Fields of Blood (23 page)

During the reign of Manasseh’s grandson
Josiah (640–609), however, a group of prophets, priests, and scribes attempted a far-reaching reform. By this time, Assyria was in decline:
Pharaoh Psammetichus had forced the Assyrian army to withdraw from the
Levant, and Josiah technically became his vassal. But
Egypt was occupied elsewhere, and Judah enjoyed a brief period of de facto independence. In 622 Josiah began extensive repairs in
Solomon’s temple, emblem of Judah’s golden age, perhaps as an assertion of national pride. Yet Judeans could not forget the fate of the Kingdom of Israel. Surrounded by huge predatory empires, with Babylon now becoming the dominant power in Mesopotamia, how could Judah hope to survive? Fear of annihilation and the experience of state violence often radicalize a religious tradition.
Zoroaster had been a victim of excessive aggression, and this violence had introduced an apocalyptic ferocity into his initially peaceable alternative to the belligerent cult of Indra. Now, in seventh-century Judah, reformers who dreamed of independence but were terrified by the aggression of the great
imperial powers brought a wholly new intransigence into the cult of Yahweh.
⁹⁷

During the construction work in the temple, the high priest, one of the leading reformers, made a momentous discovery: “I have found the book of the law [
sefer torah
] in the temple of Yahweh,” he announced.
⁹⁸
Until this point, there was no tradition of a written text given on Mount Sinai; in fact, until the eighth century reading and writing had little place in the religious life of Israel. In the early biblical traditions
Moses imparted Yahweh’s teachings orally.
⁹⁹
Yet the reformers claimed that the scroll they had discovered had been dictated to Moses by Yahweh himself.
¹⁰⁰
Tragically, this precious document had been lost, but now that they had recovered this “second law” (Greek:
deuteronomion
) that supplemented
Yahweh’s verbal teaching on
Mount Sinai, the people of Judah could make a new start and perhaps save their nation from total destruction. So authoritative was the past in an agrarian state that it was quite customary for people who were promoting an innovative idea to attribute it to an iconic historical figure. The reformers believed that at this time of grave danger, they were speaking for Moses and put forward their own teachings in the speech they make Moses deliver, shortly before his death, in the book of Deuteronomy.

For the very first time, these reformers insisted that Yahweh demanded exclusive devotion. “Listen, Israel,” Moses tells his people, “Yahweh is our god, Yahweh alone!”
¹⁰¹
He had not only emphatically forbidden
Israelites to worship any other god but had also commanded them to wipe out the indigenous peoples of the
Promised Land:

Because they had lost this “second law” recorded by Moses, Israelites had been ignorant of his command; they had condoned the cult of other gods, married Canaanites, and made treaties with them. No wonder Yahweh’s anger had “blazed out” against the northern kingdom. Moses, the reformers insisted, had warned the Israelites what would happen. “Yahweh will scatter you among the peoples, from one end of the earth to the other.… In the morning you will say, ‘how I wish it were evening!’ and in the evening, ‘how I wish it were morning!’ Such terror will grip your heart, such sights your eyes will see.”
¹⁰³
When the scroll was read aloud to Josiah, its teachings were so startling that the king burst into tears, crying: “Great indeed must be the anger of Yahweh, blazing out against us.”
¹⁰⁴

It is difficult for us today to realize how strange this insistence on cultic exclusivity would have been in the seventh century BCE. Our reading of the
Hebrew Bible has been influenced by two and a half thousand years of
monotheistic teaching. But Josiah, of course, had never heard
of the First Commandment—“Thou shalt not have strange gods before my presence”—which the reformers would place at the top of the
Decalogue. It pointedly condemned
Manasseh’s introduction of the effigies of “strange gods” into the
temple where Yahweh’s “presence” (
shechinah
) was enthroned in the Holy of Holies. But pagan icons had been perfectly acceptable there since
Solomon’s time. Despite the campaigns of such prophets as Elijah, who had urged the people to worship Yahweh alone, most of the population of the two kingdoms had never doubted the efficacy of such gods as Baal, Anat, or Asherah. The prophet Hosea’s oracles showed how popular the cult of Baal had been in the northern kingdom during the eighth century, and the reformers themselves knew that
Israelites “offered sacrifice to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations and the whole array of heaven.”
¹⁰⁵
There would be great resistance to monotheism. Thirty years after Josiah’s death, Israelites were still devotees of the
Mesopotamian goddess
Ishtar, and Yahweh’s temple was once again full of “the idols of the house of Israel.”
¹⁰⁶
For many it seemed unnatural and perverse to ignore such a divine resource. The reformers knew that they were asking Judeans to relinquish beloved and familiar sanctities and embark on a lonely, painful severance from the mythical and cultural consciousness of the
Middle East.

Josiah was completely convinced by the
sefer torah and at once inaugurated a violent orgy of destruction, eradicating the cultic paraphernalia introduced by Manasseh, burning the effigies of Baal and Asherah, abolishing the rural shrines, pulling down the house of sacred male prostitutes and the
Assyrian horses. In the old territories of the Kingdom of Israel, he was even more ruthless, not only demolishing the ancient temples of Yahweh in
Bethel and
Samaria but slaughtering the priests of the rural shrines and contaminating their altars.
¹⁰⁷
This fanatical aggression was a new and tragic development, which excoriated sacred symbols that had been central to both the temple cult and the piety of individual Israelites.
¹⁰⁸
A tradition often develops a violent strain in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive
imperialism; fearing annihilation by an external foe, people attack an “enemy within.” The reformers now regarded the Canaanite cults that Israelites had long enjoyed as “detestable” and “loathsome”; they insisted that any Israelite who participated in them must be hunted down mercilessly.
¹⁰⁹
“You must not give way to him, nor listen to him, you must show him no pity,” Moses had commanded; “You must not spare him, and you must not conceal his guilt. No, you must kill
him.”
¹¹⁰
An Israelite town guilty of this idolatry must be put under the “ban,” burned to the ground, and its inhabitants slaughtered.
¹¹¹

This was all so novel that in order to justify these innovations, the Deuteronomists literally had to rewrite history. They began a massive editorial revision of the texts in the royal archives that would one day become the
Hebrew Bible, changing the wording and import of earlier law codes and introducing new legislation that endorsed their proposals. They recast the history of Israel, adding fresh material to the older narratives of the
Pentateuch and giving Moses a prominence that he may not have had in some of the earlier traditions. The climax of the Exodus story was no longer a theophany but the gift of the
Ten Commandments and the
sefer torah. Drawing on earlier sagas, now lost to us, the reformers put together a history of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah that became the books of
Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, which “proved” that the idolatrous iniquity of the northern kingdom had been the cause of its destruction. When they described Joshua’s conquests, they depicted him slaughtering the local population of the
Promised Land and devastating their cities like an
Assyrian general. They transformed the ancient myth of the ban so that it became an expression of God’s justice and a literal rather than a fictional story of attempted
genocide. Their history culminated in the reign of Josiah, the new Moses who would liberate Israel from Pharaoh once again, a king who was even greater than David.
¹¹²
This strident theology left an indelible trace on the Hebrew Bible; many of the writings so frequently quoted to prove the ineradicable aggression and intolerance of “
monotheism” were either composed or recast by these reformers.

Yet the Deuteronomist reform was never implemented. Josiah’s bid for independence ended in 609 BCE, when he was killed in a skirmish with
Pharaoh Neco. The new Babylonian empire replaced Assyria and competed with Egypt for control of the Middle East. For a few years Judah dodged between these great powers, but eventually, after an uprising in Judah in 597,
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, deported eight thousand Judean aristocrats, soldiers, and skilled artisans.
¹¹³
Ten years later he destroyed the temple, razed Jerusalem to the ground, and deported five thousand more Judeans, leaving only the lower classes in the devastated land. In Babylonia the Judean exiles were reasonably well treated. Some lived in the capital; others were housed in undeveloped areas near the new canals and could, to an extent, manage their own affairs.
¹¹⁴
But
exile is a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation. In Judah the deportees had been the elite class; now they had no political rights, and some even had to work in the corvée.
¹¹⁵
But then it seemed that
Yahweh was about to liberate his people again. This time the exodus would not be led by a prophet but would be instigated by a new imperial power.