Chapter One
The Jews started it all-and by "it" I mean so many of the things we
care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and
gentile, believer and atheist, tick. Without the Jews, we would see
the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even
feel with different feelings. And not only would our sensorium, the
screen through which we receive the world, be different: we would
think with a different mind, interpret all our experience
differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall
us. And we would set a different course for our lives.
By "we" I mean the usual "we" of late-twentieth century writing: the
people of the Western world, whose peculiar but vital mentality has
come to infect every culture on earth, so that, in a startlingly
precise sense, all humanity is now willy-nilly caught up in this
"we." For better or worse, the role of the West in humanity's
history is singular. Because of this, the role of the Jews, the
inventors of Western culture, is also singular: there is simply no
one else remotely like them; theirs is a unique vocation. Indeed, as
we shall see, the very idea of vocation, of a personal destiny, is a
Jewish idea.
Our history is replete with examples of those who have refused to
see what the Jews are really about, who-through intellectual
blindness, racial chauvinism, xenophobia, or just plain evil-have
been unable to give this oddball tribe, this raggle-taggle band,
this race of wanderers who are the progenitors of the Western world,
their due. Indeed, at the end of this bloodiest of centuries, we can
all too easily look back on scenes of unthinkable horror perpetrated
by those who would do anything rather than give the Jews their due.
But I must ask my readers to erase from their minds not only the
horrors of history-modern, medieval, and ancient-but (so far as
one can) the very notion of history itself. More especially, we must
erase from our minds all the suppositions on which our world is
built-the whole intricate edifice of actions and ideas that are our
intellectual and emotional patrimony. We must reimagine ourselves in
the form of humanity that lived and moved on this planet before the
first word of the Bible was written down, before it was spoken,
before it was even dreamed.
What a bizarre phenomenon the first human mutants must have appeared
upon the earth. Like their primate progenitors, they were
long-limbed and rangy, but, with unimpressive muscles and without
significant fur or claws, confined to the protection of trees, save
when they would tentatively essay the floor of the savannah-hoping
to obtain food without becoming food. With their small mouths and
underdeveloped teeth, their unnaturally large heads (like the heads
of primate infants), they were forced back on their wits. Their
young remained helpless for years, well past the infancy of other
mammals, requiring from their parents long years of vigilance and
extensive tutelage in many things. Without planning and forethought,
without in fact the development of complex strategies, these mutants
could not hope to survive at all.
But if we make use of what hints remain in the prehistorical and
protohistorical "record," we must come to the unexpected conclusion
that their inventions and discoveries, made in aid of their survival
and prosperity-tools and fire, then agriculture and beasts of
burden, then irrigation and the wheel-did not seem to them
innovations. These were gifts from beyond the world, somehow part of
the Eternal. All evidence points to there having been, in the
earliest religious thought, a vision of the cosmos that was
profoundly cyclical. The assumptions that early man made about the
world were, in all their essentials, little different from the
assumptions that later and more sophisticated societies, like Greece
and India, would make in a more elaborate manner. As Henri-Charles
Puech says of Greek thought in his seminal Man and Time: "No event
is unique, nothing is enacted but once .; every event has been
enacted, is enacted, and will be enacted perpetually; the same
individuals have appeared, appear, and will appear at every turn of
the circle."
The Jews were the first people to break out of this circle, to find
a new way of thinking and experiencing, a new way of understanding
and feeling the world, so much so that it may be said with some
justice that theirs is the only new idea that human beings have ever
had. But their worldview has become so much a part of us that at
this point it might as well have been written into our cells as a
genetic code. We find it so impossible to shed-even for a brief
experiment-that it is now the cosmic vision of all other peoples
that appears to us exotic and strange.
The Bible is the record par excellence of the Jewish religious
experience, an experience that remains fresh and even shocking when
it is read against the myths of other ancient literatures. The wordbible comes from the Greek plural form biblia, meaning "books." And
though the Bible is rightly considered the book of the Western
world-its foundation document-it is actually a collection of
books, a various library written almost entirely in Hebrew over the
course of a thousand years.
We have scant evidence concerning the early development of Hebrew,
one of a score of Semitic tongues that arose in the Middle East
during a period that began sometime before the start of the second
millennium B.C.-how long before we do not know. Some of these
tongues, such as Akkadian, found literary expression fairly early,
but there is no reliable record of written Hebrew before the tenth
century B.C.-that is, till well after the resettlement of the
Israelites in Canaan following their escape from Egypt under the
leadership of Moses, the greatest of all proto-Jewish figures. This
means that the supposedly historical stories of at least the first
books of the Bible were preserved originally not as written texts
but as oral tradition. So, from the wanderings of Abraham in Canaan
through the liberation from Egypt wrought by Moses to the Israelite
resettlement of Canaan under Joshua, what we are reading are oral
tales, collected and edited for the first (but not the last) time in
the tenth century during and after the kingship of David. But the
full collection of texts that make up the Bible (short of the Greek
New Testament, which would not be appended till the first century of
our era) did not exist in its current form till well after the
Babylonian Captivity of the Jews-that is, till sometime after 538
B.C. The last books to be taken into the canon of the Hebrew Bible
probably belong to the third and second centuries B.C., these being
Esther and Ecclesiastes (third century) and Daniel (second century).
Some apocryphal books, such as Judith and the Wisdom of Solomon, are
as late as the first century.
To most readers today, the Bible is a confusing hodgepodge; and
those who take up the daunting task of reading it from cover to
cover seldom maintain their resolve beyond a book or two. Though the
Bible is full of literature's two great themes, love and death (as
well as its exciting caricatures, sex and violence), it is also full
of tedious ritual prescriptions and interminable battles. More than
anything, because the Bible is the product of so many hands over so
many ages, it is full of confusion for the modern reader who
attempts to decode what it might be about.
But to understand ourselves-and the identity we carry so
effortlessly that most "moderns" no longer give any thought to the
origins of attitudes we have come to take as natural and
self-evident-we must return to this great document, the cornerstone
of Western civilization. My purpose is not to write an introduction
to the Bible, still less to Judaism, but to discover in this unique
culture of the Word some essential thread that runs through it, to
uncover in outline the sensibility that undergirds the whole
structure, and to identify the still-living sources of our Western
heritage for contemporary readers, whatever color of the
belief-unbelief spectrum they may inhabit.
To appreciate the Bible properly, we cannot begin with it. All
definitions must limit or set boundaries, must show what the
thing-to-be-defined is not. So we begin before the Bible, before the
Jews, before Abraham-in the time when reality seemed to be a great
circle, closed and predictable in its revolutions. We return to the
world of the Wheel.
(Continues.)
