From Yahweh to Zion Read online

  It is believed that a general by the name of Jehu first promoted the cult of his god Yahweh in the kingdom of Israel, after seizing the throne in 842 BCE.15 Yahweh Sabaoth (Yahweh of armies) seems to be the archaic name of this military god, which was carried in battle in a mobile ark (1 Samuel 4:4). He resembled Assur, the national and military god of the Assyrians, presented in Assyrian chronicles as the true king of the eponymous city-state, with the human ruler being only the vicegerent. Assur is a warrior god, who grants victory to his people and destroys the gods (i.e., temples and shrines) of conquered peoples.16 This is also, as we shall see, the dominant feature of Yahweh.

  In the middle of the eighth century, the Neo-Assyrian Empire embarked on a new round of political and commercial expansion, systematically destroying the cities that refused vassalage. Israel allied itself with Damascus against Assyria. Judea refused to join in this endeavor and stood under Assyrian protection. Israel was annihilated in 720 BCE. Jerusalem saw its population double in an influx of refugees who included priests bent on preserving their former national identity. Under their influence, a pan-Israelite ideology developed aiming to reconquer the North under the banner of Yahweh. The opportunity seemed to present itself with the weakening of Assyria during the reign of King Josiah (639–609), who tried to extend his control over the northern lands, and dreamed of making Jerusalem the center of a new empire.

  In those ancient times, government propaganda took a religious form. And Yahweh is a vengeful god. He had defied Assur, was defeated by him, but continued to assert his superiority over his conqueror. The book of Isaiah, whose oldest strata was composed soon after the destruction of Israel by Assyria, is the founding document of that program: “Yahweh Sabaoth has sworn it, ‘Yes, what I have planned will take place, what I have decided will be so: I shall break Assyria in my country, I shall trample on him on my mountains. Then his yoke will slip off them, his burden will slip from their shoulders. This is the decision taken in defiance of the whole world; this, the hand outstretched in defiance of all nations. Once Yahweh Sabaoth has decided, who will stop him? Once he stretches out his hand, who can withdraw it?’” (14:24–27).

  The book of Isaiah would be expanded during several centuries, without deviating from the initial plan, which was to make Zion the new center of the world: “It will happen in the final days that the mountain of Yahweh’s house will rise higher than the mountains and tower above the heights. Then all the nations will stream to it. […] For the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem” (2:2–3). Kings, Yahweh assures his people, “will fall prostrate before you, faces to the ground, and lick the dust at your feet” (49:23), whereas “I shall make your oppressors eat their own flesh, they will be as drunk on their own blood as on new wine. And all humanity will know that I am Yahweh, your Saviour, your redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob” (49:26). “For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed” (60:12).

  Yahweh held his people solely responsible for his defeat by Assur: they have failed him by their religious pluralism, likened to a betrayal of their holy alliance. In fact, according to the biblical chroniclers, it was Yahweh himself who led Assur against the Israeli people to punish them for their apostasy. Judah, on the contrary, saw its own survival as the sign of Yahweh’s favor: Judah thus earned the birthright over Israel, as Jacob had over Esau. This theme was probably introduced into the biblical narrative at the time of Josiah, by weaving together traditions from the North (Israel) and from the South (Judea). Northern legends, for example, glorified the ancient king Saul, while southern folklore honored David, the shepherd turned honorable bandit. In the resulting story, the tension between Saul and David is resolved in favor of the latter when Saul says to David, who once served him: “Now I know that you will indeed reign and that the sovereignty in Israel will pass into your hands” (1 Samuel 24:21). God establishes on David an eternal dynasty (2 Samuel 7:12–16) and his son Solomon reigns over an empire.

  Despite two centuries of fruitless searching, archaeologists have come to admit that the magnificent Kingdom of Solomon has no more reality than Arthur’s Camelot. At the supposed time of Solomon, Jerusalem was only a large village, while Samaria hosted a palace. The myth of Solomon probably started as a fantasy mirror image of Josiah’s political project, designed to strengthen the claims of prophet-priests that a new David (Josiah) would restore the empire of Solomon. The game of mirrors thus created between mythical past and prophetic future is a masterpiece of political propaganda.17

  Josiah’s expansionist scheme was thwarted by Egypt, which also hoped to take advantage of the weakening of Assyria. After Josiah’s death in battle against the Egyptian army, the days of Judah were numbered. The books of Kings tell us that several of his sons reigned briefly, first as vassals of Egypt, then of Babylon. When the last of them rebelled against King Nebuchadnezzar II, the latter retaliated by besieging and finally burning Jerusalem in 588 BCE, deporting some of its elites (the book of Jeremiah advances the plausible figure of 4,600 people); another group found refuge in Egypt. The exiles enjoyed broad autonomy in Babylon, and some even acquired wealth and influence. Speaking on behalf of Yahweh from Egypt, the priest-prophet Jeremiah wrote to the exiles: “Work for the good of the city to which I have exiled you; pray to Yahweh on its behalf, since on its welfare yours depends” (Jeremiah 29:7). But twenty chapters later, Jeremiah announced the “vengeance of the Lord” on the Babylonians and called on their Persian enemies to “slaughter and curse with destruction every last one of them” (50:21). In the same spirit, the author of Psalm 137:8 writes: “Daughter of Babel, doomed to destruction, […] a blessing on anyone who seizes your babies and shatters them against a rock!” The reason for this violent shift in Yahweh’s sentiment was that the situation had changed: in 555 BCE, a prince named Nabonad seized power in Babylon. He made war against the Persian king Cyrus (Koresch) and allied with the king of Egypt Amasis. There is evidence that the Judean exiles sided with the Persians, according to Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz: “Did any of the Judean favorites at the Babylonian court, or any of the converted heathens open secret negotiations with Cyrus? The kindness shown later on to the Judeans by the Persian warrior, and their persecution by Nabonad, led to the supposition that such was the case.”18

  When the Persians conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, some of the exiles and their descendants (42,360 people with their 7,337 servants and 200 male and female singers, according to Ezra 2:64–67) returned to Jerusalem under the protection of King Cyrus, with the project of rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. For his gentleness, Cyrus is bestowed the title of God’s “Anointed” (Mashiah) in Isaiah 45:1, Yahweh (or his influential devotees) having “grasped [him] by his right hand, to make the nations bow before him.” In 458 BCE, eighty years after the return of the first exiles, Ezra, proud descendant of a line of Yahwist priests, went from Babylon to Jerusalem, accompanied by some 1,500 followers. Carrying with him an amplified version of the Torah, Ezra called himself the “Secretary of the Law of the God of heaven” (Ezra 7:21), mandated by the king of Persia. He was soon joined by Nehemiah, a Persian court official of Judean origin.

  Ezra the Proto-Zionist

  Chapter 22 of the second book of Kings tells how Deuteronomy, the heart of the biblical canon, was “discovered” during the reign of Josiah. It was during renovation work in the Temple that the high priest Hilkiah found a “scroll of the Law (Torah)” that he identified as having been written by Moses himself. Historians interpret this narrative as a legend fabricated by priests to pass their new law (Deuteronomy) as the mere reenactment of an old law. Therefore, according to the most conservative biblical science, Deuteronomy dates to the age of Josiah around 625 BCE. The story of its discovery is a pious fraud. From the same period come most of the six historical books following Deuteronomy (Joshua, Judges, Samuel I and II, Kings I and II), which recount the history of Israel from Moses to Josiah. They f
orm what is known as “Deuteronomic history,” as they are cast in the same ideological mold as Deuteronomy—what I more simply call Yahwism.

  But this dating is now being challenged. According to Philip Davies, a representative of the “minimalist” school, the “reform of Josiah” is itself “bound to be regarded as a pious legend, just about possible perhaps, but extremely improbable.” Indeed, it is hardly conceivable that Deuteronomy was written in a monarchy, let alone under the authority of a king, because it is a law code adapted to a theocracy, a country ruled by priests. The entire Deuteronomic history minimizes the royal function, which it depicts as having been only grudgingly granted by Yahweh to the Hebrews: “It is not you they have rejected but me,” Yahweh complains to Samuel when the Hebrews ask for a king (1 Samuel 8:7). The idea that a king would sponsor a priestly code of law limiting his power, to which he would then submit voluntarily, makes no sense. On the other hand, the Deuteronomic ideology perfectly corresponds to the regime that Ezra and Nehemiah wanted to impose: the reign of a caste of priests, with a weak king or no king at all. This does not mean that all the contents of the Bible were invented in this period. There was an aggregation of oral and written materials: chronicles and legends of kings, warriors, and holy men, as well as religious and secular songs, visions, and prophecies. But “the ideological structure of the biblical literature can only be explained in the last analysis as a product of the Persian period,” the time when Ezra drafted his project of reconquest.19

  The tale of the “discovery” of the “Law of Moses” in the Temple under Josiah is a double deception. This Torah supposedly written by Moses, abandoned and then revived two centuries later by Josiah, then becoming obsolete again as the country was ravaged, then finally returned by Ezra to a people who, it seems, no longer remembered it—this Torah had in fact never been known or applied before Ezra, but was invented by him and the Levitical families who intended to make it the instrument of their new power over the Palestinian population.

  The biblical text was designed to establish Ezra’s legitimacy based on Moses the mythical ancestor, as well as Josiah the last king before the Exile. It is built on a mise en abîme that goes like this: First, Moses receives from Yahweh the Law (of Deuteronomy) and urges the Hebrew people to “faithfully obey the voice of Yahweh your God, by keeping and observing all his commandments” (Deuteronomy 28:1–20). Secondly, Josiah receives from the high priest that same “Book of the Law,” the “Law of Moses” (that had once fallen from the sky but now emerges from the dust), and summons “the whole populace, high and low” to hear it being read (2 Kings 23:2). Thirdly, Ezra brings back from Babylon this very “Book of the Law of Moses” and summons the families of the settlers to read it to them “from dawn till noon” (Nehemiah 8:1–3).

  The first two episodes are mythical, only the third is historical. For a historian critical of his sources, the only near-certainty is that, around 458 BCE, a clan claiming to issue from a lineage of Yahwistic Judean priests and installed in Babylon won from the Persians the right to establish a semi-autonomous state in Palestine; and that in order to dominate the local population, they developed a version of history presenting themselves as legitimate heirs of an ancient tradition.

  Historians of recent training admit that the Pentateuch incorporates traditions older than the Exile and Return, but they downgrade their importance. The conquest of Canaan by Joshua, for example, is seen as a mythical projection of the reconquest of Canaan by the Jews of Babylon, designed to give Ezra the image of a new Moses or Joshua. Indeed, what the Lord required of the Hebrews during the conquest of Canaan under Moses and Joshua is exactly what Ezra and Nehemiah required of the Judeo-Babylonians colonizing Palestine concerning their relations with the “people of the land,” an expression recurring in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah to denote the population of Judea over which the Babylonian settlers intended to reign. These indigenous people, who believed themselves rightful inhabitants of the country, were declared “foreigners” in the inverted view of history imposed by the Persian-backed settlers, and explicitly identified with the peoples fought by Joshua in bygone days.

  Ezra complains that the exiles who settled back in Palestine before him “have been unfaithful” to Yahweh “by marrying foreign women from the people of the country” (Ezra 10:2), these people with “disgusting practices” (9:14). He requires that all the perpetrators repudiate their foreign wives and the children born of them. The fact that the prohibition of intermarriage by Ezra is the faithful echo of the one formulated in Deuteronomy, and that the mixed marriages condemned by Ezra are reminiscent of those blamed on the Hebrew people in the books of Numbers and Kings, must be interpreted in reverse, according to the new historians, since much of the Pentateuch and all the Deuteronomic literature were written to support the theocratic project of Ezra.

  The book of Ezra says that when the settlers from Babylon wanted to (re)build the Temple, they first found themselves in “fear of the people of the country” (3:3). These latter are referred to as “the enemies of Judah and Benjamin” when they proposed to the exiles: “Let us help you build, for we resort to your god as you do and we have been sacrificing to him since the time of Esarhaddon king of Assyria, who brought us here” (4:2). This language actually reflects the gaze of the exiles on the locals, whom they considered the descendants of Assyrian colonists practicing an illegitimate version of the Hebrew religion, polluted by idolatry—a view justified in the second book of Kings (17:23–41) by the assertion that all of Israel was deported by the Assyrians (the famous twelve lost tribes). But current historians, informed by the Assyrian archives, estimate that only 20 percent of the population of the kingdom of Samaria was deported. Clinging to this prejudice, the exiles rejected the indigenous proposal: “It is out of the question that you should join us in building a temple for our god. We shall build for Yahweh, god of Israel, on our own, as King Cyrus king of Persia has commanded us.” Conflict ensued: “The people of the country then set about demoralizing the people of Judah and deterring them from building” (Ezra 4:3–4).

  Through additional arrogance, these “people of Judah” (the settlers) who scorned the “people of the country” (indigenous Judeans) were not content merely to declare themselves the only ones worthy of the name of Judah. They also usurped the prestigious name of Israel, which previously had only meant the former northern kingdom.

  Like the conquest of Canaan by Joshua, the journey of Abraham from Mesopotamia to Palestine, prompted by Yahweh’s commitment “to give you this country as your possession” (Genesis 15:7), seems written as a model for the (re)conquest of Palestine by the exiles in Babylon. Abraham was in fact unknown among pre-exilic prophets.20 Other episodes of Genesis, like the Tower of Babel (chapter 11), cannot have been written prior to the fall of Babylon. The same is true of the Garden of Eden, since the Hebrew word Pardès (from which “Paradise” derives) is of Persian origin.

  Other episodes betray a xenophobia that fits well with the spirit of the conquest of Ezra. For example, the curious story in which the three sons of Noah, at the initiative of the youngest, Cham, “cover the nakedness” of their father (Genesis 9:18–29), contains the thinly veiled idea that Ham, the ancestor of the Canaanites, had sex with his dead-drunk father. Noah cursed him when “he learned what his youngest son had done to him.” This is probably an etiological account of the impurity attributed to the Canaanites—the narrative equivalent of an obscene insult tossed in their direction to justify their enslavement: “Accursed be Canaan, he shall be his brothers’ meanest slave.”21

  The explanation also applies to the history of the two daughters of Lot (Abraham’s nephew), who, after being virtually delivered to the Sodomites by their father (Genesis 19:8), got him drunk and seduced him, thereby conceiving Moab and Ben-Ammi, ancestors of the Moabites and Ammonites (Genesis 19:31–38). On the other hand, Judah’s fornication with his daughter-in-law Tamar, dressed as a prostitute (Genesis 38), is depicte
d as the God-blessed action that produced the tribe of Judah.

  Hasmonean Literary Production

  The books of Ezra and Nehemiah base the authority for the reforms of their eponymous heroes on edicts supposedly issued by Persian sovereigns. “Yahweh roused the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia to issue a proclamation and to have it publicly displayed throughout his kingdom: ‘Cyrus king of Persia says this, Yahweh, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has appointed me to build him a temple in Jerusalem, in Judah.’” (Ezra 1:1–2). The book of Ezra then reproduces a contrary edict of the next emperor, Xerxes, prompted by a warning from locals against the danger of allowing the exiles to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem: “this city is a rebellious city, the bane of kings and provinces, and […] sedition has been stirred up there from ancient times” (4:15). The Judeans countered by writing to the next king of Persia, Darius, to invite him to search the archives of Babylon for the edict of Cyrus. This was found at Ectabane, and summarized in a new edict of Darius authorizing the rebuilding of the temple, and ordering gigantic burnt offerings financed by “the royal revenue.” Darius warned that “if anyone disobeys this order, a beam is to be torn from his house, he is to be impaled on it and his house is to be reduced to a rubbish-heap for his offense” (6:11).

  Then it is Artaxerxes who, by a new edict, is supposed to have granted Ezra authority to lead “all members of the people of Israel in my kingdom, including their priests and Levites, who freely choose to go to Jerusalem,” and to rule over “the whole people of Trans-Euphrates [territories west to the Euphrates], that is, for all who know the Law of your God; and you are to teach it to those who do not know it. And on anyone who will not comply with the Law of your God and the Law of the king let sentence be swiftly executed, whether it be death, banishment, fine or imprisonment.” Thus ends what is presented as “the text of the document which King Artaxerxes gave to Ezra” (7:11–26).