The Evolution of Love: Theology and Morality in Ancient Judaism

Acknowledgements

For Sheldon Liebman, The Evolution of Love was his deep expression of love for the origin and tenets of Judaism. It was also his final scholarly achievement. Sheldon died September 15, 2020, with the manuscript in the editing process. As his loving partner, my role quickly switched from caregiver to next-steps-taker. And so, let me first extend my deepest appreciation to the team at Wipf & Stock Publishers—particularly Caleb Shupe, Zechariah Mickel, and Emily Callihan—for their kind words of comfort and their professional expertise in assisting me, an untested novice, to understand and continue moving the pre-publication process forward.

Although battling a raging cancer, revising and perfecting the manuscript for The Evolution of Love in the spring of 2020 was Sheldon’s purpose and focus, and brought him great joy. And while he could no longer join in the lively discussions over drinks and supper in little cafes with colleagues from Wilbur Wright College, their outpouring of affection, respect, and support helped sustain him.

Among those colleagues, I extend my most heartfelt gratitude and indebtedness to Adrian Guiu, PhD, who, in addition to his own rigorous academic schedule, offered to step in after Sheldon’s death to assist in the completion of the editing process. He did so with enthusiasm and an abundant knowledge of Sheldon’s ideas and beliefs, and the query phase of editing was completed November 17, 2020, on what would have been Sheldon’s eightieth birthday.

As Sheldon’s health declined, his voice and our conversations waned to literal whispers of our former passionate discussions, arguments, agreements. But the early Judaic principles he embraced through decades of religious study remained constant in both frequency and consistency: Love your neighbor. Welcome the stranger. Take care of everyone.

Gail Fiske Crantz

La Grange Park, Illinois

November 22, 2020

Introduction

What I have found has been in many ways surprising to me, and though not surprising

to experts in the field, may be surprising to readers of [my] book.

—Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution

This book is an examination of Judaism as it evolved over a period of approximately 1,500 years, from the middle of the second millennium BC to the early first millennium AD. It is not a history of the Jews from the time of Abraham onward. Rather, it is an analysis of the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Jewish writings, with special emphasis on the two most important concepts in the study of religion: theology and morality.

My objective is to show how the faith of the Israelites developed from a fairly typical primitive religion into something entirely new: a religion that was in many ways significantly different from most of the established faiths of the ancient world. As Alan F. Segal says, Judaism underwent radical religious changes in response to important historical crises.¹ More specifically, Judaism began as a set of beliefs that were in many ways indistinguishable—and to some degree derived—from those of other societies in the Near East.² And these beliefs developed, eventually, into a religion that embraced many of the main features that characterized the major religions of the Axial Age: Taoism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Platonism.

As different from each other as these religions may be, they share the common assumption that the universe is not ruled by amoral and impersonal gods that must be appeased by sacrifice or controlled by magic. Unlike the Egyptians and many other residents of the Near East, who worshiped many gods and understood them to be morally imperfect,³ they collectively affirmed the idea that the relationship between humanity and the Other—whether it is called God or Nature or Spirit—is not based on fear and sustained by the performance of rituals. On the contrary, it is honored and supported by human beings who conduct their lives according to such principles as virtue, compassion, and justice. To be sure, according to two of the religions that emerged in the first millennium BC—Judaism and Zoroastrianism—the universe is ruled by a force whose capacity to inflict pain and provide pleasure far surpasses the offensive and defensive capabilities of mankind. Instead of being cowed and controlled by the kind of superior power that a mighty king might use against his subjects, however, members of both of these faiths, as well as Taoists, Buddhists, and Platonists are invited to participate freely in a world order that requires moral probity, not abject submission and blind obedience.

According to Segal, Dislocation, war, and foreign rule forced every variety of Jewish community to rebuild its ancient national culture into something almost unprecedented, a religion of personal and communal piety.⁴ Speaking of the book in which this spiritual metamorphosis appears most clearly, Robin Lane Fox says that Deuteronomy is a text of commands and warnings which struck a new and alarming note in the entire history of Hebrew texts. Focused on God’s orders for human behavior, the book is not so much a code of ceremony and ritual as a book of conduct and commandments.

On the one hand, Fox continues, Deuteronomy covers a broad range of subjects, describing as it does the proper attitudes of the Israelites in worship, their justified aggression toward their heathen neighbors, their respect for the poor and the defenceless, their festivals, some of their rules of law and the right behavior of their kings. On the other hand, however, it is the theological and moral formulation of a single, jealous God who required total love from his chosen people and thereby distinguished Israel from her Gentile neighbors. Indeed, even in its discussion of some of the great festivals and ceremonies, Fox adds, the book emphasizes the scope for inner piety and charity on these occasions.⁵

What is different about the faith of the Jews, however—that is, what separates it from the four religions mentioned above—is that Judaism did not suddenly break away from existing religious traditions, at least in the same way that Taoism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Platonism turned their backs on the ancient religions of China, India, Persia, and Greece. Nor was Judaism founded by one man (or the followers of one man), as were the religions established by Lao-Tse, the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Plato. This means that Judaism is not represented by the ideas of a single person and is not understandable by reading a single brief book—such as the Tao-te-Ching, the Gathas, the Sayings of the Compassionate Buddha, or the Phaedo—composed by either the religious founder or his disciples. Rather, Judaism developed over a very long period of time, its principles are expressed in a very large book written by many different writers, and its dominant ideas and practices are often inconsistent and contradictory. For these reasons, the Hebrew Bible—and, consequently, ancient Judaism itself—has long been regarded as extremely difficult to explain—which is, again, the main objective of this book. There are several obstacles.⁶

Change. According to Alfred Gottschalk, Revolutions within religious thought, reformations of its beliefs and practices, ‘updating’ and adjustments to the times, are not new to the thoughtful student of the history of religion.⁷ Thus, as I said, the religion of the Jews changed over time, particularly in relation to its view of God and its definition of morality. Stephen A. Geller asks, Can one summarize biblical religion in a way that will organize its disparate traditions? He answers, The Bible is the most unsystematic of sacred texts, representing 1,000 years of textual development from different areas and social and religious groups.⁸ As Meek explains: [T]he Hebrew Torah is not one consistent whole, the creation of a single legislator, Moses, or anyone else. Law does not originate in that way. It comes into existence slowly to meet the ever-changing needs of the time, and this is more evident in the Hebrew Torah than in any of the other codes, because we have here not one book but several, separated by many centuries of time.⁹

On the subject of God, Robert Wright says, If you read the Hebrew Bible carefully, it tells the story of a god in evolution, a god whose character changes radically from beginning to end.¹⁰ Thus, according to John Barton, although Christians (and no doubt others) read the Jewish Bible to learn about God, they are soon disappointed. They find that the God it shows them is, at best, something of a mixed blessing. Although at times he is loving, gentle and trustworthy, at others he seems capricious, harsh and unfeeling.¹¹ Mark S. Smith comments: The historical reconstruction of Israel’s religion that notes the variegated roles of state and popular religion, the mixture of indigenous and imported religious features, and the complex features of convergence and differentiation undermines some of the main scholarly views about Israelite religion in general and Israelite monotheism in particular.¹²

On the subject of morality, Barton comments: Any historical study of ethical conduct, norms and systems in ancient Israel is bound to be highly complex, for the OT provides material from which to reconstruct the life and thought of a whole nation over a period of about a thousand years; and we could hardly expect that everything would have remained the same throughout this period.¹³ James L. Kugel reminds us that [t]he Hebrew Bible is actually not one book, but an anthology. Some parts of this collection go back very far, at least to some time in the tenth century BCE—or considerably earlier, while [i]ts latest chapters . . . belong to the early second century BCE. Because it was written over the course of a thousand years, the texts themselves were likely to disagree with one another on the most fundamental matters.¹⁴ Indeed, Barton says elsewhere that the huge variety of ethical commitments and points of view in ancient Israel means that [a]nyone who wants to treat the biblical text as an absolute authority will have problems in deciding which line of thought is to be followed in this matter.¹⁵ In short, as Jon D. Levenson has said, this notion that all the literature of the Hebrew Bible, which was composed over a millennium, has one message presents grave historical problems."¹⁶

As we shall see, if the student of ancient Judaism begins with the book of Genesis, he or she will encounter a deity who is first described in highly anthropomorphic terms. This God is referred to as having body parts (hands and feet), a voice, and a volatile temperament, which allows him to pass through a wide range of emotions, including satisfaction, disappointment, and anger.¹⁷ Yet he is consistently friendly to and supportive of all of the patriarchs, to whom he offers advice and assurances of his goodwill, speaks intimately and warmly, and—except for his condemnation of Adam and Eve, their son Cain, Noah’s contemporaries, the builders of the Tower of Babel, and the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah—seldom provides negative criticism, at least to the patriarchs and their wives. Like some other gods of the ancient world, he is simply called El, which means god. And he offers no moral code. He uses words such as righteous and blameless, but he never bothers to explain what these words mean. Indeed, he seems far more interested in cultic matters—such as circumcision and the construction of altars—than in morality.

In this regard, according to Frankfort, speaking especially of Egypt, Israel at the time was very much like its neighbors, who, finding no correlation between man’s dependence upon God and God’s concern for man—which is, after all, the main theme of both the Old and New Testaments, absent though it may be from Genesis—offered no specific divine commands which gave man directives for the shaping of his actions. The Egyptian gods require[d], in a general way, that man respect Maat, the principle of justice and order, but otherwise they remain[ed] aloof. As a result, the Egyptians "were without divine guidance in their daily lives.¹⁸ According to J. E. Manchip White, the Egyptian gods had no basis for making moral demands since they were not categorized as good or bad.¹⁹

However, the God who first appears in Genesis is, through the centuries, transformed into a more powerful and transcendent deity, who is often not only angry with his people, the Israelites, but quite punitive; jealous of their worship of other gods; and impatient with their ongoing failure to believe in his promises, unlike the patriarchs, their ancestors. To be sure, God tells the Israelites his name, Yahweh; provides them with a large body of both ceremonial and moral laws—all of this in spectacular fashion at Mt. Sinai; and spells out precisely the terms of their relationship. Unlike El in Genesis, however, who asks for little in return for his promises of security and prosperity, Yahweh in the middle books of the Pentateuch requires obedience to his commandments in exchange for his many gifts. He is no longer a friend, as he was in Genesis (except to Moses, of course), but a king, who not only rules through the threat of violence—indeed the complete destruction of the Hebrew people—but also engages in the mass murder of the native population of Canaan, not because these people are sinful, but merely because they occupy the land that he has promised to the Israelites.

By the middle of the first millennium, with the writing of Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and the works of the prophets, Judaism had embraced the idea that God is a compassionate father; that his relationship with his people is based on love rather than fear; that his response to their commission of sins is based on the assumption that they are capable of repentance and worthy of forgiveness; and that, rather than the threat of murder, he can use chastisement to bring them back to faith and obedience. In other words, the Covenant, which was first established as an almost unconditional promise in the book of Genesis and became a treaty-based quid pro quo agreement in the books of Exodus and Numbers, finally became a document in which love—mutually shared and equally proffered—emerged as the foundational principle of Judaism.²⁰

It is also clear that the story of the liberation of the Israelites from oppression in Egypt eventually became a basis in the literature of the ancient Jews for the view of God as the Redeemer and Savior whose act of salvation was an expression of his grace and mercy, as well as love, that could only be responded to with gratitude—that is, matching love. The prophets and psalmists, in particular, as well as the intertestamental writers, returned again and again to this event and understood it in the same way and with the same fervor that Moses recalled it in Deuteronomy.²¹

Discontinuity. What muddies the water, however, is the fact that this transition across a thousand years was not a linear development. As Robert Wright explains: You can’t just start reading the first chapter of Genesis and plow forward . . . The first chapter of Genesis was almost certainly written later than the second chapter of Genesis, by a different author. The Hebrew Bible took shape slowly, over many centuries, and the order in which it was written is not the order in which it appears.²² The God of love, who makes his strongest appearance in Deuteronomy, is first introduced much earlier, in Exodus—briefly in 20:6 and more emphatically in 34:6–7. The idea that the Covenant is a quid pro quo agreement, which dominates the books of Exodus and Numbers, persists in many psalms and proverbs, especially the latter. The portrayal of Yahweh as a God of War, who emerges first in Exodus, reappears not only in Deuteronomy, but also in the books of Joshua and Judges, as well as many of the psalms. The concept of forgiveness, which is important to the prophets, is introduced by Joseph in the final pages of Genesis. And the command that human beings should love each other makes its first appearance in Leviticus 19:18, as part of the Holiness Code.

Furthermore, Judaism retained its earliest legends, such as the stories in Genesis and Exodus, which remained inspirational not only in the remaining books of the Pentateuch, but also in the works of the prophets and psalmists, including God’s covenant with Abraham and the Israelites’ disobedience at Sinai, as well as the liberation from Egypt. As Bernhard W. Anderson explains: The most distinctive feature of the Jewish people is their sense of history. Indeed, Judaism is the religion of a people who have a unique memory that reaches back through the centuries to the stirring events of their Bible, events that formed them as a people with a sense of identity and vocation. Whenever the Passover is celebrated, whenever the law is celebrated in the synagogue, whenever a parent instructs his child in the tradition, this memory is kept alive.²³ According to Robert N. Bellah, whereas the Egyptians and Mesopotamians elided . . . from [their] cultural memory any evidence of their premonarchical development, the Jews retained their memory of that experience, which, of course, plays a prominent role in the Hebrew Bible.²⁴

Yehezkel Kaufmann says that, in refusing to ignore the past, the ancient Jews also distinguished themselves from the Greeks and Indians: In marked contrast to the repudiation of Greek popular religion by the higher religion of Greece’s philosophers, or Buddhism’s independence of and aloofness toward the religion of the masses, biblical religion neither disdains nor detaches itself from the popular legends.²⁵ Meek makes the same point about Jewish laws, which not only arose to meet new needs, but remained, as did the laws of other Near Eastern countries, a veritable hodge-podge of precedents with no discernible order or clarity: New and old material is found in all of them, even the latest, so that the Torah, as we have it, is the accumulation of centuries, a legislative snowball that has rolled down the avenues of time, gathering more and more material from various sources the further it rolled and taking on new forms with every change in the course.²⁶ Thus, says Michael E. Stone, when we make statements about ‘developments’ or ‘innovations’ or the like, we cannot mean that with the emergence of each new stage all vestiges of the past vanish and no intimations of the still unborn future can yet be discerned.²⁷ That is simply not the way the Bible was composed.

In other words, it is not as if, in the so-called Axial Age of the first millennium BC, one Judaism replaced another, as Greek philosophy supplanted the religion of Zeus and his associates or Buddhism turned its back on Vedic Hinduism. Rather, at different times and in different places, Yahweh was worshiped as a God of mercy as well as a God of vengeance, faithfulness was expressed in ceremonial activities as well as moral actions, and morality itself was understood to be a matter of obedience as well as love. Unlike Christianity, with its Nicene Creed and Westminster Confession, there was no point at which Judaism was understood to embrace a particular view of God, a particular statement of faith, or a particular body of practices. As Raymond E. Brown explains, The need to give expression to the centrality of Jesus in the new covenant made Christianity a creedal religion in a manner dissimilar to Judaism.²⁸

Diversity. In short—and this is the third major obstacle to understanding Judaism—the Jewish faith remained a religion without a creed, meaning that it is and always has been diverse in belief and practice, with many quite varied ideas and actions competing for legitimacy as expressions of the one true faith. On the one hand, some scholars argue that there is an essential Judaism that, despite the disagreements, is shared by all Jews. Donald H. Akenson says that there are four basic principles of Judaism, pertaining to the divinity of Yahweh, the legal authority of the Pentateuch, the special status of the Jews, and the importance of the Temple.²⁹ W. H. Davies names three main ideas in the Jewish faith: (1) The One God . . . [who] was Holy in his will, and asked of man to love mercy and to do justly; (2) The One People . . . with] a special relation between the One God and the One people’; and (3) The One Law . . . [in which] the God of Israel had revealed his will.³⁰ Patrick D. Miller argues that Israelite religion culminated in a faith that could be called orthodox and normative. It was probably best represented in the words of the prophets, the history as told by the Deuteronomists and the religious system by which they measured it, and the cultic establishment of the priestly elements and writers of exilic and postexilic Judah."³¹

On the other hand, however, most scholars emphasize the diversity of Judaism. George F. Moore, for example, suggests that although there is no way to summarize or explain the essence of Judaism, it survived because it succeeded in achieving a unity of belief and observance among Jews in all their wide dispersion then and since. However, this unity and universality . . . was not based upon orthodoxy in theology, but upon uniformity of observance.³² Referring to the many biblical stories that Jews had to interpret, James D. Tabor says: [T]here was no systematic treatment of these and a hundred other subjects related to the core beliefs of Judaism. What characterized Jewish life . . . was this endless ongoing discussion and debate of the meaning and interpretation of the stories, commandments, and teachings of the Torah and the Prophets.³³ Speaking of the pre-exilic period, Miller says: Any effort to describe the religion of ancient Israel comes up against clear indications that, as in most religious communities, there was not a single understanding or expression of what that religion was. Both biblical and extrabiblical evidence suggest a certain degree of pluralism, of multiformity rather than uniformity.³⁴

Ekkehard W. and Wolfgang Stegemann argue that the postexilic situation in the land of Israel was shaped by ‘multicentrism, heterogeneity, and socio-religious multiplicity.’³⁵ Furthermore, according to L. Michael White, after the sixth century BC, the Judean state and Jewish religion were in constant flux due to the external political forces. The responses were as much religious as political, and in the process new religious ideas, groups, and practices resulted within the broad spectrum of what we may call ’formative Judaism.’³⁶ Thus, says Paul Joyce, it is in any case always risky to speak about typical ‘Israelite Thought’ as something that may be precisely described (largely because Israel and its literature contain such an enormous variety of ways of thinking). And this, in turn, is because Israel was such a diverse entity, extending through many centuries, increasingly spread out in many lands, and producing a great variety of religious literature.³⁷ Segal attributes this diversity in belief partly to the spread of Judaism to the Roman-controlled Diaspora: Hellenization, the dominant cultural tendency of the Empire, brought about a wider diversity of opinion and individualism.³⁸

Speaking of the intertestamental period, from 200 BC to AD 100, D. S. Russell comments: The Judaism of the period . . . was a most complex system, containing within itself many different parties and groups and sects whose names and distinctive beliefs have not always been recorded in history. To quote the words of R. H. Pfeiffer, ‘Judaism in the period under consideration was so alive, so progressive, so agitated by controversies, that under its spacious roof the most contrasting views could be held.’³⁹ All of this was particularly true in the first century AD, when Jesus—like the leaders of the Essenes, the Pharisees, and other Jewish groups—offered yet another interpretation of Judaism to his fellow Jews.

According to John P. Meier, Judaism around the time of Jesus was a rich tapestry of many different religious tendencies.⁴⁰ James Charlesworth says of this period, Most scholars have come to discard the concept of ‘normative Judaism’ for pre-70 phenomena. Jews shared a common confession: the Shema—the famous Jewish prayer that announces the oneness of God and his requirement to love him with heart, soul, and might (Num 6:4–9). However, they embraced different ways of obeying this commandment. As Charlesworth puts it: "Suffice to say for the present that Early Judaism was not anarchistic and totally torn apart. Neither was it so unified and systematic as scholars have tended to portray it. We should not think about Judaism as a uniform ‘religion’; rather, we should think about Judaisms and the various dimensions and freedom of expression and reflection before 70."⁴¹

Multiple sources. Of course, if Judaism had flourished in a homogeneous society, it might have had a chance to develop a single theology and a single morality. As it happened, however, the Jews have always been diverse, says Anderson, not only in theology and culture, but even in racial characteristics.⁴² Kaufmann notes that the Israelites were, from the very beginning, made up of a variety of ethnicities: Israel is thus depicted as an ethnic mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Canaanite, and Egyptian elements.⁴³ We think of the Israelites as made up exclusively of twelve Hebrew tribes, but, according to Meek, this was not the case. The tribes who settled in the north were more native than Hebrew and became Hebrew only as they were drawn into the Hebrew confederacy by a common peril. And the southern tribes, led by Judah, Simeon, and Levi, were joined by Kenites, Calebites, Kenizzites, and Jerahmeelites.⁴⁴

Meek also mentions the fact that—no doubt, partly because of its geographical location and ethnic diversity—Israel borrowed freely and extensively from its neighbors, thus adding the attainments of others to [its] own, but also significantly diversifying the pool of ideas from which it drew.⁴⁵ After all, as Bellah argues, Israel was not . . . an isolated society or one surrounded only by tribal peoples. It was, rather, one of several ‘frontier societies’ with highly differentiated religious systems. Probably in premonarchical and certainly in early monarchical Israel something of archaic polytheism was present.⁴⁶ Merrill C. Tenney says: As long as the people lived in Palestine, surrounded by prosperous and powerful heathen neighbors and subjected to their influence, they were tempted to experiment with alien worship and to desert—at least for a time—the God of their fathers. The prophets protested in vain against this tendency which had appeared during the wilderness wanderings of the people (Num. 25:13), and which had persisted into the period of the captivity and exile (Ezek 14:1–5; Jer 7:16–20).⁴⁷

Thus, Geller argues that biblical religion is not a unity but rather a congeries of differing and often competing opinions and traditions. Of the three major forms of biblical religion in the Bible—Deuteronomic, Priestly, and Wisdom—all are derived, to some degree, from foreign sources. As revolutionary as Deuteronomic religion may be, its covenantal formula comes from Hittite sources. Judaism’s so-called Priestly religion, which dominates the book of Leviticus, comes from the cultic traditions that constitute the common heritage of the Near East (and, indeed, the rest of the world). And Wisdom religion, which appears in the book of Proverbs, is easily traceable to both Egypt and Mesopotamia.⁴⁸ William A. Irwin says, It has long been recognized that a considerable portion of the Old Testament legal system, notably the social legislation in Exod. 21–23, was originally Canaanite but received Israel’s characteristic stamp.⁴⁹ In short, according to James Muilenburg, It is obvious that the literary materials [of the Hebrew Bible] are of great complexity, that various sources have gone to their making, and that the point of view of the compilers has left it stamp upon their compilations.⁵⁰

Gerhard von Rad argues that, unlike Greek thinking, which seeks a ‘uniform natural principle’ of the cosmos, . . . Hebrew thinking is thinking in historical traditions. The result is a mixture of acts of revelation and other events without a centre: The most varied traditions are superimposed upon one another, and even interwoven. Thus, a fragment of archaic uninterpreted legend can without the least difficulty be brought into conjunction with a text which has been subjected to thorough theological reflection. Especially in the case of the earliest books of the Bible, a number of old, detached tribal or local traditions, previously quite unrestricted in in range and currency, were incorporated in the Hexateuch or the Deuteronomic history; but now they are all related to ‘Israel.’ In the process the old disassociated traditions have been given a reference and interpretation which in most cases was foreign to their original meaning.⁵¹

However, even if Israel had not been a multi-ethnic society and had borrowed nothing at all from its neighbors, the Jewish Bible would still have been a complicated text for the simple reason that it was not composed by a single writer. Although every book of the Bible might have been inspired by God, each book was written by a different person (or persons), some living in the northern kingdom, some in the southern, some living in exile, and all living at different times, from the eighth through second centuries BC. The situation is further muddled by the fact that the answer to Richard Elliott Friedman’s titular question, Who wrote the Bible? is We really don’t know because all of the books of the canonical Hebrew Bible are anonymous. As Fox explains, speaking of a work included in the Apocrypha, Not until c. 200 BC is a Hebrew author known to us by name in a surviving text: Jesus ben Sirach, author of our Bibles’ Ecclesiasticus. Even the Jewish books written after Ecclesiasticus but before the writing of the New Testament, with the exception of the works of Philo and Josephus, were anonymous compositions.⁵²

Furthermore, scholars as early as the eighteenth century speculated that the frequency of doublets in the Pentateuch, particularly in Genesis and Exodus,⁵³ meant that some stories had been written by two different writers, who came to be known as J and E, based on whether they called God Jahweh (the German spelling of Yahweh) or Elohim. Eventually, four different writers were identified, including, in addition to J and E, the Priestly writer (who was largely responsible for the end of Exodus, all of Leviticus, and the beginning of Numbers) and the Deuteronomist (who was responsible for Deuteronomy and the history books that follow it, from Joshua to 2 Kings).⁵⁴ Thus, Karen Armstrong says, [w]hen the editors fixed the canons of both the Jewish and Christian testaments, they included competing visions and placed them, without comment, side by side. Furthermore, biblical authors felt free to revise the texts they had inherited and give them entirely new meanings.⁵⁵

William M. Ramsay says that the book of Exodus in the form we now have it used different versions of the same stories, traditions that had been passed down orally by different tribes in different places before being written down for different purposes. Ramsay also notes that other books of the Bible are similarly compromised by multiple authorship, including the prophecy of Isaiah, which is now understood to have been composed by three different writers, before, during, and after the exile.⁵⁶ I use the word compromised because the problem presented by these twice-told tales is twofold. First, in some instances, such as the two versions of Joseph’s betrayal by his brothers, there is no way of knowing which story is true. Did the resolution of the conflict come from Reuben or Judah? Was Joseph sold to strangers or put into a pit? And who were his new captors, Ishmaelites or Midianites?⁵⁷

More significantly, as Friedman says, the different writers of these stories, often presented side by side, offer different views of God, morality, and religious practice. Friedman says: The combination of sources did more than just affect individual Bible stories. It had an impact on the biblical conception of God. J, E, and D pictured God in very personal ways: moving around on the earth, taking visible forms, engaging in discussion and even debate with humans. P’s conception was more of a cosmic, transcendent deity. Furthermore, Friedman adds, [i]n the P text—meaning the entire body of P’s work in the middle books of the Pentateuch—"there is not a single reference to God as merciful. Indeed, [t]he very words ‘mercy,’ ‘grace,’ ‘faithfulness,’ and ‘repent’ never occur."⁵⁸ Ramsay observes that, faced with multiple views of the important issues, among other daunting problems, people are known to begin reading the Bible, full of high expectations for finding inspiration and guidance, only to give up the study after a few pages out of confusion—even boredom.⁵⁹

Summarizing these issues, Cuthbert A. Simpson says that between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries scholars identified three problems related to the composition of the Pentateuch: (a) the occurrences of two or more versions of what appeared to be the same incident, (b) the inconsistencies in the narrative, and (c) its recurring chronological difficulties.⁶⁰ Anthony J. Saldarini states that such problems as these may have resulted, in part, from the fact that the books of the Bible were copied and redacted by copyists and unsystematic interpreters who made comments and interpretations at various points in the text, some of which have been incorporated into the text as we have it. Furthermore, we have no way of identifying the various groups who participated in this process, many of whom, because of [c]onflicts within society, inevitably produced competing interpretations. Saldarini concludes, All the Biblical materials have been passed on in such a complex way that the activity of learned interpreters and tradents must be postulated for all of Israel’s history from the monarchic period on.⁶¹

Several other problems have been identified by Mark Smith. First, some Bible passages refer to mythic images, such as Leviathan and other cosmic foes of God, without including the mythic narratives from which these figures derive, giving the reader only a glimpse of the larger understanding that the original narrative would provide. Second, many biblical texts have been written so much after the fact or have undergone such long redactional histories that [t]he work [of interpretation necessarily remains highly inferential. Third, despite the availability of archeological and iconographic evidence, the lack of aid from roughly contemporary textual sources makes it difficult to be confident about the reliability of many textual accounts. Furthermore, biblical material—that is, the resources that make interpretation possible—are unevenly . . . distributed over the history of ancient Israel. Consequently, Smith adds, much more is known about the late monarchy, for example, than either the period of the judges or the first half of the monarchy.⁶²

Subjectivism. Another obstacle to an objective understanding of Judaism is the fact that all acts of interpretation are made difficult by two elements: the ambiguity of the texts and the subjectivity of the interpreters. Both issues have been thoroughly explored by Bible scholars and theologians. Speaking of all writing, Robert Wright says that, because words can have more than one meaning, the act of reading involves making choices—that is, inevitably arbitrary decisions.⁶³ Speaking of all sacred texts, Robert M. Grant says that the essential problem in the interpretation of any religion is that the primary documents are not self-explanatory.⁶⁴ And speaking of the Hebrew Bible, Jon D. Levenson notes that the meaning of a particular passage changes as we read other passages and that the meaning of the whole text can change as we read other related texts. That is, just as each piece on a chess board changes the meaning and value of every other piece, so does each text in the Bible change our readings of all the others. Levenson adds, Just as text has more than one context, and biblical studies more than one method, so scripture has more than one sense.⁶⁵

Segal says that ancient Judaism was characterized by the proliferation of competing sects and interpretations of Scripture for two reasons: First, the text itself is refractory. What the Torah means to say is not always clear. Second, and more important (as I mentioned earlier), Hellenization of the country made a greater variety of responses to the ancient document both possible and necessary, in order to comprehend the wider diversity of opinion and individualism encouraged by Hellenistic society.⁶⁶ To the first point, Shaye Cohen says that, to both modern literary critics and ancient Jewish exegetes, the ancient texts were multivalent, that is, they convey numerous meanings. Thus, no single interpretation could accurately reflect all meanings imparted by the text.⁶⁷

To the second point, Wright argues that, just as people from different cultures inevitably interpret texts from different perspectives, so do people from different time periods: When the context of the original composition is very different from the reader’s context—long ago or far away, or both—the choices made may steer the text away from the author’s intent.⁶⁸ Abraham Heschel comments: All language is relative, adapted to the ideas and associations cherished in a particular age and capable of evoking them. But so is our understanding relative, attuned to the ideas and associations cherished in our age. In reading ancient words, it is difficult to ascertain the ideas which they represented and the thoughts which they sought to evoke in their contemporaries.⁶⁹

Another consequence of reading a text from a great distance in time and space is that it may appear to be so strange and alien as to be forbidding, as well as incomprehensible. As Bellah says, From the point of view of a modern historical approach, the data concerning ancient Israel, and the scholarly interpretations of the data, are very nearly baffling.⁷⁰ Indeed, in the view of many scholars and even general readers, the Bible seems to be unapproachably removed from either understanding or appreciation. According to John Barton, part of the problem is that the book which to Christians . . . seems a comfort and an inspiration strikes others as thoroughly barbaric and alien; it seems to come from a world so remote from our own that it can have nothing to say to us. The Jewish Bible, in particular, Barton adds, is problematic because of the Old Testament’s rootedness in a culture which is not ours, its internal contradictions, and its use of categories of thought which are alien to modern thinking about morality.⁷¹ Muilenburg says that, for such reasons, the Old Testament is unintelligible outside of Israel, the living historical community which passes through varying vicissitudes and through deep chasms of crisis and destruction.⁷² And John J. Collins adds, To understand the Bible in its historical context is first of all to appreciate what an alien book it is.⁷³ Thus, E. P. Sanders argues, The act of historical understanding requires that this alienation be overcome and that the ancient religion be seen as it really is.⁷⁴

These spatial and temporal limitations on our ability to understand a text as the original author intended it to be understood contribute to the second problem, the subjectivity of the interpreter. Indeed, in Wright’s words, they combine to give believers—i.e., readers or interpreters—great influence on the meaning of their religion. Indeed, people can look at their holy texts and see what they want to see—see what meets their psychological, social, political needs.⁷⁵ This is because interpretation depends on the context of the Interpreter as well as the context of the work in question. Tim Gorringe explains: The sociology of knowledge—an area of study developed by Karl Mannheim—establishes that what we write, as authors, or what we understand, as readers, is profoundly influenced by the society in which we live and our place in it. Exegesis which takes account of these factors will ask of the text, of the commentary and of the reader questions about the type of society they come from, their class allegiance and where they stand in relation to the conflicts of their society. In short, the reader always brings a ‘pre-understanding’ to the text,⁷⁶ and the pre-understanding may be religious as easily as it may be political.⁷⁷

Thus, Mark Smith comments, concerning interpretations of ancient Judaism, like the ancient historians of Israel, modern historians investigating ancient history often have a personal, theological interest in the subject, even if they attempt to maintain a critical distance from the subject. Indeed, the research of modern scholars is dictated in large measure by both the concern with historical accuracy and scholars’ religious interest in the biblical record.⁷⁸ Barton points out that the distortion that concerns Smith and many other contemporary scholars is not necessarily a product of conscious anti-Semitism, but merely a consequence of reading the Bible from a religious perspective: The vast majority of biblical interpreters until very recently have been religious believers. Many have worked in ecclesiastically supported colleges and faculties, and most have been intensely interested in the religious relevance of their exegetical work. E. P. Sanders’s trenchant criticisms of most scholars who have written on Jesus and Paul show that their reconstructions have normally been heavily influenced by their religious beliefs: by the need to show the uniqueness of Jesus, or the essentially Lutheran character of Paul’s teaching.⁷⁹

Depending on where and when we are engaged in the interpretive act—specifically, what we have learned, what we believe, and what we value—we bring our own biases to the act of interpretation, so that not only whatever is written is written from some point of view, as John P. Meier has said, but also whatever is observed is observed from some point of view. That is, everyone writes from some ideological vantage point; no critic is exempt.⁸⁰ Segal says that every Jewish sect in the ancient world—and the point applies to every religious sect, past or present—"quite naturally read the Torah as if it uniquely prophesied their position.⁸¹ Many scholars have noted that this naïve kind of interpretation began to be challenged in the eighteenth century. According to John Rogerson, for example, Before 1750, critical scholarship was ultimately a defence of whatever type of orthodoxy a scholar accepted . . . After 1750, critical scholars were more prepared to let their biblical scholarship challenge their own orthodoxy."⁸²

Nevertheless, Meier says that the legion of scholars—no doubt, including some scholars in the modern period—peered narcissistically into the pool of the historical Jesus only to see themselves."⁸³ Thus, Kugel argues, despite the currently almost universal awareness (at least, among scholars) that because bias is inherent in all faiths it must be confronted, analyzed, and (as much as possible) minimized, if not expunged, the task is evidently harder than it appears to be. Committed to the scientific principles of modern literary criticism and quite willing to dispense with the ancient interpretive methods that were maintained by the Christian church until the last century, modern scholars nevertheless suffer from the need to defend or protect their own religious beliefs while they simultaneously honor the standards of scientific criticism. The result is an unsatisfactory effort to occupy the middle ground between the old and the new: In fact, so much of what liberal theologians and commentators have to say is typically not all that modern scholarship has brought to light, but rather represents an attempt to find a compromise between that scholarship and what the commentators themselves would still like the Bible to be . . . At times, their interpretations are scarcely less forced than those of ancient midrashists [i.e., interpreters] and usually far less clever.⁸⁴

Misrepresentation. The biggest obstacle to our understanding of ancient Judaism, however, is the fact that this kind of subjectivity is not only a danger to any contemporary student of the Bible. It was also a very serious problem for the many writers in the ancient world who left us with a rather large body of writings that have for many centuries served as a principal source of our knowledge about the Jews and their religion. Among Jewish writers, for example, Josephus, the first-century historian, wrote from the point of view of a sympathizer with the Imperial Roman government as well as a defender of Judaism. Philo wrote as a Hellenized Jew who defended Judaism against the criticism of his Greek-speaking contemporaries in Alexandria. And the Jews who wrote the Hebrew Bible were patriots—defenders of the faith—who were obviously committed to presenting their co-religionists in the best possible light.⁸⁵ In short, subjectivity, including some degree of misrepresentation, has been a longstanding feature of the very sources with which any student of the Jewish religion must deal and on which any conclusions about that subject necessarily depend.

The problem facing twenty-first-century students of ancient Judaism, however, is not the inevitable bias of Jews writing about Jews, which is predictable and therefore both understandable and discountable. Rather, the problem is now understood to be the extraordinary bias of non-Jews writing about Jews. It goes without saying that the Romans were sometimes contemptuous of Judaism, although their hostility did not ordinarily result in gratuitous acts of discrimination and violence. As Alan F. Segal explains, Anti-Semitism was known during the Hellenistic period. But it was not especially prevalent. More often than not the anti-Jewish writings of Greeks and Romans turn out to express a general dislike of foreigners rather than a specific anti-Semitism.⁸⁶

However, the other non-Jewish sources of information about the ancient Jews and their religion were written by Christians. And their hostility to their religious opponents, unlike that of the pagan Romans, was often virulent, destructive, and unremitting. At the very least, as Jay Parini says, the evangelists each had a subjective view, an intended audience, with ideological assumptions that would have shaded their reflections.⁸⁷ But historical circumstances made those personal points of view far more negative than they would have been otherwise. Shortly after the Revolt of AD 66, when Jews began to expel Christian proselytizers from their synagogues, and Christians were struggling for their survival—conflict became increasingly hostile, which deeply affected the evangelists, who at that very time were composing their accounts of Jesus’ interactions with his fellow Jews. Thus, John P. Meier says, The Gospels reflect the struggle between nascent Christianity and nascent rabbinic Judaism.⁸⁸

According to Karen Armstrong, A thread of hatred runs through the New Testament. It is inaccurate to call the Christian scriptures anti-Semitic, as the authors were themselves Jewish, but many of them had become disenchanted with Jewish religion. By the time John wrote his Gospel, in Armstrong’s words, the bias against the Jews, represented by the Pharisees, turned into vitriolic hatred.⁸⁹ This means, of course, that many of the available sources of information on the ancient Jews, including accounts written by Matthew and Luke, were undermined by distortions, exaggerations, and outright misrepresentations.

The idea that Christians mischaracterized the Jews and portrayed their religion unsympathetically and therefore negatively is a commonplace among contemporary scholars. John Shelby Spong, for example, argues that a wretched spirit of anti-Jewish hatred was . . . pervasive among Christians from the Gospel writers onward. And later Christians continued to believe that the Gospels were the word of God, were objectively true, that they described events of literal history, and that all that was contained therein did in fact happen just as it was written. They read the Gospels with a deeply prejudiced anti-Jewish bias that distorted their understanding. And this bias was challenged less and less as the years rolled by, until this attitude became viewed, not as a prejudiced distortion, but as an unchallenged kind of orthodoxy. Spong continues, It was, furthermore, on the basis of these gentile interpretations that the creeds, theological systems, and ecclesiastical superstructures of the Church were erected.⁹⁰

This means that even the most objective student of Judaism is unable to achieve a true understanding of or come to reliable conclusions about ancient Judaism insofar as they are based—uncritically—on this collection of judgments and interpretations. The problem is compounded by the fact that, although the New Testament picture of the Jews has been seriously challenged by Bible scholars, historians, and theologians in recent years, this challenge has had little impact on the thinking of contemporary Christians, who have always suffered from the same lack of knowledge that, as Meier says, inspired the rabid anti-Jewish polemic of many patristic writers, such as St. John Chrysostom and St. Jerome.⁹¹

To be sure, for the past millennium and a half, almost nobody (except scholars) has read the writings of anti-Semitic Romans. Unfortunately, however, most Christians have read at least parts of the New Testament without understanding its limitations as an objective record of Christian-Jewish relations. This is partly why the other source of Christian hostility to Judaism is Christian scholarship—more specifically, the work of many scholars over most of the past two millennia who either wittingly or unwittingly looked at Judaism through the distorting lenses of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, particularly those who relied on the New Testament for their information. This is an issue that has been systematically ignored for centuries, but it has been brought to the attention of the scholarly community (as well as the reading public, to some degree) in the past half century, particularly as a consequence of the intense and comprehensive study of the Jewish background of Jesus, taken up in the last few decades by both Jewish and Christian students of the Bible and the history of early Christianity. Thus, as Mark Smith says, [i]n rendering a picture of ancient Israel, modern historians customarily avoid the heavily theological interpretations of events that lace biblical historiography.⁹²

Since I intend to examine this subject in some detail in the first two chapters of this book, I will defer further commentary until then. Suffice it to say that references to both biblical and scholarly anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism can be found in Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, xxvi–xxvii; Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ, 31–33; Donald H. Akenson, Saint Saul, 52–53; Charles Guignebert, The Jewish World in the Time of Jesus, 71; Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week, xi, 127–28; James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 73, 85, 103; and Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew, 119,124–25, 158–59. The most important book-length studies of the subject are Rosemary R. Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide, John G. Gager’s The Origins of Anti-Semitism, James W. Parkes’s The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study of the Origins of Antisemitism, and Charlotte Klein’s Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology.

The Contemporary View of Judaism. After I examine the subject of misrepresentation in my first two chapters, I will turn to a study of ancient Judaism from the perspective of modern biblical scholarship. From this point of view, Judaism emerges as an ongoing attempt to answer two fundamental questions, as the title of this book suggests. The first is the theological question, Who is God? The second is the ethical question, What does he want us to do? As I discussed above, the answers to these questions are complicated because the religion of the ancient Jews came from many different sources, was influenced by many different cultures and their religions, and changed over time in what can best be described as fits and starts.

Indeed, the answers are further complicated by the fact that the Jewish Bible can be said to preserve many of these different sources and influences and to represent, therefore, a multiplicity of views. Speaking only of the evolution of the concept of theophany but making a point that applies to all aspects of ancient Judaism, James L. Kugel comments: The history of divine encounters as reported in the Bible is not one step forward and then the next, but includes lateral jumps, idiosyncratic depictions that become traditional for a time, followed by later imitations and slight modifications, then fresh starts and various subsequent resumptions and reiterations.⁹³

Despite these problems, however, it is possible to demonstrate that ancient Judaism began as a more or less generic faith, similar in terms of theology and morality to other so-called primitive religions of the second millennium BC. As I said earlier, it is equally possible to show that the Jewish faith developed over the ensuing centuries into a religion very similar to those that arose in the mid-first millennium in China, India, Persia, and Greece: namely, Taoism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Platonism. This change first began in Israel under the prophets of the eighth through sixth centuries and continued under the psalmists in the exilic and post-exilic periods and under the Deuteronomist sometime in the middle of the first millennium. Ancient Judaism reached what most scholars consider to be its final stage of development under the Pharisees and the Rabbis in the early centuries of the Common Era, when it became the foundation of modern Judaism.

Again, despite the haphazard way in which the Jewish Bible was composed—especially its mixture of legend and history—it is widely assumed that the earliest phases of ancient Judaism can be seen in the first four books of the Pentateuch, which are believed to lead from the origins of Judaism through several phases of its development. In Genesis, God’s primary goal is to be obeyed. He tells Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and he orders Noah not to commit murder and not to eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. Although he neglects to tell them in advance, God evidently wants the patriarchs not to engage in forbidden sexual acts or to construct high towers, but, as he does tell them, to be righteous, to build shrines dedicated to him, and even to sacrifice their children if he requests it. More explicitly, they must perform circumcisions, clearly an act that has no purpose other than to honor God by fulfilling the patriarchs’ part of the Covenant. Notably, the word righteousness, which God attributes to both Noah (6:9, 7:1) and Abraham (15:6) is never defined in Genesis, and God’s interest in morality—except for prohibitions against murder, sodomy, and onanism—is minimal.

Aside from his banishment of Adam, Eve, Cain, and the builders of the Tower of Babel, as well as his destruction of all of humanity (except for Noah and his family) and the residents of Sodom and Gemorrah (except for Lot and his daughters), God is a friendly advisor in Genesis, who has been described by scholars as a personal god, usually identified with and accessible to tribal chieftains, and therefore known among ancient Jews as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who are heads of clans or tribes. As James Muilenburg explains: With each of the patriarchs there is associated a special theophany in which the deity reveals himself in a highly personal way . . . These were family or clan gods with family names and associations.⁹⁴ Thus, God occasionally appears to people one-on-one—as he does with the patriarchs, especially but not exclusively (12:7, 17:1, 18:1, 26:2, 35:9), at which times the recipients of God’s visit sometimes either fall on their faces in astonishment or bow to the earth as an expression of worship. Except for these few incidents, as well as God’s or his angel’s encounter with Jacob in Haran (28:12–15), God ordinarily speaks to people invisibly; his speech is unaccompanied by any pyrotechnics; and he delivers his helpful and more or less unambiguous message in a measured, unemotional manner.

In Exodus, despite his self-description as a God of mercy, graciousness, love, faithfulness, and forgiveness (34:6–7), God seems to be interested in promoting his reputation as God—to the Egyptians as well as the Israelites (7:4–5; 8:10; 9:14–16, 29; 10:1–2; 11:9; 14:4, 17–18; 15:1–18)—and discouraging the worship of other gods. Moses is able to persuade God not to kill all of the Israelites for their idolatry by reminding him of his Covenant with the patriarchs and his concern for his reputation among the Egyptians: Why should the Egyptians [be able to] say, Moses says to God, ‘With evil intent did he bring them forth, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people (32:12).

Although much of Exodus is devoted to spelling out in great detail what God means by righteousness, one-fourth of the book is devoted to directions for building a sanctuary (including a tabernacle, a tent of meeting, and an ark for the Covenant) and establishing a priesthood. Nevertheless, God offers the Israelites a long list of commandments and makes it perfectly clear what he expects from them as part of his Covenant with them. Besides announcing himself to Moses as Yahweh, God has evidently turned into a God of War. He performs both small and large miracles, including the rescue of the Israelites from Egypt, the destruction of the Egyptian army, and the care and feeding of his people in the desert. On Mt. Sinai, his actions are carried out in an atmosphere that can only be described as spectacular—including, as it does, thunder, lightning, an earthquake, and a very loud trumpet blast. God speaks understandably only to Moses, but his voice is loud enough to be heard by the hundreds of thousands of people in attendance, whose reaction is, of course, a mixture of terror, confusion, and awe.

In Leviticus, entirely composed by the so-called Priestly writer, God is associated with mercy only in reference to the mercy seat, which the editors of The Oxford Annotated Bible define as the cover of the ark, which serves as the footstool of the Lord’s throne in the tabernacle (99–100). The word love occurs, importantly and famously, in what might be called the capstone verses of the Holiness Code, God’s command to love both neighbor and stranger (19:18, 34), but nowhere else. As the editors of the Oxford Bible also mention, outside of the Holiness Code (chs. 17–26), the God of Leviticus focuses on directions for the worship of God—including laws of sacrifice, priestly consecration, purity laws, the Day of Atonement, and religious vows. Except for chapter 19, the Code is largely devoted to issues pertaining to cultic matters.

In the first ten chapters of Numbers, also written by the Priestly writer, God continues to focus on aspects of worship. After this, when the story of the exodus journey is resumed, the fierce God of Exodus reappears and deals again with the disobedience of his people, this time, however, far more harshly and unforgivingly than he does in Exodus. Here, instead of responding sympathetically to the Israelites’ murmurings, God interprets them as hostile acts and, once again, threatens to kill everyone: How long will this people despise me? (14:11, 28, 35; 17:10). He responds favorably to Moses’ passionate request to relent because Moses, once again, tells God that his act will stain his reputation, not just among the Egyptians, but to the nations who have heard thy fame (14:13–16).

In the earlier books, God does not merely want to be obeyed; he also wants to be worshiped—indeed, as he is in some psalms, praised and lauded for his power, majesty, and righteousness. Not until Exodus does he show any interest in morality. And, even then, his commandments are (1) a mixed bag of moral and ceremonial laws; (2) presented as a test of his people’s loyalty, violations of which result not only in the loss of God’s rewards but also in the loss of life; and (3), at least in Numbers, violations of which are not merely treated as sins but as personal insults to God. God responds to these offenses by imposing no fewer than five plagues on his people, resulting in thousands of deaths (11:33, 14:37, 17:47, 25:8–9, 31:16). Again, as far as God is concerned, the Israelites’ expressions of regret (about leaving Egypt in the first place), frustration (regarding difficult living conditions in the Sinai desert), and uncertainty (concerning their destiny and God’s intentions) are nothing more than spiteful and mean-spirited reactions to his extraordinary devotion and beneficence.

As a glance at the major Jewish works of the mid-first millennium (including Deuteronomy) demonstrates, a different view of God developed—and one that led directly to the God of the Pharisees and Rabbis. It is especially in the work of the prophets and the psalmists that a radically new picture of God emerges. Here, he is a father rather than a king, asking for love rather than fear, and responding to wickedness or disobedience not just in anger, but in a wide variety of ways, including sorrowfully, compassionately, graciously, mercifully, forgivingly, patiently, and helpfully. His options