History of the Jews (8 page)

It is more: it is a primitive declaration of equality. Not only is man, as a category, created in God’s image; all individual men are also created in God’s image. In this sense they are all equal. Nor is this equality notional; it is real in one all-important sense. All Israelites are equal before God, and therefore equal before his law. Justice is for all, irrespective of other inequalities which may exist. All kinds of privileges are implicit and explicit in the Mosaic code, but on essentials it does not distinguish between varieties of the faithful. All, moreover, shared in accepting the covenant; it was a popular, even a democratic, decision.

Thus the Israelites were creating a new kind of society. Josephus later used the term ‘theocracy’. This he defined as ‘placing all sovereignty in the hands of God’.
¹¹⁴
The sages were to call it ‘taking on the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven’.
¹¹⁵
The Israelites might have magistrates of one kind or another but their rule was vicarious since God made the law and constantly intervened to ensure it was obeyed. The fact that God ruled meant that in practice his law ruled. And since all were equally subject to the law, the system was the first to embody the double merits of the rule of law and equality before the law. Philo called it ‘democracy’, which he described as ‘the most law-abiding and best of constitutions’. But by democracy he did not mean rule by all the
people; he defined it as a form of government which ‘honours equality and has law and justice for its rulers’.
¹¹⁶
He might have called the Jewish system, more accurately, ‘democratic theocracy’, because in essence that is what it was.
¹¹⁷

In the age of Moses, then, the Israelites were strengthening and confirming a tendency we have already noted to be subversive of the existing order. They were a servile people, who rose up against their Egyptian master, the most ancient and autocratic monarchy in the world. They fled into the desert, and received their laws in mass popular assembly, not in some long-established city but on the bare mountainside from a wild leader who did not even call himself a king. We do not know where Moses’ Mount Sinai was. It may have been a still-active volcano. The present monastery of Sinai has always been a Christian site; it goes back certainly to the fourth century
AD
, and perhaps to about 200 years before. But even that was 1,450 years after Moses came down from the mountain. It is likely that, after the Israelites settled in Canaan, the Mosaic Sinai remained a pilgrimage site for generations. But the tradition eventually lapsed and the site fell out of memory, and it is most improbable that the early Christians went to the right place. All the same, this dramatic place, with its fierce and terrible beauty, has poetic aptness. It is the right setting for the formative act of a revolutionary people who did not recognize the cities, power and wealth of the day, and who were able to perceive that there is a moral order superior to the order of the world. Later, in a dramatic passage, Deutero-Isaiah was to express the Jewish exaltation of powerlessness in the person of the Suffering Servant of the Lord, who in the end is victorious; and later still, a Jewish sectarian, St Paul, was to ask: ‘Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?’ and to quote the Scriptures: ‘For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.’
¹¹⁸
But the spring of this tradition opened at Sinai.
¹¹⁹

With their long experience of being strangers and sojourners, for the Israelites their exodus from Egypt and their wanderings in the desert and mountain country of Sinai were nothing new. But this episode, of perhaps half a century, tended to confirm their singularity, their antinomianism, their apartness. It is curious, as the Jewish historian Salo Baron has pointed out, that the God they worshipped, despite his epiphany on Mount Sinai, remained portable, as in Abraham’s days: he dwelt in the Ark, a kind of large, elaborate dog-kennel, or was present in the tabernacle in the tent, or operated through the casting-lots, Urim and Tummin.
¹²⁰
This movable core was present even during the period of the Temple, and the idea that God has no fixed
abode was easily resumed after the Temple fell and has been paramount ever since in Judaism. It fits more naturally into the Jewish notion of the universal and ubiquitous but invisible God. It reflects too an extraordinary adaptability in the people, a great skill in putting down roots quickly, pulling them up and re-establishing them elsewhere, an admirable tenacity of purpose irrespective of the setting. As Baron has put it, ‘The religious and ethnic power of perseverance, rather than the political power of expansion and conquest, became the corner-stone of Jewish belief and practice.’
¹²¹

Nevertheless, it must be stressed again that the Israelites, though inclined to restlessness, were not desert nomads, by origin or inclination. Even their Sinai wanderings were not truly nomadic. The bulk of the Exodus narratives, covering some thirty-seven years, centre on the conquest of Kadesh or Qadesh, which was rich and well-watered and was taken from the settled Amalekites. Some other sites mentioned in Exodus have been tentatively identified. But plotting the wanderings on the map, though often attempted and undoubtedly entertaining, can produce nothing more than conjecture.
¹²²
One interesting theory is that the Levite tribe, to which Moses himself belonged and which soon claimed the exclusive right to the priesthood, was the first to settle in Kadesh and there elaborated the new religion. The other tribes were already in Canaan. The last to force its way into the Promised Land were the tribe of Joseph, from Egypt, and the Levites of Kadesh, who had been reformed by Moses as an instrument for the fervent worship of Yahweh. Under its dynamic impulse, the new Israelite society came into being, religion being the catalyst.
¹²³
It is plausible but undemonstrable.

With the entry into and conquest of Canaan, however, the pattern of historical events begins to clarify as more and more archaeological evidence confirms or illuminates the Biblical record. The Book of Joshua, called after the Israelites’ first great military commander, can now be regarded as essentially an historical account, though with important qualifications. Joshua, son of Nun of the tribe of Ephraim, was Moses’ security chief, acting as his bodyguard at Sinai and commanding the guard of the tent. He established his military reputation during the wanderings in a desperate encounter at Rephidim with a band commanded by the sheikh Amalek. Moses commanded Joshua to ‘go out, fight with Amalek’, while he himself stood ‘on top of the hill with the rod of God in mine hand’. Aaron and Hur held up the old prophet’s hands to encourage the warriors, ‘and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. And Joshua discomfited Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword.’
¹²⁴
Just
before his death, Moses transferred the leadership to Joshua and ‘set him over the congregation’ at a solemn public ceremony. This made him a prophet as well as a general: ‘And Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom; for Moses had laid his hands upon him.’
¹²⁵

Thus Joshua began and to a great extent completed the conquest of Canaan. He may not have commanded all the Israelites, at any rate at the beginning. Nor did he conduct a full-scale invasion. Much of the settlement was a process of infiltration, or reinforcement of affiliated tribes who, as we have seen, already held such towns as Shechem. But there were numerous skirmishes and several spectacular sieges. The Canaanites were a higher material civilization than the Israelites and must have had much better weapons as well as strongly built stone cities. There is an air of desperation about the Israelites’ conquest and this helps to explain why they were so ruthless when they took a town.

The first place to fall, after the crossing of the Jordan, was Jericho, one of the most ancient cities in the world. The excavations of Kathleen Kenyon and carbon-dating show that it goes back to the seventh millennium
BC
. It had enormous walls in the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, and the strength of its defences produced one of the most vivid passages in the Bible. Joshua the prophet-general ordered the priests to carry the Ark round the city, with their ram’s-horn trumpeters, on six consecutive days; and on the seventh, ‘when the priests blew with the trumpets’, he commanded to all the people: ‘Shout; for the Lord hath given you the city.’ Then ‘the people shouted with a great shout, that the walls fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city.’
¹²⁶
Owing to erosion, the Kenyon researches threw no light on how the walls were destroyed; she thinks it may have been an earthquake which the Israelites attributed to divine intervention. The Bible narrative says: ‘And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and ass, with the edge of the sword.’ Miss Kenyon established that the city was certainly burnt at this time and that, in addition, it was not reoccupied for a very long time afterwards, which accords with Joshua’s determination that no one should rebuild it, and his threat: ‘Cursed be the man before the Lord, that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho.’
¹²⁷

Joshua did not storm a city if he could avoid it. He preferred to negotiate a surrender or better still an alliance and peaceful settlement. This was what happened, for instance, at Gibeon. But its inhabitants, he discovered, had deceived him over the terms of their covenant, and though he saved them from Israelite vengeance, he ‘made them that day hewers of wood and drawers of water for the congregation’.
¹²⁸
Gibeon, says the Bible, was a ‘great city’, ‘one of the royal cities’. Its precise location was finally established after the Second World War by the American archaeologist James Pritchard. There are no fewer than forty-five references to Gibeon in the Bible and Pritchard was able to confirm many of them. It was the centre of a fine wine-producing area, and the city had underground cellars for storing wine in nine-gallon vats. On the handles of no fewer than twenty-five of these Pritchard found the letters
gb’n
—Gibeon.
¹²⁹
The loss of the city was regarded as so important that five Amorite city-kings tried to retake it. Joshua came to its rescue from Gilgal, ‘and all the men of war with him, and all the mighty men of valour’—he now had a small regular army—and defeated the Amorites in a hectic battle fought during a hailstorm: ‘they were more which died from hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword’. Then followed a dramatic scene, according to the Bible record. Joshua needed daylight to complete the destruction of the Amorite army, so he prayed to the Lord for the weather to clear: ‘Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.’
¹³⁰

Joshua then went on to achieve a still more important victory over Jabin, King of Hazor, who had tried to create a coalition in the northern part of Canaan to keep out the Israelite intruders. He collected an enormous army, ‘even as the sand that is upon the seashore in multitude’, but the Lord ‘burnt their chariots with fire’. Then Joshua ‘turned back, and took Hazor, and smote the king thereof with the sword…. And they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them: there was not any left to breathe: and he burnt Hazor with fire.’
¹³¹
Hazor was thoroughly excavated by the Israeli archaeologist-general, Yigael Yadin, in 1955-9. He found a vast and splendid town, with a lower section of 200 acres and a citadel of 24 acres, housing perhaps over 50,000 people. There were strong gates and massive walls. Here, again, the evidence of burning and destruction during the thirteenth century
BC
, the time of the Israelite conquest, is entirely consistent with the Biblical record. Among the debris Yadin found a deliberately mutilated temple stele of the moon-god Baal Hamman with the uplifted hands symbolizing his wife Tanit; so evidently Joshua’s men had carried out the injunction to ‘tear down their altars’.
¹³²

Despite Joshua’s spectacular victories, however, the conquest of Canaan was by no means complete at the time of his death. The consolidation of the Israelite settlement, the reduction of the remain
ing towns, and the final occupation of the coast took more than two centuries, 1200-1000
BC
, and was not accomplished until the unified kingdom of Israel came into being at the end of the millennium. The different Israelite tribes acted independently of each other, and sometimes fought. They had a variety of enemies: Canaanite enclaves, incursive Bedouin tribes, the new menace of the Philistines pushing in from the coast. They also had to take over from the Canaanites they had beaten, restore the cities, work the land. In the Book of Joshua, God says to them: ‘I have given you a land for which ye did not labour, and cities which ye built not, and ye dwell in them; of the vineyards and oliveyards which ye planted not do ye eat.’
¹³³
This is abundantly confirmed by excavations which show the Israelites strikingly inferior to their Canaanite predecessors in civil technology, notably building and pottery.
¹³⁴
The children of Israel had a lot to learn.

Moreover, Palestine, though small, is a country of great variety, broken up into forty different geographical and climatic units.
¹³⁵
That is what helps to give the land its extraordinary fascination and beauty. But it also tended to perpetuate tribal divisions and impede unity. The Israelite tradition, already strongly entrenched, of equality, communal discussion, acrimonious debate and argument, made them hostile to the idea of a centralized state, with heavy taxes to pay for a standing army of professionals. They preferred tribal levies serving without pay. The Book of Judges, covering the first two centuries of the settlement, gives the impression that the Israelites had more leadership than in fact they were prepared to tolerate. The ‘judges’ were not national rulers, holding power in succession. Normally they ran only one tribe each, and some may have been contemporaries. So every military coalition had to be negotiated on an
ad hoc
basis, summed up in the words of Barak, the chief of the Kedesh-Naphtali, to Deborah the warrior-prophetess: ‘If thou wilt go with me, then I will go; but if thou wilt not go with me, then I will not go.’
¹³⁶
The Book of Judges, though undoubted history and full of fascinating information about Canaan in the Late Bronze Age, is flavoured with mythical material and fantasy and presented in a confused fashion, so that it is difficult to work out a consecutive history of the period.