Topic: "Jewish" Bible as source for Christianity (and Islam) 1911 Eduorad DuJardin

[Prometheus]

THE SOURCE

OF THE

CHRISTIAN TRADITION

A CRITICAL HISTORY OF ANCIENT JUDAISM

BY

Edouard dujardin

Revised Edition, translated by JOSEPH McCABE

[issued fob the rationalist press association, limited]

London:

WATTS & CO.,

17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1911


https://archive.org/details/sourceofchristia00dujauoft



 
 The historian neither attacks nor defends religions; he
studies how certain books, which have become sacred books,
claiming the veneration of all ages throughout the whole
earth, came into being among a certain people, at a certain
period, in certain circumstauces, in order to meet certain
needs.

Page 99.

The evolution of the Jewish people must be studied with
the same cold impartiality as the evolution of any other
people of the ancient East.

Page 200.
 

I
 CONTENTS

PAGE

Jewish History   -------   ix

Chronological Table   ------   ix

Map of Palestine   -------   xi

Jewish Literature   -------   xii

FIRST PART

THE LAW

Chap. I.—The early Days op Jewish History -   -   l

Chap. II.—Esdras

§ 1. The Beginning ------   19

§ 2. The Esdras School   31

§ 3. The First Institutions -----   39

§ 4. Progress of the State of Jerusalem -   -   -   43

Chap, in.-—The books of Moses

§ 1. The National Epic of an Imperialism   48

§ 2. The Jehovist-Elohist Period   -   -   -   58

§ 3. The Deuteronomic Period -   -   -   -   74

§ 4. The Levitical Period -----   90

§ 5. A First Glance at the Internationalisation of Judaism-   99

SECOND PART

THE PROPHETS

Chap. I.—Birth op Prophetism

§ 1. Hellenism ------   105

§ 2. The Men of God -   -   -   -   -   111

§ 3. Hosea and Amos -----   123

Chap. II.—Jeremiah ------   131

vii
 viii

CONTENTS

PAGE

Chap. III.—Ezekiel

§ 1. The First Book of Ezekiel ....   149

§ 2. The Second Book of Ezekiel. Legends of Samuel,

Elijah, and Elisha. Success and check of the
Prophetic Party   -----   155

Chap. IV.—The Two Isaiahs and the Imperialist
Revival

§ 1. The Jewish People in the Days of the Two Isaiahs -   168

§ 2. The First Isaiah -   -   -   -   -   175

§ 3. The Second Isaiah   -----   185

§ 4. The Internationalisation of the Prophetic Books. The

“ Age of the Prophets ”   -   -   -   -   194

THIRD PART

THE APOCALYPSES

Chap. I.—Hymns in the Synagogues   -   -   -   207

Chap, ii.—The First Apocalypses   -   -   -   -   223

Chap. III.—The Roman Period

§ 1. Hillel and Shammai -----   249

§ 2. Renascence of Prophetism -   -   -   257

§ 3. Jewish Agitators from the Year 1 to 66   -   -   261

Chap, iv.—The Invasion, notes on the Dispersion -   269

APPENDICES

I.—“Israel” ------   297

II.—The Samaritan Pentateuch -   -   -   -   298

III.   —Our “ Imperialist ” Theory of the Composition of the

Mosaic Books -----   298

IV. —The “Documents”............................299

V.—Simeon the Just -----   300

VI.—The Non-existence of the Prophets before the Chris-
tian Era ------   300

VII.—Were the Galilseans Jews? -   -   -   -   302

VIII.—Spelling of Proper Names -   -   -   -   303

Index

305
 PRELIMINARY NOTE

Before we begin our study of Judaism, let me give a little
elementary information in regard to Jewish history, geography,
and literature.

JEWISH HISTORY.

The following table indicates the chief divisions of Jewish
history, and, side by side with it, in a still more compendious
form, the stages in the history of surrounding peoples.

In this table there is no mention of the patriarchs, the
captivity of the Hebrews in Egypt, the exodus under Moses,
or the conquest of Canaan by Joshua; it will be seen, in the
course of the work, that these persons and events are legendary.
It is enough to say that tradition places Abraham in the
twentieth century; certain recent writers have sought to make
him a contemporary of Hammurabi. Moses is assigned by
tradition to the sixteenth century.

CHEONOLOGICAL SCHEME.

TO ILLUSTRATE THE HISTORY OF JUDAISM.

Jewish History.   Synchronisms.

Thirty Centuries of History

BEFORE THE SETTLEMENT OF THE ISRAELITIC TRIBES.

4000 B.C.: Sume r o-A k k adian
Empire in Ckaldsea.

In Egypt, first dynasties.

2000: Hammurabi, King of Baby-
lon.

1580: Amasis I., King of Egypt.
1300: Salmanasar I., King of
Assyria.

XIV-XI cent.: The Israelitic tribes
in Palestine.

Period of “Judges.”

IX
 X

PKELIMINARY NOTE

1000-5B8 B.C.

The Two Kingdoms.

1000: Saul aud David, then In the East, the great Assyrian and
Solomon.   Babylonian Empires.

In Egypt, the last national dynas-
ties.

933 : Death of Solomon.

The two kingdoms of Judah
and Ephraim.

722: Destruction of the kingdom
of Ephraim by Salman-
asar II., King of Assyria.

538: Destruction of the kingdom
of Judah by Nabuchodo-
nosor, King of Babylon.

The “Deportation.”

538-332 B.C.

Persian Period.

538: Conquest of Western Asia by
Cyrus, King of Persia; then
of Egypt by Cambyses, his
successor.

End of 6th century: Formation of
the State of Jerusalem under
Persian suzerainty.

The “ Restoration.”   490: Battle of Marathon.

5th century : Period of “ Esdras.”   480: Battle of Salamina.

429: Death of Pericles.

332-63 B.C.

Hellenistic Period.

332-141: Judaea passes under the
suzerainty of Alexander
and his successors (the
Ptolemies in Egypt, the
Seleucids in Syria).

167 : Civil war : the Machabees.

141: Triumph of the Machabees:
independence of Judaea.

332 : Conquest of Western Asia and
of Egypt by Alexander the
Great, King of Macedonia.

63 B.C.-70 A.D.
Roman Period.

63 : Pompey takes Jerusalem.   48 : Battle of Pharsala : reign of

Caesar.

40-4 : Reign of Herod.   31: Battle of Actium : reign of

Augustus.

35 A.D.: “Conversion” of St.

Paul.

66: Rebellion of the Jews against
the Romans.

70: Taking and destruction of
Jerusalem by Titus.
 Map op Palestine and the surrounding Countries, from the fifth to the First Century b.c.
 xii

PRELIMINARY NOTE

JEWISH LITERATURE.

The Bible is a collection of the following books :—

1. Legendary and Historical Books.—First, there are
the five books of Moses: Genesis, the best known of the five,
relates the creation of the world, the deluge, and the story of
the patriarchs—Abraham, father of the Jewish people, and
Jacob and his twelve sons, including Joseph, who was sold by
his brethren; Exodus depicts the captivity of the Hebrews in
Egypt, their flight under the leadership of Moses, the crossing
of the Red Sea, and the revelation of the law on Mount Sinai;
Leviticus continues the expounding of the law; in Numbers we
read the enumeration of the people of Israel, and the continua-
tion of the law; lastly, Deuteronomy expounds a new series of
laws, and closes with the death of Moses. This collection of
five books is often entitled “The Book of the Law”; it has
also the name of the Pentateuch, or book of five volumes.

It is customary among informed writers to add to the
Pentateuch the Booh of Joshua, an account of the conquest
of Canaan by the Israelites under the command of Joshua.
The six books thus combined form what is known as the
Hexateuch.

To the Hexateuch succeed the so-called historical books:
the book of Judges, for the more or less legendary period
which extends from Joshua to Saul; the two books of Samuel,
for the reigns of Saul and David, with the prophet Samuel as
protagonist; and the two books of Kings, for Solomon and his
successors, down to the taking of Jerusalem by Nabuchodo-
nosor1 and the Deportation.

The book of Chronicles is a duplicate of the historical books :
the books of Esdras and Nehemiah, which are a continuation of
Chronicles, describe the Restoration under Cyrus (end of the
sixth and the fifth centuries).

2. Prophetic Books.—After the Hexateuch and the his-
torical books come the books of the prophets. There are three
great prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel (Daniel, the
fourth, being generally referred to a different series)—and

1   At the author’s request I have retained the older and more familiar
spelling of Biblical names.—J. M.
 PRELIMINARY NOTE

xiii

twelve minor prophets, who extend from the period of the
kings to that of Esdras. These books consist of series of
discourses or apologues.

3. The Hagiographers.—We have then a group known
as the Hagiographers; a series of dogmatic romances, pious
stories, poetry, and philosophic essays, such as Job, the Song
of Solomon, Esther, and, most important of all, the book of
Psalms. To these is added the book of Daniel, which opens
the series of apocalypses.

We ought to add to the preceding group certain books which
have not been admitted by the Jews into the Canon of sacred
scriptures, though their importance is no less great. They are
called the Deutero-Canonical or Pseudepigraphic books. Most
of them are apocalypses: for instance, the books of Enoch.

Traditional Conceptions.

The synagogue and—after, and in harmony with, the syna-
gogue—the Christian Church have simply accepted as the date
of composition of each of these works (with the exception of
some of the non-canonical books) the date of the latest events
recorded in each book. Further, the principal character of
each of the works is almost always regarded as the author of
the work.

Thus Moses and Joshua are believed to have written the
Hexateuch in the sixteenth century before the present era.
The aged prophet Samuel is believed to have written, in his
severe style, the book of Judges and the books which bear his
name. Each of the prophetical books is supposed to have been
delivered orally at first, then written, by the prophet who is the
hero of each book. As to the hagiographers, tradition spreads
them over the whole period of sacred history, from Moses to
the last days of Judaism.

An elementary criticism suffices to cast doubt on these
conceptions. As soon as any freedom in the study of history
was obtained in Europe, the traditional teaching was assailed.
After considerable labour the critical school had, in the second
part of the nineteenth century, reached conclusions to which
it still adheres to-day, except on a few points of detail. Reuss
 XIV

PRELIMINARY NOTE

in France,1 and Graf in Germany, were the leaders of this
school. Renan, in his History of Israel, has accepted the
results of their exegesis without reserve, and this has given
them a wide publicity. It will therefore suffice to recall the
theory of Renan in broad outline to give an idea—in spite of
more recent advances in detail—of the conclusions of the
critical school.

Conceptions of the Critical School.

To the period of the Judges, of Saul, David, and Solomon,
are assigned the beginnings of Hebrew literature; namely,
certain old songs, such as the Canticle of Deborah, and a few
heroic narratives, which are believed to have been interpolated
in the body of the canonical books, where they are found.

Literary works do not begin, it is added, until the age of
the successors of Solomon, and a first version of Genesis was
written in Samaria. The prophets appear at the same time.
With the exception of the second part of Isaiah, and a few
fragments scattered through the whole series, the prophetical
books are still assigned to the dates which tradition had given
them. The books of Judges and Samuel are believed to have
been written in succession. Then Deuteronomy was promul-
gated by King Josiah, under the influence of the prophet
Jeremiah.

We come next to the ruin of Jerusalem and the Deportation.
The prophets continue their work: it is the age of Ezekiel
and the second Isaiah. Then there is the Restoration, and to
Esdras is attributed the promulgation of the laws contained,
chiefly, in part of Exodus, in Leviticus, and in Numbers. The
Hexateuch is presently completed, and thus the end of the
fifth century would mark the close of the great Biblical
literature.

After a comparative silence of more than two hundred
years, the second century is assigned as the period of the
psalms and the apocalyptic books, of which Daniel is the first.

1 In the introduction to his Histoire Sainte et la Loi (third volume of
his Bible) Reuss has given at length all the arguments—irrefutable
arguments—which forbid us to attribute the Pentateuch to Moses, or to
assign it to any period previous to that of the kings.
 PRELIMINARY NOTE

xv

Recent Conceptions.

Except as regards the Psalms and Daniel, the preceding
views have been ruined by M. Maurice Vernes, who has proved
that the compilation of all the Biblical writings, especially the
prophetical works, must be placed later, not only than the
destruction of the ancient kingdoms, but even than the
Restoration.1 M. Joseph Hal6vy, again, while defending the
antiquity of the Biblical works, has demonstrated that the
prophetical books are later than the Mosaic writings.1 2 3

Tradition placed the Mosaic books before the prophets.
The formula of the critical school, on the contrary, is: the
Prophets before the Law. With the new theory of dates we
return to the traditional formula : the Prophets after the Law.

Since the issue of the first edition of this book the discovery
of the papyri of Elephantine8 has given a most striking con-
firmation of the scheme of dates which we had adopted after
M. Maurice Yernes. They show that the Jews of Elephan-
tine knew nothing of a Mosaic law in the middle of the fifth
century, and were especially ignorant (down to 409) of the
fundamental law of Deuteronomy, though in constant com-
munication with the metropolis. Certain students of the
subject have made desperate efforts to resist the evidence; but,
on the whole, we are now granted almost everything except

the late date of the prophets. One thing at a time.......Quite

recently, however, Mr. Thomas Whittaker4 has given his valu-
able adhesion to our thesis.

On the other hand, we protest against the version of our
theories that is given by certain critics, such as Jean R6ville,
who have represented us as saying that not a single element
in the Hexateuch is earlier than the Restoration. We have,
on the contrary, explained in this very work how the compilers

1   See especially Risultats de l 'exig&se biblique (1890), Essais bibliques
(1891), and Duprttendupolytheisme des Hibreux (1891).

2   See Recherches bibliques, 3 volumes, 1895, 1901, and 1905.

3   Sayce and Cowley, Aramaic Papyri discovered at Assuan, London,
1906; Sachau, Drei Aramaeische Papyrusurkunde aus Elephantine, Berlin,
1907; and Sachau, Aramaeische Papyrus und Ostraka aus Elephantine,
Leipzig, 1911.

4   The Origins of Christianity, 2nd ed., London, 1909.
 XVI

PRELIMINARY NOTE

of the Mosaic writings made use, after the Restoration, of
legends and customs belonging to earlier times.

It is on these terms that we have proposed, and still
propose, the following conceptions :—

1.   Legendary and Historical Books.—The Mosaic
books, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, were composed
during the fourth, and at the beginning of the third, century.
To these we may add Chronicles, Esdras, and Nehemiah, which
are later.

2.   Prophetical Books.—Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the double
Isaiah, and the minor prophets, were composed in the second
part of the fourth, and in the course of the third, century.

3.   Hagiographical.—The Psalms, Daniel, and other
works, were composed during the second and first centuries.

Retaining the apocalyptic books, especially, in this third
and last series, we have framed a classification of the books
of the Bible which corresponds to the history of Judaism, and
which will provide the main divisions of our inquiry:—

The Law (books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and
Kings).

The Prophets.

The Apocalypses.

[Prometheus]

 PART FIRST

THE LAW

Chapter I.

THE EARLY DAYS OF JEWISH HISTORY

Fourteen centuries before the Christian era opens we
find, in the correspondence of certain Egyptian kings,
which we have discovered at El Amarna, Palestine
described as divided among a number of long-settled
peoples, and we read of the recent arrival of bands of
marauding Bedouins.

A column erected by an Egyptian king a hundred and
fifty years later mentions Israel among these peoples. It
is the first reference we have as yet to the name, and this
first indication, marking the appearance of Israel in the
history of the world, tells at the same time of its first
disaster. “ Israalou is annihilated,” says the column.
It is an announcement of the destiny of that extraordinary
people, unceasingly shattered, rising again unceasingly.

Then silence falls once more on Palestine, and until
about the year 1000 before the commencement of the
present era we have nothing to supply the deficiency but
the legends incorporated afterwards in the sacred writings
of Judaism.

Who were these populations that we find settled on the
plains of southern Syria in the fourteenth century, and
these tribes, hardly advanced beyond the nomadic life,
who sought a place among them? Whence did they
come ? To what families did they belong ? History can
only reply to these questions by hypotheses.

1

B
 2

THE EARLY DAYS OF JEWISH HISTORY

The last nomads to settle in the country seem to have
come from the deserts of the south. There is nothing
improbable in the supposition that, before they invaded
Palestine, these hordes of formidable Bedouins had for
many years wandered in the arid peninsula of Sinai. On
issuing from the pitiless desert they had found in Palestine
a country watered with many streams and shaded with
verdure, a vast oasis, in which they were disposed to
settle. The former inhabitants had been powerless to
repel them. They were hardly able to maintain their
hold in the most strongly fortified of their small towns;
while the nomads, scattered about them, reaped their
harvests, plundered their caravans, and fought with each
other. After a long period of guerilla warfare the
invaders succeeded in making themselves sole masters of
the territory; and, adopting fixed habitations, they slowly
absorbed what was left of the primitive population.

We have no reliable document to throw light on this
obscure origin. We can but hesitatingly pronounce a few
names: the Ammonites and the Moabites to the east,
the Edomites in the south, the Israelites in the centre.

They no longer lived under the shade of the tent.
Huts of earth and stone now lodged them; and they
gradually settled in the older towns, which they took.
The soil of Palestine was suited for the cultivation of
barley and wheat, the vine and the fig, as well as for the
rearing of cattle. The olive flourished in it, and honey
was plentiful. The pastoral people turned to agriculture.

At times there were still great migrations. Tribes dis-
placed each other, and, crossing the entire region, went
on to establish themselves more strongly in a different
district, or to seize by force the better situated or better
built villages.

The memory was preserved of an attempt made by an
Israelite sheik, named Abimelech, to subdue the surround-
ing population. But from that period of remote bar-
barism only a few half-legendary names have survived.
 THE EARLY DAYS OF JEWISH HISTORY

3

These were preserved by popular traditions, remains of
primitive monuments, and very ancient customs, for the
use of those who, at a later date, undertook to narrate the
past of the Jewish people. This was what is called the
period of the Judges.

The ethnographic development of the Israelites cannot
be regarded as different from that of the other peoples of
western Asia. Struggling in obscure savagery for exist-
ence, entirely resembling the neighbouring groups, just
as barbaric as they, Israel has no history during long
centuries.

On every side of the Israelites were great empires that
had reached the height of their civilisation long before.
To the south-west was Egypt, then at least three thousand
years old. In the east was Babylonia, still older than
Egypt. To the north-east lay Assur, the expansion of
which dated from only a few centuries back; in the north
was the vast feudal empire of the Hittites. A thousand
years earlier, in the time of Hammurabi, the Babylonians
had brought under their dominion the obscure region
which was one day to be known as Judaea. The Egyptians,
the Hittites, and, more recently, the Assyrians, had come
after them, and Palestine had begun to be a route between
the Nile and the Euphrates. Then the conquerors had
left these mountains to their inhabitants, and had dis-
appeared since the middle of the eleventh century.
Egypt was spending itself in internecine warfare; the
empires of the Hittites and Assyrians were likewise in
decay. But these successive masters had brought with
them a certain civilisation, which the Israelites had
inherited when they settled in the country. The high
culture of Babylonia had, as in the whole of western Asia,
accomplished its work.

It was, apparently, a little before the year 1000 that
the attempt which Abimelech had made in vain was
successfully repeated by Saul, the chief of the Israelitic
tribe of Benjamin. A number of guerilla raids were made
 4

THE EARLY DAYS OF JEWISH HISTORY

on the formidable and menacing populations of Philistia,
and Saul was able to extend his dominion over several
tribes.

The chief of one group, David, of the neighbouring
tribe of Judah, resumed and completed the work of Saul.
He seized the ancient town of Jerusalem, which had up
to that time remained in the hands of the early inhabitants.
Situated on the height of the Judaic plateau, in the most
fertile part of Palestine, and strongly entrenched, it was
made his capital. He rapidly imposed his dominion on
all the tribes of Israel, and possibly extended it to the
sister tribes, Ammon, Moab, and Edom.

First bandit, then chief of tribes, David was a successful
adventurer, who held his power by force and ability.
His successor, Solomon, seems to have been a peaceful
sultan, with a taste for splendour, who sought to make
something of a kingdom out of the confederation of rival
tribes subdued by his father. But none of his successors
had the strength or the ability to keep the elements
together.

If a fusion had been possible between the Israelites of
the north and those of the south, between the various
populations of Palestine, the history of the east might
have counted one more empire in the series of victorious
and fugitive dominations which followed each other in
Asia until the time of Alexander. But the fusion was
not accomplished, and the work of Saul, of David, and of
Solomon had no sequel.

It is well known that at the death of Solomon the
northern Israelites formed a small State, which was called
the Kingdom of Ephraim, and that the southern Israelites
(Kingdom of Judah) alone remained faithful to the house
of David. As to the neighbouring and related populations,
they rapidly fell away.

At this point the word “ Israel ” loses its meaning and
its use in the life of the peoples of Palestine. The name
“ Israelites ” had been that of a certain number of tribes
 THE EARLY DAYS OF JEWISH HISTORY 5

established before the year 1000 in southern Syria. Now
these tribes are gathered into two distinct groups, the
Ephraimitic and Judaic kingdoms. Tlie name of Israel
is about to pass out of the pages of history, until the day
when it will be revived by the policy of Jerusalem.1

Chronologists put the death of Solomon in the year
933. From that date, for many centuries, the story of
the two peoples, Ephraim and Judah, runs its obscure
course.

Like all small oriental courts, the primitive and rude
palaces of the kings of Judah and Ephraim abound in
domestic crimes. Writing is hardly known; the arts are
primitive, and, to build their royal houses, the sultans of
Judah bring workmen and precious material from the
industrial and commercial towns of Phoenicia, and pay for
them in market produce.

The political organisation is the most summary of
autocracies. The king is a despot, surrounded by a small
legion of janissaries, who guard his omnipotence; the
officers and governors are slaves of the monarch. There
is nothing in the nature of regular taxation or fixed
administration. It is a tyranny of the most barbaric
character.

Of fixed laws there is not a shadow. The first law to
be promulgated in Judah will be nearly two centuries
after the fall of the royalty. Josias did not promulgate
any legislation. There is no trace of codified law before
the time of Esdras. The one rule is custom; its sole
corrective, the caprice of the sultan.

Of the religion of these tribes, from whom will issue
the people that will establish Christianity in the world,
we are able to form a fairly reliable idea.

In all probability, the Israelitic tribes had, like the
Moabite, Edomite, and Ammonite tribes, brought with
them into Palestine the patron-god who had, from the

1 See Appendix I.
 6

[Prometheus]

THE EARLY DAYS OF JEWISH HISTORY

sacred tent in which he dwelt, protected their wandering
across the desert. Few monuments of this remote period
have been preserved for us, and the Bible, which is a
precise and precious document for the beliefs of the age
in which it was composed, gives us the most inaccurate
information on earlier times.

We may, nevertheless, conceive that in the course of
time, as the former Bedouins of the desert settled on the
soil of Palestine, the god of each of their tribes had
become attached to the land to which the tribe was
attached; and, while the gods of the earlier populations
fell to the rank of inferior divinities, he reigned in propor-
tion to the reign of his worshippers.

All the tribes had substantially the same religion. Did
they all adore the same god under different names ? Had
they different gods ? In view of the lack of precise
mythologies, history can tell us nothing; but the only
difference it has yet detected between the various gods of
the southern Syrians is a mere difference of name.

Let us leave to specialists the discussion of the religious
origins of Judaism, and restrict ourselves to the better
known period of the kings. Each of the little Palestinian
kingdoms has its god. Moab adores Camos; Ammon
adores Milkom; Ephraim and Judah adore Jahveh.1
These deities entirely resemble each other, and all are fed
with the fat of the flocks; in exceptionally grave circum-
stances children are sacrificed to them.

Each of these deities was the special god of his people,
the divine patron of his country. Just as Jahveh is the
god of Ephraim and Judah, Milkom is the god of the
Ammonites and Camos the god of Moab. It must not be
supposed for a moment, however, that, in sacrificing to
their own god, these peoples deny the god of their neigh-
bours. Judah prays to Jahveh, but does not fail to
recognise the formidable power of Dagon.

1 The form “ Jahveh ” seems to he preferable to “Jehovah” as a vocal
expression of the four consonants rP»P which make up the divine name.
 THE EARLY DAYS OE JEWISH HISTORY 7

One day the kings of Samaria, the capital of Ephraim,
and of Jerusalem, the capital of Judah,- set out to make
war on Mesa, king of Moab. What does Mesa do ? He
says to himself that perhaps Jahveh, the protector of
Jerusalem and Samaria, is not inaccessible to corruption;
and, in solemn sacrifice, he offers up to him his eldest
son. Jahveh, won by the sacrifice, grants him the
victory; Jerusalem and Samaria are betrayed by their
god, and vanquished. So we read, almost, in the third
chapter of the second book of Kings.

The protecting, patronising, territorial god is in effect
a national god; and, if the grandchildren of the Israelites
alone deduce the full consequences from the idea of a
national Jahveh, centuries later, it is nonetheless true
that the premises were common to all the inhabitants of
lower Syria from the tenth to the sixth century before
the present era. Mesa, king of Moab, conqueror of his
enemies from Ephraim and Judah, could thank his god
Camos (the author of the stele has made no mistake) in
the very same terms in which Ephraim and Judah would
have congratulated Jahveh, if they had won.

We must, therefore, conceive the history of the Hebrew
kingdoms up to the Deportation in the same way as that
of the neighbouring peoples; scientifically, it is impossible
to conceive it otherwise. Jahveh, who afterwards became
the one god of the Jews, the Eternal of the Christians,
and the Absolute of the philosophers, cannot have been

a less abominable idol than Camos or Milkom.........Let us

try, for our edification, to reconstruct the cult of Jahveh,
from the tenth to the sixth century.

At the summit of a high hill, in the shade of a vener-
able and verdant tree, is a large flat stone, uncut, on
which the victims are immolated. Before the altar are
two emblems. On one side is the matsebah, a column of
stone in the form of a menhir; on the other side is the
asherah, the trunk of a tree which has taken root there
and had its branches lopped off, or the trunk of a tree
 8

THE EARLY DAYS OE JEWISH HISTORY

forced into the soil. Some of the Semitic gods, such as
Bel of Phoenicia, have a female partner; but most of them
are originally hermaphroditic, and, at some unknown
epoch, the lord Jahveh was perhaps of this number, both
male and female.

To these rural altars the families bring the beasts
destined for the sacrifice. A sacrificial priest lives close
by. At their call he approaches, clad in a white tunic.
He begins by pouring oil and wine on the altar. Then
the beast is brought forward, and is felled and dismem-
bered by one skilful stroke of his knife. The pieces are
distributed. The priest has put aside those which custom
assigns to himself; the remainder is given back to the
pilgrims; and from the fat, which is set afire, the portion
of Jahveh rises to heaven in a black and acrid smoke.
Jahveh loves fat, says the Bible. Then they all take
their seats at the table, and the ceremony ends piously
with a banquet, at which the head of the family presides.

By the side of the altar of sacrifice is the tabernacle.
There the image of the god dwells and gives his oracles.

At first the images of Jahveh were manifold. He was
adored under the form of an aerolith, under the form of
a precious stone, and under the form of various animals.
It is well known that at Jerusalem he was a brazen
serpent; in Ephraim he was a young golden bull. We
speak of it to-day as a golden calf, because we have in our
language no word for the young male corresponding to
the name of the young female, heifer. [Bullock would
be the more correct term in English.] Jahveh was a
young bullock. He had also a human form.

Nothing of importance could be meditated, either in the
family or the tribe, without consulting Jahveh. It seems
that Jahveh replied with a “ yes ” or a “ no.” The ephod
was a small formless statue, plated with gold, representing
a human appearance of the god, with a pocket, in which
were two balls of different colours. One of these balls
meant “yes,” the other “no”; and the priest drew out
 THE EARLY DAYS OF JEWISH HISTORY

9

one ball in giving the divine answer. The tabernacle, a
kind of small chapel made of animal skin or of carpet, but
sometimes built of stone, sheltered the precious statue and,
perhaps, its interpreter. Not far away was the vigilant
sheik of the village, the owner of the sanctuary, with a
troop of well-armed servants. A consultation of the
ephod of Jahveh was paid for in ready money, and was
a good source of revenue. Sometimes a neighbouring
sheik made a sudden descent, at the head of his people,
to seize the god, and there were battles waged round the
profitable idol. There were even cases—witness the
seventeenth chapter of Judges—in which the sheik not
only stole the ephod, but enticed away its priest.

The aron, or ark, of Jahveh was a wooden chest in
which the precious stone, or the aerolith, was kept, and
it was represented as the dwelling of Jahveh. During
the battles of different peoples the ark of Jahveh was
brought sometimes into the midst of the army, so that
the presence of the god might lead to victory; but at
times—witness the fourth chapter of Samuel—the army
was nevertheless defeated, and the enemy carried off the
abode of the vanquished god as the most glorious of
trophies.

The sanctuaries of Jahveh were numerous. What we
have just described was the rural “ high-place.” In the
more important towns the sanctuaries rose to the position
of temples; but, save that they were of vaster proportion,
they only differed from the little provincial sanctuaries in
being enclosed by a wall. At the bottom of the court
was the tabernacle; in front of the tabernacle was the
altar of sacrifice; and on either side were the phallic
matsebah and the accompanying asherah. Round the
court was a line of priests’ houses; and near by was
always the house of the emir, the sheik, or the sultan,
the sentinel at the door of the divine patron. Whether
the sanctuary is a temple or a simple high-place, it is
always a tabernacle in which the representation of the
 10 THE EARLY DAYS OE JEWISH HISTORY

god dwells, and an altar on which cattle, and sometimes
human beings, are immolated.

The most famous temples of the period of the kings
were those of Jerusalem and Gabaon in Judah, and of
Sichem, Dan, Bethel, and Silo in Ephraim. In the
description of the Jerusalem temple, which is given in
the book of Kings, we must not seek more than general
and very summary indications, as the description was
composed long after the building had been destroyed, and
with the view of depicting an ideal type.

The proportions of the structure, the richness of the
materials, the number of the priests, and the splendour of
the accessories, distinguished the metropolitan temples
from the provincial sanctuaries. It seems even that
Solomon, in building the temple at Jerusalem, imitated
the magnificence of the Phoenician temples, and copied
their arrangement. The traditions of the east were not
less observed at Jerusalem than at Tyre or Sidon, or in
the capitals of Syria. By the side of the priests’ houses,
round the central court, where the sacrifices were offered,
there were the chambers of the sacred courtesans. Mas-
culine, as well as feminine, prostitution formed part of the
cult of Jahveh.

What was the further development of beliefs and
religious institutions in the Hebrew kingdoms of Ephraim
and Judah ? The same as those of Moab, of Ammon, of
Edom, or of any of the neighbouring peoples of Syria;
nor is it possible to conceive otherwise.

Jahveh was the god of Judah, just as Camos was the
god of Moab, or Milkom the god of Ammon, and conquest
alone could dislodge them. The older Palestinian cults,
anterior to the arrival of the Israelitic tribes, had assuredly
not wholly disappeared; but, as we said, these ancient
divinities only survived as inferior divinities. In each
population there was only one god officially adored, the
god of the conquerors, the patron-god: Jahveh in Israel,
Camos in Moab, Milkom in Ammon—each in his own
 THE EARLY DAYS OP JEWISH HISTORY 11

home. Syrian princesses, coming, by chance alliance, to
reign over the harems of the Hebrew kings, may have
brought with them the image of their national god.
Certain kings may, to please a favourite sultana, to flatter
their Phoenician ally or Ninevite suzerain, or to disarm
the anger of the foreign god, have set up altars to Bel or
Astarte in their kingdoms. That is not only possible, but
probable; yet these were exceptional occurrences, and the
old national religion was never altered. An altar of
Camos at Jerusalem would be as inconceivable as the
German flag at Paris.

Why, then, did the Biblical writers afterwards relate
that the sanctuaries of Baal, Moloch, and Astarte had
covered the land of Jahveh ? The source of this error—
an error of which, as we shall see, the policy of Jerusalem
took advantage—is easy to trace. The word king is
melek (moloch, according to an orthographical corrup-
tion) in Hebrew; lord is baal. Now, the titles of lord
and king were precisely those which the peoples of
Palestine lavished on their gods; throughout the whole
of Syria it was customary to speak of the local god as the
baal or the 'moloch. Like their neighbours, the Israelites
of Judah, as well as the Israelites of Ephraim, called
Jahveh their baal and their moloch ; that is to say, their
master and their king. When the practice was lost, the
biblical writers, who were at times great poets, but always
bad linguists, did not understand that this baal or moloch
was Jahveh himself, and they imputed to their ancestors,
in regard to the Phoenician Baal and the Ammonite
Moloch, sins of apostasy of which they were really
innocent. By an analogous blunder they confused the
tree-trunk, the asherah, with the Astarte of the Phoeni-
cians ; and the Jewish writers, and the Christian writers
after them, said that the idol of Astarte was raised,
throughout Israel, by the side of the matsebah before the
altar of Jahveh. Apart from a few chance altars, raised
in temporary circumstances to foreign divinities, and
 12 THE EARLY DAYS OF JEWISH HISTORY

[Prometheus]

apart from the survivals of ancient pre-Israelitic cults
which had passed to the condition of popular superstitions
(like the cult of certain saints in our own time), we may
affirm that, on the contrary, no temple could he conse-
crated, either in Judah or Ephraim, to any other god than
the god of Judah and Ephraim; any more than an altar
could be raised in Moab to any other than the god of
Moab.

When we have thus recalled, amid the stony mountains
of Palestine, the ancient sanctuaries of Jerusalem, Bethel,
Silo, Dan, Sichem, and Gabaon, with their stone altars,
their tent-like tabernacles, their matsebah and asherah,
and, in the case of the more magnificent, their walls of
worn masonry, the homes of their priests, and, in the
case of those which affected rivalry with the Egypto-
Phoenician temples, their chambers of double prostitution;
when we have pictured to ourselves the sheik followed by
his family, the lowly shepherd of the flock, the husband-
man bound to the soil, clothed in their white mantles
and turbans, leading the ox or the ram to the altar of the
god, or coming to ask of the ephod some news of the ass
they have lost, or some counsel as to the coupling of their
heifers or the proper season to sow; when, in the midst
of a frightful combat, we have seen the emir take the
supreme measure of sacrificing his son as a holocaust to
the anger of the god, we have nothing further to do, if
we would exhaust all that the authentic documents can
tell us of this remote past, of three thousand years ago,
but to evoke from their remote obscurity the processions
and the rejoicings at the festivals of Jahveh, which we
may witness to-day in this unchanging east.

These festivals are alike over the whole of Palestine,
and their order is dictated by the natural development of
the rural year. First we have the spring, when the
seedlings begin to break through the soil, and when the
mothers of the flock deliver. Little caravans form on all
sides round the village, and bring to Jahveh—each seeking
 THE EARLY DAYS OF JEWISH HISTORY 13

the nearest sanctuary—the first-fruits of the field, the
first-born of the flock.

Then it is harvest-time, which will later be called the
Pentecost. The Israelites pray to Jahveh and thank him,
with ripe ears of corn and weaned beasts, with the offer
of young bullocks, of yearling lambs, of the rams whose
odour he finds pleasing. During this time no servile
work is done.

Later is the vintage and the end of agricultural labour.
Prom all sides the caravans rise toward the sanctuary of
the protecting god. Each man has brought the fruit of
his trees, and branches of palms and willows from the
river-side, and for several days they rejoice before their
god. The sky is serene, the nights are mild. Round the
sanctuary, at the summit of the hill, at the foot of the
venerable and verdant tree, they have built huts of foliage,
the shelter of a few days. There they live, and eat and
drink, and celebrate the passing of the year and the
coming repose of the autumn. It is the feast of
Tabernacles, the feast of the tents of foliage.

What can literature have been among these half-
barbaric peoples, without written laws, without govern-
ment, in the throes of perpetual warfare, interrupted only
by the common cycle of annual festivals, and with this
local and idolatrous religion ?

There cannot have been any more literature in Ephraim
or Judah than in Moab, or in any of the neighbouring
kingdoms. Most assuredly there cannot have been more
than in the regions of higher civilisation, like Phoenicia.
And this literature is the same everywhere. At the court
of each of the petty oriental kings an historiographer
recounts the high deeds of the master. Among the
people a few short religious chants, not written, pass from
mouth to mouth. There are legends, finally, epical
narratives, certain familiar stories, which the elders teach
the young, and which pass down the course of ages.

The legends, the chants, the annals of the historio-
 14 THE EARLY DAYS OE JEWISH HISTORY

graphers of Moab, Ammon, and Edom have been lost in
the melting away of tribes which, once they had been
devastated, were unable to form again into peoples. On
the other hand, thanks to the Restoration, the official
annals, certain religious songs, and a few ancient legends
remained, after the confusion of the Babylonian captivity,
in the memory of the Jews of the fifth and fourth
centuries. These reminiscences enabled the Jews after-
wards to write the story of their past. But what was
afterwards made of this historiography and these legends
must not deceive us. Neither in Judah nor in Ephraim,
any more than in Moab, Ammon, or Edom, can we seek,
among such primitive races, anything else but the popular
songs, the legends, the epic stories, which we find at the
origin of all civilisations. We must not imagine that,
beside the despotic and formidable sultan, there was any
other historian than the servile scribe charged to leave to
his successors, in lines as brief as those of an inscription,
the memory of falsely represented exploits.

Have we at least some monument, some inscription,
from this remote epoch ? Have we found a single stone
of the harems of these petty monarchs, their citadels, the
ancient sanctuaries, the stone columns, the matsebahs,
the triumphal arches ? It was believed, a few years ago,
that Moab, in default of literature, had left us a really
ancient monument in the pillar (stele) of its king Mesa.
Unhappily, the famous stele seems too fine to be genuine.
Of ancient Hebraism no monument of the slightest
interest has come down to us. Apart from a few stones
of Jerusalem, apart from what the future may discover in
the deeper soil of Palestine, nothing has survived the
ages. While, in Assyria, Babylonia, Susa, and Egypt,
the spade of the explorer has brought before us the fallen
empires, with glories that fill us with amazement, and
disclose to us the marvellous civilisations they had in the
remotest depths of history, Judaea has as yet yielded only
a miserable past. This corner of the east lingered in the
 THE EARLY DAYS OF JEWISH HISTORY 15

primitive state which is, indeed, no longer barbarism, but
is hardly civilisation; and the great fortune of the Jews,
one day destined to spread far and wide, had not yet,
even in the seventh century, in the time of the last kings
of Judah, begun to reveal itself.

No history, indeed, is more pitifully obscure than that
of the petty kings of Ephraim and Judah, down to the
day when they were swallowed up in the flood of the
Assyrian and Babylonian invasions. After the death of
Solomon, his successors in Ephraim and Judah had worn
themselves out, during two centuries, in warfare with
each other or with their neighbours. And one day the
countless and terrible multitudes of the Assyrians appeared
in the north of Palestine.

The kings of Nineveh were then reconstructing one of
those vast empires which had successively held western
Asia, had pushed as far as Egypt, and, passing on to
Europe, had been arrested only at Marathon. The
Assyrian troops made their way by great invasions,
without settling anywhere. They passed like a devour-
ing wave, ravaging everything, carrying off the booty, and
massacring the population. A defeat would arrest them
for a few years ; submission, ransom, the paying of tribute,
would set them on their way again. Then the wave came
back like the tide, and, sooner or later, swept over the
barriers. The kingdom of Ephraim, situated in the north,
was the first to suffer. The ancient historiographers of
Samaria, and the writers of Kings after them, have left
us the record of the unequal struggle of Ephraim against
the northern foe; and the cuneiform monuments found
in the Assyrian ruins mention the misadventures of the
petty kings of the land of Omri.

Toward the end of the eighth century, two centuries
and a-half after Solomon, Salmanasar, king of Nineveh,
took Samaria, and bore away in captivity the king and the
chief inhabitants of Ephraim. The northern kingdom had
ceased to exist.
 16 THE EARLY DAYS OF JEWISH HISTORY

Jerusalem, more sheltered, in a stronger situation on its
hill, resisted the Assyrians. History tells that Sancherib,
the successor of Salmanasar, had come to lay siege to
Jerusalem, where the pious king Ezekias reigned, and
that the angel of Jahveh went forth one night, and smote
a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in the Assyrian
camp; so that, when the Hebrews arose in the morning,
they found the enemy slain. But the angel of Jahveh
intervened too rarely, and the little kingdom of Judah
(about the size of Corsica) only lived from that day in a
death-agony.

War was being waged between Nineveh and Egypt, and
the land of Judah was the line of march and the field of
battle. Over it passed the hostile armies, with which no
neutrality was possible. After a hundred years of guerilla
fighting in the mountains, of submission, revolt, and
desolation, the poor people found itself reduced to one
strong town, Jerusalem, perpetually besieged and ran-
somed, with its surrounding country eternally devastated.

Babylon had displaced Nineveh ; the formidable empire
of Assyria had fallen; the Chaldaean armies of Babylon
passed in turn across western Asia. After resisting the
Assyrians so long, the Jerusalemites were about to yield
to the unceasing attack of the Chaldaeans. We have
reached the time of Nabuchodonosor. The virulent
poetry attributed to Jeremiah has immortalised the last
years of the descendants of David; but, from party spirit,
it has perverted the truth.

It is very difficult for us to conceive the last years of
ancient Jerusalem, with its Josias, Joachim, and Sedecias,
as the chastisement of a people punished by a jealous god
for falling from its earlier virtue, or to see in them any-
thing else than the bloody and terrible resistance of a
small agricultural and pastoral population, who have been
devastated and have taken shelter behind the walls of the
citadel, where the emir dwells, in the shadow of the chief
sanctuary of their god. It is a savage struggle, and the
 THE EARLY DAYS OF JEWISH HISTORY 17

end of it must be either an improbable victory or destruc-
tion.

Jerusalem had, four centuries earlier, under the bold
and astute David, almost become the centre round which
might gather all these small populations, of like customs
and the same language and religion, to form a kingdom of
the southern Syrians, masters of the route between Egypt
and Asia, with every prospect of vanquishing the Phoeni-
cian ports, the Mediterranean, and the open west. Israel
fell short of this destiny ; a more extraordinary future
was reserved for it. These tribes, nomads but a short
time before, hardly emerged from barbarism in the sixth
century, wore themselves out in unceasing intestine war;
and their petty sultans, cruel and knavish as are all
oriental despots, could only pillage, betray, and massacre
each other, while the formidable power of the great
military dominations of Nineveh and Babylon increased
beside them.

In 588 Jerusalem is taken by storm by the troops of
Nabuchodonosor. The king Sedecias, after seeing his
sons slaughtered, has his eyes put out; bound in bronze
chains, he is carried off to Babylon with the chief men of
the town. The house of Jahveh is burned down.

The kingdom of Judah is destroyed; the kingdom of
Ephraim has disappeared a century and a-half before;
Moab, Ammon, and Edom, their brothers, successively
melt away. Syria is conquered. There is no longer a
Philistia ; Tyre alone holds out on its island. The whole
of Palestine is thrown into confusion. The Chaldseans of
Babylon use it as the Assyrians of Nineveh had done.
When they have conquered a land, they begin by carrying
off all that is portable in gold, bronze, and precious
objects. Then they burn down the buildings and destroy
the walls. They massacre all who resist, and divide those
who submit into two groups: the chiefs, whom they bear
away into captivity, and the common folk, whom they
leave, with the charge of paying tribute, on a land of

c
 18 THE EARLY DAYS OF JEWISH HISTORY

smoking ruins, of desolation, of long infertility. It is all
over then with Judah, as with Ephraim, and Moab, and
Edom, and Ammon. The Hebrew people has perished,
and it has perished without leaving any memorial—
neither in history, nor art, nor legislation, nor literature,
nor religion. It has perished like the most obscure of
these rough tribes of western Asia. But from this people
which has done nothing there will now come sons who
will do everything.
 Chapter II.

[Prometheus]

ESDBAS

§ 1. The Beginning.

The history of the Jews begins in 588.

Jerusalem, which has never been more than a small
and obscure town, is now a heap of ruins. On every side
the surrounding country is laid waste. Nothing is seen
in it but bands of marauding Bedouins. The soil is
cultivated no longer; there are now no flocks. The
sheiks and leading men have been massacred or borne
away. There remains only a miserable gathering of the
poorer folk.

The years pass slowly by.

Some measure of peace has been recovered, however.
People endeavour to rebuild their dilapidated huts. To
restore the walls of the town is out of the question. They
seek to draw closer to and help each other amidst the
general desolation, but they have no resources, no means
of defence, and, apparently, no energy. In the half-peace
which ensues upon great disasters, they return somewhat
toward the primitive savagery.

Still the years pass by.

These plains of southern Syria have become a desert
where one no longer dare put flocks to graze, where it is
fruitless to till the soil, where the olive and the fig are
blighted, and no one seeks to restore them. In the
general insecurity what remains of life gathers instinc-
tively round the old town, where it is easier to defend
oneself against the marauders, and the nearness of neigh-
bours gives one a feeling of confidence. Jerusalem has
remained a small centre, like Samaria. In and around
Jerusalem, in spite of the demolished walls and the

19
 20’

ESDRAS

blackened sanctuaries, there are some signs of sluggish
life. Two generations pass in this wise.

Suddenly, in the year 538, it is said that strange armies
have arrived from the distant heart of Persia, that they
have gathered on all sides round invincible Babylon, and
that one night, while the emperor Balthasar held festival
with his courtesans, they swarmed to the assault of the
impregnable capital; that Babylon has fallen and its
terrible empire is over. A new people is master of the
world; a new emperor reigns, Cyrus. Emissaries, with
armed cohorts to support them, go out to every part of
Asia. It is said that the new people is strong, but not
cruel; that the new emperor lets every man live at his
own fireside, worship his own god, tend his vine, lead out
his flock to pasture, and do his business in peace in the
markets of the large towns, under the shadow of his
formidable, but protective, power.

It is difficult to say, in the present state of science, if
the Persian domination and the government of Cyrus
were at the start as peaceful as the flattering historians
would have us believe. It seems clear, at least, that the
Persians acted differently from the Assyrians and Chal-
daeans. The latter had been ruthless conquerors, indifferent
to organisation; the Persians sought from the first to
organise their empire. The Persians were a great
aristocratic nation, of strong government, with severe
morals and religion, far removed from barbarism, with
laws and agriculture. Their powerful military organisa-
tion, instead of pressing toward savagery, maintained
discipline. Their Aryan spirit showed itself in a craving
for government, a leaning to administration, a feeling of
the need of order; so that, at the time when they were
leading their armies across Asia, Cyrus, Cambyses, and
Darius were writing edicts, appointing satraps, maintain-
ing an interchange of couriers with each of them, holding
the final court of justice, and governing.

The Jewish historians relate, with improbability of
 THE BEGINNING

21

detail, that, as soon as Cyrus had taken Babylon, he
allowed the descendants of the Judaites, who had been
brought into captivity by Nabuchodonosor, to return to
their country, rebuild their town, and restore their temple.
They assert that the first caravan left Babylon under the
guidance of Zorobabel, and returned to Jerusalem; and
that then, nearly a century later, in 458, Esdras in turn
led back a group of exiles to their country. They give
the names of the heads of families, count the caravans,
and relate the most precise details about the two
migrations.

Historical criticism retains only a few facts out of
these accounts. The Restoration was the work of the
Jerusalemites who had remained in and around the
town, rather than of the descendants of the exiles of 588.

The descendants of the Jerusalemites who had been
exiled to Babylon had definitely settled there. It is likely
enough that exiles who found the doors of their country
re-opened after fifteen, twenty, or even thirty years of
captivity would be eager to return to their homes. But
by the time of Cyrus it was already more than fifty, and
even sixty, years since the deportation (as the great
deportation of 588 had been preceded by another in 599).
Two generations had passed away, and they had settled
in the land of exile. At the time of the supposed return
of Esdras a hundred and thirty, or a hundred and forty,
years had elapsed since the deportation. There was no
longer question of returning to Jerusalem. They were
in Babylon, and would remain there. “ Captivity ” is an
incorrect word, and has done much to put a false com-
plexion on their history. There was no captivity or
slavery. They had been forcibly transferred to the banks
of the Euphrates, but had settled there, and now lived
there in freedom. Though the Babylonian deportation
had been compulsory, it proved to be merely the first of
the countless emigrations by which the Jews were after-
wards to fill the world. The Babylonian colony, the first
 22

ESDRAS

of the Jewish colonies, remained, grew, and lasted for
centuries.

That a small number of the Judaites returned to
Palestine in the time of Cyrus is quite possible ; but we
must seek the restorers, or, rather, the founders, of the
Jewish nation amid the miserable population which
remained in the country. The Persian domination, suc-
ceeding the Chaldsean domination, gave the Judaites who
remained in their home the chance of restoring and
organising. It seems that the world began to breathe
once more, after the Babylonian oppression; in Palestine,
as everywhere else, if a spark of life remained in the
breast, it was now possible to rise again. But nothing
was more lowly, and nothing is more obscure, than the
beginning of this resurrection.

The first known act of the story is the restoration of
the temple of Jahveh, which is attributed to Zorobabel.
However modest this reconstruction of the temple may
have been, it is the first stirring of the soul of Jerusalem.
As long as there was no temple there was nothing but a
stricken population, scattered over a land of ruin. The
temple means that Jahveh has returned to his land, and
that there is once more a god at Jerusalem.

Years passed by after the reconstruction of the temple.
Jerusalem had remained dismantled since 588; and, at
this period in the east, an open town was an easy prey to
the attacks of neighbours and nomads. The Biblical
writers narrate that a Jew of the name of Nehemiah, who
held the office of cup-bearer to the emperor Artaxerxes,
obtained from his master, and brought to Jerusalem,
permission to rebuild the walls. There were frightful
difficulties. The workers, as they built, had the trowel
in one hand and the sword in the other. It seems that
the work was completed less than a hundred years after
Cyrus, about the middle of the fifth century.

With temple and walls Jerusalem became a town.
With the narrow strip of country immediately around it,
 THE BEGINNING

23

the town became what we should call a small territorial
unity, and provided the conditions which were necessary
for life and prosperity.

Jerusalem and its outskirts were typical of the organi-
sation which the Persian government sought to promote
in the immense agglomeration of peoples under its yoke.
The Persian government expressly restored life to the
small States, the agricultural populations, the cities girt
about with countryside, all the little territorial unities.
A large State would have been a great danger; very small
States were preferable in the confederation which made
up the new empire. The policy of the Persian emperors
aimed at the development of the small States and preventing
the formation of large ones. In one of the chief towns of
Syria resided a satrap, with an army, who governed the
Syro-Palestinian region. He had a lieutenant and some
troops in each town, and his work consisted in maintaining
order and receiving the tribute. Provided it paid the
tribute and there was no disorder, each town and each
group of towns, each petty State, did what it pleased.

Was there a restoration in the other cities of Palestine
like that of the capital of the former kingdom of Judah ?
Did the earlier kingdom of Ephraim witness a revival of
Samaria? Had Moab, Edom, and Ammon the same
good fortune ? Did the old cities and centres of Syria,
devastated in the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests,
return to life ? Certainly. But the history of these
peoples is almost unknown. Even the history of Jeru-
salem, in spite of the brilliance of its later development,
is full of obscurity until the second century; it is the
more natural that we should know little of the destiny of
the unhappy neighbours who never attained distinction.
It is, however, certain that under the dominion of Persia
there was, from end to end of Palestine, a re-awakening
—I had rather say an awakening—of these stricken popu-
lations. At Samaria as well as Jerusalem, in the capitals
of Moab, Edom, and Ammon, in certain towns of Philistia,
 24

ESDRAS

at Damas, there was an organisation not unlike the
development of the burglier-cities of the Middle Ages.

In the midst of these petty States, and not differing
from them in origin, the little State of Jerusalem is
destined to grow and develop. It is the story of this
little State, similar at first to the story of the surrounding
States, that we have henceforth to follow. The inhabitants
of Jerusalem now call themselves by a new name, the
“ Jews.” The word “ Jew ” is a corruption of the older
“ Judaean but a new name characterises a new fact.
Formerly there was a kingdom of Judah; now there is
a Jewish people. The name “ Jew ” is born in history.
Instead of the little kingdoms which divided southern
Syria between them before the sixth century, there have
appeared a multitude of tiny, independent States, under
the common hegemony of the Persian emperor, not larger,
at the most, than one or two counties. Jerusalem is one
among this mass of rival cities, which are irremediably
lost to us in the night of a dead past. It has its thousands
of acres of pasturage and crops around it, and at this date
vegetates miserably, like in all respects to the obscure
cities about it; yet its name will one day stand high in
the world’s annals. We saw in the first chapter that the
story of the earlier kingdom of Judah was the same as
that of neighbouring peoples; we shall see in the history
of the Jewish people something wholly special, extra-
ordinary, unique. Did something happen at Jerusalem,
then, during the fifth century, which could not happen in
the rival cities of Palestine ? All the evidence is against
it. But from the common circumstances of all these
cities and all these peoples of Palestine one people alone
was able to develop the logical consequences. They had
a common origin, a common beginning; but everywhere
else was abortion—at Jerusalem alone we find a con-
tinuous development to the higher stage. Of different
children of the same parents one only becomes a Napoleon;
the others remain Jerome, Joseph, or Lucien.
 THE BEGINNING

25

[Prometheus]

For twenty centuries the Jewish and Christian ortho-
doxies have taught that the destiny of Israel can only be
interpreted as a prolonged miracle. History will simply
say that the development of the Jewish State, among the
other States of Palestine, has been a similar success to
the development of the Athenian republic among the
republics of Hellas, or to the even more extraordinary
development of Rome among the cities of Italy.

What is the Jewish people in its beginning ? A few
miserable shepherds or husbandmen, a few lowly artisans
and poor folk without chiefs, who have gathered round
the ruins of a dismantled city, three parts destroyed by
fire, from the terror of looting hordes and hostile neigh-
bours. Then, when a better age begins and a great peace
fills the world, the little town is gradually rebuilt, the
temple of its national god restored, its walls raised once
more in spite of a thousand difficulties, and some security
is provided for its inhabitants and its outskirts. We are
now in the middle of the fifth century. There is still no
organisation, no written law, at Jerusalem. The town,
except for its modest temple and perhaps a few houses, is
no more than a cluster of huts with an encircling wall.
There is no civilisation; it is the dubious age when a
people barely begins to exist. Savagery and misery lie at
the gates. It is much the same with Samaria, the old
capital of Ephraim, with the sacred towns of Bethel and
Silo, and with the small Syrian towns, the towns of Moab,
Ammon, Edom, and Philistia. Jerusalem, for all its
temple and its walls, remains a humble city of Palestine.

It is at this moment that the evolution commences
from which Christianity will issue. The date is fixed by
the name of Esdras.1

The story of Esdras, as we read it in the book which
bears his name in the Bible, is, like almost all the Biblical
stories, a doctrinal legend; that is to say, a legend with
the purpose of establishing a religious dogma. Criticism

1 See Appendix II.
 26

ESDRAS

can glean only two or three facts from it, and the greatest
obscurity surrounds the person, and even the age, of Esdras.
Was he the man of genius who first organised the popu-
lation of Jerusalem? Was he the head of a school of
reformers ? Is his name merely the symbol which con-
ceals a popular movement, or the geographical expression
which denotes a group ? It is supposed that Esdras was
a real personage, a priest of Jahveh; that he, in par-
ticular, forbade the Jerusalemites to have foreign wives,
and that he came after Nehemiah. But if his personality
is, and must apparently remain, shrouded in irremovable
obscurity, the work done, whether it was the work of one
(as is the more probable) or of many, or, better still, the
collective work of the nation, is clear and intelligible. It
is the first affirmation of the nationalism which was the
point of departure of Judaism.

When the men of Jerusalem had rebuilt the temple of
their god and restored their walls, it seems that, instead of
slumbering in their comparative security, they went on to
give a profound consideration to their situation, their past,
and their future; and that this profound meditation laid
the foundation of their fortune. The other peoples round
about them, Samaria, Moab, and Edom, similarly situated,
did not rise above the needs of daily existence. It seems
that the men of Jerusalem stopped to reflect, and interro-
gated their destiny. The others, accepting the lot which
chance dealt out to them, were content to live. The men
of Jerusalem trembled for themselves ; they dwelt on the
two long centuries, the horrors of which were barely over.
This little population, restricted to the few acres which
lay between the Cedron and the valley of Ben-Himmon,
shuddered to find itself conquered, isolated, and so weak,
and it reflected anxiously on its past. With the terrible
memories of ruin and deportation, with the painful recol-
lection of the slow and burdensome restoration, they
contrasted the memory of their earlier glories. Among
the older folk one still heard tell of the former greatness
 THE BEGINNING

27

of the nation’s heroes, the victories of David, and the
splendour of Solomon. They dreamed of the old Davidic
kingdom, and in exaggeration made it stretch from the
desert to the great sea. They told marvellous tales of the
temple so magnificently huilt by Solomon, and contrasted
with it the poor edifice of Zorobabel. While other nations
drowsily accepted things as they were, the men of Jeru-
salem asked themselves why this thing had happened to
them, and why that; why this former grandeur and why
the fall. They could not reconcile themselves to the
thought that they had once been great, and were now
miserable, unless it were for some extraordinary reason.
They put themselves the fateful question, Why, which is
the root of all resurgence.

The naive theology of the tenth, the eighth, and even
the sixth century, taught that the victories of nations were
the victories of their protecting gods, and their defeats a
defeat of the god. A victory effaced a defeat. Jahveh,
once beaten under Achaz, had had his revenge under
Ezekias. It was a very natural idea in the turmoil of
brigandage, sometimes profitable, sometimes a failure,
among the ancient populations of Palestine. But the
frightful events which had ensued, the Chaldaean invasion,
the ruin and exile, had definitely brought these tribes into
subjection, and had meant the defeat of their gods. And
each people continued, as before the Babylonian conquest,
to honour its own god. Moab worshipped Camos, Ammon
worshipped Milkom. In the same way Jahveh reigned at
Jerusalem. Just as Camos was the territorial god of
Moab, Jahveh remained the territorial god of Judah.
Nevertheless, while the neighbouring peoples acknow-
ledged the defeat of their gods, the men of Jerusalem
proclaimed that their god had not been conquered. On
the very morrow of the Babylonian deportation, under
the ignominy of the Persian domination, they declared
that Jahveh was the terrible master who had thought fit
to chastise his people, and now thought fit to restore it.
 28

ESDRAS

They affirmed that their disasters and their ruin and
oppression were the work of their national god himself.

In appearance, there was no change of the old traditions
in the Palestine of the fifth century; but in reality the
whole soul was revolutionised in the men of Jerusalem.
While the others thought it enough to cultivate the
protecting deity, who sent the sun and the dew, the men
of Jerusalem put their own despair, anxiety, and pride
into the terrible soul which they gave to Jahveh. It was
a prodigious effort of a few heroic men. The other gods
had become poor secondary deities, oppressed with their
people, now, under the Persian hegemony, ruling only the
small happenings of their little towns. The men of
Jerusalem had the boldness to proclaim that their god
had triumphed, that he had deliberately allowed the
downfall of his people, and that he now willed its
restoration. Jahveh was no longer a mere territorial
god, sitting in the ark, a lover of fat. He appeared to
Esdras, to the Esdras group, in the agony of their
humiliation, as the terrible master who had done every-
thing.

Why had Jahveh willed these abominable things—the
burning of his temple, the destruction of his town, the
dispersal of his people, and the desolation of his land
during two hundred years ?

As a stricken soul, which has felt the throes of agony,
is determined to learn the cause of its misfortune, and, if
it is to live again, absolutely needs to know why it came
so near death, so the Esdras group invented the only
answer which seemed fit to reassure its life.

This answer had to be the powerful stimulant which
would restore the patriotism of the people, and exalt that
patriotism into the most sombre fanaticism. The men
of Jerusalem must be united in a savage love of their
city. Patriotism must in future fill every heart until
there is no place for any other feeling. The love of
Jerusalem, their country, must flash forth in the depths
 THE BEGINNING

29

of their souls so vividly that for ages to come its walls
will need no other light.

What was there, then, among these peoples of southern
Syria to correspond to what we now call our country ?
At Jerusalem this thing was Jahveh; in Moab men called
it Camos; in Ammon it was Milkom; in Tyre, Bel and
Astarte; at Damas, Rimmon; and in Philistia, Dagon. If
this exalted patriotism had been born in Moab or at
Damas, it would have found expression in the names of
Camos or of Rimmon. Being born at Jerusalem, it was
uttered in the name of Jahveh.

The man, or the group, known as Esdras announced
that Jahveh had devastated his land, scattered his people,
destroyed his town, and burned his temple, because his
town had denied him, and his temple had witnessed the
setting-up of foreign idols in face of his jealousy. That
meant that the land of Judah had been laid waste, its
people scattered, and the town destroyed, because their
ancestors had let the love of their country grow cold in
their hearts; because the people had not held together in
the great national solidarity; because nationalism, which
alone makes a people great, had been enfeebled in the
town of Jerusalem.

The defeat, the ruin, the deportation, the obscure
misery, and the servitude had punished the soul of Judah
for not maintaining the great passion for one’s country,
for lack of which every people is condemned to death.
Esdras expressed that when he proclaimed that Jahveh
had punished his people for being unfaithful to him, for
having worshipped other gods. The restoration, the
return of hope, the better prospect, would reward the
Jewish people, if it drew together in a fiercely exclusive
nationalism. Esdras expressed that when he announced
that Jahveh restored the life of his faithful children, and
promised them a happy future if they consecrated them-
selves entirely to him.

Historically, it was false to say that the old kingdom of
 30

ESDRAS

Judah had been faithless to Jahveh. We know that
Jahveh had always been worshipped in Judah, and it is
impossible to conceive that any other national god than
Jahveh had been worshipped there. But Esdras was not
concerned with historical criticism; and the glorious
untruth of those who restored the Jewish nation to life
in the fifth century met none to contradict it. The soul
that has come back from the death-agony, and seeks to
know why it has suffered, does not need a true answer;
it needs a reply that will prove a remedy. The untruth
of Esdras was the sole remedy that could, and did, save
the Jewish soul. After such dire catastrophes, in the
midst of continual danger, in face of a future full of peril,
it was necessary to put soul into a people that would live.
It was necessary to say to it: “ Behold thy flag! In that
is thy strength. If thou wilt keep thy eyes on that
emblem, thou shalt be strong. If thou turnest away,
doubt not that thou art lost. Know that, as often as thy
fathers rallied to it they won glorious victories. And
when they turned away from it remember Nabuchodo-
nosor the conqueror, remember they blackened home and
scorched vine, remember the exile by the rivers of
Babylon. Thou hast been conquered, Judah, because
thou didst betray Jahveh. Thou hast recovered because
thou hast returned to him. Be faithful to Jahveh, Judah,
and thou shalt be happy.”

It was thus that the profound and desperate meditation
of the men of Jerusalem, in the fifth century, saved them.

It was thus that the earlier local god of Judah, the
protecting Jahveh of Judah, like to the Camos of Moab
and the Milkom of Ammon, was transformed, enlarged,
animated, and became the formidable being whom we
afterwards find depicted in the Bible.

At Jerusalem, then, the religious question was a
national question. The unutterable name, Jahveh, of
which scholars are unable to find the origin, has this
meaning, and may be thus translated: our Fatherland.
 THE ESDRAS SCHOOL

31

[Prometheus]

“ Thou shalt love the lord thy god with all thy love,”
commands Deuteronomy. That means: “ Thou shalt
love thy country above thyself.” The standard to which
the patriots were to rally was the name of the god.
Henceforth to offer outrage to Jahveh would be to insult
the flag. In great nations there is a blind and fierce idol,
with sword in hand, the Fatherland, which demands
human sacrifices, and to which fathers must bring their
children as holocausts. At Jerusalem the idol was named
Jahveh.

This exalted nationalism, of which we are now to
follow the development, was the cradle of Christianity.

§ 2. The Esdras School.

Tradition places in the year 458, three-quarters of a
century after the rebuilding of the temple, the arrival of
Esdras at Jerusalem. There was much dispute about
this date, and even about the historical reality of Esdras,
when the Elephantine papyri1 were found to confirm, not
indeed the historicity of Esdras, but the dating of the
events which are ascribed to him. We have therefore, in
this study, taken Esdras as the expression of the school,
political group, or national movement, which developed
at Jerusalem at this very epoch.

The work of the Esdras school consists of three great
leading achievements:—

1.   The prohibition of any other cult than that of
Jahveh.

2.   The prohibition of mixed marriages.

3.   The prohibition of any representation of Jahveh in a
material form.

Prohibition op any other cult than that op
Jahveh.—In the older Jerusalem of the kings, and in

1 See p. xv.
 32

ESDRAS

the restored Jerusalem of Zorobabel and Nehemiah, there
had not been any other cult, apart from insignificant
exceptions, than that of Jahveh. But in this the
Jerusalemites merely followed the common Palestinian
custom of worshipping no god but their own. With the
Esdras school the exclusion of foreign gods becomes a
formal proscription.

Was there some danger at Jerusalem, at the time,
of the intrusion of foreign cults ? At first communica-
tion between one people and another had been
rare and difficult, and the Persian empire did not
concern itself with proselytism. One cannot see how
the old Jahveh, in the depths of his sanctuary, could
be disturbed by any god of the district or by a Persian
god.

Did the danger come from the ancient gods of
Palestine, which Jahveh had once reduced to the condi-
tion of vanquished gods, as the Israelitic tribes subdued
their worshippers ? As we have said, these cults had not
disappeared; but they had become lowly popular super-
stitions, and it is impossible to imagine the ancient gods
of Canaan, in the Judah of the fifth century, otherwise
than as little agrarian gods, insignificant local demons,
which no more threatened the lord Jahveh than the altars
of a St. Antony of Padua contain a menace to the official
Catholic cult.

The obscurity of Jewish history at this period reduces
us to hypotheses. In any case, the legislation of the fifth
and fourth centuries betrays a constant preoccupation
with foreign cults and the ancient cults of Palestine.
With Esdras, in fact, the law of fierce patriotism, without
which the Jewish State could not exist, always took the
form of a kind of uncompromising fidelity to the national
god. Jahveh alone is the god of Jerusalem, is the in-
variable starting-point of the Jewish legislation. As soon
as there were any laws at Jerusalem, apostasy—that is to
say, the worshipping by a Jew of any other god than
 THE ESDRAS SCHOOL

33

Jahveh—was denounced as the greatest of crimes, and
punished with death. One after another the most
frightful measures were passed to prevent the possibility
of a religious secession.

The text we are about to quote is about half a century
later than Esdras, but it will give an accurate idea of the
way in which the Esdras school were disposed to treat
anti-patriotism:—

If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or
thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend,
which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying:
Let us go and serve other gods....

Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto
him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou
spare, neither shalt thou conceal him :

But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be
first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the
hand of all the people.

And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die;
because he hath sought to thrust thee away from Jahveh
thy god.....

If thou shalt hear say of one of thy cities, which
Jahveh thy god hath given thee to dwell there, saying:
Certain perverse men are gone out from among you, and
have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying: Let
us go and serve other gods....

Then shalt thou inquire, and make search, and ask
diligently.

And behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that
such abomination is wrought among you ;

Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city
with the edge of the sword, thou shalt curse it with all
that is therein, and thou shalt slay the cattle thereof with
the edge of the sword.

And thou shalt gather all the spoil of it into the midst
of the street thereof, and shalt burn with fire the city and
all the spoil thereof every whit, for Jahveh thy god; and
it shall be an heap of ruins for ever; it shall not be built
again.1

The purpose of the Inquisition was to establish a

1 Deuteronomy xiii. 6-16. [The few modifications of the English text
are in accordance with the author’s reading of the Hebrew.—J. M.]

D
 34   ESDRAS

religion. The purpose of the atrocities of Deuteronomy
was to found a nation.

Prohibition of Mixed Marriages.—This was, perhaps,
the special work of Esdras.

The princes came to me [says Esdras, in the book
which is ascribed to him] saying: The people of Israel,
and the priests, and the Levites, have not separated
themselves, in regard to their abominations, from the
people of the lands.

Eor they have taken of their daughters for themselves,
and for their sons ; so that the holy seed have mingled
themselves with the people of these lands.

And when I heard this thing, I rent my mantle and
my garment, and plucked off the hair of my head and of
my beard, and sat down astonished until the evening.1

And later on :—

Now therefore give not your daughters unto their sons,
neither take their daughters unto your sons, nor seek
their peace or their wealth for ever; that ye may be
strong and eat the good of the land, and leave it for an
inheritance for your children for ever.2

And foreign women were expelled, with the children
they had had.

The narrative is legendary; but the fact seems to be
historical, and there is reason to allow Esdras the honour
of having accomplished it. All the Hebrew books make
the prohibition of mixed marriages one of the funda-
mental laws of Judaism. When they have to relate the
apostasies of Solomon, they will ascribe them to the
influence of the foreign princesses introduced into his
harem. When they have to describe the edifying life of
the typical heroes of Judaism—the life of Abraham and
his descendants—they will marry them solely to women
of their own race. Indeed, the Deuteronomic law was
explicit:—

Neither shalt thou make marriages with them [the
surrounding nations] ; thy daughter thou shalt not give

1 Esdras ix. 1-4.

2 Esdras ix. 12.
 THE ESDRAS SCHOOL

35

unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy
son.

For they will turn away thy son from following me,
that he may serve other gods.1

The prohibition to take a foreign wife was a powerful
means of maintaining at Jerusalem the exclusive cult of
Jahveh ; that is to say, of promoting a purely national
development. Later the Jewish writers will speak of the
sacredness of their race, and will shrink from the mixed
marriage as a sacrilege. But in the fifth century there is
only question as yet of inspiring a fierce nationalism,
under the pretext of an absolute consecration of the Jewish
families to Jahveh. We have to come to the first century
before the present era to find the Jews relaxing in their
observance of the old law, and to St. Paul to discover
their entire rejection of it.

Historians admire the decision with which the men of
Jerusalem made for themselves this anti-human law,
which, in repelling from them the women of the surround-
ing populations, at the same time isolated them in the
midst of those peoples.

Prohibition to Represent Jahveh in a Material
Form.—Here the historian does not merely admire the
opportuneness of a severe law, but is amazed at a con-
ception so profound that he can hardly grasp its reali-
sation.

How will it be possible to make this enormous differ-
ence between Jahveh and the other gods? How will it
be possible to isolate him so jealously in the heart of the
Jewish people ? How can they make of him so excep-
tional a god that the cult of other gods will never mingle
with his, and the Jewish fatherland will be for ever the
sole deity of these ardent hearts ?

The men of Jerusalem in the fifth century imagined
that the other gods, such as Camos, Bel, or Rimmon,

1 Deuteronomy vii. 4.
 36

ESDRAS

might be represented as an ox, a serpent, or a fish, as of
either or both sexes, but that Jahveh should have no
representation or emblem; that he should rule, sexless
and invisible, in the storm.

The critic finds it difficult, in view of the scarcity of
documents belonging to the period, to say how the idea
came to the Jews of the fifth century of a god without
images. Possibly it was suggested to them by the Iranian
religion, which had no representations of Ormuzd; though
the influence of Iranism on the Jews seems to be later
than the fifth century, and it is at Babylon and in the
Babylonian civilisation that the men of Jerusalem were
educated. There may have been some accidental cause.
Perhaps the destruction of all the emblems of Jahveh at
the time of the Babylonian conquest, the extreme misery
of the Jerusalemites at the time of the Restoration, the
impossibility of making divine images rich and magnificent
enough to represent the god of whom they now dreamed,
or a repugnance to their rude and inadequate images,
inclined them to dispense with a material representation
of their deity altogether. We do not know. Accidental
causes are unknown, the deeper cause is clear. In impos-
ing this new law, he whom we call Esdras yields to a
powerful political need. The man of genius is but the
mouthpiece of a group. He seems to stand out in
advance because he is the first to formulate clearly
the law which is vaguely muttered by those about him.
At times he seems to be in opposition to his contem-
poraries, but it is an illusion. He is merely overpowering
their inertia, pressing them toward the goal to which they
are unconsciously tending. So extraordinary a novelty as
a god without images in the Palestine of the fifth century
must be explained by the normal development of a
nationalism which was pushed to its extreme conse-
quences. For the Jews of the fifth century Jahveh, or
the Jewish fatherland, had to be something unique,
something monstrously and incredibly isolated. This
 THE ESDRAS SCHOOL

37

was necessary for the preservation of Jahveh; in other
words, that the Jewish fatherland might survive amidst
so many dangers.

Take ye therefore good heed to yourselves lest ye make
you a graven image, the similitude of any figure,

The likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast
that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that
flieth in the air,

The likeness of anything that creepeth on the ground,
the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the
earth:

And 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, shouldst be driven to worship them,
and serve them.....

And if ye corrupt yourselves, and make a graven image,
or the likeness of anything, and shall do evil in the sight
of Jahveh, thy god, to provoke him to anger,

I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day
that ye shall soon utterly perish from off the land.1

Similar is the command of the Decalogue :—

Thou shalt have none other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make thee any graven image......2

After the period of Esdras there is no representation of
Jahveh in the temple. At the bottom of the sanctuary
there is a curtain, and the holy of holies behind the
curtain is an empty room. The Jewish god dwells there
unseen. The golden bulls, the bronze serpents, the old
ephod and matsebali and asherah, are memories of
abomination; or, rather, they change their meaning.
The golden bulls are now identified with the angels of
Jahveh, the Kerubim; the bronze serpents with the
Saraphim; the ephod becomes a ritual garment; the
matsebali is now merely a commemorative column. The
asherah alone perishes in the wreck; it is taken to be a
representation of the Phoenician Astarte. The old cult
disappears, is proscribed, and becomes criminal.

1 Deuteronomy iv. 16-26.

2 Deuteronomy v. 7-8.
 38

ESDRAS

[Prometheus]

And now a new phenomenon appears. Representations
of the deity are so severely condemned that people confuse
the ancient representations of Jahveh with the figures of
the other gods of Palestine. Idolatry means the worship
of images; it may apply to the worship of an image of
Jahveh, just as well as to the worship of images of other
gods. The older Israelites had been guilty of idolatry in
worshipping Jahveh under a human or animal form; but
they had not worshipped foreign gods, such as Camos and
Milkom, under these material forms. The Jews of the
Esdras school would make no distinction between Jahvic
and foreign idolatry; the one was coupled with the other
in a common execration; and, when some centuries had
passed, the prophets did not even understand that these
material representations had belonged to Jahveh. This
failure to understand the ancient religion of Israel is, as
Maurice Vernes has shown, one of the proofs of the
extremely late date of the prophetical books.

In after years the idea of a god without material repre-
sentation will be one of the forces of the Judaism which
becomes Christianity, when it presents itself to minds
that love abstraction and are weary of the symbolism
of the Greek divinities. But we must understand that in
the fifth century, and as long as the temple of Jerusalem
stood, this cult of a god without images, instead of being a
spiritual cult, was just as grossly materialistic as that of
the other gods. At Jerusalem, just as everywhere else,
the local god is honoured by the immolation of animals.
The beasts are slain before the altar. The priest is a
sacrificer—in other words, a butcher. The Mosaic legis-
lation will publish a manual of slaughtering; and, when
Jerusalem becomes the holy city, the goal of countless
pilgrims, the temple will be a vast slaughter-house where,
in honour of the unseen god, the blood of animals will flow
without ceasing.
 THE FIRST INSTITUTIONS

39

§ 3. The First Institutions.

Meantime the institutions which were inspired by the
great design of centring all the strength of the Jewish
soul on the name of Jahveh were gradually rising.

The Babylonian influence, which will presently prove
overwhelming at Jerusalem, is not yet appreciable except
in so far as it dominates the whole civilisation of western
Asia. The disciples of Esdras shut themselves sternly
within their walls, under the shadow of their temple.
The Jewish element rules as exclusively as is possible.
Then the nationalism of the Jews clothes itself at once
with the religious garb which it will never again lay
aside. The form of government becomes a theocracy.
The institutions, evolving round the religion of Jahveh,
assume a religious form. The laws, civil as well as
hygienic, will become religious laws. The government
will assume a religious character, and the leaders of the
State will rule in the name of Jahveh, and be priests.

How did the priests of the local god attain, in the
fifth century, to the government of the State of Jerusalem ?
In the absence of documentary evidence, we can only say
that the historical probabilities point to the priests as the
only men, after the Restoration, who were capable of
exercising authority in the town and its neighbourhood.

The State of Jerusalem advances under the supervision
of its Persian masters; the emperor who reigns at Susa,
and the satrap who governs in Syria, grant the Jews full
liberty of administration, provided that they live in peace
and pay the tribute. There was not, and could not be,
a Jewish army, and assuredly there was no military
caste. The Persian hegemony laid no other specific
obligation on its subject-peoples than political submission
and taxation. There was, then, nothing of a military
character at Jerusalem to take the lead. The extreme
poverty and lack of commerce and industry during the
 40

ESDRAS

century which followed the Restoration prevented the
formation of a middle class. Industry never flourished
at Jerusalem. Commerce remained scanty when the
Persian peace was established in the east. An oligarchy
of merchants was hardly more possible than a military
oligarchy in the Jerusalem of the fifth and fourth
centuries. The domination of a petty sultan, a sort of
pacha ruling under the suzerainty of the Syrian satrap,
could not have been set up without at least a semblance
of national military authority. Supported solely by the
power of Persia, it would have been odious to the people.
The Persian Empire never inclined to have its small
vassal states administered by prefects. It was only the
organisation of Rome that would send functionaries to
the other end of the world. In view of the impossibility
of any other form of government, therefore, a clerical
government was almost inevitable, from the very nature
of the situation. And it was found that this government
corresponded with the needs of the people of Jerusalem.

Was the patriotism of the Jews formulated in the
name of the national god because a priestly government
was the only one possible at Jerusalem in the time of
Esdras ? Or did the government of Jerusalem fall into
the hands of the priests because Jewish patriotism
expressed itself in the name of the national god ? It is
probable that cause and effect acted together and gave
rise to a twofold logical necessity; the priestly govern-
ment confirmed the patriotism of the Jews in a religious
form, and the concentration of their patriotism in a
religious form decisively strengthened the priestly govern-
ment.

From the time of Esdras—that is to say, from the time
when the Jewish State began to live—the priests found
themselves at the head of the social hierarchy. There
was neither military caste, nor oligarchy of merchants,
nor despotic pacha. The Persian lieutenant represented
the distant military power, to which no one dreamed of
 THE FIRST INSTITUTIONS

41

offering resistance, and the local police sufficed to maintain
order. There was a sacerdotal caste; and the leader of
the priests, the high-priest, governed. The first care of
the Jewish legislators seems to have been to establish a
system of tithes on the harvest and on cattle, a scheme
of offerings, voluntary or involuntary, which would
rapidly gather into the hands of the priests all the wealth
possible in the miserable little country. The sacerdotal
caste was soon as rich as it was powerful.

It quickly formed itself into a hierarchy. Round the
person of the high-priest a certain number of families
seized the revenue and the authority. The Mosaic law
will give the name of priest-levites to these privileged
members of the priesthood. The simple levites, at a
lower level than these, formed a sort of army, maintained
and directed by the priests. Finally, at the bottom of
the sacerdotal caste there were the lowly functions of the
poor officers who were not even levites. If we imagine
the vast Catholic Church reduced to the proportions of a
Church having control of a community of less than thirty
thousand souls, we can picture to ourselves the bishops
with their pope, then the army of curates and vicars,
and, as was seen in the Middle Ages, the crowd of
humbler officials working in obscurity about the altar.

There was this difference, that at Jerusalem the priests
made and applied the laws and administered justice.
The executive and judiciary power, as well as the legis-
lative authority, belonged to them. They were the
heart, the brain, and the arm of Jerusalem.

Beneath the sacerdotal caste the people were distri-
buted in families of husbandmen, shepherds, and small
merchants. They were far removed from the life of the
patriarchs; nevertheless, beyond the little commerce that
was indispensable in any community, agriculture and the
rearing of cattle were the sole business of the Jews in
the Persian period. The legislation of Exodus, Deutero-
nomy, and, later, Leviticus, does not deal with any other
 42

ESDEAS

customs than the quite primitive ways of an absolutely
territorial people, among whom there is great poverty.

Finally, the Sabbath is a theocratic institution; its
purpose, like that of the prohibition of mixed marriages
and the condemnation of any representation of Jahveh in
a material form, is to isolate the nationalism of the Jews
among the other peoples.

The Sabbath would have little interest if it were no
more than a day of idleness for the profit of the workers,
the slave as well as the free man, even to the beasts of
the fields. It is, on the contrary, the day consecrated to
Jahveh ; it is a sort of tithe that the Jew will take from
the week, the offering of a day which he owes to his god.
It is a taboo day. Let any man who doubts this open
his Bible :—

The seventh day is the sabbath of Jahveh, thy god...

Remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt,
and that Jahveh, thy god, brought thee out thence through
a mighty hand and by a stretched-out arm; therefore
Jahveh, thy god, commanded thee to keep the sabbath
day.1

The law of the third century puts the motive even
more plainly:—

Jahveh rested on the seventh day; wherefore Jahveh
blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.2

The man who desecrates the Sabbath is put to death.3
We must admit that the death-penalty would be excessive
if it were merely a matter of ensuring respect for a purely
humanitarian institution.

Even more than circumcision, which was common to
many of the peoples of Palestine and has not a great
importance in the Bible, the Sabbath is the outward mark
by which the children of Jahveh must separate themselves
from other men. He therefore does not merely order

1 Deuteronomy v. 14-15.   2 Exodus xx. 11. See also xxxi. 12-17.

8 Exodus xxxi. 14-15.
 PROGRESS OF..THE STATE OF JERUSALEM 43

rest, but commands abstention from all work, of any kind
whatever, and an entire consecration to Jahveh.

The Jewish institutions are, therefore, organised on an
essentially nationalist basis, and in an essentially religious
form. The Persian suzerainty was the providential feature
which, by maintaining a general peace in the world,
allowed the theocracy to develop. If Jerusalem had been
independent, it would have needed an army, a military
power, and would have had the precarious existence of
all petty States. As a vassal of Persia, Jerusalem was
able to begin in freedom the extraordinary work of con-
quering Palestine, and then the world, with the arms of
a spiritual body.

§ 4. Progress of the State of Jerusalem.

In virtue of the nationalism which its priests had
imposed on it, the little State of Jerusalem enjoyed a
great prosperity from the end of the fifth century. The
Jewish soul was greater than that of neighbouring peoples.
Jerusalem was a centre, or, rather, a heart, from which
the strength streamed out on every side. The Jewish
activity—the activity of the men of Jerusalem—was felt
as far as the frontiers of the Palestinian territory.

In Palestine the State of Samaria alone made some
show of resistance to Judaism. We have not the needful
documents to tell the story of the development of Samaria.
Possibly the capital of the former kingdom of Ephraim
had preserved its regional supremacy, and it may have
been an important town in the sixth century, when
Jerusalem was only just beginning to revive. Possibly it
developed at equal pace with Jerusalem in the fifth
century, retaining, while Jerusalem enlarged, its moral
autonomy, with its temple on Mount Garizim in contrast
to the temple of Jerusalem. Finally, it is possible that
the temple of Mount Garizim, as the Jewish historian
 44

ESDRAS

[Prometheus]

Flavius Josephus tells, was not built until the end of the
fourth century.1 However that may be, we find the
antagonism of Jerusalem and Samaria in the earliest
pages of Jewish history. By the fourth century Samaria
was a rival, if not an enemy, of Jerusalem.

The other Palestinian States were incapable of resisting
Jewish influence. Most of them merely vegetated, or
remained stationary. The priests who ruled at Jerusalem
saw their authority extend on every side.

Their ambition grew with their success.

Judaea has always been a poor country. The thousand
square miles which represented the little State in the fifth
century consisted of a vast plateau which was for the most
part sterile, and gradually merged into the desert toward
the south. The State of Samaria in the north was more
fertile; but the plains of Gaza in the west, and the rich
valleys of Galilee beyond Samaria, excited the envy of the
wretched mountaineers of Jerusalem. The populations
of these regions spoke the same language. Though they
were often at enmity, they seemed to belong to the same
family. Why should not the Jews succeed in imposing
their leadership on the others ?

From the remotest period of the history of the ancient
kingdom of Judah, which they had set themselves to study,
the names of David and Solomon shone with the aureole
which illumined their sombre genius. David and Solomon
had not been humble sultans, like their successors; their
empire had reached from the Mediterranean to the Jordan,
from Lebanon to the southern deserts. David, the first
king of Jerusalem, and king of nearly the whole land of
Palestine, was quite enough to suggest to the cupidity of
the Jerusalem aristocracy the idea of the kingdom of
which Jerusalem would be the capital.

The Persian Empire had not allowed the thousand
small States and slight territorial unities it had con-

1 Appendix II.
 PROGRESS OF THE STATE OF JERUSALEM 45

federated to enlarge their boundaries at each other’s
expense. The satrap who governed the Syrian region
was at Sidon. Both at Jerusalem and Samaria there
were lieutenants representing his authority. Under the
Persian dominion there was no chance for Jerusalem to
enlarge its power in any other than a religious sense.
But religious aggrandisement meant political aggrandise-
ment. The Persian government merely exacted the pay-
ment of the tax. Once that was paid and order was
respected, every man who worshipped the god of Jeru-
salem obeyed the clergy of Jerusalem. To introduce the
Jewish religion into the towns of Palestine was to secure
the acceptance of the Jewish law, the recognition of the
Jerusalem aristocracy as master, and a fresh source of
revenue for the temple through the tithes.

In this way, under the suzerainty of its Persian masters,
Jerusalem could become the capital and the metropolis of
the ancient cities of Palestine. Its aristocracy did not,
however, confine itself to this ambition. Had it not the
right to expect and to hope that at some future date—it
might be far or it might be near—the Persian Empire,
against which its neighbours, Phoenicia and Egypt, were
constantly rebelling, and which showed evident signs of
decrepitude at the end of the fifth century, would fall
to pieces? It had succeeded too well, in virtue of its
nationalism, in restoring the little State of Jerusalem, in
spite of countless difficulties, not to consider itself justified
in entertaining such high ambitions. Nationalism, a
necessary condition of the development of a young people,
proves inadequate unless it is enriched with that spirit
of expansion, domination, and conquest which we call
imperialism. Thibet is, perhaps, a model of the nation-
alist state. More gifted peoples are not content merely
to endure; they wish to grow, and they unconsciously
feel that he who does not grow will perish. It is the
law of imperialism.

The ancient kingdom of Judah had been independent.
 46

ESDEAS

Could not the new State, which they dreamed of building
within the frontiers of the former Davidic empire, secure,
with the help of Jahveh, its political independence ? The
possession of Palestine—the free and peaceful possession
of Palestine—was the formula which the priests of Jeru-
salem were about to write on every page of their books.
It was the programme they had undertaken to carry out
ever since the close of the fifth century.

It is at this period that literature is born at Jerusalem.
From this point the study of the history of Judaism
becomes a study of its books—the books of the Bible—
in the order in which they were composed.

We are singularly fortunate in having the history of
Judaic ideas recorded in a series of books that had issued
from such a depth of the Jewish soul, had been so passion-
ately lived by the Jewish soul, and were so vehemently
symbolical of the Jewish soul, that no literature of any
other people forms so adequate an expression of the
history of that people.

With some sublime pages, the books of the Bible are
undigested compilations of badly-made records, contra-
dictory, devoid of art or style. The smallest chapter of
a Greek or Roman writer seems to be all harmony, logic,
and truth, when one approaches it from the chaos of
Hebrew remains. But so strong a soul suffers, hopes,
and uplifts itself so vigorously in this confusion that the
wretched people lives again for us through all the years of
its terrible career. We have but to follow the series of
these books to retrace, from its very source, the course of
the great river that will one day be the river of Christian
tradition.

The fifth century is the century of the Medic wars.
Asia is failing to subdue Greece, and Greece is beginning,
in Asia Minor, to conquer Asia. Isolated from these
glorious episodes, lost in the most obscure corner of a
small province of the vast Persian Empire, living among
mountains on which no echo ever falls of the great events
 PROGRESS OF THE STATE OF JERUSALEM 47

in the north, the Jewish State, with a religious fanaticism
that is merely an exalted nationalism, succeeded in giving
itself a remarkably original character.

Before Jerusalem was destroyed by Nabuchodonosor
the State of Judah was a small nation. After the
Restoration the Jewish State is a congregation, a church,
a group without political independence, military power, or
lay chief, governed by its priests under the suzerainty of
the Persian satrap.

But there is in the bosom of this little church so
profound and ardent a soul that without armies, by the
sole power of its vitality, it will come to conquer a portion
of the civilised world. Everywhere else men’s ambitions,
dreams, and fevers find an expression in deeds; here it is
all expressed in the name of a god who is the soul of the
people, and in whom the people are concentrated.

Literature only makes its appearance among a people
when it has reached a certain stage of its development.
Quarter of a century after Esdras the Jewish State is
sufficiently confident of its spirit, its institutions, and its
ideal to have a literature at length. The story of this
literature will henceforth be the history of the imperialism
of Jerusalem.
 Chapter III.

THE BOOKS OF MOSES

§ 1. The National Epic of an Imperialism.

The literature of the Jews is born at Jerusalem in the
fifth century before the present era. It has from the first
all the characters of primitive literatures.

The general character of primitive literatures is to take
the shape of a series of epic fragments, independent of
each other even when they continue the same subjects.
As epic fragments, they relate the history, legends, and
fables of the past. A concern about origins is found at
the beginning of all literatures; every people, as soon as
it becomes self-conscious, demands that it be told whence
it came. Being independent of each other, these epic
fragments are short compositions that are held together
by no unity, unless it be the unity of inspiration. Called
rhapsodies in ancient Greece, they gave themselves in
Judaea the name masJial, the meaning of which would
afterwards be somewhat altered; their writers are
moshlim. And we beg to be allowed to use these two
words, unfamiliar as they are, rather than words borrowed
from a foreign environment.

Besides this general character, which is common to all
primitive literatures, a certain number of special char-
acters are due to the different situations of various peoples.
In the west of Asia the first writers are local priests. The
priests are powerful among newly-formed societies; at
Jerusalem they govern the State. Art, in the sense of a
composition for its own sake, does not exist among the
primitive Orientals, and some of them, such as the Jewish
people, will never rise to its level. With them literature

48

[Prometheus]

 THE NATIONAL EPIC OF AN IMPERIALISM 49

has always an immediate object. It is utilitarian and
political; it is dogmatic; it justifies, enforces, or recom-
mends something.

Most frequently it provides a frame for legislation.
The laws must come direct from heaven, and the writers
are engaged to describe how.

Everything contributes to the same object—fabulous
traditions, national legends, and the history of their
ancestors, are turned into illustrations of the religious,
political, or social theses that it is sought to impose.

To show the legitimacy of the actual institutions seems
to be no less needed. It must be explained how they
were established, and they must be consecrated by having
a venerable origin assigned to them.

The relation to neighbouring peoples is another point
that the moshlim will never forget; they have to show
that, if their own people have such and such a descent,
the neighbouring people has a different origin, so that the
recriminations, ambitions, and hatreds between them will
thus be more or less sanctified.

These special characters of the early literatures of
ancient western Asia may be resumed in a general law,
which has persisted so steadily as the dominant law of
the Hebrew literature that it seems to us to-day to be
peculiar to it; it is the constant practice of projecting
into the past, in the form of myths and legends, the
institutions, laws, and theories of the present time.

Encyclopaedias of the religion, law, organisation, and
ambitions of an epoch, these epic growths are born and
develop as soon as the national soil is sufficiently fertile,
and they increase, in infinite variety and often in contra-
diction with each other, until the time when the reflective
work of an established school undertakes to gather them
together in great epics. Such were the earliest literatures
of western Asia; such was bound to be, and such was, at
Jerusalem, the Mosaic literature, or, to speak more
correctly, the great cycle of epic narratives of which the

E
 50

THE BOOKS OF MOSES

five books of Moses, and the books of Joshua, Judges,
Samuel, and Kings, were afterwards formed.

But, while this national epic was bound to have, and
actually had, the general characters of the earliest writings
produced in any civilisation, and especially those of the
civilisations of western Asia, it was further bound to have
the absolutely special character, which distinguishes it
from all others, of being the expression of an imperial-
ism.

Born in the age of Cyrus, the Jewish people had hardly
known more than a century of real existence when the
first mashal was written; nevertheless, the five centuries
of the Davidic dynasty formed a prologue, a necessary
pre-historic phase, to it. The succinct narratives of the
ancient historiographers of the kings of Judah, which
survived in part at least, provided a chronological frame
for Jewish history from David to the Deportation; though
they may have been no more than a few great deeds, a
few anecdotes. The priests of Jerusalem had only to
resume this history to adapt it to the lessons which they
desired to give. But what could they discover before
David ? Until the day when David made Jerusalem his
citadel it had been but a poor little town without history
or legends. Babylon and Memphis had countless ages of
ancestors; Sichem, Bethel, and Hebron, in Palestine, had
certain vague memories. Jerusalem had nothing.

How could the priests who governed the little State of
Jerusalem make their past begin with David ? Primitive
peoples have always hung upon the most remote antiquity
the national epics with which they illustrated their legis-
lation. The priests of Jerusalem, who began, at the end
of the fifth century, for the purpose of political education,
to write the ancient history of their town, could not
escape this psychological necessity. Their ambition
suggested to them a way to create the ancestors that they
had not.

We saw how, from the close of the fifth century, the
 THE NATIONAL EPIC OF AN IMPERIALISM 51

priests of Jerusalem had entertained the hope of re-estab-
lishing, with profit to themselves, the ancient empire of
David and Solomon, and formed the project of subduing
the populations of the same tongue and similar manners
who, in the north and on the west, surrounded their
barren mountains. The history of Jerusalem in Palestine
is the same as that of Home in Italy, if we take account
of the difference that separates the Jewish from the
Roman soul. Apart from the difference in the means
that are at the command of a sacerdotal aristocracy and a
military, positivist, and juridical aristocracy, we find, on
both sides, a long-matured resolution, carried out with
patience, to annex the surrounding peoples. But while
Rome relies solely on military force and administrative
power, Jerusalem uses the devices of churches; its leaders
begin by annexing the traditions, the ancient glories, the
legends, the national reminiscences of their neighbours,
before annexing their consciences and, ultimately, their
territory.

By a piece of brilliant audacity the priests of Jerusalem
were about to lay at once the first stone of their work.
Without avowing an ambition that would have brought
violent hostility upon them, they set to work on a plan
that was conceived for ages.

The territory of Jerusalem and its surroundings had
no past; but, as we said, a few ancient legends survived
among their Palestinian neighbours. Monuments, tombs,
and stone columns preserved the remembrance of heroic
names and adventures; traditions were cherished that
told of deeds of earlier days; sanctuaries were still found,
sometimes half ruined, which went back to an age long
before the time of David and Solomon. The priests of
Jerusalem resolved to appropriate the names, adventures,
traditions, and legends of their neighbours. It was the
beginning of the conquest. Above all things they strive
to give a Jewish character to the traditions of Palestine,
to bring local legends into the Jewish cycle, to persuade
 52

THE BOOKS OF MOSES

the Palestinians that they are brothers. Finding no past
among themselves, the priests of Jerusalem resolutely
seize the past of their future subjects, and the great
national epic, which ought to be an epic of Jerusalem, is
going to be an epic of Palestine.1

Then, with no less brilliant decision, they put into
circulation the word which, since it symbolised the past
that they were restoring, symbolised their ambition. To
the empire of David and Solomon, which had disappeared
five hundred years before, they gave a name which was
destined to create a unity between the scattered populations
of the then divided Palestine. They did not invent this
name; they rescued it from oblivion, and adopted it. It
was the name Israel.

In a certain sense it might be said that the Mosaic
books were written for the purpose of launching the name
Israel, which represented the programme of the Jerusalem
aristocracy. If Israel was not a new name, we may be
sure that it had no longer any meaning at the time of the
Restoration. It had been borne, a thousand years before
Esdras, by the last nomads to settle in Palestine ; and,
among the populations whose destruction, as we saw, is
recorded on it, the column of a pharaoh mentions Israalou.
David and Solomon had afterwards united under their
domination all the Bene-Israel, but their empire had not
cohered. After Solomon the tribes of the north are rent
from the tribes of the south. The former make up the
kingdom of Ephraim; those of the south form the
kingdom of Judah. Two and a-half centuries later the
destruction of the Ephraimitic empire throws the ancient
tribes of the north into a chaotic condition. The Judaic
kingdom lasts another century and a-half; then it in
turn disappears in the conflagration lit by Nabuchodo-
nosor, and we have to come to the age of Cyrus and the
end of the sixth century to witness the restoration, or

1 See Appendix III.
 THE NATIONAL EPIC OE AN IMPERIALISM 53

creation, of the cities of Palestine. At that time there are
a certain number of small populations speaking the same
language and having analogous religions. Possibly they
descend from the ancient Israelitic tribes, but they are
none the less isolated from each other. All recollection
of ancient Israel is obscured. It is even declared that
Judah alone was restored of the ancient twelve tribes of
Israel; the others have disappeared. And the unlimited
complaisance of commentators has, down to our own
time, disposed them to seek the lost tribes in the centre
of Asia, in Madagascar, or in Japan.

The priests of Jerusalem at once give a meaning and
some prestige to the name of Israel by applying it to the
ancient kingdom of David and Solomon. A certain unity
immediately appears among the populations of Palestine.
They are found to have common ancestors, they form one
large family, and, as far back as the legends of Palestine
reach, they discover a national history; a new fatherland
has been created. But, in making an Israelitic kingdom
of the provinces of the former Judaic sultan David, the
men of Jerusalem indicated that, since all the territory of
Palestine had once been united under the sceptre of
Jahveh’s favourite king, it must be united again some
day, and that, as in the time of David, Jerusalem must
be its centre and capital.

The name Israel is, then, merely the myth in which
the men of Jerusalem have symbolised their ambitions.
It is a Utopia endowed with a past. Renan, after and
before many others, wrote a history of the people of
Israel. We know Israelitic tribes fourteen hundred years
before the present era; we then become acquainted with
two Hebrew kingdoms; lastly we find a Jewish people.
But we must erase from history the expression, “ the
people of Israel,” or leave it only in the sense of being the
ideal of the Jewish people.

The priests of Jerusalem had thus conceived a history
of their past in which they would absorb the precious
 54

THE BOOKS OF MOSES

relics of their neighbours whom they proposed one day
to annex. But, although it stretched farther back than
the past of Jerusalem, the past of their Palestinian neigh-
bours was soon exhausted, and the most ancient of their
memories scarcely reached more than a couple of centuries
ahead of David, to the time of the Judges. Beyond the
Judges lay the dark night of barbarism.

One must remember that at the time of the Judges
those whom we call the Israelites are Bedouins, scarcely
settled on the land. Whence do they come ? Through
what adventures have they passed ? How can these
mysteries be penetrated ? It was necessary for the com-
mentators to be affected with dogmatism just as much as
the priests of Jerusalem were in the fourth century, not
to advance a fatal question, an absolute non possumus, to
the Mosaic records.

One day hordes of nomadic shepherds and marauders
arrive in the midst of the plains of western Syria, dragging
their flocks and their women behind them. With their
weapons in their hands, they have slowly crossed the
desert in search of a fountain to assuage their thirst, a
grain-pit to sack. Now they discover a more temperate
clime, a soil that is watered with dew every night, streams,
and green trees. The indigenous populations are not
strong enough to resist them, and they settle, vagabond
troops brought from the depths of the unknown like a

cloud of locusts in the wind of the desert......What critic

will be able to retrace the migrations of these locusts ?

Egyptology has not yet found any trace of the Israelitic
episode. In the present state of the science it is almost
certain that, if nothing has yet been found, it is because
nothing exists. Do we need to add how the Biblical
record, in all that relates to the sojourn in Egypt and the
exodus, swarms with material improbabilities, geographical
errors, and historical impossibilities ? It is a clear proof
of an imaginative composition.

We may grant that a name, the possibility of a fact,

[Prometheus]

 THE NATIONAL EPIC OF AN IMPERIALISM 55

may have been saved in the wreck of the ancient history
of Israel. It is possible that these nomads may have pre-
served, and transmitted to their descendants, the name of
some great chief who had directed their migrations in a
remote age. It is no less possible that the memory may
have survived of a period of slavery in the land of Egypt;
though nothing is less probable, since not a single Egyptian
monument mentions this Israelite episode. We may, if
we will, retain the name of Moses, but that is all.

Twelve centuries lie between the recorded facts and
the age in which they were recorded; the critics who put
back the composition of the Mosaic books to the eighth
century will say eight, instead of twelve, centuries. How
many generations in twelve, even eight, centuries! How
many generations lost in the vicissitudes of nomadic life,
of barbarism, or of a most rudimentary civilisation! Let
us understand that nothing crosses such steppes as those.

The priests of Jerusalem who, after Esdras, undertook
to relate the origin of their people, or, rather, of the so-
called people of Israel, would thus find themselves con-
fronted, in regard to the time before the Judges, with a
yawning abyss, in which nothing was offered to them but
a few remote traditions. But they are determined at all
costs to glorify this ancient Israel, and from that time,
with the aid of these vague traditions, they proceed to an
imaginative creation.

Does anyone hesitate to admit that the priests of Jeru-
salem would deliberately, shamelessly forge the Mosaic
history ? We must not forget that we are dealing with
orientals: that we are dealing with priests, with rulers
who have no idea of writing history in the modern fashion,
but write merely to establish dogmas, give a divine
character to laws, legitimise institutions, preach a national
faith to a people, and create for it a sublime past.

That the ancestors of the Jewish people, the people of
Israel, should have come from Egypt, guided across the
desert by the hand of Jahveh, to settle in Palestine, will
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hardly suffice as a picture of their origin for the men of
Jerusalem. Whence came the Israelites before they
settled in Egypt ? Had not Jahveh chosen the people,
which he was to cherish, in the remote ages ? Had he
not, since the first days of the world, promised to the
ancient Israelites the country which he would give to
their descendants? The writers of the Bible do not
doubt that they can put back to the very creation of the
universe the promises of Jahveh and the miraculous
choice of Israel. Thus will be composed the history of
the patriarchal times, the account of the first days of the
world.

Possibly the Palestinian traditions furnished one or two
other names; but, though the imagination of Jerusalem
continued to play the chief part, it was Babylon, possibly
Egypt, perhaps even Persia, that would now contribute
elements to the story.

Science is gradually making clear the share that the
sages of Babylon had in their conception of the origin of
humanity. The story of Moses may seem to imply no
foreign document, but the account of the origin of man
points to documents of Babylonian origin; witness the
Deluge.

The Babylonian civilisation, like that of Egypt, sinks
into the remotest depths of history. Countless centuries
old at the time when the writers of Jerusalem were but
beginning to think of writing a history of their ancestors,
Babylon had civilised the west of Asia all around it. The
kings of Persia, instead of destroying the vast city, had
often resided there. Alexander and his successors respected
its great antiquity, and it was still, in the fourth and the
third centuries, the centre of western Asia. Though it
had ceased to be its political capital, it had remained the
spiritual metropolis. From immemorial time science, art,
and a powerfully-organised religion lived under the shelter
of its walls. Heir of the ancient cities of Chaldasa, it has
been the religious, artistic, and scientific teacher of Asia.
 THE NATIONAL EPIC OF AN IMPERIALISM 57

In the fourth century it is still ruled by its own laws; the
Persians, its masters, respect the legislation that had been
promulgated, fifteen hundred years before, by the Baby-
lonian king Hammurabi. The little States of western
Syria accept this influence, like the others, and the Jews
are affected by it even more than the others. A Jewish
colony lived at Babylon; they are the descendants of the
men of Judah deported in 588 by Nabuchodonosor. There
is unbroken intercourse between the Jews of Jerusalem
and the Jews of Babylon; the Jews of Babylon continue
to teach those of Jerusalem the legends, laws, and sciences
of Babylon.

The men of Jerusalem could therefore learn from Baby-
lon certain legends about the early ages of humanity, the
Deluge, and certain movements of peoples across Asia;
but could they learn from it anything concerning their
own ancestors ? Is it conceivable that the Babylonians
possessed information on the migrations of the Israelitic
nomads in the time of Hammurabi, or in the time of the
Kassite kings ? In point of fact, Assyriology is still
silent as to the adventures of the Bene-Israel before the
time of Solomon. The amount of information that the
writers of Jerusalem may have received from the Baby-
lonian civilisation is, therefore, easy to determine. Of the
ancestors of the great family of western Asia which is
called Semitic they might learn something; of the ances-
tors of the Israelitic tribes in particular they could learn
nothing.

As to the Medo-Persic science and religion, it is certain
that the priests of Jerusalem were acquainted with it, but
its influence seems to have been rather theological, and
came later.

Gathering, therefore, on the one hand, from the reminis-
cences of the cities of Palestine certain fragments of
legends, and possibly a few vague names, such as that of
Moses, and from the science of Babylon, and perhaps that
of Egypt, on the other hand, a few traditions which
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Assyriology and Egyptology are gradually detaching from
the Biblical narratives, they proposed to make amends for
the lack of a national past of their own, and, in view of the
dogmas which they purported to illustrate, in the fashion
of their contemporaries, and the ambitions that they
resolved to justify, to erect in freedom the monument of
their pretended past.

Thus, although the historical, legendary, and mythical
framework of the Mosaic books is borrowed from the
legendary and fabulous histories of other peoples, they
are in substance profoundly national. These legends
have been borrowed from their Palestinian neighbours
only with a view to annexing them; from their Baby-
lonian ancestors only to enrich themselves with their
glory. All this legislation, theory of origins, legitimising
of institutions, lessons drawn from events, and justification
and glorification of the ambitions of Jerusalem, will be so
fiercely national that this epic, created afresh or borrowed
from foreigners by this people without a past, seems to us
as profoundly Jewish as if it had really been born of the
forty centuries’ past which the writers of Jerusalem
pleased to imagine. The books of the law are the
programme of the imperialism of the men of Jerusalem.

§ 2. The Jehovist-Elohist Period.l

If the date 458, which tradition assigns to the arrival
of Esdras, corresponds to the great nationalist movement
from which Judaism issued, it is to the generation that
lived about the middle of the fifth century that we must
grant the high honour of having written the first pages of
the Mosaic books. Above all things, the priests who then
governed wished to impose upon the people of Jerusalem,
not merely by force, but by persuasion—that is to say, by

1 See Appendix IV.
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59

faith—that fidelity to the patron-god, Jahveh, the soul of
the Jewish State, in which they recognised the supreme
condition of the existence of their country; they must
perpetuate, as a living and eternal reality, the teaching
of Esdras. Jahveh punishing his people for their unfaith-
fulness to him, and restoring them for their fidelity to
him, was the great lesson with which they needed to
penetrate the Jewish people. And these terrible priests,
who enforced nationalism under pain of death, wished,
instead of legislating in the abstract, to give the precept
at once in the form of example.

Thus was the Bible begun.

The priests of Jerusalem wished to enact: “ Jahveh is
the national god of Jerusalem; Jerusalem can have no
other god but Jahveh.”

What they said was : “ Your fathers were taken away
by the rivers of Babylon, because they had forsaken
Jahveh.”

They wished to enact: “You shall not have foreign

wives....You shall make no image of your god.......You

shall not offer the holocaust to your god save in his house
of Jerusalem.”

What they said was : “ Your town was burned down,
your fathers were slaughtered, your nation was destroyed,
because you had taken foreign wives, because you had
worshipped images, because you had burned the fat of
your flocks under every high tree and on every green
hill.”

Thus did they undertake to relate to the people the
story of its past, in order to give it an example and a
lesson. In following the development of the many
narratives, the combination of which afterwards formed
the earliest books of the Bible, we shall see the unfolding
of the series of dogmatic theses of the aristocracy of
Jerusalem in the fifth and fourth centuries.

After the manner of the sages of Babylon, the priests
of Jerusalem made their history go back to the creation
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of the world. The moshlim narrated with light heart the
marvellous adventures of primitive ages, which had for
the most part been taken from Babylon. But the main
object of the priests was, by means of complete genealo-
gies, to connect the patriarchs, the fathers of the people
of Israel, with the first man. No link in the chain must
be wanting; and, unfortunately, the different moshlim
invented different genealogies, which, in spite of their
disagreement, were equally preserved for our veneration.

From the time of Noah and the Deluge we find the
theory of the Pact making its appearance. The Deluge
is over, and Jahveh puts before the patriarch, for the
first time, the bases of the famous alliance.

Let us explain what we mean.

The history of the Jewish people from its constitution
as a people—that is to say, from Esdras—until the time of
its destruction, the history of the Jewish soul, such as it
was framed amid the civilisations of the east and as,
afterwards, in its Christian form, it was imposed on the
Graeco-Roman world, is the development of a leading
idea, which shows itself from the childish legends of
Judges to the death-rattle of the Judaeo-Christian
apocalypses. This is the Pact—the compact agreed upon
between Jahveh and the Israel which symbolised the
ideal of Jerusalem. Theologians speak of it as the
Covenant.

Jahveh will punish Israel, if Israel is unfaithful to
him; if Israel is faithful to Jahveh, he will reward Israel.
But it must be clearly understood that the Jews were not
thinking of vague promises made by the deity; there was
question of a real treaty, an act drawn up in good and
due form, a private deed, signed, read, and approved, the
considerations and clauses of which will fill the whole of
the Judaic literature. Only, in the fourth century,
Jahveh merely promises the Jewish people the free and
peaceful possession of Palestine.

With the legend of Abraham the theory of the Pact
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61

reaches its full development, at the beginning of the
fourth century. Abraham is brought by Jahveh from
Ur in Chaldasa to take possession, for his descendants, of
the country that the god reserves for them. A score of
times the god gives his divine word to the patriarch:—

In the same day Jahveh made a covenant with

Abraham, saying: Unto thy seed do I give this land...

And I will establish my covenant between me and thee
and thy seed after thee in their generations for an ever-
lasting covenant, to be a god unto thee, and to thy seed
after thee.1

The choosing of Israel, the fundamental dogma of
Judaism, is the starting-point of the Pact. Jahveh has
chosen Israel among the peoples from the earliest time;
and now, if Israel observes the law of Jahveh, Jahveh
will secure its happiness in the land which he has given
to it. We know what is meant by Israel. At the time
when the mashal of Abraham were written Israel has no
real existence; it is the myth that symbolises the future
kingdom of which the aristocracy of Jerusalem dreams.
The choice of Israel has, therefore, two stages: in the
first stage it is the union of the populations of Palestine
in one single kingdom by the Jewish people, under its
hegemony; in the second stage it is the assurance of an
endless prosperity to this new kingdom amid the
kingdoms of the earth.

The writers who, in the fifth century, composed the
earliest Biblical narratives aimed at proving this choice of
their people, by putting it at the very source of history.
But they were not less concerned to specify the degrees
of subordination of the States which must make up the
kingdom of their dream, and the degree of vassalage of
the surrounding States. Bound about them are the little
peoples which they regard as brother-peoples, believe to
belong to the Israelitic stock, and propose to absorb in
their ideal Israel. A little farther off are their neigh-

1 Genesis xv. 18 ; xvii. 7, and passim.
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hours, the congenital peoples of Moab, Ammon, and
Edom. Legend says that David reigned over them;
why should they not some day be subject to the hegemony
of Jerusalem ? The moshlim of Jerusalem will tell how
Moab, Ammon, and Edom are cousins, or, rather, more
lowly brothers, younger sons who owe obedience to their
elders. Beyond them there is Syria, into which Jewish
action is already penetrating; for Syria also is a country
of the same family.

These relationships are symbolised in a series of myths.

Abraham, the mythic father of the people of Israel,
was not the only son of Thare (or, as is now more com-
monly said, Terah) when he left Ur in Chaldaea to come
to Palestine; he brought with him Lot, his brother’s son.
Now, Lot is the father of Ammon and Moab. But
Ammon and Moab are the sons of incest; the myth of
the daughters of Lot puts in their place, in this great
table of origins, the lower tribes of Moab and Ammon.

Abraham himself has two sons. One is Isaac, the
legitimate son, the heir of Abraham, the chosen of Jahveh;
the other is Ishmael, son of a slave, bastard, humbler
brother of Isaac—Ishmael, the father of many Arab
tribes.

Isaac, again, has two sons. Esau, deprived of his birth-
right, is the father of Edom; Jacob, the favourite of the
god, is destined to continue the family.

Jacob himself is the eponymic father of the privileged
people. He is Israel himself; for the name Israel, which
the priests of Jerusalem have revived in order to give it
to the former kingdom of David—that is to say, to the
collection of Palestinian States which they hope to unite
under their hegemony—is now projected upon the ancestor
Jacob. Israel becomes the second name, the surname
given by Jahveh himself to the patriarch Jacob.

And Jahveh said to Jacob : What is thy name ? And
he said, Jacob.

And he said : Thy name shall be called no more Jacob,
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63

but Israel; that is to say, conqueror of God! Because
thou hast fought with God and with men, and hast
prevailed.1

On that day the definition is completed. Israel is the
solemn name of the eponymic patriarch in whom the
Jerusalemites of the fourth century symbolised the Pales-
tinian kingdom which they aspired to found on the model
of the ancient empire of David.

With Jacob-Israel we come to the very heart of the
family which the men of Jerusalem are ambitious to form.
The people of Israel is created. Jacob has twelve children,
and these twelve children are the fathers of the twelve
tribes of Israel, and give them their names—Ruben,
Simeon, Levi, Judah, Joseph, Benjamin, etc. From that
time, through the whole of Jewish history, the relations
between the different Israelitic groups will be reflected in
all the Biblical narratives. At one time Joseph will be
exalted, at another time he will be cast in the shade;
though he is the hero of a celebrated mashal, this eponymic
father of a northern tribe will never be raised to the rank
of ancestral patriarch, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Benjamin will be alternately praised and vilified. Simeon
will become the expression of the Jewish ambitions in the
southern territories. Judah himself will not always be
equally glorified, and he will experience the severity of
the depreciating myths, when the priest-writers are minded
to rebuke their people; but at the origin of the tribe will
be placed the myth of Thamar, with the purpose of cele-
brating, by a providential and almost miraculous inter-
vention, the birth of the ancestors of Jerusalem.

Nothing is more comical than the concern of com-
mentators to locate on the Palestinian territory these
twelve tribes, of which scarcely one half had a real
existence, and which, in the mind of the fourth-century
writers, are only the expression of political views. For-
merly—a long time ago—geological and astronomical

1 Genesis xxxii. 27-28.
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truths were sought in Genesis; later an effort was made
to reconcile the Bible and geology. To-day people seek
ethnographical and anthropological indications in Genesis,
as if the Biblical writers had been better at ethnography
than geology; as if the Bible were anything else but
dogmas illustrated by fables.

We have only quoted a few instances. The early
Biblical narratives are encumbered with genealogies which
are all dogmatic, and all aim at expressing the pretensions
of the aristocracy of Jerusalem. If there are many con-
tradictions between these genealogies, these ethnic myths,
it is because the Bible was not composed by one single
school, nor in one single day; it is because each genera-
tion, each school, inscribed its ambitions therein. Such
is the myth of the sons of Noah, one of the last born of
the Mosaic myths.

Everywhere, in the course of their wanderings over the
land of Palestine, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lay the first
stones, in some way, of the ancient sanctuaries of Jahveh
scattered over Palestine, for which it was necessary to
find a patriarchal origin.

Let us try to understand how the Jerusalemitic writers
of the fourth century could, and must, glorify the sanc-
tuaries of their neighbours. Commentators see in that
an irrefutable proof of the non-Judaic origin of a large
part of Genesis ; we see in it a proof of the contrary. In
the fourth century these famous sanctuaries had almost
all disappeared, or were in ruins. Most of them were
mere memories. Bersabee, Hebron, Bethel, Gabaon,
Mispha, Galaad, and Mahanaim no longer existed; vener-
able ruins, they could cause no apprehension to the clerical
aristocracy at Jerusalem. On the other hand, they are
careful not to seek a sacred origin for Samaria, the rival
city; and Sichem, a sub-prefecture of Samaria, too ancient
and celebrated to be omitted, is most frequently mentioned
unfavourably. For Jerusalem, on the contrary, they find, in
Melchisedech and the sacrifice of Moriah, especially sacred
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65

antecedents. The old sanctuaries celebrated by the aris-
tocracy of Jerusalem are almost always vanished or fallen
rivals, whose extinct glory does but exalt the primacy of
Jerusalem, in preparing the way for it.

But in collecting the ancient legends of Palestine, and
appropriating the old memories of neighbouring cities, the
priests of Jerusalem are, as we know, pursuing their secret
aim. They, a people without a past, must enrich them-
selves with the legendary and national treasures of the
tribes that they dream of assimilating; they will gather
about themselves, and under their leadership, this land of
Palestine that they are ambitious to conquer; they are
more than ever determined, in incorporating in their work
the traditions and dreams of congenital and neighbouring
peoples, to realise at some near date their ideal of a people
of Israel.

We ought also to say a word of the etymologies that
abound in the Mosaic books—etymologies of which hardly
a single one has been admitted by philologists, plays upon
words such as primitive peoples love, puns with a purpose
of proving something. But it is enough to understand
that everything in this Bible, in which some have thought
to find history, is dogmatic, purely dogmatic.

The marvellous thing is that the patriarchal legends
have grown round these theses in a delicious flowering of
the oriental imagination. Doubtless, in this never-chang-
ing east, the Jews of the fourth century did not imagine,
in their more remote legends, caravans that differed from
those which they saw passing at the foot of the walls of
Jerusalem; and the gates of the town opened at evening
to the same nomad flock-drivers, seeking rest and refresh-
ment. Yet the theorists who related the vagabond origins,
in which they found it expedient to fix their dogmas, were
at the same time poets. Thus these flowers, the prettiest
that the east has produced, came into the light: Abraham
wandering in the valleys of Palestine, Eliasur and Rebecca,
Joseph and his brethren, etc.—those beautiful stories whose
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profound charm has won the soul. Strange genius, in
which the narrowest dogmatism has clothed itself with so
delicious a mantle of idylls !

The great episode of Joseph closes the patriarchal
legend. With it, in our Bible, the book of Genesis
terminates. The following book, Exodus, is a collection
of narratives relating to the departure from Egypt and
the crossing of the desert; Moses is its hero.

Everyone will remember the scenario.

The people of Israel languishes in the service of Egypt.
Jahveh gives Moses the mission to deliver them. Episode
of the ten plagues of Egypt. Passage of the Bed Sea.
After that the people of Israel wander in the Sinaitic
peninsula, under the lead of Moses. But the writers of
the beginning of the fourth century, who were the first to
relate the vicissitudes of the exodus, knew nothing of the
revelation on Sinai. For them the sacred mountain on
which Jahveh appears to Moses is called Horeb. It is the
unanimous opinion of the critics that the mention of Sinai
suffices to discredit a later series of narratives—the series
which we shall call the levitical.

Here are expounded a certain number of laws which
the priests of Jerusalem wished to legitimise, and which
they describe as dictated by Jahveh himself to Moses.
Let us add that they occupy only a small part of our
actual Exodus.

Our whole Leviticus and part of the actual book of
Numbers belong to a later period. The sequel to the
preceding narratives is found in the second half of the
book of Numbers. Forty years have elapsed; the people
of Israel still wander in the desert; they reach Cades;
fights with the natives; arrival on the plains of Moab,
near the Jordan, opposite Jericho. There Moses dies,
after placing his hands on the head of Joshua. From
that time the children of Israel obey Joshua.

The book of Deuteronomy is altogether later, and
certain chapters of Joshua have preserved the narratives
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67

of the earliest Biblical writers. Under the leadership of
Joshua the Israelites conquer the promised land. Jericho
is taken, its walls falling at the sound of the sacred
trumpets; the Israelites settle in the promised land, the
twelve tribes dividing it more or less between them.
Joshua dies, and is buried in Mount Ephraim.

Nothing is more familiar than this series of episodes of
which Moses and Joshua are the heroes. The group of
priestly writers who first offered them as a lesson to the
people of Jerusalem saw in them, especially, an illustration
of the famous compact between Jahveh and his people, the
same covenant which other priestly writers had traced to
the patriarchs. The Israelites, saved from Egypt, guided
in the desert, and endowed with the soil of Palestine,
exhibit the benevolent, but definitive, act by which
Jahveh consecrates to himself the people he has chosen.
Henceforth the Jewish literature will unceasingly remind
the Jews how they owe to Jahveh the land they occupy
and their very existence. Israel belongs to Jahveh as one
who is saved from death belongs to his saviour; so, at
least, the theology of Jerusalem will have it.

The earliest legislation of the priests of Jerusalem is
thus found to be inserted in the midst of the Mosaic
episodes. The priests, as we said, wanted to represent
as dictated formerly by Jahveh the laws which they
wished to impose on their contemporaries, and we are
not astonished at their procedure. There is no legislator
in ancient times who did not assign a divine origin to his
work. Why should the Jerusalemitic legislators of the
fourth century act otherwise ?

But it was equally important to make these laws the
very conditions of the compact between his people and
Jahveh.

And Jahveh said: Behold, I make a covenant; before
all thy people I will do marvels, such as have not been
done in all the earth, nor in any nation : and all the people
shall see how terrible is the work of Jahveh.
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Thou shalt worship no other god: for Jahveh, whose
name is Jealous, is a jealous god.1

Thou shalt not make a covenant with the inhabitants
of the land, and thou shalt not take their daughters unto
thy sons......2

Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.8

The feast of unleavened bread thou shalt keep: seven
days thou shalt eat unleavened bread.........*

Every first-born of a mother is mine, and every firstling

among thy cattle, whether ox or sheep, that is male...........

All the first-born of thy sons thou shalt redeem, and none
shall appear before me empty.5

Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou
shalt rest; in earing time and in harvest thou shalt rest.6

And thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the first-
fruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at
the year’s end.7

Thrice in the year shall all your menchildren appear
before your lord Jahveh, the god of Israel. For I will
cast out the nations before thee, and enlarge thy borders:
neither shall any man desire thy land, when thou shalt
go up to appear before Jahveh, thy god, thrice in the
year.8

Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with
leaven; neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the
passover be left unto the morning.9

The first of the first-fruits of thy land thou shalt bring
unto the house of Jahveh thy god.10

Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.11

And Jahveh said unto Moses: Write thou these words:
for after the tenour of these words I have made a
covenant with thee and with Israel.12

All these are religious laws, it will be said. They are
not, because at Jerusalem religious institutions are but
the form of the civil institutions; because the rulers are

1   Primordial law nationalising the cult of Jahveh.

2   Prohibition of mixed marriages.

8 Prohibition of images.   4 Feast of the Passover.

8 Law of taxes.   6 Law of the Sabbath.

7   The three great feasts, that of Easter recalled.

8   The three pilgrimages.   9 A detail of the Passover.

10   Lax of taxes.

11   A law the meaning of which, Reuss says, was unknown even to the
ancient Jewish commentators. We believe that it refers to a proverb, of
which the meaning has been lost.

12   Exodus xxxiv. 10-27.
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69

priests, and we know that to worship Jahveh means to
consecrate one’s soul to one’s country, Jerusalem. But,
from the first feeble utterance of the Jewish legisla-
tion, we see, among other laws, the utopian law: the
ideal law by the side of the practical law. In demanding
that the males shall come in pilgrimage thrice a year
from the country round Jerusalem to the one temple (for
it is a question of the one temple, whatever the commen-
tators may have thought of it), Jahveh promises them
that no enemy shall profit by their absence to sack their
houses and ravish their women.

Another small, but slightly longer, code1 deals with
certain questions of the civil order. It regulates the
position of servants; it punishes homicide, theft, blows
and wounds, seduction, sorcery, bestiality, and usury; it
resumes the prescriptions of the preceding code, and adds
the extraordinary utopianism of the sabbatic year. The
Jews are not only enjoined to dedicate to Jahveh the
seventh day of the week, but they are also commanded to
consecrate a whole year in every seven years:—

Six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather in
the fruits thereof: but the seventh year thou shalt let it
rest and lie still.2

At a later date the legislators of Jerusalem will
guarantee their people that Jahveh will, in the sixth year,
give them a double harvest, sufficient to feed them during
the seventh.

Lastly, a number of enactments are devoted to protect-
ing the man whom our translations call “ the stranger,”
and who is really only the Judaising foreigner. For a
people who were ambitious and hopeful to annex the
surrounding peoples it was necessary to protect foreigners,
when they began to accept Jewish ways. Jerusalem is
still but a town with its immediate surroundings ; but it
dreams of becoming the capital of a great country, and

1 Exodus xxi. 1 to xxiii. 19.

2 Exodus xxiii. 10, 11.
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the mashal of Jerusalem always think of the people of
Israel which does not yet exist, except as an ideal.
Theoretically, the Mosaic laws are made for the whole of
the States of Palestine; in practice, they are only valid
for Jerusalem and its immediate district. Theoretically,
the Palestinian neighbours are brothers; in practice, they
are still foreigners. The protection of the Judaising
foreigner at Jerusalem is a transitory arrangement. It is
an accommodation of the utopia to realities.

The Pact, formerly concluded by the patriarchs, now
signed by Moses, is afterwards renewed by Joshua.
After delivering Israel from the bondage of Egypt,
Jahveh gives it the good and spacious land, the land
flowing with milk and honey, the land of the Canaanites,
Hethites, Amorrhites, Pheresites, Hevites, Jebusites, and
Gergezites.

What historical value is there in this list ? Possibly
they have founded erudite discussions on narratives in
which dogmas are covered with a mantle of fable. If
peoples who attained to some idea of history, the Greeks
and the Latins, were unable to learn anything of their
past beyond a few centuries, how can we suppose that
Orientals, Jews entirely lacking the historical sense,
can, apart from a miraculous communication, and
apart from what was afforded by Chaldaea and Egypt,
have learned anything about a period that was contem-
porary with nomadism, a period one thousand years
before their time ?

Kenan, with his habit of ridiculing the improbabilities
of the exegetic theses which he adopted, was astonished
that there was no mention of a revolt of Canaan in the
history of Israel. The Canaanites, Hethites, Amorrhites,
Pheresites, Hevites, Jebusites, and Gergezites are, in the
Mosaic epic, the characters which the imagination of the
Jerusalem moshlim of the fifth century has summoned to
play a part: to explain that Jahveh had, as an effect of
his favour, given to the Israelites a country to which they
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71

had no other right than this favour of Jahveh. Later, in
the deuteronomic period, these supposed peoples, gathered
together under the generic name of Canaanites, will serve
to illustrate another dogma. At no time are they any-
thing hut puppets in the hands of the priests of Jerusalem.

We do not mean to say that there never were any
Canaanites, Hethites, or Amorrhites. The Hethites
formed a great empire in the north of Palestine at the
time of the Egyptian and Assyrian invasions. The
Canaanites seem to have come from Chaldaea, and are
related to the Hyksos who invaded Egypt. But the Bible
knows nothing of these historical Hethites and Canaanites.
It knows next to nothing of the Hethite empire; it is
unable to distinguish the Hethites from the most miserable
tribes of Palestine. The names only are real; the rest is
fiction, and fiction with a purpose. The fact is that they
needed an appendage to Israel. They had taken from
the past the old and disused name of Israelites, and the
Israelites had become the chosen people of Jahveh. In
the same way they take from the past the forgotten and
lost name of Canaanites. The Canaanites become objects
of disgrace to Jahveh; as a kind of theological helots,
they are the rejected of Judaism. Canaan is the counter-
part to Israel. Palestine will henceforward bear two
equally unreal and dogmatic names. Before Jahveh
makes a gift of it to his people, it will be called Canaan;
afterwards, it will be known as Israel.

After the narrative of the conquest of Canaan, the
history of Israelitic antiquities is continued in a new
cycle of epic episodes.

Judges was the name given to the legendary heroes of
Palestinian extraction who had lived in the land of Israel
before the establishment of royalty. Such were Gideon
and his son Abimelech, Deborah the prophetess, Jephtha,
who sacrificed his daughter to Jahveh, Samson, the lover
of Delilah the Philistine, Samuel, whose sombre figure
would afterwards grow to terrible proportions.
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[Prometheus]

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Does anyone question the purely, absolutely dogmatic
intention of the moslilim ? Let us see how the book of
Judges will presently speak:—

The children of Israel went every man unto his inherit-
ance : and the people served Jahveh for many days.....

And there arose another generation after them which
knew not Jahveh, nor yet the works which he had done
for Israel. And the children of Israel did evil in the
sight of Jahveh, and served the Baals, and they forsook
Jahveh, and followed other gods of the gods of the people
that were round about them; and bowed themselves
unto them, and served Baal and the Astartes.

And the anger of Jahveh was hot against Israel, and he
delivered them into the hands of the spoilers that spoiled
them ; and he sold them into the hands of their enemies
round about, so that they could not any longer stand
before their enemies.

Whithersoever they went out, the hand of Jahveh was
against them for evil, as Jahveh had said, and as Jahveh
had sworn unto them; and they were greatly distressed.
Nevertheless Jahveh raised up Judges which delivered

them out of the hand of those that spoiled them.....

And when the Judge was dead, they returned and
corrupted themselves again, in following other gods to

serve them, and to bow down unto them........

And the anger of Jahveh was hot against Israel.....1

It is always the same story. The Israelites having
forsaken Jahveh, they are handed over by him to their
enemies. As soon as they repent, Jahveh raises up a
Judge to deliver them. Then the Israelites fall back
into their sin; they forget Jahveh, and serve the Baals
and Astartes. At once the anger of Jahveh flames out
against them, and again he delivers them to their enemies
until they repent, when he raises up another Judge to
save them.

The legends of the Judges are merely an illustration of
this doctrine: the forsaking of Jahveh is punished by
defeat, the return to Jahveh is rewarded with victory.

After the Judges, the writers of Jerusalem undertook

1 Judges ii. 6-20.
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73

to narrate the history of Saul, the first Israelitic king,
and of David, the great founder of the dynasty. This
made up what are called the two books of Samuel. But
the story of Saul and of David has no other object than
to show how fidelity to Jahveh is [infallibly rewarded, and
disobedience is infallibly punished. The history of
Solomon and the kings who succeeded him, down to the
disappearance of the dynasty and the destruction of Jeru-
salem by Nabuchodonosor, was written later. The present
state of Biblical criticism does not enable us to determine
if the earliest Jerusalem writers went beyond the reign of
David; if they did, their narratives must have been lost.

Such, then, is the literature of Jerusalem at the begin-
ning of the fourth century. Some men of the sacerdotal
caste which ruled the little State of Jerusalem, and already
had some influence in neighbouring countries, have under-
taken to relate how their laws were given by Jahveh,
their god; how Jahveh, their god, chose them as his
people; and how their fortune has depended, and will
always depend, on their fidelity to him. Each narrated
these episodes that were used to illustrate the fundamental
dogmas according to the traditions he had collected,
according to his own imagination, according to the legends
that circulated about him or the knowledge brought from
Babylon. These early fragments, from which the Bible
would afterwards be formed, were a kind of rhapsodies,
but rhapsodies with a purpose ; fables, but in the sense of
the Greek 6 /xvOoq SrjXot on; moral tales, epics or idylls,
proverbs in the form of legends, a vast cycle of inde-
pendent narratives. And from this mass of different
episodes there emerges at once a sort of great national
history, which this people, boldly absorbing its neighbours,
gives itself in order to learn from the example of an
imaginary past. The creation of the world, the Deluge,
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his sons; then the captivity
in Egypt, Moses raised up by Jahveh to deliver his people
and lead them to the gates of the promised land, the
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crossing of the desert, the giving of the law; after Moses,
Joshua and the conquest of Palestine; then, when Israel
is settled in its inheritance, the constant punishment of
secession, the invariable reward of a return to Jahveh,
the Judges, Saul, David founding the famous Israelitic
kingdom that they would restore—a complete past created
almost in its entirety by a small people that is hardly
born, with a view to opening out the future. Never was
there a vaster programme, or one that was more magni-
ficently realised.

But the years were passing, and fresh needs demanded
fresh activities.

§ 3. The Deuteronomic Period.

The few laws which the earlier moshlim had inserted
among the Mosaic episodes sufficed, as legislation, for the
period of the immediate successors of Esdras. Written
laws never precede the organisation of a people; they
do not appear until the people becomes self-conscious.
Societies which do not develop have no legislation.
Legislation is a sign that a society has entered upon
adolescence.

Half-a-century after Esdras the State of Jerusalem has
reached the period of development which is the adoles-
cence of a people. It has become stronger every day, in
proportion as it has deepened the ardent nationalism
which was symbolised in the name of the lord Jahveh.
The sacerdotal aristocracy is larger; the people obey
with more comprehensive soul; the temple casts a more
formidable shadow round the city. The time has come
for framing more precise laws. The Deuteronomic period
will be above all things legislative.

Of the two most important of the Deuteronomic laws,
one relates to the prohibition to worship Jahveh elsewhere
than in the temple at Jerusalem, which is thus raised to
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75

the rank of the sole temple of the god; the other relates
to the extermination of the so-called Canaanitic cults.
Both of them—the one in looking to the Palestinian
worshippers of Jahveh, the other referring to the
Palestinian worshippers of other deities—seem to have
aimed chiefly at preparing the hegemony of Jerusalem
over the whole of Palestine.

The enacting that the temple of Jerusalem shall be the
sole temple of Jahveh is a fact turned into a law. We
must explain how the exigencies of their imperialism led
the successors of Esdras to codify a state of things which
already existed in point of fact.

The Jewish State of the fifth century comprised the
small town of Jerusalem and its outskirts. It is the same
situation as that of the Athenian Republic, of which
Athens was the only town; or of the Roman Republic,
which consisted of Rome alone. One cannot imagine two
Capitols at Rome, or more than one Acropolis at Athens;
and it is even more inconceivable that there should be
several temples at Jerusalem in the east, with its one god,
a god personifying the soul of the country. Our modem
Catholic churches, Protestant chapels, and Jewish syna-
gogues are houses of prayer. They convey no idea of the
temple at Jerusalem, which was the centre of the State.
We must regard it as, not merely the house in which
sacrifice is offered, but the throne on which is placed the
sovereignty of the national god. The Bible will teach
that Jahveh has two homes—one in heaven, the other in
the temple at Jerusalem.

If the State of Jerusalem had been larger, or had
comprised more than one town, it is possible that sheer
necessity would have brought about a decentralisation of
the cult. In point of fact, it consisted of one town only,
and its outskirts, including the desert regions, had an area
of only a few thousand acres—not twice the extent of the
Isle of Wight. In a few hours’ march the most distant
rustics could reach their capital, and all the Jews, without
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exception, could bring their offerings in their hands to the
temple at each of the ceremonies on which this was
enjoined.

We said a moment ago that the Jerusalem temple had
not the same character as our Christian churches or our
synagogues; it was also quite different in arrangement.
When we regard the situation of the temple as it is
to-day, and try to imagine what the topography of these
places was formerly, we see plainly that there could not
be two such edifices in a State of a few thousand acres.
The temple of former days was, like the Haram of to-day,
an immense fortified esplanade, with the house of the god
in the centre. The house of the god was not larger than
one of our small churches; the esplanade could easily
contain the whole Jewish people on the days when they
were commanded to appear before their god.

Can it be supposed that there were rural sanctuaries in
the surrounding district ? It is not impossible, if we are
merely thinking of lowly survivals of the older Palestinian
cults. Instead of regarding them as temples, however, we
can at the most see in them certain obscure high-places
maintained by local superstition. A temple was at once
a fortress, a palace, and a court-house. What common
measure could there be between the seat of the govern-
ment at Jerusalem and miserable chapels lost on the
mountains ?

In the time of Esdras and his successors, then, the
Jerusalem temple is the sole temple of the State, and it
is difficult to see how any historian can doubt this. Why,
then, did the men of Jerusalem take the trouble to
formulate a solidly accomplished fact in the form of a
rigorous enactment ?

When they looked out beyond their walls, the men of
Jerusalem perceived Moab and Camos, the god of Moab,
in the east, across the Dead Sea; in the north-east they
saw Ammon, and its god Milkom; but what did they see
in the south, in the nearer west, and in the north, in
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77

Samaria ? They saw hostile peoples worshipping Jahveh,
their own national god. The national god of the Jeru-
salem State had, in fact, once been the god of all the
Israelitic tribes. In the time of David and Solomon he
had had altars from one end of Palestine to the other.
Later, in the period of the two kingdoms, his cult had
been celebrated in Ephraim, as well as Judah. The
Assyrian and Chaldaean invasions had thrown everything
into confusion; but, as the times became more tranquil,
a certain number of these old sanctuaries were restored.
Some of the ancient towns of Palestine, notably Samaria,
had then, in the fifth century, preserved or rebuilt
temples in which holocausts sent up their smoke to
Jahveh no less than in the temple at Jerusalem.

The disciples of Esdras were bound to regard these
cults as sacrilegious. Their sanctuary was, in their eyes,
the sole orthodox sanctuary; the others were altars of
abomination, plainly repudiated by the god. They might
indeed have been content to declare that Jahveh was
rightly worshipped in Jerusalem, and not rightly in
Samaria and elsewhere; but with the magnificent decision,
of which we find so many examples in Jewish history,
and which made the Jewish people one of the great peoples
of the world, they took advantage of what might have
been an unfortunate circumstance.

They intended some day to rally or annex to the recon-
stituted kingdom of Israel, of which they would be the
chiefs, these Palestinian towns in which an illicit incense
was offered to their god. But how could they express in
the language of the fifth century the rallying, annexing,
or subduing of Samaria ? Solely by imposing the Jeru-
salem cult upon Samaria. Turning toward Samaria, and
toward the towns of Palestine in which Jahveh was wor-
shipped, the men of Jerusalem did not hesitate to proclaim
that it was only in their town and their temple that all
the children of Israel—that is to say, all the Palestinians
—should render to the god the cult that was due to him.
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We do not say that the Deuteronomic law of the
monopolisation of the cult in the single temple at Jeru-
salem was promulgated for the use of the neighbouring
populations, and especially the State of Samaria. We
say that this law, inspired by the imperialism of the
legislators, had in view, in their minds, the neighbouring
populations, and especially Samaria. It is laid down in
view of the time when the whole of Palestine will be
under their domination. It condemns the other sanctu-
aries in advance: it kills rivalry in the germ. Two
centuries in advance it formulates the principles on which
the Machabees will proceed. It is, in the minds of the
successors of Esdras, the complement of their theory of
Israel. They gave their mountain in advance as capital to
the people of Israel whom they proposed to create some day.

Jerusalem was to be the capital of the State of Jeru-
salem : that was the expression that Deuteronomy gave
to the ambition of the successors of Esdras. In putting
forward, at the close of the fifth century, the pretension
to appropriate the cult of Jahveh—that is to say, to appro-
priate Jahveh—they were putting forward the pretension
to make tributaries of their neighbours; they posed as
sovereigns. To rule religiously meant, as we know, to
rule as completely as it was possible under the suzerainty
of Persia, in expectation of the time when this yoke itself
would be cast off.

[Prometheus]

The ordaining of the Jerusalem temple as the sole
temple of Jahveh, the monopolisation of the cult of Jahveh
in the single temple of Jerusalem, was at first a fact, then
a law. The fact arose from the natural circumstances in
which the little State of Jerusalem was placed by the end
of the sixth century; the law arose from the deliberate
ambition of the Jewish aristocracy. In order to impose
its hegemony on its neighbours, it had created the theory
of the ideal Israel. Now it proclaims, as a supreme law,
that Jerusalem is the centre from which Jahveh must
reign over the whole of Palestine.
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79

Unto the place which Jahveh, your god, shall choose
out of all your tribes to put his name there, even unto
his habitation shall ye seek.1

Is it possible to determine the date of this event ? The
task seemed difficult, until the papyri recently discovered
at Elephantine2 provided the means, apparently. Let us
give the facts which became known to us through the
discovery.

At some unknown period, perhaps at the beginning of
the sixth century—that is to say, at the period of the
destruction of Jerusalem by Nabuchodonosor—a Jewish
colony had settled in Egypt, on the island of Elephantine,
opposite Assouan, not far from the first cataract. They
built there a temple to their god, Jahveh. In the year
523 or 522, when Cambyses crossed Egypt, he sees and
respects this sanctuary, the papyri state. It is the time
when the Jews of Jerusalem are restoring their town.

A century passes. The Jews of Elephantine, never-
theless, have a social and economic life. They obey laws.
They would observe the Mosaic laws, the Jehovist and
Elohist and Deuteronomical laws, if they knew them.
But, in point of fact, they obey laws which at times
cruelly violate the Jehovist, Elohist, and Deuteronomic
codes. They are nevertheless in constant communication
with the metropolis, and, in the year 419-418, they
receive from it a regulation for the celebration of the
Passover. Hence the priests of Jerusalem do not regard
the priests of Elephantine as schismatics. Elephantine
is more than seven hundred miles from Jerusalem. The
monopolisation of the cult in the Jerusalem temple is a
fact in the State of Jerusalem; but the fact has not yet
been erected into a law, and it only holds of the State of
Jerusalem. The fundamental law of Deuteronomy is not
yet codified in the year 419-418.

Suddenly, during the month of Tammuz, in the four-
teenth year of Darius (that is to say, in the month of

1 Deuteronomy xii. 5.

2 See p. xv, note 3.
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July, 409), the Egyptian priests of Elephantine come to
terms with the local authorities.

“ The sanctuary of the god Jahveh must be removed
from the city of Elephantine,” they say.

And the temple of Elephantine is rased to the ground.

What do the priests of the ruined temple do ? They
petition the Persian governor; and at the same time they
appeal to the high-priest at Jerusalem for his intercession.

The priests of Elephantine do not regard themselves as
schismatics in 409. It is a fresh proof that the Deutero-
nomic law was not known to the Jews of Elephantine in
409.

We have just seen that in 419-418 the government
which ruled at Jerusalem had sent them a regulation for
the celebration of the Passover.

What reply does the high-priest of Jerusalem make
in 409 ? He does not reply at all. Is his silence due to
negligence or hostility ? We shall see.

Three years pass, and, in the month of Marchshvan, the
year 17 of King Darius (that is to say, in November, 406),
the Jews of Elephantine make a fresh appeal to the
Persian governor. To whom do they turn for help this
time ? To the sons of the pacha of Samaria, the rivals
and opponents of Jerusalem.

The silence of the high-priest of Jerusalem, therefore,
was a mark of hostility. The Jewish priests of Elephan-
tine must have seen that they had nothing to hope for
from him. They turn to the enemy.

The Jerusalem aristocracy admitted in 419-418, but
admits no longer in 409, the practice of the cult outside
the temple of Jerusalem. The Deuteronomic law,
which did not exist in 419-418, and was not yet known
at Elephantine in 409, is now promulgated. It is
taught to the Jews of Elephantine by the hostility
of the high-priest at Jerusalem. They become schis-
matics, and can only turn to Samaria. The year 409 is
the approximate date when the monopoly of the cult in
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81

the single temple of Jerusalem changes from law by
custom into written law.

But, besides the regions in which Jahveh was wor-
shipped, there were parts of Palestine in which other
gods were worshipped. Such were the coveted plains of
Philistia, and the sister-countries of Ammon, Moab, and
Edom. There were also regions in which the cult of
Jahveh was accompanied with that of other deities; as
in certain parts of the State of Samaria. The priests of
Jerusalem, moreover, failed to distinguish properly
between the cult offered to images of Jahveh and the
worship of strange gods. We have, for instance, seen
them confusing the altars of Jahveh-Melek with the
altars of the Ammonite Moloch. Finally, on every side,
perhaps even in Judaea, local superstition raised numbers
of small sanctuaries to the most sanguinary demons; and
although these sanctuaries no longer threatened the
great official temples, they propagated idolatry. Of all
these cults, which Deuteronomy, as we shall see, collec-
tively denominates Canaanitic, some were Canaanitic in
the scientific sense of the word—that is to say, anterior to
the arrival of the Israelitic tribes in Palestine; others
might be the cults of sister-tribes such as Ammon, Edom,
and Moab; while others may have been introduced later
into the country. Whatever their origin and development
were, it is against these different forms of Palestinian
paganism that the Deuteronomic legislators found them-
selves compelled to act; just as they had been constrained
to act against the Jahvic temples which rivalled that of
Jerusalem.

In the Jehovist period the chief object of the successors
of Esdras had been the resolute maintenance of Jewish
nationalism about the name of Jahveh, the national god.
Jerusalem was then the most meagre of the Palestinian
States; it seemed to the priests of Jerusalem necessary
to create a focus of unquenchable patriotism in the temple
of Jahveh. Half a century afterwards, the little State

G
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having prospered, and beginning to extend its activity
into surrounding regions, there was a danger of the people
of Jerusalem allowing strange deities to penetrate into
their town and their hearts. Further, a new danger was
arising. Would not the people of Jerusalem take their
gods from these foreigners whom they were beginning to
subdue ? Would not the conquered impose their gods on
the conquerors ?

It was not enough to preserve the people of Jerusalem
from the contagion of foreign idolatry; this idolatry must
be exterminated in such of the neighbouring communities
as came under their influence and began to feel their
domination. It is, indeed, an invariable fact that, in the
history of religions, the people who have suffered a
religious defeat tend, in spite of their conversion, to
persevere in their former practices. It could not be
otherwise among the peoples who were gradually falling
under the hegemony of Jerusalem. These Judaisers were
not all good Judaisers; a large number, especially in the
country, were clearly very bad. The old idolatrous and
fetichistic practices, the worship of Jahveh in an animal
or inorganic form along with their insignificant and
domestic gods, sacrifices, and necromantic propitiations,
would not fail to persist. They must be eradicated at
any cost.

Thus it is that the State of Jerusalem, which is a
people, now assumes the features of a sect. The work of
Esdras, creating an ardent nationalism, but giving it the
form of a religion, has developed an extraordinary
fanaticism in the souls of the Jews. When Home con-
quered Italy, it imposed its laws strenuously; Jerusalem
imposed a faith, a cult, a ritual, on those about it. The
despotism would be terrible some day. Judaism, through
its priests at first, through its Pharisees afterwards,
always exacted of the Judaisers, not merely material
obedience, but the entire surrender of the moral per-
sonality. It has been said that the Inquisition is found
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83

in Deuteronomy. The clerical aristocracy of Jerusalem
inaugurated the Inquisition in the fourth century before
the present era.1

In fine, not content with preserving the Jewish soul
from foreign idolatry, or with attacking this idolatry in
the heart of the Judaising peoples, the Jerusalem legis-
lators felt that the great programme of the reconstitution
of the kingdom of Israel implied, if the neighbouring
populations were to be conquered some day, the con-
demnation of whatever deities they had besides Jahveh
and the monopoly of the Jahvic cult at Jerusalem. Like
the monopoly of the Jahvic cult at Jerusalem, the con-
demnation of pagan cults in Palestine was a logical and
necessary consequence of the ambition of Jerusalem.
The leaders who ruled at Jerusalem took the offensive.
They turned again to the neighbouring populations, whom
they dreamed of conquering some day, and, in order to
impose on them the worship of the Jahveh who reigned
at Jerusalem, they cast anathema on their gods. The
centres of anti-Jahvic idolatry which continued to increase
in Palestine threatened—at first in Jerusalem itself, then
among the Judaisers, lastly among their idolatrous neigh-
bours—the authority which the Jerusalem clergy dreamed
of securing in the name of the people of Israel. It was
the exigencies of their imperialist policy that once more
guided the Deuteronomic legislators when, on the one
hand, they promulgated their fearful enactments against
idolatry, and when, on the other, they launched their
anathema against the Canaanites.

We know that the Canaanites, Hethites, Amorrhites,
Pheresites, Hevites, Jebusites, and Gergezites are names
that the Jehovist writers used in order to explain how
Jahveh had benevolently bestowed their land on Israel.
In the Deuteronomic writers all these peoples are con-
founded under the generic name of Canaanites. But the

1 See ante, p. 33.
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Canaanites are no longer merely victims despoiled by
Jahveh in favour of Israel. They become the symbol of
idolatry, of paganism; they are, by the very definition,
the enemies of Jahveh. In accordance with the invariable
usage of Jewish literature, the moshlim of the fourth
century project on them, in the past, a contemporary
reality. The Canaanites of the Deuteronomic Bible are
the mythical image of those neighbours of Jerusalem who,
in the midst of and by the side of the hegemony of
Jerusalem, maintained in the fourth century the religious
practices condemned by the law of Jerusalem. Even
more than during the Jehovist period, Canaan is the
counterpart of Israel.

Thus the mashal of the Deuteronomic period are terrible
for the Canaanites. The Deuteronomic episodes of the con-
quest, in the book of Joshua, are pages of blood. There
is nothing but frightful massacres. Women are no more
spared than men ; children no more than the aged. The
flocks are exterminated, the soil is accursed. These pages
seem to be written in the fearful delirium of visionaries
sated with carnage. The command of Jahveh is explicit
—none must be spared. And when Joshua is laid in his
tomb after the conquest, not a single Canaanite remains
alive, say the ancient narratives. The priests who ruled
at Jerusalem in the fourth century were giving to the
world the dilemma that pervades the whole of Jewish
literature, including the prophets and the apocalypses—
submit or be exterminated.

The ancient Jehovist narratives of a period presumably
later than Joshua and the ancient episodes of the Judges
knew nothing of this extermination of the Canaanites;
they had frankly related the sequel of the conflicts
between the Israelites and the Canaanites. With that
indifference to contradictions that shocks us so much,
though it is general among the Orientals, and particularly
found in the Jews, the Deuteronomic writers did not
trouble to recast the legends of the Judges and Samuel.
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85