History of the Jews Read Free

historical narratives. The work of W.F. Albright and Kathleen kenyon in particular has given us renewed confidence in the actual existence of places and events described in the early Old Testament books. 8 Equally important, the discovery of contemporary archives from the third and second millennia BC has thrown new light on hitherto obscure Biblical passages. Whereas, fifty years ago, any early passage from the Bible was assumed to be mythical or symbolic, the onus of proof has now shifted: increasingly scholars tend to assume that the text contains at least a germ of truth and see it as their business to cultivate it. This has not made the historical interpretation of the Bible any easier. Both the fundamentalist and the ‘critical’ approach had comforting simplicities. Now we see our Bible texts as very complex and ambiguous guides to the truth; but guides none the less.
    The Jews are thus the only people in the world today who possess a historical record, however obscure in places, which allows them to trace their origins back into very remote times. The Jews who worked the Bible into something approaching its present shape evidently thought that their race, though founded by Abraham, could trace forebears even further and called the ultimate human progenitor Adam. In our present state of knowledge, we must assume that the very earliest chapters of the book of Genesis are schematic and symbolic rather than factual descriptions. Chapters 1-5, with their identification of such concepts as knowledge, evil, shame, jealousy and crime, are explanations rather than actual episodes, though embedded in them are residual memories. It is hard, for instance, to believe that the story of Cain and Abel is complete fiction; Cain’s reply, ‘Am I mybrother’s keeper?’, has the ring of truth, and the notion of the shamed and hunted man, with the mark of guilt upon him, is so powerful as to suggest historic fact. What strikes one about the Jewish description of creation and early man, compared with pagan cosmogonies, is the lack of interest in the mechanics of how the world and its creatures came into existence, which led the Egyptian and Mesopotamian narrators into such weird contortions. The Jews simply assume the pre-existence of an omnipotent God, who acts but is never described or characterized, and so has the force and invisibility of nature itself: it is significant that the first chapter of Genesis, unlike any other cosmogony of antiquity, fits perfectly well, in essence, with modern scientific explanations of the origin of the universe, not least the ‘Big Bang’ theory.
    Not that the Jewish God is in any sense identified with nature: quite the contrary. Though always unvisualized, God is presented in the most emphatic terms as a person. The Book of Deuteronomy, for instance, is at pains to draw a distinction between the despised pagan peoples, who worship nature and nature-gods, and the Jews who worship God the person, warning them ‘lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them’. 9 Moreover, this personal God, from the start, makes absolutely clear moral distinctions, which his creatures must observe, so that in the Jewish version of early man moral categories are present and imperative from the very beginning. This again differentiates it sharply from all pagan accounts. The prehistoric sections of the Bible thus constitute a kind of moral fundament, upon which the whole of the factual structure rests. The Jews are presented, even in their most primitive antecedents, as creatures capable of perceiving absolute differences between right and wrong.
    The notion of a moral universe superimposed on the physical one determines the treatment of the first truly historical episode in the Bible, the description of the Flood in Genesis 6. There can now be no doubt that some kind of huge inundation did occur in