Peace (18 page)

The twelve tribes, probably drawing on the monarchical models elsewhere in the region, began agitating for a king to solidify these consolidations, only three of which ruled (
c
. eleventh–tenth centuries BCE) before the Promised Land was once again lost. The last Judge, Samuel,
appointed the first two Kings, Saul and David. Yahweh supported Saul as he led the twelve tribes to military victories over regional rivals, but then condemned him for keeping loot for himself, and he dies in battle shortly thereafter. Under David, the twelve tribes' combined forces were able to fully pacify their foes. The internal peace David's defensive/offensive alliances conferred to the twelve tribes was offset by the external wars by which it came into being. With fewer and fewer enemies left to be united against, staying united in and for peace became more and more of a problem. David's dream of building a great temple in the kingdom's new capital, Jerusalem, was forbidden by Yahweh because David was a “man of battles” who had “shed blood.”
⁵
Yahweh, once a staunch supporter of his people's wars, had become the protagonist of their peace. Famed for his wisdom, David's son and successor's name is a variation of Shalom and his early reign an example of its socio-political meaning. King Solomon, reaping the benefits of his forefathers' cumulative achievements, also extended them. With peace at the borders and prosperity within them, Solomon established new cities and repaired old ones throughout the kingdom while founding several colonies. He formed inter-kingdom economic alliances, as with the King of Tyre, and political ones by way of multiple marriages, as with a Pharaoh's daughter. Yahweh, approving of Solomon's peaceful reign up to this point, allowed him to build the great temple David was denied, where ancient ritual sacrifices intended to appease, give thanks to and glorify the deity continued. But he began levying disproportionately heavy taxes affecting the poor and demanded compulsory labor to execute his extensive building programme in Jerusalem, stirring dissent among the more distant tribes. He also encouraged his foreign wives in practicing their native religions, shocking his subjects' spiritual sensibilities, to say nothing of Yahweh. Shortly after Solomon's death, these policies divided the kingdom, the strength and peace of which depended on unity and justice. The ten northern tribes seceded and became Israel; the two southern, loyalist tribes became Judea. Israel, weak and war-torn, fell to the Assyrians in 722 BCE. In the same state, Judea fell to the Babylonians in 586 BCE, when the great temple symbolizing King Solomon's Shalom was destroyed.

The subsequent Exile and Diaspora or “scattering” of the Hebrew people, at first around the region then across the Hellenic and Roman Empires, stretched Shalom's meanings in new directions. Without a homeland, estranged or integrated in societies often historically unrelated to them, and a lack of military wherewithal dramatically changed perspectives on peace. Suddenly, tactical surrender as a means to Shalom began to be preferred to conflict, armed or otherwise. Power was no longer considered solely as an instrument of survival and domination, but also as a means of constructively reforming societies from within, instead of
destructively from without. “Be at peace,” asserts Job in the book bearing his name, “and thereby thou shalt have the best fruits.”
⁶
Renewed readings of the Torah, now taking its final form, informed prophecies and philosophies aimed at collective transformations, Kabala enhanced the mystical elements of Judaic inner peace, while exegetical works such as the Talmud aimed at conserving peace-oriented priestly, legal and lay traditions. Genesis, the first book of the Torah, tells of a Paradise called the Garden of Eden created by God for humankind where the primordial man and woman (Adam and Eve) lived in plenty and perfect peace with each other, the natural world and the deity. However, tempted by a serpent, they sacrificed this sublime Shalom by disobeying God's only command to them: not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. As punishment, God cast them and their descendents out of Paradise into this world of toil and trouble. Cain, one of their sons, kills his brother Abel in a jealous rage over God's preferential treatment, the act of violence back to which the three monotheisms sharing this story trace the history of warfare. Just as the peace of Paradise was lost by the sin of its inhabitants, so it was now believed was that of its closest approximation since Solomon's kingdom. God had sent many great leaders to guide his people after their banishment from Paradise. Now that they were banished from the Promised Land, a widespread belief emerged that the peaces of the past would return in the near future through a new kind of leader.

Working within this theological paradigm, Jewish Prophets predicted the coming of a Messiah (“Anointed One”) who would bring about spiritual salvation, ethical regeneration, Shalom to God's people and, through them, to humanity. The Messianic message was one of universal peace, though along strict sectarian lines. The Messiah would be a descendent of David, but part human and part divine. His wisdom and justice would pacify the earth, which would then become his undivided kingdom. His peaceful reign would be eternal; he would purify the hearts and minds of his subjects, who would then model their morals and actions on his; and God would accept his suffering as atonement for humanity's sins since Adam and Eve's fall from grace. After the Messiah's arrival, “the work of righteousness shall be peace,” as opposed to the history of righteous warfare in God's name preceding it, and “the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance forever.”
⁷
The Messiah would also be a conciliator, as “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,” but would concurrently deliver divine judgment, so that “there is no peace to the wicked.”
⁸
The Messiah would be an activist arbiter, stopping all wars at their sources:

And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into ploughs, and their spears into pruning
hooks; nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.
⁹

Through the Messiah, Shalom in all its meanings would come into being and Paradise would be restored. Combining Jewish with the Greco-Roman traditions, Philo of Alexandria (
c
. 30 BCE–40 CE) concluded that war is a corruption of the soul curable by living “with fellow citizens in peace and law-observance, that order of which justice is the guiding influence.”
¹⁰
The peace he envisioned by synthesizing the Pax Romana's ideological imperative and the Messianic message was single, indivisible, the same for one and all. But one question the Prophets left unanswered was: When exactly would the Messiah's Shalom arrive?

“Our” Universal Peace: From Christ to Constantine

The history of Christianity from its origins to its adoption by the Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine (
c
. 280–337) is inseparable from the peace and peacemaking preached and practiced by its founder, Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus Christ, Messiah in Greek. Indeed, Jesus' innovative forms of pacification, pacifism and peacemaking were decisive in the early proliferation of his doctrine. However, from Jesus' immediate followers onwards, as the socio-political situation of Christians changed, so did their ideals and practices of peace, sometimes even in the opposite directions in which they were originally intended. Jesus' life and death are innermost to pacific Christian practices and beliefs. The story is recounted in the Gospels (“Good News”) of the Apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the first four books of the New Testament, the Torah being the Old and the two together, the Bible. This link would prove to be the starting point of both amity and strife between practitioners of the two religious traditions, and a third.

Jesus' lineage is traced back to David, genealogically positioning him as the prophesized, peace-bearing Messiah. Son of a virgin mother and an itinerant carpenter from Galilee, once part of Judea and now ruled by the Jewish King Herod on behalf of Rome, angels are said to have greeted his birth with the words “Peace on earth to men of good will.”
¹¹
The only episode told of Jesus' youth is that his parents, having lost him for three days, found him at the local temple amazing priests with his knowledge of the Torah. The story picks up again some twenty years later as he is ritually purified by John the Baptist, who publicly attests that Jesus is the Messiah Prophets had foretold. After fasting for forty days in the desert, where he refutes temptations by quoting scripture, he embarks on his
mission to prepare humanity for God's final judgment and peaceful heavenly kingdom. He grudgingly performs miracles such as healing the diseased and resurrecting the dead to prove his divinity to the doubtful of all races and religions. When met with hostility he never reciprocated, avoiding violence by subterfuge or persuasion. He is often portrayed catering solely to the sick, weak and downtrodden whom the religions of the times considered disfavoured by their deities, in proposing they would be favoured on judgment day and the first to enter God's kingdom, making him popular among them. But he also preached to soldiers, tax collectors, priests and officials whose salvation was also assured if they changed their beliefs and ways, eliciting affection as well as animosity. Jews, non-Jews and members of all sections of society became his disciples, showing that his transformation of the particular Messianic message into one of universal import was working.

Jesus set out the terms of a new covenant – one of peace not only between Jews and God, but also among all humans and with God – in a series of readily intelligible sermons and parables, accounting in part for the speedy distance of their dissemination. The most influential, the Sermon on the Mount, contains the following passages, which distinguished his message from that of the Jewish past and defined Christian non-violence, or the
law of love
:

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God. . . You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you: resist not evil. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. . . You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.
¹²

By the old covenant, Yahweh had condoned his people's use of violence to pacify their way to the Promised Land. The new covenant was a commitment to reject hate and violence as evil, the doctrine of Christian pacifism, and diffuse violence by forgiving and loving deeds, the doctrine of Christian peacemaking. Similarly, the Parable of the Good Samaritan depicts unconditional kindness in helping others regardless of who they are. Fostering peace in this life by working for the benefit of others in this way became a spiritual reward infinitely more valuable than any material reward because it is the basis upon which God will judge our worthiness of everlasting, blissful peace and felicity in the next life. Jesus' so-called Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” expresses the Parable's moral in prescriptive form.
¹³
But its proactive formula, by which what is peaceful for me is peaceful for you, can be less propitious and entail more risks than the passivity of Confucius'
Silver Rule.

The inner peace Jesus proposed was as much the prerequisite of the new covenant as social peace was its result, discernable in his send-off to disciples to preach and do good works in his name: “When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.' If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you.”
¹⁴
Unlike the peace of the Promised Land, limited by its ties to a single people and geographical location, the peace of the heavenly kingdom Jesus proposed was open to all and not of this world, not even of this life, but of the next. Unlike the peace of Paradise, isolated in the spiritual and temporal past, the peace of the future heavenly kingdom offered peace of mind, consolation and hope in the present on the basis of reincarnation. Believers thus had a strong motivation for sacrifice and personal betterment. Hence, in one instance, Jesus says to an Apostle, “Put up again thy sword in its place: for they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”
¹⁵
And in another, he says, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
¹⁶
The overcoming Jesus speaks of here is ethical and peaceful, as in forgiveness and fellowship, rather than material and violent, as in fighting foes. He advised that rulers who are contemplating going to war with another should first seek peace, especially if they are weaker. So important was peace to Jesus' ministry that among his last words to disciples were: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”
¹⁷

Within no more than three years, Jesus' radical teachings rooted in Jewish traditions had such a following the authorities perceived him as a threat. That John the Baptist was beheaded by King Herod may have given Jesus a premonition of his suffering and death to come, called the Passion, in any case confirmed to him by God. Following a triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, the solemn Last Supper took place, during which disciples learned of upcoming events and roles they would play to their dismay. Bread and wine Jesus passed around to symbolize the passing of his body and blood also signified that the Passion would be the seal of the new covenant. That night, as portended, Jesus was arrested by the betrayal of disciple Judas for thirty pieces of silver. He did not resist the arrest, nor did he denounce his betrayer, nor did he allow the other disciples to protest on his behalf. Jesus then avowed the two crimes for which he was tried separately: first by a Jewish council for blasphemy, for not denying he was Son of God; second by the Roman authorities for sedition, for not denying he was the King of the Jews. His punishment was death by crucifixion, including a long, cross-carrying procession during which convicts like him were spat on and stoned. The people of Jerusalem, given the choice between saving Jesus or a militant insurrectionist, chose
the latter. Christian faith is founded upon his subsequent resurrection and ascension to heaven, celebrated as Easter today. Jesus' self-sacrifice, and God's of his only son, to atone for humanity's sins was believed to be the final preparation for the everlasting peace of the heavenly kingdom, which must therefore be close at hand. Otherwise violent, the Passion is vital to the history of peace because it became the non-violent model for early Christian life and martyrdom, backed by Jesus' pacific teachings and theology, which made peace into the
moral imperative
it became throughout the rest of Western history.