The Case for God (10 page)

This was a nonviolent cosmogony. When P’s first audience heard the opening words “At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,” they would have expected a story of fearsome battles. But P surprised them: there was no fighting, no killing. Unlike Marduk, Elohim did not have to fight to the death to create an ordered
cosmos; instead he simply issued a series of commands: “Let there be light!” “Let the earth sprout forth with sprouting growth!” “Let there be lights in the dome of the heavens, to separate the day from the night” and each time, without any struggle at all, “it was so.”
⁶⁹
Yahweh had no competition and was the sole power in the universe.
⁷⁰
But there was no stridency in P’s polemic. On the last day of his creation, Elohim “saw everything that he had made and here: it was exceedingly good.”
⁷¹
P knew that some of the exiles routinely cursed the Babylonians, but, he implied, this was not the way to go because God had blessed everything that he had made. Everybody should be like Elohim, resting calmly on the Sabbath and blessing all his creatures without exception—even, perhaps, the Babylonians.

This was emphatically not intended as a literal account of the physical origins of life. P was saying something much more relevant to the exiles. If J’s creation story had been a myth of Solomon’s temple, P’s was the myth of the virtual temple he was encouraging the exiles to build by means of the new rituals of separation. Yahweh’s creation of the cosmos had been an important theme in the cult of Solomon’s temple, and in the Near East a temple was widely regarded as a symbolic replica of the cosmos. Temple building thus enabled human beings to participate in the gods’ ordering of the universe. With this in mind, P’s creation hymn was deliberately linked to his elaborate description of the construction of the tent shrine.
⁷²
After God has issued his very detailed instructions for the tabernacle, we have a laborious and repetitive description of Moses carrying them out, point by point. At each stage, Moses “saw all the work” and “blessed” the people, just as Yahweh had “seen” all he had made and “blessed” it at the end of each day of creation. The sanctuary was built on the first day of the first month of the year; Bezalel, its architect, was blessed by the “rushing-spirit” of God that had brooded over the primal waters, and both the creation hymn and the Tabernacle Document emphasized the importance of the Sabbath rest.
⁷³
The temple, the Israelites’ replica of the divinely ordered cosmos, was in ruins; their world had been annihilated, but they could build a symbolic temple in the wilderness of exile that brought order to their dislocated lives. This would restore them to the intimacy of Eden, because an Israelite temple symbolized the original harmony before
adam
had ruined the world.

But P’s creation myth was not the last word on the subject and nobody was required to “believe” it to the exclusion of all others. Alternative cosmogonies continued to flourish in Israel. Toward the end of their seventy-year exile in Babylonia, an anonymous prophet, usually known as Second Isaiah, revised the old tales of Yahweh fighting a sea monster in order to bring “comfort” to his people.
⁷⁴
And again, he told his creation story therapeutically, not as a factual cosmogony but to throw light on the hidden meaning of history. At the beginning of time, Yahweh had slaughtered his enemies, splitting the cosmic Sea in two and drying up the waters of the great Abyss, just as he had parted the Egyptian sea “to make the seabed a road for the redeemed to cross.”
⁷⁵
Now he would end the exile and bring the deportees home.
⁷⁶
It is in Second Isaiah that we find the first unequivocal statement of monotheism in the Bible. “I am Yahweh unrivalled,” God announces proudly. “There is no other god besides me.”
⁷⁷
But this was a far cry from P’s
ahimsa
. Second Isaiah imagined Yahweh marching aggressively through the world like the divine warrior of early Israelite tradition.
⁷⁸
The strident insistence on a single symbol of the divine was linked once again with a blatant projection of the national will and the destruction of its enemies. Yahweh has nothing but contempt for other deities: “You are nothing,” he tells the gods of the
goyim
, “and your works are nothingness.”
⁷⁹
All the gentiles would be “destroyed and brought to nothing,” scattered like chaff on the wind. Even those foreign rulers who helped Israel would fall prostrate before the Israelites, licking the dust at their feet.
⁸⁰

Yet these fierce oracles are interspersed in the extant text with four songs that are redolent of compassion, nonviolence, and universal concern, sung by an individual who called himself Yahweh’s servant.
⁸¹
We do not know who he was, but these songs clearly represented an ideal active in the exiled community that was very different from Second Isaiah’s aggressive monotheism. The servant’s task was to establish justice throughout the world, not by force but by a nonviolent, compassionate campaign:

When attacked, the servant turns the other cheek and refuses to retaliate.
⁸³
Despised and rejected, he will eventually be “lifted up, exalted, rise to great height,” and the people will realize that his serene resignation has healed them.
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He will become, Yahweh promises, “the light to the nations, so that my salvation will reach to the ends of the earth.”
⁸⁵

Second Isaiah’s predictions were fulfilled. When Cyrus, king of Persia, conquered the Babylonian empire, he gave all deportees the option of returning to their homelands. Most of the Jewish exiles had acclimatized to life in the Diaspora and decided to stay in Babylonia, but in 530 a party of Jews made the decision to return home, and ten years later, after many trials and tribulations, they rebuilt the temple. The return was difficult: the Second Temple failed to live up to the fabled glories of Solomon’s, and the returning exiles had to contend with opposition from their pagan neighbors as well as from those Israelites who had not been deported and found the new religious ideas of the Golah, the community of exiles, alien and exclusive.

The Hebrew Bible was almost complete: preaching tolerance and respect for difference on the one hand and a strident chauvinism on the other, it was a difficult document to decipher, and it is not clear that at this stage it had any official religious significance or that it was used in the cult. A transitional figure was Ezra, a scribe in the Persian court who had “set his heart to investigate the Torah of Yahweh and to do and teach the law and ordinance in Israel.”
⁸⁶
In about 398, the Persian king sent him to Jerusalem with a mandate to enforce the Torah of Moses as the law of the land.
⁸⁷
The Persians were reviewing the legal systems of the subject peoples to make sure that they were compatible with imperial security, and Ezra had probably worked out a satisfactory modus vivendi between Mosaic and Persian jurisprudence.

When he arrived in Jerusalem, Ezra was horrified to find that instead of maintaining the separation that P had prescribed, some of the people had actually taken foreign wives. On New Year’s Day, Ezra brought the Torah to the square in front of the Water Gate and read it aloud, “translating and giving the sense, so that the people understood what was read,” while Levites, lower-ranking priests, circulated
among the crowds, supplementing his commentary
⁸⁸
. We cannot be sure of his text, but whatever it was, it reduced the people to tears. They had clearly never heard it before and were dismayed by these unfamiliar demands. Read “neat,” as it were, scripture could be daunting and alarming. “Do not weep!” Ezra insisted. It was the month of Sukkoth, and the law commanded Israelites to spend these weeks in special “booths”
(sukkoth
) in memory of their ancestors’ forty years in the Sinai wilderness. Again, this was a novel instruction: the First Temple rituals had celebrated Sukkoth very differently. At once, the people rushed into the hills to pick branches of olive, myrtle, pine, and palm, and leafy shelters mushroomed all over the city. There was a festive atmosphere as the people assembled each evening to hear Ezra’s exposition.

But later Ezra held a more somber assembly in the square in front of the new temple, during which the people stood shivering as the torrential winter rains deluged the city and they heard Ezra commanding them to send away their foreign wives.
⁸⁹
Membership in Israel was now confined to the Golah and to those who submitted to the Torah, the official law of the land. Ezra had interpreted the scriptures in an exclusive manner, emphasizing the duty of separation but neglecting P’s equally stringent demand that Israelites treat the stranger with “love” and respect. The Bible consists of many contradictory texts, so our reading is always selective. Tragically, however, a selective reading of scripture to enforce a particular point of view or marginalize others would be a constant temptation for monotheists.

Ezra’s reading, accompanied as it was by his own running commentary, also made it clear that the Torah required interpretation. This is the first time we hear of these miscellaneous texts being treated as scripture with binding force. Ezra’s presentation at the Water Gate marked the beginning of classical Judaism, a religion that focuses not merely on the reception and preservation of revelation but on its constant reinterpretation.
⁹⁰
When he had expounded the text, Ezra did not merely recite the Torah given to Moses in the distant past but created something new and unexpected. The biblical writers had worked in the same way, making radical revisions to the texts and traditions they had inherited. In classical Judaism, revelation would never be something that had happened once and for all time, but an ongoing process that could never end, because there was
always something fresh to be discovered. If it was simply read like any other text, the Torah could be disturbing. It must be heard in the context of rituals, like those of Sukkoth, which separated it from ordinary life and put the audience in a different frame of mind. And in any reading of the Torah, the commentary was as important as the text itself. The Jews had discovered that religious discourse was essentially interpretive. Ezra had not swallowed the text gullibly but had “set his heart to investigate
(li-drosh)”
it. Jewish exegesis would be called
midrash
, which derives from the verb
darash
, “to search,” “investigate,” “to go in pursuit of something” as yet undiscovered. Midrash would become a new ritual evoking the divine and would always retain connotations of dedication, emotional involvement, and expectant inquiry.
⁹¹

Reason

A
t about the same time as P was writing his creation story, a handful of philosophers in the thriving Greek colony of Miletus on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor had begun to think about the cosmos in an entirely different way.
¹
What they were attempting was so new that they had no name for it, but they became known as the
phusikoi
, the “naturalists,” because their thinking was based entirely on the material world. The Milesians were merchants; their interests—sailing, land surveying, astronomy, mathematical calculation, and geography—were pragmatic and geared to their trade, but their wealth had given them leisure for speculation. They came to a startling conclusion. Despite the flux and change that were apparent everywhere in the universe, they were convinced that there was an underlying order and that the universe was governed by intelligible laws. They believed that there was an explanation for everything and that stringent rational inquiry would enable them to find it. These Ionian naturalists had launched the Western scientific tradition.

They did not have a large following, since very few people could understand their ideas and only fragments of their writings have survived. But it seems that from the first the
phusikoi
pushed their minds to the limits of human knowledge, looking more deeply into the natural world than was deemed possible at the time. Why was the world the way it was? They believed that they could find an answer by examining the
arche
, the “beginning” of the cosmos. If they could discover the raw material that had existed before the universe as we know it had emerged, they would understand the substance of the cosmos, and everything else would follow.

They were not hostile to religion; indeed, there was nothing in Greek religion that was incompatible with this type of investigation. As an Aryan people, the Greeks accepted the idea of an overarching cosmic order to which all beings were subject. There were no orthodox doctrines of creation, and the gods of Mount Olympus were neither omnipotent nor cosmic powers. They differed only in being more anthropomorphically conceived than the gods of most other pantheons. In his eighth-century epics, Homer had fixed the gods’ personalities for all time, and their endless feuds symbolized the agonistic relationship of the sacred forces that the Greeks sensed all around them. When they contemplated the complex Olympian family, Greeks were able to glimpse a unity that drew its warring contradictions together.
²
The gods might meddle irresponsibly in human affairs, but their similarity to mortal men and women emphasized their compatibility with the human race. The Greeks sensed the presence of a deity in any exceptional human achievement.
³
When a warrior was possessed by the fury of battle, he knew that Ares was present; when his world was transfigured by the overwhelming reality of erotic love, he called this emotion Aphrodite. Hephaestus was revealed in the work of an artist and Athena in each and every cultural attainment.