly rejected its structural violence but failed to establish a viable alternative. Despite their dreams of freedom and equity, Israelites had discovered, time and again, that they could not survive without a strong state.
Saul, Israel’s first king, still ruled as judge and chieftain. But David, who deposed him, would be remembered as Israel’s ideal king, even though he was clearly no paragon. The biblical authors did not express themselves as bluntly as Lord Shang, but they probably understood that saints were not likely to be good rulers. David expanded Israelite territory on the east bank of the Jordan, united the separate regions of Israel in the north and
Judah in the south, and conquered the city-state
of
Jerusalem from the
Hittite-
Jebusites, which became the capital of his united kingdom. There was no question of putting the Jebusites “under the ban,” however: David adopted the existing Jebusite administration, employed Jebusites in his bureaucracy, and took over the Jebusite standing army—a pragmatism that may have been more typical in
Israel than
Joshua’s alleged zealotry. David probably did not set up a regular tributary system, however, but taxed only the conquered populations and supplemented his income with booty.
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In this young, hopeful kingdom we find a heroic ethos that has nothing “religious” about it.
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We see it first in the famous account of the young David’s duel with the
Philistine giant
Goliath. Single combat was one of the hallmarks of chivalric war.
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It gave the warrior a chance to show off his martial skills, and both armies enjoyed watching the clash of champions. Moreover, in Israel’s chivalric code, warriors formed a caste of champions, respected for their valor and expertise even if they were fighting for the enemy.
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Every morning, Goliath would appear before the Israelite lines, challenging one of them to fight him, and when nobody came forward, taunted them for their cowardice. One day the shepherd boy David, armed only with a sling, called Goliath’s bluff, knocked him out with a pebble, and decapitated him. But the heroic champion could also be utterly pitiless in battle. When David’s army arrived outside the walls of Jerusalem, the Jebusites taunted him: “You will not get in here. The blind and lame will hold you off.”
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So in their hearing David ordered his men to kill
only
“the blind and lame,” a ruthlessness designed to terrify the enemy. The biblical text here is fragmentary and obscure, however, and may have been edited by a redactor who was uncomfortable with this story. One later tradition even claimed that David was forbidden by
Yahweh to build a
temple in Jerusalem, “since you have shed so much blood on the earth in my presence.” That honor would be reserved for David’s son and successor
Solomon, whose name was said to derive from the Hebrew
shalom,
“peace.”
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But Solomon’s mother,
Bathsheba, was a Jebusite, and his name could also have derived from
Shalem, the ancient deity of Jerusalem.
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Solomon’s temple was built on the regional model and its furniture showed how thoroughly the cult of Yahweh had accommodated itself to the pagan landscape of the Near East. There was clearly no sectarian intolerance in Israelite Jerusalem. At the temple’s entrance were two
Canaanite standing stones (
matzevoth
) and a massive bronze basin,
representing
Yam, the sea monster fought by
Baal, supported by twelve brazen oxen, common symbols of divinity and fertility.
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The temple rituals too seem to have been influenced by Baal’s cult in neighboring
Ugarit.
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The temple was supposed to symbolize Yahweh’s approval of Solomon’s rule.
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There is no reference to his short-lived empire in other sources, but the biblical authors tell us that it extended from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean and was achieved and maintained by force of arms. Solomon had replaced David’s infantry with a chariot army, engaged in lucrative arms deals with neighboring kings, and restored the ancient fortresses of Hazor,
Megiddo, and
Arad.
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In purely material terms, everything seemed perfect: “Judah and
Israel lived in security: each man under his vine and fig tree!”
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Yet this kind of state, maintained by war and taxes, was exactly what Yahweh had always abhorred. Unlike David, Solomon even taxed his Israelite subjects, and his building projects required massive forced labor.
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As well as farming their own plots to produce the surplus that supported the state, peasants also had to serve in the army or the corvée for one month in every three.
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Some biblical redactors tried to argue that Solomon’s empire failed because he had built shrines for the pagan gods of his foreign wives.
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But it is clear that the real problem was its structural violence, which offended deep-rooted Israelite principles. After Solomon’s death a delegation begged his son
Rehoboam not to replicate his father’s “harsh tyranny.”
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When Rehoboam contemptuously refused, a mob attacked the manager of the corvée, and ten of the twelve tribes broke away from the empire to form the independent Kingdom of Israel.
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Henceforth the two kingdoms went their separate ways. Situated near important
trade routes, the northern Kingdom of Israel prospered, with royal shrines in
Bethel and Dan and an elegant capital in
Samaria. We know very little about its ideology, because the biblical editors favored the smaller and more isolated Kingdom of Judah. But both probably conformed to local traditions. Like most Middle Eastern kings, the king of Judah was raised to a semidivine “state of exception” during the coronation ritual, when he became Yahweh’s adopted son and a member of the Divine Assembly of gods.
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Like Baal, Yahweh was celebrated as a warrior god who defended his people from their enemies: “When he grows angry he shatters kings, he gives the nations their deserts; smashing their
skulls, he heaps the world with corpses.”
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The chief responsibility of the king was to secure and extend his territory, the source of the kingdom’s revenues. He was therefore in a perpetual state of conflict with neighboring monarchs, who had exactly the same goals. Israel and Judah were thus drawn inexorably into the local network of trade, diplomacy, and warfare.
The two kingdoms had emerged when the imperial powers of the region were in eclipse, but during the early eighth century, Assyria was in the ascendant again, its military might forcing weaker kings into vassal status. Yet some of these conquered kingdoms flourished. King
Jeroboam II (786–746 BCE) became a trusted
Assyrian vassal, and the Kingdom of Israel enjoyed an economic boom. But because the rich became richer and the poor even more impoverished, the king was castigated by the prophet
Amos.
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The prophets of Israel kept the old
egalitarian ideals of Israel alive. Amos chastised the
aristocracy for trampling on the heads of ordinary people, pushing the poor out of their path,
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and cramming their palaces with the fruits of their extortion.
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Yahweh, he warned, was no longer unconditionally on Israel’s side but would use Assyria as his instrument of punishment.
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The Assyrians would invade the kingdom, loot and destroy its palaces and temples.
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Amos imagined Yahweh roaring in rage from his sanctuary at the war crimes committed by the local kingdoms, Israel included.
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In Judah too, the prophet Isaiah inveighed against the exploitation of the poor and the expropriation of peasant land: “Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, and plead for the widow.”
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The dilemma was that this callowness was essential to the agrarian economy and had the kings of Israel and Judah fully implemented these compassionate policies, they would have been easy prey for Assyria.
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In 745
Tiglath-pileser III abolished the system of vassalage and incorporated all the conquered peoples directly into the Assyrian state. At the merest hint of dissent, the entire ruling class would be deported and replaced by people from other parts of his empire. The army left a trail of desolation in its wake, and the countryside was deserted as peasants took refuge in the towns. When King
Hosea refused to pay tribute in 722,
Shalmeneser III simply wiped the Kingdom of Israel off the map and deported its aristocracy. Because of its isolated position, Judah survived until the turn of the century, when
Sennacherib’s army besieged
Jerusalem. The Assyrian army was finally forced to withdraw, possibly
because it was smitten by disease, but
Lachish, Judah’s second city, was razed to the ground and the countryside devastated.
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King
Manasseh (r. 687–642) was determined to keep on the right side of Assyria, and Judah enjoyed peace and prosperity during his long reign.
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Manasseh rebuilt rural shrines to
Baal and brought an effigy of
Asherah, the
Canaanite mother goddess, into Yahweh’s
temple; he also set up statues of the divine horses of the sun in the temple, which may have been emblems of
Ashur.
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Few of Manasseh’s subjects objected since, as archaeologists have discovered, many of them had similar effigies in their own homes.
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