The Case for God (9 page)

But a rational, secular ideology is not necessarily any more tolerant than a mythical one. The Deuteronomists’ reform revealed the greatest danger of idolatry. In making their national God, now the
only
symbol of the divine, endorse the national will, they had crafted a god in their own image. In the past, Marduk’s power had always been challenged by Tiamat’s, Baal’s by Mot’s. For J and E, the divine was so ambiguous that it was impossible to imagine that Yahweh was infallibly on your side or to predict what he would do next. But the Deuteronomists had no doubt that they knew exactly what Yahweh desired and felt it a sacred duty to destroy anything that seemed to oppose his/their interests. When something inherently finite—an image, an ideology, or a polity—is invested with ultimate value, its devotees feel obliged to eliminate any rival claimant, because there can be only one absolute. The type of destruction described by the Deuteronomists is an infallible indication that a sacred symbol has become idolatrous.

The vision of the Deuteronomists had been affected by the violence of their time. At about the same time as the sages of India had started to make
ahimsa
, “nonviolence,” essential to the religious quest, the Deuteronomists depicted Joshua slaughtering the inhabitants of Canaan like the Assyrian generals who had terrorized the region for over two hundred years. In the event, the Deuteronomists’ divinely articulated nationalism ended in tears. Their belligerent theology had blinded them to practical realities on the ground. It was only a matter of time before the great powers turned their attention to Judah. In 611 Pharaoh Necho II marched through Canaan in a bid to counter the rising power of Babylon. In a futile show of defiance, Josiah intercepted the Egyptian army at Megiddo and was killed in the very first encounter.
⁴⁴

Henceforth the tiny Kingdom of Judah would become the pawn of the great powers of Egypt and Babylon, and their foreign policy veered erratically in favor of one or the other. Some of the Israelites insisted that because Yahweh was their God, Judah could not be defeated and urged their rulers to assert their independence. But the prophet Jeremiah and others tried to force them to face facts—to no avail. Twelve years after Josiah’s untimely death, a tragedy of far greater magnitude occurred. Judah rebelled against Babylonian supremacy, and in 597 Jerusalem was brought to its knees by King Nebuchadnezzar, who deported the elite—the king, the nobility, scribes, priests, the military, and artisans—to Babylonia and installed a puppet king in the Holy City. Eleven years later, in 586, after another senseless revolt, Jerusalem was destroyed and Yahweh’s temple, his objective correlative on earth, was burned to the ground.

The Deuteronomists had made violence an option in the Judeo-Christian religion. It would always be possible to make these scriptures endorse intolerant policies. But the Deuteronomists did not have the last word because other biblical writers worked hard to counter this idolatrous tendency. When the redactors had put the JE document together, they used E’s more transcendent image of Elohim to modify J’s unabashedly anthropomorphic vision of Yahweh. In E’s account of the first meeting between Moses and the God who speaks to him from the burning bush, Yahweh reveals his name:
“Ehyeh asher ehyeh”:
“I am what I am.”
⁴⁵
Later Jews and Christians would interpret this to mean that God was being itself, He Who Is. But E did not yet think in these metaphysical terms. In his narrative, God may have been saying something far simpler.
Ehyeh asher eyheh
is a Hebrew idiom that expresses deliberate vagueness. The remark “they went where they went,” for example, means “I have no idea where they went.” So when Moses asked God who he was, Yahweh in effect replied: “Never mind who I am!” There must be no discussion of God’s nature, and no attempt to manipulate God, as the pagans did when they called on their deities by name. Eventually Jews would refuse to pronounce the name Yahweh, as a tacit admission that any attempt to express the divine reality would be so limiting as to be almost blasphemous.

Where the very earliest accounts suggest that Moses had actually
seen
God on Mount Sinai,
⁴⁶
later authors would declare this to be impossible. When Moses begged to see Yahweh’s “glory”
(kavod)
, Yahweh told him that no mere mortal could look upon the holiness of God and live.
⁴⁷
In a scene that would become emblematic, when Moses climbed Mount Sinai to meet with God, a thick cloud and a blanket of impenetrable smoke hung over the summit. There was thunder and lightning and what sounded like deafening trumpet blasts. Moses may have stood in the place where God was, but he had no lucid vision of the divine.
⁴⁸
The biblical writers made it clear that the
kavod
of Yahweh was not God himself; it was, as it were, a mere afterglow of God’s presence on earth, essentially and crucially separate from the divine reality itself, which would always be beyond human ken.

The Israelites who had been deported to Babylon in 597 were not badly treated. They lived together in communities in the capital or in new settlements beside the canal and were allowed a degree of autonomy. But they were shocked, bewildered, and angry. Some wanted to pay the Babylonians back in kind and dreamed of dashing their children’s heads against a rock.
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Others felt that Yahweh had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Marduk and was no longer worthy of their loyalty. How could they possibly worship a god who had no cult and no temple?
⁵⁰
But five years after his deportation, a young priest called Ezekiel had a terrifying vision of Yahweh’s “glory” beside the Chebar Canal.
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It was a bewildering theophany, since it was impossible to make out anything clearly in the stormy obscurity of thunder, lightning, smoke, and wind. The trauma of exile had smashed the neat, rationalistic God of the Deuteronomists. Ezekiel’s vision left him stunned for a whole week. But one thing seemed clear. God had chosen to leave Jerusalem and take up residence with the exiles. Henceforth they must live as though the “glory” previously enshrined in the temple was indeed in their midst.

But how could they do this? A small circle of exiled priests began to construct an answer, reinterpreting old symbols and stories to build an entirely new spirituality. Scholars call this priestly layer of the Bible “P”: its most important sources were the Holiness Code (a miscellaneous
collection of seventh-century laws)
⁵²
and the Tabernacle Document, the centerpiece of P’s narrative, which described the tent that the Israelites had built in the wilderness to house the divine presence.
⁵³
With these and other ancient oral traditions, P compiled the two legal books of Leviticus and Numbers, which reversed the aggressive theology of the Deuteronomists by creating a series of rituals based on the experience of exile and estrangement. P also added material to the JED narrative, so that it became a story of one tragic migration after another: the expulsion from Eden, the wanderings of Cain, the dispersal of humanity after the rebellion at Babel, the departure of Abraham from Mesopotamia, the tribes’ flight to Egypt, and the forty years in the wilderness. In P’s revised chronicle, the climax of the Exodus was no longer the bestowal of the Torah but the gift of the divine presence in the “Tent of Meeting.” God had brought his people into the Sinai desert precisely in order “to dwell
(shakan)
, myself, in their midst.”
⁵⁴
The verb
shakan
had originally meant “to lead the life of a nomadic tent-dweller;” God would now “tent” with his wandering people wherever in the world they happened to be.
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Instead of ending the story with Joshua’s brutal conquest, P left the Israelites on the border of the Promised Land.
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Israel was not a people because the Israelites lived in a particular country, but because they lived in the presence of a God who accompanied them wherever they happened to be. Their present exile was simply the latest instance of the tragic uprooting that had given Israel special insight into the nature of the divine.

P made a startling legal innovation. The exiles would create a sense of the divine presence by living
as if
they were priests serving in the Jerusalem temple. Hitherto the laity had never been expected to observe the ceremonial laws, purity regulations, and dietary rules of the temple personnel.
⁵⁷
But now the exiles had become a nation of priests and must live as if God were dwelling in their midst, thus ritually creating an invisible, symbolic temple. There was a profound link between exile and holiness. God had told the Israelites that he was
kaddosh
(“holy”), a word that literally meant “separate,” “other;” God was radically different from ordinary, mundane reality. Now the exiles must become
kaddosh
too.
⁵⁸
The legislation crafted by P was based on the principle of sacred segregation. In Leviticus, Yahweh issued detailed directions about sacrifice, diet, and social, sexual, and cultic life to differentiate the exiles from their Babylonian captors. By
replicating the condition of otherness, the exiles would symbolically relocate to the realm of holiness where God was. God would “walk about” in their midst, as he had once walked with Adam in the cool of the evening.
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Babylon would become the new Eden because the rituals of separation would heal the long estrangement from the divine.

But holiness also had a strong ethical component, because it involved absolute respect for the sacred “otherness” of every single creature. Even though they kept themselves apart, Israelites must not despise the foreigner: “If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him. You must treat him like one of your own people and love him as yourselves, for you were strangers in Egypt.”
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It was a law based on empathy and compassion, the ability to
feel with
the other. The experience of one’s own pain must lead to an appreciation of other people’s suffering. When P spoke of “love” he did not mean emotional tenderness. This was a law code, its language as technical and reticent as any legal ruling. In Middle Eastern treaties, to “love” meant to be helpful and loyal and to give practical support. Earlier biblical authors had commanded the Israelites to confine tribal loyalty
(hesed
) to their fellow Jews, but this was not true of P, whose purity regulations are remarkable in that other people are never regarded as contaminating.
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The foreigner was not to be shunned but loved. Impurity came only from yourself, not from your enemies.

P insisted that Israelites must honor all life. Death was the great contaminator. It was an insult to come into the presence of the living God without undergoing a simple ritual of purification after coming into contact with the death of one of his creatures. In the dietary laws forbidding the eating of “unclean” animals, P developed a modified version of the Indian ideal of
ahimsa
. Like other ancient peoples, the Israelites did not regard the ritual slaughter of animals as killing; sacrifice was universally held to give the beast posthumous existence, and it was usually forbidden to eat an animal that had not been ritually consecrated in this way. P permitted the Israelites to sacrifice and consume only domestic animals from their own flocks. These were the “pure” or “clean” animals, which were members of the community; during their lifetime they must be allowed to rest on the Sabbath, and nobody could harm them in any way.
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But the “unclean” animals—dogs, deer, and other wild creatures— must not be killed at all; it was forbidden to trap, exploit, or eat them under any circumstances.
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This was not because they were “dirty.” It
was perfectly all right to touch them while they were alive. They became unclean only after death.
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The law that forbade contact with a dead animal’s corpse protected it: because the carcass could not be skinned or dismembered, it was not worthwhile to hunt or trap it. For the same reasons, those animals classed as “abominations”
(sheqqets
) must be avoided only when they were dead. These tiny “swarming creatures” were vulnerable and should inspire compassion; because they were prolific and “teemed,” they enjoyed God’s blessing, so it was an “abomination” to harm them.
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God had blessed the unclean animals on the day of creation, and had saved pure and impure animals during the Flood. To damage any one of them was an affront to his holiness.

This is the context in which we should read P’s most famous work, the creation hymn in the first chapter of Genesis. Like all ancient cosmogonies, its purpose was primarily therapeutic. In Babylon, the Israelites would have been painfully aware of the magnificent New Year rituals in Esagila that celebrated Marduk’s victory over Tiamat. P’s cosmogony is, first, a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion that would have been balm to the exiles’ bruised spirits. Marduk may have appeared to defeat Yahweh, but in reality Yahweh was far more powerful. Like all ancient cosmogonies, this was no creation ex nihilo. Elohim simply brings order to preexistent chaos, “when earth was wild and waste
(tohu va bohu)
, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit hovering over the face of the waters.”
⁶⁶
The Ocean would immediately have recalled Tiamat, but instead of being a frightening goddess, it was merely the raw material of the universe. The sun, moon, and stars were not deities but functionaries, timekeepers that brought light to the earth.
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The “great sea-serpents” were no longer threatening adversaries like Yam or Lotan but simply God’s creatures. He did not have to slaughter or split them in two, and at the end of the day, he blessed them.
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Marduk’s victory had to be reactivated every year in order to make the cosmos viable, but Yahweh finished his creative work in a mere six days and was able to rest on the seventh.