Archibald Robertson, The Origins of Christianity, International Publishers, 1954, rev. ed. 1962.

CHAPTER II

WHO WERE THE JEWS?

Palestine, the country of origin of Judaism and Christianity, owed its importance in ancient as in modern times to its geographical position. It lies at the south-western end of the "fertile crescent" which encircles the Arabian desert from the Persian Gulf to the frontier of Egypt. Here the predatory powers of Egypt and nearer Asia were bound to clash. The inhabitants of Palestine, therefore, in addition to the misery everywhere attending the passage from primitive communism to class society, suffered the special drawback of living in a land inviting invasion both by the nomads of the neighbouring desert and by great rival empires. For centuries before 2000 B.C. Amorites from the Arabian desert raided and infiltrated into the sown lands in such numbers that Syria and Palestine are known on Egyptian and Assyrian monuments as "the land of the Amorites". About 1800 B.C. Hyksos barbarians from the north overran the country on their way to conquer Egypt. After 1580 B.C. the Theban Pharaohs drove out the Hyksos, annexed Palestine and Syria, and enriched Egypt with plunder, slaves and tribute. After 1400 B.C. new invaders, the Hittites from the north and the Habiru (Hebrews) from the desert, took advantage of Egypt's decline to push into Palestine. In the thirteenth century B.C. Egypt temporarily reconquered the country. An inscription of Pharaoh Merneptah about 1223 records that "Israel is desolate, her seed is not." This is the first mention of Israel in any extant record. About 1200 a new people from the north, the Philistines, overran the country, put an end to Egyptian rule and gave Palestine the name which it still bears.

The Hebrews who invaded Palestine did not differ culturally from the barbaric peoples about them. They were not even a single people. Fourteenth-century Egyptian despatches (the Tell-el-Amarna tablets) call them sometimes "Habiru", sometimes simply "robbers". They were a miscellany of nomad tribes who, like many before and after, raided the country and, when the central government was weak, did "deals" with local princelings and made permanent settlements. Israel seems to have entered Palestine earlier than Judah. There is no evidence on the monuments that they were fugitive slaves from Egypt. But it would be very natural for fugitive slaves who made their "getaway" to attach themselves to nomad tribes; so there may be some basis for the tradition of Egyptian oppression. They were not monotheists. The historical books of the Old Testament in their present form date from eight hundred to a thousand years after the Amarna period and have all been edited by monotheistic compilers. They are based on sources at most a few centuries older than themselves and in no case anything like contemporary with the Amarna tablets: they are even silent on the desolation of Israel by Pharaoh Merneptah. In fact the Biblical story of the exodus from Egypt under Moses and the conquest of Palestine under Joshua cannot be fitted into the Egyptian records.1 It may contain a dim and distorted tradition of historical events, just as the Homeric poems contain a dim and distorted tradition of a real Trojan war. But the authority of the two stories is about on a level.

Nevertheless one fact leaps to the eye. With all their editing the compilers of Old Testament history are unable to conceal the fact that the Hebrews of the time of the invasion and for centuries after were, in their religion and in their whole way of life, barbarians. They worshipped their rain-god Jahu or Jahveh with rites which included human sacrifice. Jephthah sacrifices his daughter; Samuel hews Agag in pieces before Jahveh; David hangs seven sons of Saul to end a famine; and in no case does the source represent the act as other than right and proper.

Nor was Jahveh their only god. From their first settlement in Palestine the Hebrews, as was natural, adopted the cults of the country in which they had settled. Jahveh was only one baal (lord) among many, and indistinguishable from the local fertility-gods worshipped "under every green tree". On pieces of pottery excavated at Samaria proper names compounded with "baal" are more frequent than those compounded with "Jahu". Jahveh even had female consorts. Excavations at Mizpah in central Palestine show that in the ninth century B.C., in the time of the kings of Israel, there stood there side by side a temple of Jahveh and a temple of Astarte -- a Syrian variant of the Babylonian Ishtar. Papyri discovered at Elephantine in Upper Egypt show that as late as 408 B.C., after the time of Nehemiah, a colony of Jews, settled there for more than a century, worshipped along with Jahu two variants of the mother-goddess, Anath and Ashima.

Cults such as these are characteristic of the oldest civilizations, in which a class of priests, lineal successors of barbaric magicians or medicine-men, perform traditional rites deemed to be necessary to the public welfare and enjoy in return exceptional wealth in land, offerings and slaves. Only gradually do the priestly and kingly functions become separated. Even in the Old Testament we read (in a source evidently older than the monopoly of the priesthood by the Levite clan) that "David's sons were priests."2

The cults of ancient Palestine differed from those of the neighbouring empires of Egypt and Babylonia only in the fact that the country was smaller and poorer, and its priests and kings therefore less firmly established and more exposed to attack in times of acute class struggle or national disaster. There were class struggles in other ancient societies; but Palestine differed from other countries in one important respect. Wherever a great empire arose, as in Egypt, Babylonia or later in the Graeco-Roman world, the exploited classes -- peasants, artisans and slaves -- were hopelessly defeated and held down. We know little of their struggles, for the simple reason that the slave-owning class wrote the history of the times. We have no Helot account of Greece, no Spartacist account of Rome. But in Palestine, owing to its position at the junction of rival empires and in close proximity to the tribal society of the desert, the struggle, though the final issue was the same, was more obstinate and more protracted. Until Rome appeared on the scene, Palestine was never under one great empire long enough to extinguish in the masses the will to resist and the hope of deliverance. After the fall of the Egyptian Empire in the twelfth century B.C. the petty kingdoms of Syria and Palestine, among which Israel and Judah were eventually numbered, were left alone to raid and plunder one another until the ninth century, when the Assyrian military machine began its great westward push. Assyria conquered Palestine in the eighth century, but was itself conquered in the seventh by the Medes and Babylonians. The new Babylonian Empire in less than a lifetime fell before Persia. Persia held Palestine for two centuries, but for most of the time had to conciliate the Jews owing to their key position on the frontier of Egypt. Under Alexander's successors the country was continually fought for by rival dynasts. The result was that although Palestine had more than its share of massacres, devastations and deportations, the hold of the conquerors was never secure. The revolutionary movement, unlike those elsewhere, was able to organize, to flare up not once or twice but again and again into open revolt, and to produce in the prophetical books of the Old Testament the earliest considerable revolutionary literature which has come down to us.

The word "prophet" means to us one who foretells the future. But that was not its original sense. The Hebrew word nabi, which is translated "prophet", meant a speaker or announcer, whether what he announced referred to the future or not. When we first read of prophets in the Old Testament, they are an order very like the dervishes of modern Islam. They go about in organized bands "prophesying" to the accompaniment of music and are reckoned rather disreputable people. When the warrior Saul is seen with one such band, bystanders ask: "Is Saul also among the prophets?" and add in contempt: "And who is their father?"3 We gather that prophets were usually of the poorer classes and disliked by the great families as mob-orators and trouble-makers. It cannot be accidental that their first appearance on the scene follows certain flagrant cases of priestly misrule -- the "racket" of the sons of Eli in I Samuel ii, and that of the sons of Samuel in I Samuel viii.

Closely allied to the prophets in the Old Testament are the Nazirites or "devotees", unkempt of person and vowed to total abstinence, and the very similar Rechabites, who lived a life of nomad simplicity in the midst of civilization and played a part in the revolution which exterminated the house of Ahab and put Jehu on the throne of Israel.

The early history of the prophets is wrapped in legend. The magnificently told stories of Elijah and Elisha are the work of devout partisans with an infinite appetite for miracle. We cannot be sure that these two prophets ever lived. Elijah's life is miraculous from beginning to end, and Elisha's hardly less so. But their stories at least tell us what people held to be the function of a prophet. It was to beard kings in their palaces at the risk of outlawry, exile and death, and to fight land-grabbing rulers to the point of revolution. To justify their attack on the established priesthoods the prophets invoked the name of Jahveh, the god of their nomad ancestors, and in the course of the struggle transformed him from a tribal idol, a nature-god like any other, into a symbol of the social justice for which they battled. As in other popular movements, we read in many places of prophets who are bought or intimidated by the ruling class -- of "prophets of Baal" who "eat at Jezebel's table",4 and prophets who are silent or prophesy smooth things at the command of authority. The reader will be able to supply his own parallels.

The eighth-century prophet Amos was the first prophet, so far as we know, to commit anything to writing. He is a peasant poet attacking the enemies of his class -- the rulers of Syria and Palestine who make a hell for their subjects by their petty, but atrocious wars; the usurers who sell "the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes";5 the lords who sit drinking with their ladies -- "cows of Bashan who oppress the poor", Amos impolitely calls them;6 the swindling merchants who make "the ephah small, and the shekel great";7 and the priests with their ornate services and sacrifices -- unknown, says Amos, to the desert ancestors of Israel. He does not attack idolatry as such. He attacks the priests of Bethel, the chief sanctuary of the kingdom of Israel, not for worshipping Jahveh in the form of a bull-calf, but for exacting tithes, burnt offerings and meal offerings instead of letting "judgment roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream".8 Another feature of Amos is his internationalism. He denounces the neighbouring kingdom of Moab for an atrocity against Edom, even though no Israelite was the victim. He tells his countrymen that they are no more important in the divine scheme than other nations and that their "sinful kingdom"9 will be wiped off the face of the earth.

The greater part of the prophetical literature is written in rhythmical verse. This suggests that it was, as we should expect in a people's movement, passed from hand to hand among those who could read and committed to memory by those who could not. Naturally this method of propaganda led to extensive corruption of passages once they had ceased to be topical. Many passages of the prophets are so mutilated as to be no longer intelligible even to Hebrew scholars. And as writings were handed down from generation to generation, copyists would amend and interpolate them, and even add the work of a later writer to that of an earlier without indicating the different authorship. The result is that some prophetical books (especially Isaiah) are a patchwork in which the dates of different parts vary by several centuries. An acid test of authenticity is the consistency of a passage with the date of its ostensible writer. We can accept most (not all) of Amos as authentic, since it was evidently written when Samaria and Damascus were the capitals of independent kingdoms, and they ceased to be so soon after the reputed date of Amos. But we cannot accept as authentic prophecies of the end of a captivity which, when Amos wrote, had not even begun. And we cannot allow prophets who write in Assyrian times to get away with references to the rise of Persia, or prophets of the Persian period to write as if the main enemies of Israel were the Greeks. That sort of anomaly is frequent in the prophetical books.10 Yet their general tendency is clear and points to a continuous movement deeply rooted in the social and political conditions of the age.

From the ninth century B.C. the armies of Assyria pressed on in ruthless pursuit of plunder and tribute. The petty kingdoms of Syria and Palestine occasionally made common cause against her, but more often bargained for her alliance in their internecine feuds. The kings of Israel from Jehu onward repeatedly paid her blackmail in the form of tribute in order to enlist her aid against Damascus. At the time of Amos, Assyria was temporarily weakened by civil war: hence he does not name her. But a few years later, under the military usurper Tiglath-Pileser III, a new push began. In 738 a western coalition was smashed, and Israel paid tribute again.11 In 734 a new coalition between Israel and Damascus brought the Assyrian armies down on them. Syria and Palestine were ravaged as Assyria knew how to ravage. Damascus was besieged and in 732 ceased to exist as a kingdom. Israel survived a little longer, but rebelled in 727 after the death of Tiglath-Pileser and in 722 shared the fate of Damascus: 27,000 Israelites were deported by Sargon to Assyria and replaced by colonists from other conquered lands. A considerable Israelite population, however, remained. Judah, the surviving Hebrew kingdom, had saved itself by becoming tributary to Assyria.12

After that Palestine was overrun again and again by Assyrian armies marching against this or that rebel city or against Egypt, which tried to avert its own danger by using the little states as pawns. The death of Sargon in 705 was followed by a general revolt of subject peoples -- Babylonia, the western states and the desert tribes between joining forces with Egypt against the Assyrian pest. Sennacherib, the new king, had to reconquer his empire country by country and could not attend to Palestine until 701. Then indeed "the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold". City after city was taken. Egypt came too late to help her allies and was beaten off. Two hundred thousand Jews were deported; and king Hezekiah was besieged in Jerusalem and paid a heavy indemnity in treasure and slaves.13 Something -- perhaps an outbreak of plague in the Assyrian army -- saved Jerusalem from actual sack. But the Jewish story of a divine slaughter of 185,000 Assyrians is plain wishful thinking. Sennacherib's losses cannot have been crippling; for he was able next year to finish off the rebellion in Babylonia and to make his son king of Babylon.

To this miserable time in Jewish history belongs whatever is genuine in the book of Isaiah. In the existing book the work of many prophets from the eighth down to the second century B.C. has been strung together without regard to date or historical fitness. But in parts of the first half of the book we catch authentic echoes of the terror spread by the march of the Assyrian armies. The country is desolate, its cities burnt, its crops eaten by strangers, its people carried captive, and its impregnable city, "the virgin daughter of Zion", threatened with violation. Isaiah uses these disasters to ram home denunciations of priestly mummery, princely corruption, the land-grabbing of lords and the luxury of ladies, very much in the manner of Amos. He is not a peasant like Amos, but a citizen of Jerusalem, influential enough to threaten a rich court official with disgrace. Isaiah is married to a "prophetess" who presumably shares his work. They give their children quaint, topical names such as "Remnant-shall-return"14 and "Hasten-booty-speed-spoil"15 -- like the English Puritans of a later age. Isaiah outdoes Amos in attacking idolatry as such. National disaster had so discredited the priesthood that a prophet could now openly mock those who "worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made".16 But the main attack is on class oppression. "The spoil of the poor is in your houses: what mean ye that ye crush my people, and grind the face of the poor? saith Jahveh, Jahveh god of hosts."17 Such a society is not worth saving. Assyria, "the overflowing scourge",18 will tread it down. Egypt, to which Jewish rulers look for help, will share their ruin. Isaiah allows himself only one consolation -- that Assyrian violence will overreach itself, and that the rod which Jahveh lifts up against his people will in his own good time be broken.

Very like the denunciations of Isaiah are those of Micah, who attacks the oppression of the people by rulers "who pluck their skin from off them, and their flesh from off their bones ",19 and with a countryman's hatred of a big city, threatens that "Zion shall be ploughed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps".20 The genuine work of both prophets is incongruously bound up with later matter predicting the conversion of all nations to Judaism and the advent of a reign of peace on earth. These prophecies contain magnificent poetry, but have nothing to do with Isaiah of Jerusalem or Micah of Moresheth. Assyria remained in possession of Palestine during the greater part of the seventh century B.C. In 670 her power reached its peak with the conquest of Egypt. But she had conquered more than she had the men or resources to hold. By the middle of the century Egypt with the aid of Greek mercenaries had recovered her independence. Babylonia too was repeatedly in revolt, and by 625 was independent and threatening Assyria from the south. Meanwhile Aryan-speaking hordes from the northern steppes invaded the exhausted Assyrian Empire and swept through Syria and Palestine to the frontier of Egypt, ending what was left of Assyrian power in the west. In 612 Nineveh itself was sacked by a detachment of these Scythians under Cyaxares the Mede, allied with the Babylonians under Nabopolassar. Thenceforth Assyria disappears from history.

But though avenged on their old oppressors, the Jews were not in happy case. The Scythians had wrought havoc in Palestine. We hear echoes of that havoc in the early chapters of Jeremiah -- the "seething cauldron from the north"; the summons to flee for safety to the fenced cities; the panic of kings, princes, priests and prophets; "destruction upon destruction"; the whole land spoiled and a desolation; cities forsaken; inhabitants fleeing to the thickets and the rocks; harvest and livestock eaten up by barbarian hordes.21 The established cult had never been so discredited. The stalwarts of the prophetic party exploited its discredit. Jeremiah, the greatest prophet of that time, was a young priest disgusted with his class. Anathoth, his native town was a seat of the cult of Anath, whom the Jews of that day worshipped as a female consort of Jahveh. She is, no doubt, the "queen of heaven" whose cult Jeremiah repeatedly denounces.22 The book which bears his name has been much edited and interpolated; but the genuine core gives a graphic picture of the time. All this has come upon the Jews, says Jeremiah, because they worship the works of their own hands, because the rich oppress the poor, and because prophets are false to their mission, and make themselves the tools of priestcraft. "Shall I not visit for these things? saith Jahveh: shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?"23

The priests were in a tight corner and knew it. In their extremity they did what a cornered ruling class often does. They compromised, and offered to accept part of the prophetic programme in order to serve their ov/n interests.

Before we examine the compromise, we must take a look at ancient Hebrew law. We know nothing of the laws of the nomad ancestors of Israel. The oldest extant Hebrew code is contained in Exodus xxi-xxii. Though attributed to Moses, it is framed for an agricultural society with fields and vineyards, and must be later than the settlement of Israel in Palestine. Many of its laws are borrowed or adapted from the Babylonian code of Hammurabi (about 2000 B.C.) which remained in force in Babylonia throughout ancient history and can easily have influenced Palestinian law. Thus both the Babylonian and Hebrew codes enact that a man guilty of assault shall pay for the medical treatment of his victim; both provide a fine for causing miscarriage; both lay down compensation for damage by cattle, or for loss of goods deposited with another person. Neither code is exhaustive. The normal relations of life were regulated by custom, as interpreted by tribal elders or at need by a priest or a king. A code was meant to cover cases which might puzzle those who had to try them.

This early Hebrew code has come down to us through prophetic editors of the eighth or seventh century B.C. who amplified it in the interest of their reform programme. How far they amended the code itself we cannot tell -- perhaps considerably. But the original code (Exodus xxi, 2-xxii, 17) is rounded off by rhetorical exhortations in quite a different style against idolatry, usury, bribery, false witness, oppression of the widow, orphan and stranger, and so on; and is prefaced by the story of the divine delivery of the Decalogue on Sinai. The Decalogue has been dulled for us by centuries of liturgical repetition. But as originally written it summarized the prophetic programme in a few short slogans, ascribed to the god who in popular belief had delivered the ancestors of Israel from Egyptian slavery. No gods but one; no graven images -- the instruments of priestcraft; no juggling with the name of Jahveh for magical purposes;24 a weekly day of rest for all -- even for slaves; honour for parents; respect for life, property and the family; an end to the sharp practices which cozened men out of house and holding. The reasons appended to some of the commandments in our actual Decalogue are afterthoughts by later editors. The Decalogue was the notice to quit served by eighth or seventh century prophets on rulers whose cults of fertility-gods and fertility-goddesses, with human sacrifices thrown in for good measure, had signally failed to stave off calamity from their country.

In 621, a few years after the Scythian invasion, when the prestige of the priesthood must have been at its lowest, the high priest of Jerusalem sent word to king Josiah that he had found "the book of the law" in the temple. The book was produced and read to the king, who, after consulting a prophetess, convened an assembly of the people and won their assent to the execution of its provisions. As a result a radical reformation took place, idolatry was suppressed, and all "high places" except the temple of Jerusalem were desecrated. For the first time in history monotheism was imposed by a Palestinian king. Nothing of the kind had been attempted since Akhenaton's revolution in Egypt seven centuries before.

That is the account which we read in 2 Kings xxii-xxiii. There is no reason to doubt its substantial truth. The book of Kings was almost certainly compiled within a lifetime of these events. The utterances of the prophetess Huldah have been touched up, and the extent of Josiah's iconoclasm outside Jerusalem must be exaggerated: the Scythians had probably left little for him to destroy. Otherwise the account contains nothing improbable.

The book found in the temple (and obviously put there in order to be found) is generally considered to have been part of Deuteronomy. It was not the whole existing book; for that could not have been read to the assembled people at one meeting. Deuteronomy, like other Old Testament books, has been considerably edited. But to produce the effect it did the book must have included much of the exhortations and enactments of Deut. v-xxvi, and probably the promises and threats of xxviii as a peroration. Leading off with the Decalogue, it continued with an eloquent statement of monotheism, a condemnation of the polytheism practised in Palestine, and an injunction to uproot it. Human sacrifice, temple prostitution and other barbaric rites were to be suppressed. There was to be one place of worship and one only, devoted to Jahveh alone and supported by prescribed offerings. Part of the tithes paid to the priests were to go to the widow, orphan and stranger. Every seven years all debts between Jews were to be cancelled, and all Hebrew slaves offered their freedom and a chance to start as independent producers. Justice was to be cleanly administered. The king was not to be a despot with a standing army and a harem, but a people's king bound by the law. Military service was to be voluntary; and newly married men were excluded from service. Concubinage with captive women was forbidden; but marriage with them was allowed. Fugitive slaves were not to be returned to their owners, but freed. Usury among Jews was to be forbidden; and clothing was not to be taken in pledge for debt. Wages were to be promptly paid. Weights and measures were to be true. And the code was not to be a professional secret of the priests, but to be publicized in every possible way -- by posting in public places, by instruction of the young and by other propaganda.

This programme was more radical than anything earlier in history. The nearest ancient parallel is the legislation of Solon at Athens, enacted less than thirty years later. Solon, like the Deuteronomic reformers, provided for the manumission of citizens enslaved for debt and possibly (though this is disputed) for a cancellation of all debts; but neither he nor any ancient legislator outside Judaea up to this time went so far as to suppress usury or to forbid the return of runaway slaves. The Deuteronomists were clearly pioneers, too, in the abolition of human sacrifices. Human victims were slain in Phoenicia and its colonies down to the fall of Carthage in 146 B.C., and even occasionally in Greece and Rome until the time of the Roman Empire. Rationalists who are weak in historic sense often deplore the intolerance of the Deuteronomists towards rival cults. But would Rationalists tolerate a cult which offered children in sacrifice to idols? Civilization owes a debt to those who first fought against the burning of children in the fire to baalim.

How far the Deuteronomic reforms were actually enforced is disputed. The book is a programme rather than a code. Its priestly origin is betrayed by the fact that, while it provides penalties for religious offences and for certain civil offences already covered by older laws, it prescribes no penalty for infractions of its social code. Its programme on debt, slavery, usury, wage-labour and such matters consists of exhortation without sanction other than the promise of divine blessing or the threat of divine wrath. The priests who published it were mainly concerned to secure their own incomes, and threw in the social programme as a bait to attract the support of a people dangerously alienated by national disaster.

Josiah made some attempt to carry out the programme. According to Jeremiah "he judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well".25 But he was not given much time. After the fall of Nineveh in 612 two great powers, Babylon and Egypt, fought for the former Assyrian possessions in Syria and Palestine. In 608 Pharaoh Necho defeated and slew Josiah, made himself temporary master of Palestine and levied a heavy tribute. The new Jewish king Jehoiakim was a creature of Egypt and completely undid the reformation. We read of a revival of baal-cults, of forced labour, and of a prophet named Uriah who made himself obnoxious and fled to Egypt, but was extradited and put to death. This incident is confirmed by letters excavated in 1935 at Lachish, in which two military commanders confer about the case.26

But the Egyptian hold on Palestine was short. In 605 Necho was routed on the Euphrates by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and had to evacuate Asia. In 597 Nebuchadnezzar marched against the Egyptian puppet, Jehoiakim, took Jerusalem and carried off thousands of Jews and much treasure. The captives were not enslaved, but settled on the land in Babylonia. In 588, the new Jewish king Zedekiah having played false, Nebuchadnezzar's army again invaded Palestine. Jerusalem stood a siege of eighteen months; an Egyptian relieving force was driven off; and in 586 the city was stormed and destroyed, the temple plundered and burnt, and the remaining citizens deported to Babylonia. Some escaped to Egypt, and probably founded the colony at Elephantine mentioned earlier in this chapter. Only the poorer peasants were left on the land. So ended the kingdom of Judah.27

The failure of the reformation had made the prophetic party violently anti-nationalist. To Jeremiah and his younger contemporary, Ezekiel, the Jewish kingdom and its cult are an unmitigated evil and their destruction clear gain. Their main attack is on polytheism and idolatry; but Jeremiah also fiercely inveighs against the forced labour levies of Jehoiakim and the re-enslavement under Zedekiah of persons manumitted under the Deuteronomic code. Jeremiah compares the kingdom of Judah to a spoilt pot which the potter scraps to make a better; calls the exiles in Babylonia "good figs" and the Jews left behind "bad figs which cannot be eaten";28 and urges the exiles in a letter to ignore nationalist demagogues and settle down as peaceable farmers in Babylonia. Ezekiel, a priest like Jeremiah and one of the "good figs" exiled in Babylonia, pours scorn on Jewish claims to racial purity, saying in an invective against Jerusalem: "The Amorite was thy father, and thy mother was a Hittite."29 "The bloody city"30 which sacrifices children to idols and takes usury of the poor and needy is better blotted out. Jeremiah and Ezekiel see in Nebuchadnezzar, polytheist though he is, a "servant of Jahveh" (or as we should say, an instrument of history) and a better ruler than the wretched Jewish princelings whom he dethroned. Ezekiel prophesies success to him in his campaigns against Phoenicia and Egypt -- indeed more than he achieved; for though Nebuchadnezzar invaded Egypt, he could not conquer it.

But there were many reasons why the exiled Jews could not become contented Babylonian subjects. The Hammurabi code was based on rigid class distinctions between patricians, plebeians and slaves. Injuries to the person were punished on a scale graded according to the rank of the victim. Masters were absolute owners of their slaves; and the penalty for aiding or harbouring fugitive slaves was death. Money could be lent at interest up to 20 per cent, and corn up to 33 per cent; and in default of payment in cash or kind the debtor could be enslaved -- unless he chose to pledge his wife or child for three years to work off the debt. Now the prophets had been trying for two centuries to annul or at least humanize these features of ancient law -- to establish one law for rich and poor, to end usury and at least to mitigate slavery. The Babylonian code was an immovable obstacle in the way. Accordingly Ezekiel in his last prophecies looks forward to a day when the "dry bones"31 of Israel will live, and when the exiles, with any aliens who may join them, will be resettled in Palestine in a new community reformed as he desires. Perhaps he believed in the possibility of home rule under Babylonian suzerainty. At any rate he nowhere betrays any hostility to Babylon.

But the Babylonian Empire was even shorter-lived than its Assyrian predecessor. In 550 a petty vassal of the neighbouring Median Empire, Cyrus the Persian, led a revolt, made himself master of Media and began a push westward. Nabonidus of Babylon was engaged in a quarrel with his priests and was ill situated to meet the new threat. He withdrew his garrisons from Palestine -- a sure sign of weakness. In a few years Cyrus overran western Asia and in 538 closed in on Babylon. After a single battle Nabonidus fled, and Cyrus entered Babylon unopposed -- acclaimed by its priests as their deliverer from Nabonidus.

The Jewish prophets also acclaimed him. Persia was not an old imperialist power like Egypt, Assyria or Babylonia. The Persians had until recently been a small and insignificant people. They are not even mentioned in Assyrian inscriptions. In all probability they had only lately migrated in the wake of their kinsmen, the Medes, from the northern steppes to their home among the mountains east of the Persian Gulf. There they lived as hardy peasants, scarcely out of the stage of barbarism, until Cyrus led them to adventure and conquest. Until they conquered Babylonia there is no evidence that they could read or write. Even when they had inherited the civilization of Babylonia and Egypt, their writings were confined to inscriptions and official documents. They left little art and no literature behind them to remind the world that they had once been lords of Asia.

To the Jewish prophets the backward Persians seemed far more likely than the civilized Babylonians to provide them with an opportunity to set up an ideal commonwealth. Their hope was the greater since the Medes and Persians professed the Zoroastrian religion, which had points of contact with that preached by the Jewish prophets. The Aryan peoples in their nomadic state had called their gods deva (heavenly beings) and the gods of their peasant enemies asura or ahura (demons). But when they themselves settled down as peasants, ahura came to mean a friendly spirit and deva, the nomad deity, a devil. The "wise lord", Ahura Mazda, became the patron of the peasants and their defender against the "destructive spirit", Angro Mainyush, ruler of the nomads and the cold north. Zoroastrianism was a religion of struggle, like that of the prophets. Its main influence on Judaism did not begin until after the fall of the Persian Empire; but there seems to have been some sympathy between them from the first.

The Jewish prophetic literature of this period is the work of an underground movement and naturally, therefore, anonymous. Copyists of a later age added these anonymous poems to the works of older prophets, especially Isaiah; and only the evidence of style and subject matter enables them to be sorted out. Some belong unmistakeably to the time of Cyrus' march on Babylon. One writer anticipates with savage glee the destruction of Babylon, "the glory of kingdoms", by an uncivilized enemy -- "the Medes, who shall not regard silver, and as for gold, they shall not delight in it".32 More important for the history of Judaism is the great monotheistic poem contained in Isaiah xl-xlviii. This anonymous poet (whom critics for convenience call the Second Isaiah) hails the advance of Cyrus, to whom kings are "as the dust to his sword, as the driven stubble to his bow".33 He expects him to sack Babylon, to order the rebuilding of Jerusalem and its temple, to let the exiles go free and to inaugurate a new deal for the poor. But the chief characteristic of this writer is his freethinking derision of polytheism and of images made by goldsmiths and cunning workmen, which when put to the test cannot deliver those who cry to them. More insistently than any earlier prophet he reiterates that there is but one God, creator of heaven and earth, author of all life, the God ahke of Israel and of Cyrus -- Jahveh and Ahura Mazda in one. Other gods are not merely false gods: they do not exist, they can do neither good nor evil, they are nothing. The attack on polytheism reminds us of the philosopher-poet Xenophanes of Colophon, who at this very time was launching a similar assault on the gods of Greece, made in the image of man, and affirming "one God, greatest among gods and men, neither in shape nor in thought like unto mortals", who "without an effort ruleth all things by thought". But whereas Greek philosophers, at least at this early date, did not try to propagate their ideas among the masses, the Jewish prophet not only does so, but summons all nations -- Egypt, Ethiopia, Arabia and "all the ends of the earth"34 -- to scrap their cults and turn to the one God.

Cyrus did not sack Babylon. As we have seen, he entered it with the good will of its priests. He seems to have given permission to exiles, including the Jews, to return to their countries and rebuild their cities and temples. But there was no considerable return of Jewish exiles, and the temple of Jerusalem was not rebuilt for many years. The reasons are plain. Firstly, the exiles had lived in Babylonia for fifty or sixty years. Many were not badly off. The proposal to return and build a new community in Palestine would appeal only to enthusiasts and those with nothing to lose. Secondly, events in Palestine had not stood still. During the exile -- perhaps between the withdrawal of the Babylonian garrisons and the establishment of Persian authority -- nomads had settled in southern Palestine, just as the Jews themselves had done centuries before. To rebuild Jerusalem and its temple amid a hostile population needed a resolution which only fanatics were likely to show. From the first the reconstruction of the Jewish community in Palestine seemed somewhat of a Utopian undertaking.

In 521 the death of Cambyses, the son of Cyrus and the conqueror of Egypt, plunged the Persian Empire into what seemed the throes of dissolution. There were revolts in Babylonia, Media, and even Persia proper. The handful of returned exiles began to nurse extravagant hopes. In 520 Haggai and Zechariah -- the last Jewish prophets to write under their own names -- called on the Jews to rebuild the temple and foretold that in "a little while" Jahveh would "shake all nations", destroy the Persian Empire and make Jerusalem the metropolis of a new world, over which Zerubbabel, a prince of the old Davidic line, would reign in peace.35 Probably at this time, too, an anonymous poet circulated a prophecy (later copied, like so many others, into the book of Isaiah) in which "the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light", the rod of the oppressor is broken, the accoutrements of war are "for burning, for fuel of fire", and a "prince of peace" of the Davidic line is to shoulder the government and bring in a golden age.36 These prophecies are evidence of the wild hopes raised by the upheavals of the sixth century and the apparent collapse of the unsteady Persian Empire. The recovery of Persia under Darius soon shattered such dreams. The temple was completed in 516; but Jerusalem remained unfortified, and we hear no more of Haggai, Zechariah or Zerubbabel. Except for scraps of prophecy of uncertain date, the next seventy years of Jewish history are a blank. When the curtain rises again, the Utopian experiment has miserably failed. Jerusalem is still unfortified, "the people few therein, and the houses not builded".37 Darius and his son Xerxescould not trust the Jews with a walled city. Even under Artaxerxes I an attempt to fortify Jerusalem seems to have been forcibly suppressed by royal order.38 Naturally exiles were in no hurry to go and live in an unprotected town.

Meanwhile momentous events were happening in world politics. The Persian Empire had been successfully challenged by the Greek cities, and after Salamis (480) and Plataea (479) was on the defensive. In 466 the Greeks carried the war into Asia and defeated the Persian army and fleet on the Eurymedon. In 460 Egypt rebelled and with Athenian aid held Persia at bay until 454. In 451 the Greeks were in Cyprus and assisted a new revolt in Egypt. To add to the troubles of Artaxerxes, Megabyzus, the Persian satrap of Syria, revolted in 448. At this juncture it was vital to Persia that Jerusalem should be defensible and in friendly hands. It was probably this which led Artaxerxes in 445 to entrust his Jewish cup-bearer, Nehemiah, with its fortification. We are fortunate in possessing Nehemiah's own account of his mission.39 He found the city in ruins; local magnates like Sanballat the Samaritan, who had doubtless profited by the troubles of the time, determined to prevent its restoration; Jewish priests and nobles hand in glove with these men and marrying into their families; usurers exploiting the peasants and enslaving insolvent debtors as in the bad old days; the new temple-cult, like the old, becoming a family racket. Nehemiah tells us how he mobilized the people as shock-workers to rebuild the walls and to be ready to resist attack while doing so, how the wall was finished in fifty-two days, and how he convened an assembly of the people to put down usury and restore the homes and holdings seized by the usurers. It was not a one-man revolution. Nehemjah could not have overborne the nobles as he did without the support of the people. The prophetic movement of three centuries had prepared the way; and he had prophets on his side.40

Nevertheless the result was a compromise, very much on the old lines of Deuteronomy. The priestly nobility secured their future at the price of concessions. Priestly hands compiled the law-book of the new community. But it would have been a very different law-book but for the prophets and but for Nehemiah.

The Pentateuch, as we have it, is a product of that time, but it is in no sense an original work. The priestly compilers strung together such laws and explanatory legends as lay to hand and suited their purpose without much regard for consistency. The compilation is prefaced by pieces of folk-lore about the origin of man, of sin and death, and of civilization. These, whatever their date, are of Babylonian derivation. The scene of man's early adventures is laid in Eden -- the Babylonian name for the alluvial plain of the lower Euphrates. Next comes the flood story, also of Babylonian origin, and then myths about the heroes of ancient Palestine. The stories of Abraham, Jacob and Joseph have an epic grandeur not incomparable to that of Homer; but we have no more reason to believe in their historicity than in that of the Greek heroes.

These stories in their present context are merely the prelude to the story of the deliverance of Israel from Egyptian slavery and the giving of the law in the desert of Sinai. As we have seen, this account cannot be fitted into the Egyptian records. The compilers of the Pentateuch use it as a peg on which to hang legislation all of which presupposes a settled agricultural society, but which is antedated to the nomadic period to give it the authority of the legendary Moses. The oldest code, that of Exodus xxi-xxii, presupposes, as we have seen, a society with fields, vineyards, cattle and slaves. A code of ritual regulations, equally presupposing an agricultural economy, is found in Exodus xxxiv. Sandwiched between the other sections of the Pentateuch and longer than any other single source is the "priests' code" (P), a compilation not much older than the Pentateuch itself. In this many provisions of older date are repeated with new explanatory myths. For example the sabbath rest-day, which in Deuteronomy is enjoined on humane grounds, is in P made to depend on the rest taken by God on the seventh day of creation;41 and circumcision, an initiation rite which the Jews shared with the Arabs, Egyptians and many other nations, is turned into a token of the covenant between God and Israel.42 This suggests that P was compiled in Babylonia, where circumcision was not practised and the Jews might well make the mistake of thinking it peculiar to themselves. The greater part of P is taken up with regulations for the upkeep of the cult. Deuteronomy with its social programme is put at the end of the Pentateuch, as if to conclude the whole on a note of lofty idealism and so leave a favourable impression on the listener or reader.

Thus the Pentateuch represented a compromise between the priesthood, bent mainly on conserving their dues and firstfruits, and the prophetic party, bent mainly on securing justice for the poor. The compromise was the issue of a struggle which lasted well into the Persian period. Nehemiah's mission was a battle with priests and nobles from start to finish. His opponents, the priestly aristocracy of Jerusalem and their Samaritan allies, formally accepted the Pentateuch, but enforced it only so far as their convenience or mass pressure dictated.

The memoirs of Nehemiah end with an account of his expulsion from Jerusalem of a grandson of the high priest, who had married the daughter of Nehemiah's arch-enemy, Sanballat. He fled to his wife's people at Samaria, where the arm of Nehemiah could not reach. This matter of mixed marriages was not a question of racial purity. Judaism welcomed not only Jews by blood, but all who "separated themselves from the filthiness of the heathen of the land".43 The danger was of a reversion to the pagan way of life and a break-up of the Jewish community.

At the close of the fifth century the Persian government was forced again to take an interest in Jewish affairs. The Persian Empire was now visibly in decline. Attack from Greece was staved off by pitting Sparta against Athens and Athens against Sparta. In 404 Egypt again revolted, and this time was not reconquered for sixty years. In 401 the younger Cyrus with a force of Greek mercenaries made a bid for the Persian throne; and though Cyrus was killed, the successful retreat of the Greeks from Babylonia to the Black Sea showed how weak the Persian Empire had become. It was more necessary than ever to secure the Egyptian frontier. The fortification of Jerusalem was of little use if the Jews were torn by factions, one of which might open the gates to an enemy.

Accordingly in 397 Artaxerxes II commissioned Ezra, a Babylonian Jew, and "a ready scribe in the law of Moses",44 to go to Jerusalem and bring order out of the chaos of faction. The compiler of our existing books of Ezra and Nehemiah is, like many Jewish historians, weak on dates, and through confusing Artaxerxes I and II makes Ezra contemporary with Nehemiah. We know, however, that he cannot have been. Ezra refers to the refortification of Jerusalem as an accomplished fact; the city is no longer a ruin, but a populous town; and the high priest in Ezra's time appears to be a son or grandson of the high priest in Nehemiah's. But the priests and nobles had not changed their ways. Their alliance, cemented by intermarriage, with neighbouring magnates was unbroken. The Pentateuchal law was applied just as far as it suited them and no further.

Ezra, like Nehemiah, appealed to the people. Men, women and children rallied to him against the aristocrats and their foreign ladies. At the request of the assembled people he read out the "law of Moses" on successive mornings, while assistants translated the Hebrew, bit by bit, into the vernacular Aramaic, and the assembly acclaimed its charter with shouts of "Amen, amen!"45 The people then ratified the law with a solemn oath, special emphasis being laid on the bar on mixed marriages, observance of the sabbath and the septennial cancellation of debts. Those who had married foreign wives were told to send them away. Their number was not great; about a hundred are mentioned; but important men were involved. "Princes and rulers" were "chief in this trespass."46 We do not know that they complied. Most likely they removed to Samaria, like the priest expelled by Nehemiah. The breach between the Jewish and Samaritan communities and the erection of a rival temple on Gerizim date from this time.


Notes

1 The higher criticism of the Old Testament (unlike that of the New) is practically an agreed subject among modern scholars. For detailed examination see The Literature of the Old Testament, by G. F. Moore; The Historical Background of the Bible, by J. N. Schofield; and standard works of reference

2 2 Samuel viii, 18 (R.V.).

3 1 Samuel x, 11-12.

4 1 Kings xviii, 19.

5 Amos ii, 6.

6 Amos iv, 1.

7 viii, 5. (An ephah was about 2,300 cubic inches.)

8 v, 24.

9 ix, 7-8.

10 The analyses of the prophetic books by T. K. Cheyne, O. C. Whitehouse, W. Robertson Smith, S. R. Driver, H. W. Robinson, Nathaniel Schmidt, R. H. Charles and other scholars in the Encyclopaedia Biblica and Encyclopaedia Britannica may be consulted with profit.

11 This payment is mentioned in 2 Kings xv, 19-20. Tiglath-Pileser is there called "Pul" -- his original name before he usurped the throne. Earlier tributes are recorded on the monuments, but ignored in the Old Testament.

12 2 Kings xvi, 5 ff.

13 2 Sennacherib's own inscriptions. Cf. 2 Kings xviii, 13-16. The sequel in xviii-xix is not corroborated by the inscriptions.

14 Isaiah vii, 3.

15 viii, 1-4.

16 ii, 8.

17 iii, 14-15.

18 xxviii, 14-18.

19 Micah iii, 2.

20 iii, 12.

21 Jeremiah i, iv-v.

22 vii, 18; xliv.

23 v, 9, 29; ix, 9.

24 This seems to be the real meaning of the prohibition to take the divine name in vain. W. Robertson Smith and S. A. Cook, Encyclopaedia Britannica, art. Decalogue.

25 Jeremiah xxii, 16.

26 That the case was the same is suggested by the name of the officer sent to arrest the fugitive. In the letters he is Achbor, son of Elnathan. In Jeremiah xxvi, 20-23, he is Elnathan, son of Achbor -- perhaps a copyist's slip.

27 2 Kings xxiv-xxv; Jeremiah xxxvii-xxxix. The book of Kings ends abruptly with the liberation of the exiled Jewish king Jehoiachin in 561. This suggests that the history was compiled soon after that event.

28 Jeremiah xxiv.

29 Ezekiel xvi, 3.

30 xxii, 2; xxiv, 6, 9.

31 xxxvii.

32 Isaiah xiii.

33 xli, xlv.

34 xlv, 22.

35 Haggai ii-iii; Zechariah ii, viii.

36 Isaiah ix, 2-7. This famous prophecy can hardly be by the historical Isaiah. The Messianic ode is incongruously interpolated between two passages of undiluted gloom (viii and ix, 8-x, 4). But it can hardly be later than the time of Zerubbabel. From that time on the Davidic family was insignificant.

37 Nehemiah vii, 4.

38 Ezra iv, 6-23. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah have come down to us in considerable confusion owing to the compiler's ignorance of Persian history. This passage, which relates to an attempt to refortify Jerusalem under Artaxerxes, has been interpolated in an account of the rebuilding of the temple under Darius.

39 Roughly, chapters i-vi and xiii, 4-31 of the canonical book.

40 It is interesting to compare the refortification of Jerusalem by Nehemiah with the refortification of Athens by Themistocles after the Persian invasion. Both men were democrats in the sense of siding with the people in the class struggles of the time. Both had to elude vigilant enemies. Themistocles was an exile at Susa a few years before the mission of Nehemiah. They may have met.

41 Genesis ii, 2-3. Cf. Deuteronomy v, 12-15.

42 Genesis xvii. Cf. Exodus iv, 24-26 -- an obviously much older myth of the origin of circumcision, dating from a period when Jahveh was still an anthropomorphic god of uncertain temper.

43 Ezra vi, 21.

44 vii, 6.

45 Nehemiah viii. This chapter is really part of Ezra x, but in the Hebrew text has been inserted in its present place and touched up to accord with the view that Ezra and Nehemiah were contemporaries. In the Greek variant of Ezra (entitled I Esdras in our Apocrypha) the reading of the law by Ezra ends the book, and Nehemiah is not mentioned. Modern scholars think this version nearer the original. See relevant articles in Encyclopaedia Biblica and Britannica.

46 Ezra ix, 2.