An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

Judaism

Why the Bible was written, and who did it

Even though all religions claim antiquity, they are refashioned by each new generation. No matter who we are and where or when we live, it is certain that forebears of a century ago experienced religion different from today. It doesn’t matter if we pray the same words in the same edifices, or if our priests wear ritual clothes of old. The gods, the angels and the saints beget an other appeal, provide new hopes and induce different fears in every century. Therefore religions are interesting for their evolution, rather than for their antiquity.

A good insight in Judaism is not to be found as much in the Bible as in the history of its composition. Two sets of books with historical content deserve special attention – each were meant by their authors as a complete and unique bible starting with Adam.

The first set is centred around the Books of Moses, and is based on Jewish and Persian myths and on wisdom, songs, laws, and records of various ages. Its redaction was finished at about 400 BCE, by Ezra, a Babylonian scribe.498 This set of book evokes the occupation of Palestine by the Israelites in the time of Moses and Joshua, but is really a defence of the right of the followers of Ezra and Nehemiah to occupy Palestine. This right is rather based on divine promises made to forefathers, than on a notice of fairness. The divine promises guaranteed success in military occupation, not a sort of international justice. For this purpose the authors of the Books of Moses merged an ancient forefather war god, Yahweh, with the Lord (Ahura) of Zoroastrianism, the religion of their Persian rulers. Promises of victory had always been part of tribal forefather god worship. Now they were redesigned as a covenant between the ancient Israelites and the god – and at once the king - of the worldwide Persian Empire.499

The second set of books is known as the Books of Ezra. Those books mythologise the historical period of the redaction of the Books of Moses, but were finished at about 200 BCE. They evoke the submission of Palestine by the governor Nehemiah and its occupation by Ezra, and are especially concerned with the rebuilding of the temple and walls of Jerusalem. The Books of Ezra are really intended as a defence of the Temple and the holy city of Jerusalem: the story of the return of the exiles serves as a proof, to the many Jews abroad, that Jerusalem remained their capital and the centre of their religion. Thus, confusingly, while the story is about the return, the author was thinking of the expatriates.500

Both Moses and Ezra have been deified at certain moments in history, much as again Jews deified Jesus a few centuries later. Moses talked face to face with God in the midst of a fire storm,501 and in a non-conical bible book ascents into heaven with body and soul.502 The Koran rebukes the Jews for calling Ezra (Arabic ‘Uzair) their Messiah and God’s son.503

Wars and war gods of the Iron Age

The continual tribal wars of the Iron Age sometimes led to more or less stable confederations, and sometimes even settled in volatile kingdoms. In Palestine, success fell to one accidental alliance established by Moses. This alliance was forged around the war god Yahweh, an Egyptian god adapted by the Arabian Midianite tribe, where Moses had lived and was married. In the following quote Yahweh is for the first time presented, in connection with the armed occupation of a land ‘wherein they were strangers’. As often, the name of a worn out god was reprocessed to establish a tradition over the hundred-years horizon retrospectively. At the same time he is identified with the Mazdayan Lord. This happening is even recorded in the Bible:

I am the Lord, and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac and unto Jacob, by the name of El Shaddai, but by my name Yahweh was I not known to them. And I have also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were strangers.504

Some scholars have understood ‘El Shaddai’ (ShDI) as ‘Baal of the Mountain’ but the exact meaning remains unknown. It could be translated with ‘Baal The Strong’, as opposed to the usual but anachronistic ‘God Almighty’: the word ‘almighty’ refers to universal power, and the political concept nor the terminology of a universal power existed when this verse was composed: obviously power over Canaan was envisaged, not power over everything.

‘Yahweh’ is related to the Egyptian moon god ‘Yah’, and often the Bible has ‘Yah’ where the English translation reads ‘Lord’. The Sinai desert, named after the Sumerian moon god Sin, played a major role in Moses’ life at several occasions: once when he had to hide after committing a murder, another time when he led the Hebrews out of Egypt. And, the most important, it was in the desert of the moon that he adapted the religion of the moon god Yahweh.505 In Canaan the Hebrews celebrated also the goddess Astarte, who was associated with the crescent moon. Another Canaanite god and an associate of Astarte was Baal, ‘The Rider of the Clouds’, like Marduk of Babylon represented as a Golden Bull. The descent of Moses from Sinai, the annihilation of the ancient temples, the slaughter by his Levites of the worshippers of ‘the golden calf’, all are a mythical recount of the usurpation by Yahwism.

Still today Jews recite the ‘Hallel psalms’ at the New moon. The halleluyah in English Bible translations literally means “Hallel Yah!’ or “Praise Yah!’.506 Some psalms remind of the moon god Yah:

extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name Yah, and rejoice before him.507

The name ‘Moses’ is an Egyptian suffix (ms or mes), meaningless by itself. It can be translated as ‘… is alive’. Tuth-Mose, for example, could mean ‘the god Tuth lives’. Frequent Egyptian names derived from ‘Yah’ are ‘Yah-mose’ or ‘Ah-mose’, but also ‘Yah-hotep’ ('Yah is content') or ‘Aah-hotep’. A century before the final redaction of the books of Moses an Egyptian general Ahmose, the later Pharaoh Ahmose II, defied Nebuchadrezzar II, a branded enemy of Jerusalem, and led an army against Egypt up to Ethiopia in which Jews served as mercenaries.

It is obvious that the name ‘Moses’ has somewhere lost its heading part. Clearly Moses was called after an Egyptian god, and this god was omitted to wipe out traces of his Egyptian faith. Wiping out names of fallen gods and aristocrats was common in Egyptian politics, and is still testified on the walls of many temple ruins. The name Ezra is in full length Hebrew Afar-yah: ‘Yah helps’. If the full Egyptian name of Moses was Yah-Mose, his successors Joshua (in Hebrew) and Jesus (in Aramaic) bore approximately the same name: ‘Yah is salvation’.

If Moses was indeed a pupil of an Egyptian court, the rock which he hit after his victory at the Red Sea must have been a victory stela, and the repeated strikes he made were hieroglyphic records of his victory - every Egyptian general would have celebrated such victory with equal display.508 The tradition has transformed this battered stela into a magical water source of which illiterate tribes understood the purpose much better.

A military pact

The pact of tribes gathered around Yahweh was another version of the oldest military pact on the earth, the pact between the living and the death, in which forefather gods are solicited to rise and join the battle. Such a pact often needs to be empowered by sacrifice, because gods never help for free.

As the highest sacrifice is required in the greatest urgency, fellow humans are often sacrificed at such occasions, and children are the most easy to deal with. Children differ in value: Jephthah won a battle by sacrificing his virgin daughter.509 The Bible recounts that he pledged to sacrifice the first one who would greet him, making it look as hard luck, but in reality the price was a reasonable trade-off: a daughter who had slept with a man would have been a worthless gift, while a son, the offer Abraham had to bring, was priceless. It is written that Yahweh withdrew his demand to Abraham at the last moment, but Abraham is still today appreciated for his submission, and when he returned from the offering place, his son was no longer with him.

Following illustration of the war god aspect of Yahweh leaves little room for sublimation:

Thou shalt have a place also without the camp, whither thou shalt go forth abroad, and thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee: for the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp, to deliver thee, and to give up thine enemies before thee; therefore shall thy camp be holy, that he see no unclean thing in thee, and turn away from thee.510

The authors of the Books of Moses had for main objective to instigate ruthless terror among the people of Palestine, and to promise divine backing as long as the gory instructions were followed without remorse. The Midianites, the tribe that once offered shelter to Moses, were the first to experience the meaning of the Hebrew covenant:

And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire. And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of men and of beasts. And they brought the captives, and the prey, and the spoil, unto Moses [..] And Moses said unto them: [..] kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.511

The furious devastation of Palestine is related in the first chapters of the infamous book that follows the Books of Moses and was named after Moses’ successor, Joshua. The first chapters of Joshua brag about annihilating prosperous cities as Ai, Jericho, Hazor, Salem,512 including the killing of their entire populations, with no other justification than the words of their war god: ‘Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you’.513 When the tribes hesitated in the mountains to invade Palestine, spies returned with an encouraging message: ‘truly the Lord hath delivered into our hands all the land; for even all the inhabitants of the country do faint because of us’.514 The inhabitants fainted because they had heard what the attackers did before to the Amorites: they took their cities and destroyed ‘the men, and the women, and the little ones. Of every city, we left none to remain: only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves, and the spoil of the cities, which we took’515. The next victim was Jericho:

They utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword. [..] And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord. 516

Ai and Bethel were set on fire after their men were lured away:

And so it was, that all that fell that day, both of men and women, were twelve thousand, even all the men of Ai [..] Only the cattle and the spoil of that city Israel took for a prey unto themselves, according unto the word of the Lord which he commanded Joshua. And Joshua burnt Ai, and made it an heap for ever, even a desolation unto this day. And the king of Ai he hanged on a tree until eventide: and as soon as the sun was down, Joshua commanded that they should take his carcass down from the tree, and cast it at the entering of the gate of the city, and raise thereon a great heap of stones, that remaineth unto this day.517

The Book of Joshua has several flaws. Many of the battles bragged about have never taken place: Ai had already been destroyed centuries before. But this does not mean that the book is unhistorical, because its real aim is to incite the immigrants to Palestine of the fifth and fourth century BCE. When we read Joshua, we must imagine Ezra.

The Books of Moses were composed after the Judeans were exiled, to demonstrate that the land of Judah was allocated by divine proclamation. The Zoroastrian Lord of the universe was a better party than the native god of a defeated tribe. The ruling of a cosmic authority was not to be questioned for its righteousness, but to be accepted under fear of chastisement. Jerusalem belonged to the returning exiles, not to other inhabitants or immigrants. Those exiles called themselves the children of Israel, after the long disappeared kingdom of Solomon, and in the Books of Moses, adventures of ‘Israelites’ were inserted before this kingdom was established. Ancient chronicles, laws and songs - Palestinian, Egyptian or Mesopotamian – were recycled, but, following the rule of mythology, the recounted events stayed far beyond the hundred-years horizon of the editors.

The Egyptian captivity narrated in the Books of Moses projected the exile back in time and into Egypt: Yahweh had promised Palestine to all consecutive patriarchs, and now the Zoroastrian Cyrus had renewed this covenant on behalf of the Babylonian descendants. Ezra – called ‘the scribe’, which makes him a Zoroastrian clerk - was the new Moses, leading his people to the land promised by an overpowering god, punishing other inhabitants, not for wickedness, but out of aversion. A war song was put in the mouth of Moses while, just before his death, he was overseeing the land of the Palestinians. It was very actual to the returning ‘children of Israel’:

If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on judgement,

I will render vengeance to mine enemies, and will reward them that hate me.

I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh;

And that with the blood of the slain and of the captives,

From the beginning of revenges upon the enemy. 518

Although many Jews returned to the Promised Land, many others remained dispersed over Asia. The history of Judaism after the Persian episode is the history of a Diaspora religion. For the dispersed Jews Jerusalem became the mythic centre of Judaism, much like the temple was the mythic centre for the returnees. People of many nationalities have been deported and chased around throughout history, from Assyrian defeaters to Portuguese conquerors, and most migrants ultimately blended in as the hundred-years horizon was crossed. The Jewish exception was caused by the power of the Books of Moses: a portable homeland with a spiritual history.

The Books of Ezra recount how Yahweh had once more brought his people back to Palestine; but now the claim on the land was no longer based on a military treaty or covenant; there was a new categorical unity between the land and the people, based on the categories of Babylonian science and expressed in Babylonian law - notions which have been preserved in the Organon of Aristotle. The ‘Children of Israel’ had inherited the properties of the ancient kingdom of Solomon by means of virtue, nature. Just as the Books of Moses had been written centuries after Moses, the Books of Ezra were written centuries after Ezra. The latter became as important to the Diaspora as the first to the Babylonian exiles. Like Yahweh had handed the clay tablets with laws to Moses, Cyrus had decreed to restore Judah’s riches and rebuild its temple. As the Books of Moses had predicted the return of the exiles from Babylon, the Books of Ezra predicted that the dead would rise from the underworld one day and join the living, and all would gather in Jerusalem again. A letter sent by the high council of Jerusalem to the Egyptian Jewish community reads:

We hope also, that the God, that delivered all his people, and gave them all a heritage, and the kingdom, and the priesthood, and the sanctuary, as he promised in the law, will shortly have mercy upon us, and gather us together out of every land under heaven into the holy place.519

Babylon, the promised land and the temple

In 586 BCE, the Babylonian armies destroyed the Judean kingdom. Rulers, priests and prophets with their households – approximately fifteen thousand people – were scattered over the Babylonian empire in the course of a few years. The yield of the land, still toiled by the same people as before, fell to Babylonian authority. This concluded a long episode in which Judah and Israel had been enmity with Egypt and Mesopotamia.

In Babylon, city of a thousand temples, the exiles were confronted with the most impressive cosmopolitan society up to that time in history - larger than ancient Rome would ever become. Some might have met Greek scholars here, inconspicuous amidst the diversity of nationalities walking along splendid boulevards and impressive gardens.

The Judean exiles reacted in various ways to this cosmopolitan environment. Many embraced its obvious modernity or added their temples to the Babylonian assortment. The Babylonian Talmud establishes that Jewish intellectual life flourished here for a millenary to come. Others, like the Deutero-Isaiah, were appalled by the depraved city-life, and contrasted their dream of a sacred Jerusalem with the repellent profane science by claiming smart oracles conveyed by their Lord who

frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad; that turneth wise men backward, and maketh their knowledge foolish; that confirmeth the word of his servant, and performeth the counsel of his messengers. 520

The book of Daniel, written in the second century BCE, still elaborates on this theme. Noble Jewish youths

such as had ability in them to stand in the king’s palace, and whom they might teach the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans

were selected by the kings’ eunuchs for education, but

in all matters of wisdom and understanding, that the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers that were in all his realm.521

Babylonian science was further ridiculed in a story where scholars failed to explain a dream of the king. To search knowledge besides god – replacing oracles by soothsaying - is blasphemy:

The secret which the king hath demanded cannot the wise men, the astrologers, the magicians, the soothsayers, shew unto the king; but there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets, and maketh known to the king Nebuchadnezzar what shall be in the latter days.522

The gods overseeing the Garden of Eden are modelled after Babylonian scientists studying salutary plants and animal life, but the authors put the snake in the wrong three. The new three represents the Zoroastrian cosmic antagonism between good and evil; it pushes backward the fifteen centuries old Mesopotamian tree of life, associated with the snake since before Gilgamesh:

The Lord planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden.523

One cannot read the second chapter of Genesis without thinking of Babylonian biologists keeping ‘savage’ humans in their gardens. Adam and Eve were naked without shame, and foraged on wild food; they lacked knowledge of civilized rules of behaviour; their abode was an artificial paradise, but it was also a barred enclosure (the Persian pairida, which means ‘enclosure’, is the original word for ‘paradise’); when they heard the approaching footsteps of their warden, they anxiously hid in the brushwood.

A Persian colony

In 539 BCE, Cyrus initiated the migration to Judah of a selected group of confidants. This was the cheapest and fastest way to make Palestine again a stronghold against Egypt. It made Cyrus one of those men in history who burned the world - the vast kingdom of Lydia, for one, was completely destroyed together with its monuments, literature and remembrance - and yet gained a lasting reputation of tolerance.

In the course of the lobbying for power over Palestine, the confidants fashioned a religion with Persian features, and merged the tribal war god Yahweh with the Zoroastrian Lord, establishing covenants in the stile of Mazdayanism.

Cyrus was a worshipper of this Zoroastrian Lord of Knowledge, Ahura Mazda, who was accompanied by seven archangels and also by Mithra, the Lord of Covenants, until Ahura Mazda absorbed this function. Zoroaster, much like Jeremiah and much at the same time, had condemned blood offerings. Many saw as little difference between Ahura Mazda and Yahweh as modern people today see between Elohim and Yahweh. After all, one step towards universalism is the believe that all people use different names to address the same highest godhead, and universalism thrived in the metropolitan environment of Babylon. Yahweh became virtually exchangeable with Ahura Mazda, who as Yahweh had created one after the other the sky, water, earth, plants, animals, and mankind as the sixth524, and who taught knowledge about good and evil, the same way Yahweh instructed Adam and Eve in paradise. When ‘the Lord’ of the Bible calls Cyrus, the worshipper of ‘the Lord’ of the Avesta, his shepherd, there can be no doubt about this merger:

I am the Lord [..] that saith of Cyrus, he is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, thou shalt be built; and to the temple, thy foundation shall be laid.525

For the first and only time in the bible, Yahweh calls a non-Jew his anointed, meaning the rightful king of the Israelites:

Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden [..]. I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron: And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.526

The colonists were selected by descend, and many candidates were dismissed. At arrival, conflicts cropped up with the local population, who experienced the immigrants as Persian agents with a Persian religion. Internal conflicts arose when traditionalists wanted to reconstruct the legendary splendour of Solomon, and made the temple of Jerusalem their emblem, while followers of Zoroastrian prophets like Trito-Isaiah were less interested in monuments and dreamed of a sober religious community:

Thus saith the Lord: the heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; where is the house that ye build unto me? And where is the place of my rest? For all those things hath mine hand made, and all those things have been, saith the Lord; but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word. 527

The rebuilding of the temple was initiated but dragged on. The local population knew that exclusion from a temple economy could weaken their position in the end, and it had never been hard to honour one more god. But their proposal of assistance was turned down: this temple, unlike Solomon’s, was designed big but narrow. The colonists examined their own sins for an explanation of the fiasco: at one solemn moment they rejected, collectively and publicly, their wives taken from the local population, as well as their children.

Finally, the temple was saved by an alleged decree of Cyrus, discovered years after his death in a library in the remote Median province. Cyrus should have ordained that the expenses of building the temple ‘be given out of the king’s house’528. This was either a forgery or a miracle: for years priests had tried to raise funds without success, and now suddenly a document popped up, not even heard of by officials old enough to remember the time of its redaction. The decree left no room for doubt:

Whosoever shall alter this word, let timber be pulled down from his house, and being set up, let him be hanged thereon; and let his house be made a dunghill for this.529

The temple of Yahweh, nearly completely financed by followers of Zoroaster, was inaugurated with a large feast in the second year of Darius. The Governor Nehemiah ordered the priests to search for the sacred fire that Jeremiah had hidden before the destruction of Jerusalem.530 They found it as a thick liquid that amazingly inflamed on the altar. It was given the name naphtha. Then the inauguration was celebrated:

The priests and the Levites were purified together, all of them were pure, and killed the Passover for all the children of the captivity, and for their brethren the priests, and for themselves. And the children of Israel, which were come again out of captivity, and all such as had separated themselves unto them from the filthiness of the heathen of the land, to seek the Lord God of Israel, did eat.531

The filthiness of the heathen of the land, as it is put in this quote, denotes the reduction of the local population to a debased labouring caste, looked upon with contempt, land labourers forever stigmatised with the mark of Cain.

As the ‘cup-bearer’ of King Artaxerxes I, Nehemiah was a powerful administrator in the Persian Kingdom and a scholar of Zoroastrianism. His task in Jerusalem was to reinforce, with regard to the local population, the immigrating epigones of central power. The wondrous fire making with naphtha was Zoroastrian, but was represented as if the prophet Jeremiah had prepared and foreseen it. However, in the books of Moses fire had been the destructive fury of God, a terrible threat rather than something desirable, and Jeremiah would never have hidden some for later. The naphtha was delivered by Zoroastrian clerks out of the Babylonian mine-pits, described in detail by Herodotus:

they draw with a swipe, and instead of a bucket make use of the half of a wine-skin; with this the man dips, and after drawing, pours the liquid into a reservoir, where from it passes into another, and there takes three different shapes. The salt and the bitumen forthwith collect and harden, while the oil is drawn off into casks. It is called by the Persians “rhadinace,” is black, and has an unpleasant smell.532

The sudden rebuilding of the temple, the eternal fire, the belief in a universal Lord, indicate that Persian Zoroastrianism had taken over the ancient tribal religion. Zoroaster had asked his Lord (Avestan Ahura):

Tell me truly, Ahura. What artist made light and darkness? What artist made sleep and waking? Who made morning, noon, and night ?533

And the same Lord answers in the Bible:

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things. 534

The campaigns of Alexander the Great destroyed borders and unsettled old beliefs and images. Greek custom, sports and clothes became fashionable in Judea, and

The priests had no courage to serve any more at the altar, but despising the temple, and neglecting the sacrifices, hastened to be partakers of the unlawful allowance in the place of exercise, after the game of Discus called them forth; not setting by the honours of their fathers, but liking the glory of the Grecians best of all. By reason whereof sore calamity came upon them: for they had them to be their enemies and avengers, whose custom they followed so earnestly, and unto whom they desired to be like in all things. For it is not a light thing to do wickedly against the laws of God. 535

Pious Jews were appalled. The high priest was accused of corruption and of plundering the temple treasures. The discussion ended in a civil war and years of bloodshed, until, in 160 BCE, the rebels conquered Jerusalem, and Demetrius II of Syria granted Judea its independence. Simon Maccabeus, the actual leader of the revolt, became the new high priest and secular ruler, but was soon contested in his turn. A new civil war over the strict interpretation of the Law of Moses, now raged between the sect of the more worldly Sadducees in power and the sect of the more pious Pharisees. The majority of people, suffering under the weight of those civil wars, were not interested in either party. The amme ha-aretz, the poor “people of the land”, had other worries than the temple treasury.

No records of this fratricide in Judea have survived outside the Bible, and it is impossible to make an estimation of the casualties. Yet the insanity witnessed in religious conflicts today imposes the most terrible assumptions.