Fields of Blood (21 page)

This was the Hebrew dilemma: Yahweh insisted that his people abandon the agrarian state, but time and again they found that they could not live without it.
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To escape starvation, Abraham had to take temporary refuge in
Egypt.
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His son Isaac had to abandon
pastoral life and take up farming during a
famine but became so successful that he was attacked by predatory neighboring kings.
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Finally, when “famine had grown severe throughout the world,” Jacob was forced to send ten of his sons to Egypt to buy grain. To their astonishment, they met their long-lost brother Joseph in Pharaoh’s court.
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As a boy, Joseph—Jacob’s favorite son—had dreams of agrarian tyranny that he foolishly described to his brothers: “We were binding sheaves in the countryside, and my sheaf, it seemed, stood upright; then I saw your sheaves gather round and bow to my sheaf.”
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The brothers were so incensed that they stuttered in fury: “Would you be king, yes, king over us?”
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Such fantasies of
monarchy violated everything the family stood for, and Jacob took the boy to task: “Are all of us, then, myself, your mother and your brothers to come and bow to the ground before you?”
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But he continued to indulge Joseph, until, driven beyond endurance, his brothers had him sold into
slavery in Egypt, telling their father he had been killed by a wild beast. Yet after a traumatic beginning, Joseph, a natural agrarian, cheerfully abandoned the pastoral ethos and assimilated to aristocratic life with spectacular success. He got a job in Pharaoh’s court, took an Egyptian wife, and even called his first son
Manasseh—“He-Who-Makes-Me-Forget,” meaning “God has made-me-forget … my entire father’s house.”
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As vizier of Egypt, Joseph saved the country from starvation: warned by a dream of impending agricultural blight, he commandeered the harvest for seven years, sending fixed rations to the cities and storing the surplus, so that when the
famine struck, Egypt had grain to spare.
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But Joseph had also turned Egypt into a house of bondage, because all the hard-pressed Egyptians who had been forced to sell their estates to Pharaoh in return for grain were reduced to serfdom.
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Joseph saved the lives of his family when hunger forced them to seek refuge in Egypt, but they too would lose their freedom since Pharaoh would forbid them to leave.
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Readers of the
Pentateuch are often confused by the
patriarchs’ ethics. None of them are particularly admirable characters:
Abraham sold his wife to Pharaoh to save his own skin; Joseph was arrogant and self-centered; and
Jacob was shockingly indifferent to the rape of his daughter
Dinah. But these are not morality tales. If we read them as political philosophy, things become clearer. Doomed to marginality, Israel would always be vulnerable to more powerful states. Ordered to leave civilization yet unable to survive without it, the patriarchs were in an impossible position. Yet despite his flaws, Abraham still compares favorably with the rulers in this story, who appropriate their subjects’ wives, steal their wells, and rape their daughters with impunity.
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While kings routinely confiscated other people’s possessions, Abraham was always meticulously respectful of property rights. He would not even keep the booty he acquired in a raid he had fought simply to rescue his nephew
Lot, who had been kidnapped by four marauding kings.
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His kindness and hospitality to three passing strangers stand in stark contrast to the violence they experienced in civilized
Sodom.
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When Yahweh told Abraham that he planned to destroy Sodom, Abraham begged him to spare the city, because unlike rulers who had scant respect for human life, he had a horror of shedding innocent blood.
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When the biblical authors tell us about Jacob on his deathbed blessing his twelve sons and prophesying their future, they are asking what kind of leader is needed to create a viable
egalitarian society in such a ruthless world. Jacob rejected
Simeon and
Levi, whose reckless violence meant that they should never control territory, populations, and armies.
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He predicted that
Judah, who could admit and correct his mistakes, would make an ideal ruler.
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But no state could survive without Joseph’s political savvy, so when the Israelites finally escaped from Egypt, they took Joseph’s bones with them to the
Promised Land. Then there were occasions when a nation might need Levi’s radicalism, because without the aggressive determination of the Levite
Moses, Israel would never have left Egypt.

The book of Exodus depicts
Egyptian
imperialism as an extreme example of systemic oppression. The pharaohs made the
Israelites’ lives “unbearable,” compelling them to “work with clay and with brick, all kinds of work in the fields; [forcing] on them every kind of labour.”
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To stem their rising birthrate, Pharaoh even ordered the midwives to kill all Israelite male babies, but the infant Moses was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter and brought up as an Egyptian aristocrat. One day in instinctive revulsion from state tyranny, Moses, a true son of
Levi, killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave.
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He had to flee the country, and
Yahweh, who had not revealed himself to Moses the Egyptian aristocrat, first spoke to him when he was working as a shepherd in
Midian.
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During the Exodus, Yahweh could liberate Israel only by using the same brutal tactics as any imperial power: terrorizing the population, slaughtering their children, and drowning the entire Egyptian army. Peaceful tactics were of no avail against the martial might of the state. Yahweh divided the
Sea of Reeds in two so that the Israelites could cross dry shod as effortlessly as
Marduk had slit
Tiamat, the primal ocean, in half to create heaven and earth; but instead of an ordered universe, he had brought into being a new nation that would provide an alternative to the aggression of imperial rule.

Yahweh sealed his pact with Israel on
Mount Sinai. The earliest sources, dating from the eighth century BCE, do not mention the
Ten Commandments being given to Moses on this occasion. Instead, they depict Moses and the elders of Israel experiencing a theophany on the summit of Sinai during which they “gazed upon God” and shared a sacred meal.
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The stone tablets that Moses received, “written with the finger of God,”
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were probably inscribed with Yahweh’s instructions for the construction and accoutrements of the tent-shrine in which he would dwell with Israel in the wilderness.
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The Ten Commandments would be inserted into the story later by seventh-century reformers, who, as we shall see, were also responsible for some of the most violent passages in the
Hebrew Bible.

After Moses’s death, it fell to
Joshua to conquer the
Promised Land. The biblical book of Joshua still contains some ancient material, but this was radically revised by these same reformers, who interpreted it in the light of their peculiarly
xenophobic theology. They give the impression that,
acting under Yahweh’s orders, Joshua massacred the entire population of
Canaan and destroyed their cities. Yet not only is there no archaeological evidence for this wholesale destruction, but the biblical text itself admits that for centuries
Israelites coexisted with Canaanites and intermarried with them, and that large swaths of the country rem
ained in Canaanite hands.
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On the basis of the reformers’ work, it is often claimed that
monotheism, the belief in a single god, made Israel especially prone to violence. It is assumed that its denial of other gods reveals a rabid intolerance not found in the generous
pluralism of paganism.
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But the Israelites were not monotheists at this date and would not begin to be so until the sixth century BCE. Indeed, both the biblical and the archaeological evidence suggests that the beliefs and practices of most early Israelites differed little from those of their Canaanite neighbors.
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There are in fact very few unequivocally monotheistic statements in the Hebrew Bible.
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Even the first of the reformers’ Ten Commandments takes the existence of rival deities for granted and simply forbids Israel to worship them: “You are not to have any other gods before my presence.”
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In the earliest strand of the conquest narratives, Joshua’s violence was associated with an ancient Canaanite custom called the “ban” (
herem
).
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Before a battle, a military leader would strike a deal with his god: if this deity undertook to give him the city, the commander promised to “devote” (
HRM
) all valuable loot to his temple and offer the conquered people to him in a human sacrifice.
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Joshua had made such a pact with Yahweh before attacking
Jericho, and Yahweh responded by delivering the town to Israel in a spectacular miracle, causing its famous walls to collapse when the priests blew their rams’ horns. Before allowing his troops to storm the city, Joshua explained the terms of the ban and stipulated that no one in the city should be spared, since everybody and everything in the town had been “devoted” to Yahweh. Accordingly, the Israelites “enforced the ban on everything in the town, men and women, young and old, even the oxen and sheep and donkeys, massacring them all.”
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But the ban had been violated when one of the soldiers kept booty for himself, and consequently the Israelites failed to take the town of Ai the following day. After the culprit had been found and executed, the Israelites attacked Ai again, this time successfully, setting fire to the city so that it became a sacrificial pyre and slaughtering anybody who tried to escape: “The number of those who fell that day, men and women together, were twelve thousand, all [the] people of Ai.”
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Finally Joshua
hanged the king from a tree, built a monumental cairn over his body, and reduced the city to “a ruin for ever more, a desolate place, even today.”
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Ninth-century inscriptions discovered in Jordan and southern Arabia record conquests that follow this pattern to the letter. They recount the burning of the town, the massacre of its citizens, the hanging of the ruler, and the erection of a cultic memorial claiming that the enemy had been entirely eliminated and the town never rebuilt.
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The ban was not, therefore, the invention of “monotheistic”
Israel but was a local pagan practice. One of these inscriptions explains that King
Mesha of Moab was commanded by his god
Kemosh to take
Nebo from King
Omri of Israel (r. 885–874). “I seized it and killed every one of [it],” Mesha proclaimed, “seven thousand foreign men, native women, foreign women, concubines—for I devoted it [
HRM
] to destruction to Ashtur Kemosh.”
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Israel had “utterly perished forever.”
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This was wishful thinking, however, because the Kingdom of Israel would survive for another 150 years. In the same vein, the biblical authors record
Yahweh’s decree that Jericho remain a ruin forever, even though it would become a thriving Israelite city. New nations in the
Middle East seem to have cultivated the fiction of a conquest that made the land tabula rasa for them.
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The narrative of the “ban,” therefore, was a literary trope that could not be read literally. Secular as well as religious conquerors would later develop similar fictions claiming that the territory they occupied was “unused” and “empty” until they took possession of it.