The Case for God (7 page)

Living a compassionate, empathetic life took Yan Hui beyond himself, giving him momentary glimpses of a sacred reality that was not unlike the “God” worshipped by monotheists. It was both immanent and transcendent: it welled up from within but was also experienced as an external presence “standing over me sharp and clear.”

Religion as defined by the great sages of India, China, and the Middle East was not a notional activity but a practical one; it did not require belief in a set of doctrines but rather hard, disciplined work, without which any religious teaching remained opaque and incredible. The ultimate reality was not a Supreme Being—an idea that was quite alien to the religious sensibility of antiquity; it was an all-encompassing, wholly transcendent reality that lay beyond neat doctrinal formulations. So religious discourse should not attempt to impart clear information about the divine but should lead to an appreciation of the limits of language and understanding. The ultimate was not alien to human beings but inseparable from our humanity. It could not be accessed by rational, discursive thought but required a carefully cultivated state of mind and the abnegation of selflessness.

But how would this apply to the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which present themselves as religions of the word rather than religions of silence? In the eighth century BCE, the people of Israel were about to attempt something unusual in the ancient world. They would try to make Yahweh, the “holy one of Israel,” the only symbol of ultimate transcendence.

God

A
t the beginning of time, the first human being (Hebrew:
adam
) found himself alone in Eden, the Land of Pleasure. This garden had been planted by the god Yahweh, who had caused a spring to gush forth in the eastern desert to create a paradisal oasis. There it divided into four separate rivers—the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates—that flowed from this sacred center to give life to the rest of the world. Yahweh had molded Adam from the soil
(adama)
, blown the breath of life into his nostrils, and put him in charge of the garden. Eden was indeed a land of delights, and Adam could have led a blissful life. Yahweh had brought forth all the birds and animals from the ground to be his companions; there were two sacred trees marking the center of the world—the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—and there was even a talking snake to initiate him into the secret lore of the garden. But Adam was lonely. So while he was asleep, Yahweh extracted one of his ribs and constructed a female. Adam was delighted: “This-time, she-is-it! Bone from my bones, flesh from my flesh! She shall be called Woman
[Isha]
, for from Man [Ish] she was taken!”
¹
Adam named her Havva (Eve), the “Life-giver.”

This immediately recalls the Upanishadic story of the lonely human person who splits in two to become male and female, but it is obviously a Middle Eastern tale and full of traditional motifs: the crafting of
adam
from clay, the river irrigating the four corners of the earth, the sacred trees and the talking animal. It is a typical lost-paradise myth. Yahweh forbids Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge, the snake persuades them to disobey, and they are cast out of the garden forever. Henceforth they must toil painfully to scratch a living from the hostile earth and bring forth their children in sorrow. Like any myth, its purpose is to help us to contemplate the human predicament. Why is human life filled with suffering, back-breaking agricultural labor, agonizing childbirth, and death? Why do men and women feel so estranged from the divine?

Some Western Christians read the story as a factual account of the Original Sin that condemned the human race to everlasting perdition. But this is a peculiarly Western Christian interpretation and was introduced controversially by Saint Augustine of Hippo only in the early fifth century. The Eden story has never been understood in this way in either the Jewish or the Orthodox Christian traditions. However, we all tend to see these ancient tales through the filter of subsequent history and project current beliefs onto texts that originally meant something quite different. Today, because the modern West is a society of
logos
, some people read the Bible literally, assuming that its intention is to give us the kind of accurate information that we expect from any other supposedly historical text and that this is the way these stories have always been understood. In fact, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, until well into the modern period, Jews and Christians both insisted that it was neither possible nor desirable to read the Bible in this way, that it gives us no single, orthodox message and demands constant reinterpretation.
²

There is also a widespread assumption that the Bible is supposed to provide us with role models and give us precise moral teaching, but this was not the intention of the biblical authors. The Eden story is certainly not a morality tale; like any paradise myth, it is an imaginary account of the infancy of the human race. In Eden, Adam and Eve are still in the womb; they have to grow up, and the snake is there to guide them through the perplexing rite of passage to maturity. To know pain and to be conscious of desire and mortality are inescapable components of human experience, but they are also symptoms of that sense of estrangement from the fullness of being that inspires the nostalgia for paradise lost. We can see Adam, Eve, and the serpent as representing different facets of our humanity.
³
In the snake is the rebelliousness and incessant compulsion to question everything that is
crucial to human progress; in Eve we see our hunger for knowledge, our desire to experiment, and our longing for a life free of inhibition. Adam, a rather passive figure, displays our reluctance to take responsibility for our actions. The story shows that good and evil are inextricably intertwined in human life. Our prodigious knowledge can at one and the same time be a source of benefit and the cause of immense harm. The rabbis of the Talmudic age understood this perfectly. They did not see the “fall” of Adam as a catastrophe, because the “evil inclination” (
yeytzer ha’ra
) was an essential part of human life, and the aggression, competitive edge, and ambition that it generates are bound up with some of our greatest achievements.
⁴

In the
Enuma Elish
, the cosmogony was linked with the gods’ construction of the Esagila ziggurat. In the ancient Middle East, creation was regularly associated with temple building, and this Genesis myth was closely related to the temple built by King Solomon (c. 970-930 BCE) in Jerusalem:
⁵
one of the four sacred rivers that flow from Eden is the Gihon, the spring at the foot of the Temple Mount. The theme of Yahweh’s creation was important in the temple cult, not because it provided worshippers with information about the origin of the universe but because the building of a temple was a symbolic repetition of the cosmogony.
⁶
It enabled mortals to participate in the creative powers of the gods and ensured that Yahweh would fight Israel’s enemies just as “in the beginning” he had slain the sea monsters. In Israel, the temple was a symbol of the harmonious, pristine cosmos as originally designed by Yahweh. Hence the description of life in Eden before the “fall” is an expression of
shalom
, the sense of “peace,” “wholeness,” and “completion” that pilgrims experienced when they took part in these rites and felt that their separation from the divine had been momentarily healed.

The Eden story is not a historical account; it is rather a description of a ritual experience. It expresses what scholars have called the
coincidentia oppositorum
in which, during a heightened encounter with the sacred, things that normally seem opposed coincide to reveal an underlying unity. In Eden, the divine and the human are not estranged but are in the same “place”: we see Yahweh “walking about in the garden at the breezy-time of the day”;
⁷
there is no opposition between “natural” and “supernatural,” since Adam is animated by the breath of God himself. Adam and Eve seem unaware of gender
distinction or the difference between good and evil. This is the way that life was supposed to be. Because of their lapse, however, Adam and Eve fell into the fragmentation of our current existence and the gates of Eden were barred by cherubim brandishing a “flashing, ever-turning sword.”
⁸
But Israelites could have intimations of this primal wholeness whenever they visited their temple and took part in its rites.

Solomon’s temple was apparently designed as a replica of Eden, its walls decorated with carved cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers.
⁹
Its massive seven-branched candlesticks, decorated with almonds and blossoms, were like stylized trees and there was even a bronze serpent.
¹⁰
As once in Eden, Yahweh dwelled in the temple among his people. The temple was, therefore, a haven
of shalom.
¹¹
When the pilgrim throngs climbed the slopes of Mount Zion to enter Yahweh’s house, there were exultant cries of joy and praise;
¹²
they yearned and pined for Yahweh’s courts. Arrival in the temple was like a homecoming; as they took part in its rituals, they experienced a spiritual ascent “from height to height” and life seemed richer and more intense: “A single day in your courts is worth more than a thousand elsewhere.”
¹³

In the eighth century BCE, the Israelites had not yet begun to interiorize their religion and still relied on external rites. By this time, they were living in two separate kingdoms: the Kingdom of Judah in the south of what is now the West Bank, with its capital in Jerusalem, and the larger and more prosperous Kingdom of Israel in the north. The Adam and Eve story was almost certainly written by an anonymous author of the southern kingdom in the eighth century, when kings had started to commission epics for their royal archives. Eighteenth-century German scholars called him “J,” the “Jahwist,” because he used God’s proper name, “Jahweh” (“Yahweh”). At the same time, another writer known as “E” (because he preferred to use the more formal divine title, “Elohim”) was composing a similar saga for the Kingdom of Israel. After the northern kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrian army in 722, the two documents were combined in the JE narrative, which comprises the earliest stratum of the Bible.
¹⁴

From the very beginning, therefore, there was no single, orthodox message in the Bible: J and E interpreted the history of Israel quite differently, and these differences were preserved by the editors.
There was nothing sacrosanct about these documents, and later generations would feel free to rewrite the JE epic and even make substantial changes in the story. The JE chronicle is almost certainly a collection of tales recited at the old tribal festivals. Since about 1200 BCE, the confederation of tribes collectively known as “Israel” had congregated at a number of shrines in the Canaanite highlands— in Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethel, Shechem, Gilgal, and Shiloh—where they renewed the covenant treaty that bound them together. Bards would recite poems about the exploits of local heroes: the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Moses, who led the people out of Egyptian captivity; and their great military commander Joshua. At first there was probably no master narrative, but when J and E brought all this local lore together, they wove it into the sustained epic that has become one of the founding stories of Western culture.
¹⁵

In its final form, it relates how in about 1850 BCE, Yahweh had called Abraham to leave his home in Mesopotamia and settle in Canaan, promising that he would become the father of a mighty nation that would one day take possession of the land. Abraham, his son Isaac, and his grandson Jacob (also known as Israel) lived in the Promised Land as resident aliens, but during a famine, Jacob’s twelve sons, founders of the twelve tribes of Israel, were forced to migrate to Egypt. At first they prospered there, but eventually, threatened by their great numbers, the Egyptians oppressed and enslaved the Israelites until Yahweh commanded Moses to lead his people back to Canaan. With Yahweh’s miraculous help, they managed to escape Egypt and lived a nomadic life for forty years in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. On Mount Sinai, Yahweh delivered his teaching
(torah
) to Moses and adopted the Israelites as his own people. Moses died on Mount Nebo on the threshold of the Promised Land, but finally, in about 1200 BCE, Joshua conquered Canaan and drove out the native inhabitants.

The excavations of Israeli archaeologists since 1967, however, do not corroborate this story. They have found no trace of the mass destruction described in the book of Joshua and no indication of a major change of population. They note that the biblical narratives reflect the conditions of the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries, when these stories were committed to writing, rather than the period in which they are set.
¹⁶
J and E were not writing rigorously factual
accounts, and this new understanding will affect the way we read the biblical stories. During the eighteenth-century philosophical Enlightenment, Western people developed a historical method that is concerned above all with giving an accurate account of the events described. But when people wrote about the past in the ancient world, they were less interested in what actually happened than in the meaning of an event. When the final editors of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) combined the J and E chronicles, they made no attempt to iron out discrepancies that would worry a modern redactor. A close examination of the text shows, for example, that J saw Abraham, a man of the south, as the prime hero of Israel and had little time for Moses, who was far more popular in the north and one of the leading protagonists of E’s narrative.
¹⁷
Neither J nor E seems to have made any effort to research the history of Canaan, but were content to adapt the old stories to the conditions of their own time.