There has long been significant support for the common notion of the right to a state. In the case of Israel, however, thinkers like Leibowitz thought of a certain kind of nationalism, if it became dominant, as idolatrous. One major text often thought to oppose such idolatrous views is Genesis 1:27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. It was and is a remarkable notion that all human beings and not simply kings are created in the divine image. How did the biblical author, a priest in this case, come to this view? In the following paragraphs, I give in some detail my perspective on the historical circumstances of the notion, while examining Leibowitz’s sense that a state providing more than the sustenance of life is nothing short of idolatrous. I do not discuss what could be a basic sustenance of life for the simple reason that it would be impossible to come to an agreement.

So, how did ancient Israelites come to such unusual views and why is it so important to understand their predicament of 2500 years ago, especially when so many institutions are in danger of being hollowed out under the pressure of plutocrats? The Biblical views of land and politics that I’m thinking about had their origins in repeated catastrophes that engulfed Israel and its neighboring kingdoms, but particularly Israel and Judah. I will focus on the book of Exodus which has so much to say about ethnicity and land. I hope that it will be sufficient for our purposes to interpret some of the themes of that book as precisely as space allows, and replace the notion of human beings as images of the divine in a larger context.

Exodus and its historical background

There is no evidence that Hebrews, Israelites, Judahites, or eventually Jews were enslaved in Egypt, or that they lived there en masse. There is some evidence from the middle bronze period that Semitic people travelled to the delta in Egypt. This evidence comes for instance from the tombs of Beni Hassan (1890 BCE). But Semitic people were numerous and they could be coming from a variety of Canaanite or Phoenician ethnic groups.

Another type of evidence is the fact that other Semitic people lived in the Sinai where they were probably employed by Egypt to mine copper from the bronze age on. This metal was critical for the making of tools and weapons in the bronze period when Egypt dominated the region. That is actually where the alphabetic writing that we still use today was created, circa the 16th century BCE, perhaps in imitation of some of the letters used for transcription by Egyptians. Parenthetically, alphabetic writing—and syllabic to a degree—was little used before the 11th to 10th centuries BCE. Its usage became particularly significant in the ninth century BCE when kings used it for law, management, and self justification. It is unlikely to have been used either in the Hyksos period (17–16th centuries BCE) or the 13th century BCE. More on this later.

The dates for the two types of evidence we have used in the previous paragraph do not fit what we know or think we know about the story of the exodus from Egypt. In regard to this story, which is prefaced in the Bible by the late novella of Joseph, most of its legendary account is clearly more recent than the small kingdom of Israel that vanished at the end of the eighth century BCE, as did the dozen or so of neighboring kingdoms. They were all conquered by Assyria—the first large Empire of antiquity—and eventually by Babylonia, Persia, the Greeks, and the Romans. The kingdom of Judah felt it was particularly protected in escaping the first onslaught. But it too fell to Babylonia in 586 BCE and had to look for better and more encompassing theological views of history. More on that later also. But note already that what we call the Bible came to existence only in Israel and Judah. It did not occur in any of the neighboring kingdoms even though they shared the basic idea that their ethnic main god—one major pantheon leader per nation—used its enemies to punish kings and people for their failures.

There is no evidence of an exodus but overwhelming documentation that some Israelites and Judahites, as well as Aramaeans, served as mercenaries in Egypt, more precisely in the island of Elephantine, on the southern border of Achaemenid Persia, beginning in the seventh century BCE but mostly in the fifth century BCE, until the loss of Egypt to Persia in 404 BCE. The mercenaries were tasked with keeping order on the southern border of Egypt, which went through several rebellions against their imperial masters. The Persians eventually withdrew from Egypt after the large rebellion of 404 BCE.

How the exodus story defined a new people

Some of the Exodus story was probably transmitted and written under the Israelite kings, perhaps in the troubled times of prophet Hosea. Egypt long remained a major enemy of the Israelites and neighboring kingdoms, even after its loss of power at the hands of Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia. So, for instance, stories of liberation from Egypt could have been told by storytellers attached to the northern court. Such stories sought to unify the people and justify the monarchy religiously. In fact, most if not all of the regional kingdoms—Israel, Judah, Damascus, Edom, Moab, Ammon, Philistines, Aramaeans, and Phoenician states in spite of the latter’s more friendly relationship with Egypt—had lived under Egyptian power until about 1200 BCE and even later.

But we miss a fundamental aspect of the story of Exodus and its additional preface, Genesis, if we insist on reading the whole of the story as a historical report, beginning with Moses’s childhood and a single national god, Yahweh. The story of slavery fits well the later brutalities inflicted by Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians as well as the Greeks and the Romans in later times. It stands to reason and fits the events of the 8th–6th centuries BCE that Egypt could still be presented as the paradigmatic enemy, rather than the powerful Mesopotamian empires of reality.

Does questioning the historical reality of the exodus event make a difference in our thinking about the revolutionary politics of the book of Exodus? No, say many—including myself. On the contrary, it makes a great difference to insist that there was a real background to the story, though it is not the one that a naïve historicist reading of the Hebrew Bible has passively reconstructed until now. The late background, under the Babylonians and Persians, is fundamental. It is that of the loss of local political and religious power to exploitative forces that had their own powerful political and religious justifications. Note that the new people described in the book of Exodus comes into being under a succession of empires. The latter empires are in a constant competition to have their authority recognized.

No kings, no land

So this story of salvation and covenant transformed the real situation of the people—filtered through a long memory of subjection—. Some of its themes were common, for instance the story of a narrow escape from Egypt, or a theomachy on a mountain (but note that these appearances occur very far from the traditional revelatory places of a local Yahweh). Other themes are more unusual, for instance the acceptance of a covenant made via a peculiar mediator, not a king, who eventually disappears from the story. Another theme is the notion of a promised land, which gives strength and affirms the people’s hopes, but is an astonishing bet on the future.

The book provides the children of Israel with a renewed capacity to interpret their situation and imagine new relations of trust and faith. It will be without the protection of kings, their domineering palaces, their publishing of laws, and without writing as a royal tool. It would also be without a temple, images (aniconism), conquering divinity, epic-styled story of creation in Genesis 1–11. In other words, a politics of resistance is being created for the first time and bound to a single god whose plans cannot be easily interpreted. There are still priests, but without royal authority. The story of Moses’ burial in Deuteronomy 34:5–6 makes this clear when it says:

So Moses, the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD, and he buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth-pe’or; but no man knows the place of his burial to this day.

The burial of Moses by the LORD suggests that priestly authority is limited—until Hasmonean times—and that it is impossible to use relics to help found a regime, at least in the case of Moses. We all know how important relics are in politics, including in modern states. Even in the US, the monuments to the dead on the Washington Mall are at the center of American politics. When one walks the whole length of the Mall and back, one can’t help but think that the White House, the Capitol and other political organizations of the state are like the wheels of an engine that draws much of its life from the glorified dead of previous wars (Arlington cemetery across the river, the Vietnam Memorial, now the Holocaust monument, etc.). Round and round it goes, gathering steam from its contact with the magic transformation of tears and nightmares into hopes. Is this very different from what the Kremlin did and does when it mummified the body of Lenin and keeps it to this day on very controlled representation for the crowds of pilgrims? Is it any different from the late Roman re-inscribing of the body of Jesus, the cross, etc. into the landscape of what became the “holy land?” Any different from the cult of relics or the cult of the shroud of Turin since the fourteenth century?

Monotheism as resistance to empire

I will now consider in list format the consequences for Israel and Judah of their being conquered by a succession of empires:

1. Monotheism (a modern word): The evolution from polylatry to monolatry seems to have been full of tensions under the kings and did not follow a simple straight line. No direct line either can be reconstructed that goes from a putative thirteenth-century BCE monotheism to polytheism or polylatry, and back to a pure form of monotheism. The evidence can only fit a more complex story and doesn’t compel us to see a progressively refined monotheism as a necessary outcome.

   What the evidence suggests, however, is that much of the monotheistic development was shaped by the need to resist larger forces. This resistance to overwhelming force was framed as a fidelity that is the thread running through the history of monotheism. Faithfulness to the covenant was expected at interlocking levels: first to one’s lineage or kinship; then beyond one’s kinship circles to the underprivileged who were doing much of the work, as social stratification increased from the ninth century BCE on; and finally to a broader, even more distant and concealed, yet related source of life.

   Is the kind of representation of the divinity that we encounter in the second temple period, as a completely ineffable and unpronounceable “name”, connected with this resistance? Did the ineffability of the divine name, or its cautious use, point towards the impossibility to see the real source of one’s being beyond the evermore complex social articulations of the time? Or, on the contrary, did it represent a necessarily hidden, unquestionable cosmic and political order?

   The present sketch of the early history of monotheism meant to suggest that in the first millennium BCE, the growth of the economy, political and military developments, relationships beyond biology, more complex technological articulations, and cultural evolution, all contributed to making families and communities more distant from the sources of their existence. Their life and reproduction of it were not exclusively any more at the kinship, village, or even ethnic (or national) level. There was a further horizon beyond which everything once “hidden” or simply invisible—as the Hebrew word ne’elam indicates—became more structured and shaped an eternity that the Hebrew word `olam came to express.

2. The divinity appears not only in its territory in the hill country of Israel and Judah, and especially in its local house or temple, as expected, but also in the Sinai or in Babylonia, which is unexpected in the ancient world. The local image or statue of the God was literally its residence or protective, divine presence. Babylonia appears as a “there” in a series of visions to Ezekiel on the Chebar canal, “in the land of the Chaldeans,” far from home. Furthermore, foreign countries were considered to be unclean. But in Ezekiel 10:1–22 and 11:22–25, Yahweh leaves his temple (his house), and “is free to appear anywhere at any time” (M. Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20, Anchor Bible, 1983, pages 196–97). Here too, as in the book of Exodus, the divine presence precedes the prophet and the people.

   So, to make virtue out of necessity, the divinity has become completely mobile and without an image, except that of the human person. The visions and especially the vision of the divinity abandoning its house and going with the exiles on the banks of the Euphrates is an extraordinary event…. Yahweh is presented as about to return without the need for a king to reinstate him. What is novel is the “being with,” that is to say, the historical, open engagement of the divinity, which we see in Ezekiel as well as in chapter 3 of Exodus, in answer to Moses at the burning bush. This is very different from the politics of the kings who claimed that they were restoring order and assumed a return to a golden era. The built-in royal wisdom was that the ideal, orderly society was at the origin and lost its quality over time. In the ancient political imagery of history, salvation was not open to the future but was presented as a return from a spoiled state of affairs to the original purity of a golden age. I note that the political model is not entirely gone and that Trump wishes to fit the ancient royal myth. The new historical engagement, on the contrary, is framed as an opening to the future, not as a return to a golden age.

   The divinity was presented as radically mobile, and this in two ways. In the first vision at the beginning of the book of Ezekiel, chapter 1, remarkably set in a location in exile, the enthronement of the divinity is a reworking of the massive architectural features that Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, or imitative kinglets of the East used to base and reinforce their hold on the population. What is striking about all of these structures, be they the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, the Assyrian or Babylonian statues of kings, bulls, lions, and strange mythological creatures, or the reliefs of the Apadana or great audience hall in Persepolis, is their imposing, repetitive, and massive, heavy presence. They were designed to strike the imagination with their weight, the extraordinary amount of labor and skill they represented, their permanence, their perspectival shaping of political power, and their majestic immutability. One instance among many is the city of Nimrud, Ashurnasirpal II’s seat in the ninth century BCE. Or the Apadanas which were the great audience halls at Persepolis and Susa. There, Persian kings received tribute from all the nations in the Achaemenid empire. The flying chariot and the luminous, airy “glory” of Ezekiel’s vision was a way to say that true *glory*—weighty, as the root *kavod* has it—is radically other than these massive imperial structures built to awe and prevent rebellion.

   A few more words about the sweeping mobility of Yhwh: this remarkable mobility is the more possible because of the minimal presence of other gods or goddesses. The divinity is not anchored in one place anymore. It has no equals, no council, no family, no theomachy either, as the late story of creation will proclaim.

   In parallel with their political re-adaptation, Judaeans and Israelites engaged in a full re-telling and re-writing of their mythological traditions and ethnic origins, relation to the land, and reasons for mobility. All of this came not from a putative nomadism at the beginning of the story, framed as a consequence of an earliest fault and Cain murder. The end was made to stand at the beginning.

3. Kings and gods: Before the monotheistic transformation, the cult evolved by offering to competing groups a more distant projection of the deity or deities and at the same time practical access and local means to worship these more transcendent and powerful gods. Kings provided means of access to the gods by building immense adjacent palaces and temples, bringing water works, offering sacrifices, enthroning divine images, donating to festivities and pilgrimages—including festive meals—, sponsoring stories, prophecies and hymns, etc. With the help of priests, prophets, and scribes, kings created and managed this increasing distance from the gods and the needed proximity to them that was the main source of their own powers. These powers were undistinguishable from those of their gods. By building and extending a larger, more distant image of the gods, kings were imitating the gods’ evolving dialectic of presence and absence and intensifying it. As Assmann, the author of Moses the Egyptian (1997) and a commentary on the book of Exodus (2015) wrote:
   

   The state therefore presupposes distance from God — and compensates for it. To put it even more sharply: If the gods were present, there would be no state. But because the gods are distant, there must be an institution that maintains contact with the world of the gods even under the conditions of distance from God. = Der Staat setzt die Gottesferne also voraus—und kompensiert sie. Noch schärfer formuliert: Wären die Götter gegenwärtig, gäbe es keinen Staat. Weil die Götter aber fern sind, muß es eine Institution geben, die den Kontakt mit der Götterwelt auch unter den Bedingungen der Gottesferne aufrechterhält.

   Yet, these cultic changes were not only called forth by the kings. The people also expected the gods to protect them in all aspects of their lives. They may have assessed the divine powers differently, however. And indeed, the development of gods and the complex dynamics of absence and presence controlled by kings—or negotiated by them—could act as a brake on the exploitation of the peasantry and ensure more equitable redistribution. So, kings had a significant interest in developing major local cults for reasons of political control and authority over access to land and labor.

4. The law was now promulgated in the Torah by the divinity, not by the king. Royal authority is severely restricted. The normal situation was for kings to promulgate the law in regard to the cult and to social order. Justice and cult were the province of the king. But Deuteronomy 17 removes any role that the king may have in granting justice. So, social order (including cosmic order) and cultic order are the prerogative of temple personnel obeying the only true king, Yahweh.

   This change in the notion of the mobility of the divinity and its detachment from the traditional territory correlated with a change in the notion of justice. The limited corpus of laws changed in tone. In Exodus, it became embedded in a story claiming the absolute reality of salvation from the grip of slavery. Without sanctuary, statue, kings, and with a deity who was both *mobile*—therefore potentially closer—and more transcendent, justice became more broadly defined and more *sui generis*. Failures to pursue this justice constituted now a greater part (arguably) of failure in *imitatio Dei*, and sin a more personalized rebellion, rather than a collection of various breaches and transgressions that involved the whole community.

   Yet, one needs to explain the Ezekelian throne: “like a throne” says the book of Ezekiel. The “like” is the part that preoccupies us, since the throne itself was the standard mark of royalty and that of the “reigning” gods, unsurprisingly. Even empty, in the first temple (?), on top of griffin-like creatures (the tamed cherubs, כרובים, which one suspects come from the notion of kings needing to be shown protecting their people and therefore conquering wild animals, as on the Persian bas-reliefs?). So, Ezekiel, as I understand it, is not letting go of this imagery that he knows from Jerusalem and even in a more grandiose fashion from Babylon (and other places perhaps), but he questions its political role because its similar use in Babylonia, as monumentalized support of an empire itself of short duration, is destined to vanish. As mentioned above, real power was not where one expected it to be, Ezekiel is saying. It could not be transposed but needed to be literally exploded or levitated and leveraged.

   Accounts of the origin of social laws that rely on a supra-historical divine intervention tend to go wrong at this juncture. By not developing a more complex historical explanation of the development of these laws, historians miss its truly revolutionary implications.

   The second important transformation is that law or Torah began to be seen as given directly by the divinity. It was not only justified and guaranteed by it as was normally done in law codes issued by kings. There is a large evidentiary set for this, often discussed by scholarship. What is required at this point and only partially provided is an analysis of the control of writing and the repeating of traditions, when the normal mediator—the king—was gone and scribal prophetic schools and priesthood survived.

   The editing and promulgation of the Torah as directly emanating from the divinity is comparable to the solution in Athens of similar social problems caused by aristocratic families. The externalities, granted, are not the same. There is no empire quite as threatening on its margins. Solon’s reform also did away with tyrants or elites as intermediaries, at about the same time as Judaean writers (beginning of sixth century BCE, for similar reasons, and with similar further editing and ideologizing by later democrats in the fifth century. The danger of tyranny was omni-present, pressed by the *Eupatridai* and other leading families. The difference between the two situations was that there was no theocracy or kings in Greece. And most importantly, a weaker appeal to divine authority was done in the enacting of just laws, at least in the fragmentary poems we have of Solon. Here too, more research needs to be done to compare to Judah this structurally similar ancient society.

5. Writing is imputed to Yahweh, not to kings.
   1. Writing in antiquity was not a civilizing instrument but a legitimating tool that empowered kings or oligarchs.. It increased the power they had on their subjects. Many aspects of the use of early writing appear to justify this radical critique. But does it still apply to Israel and Judah whose political power was destroyed in unique circumstances? Once Israel’s and Judah’s monarchy disappeared, these small nations responded to the new circumstances and imagined a new framework for a pen that their kings had lost.

   2. Against the universal use of writing as a means to increase the power of kings and elites, Israel and Judah eventually used writing in new ways. In the case of the kings and elites of Israel and Judah, writing may also have started as an instrument of domination in their developing kingdoms. Indeed, writing expanded considerably in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE. An example of the quiet power of writing is the use of letters, for instance in the legendary story of David and Uriah. But more is at stake because of the peculiar combined history of those two small kingdoms. After the disastrous end of the monarchy, writing was eventually separated from the kings.

      Several episodes in the Bible make clear that writing had considerable power but that it had been removed from the hands of the royal administration and kings. Their authority was replaced by the unique divine king who wrote directly or via Moses in Exod 24:12, 18; 31:18; and 34:1–5, 27–28. Or it was replaced by prophetic writing: for instance Jeremiah and Ezekiel, leaders of the community. The evidence from the Bible is that kings are absent of Genesis and Exodus but commanded to obey the law in Deut 17:18–19 (compare 1 Sam 8):

      and when he [the king] sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of his law, from that which is in charge of the Levitical priest; and it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them.

6. Epic or prose? Genesis 1–11, which introduces Genesis 12–50 and Exodus, is not told in epic verse as expected, but in prose. Epic style celebrates the grandeur and nobility of divine and near-divine heroes. It also justifies the political structures in which it is embedded. It invites the participants to be transported and enchanted by the elevated language. There is a touch of it in Genesis 1–11, as Alter says in the introduction to his translation of Genesis:
   

   The style [of Genesis 1–11] tends much more than that of the Patriarchal Tales to formal symmetries, refrainlike repetitions, parallelisms, and other rhetorical devices of a prose that often aspires to the dignity of poetry, or that invites us to hear the echo of epic poetry in its cadences.

   Still, why a prose narrative and not epic poetry in a story of creation that competes with the great myths used in Mesopotamian liturgy? Of course, we have to be careful not to impose our modern idea of genres on the biblical narrative. Yet, the epic genre is abundantly used in the Bible. The psalms especially are often epic texts that to this day invite singing and incantatory chanting. But not Genesis 1–11, at least at first sight. So, the question remains: was this ancient Hebrew story of creation always done in prose? Or was this narrative style adopted because the text of Gen 1–2 is much more recent than the surrounding text. More even to the point, was this narrative style adopted for certain reasons, and most prominently theological reasons? And if there was a change of narrative style from epic to prose, when did this happen? In the early Iron Age (1200–1100 BCE), in response to surrounding Canaanite epic from which ancient Israel was expected to detach itself completely, or much later in the exilic period, in response to the military power, horrors, and eventual failure, that Babylonian epic incantation represented for a conquered people?

7. The people and land are redefined: Given that everything pertains to the divinity, the land itself cannot be at the origin of the ethnos. Autochthony and allochthony see a radical shift in their values. Surprisingly, many scholars do not think that defining the people as a people before they have a land is a remarkable step. It is done by a people who has in fact lost to large kingdoms the land that they presumably thought to have always been theirs.

   Heretofore, i.e. in the early Iron Age or 1200 to 1100 BCE, they did not have to ask themselves the question as property of land was highly dependent on the larger investment of labor made in a denser demography. Many scholars seem to think that all people thought of themselves as having recently migrated. The evidence from classical Greek stories is that the community seems to know that it has moved from somewhere else but talks of its land as an eternal possession.

   Now as regards nobility of birth, their first claim thereto is this—that the forefathers of these men were not of immigrant stock, nor were these their sons declared by their origin to be strangers in the land sprung from immigrants, but natives sprung from the soil living and dwelling in their own true fatherland; and nurtured also by no stepmother, like other folk, but by that mother-country wherein they dwelt, which bare them and reared them and now at their death receives them again to rest in their own abodes. Most meet it is that first we should celebrate that Mother herself; for by so doing we shall also celebrate therewith the noble birth of these heroes. (Menexenus)

   Even now, some US citizens recreate the belief in their naturalness, no matter the emigrants’ stories and the knowledge of the elimination of indigenous people.

8. There are no kings or enthronement of kings in the first story of creation. But instead of having only one king being made as a statue in the image of a god, such as a divine son, it is every human being who is made in the image of the divinity.

The value of the human person

In a well-known text from the Mishnah Sanhedrin (4:5), written at the earliest in the second century of our era, the singularity of humans is contrasted with the extraordinary variety of their world. I quote:

Human beings were created as individuals, to teach that whoever destroys one soul, it is as if a complete world was destroyed, and whoever sustains one soul, it is as if a whole world was sustained. […] For coins are made by being struck with a die, and yet they all resemble each other. But the Divine One struck each human being with the die of the first person, yet none resembles the other.

The die or seal used for the “first person” produces a different image each and every time, yet there was but one die, used an infinite number of times. In contrast, mints have different dies, which wear out and must be replaced, yet the coins are very similar. The similarity of the coins, in turn, makes the task of governing and controlling people that much easier. In contrast to this attitude, Yahweh or the divine agent is apparently more willing to relinquish control and have images of self which can be very different, and have value in and of themselves.

This is a very short blog triggered by the sight of billionaire moguls playing the fools for the media and their new political idol. It is also prompted by the reading of a Trevor Jackson piece, The ungovernable economy in the NYRB. Summarily said, it boggles the mind that the mobility of capital across borders has not only become extraordinary but tends to be more and more politically unregulated. Labor, meanwhile, has been divided politically. All too often, it has been confused by …. billionaires and has turned migrant workers into an enemy expected to respect national borders. It accepts to be provided with divisive rhetoric while its pockets are being picked. It has become the focal point of a new and ugly class war.

The owners and largest investors in various technologies—particularly in data processing—float over us and instantly move billions of dollars or bitcoins from one bank to another. That ethereal movement of money and values allows the new nexus of power to flee any notion of having some semblance of obligations. Its leaders recognize obligations only to themselves and their largest investors. Social equality, democratic rules of law, global warming, etc,.., have been dropped from a widely shared tradition that was kept alive, say, until the nineteen eighties.

No surprise at all in the executive orders that Trump hurried to sign yesterday and today, or in the presence of mass fortunes as a token of Trumpian success. They were all expected. The second act, though, is going to be closer to fascism without its name. It is going to be punitive, particular regarding immigrants. The mass pardon issued by decree is a tell-tale sign. It is going to encourage the constitution of storm-trooper units. Why? Because resistance in the federal agencies, the opposition of legal circles, huge contradictions in the economy leading to unbridable inflation [if migrant labor is arrested in the US or prohibited entry, how do we expect the vanishing cheap labor to beat inflation? As for tariffs, how can they be put in place without inflationary effect here and industrial downturn globally?], fast coming disaffection with the new government, all of the above is going to have one Trumpian retribution: invite the MAGA troops to find enemies inside and outside. Point the finger at all the dangerous riffraff. What is developing is a class war in which the nouveaux riches have obligations only to themselves.

It was rather sad to see some of the richest CEOs of the country trapped and forced to become actors in a new drama. On January 8, the first page of the New York Times had a picture of horses pulling the Carter’s caisson on their way to the Capitol where he lay in state. I imagined the hooves resonating on the streets. What was remarkable about this first page was that the other columns of the paper were reporting signs of our backsliding. First, there was how the Meta company had decided to stop checking the content of messages, most certainly to please Trump. Another column talked about the death of the authoritarian, racist, and antisemitic leader Le Pen whose daughter Marine will probably be the next president of France three years from now. And finally, the third column is telling how kids in the public schools are fearing visits by the ICE agents.

It has become a battle of good and evil, with money greasing everything. Yet, that battle has already been joined by myriads of people whose heroes are not only Jimmy Carter—for some at least—but most surely Bishop Budde who directed her simple words to President Trump at his enthronement Tuesday in the Washington National Cathedral: “I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” said the soft-spoken leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. Mercy, not violence, vengeance or retribution. Mercy as in a God of mercy, so frequently encountered both in the Hebrew Bible (חסד about 250 times) and its Christian translations (ἔλεος 338 times). Immigrants are not criminals, but “people who pay taxes, and are good neighbors.” And also, “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives.” We are going to need plenty of such acts of resistance in the coming months and years.

On the occasions of Christmas and Easter, newspapers and other media often feel compelled to publish stories related to religion. Yesterday, the NYT published an article on Jesus’s humility by David French titled Why Are So Many Christians So Cruel?. Today, Nicholas Kristof interviewed Elaine Pagels about the historicity of the virgin birth in his article A Conversation About the Virgin Birth That Maybe Wasn’t. In this blog, I aim to show that both articles lead to reflections on political power that are closely connected.

Power and Grace

The first article rejects the claim that the faithful are entitled and justified to rule. Unfortunately, for too many Christians, the love of power trumps that of justice. This kind of self-justification disregards the stories about Jesus who was was born in humble conditions, “far from the corridors of power.” As a child, he was even a refugee, we are told by the infancy narratives. He did not aim to rule his nation or the Roman Empire; on the contrary, he rejected power and called for compassion and forgiveness. This is where the second article comes in: according to the gospels of Matthew and Luke, each in its way, his birth was both miraculous and humble. For believers, telling the story of the virgin birth was a way to glorify Christ and reduce ancient embarrassment about the realities. For Pagels, it means that “the Gospels most often speak in the language of stories and poetry” and that metaphoric interpretations are best. But doesn’t thinking that everything is metaphors risk losing sight of the realities of this story and especially of its political aspects? That is what I would like to explore in more detail in the rest of this text.

The birth stories imagined by the gospels of Matthew and Luke cry to be placed in their literary, religious, and political context. The hopes and fears that a society can entertain about principles other than biological transmission and social order are given voice in these stories. The narratives of the empty tomb and resurrection need to be analyzed along the same lines. Women are featured most prominently at both ends of Jesus’s life because their humility places them in a much more dramatic position that allows them to understand and shape everyone’s hopes.

The words of Elizabeth and even more Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55 encourage the reshaping and deepening of trust that is concealed in the nativity story and that is essential to a dignified society. What happens in the womb responds to an infinite realm of causes. Great events and power will unfold in villages like Nazareth as well as in the temple in Jerusalem, not in palaces. A new version of honor can see the light of day, and the Magnificat reverberates throughout the sweep of the gospel. It is part of a program of radical change in many passages of the gospels. And all of this vision is started by a young woman on the margins of society.

Nazareth is at the center of the proclamation in Luke 4. It continues the infancy story of revelation to a socially weak woman in an unknown village. Jerusalem and the temple are incorporated into the story but are not at the center of the annunciation. Two things are of importance therefore: 1) the openness and inclusion of foreigners (“nations”), and 2) the decentering from Jerusalem and the temple. Nazareth becomes a mediator between Zion and the nations.

My take is that the vocabulary of humility should be understood together with the vocabulary of grace and gift. In the infancy narrative, what is paramount and unfortunately not sufficiently insisted upon by commentators is that the divine agent shows itself to be a poor woman— or at least not rich and entitled— in an unknown village far away socially and religiously from the centers of power. This goes against all the rules of a society built on the notion of divine gift. A belief in a unilaterally given grace is now shaping the landscape for a newly ordered society.

I see Mary as a parallel Moses in the sense that power doesn’t rest anymore with pharaoh-like or king-like figures but with a young woman who hasn’t been accepted in the social and ethical networks of her society. Note that the secular worshipping of Mary in the Catholic Church and her glorification in art have transformed the figure for male theologians and priests who are still in charge of education and liturgy, but not yet for women who are much more likely to see the revolutionary elements of the story.

Tracking Biology, Power, and Grace

The Hebrew Bible has a strong tradition of deep reflection on the proper grounds for political order and authority. In considering why their religiously framed monarchy repeatedly collapsed in the 8th-6th centuries BCE, and further in experiencing the dynastic and religious systems of their conquerors and enemies, Israelite and Judaean circles began to realize that the foundation of their life in the community was to be sought beyond biology, beyond the material, social, and religious order in which monarchies were set up and justified. Allow me to be more precise: the Israelites were mostly concerned about their own society. The effort to transcend their catastrophic circumstances, which we interpret as their incipient theology, was little preoccupied with universal questions, at least early on. Still, it was revolutionary to re-imagine the possible meaning of one’s post-royal history as the hidden will of a single divinity. Neighboring monarchic societies did not do so (Moab, Ammon, Edom, Philistine city-states, Phoenician cities, Aramaean monarchies, etc.).

This effort to understand one’s history is apparent in the way two important themes, namely the birth of male potential heirs and the order of inheritance, became structured within the folktale tradition. I call them folktales since they were and are basically themes widely found in world tales and collected, for example, in Stith Thompson’s Motif-index of Folk Literature (1955). First, we have several important stories of women, usually loved and beautiful (a rarely noted characteristic in the Bible), who cannot conceive or only do so in a Mary-like miraculous way, after an impossibly long wait. Sarah first of all (for Isaac), Rachel for Joseph, Tamar in other ways, Hannah for Samuel (whom she renounces).

The second theme often attached to the first but not necessarily so is that of the eventual centrality of the second-born or late-born son in a system that depended on the great importance of the transfer of power over land and labor to the first-born. Abraham himself, Isaac, Jacob as a test case (by only minutes), Joseph, Moses, and David are all somewhat miraculous and belated sons. One may add the parable of the prodigal son, a further reflection on this problem of the re-ordering of first-son politics, and the dynamic integration or re-integration of the “lines.”

So, in Sarah’s case, the conception of Isaac is not only miraculous because of the long, impossible wait, but also because it is paired with a visit from the divinity. It doesn’t have the usual language about conception but is close to the gospel tale.

[to be continued in the coming hours]

“Who is my neighbor?” remains the essential political question. Trump has just won a clear majority that agrees with his claim that immigrants are enemies and that they are not worthy of our hospitality, far from it. Surprisingly, hostility and hospitality have a common origin in Latin. This commonality may help to think our relationship to foreign immigrants. Latin hospes is at the origin of host (in the sense of army) or hostile and hostility. But it is also the root of host (in the sense of guest and host) and hospitality, hostel, or hospice. An alien could become a guest or a hostile host (Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, Paris: 1969, vol.1, 355). So, beyond our family, friends, and ethnic group, there is an overwhelmingly large group of people that we can perceive as hospitable. Some among us have unfortunately pre-emptied the question and look at them as thugs.

Can we consider people who do not belong to our ethnicity or social class, people who are not in a position to reciprocate the favors we did to them (or thought we did), can we think of them as potential neighbors? Or are we to consider them as permanent hostile enemies? And if they become our neighbors and they are in need of help, are we expected to do away completely with self-interest? Or are there boundaries to what we perceive to be our duty to help? How do we define this limit? How am I to be a neighbor to others?

One kind of answer is given by Hesiod. Like Latin, he defines neighbor as being someone between the two extremes of kin and enemy. According to Hesiod who agrees here with all of antiquity’s wisdom, ideal relations with neighbors are based on their capacity to reciprocate. One is supposed to remember exactly what neighbors do for you, and vice versa:

Call your friend to a feast; but leave aside your enemy;
and preferably call him who lives near you:
for if anything happens in the village,
neighbors rush in ungirt, but kins would gird themselves.
A bad neighbor is a catastrophe, as a good one is a great treasure;
he happens to be fortunate who has a good neighbor;
not even an ox would die but for a bad neighbor.
Measure well what you get from your neighbor and reciprocate well
with the same measure, and more generous, if you can;
so that if you are later in need, you may find him sure.
(Work and Days 342–51)

The question has been raised with more urgency by other traditions, especially Leviticus 19:17–18 and the parable of the so called “Good Samaritan” found exclusively in Luke 10:25–37. The Samaritan’s story may be an expansion of the brief text of Mark 13. But I will focus on this parable and ask especially why it is the Samaritan who is considered most likely to show compassion. Jesus tells a story about a man who falls victim to bandits on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, and is ignored by a priest and a Levite before being helped by a traveling Samaritan. The parable is most often attributed to Jesus, but there are excellent grounds to think that it is the creation of the evangelist rather than of Jesus. See especially Meier, Probing the authenticity of the parables 2016, pp. 199–209.

29 But he [the lawyer], wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus: “And who is my neighbor?“ 30 In answer, Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among robbers, who after they stripped him and inflicted wounds, went away, leaving him half-dead. 31 It happened, however, that a priest was going down that road and, seeing him, passed by on the other side. 32 Likewise a Levite also passed by on the other side when he reached the place and saw him. 33 A Samaritan who was travelling came to the place and when he saw him, he had compassion, 34 and coming close, he bandaged his wounds, pouring oil and wine. After setting him up on his own animal, he took him to an inn and took care of him. 35 The next day, he took out two *denarii* and gave them to the inn-keeper, saying: ‘Take care of him and whatever more you spend, I myself will reimburse you upon my return.’ 36 Which of these three, in your opinion, was a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” 37 He said: ”The one doing charity to him” Jesus said to him: ”Go and you too do likewise.”

No original Good Samaritan appears in recorded history, but the historical conditions that make it possible to imagine the telling of this story are most interesting. One could suppose an audience composed of people hostile to Samaritans, yet all sharing or willing to understand the ideal of compassion. One could even draw an analogy triggered by the modern situation and think of a leader of the Israeli settler movement telling followers a similar story involving a compassionate Palestinian. Or a leader in the Palestinian movement… etc. What are we to imagine about the response of the audience? That Jesus did not say it, but the evangelist did, or some tradition incorporated at a later stage, that makes the story only more resolute and risky.

Why does the Samaritan show compassion to the injured man in Jewish territory (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη), and not the priest or the Levite? The road from Jerusalem to Jericho is in Judaea, and the priest and levite are arguably Jewish authorities and on their territory. In fact, the story becomes more challenging if one imagines the Samaritan being outside of his Samaritan territory and near the Jerusalem temple where he cannot and would not worship because of the hostility between Judaeans and Samaritans. He is the only character in the story that is able to see himself in the injured man because he himself is risking a lot in order to trade outside of Samaria. So, the Samaritan shows compassion to the injured man because of his perception of danger. He opens jars of wine and oil that he planned to market and even uses his money at the inn. This is why he becomes eventually seen as “the Good Samaritan”. It is the dynamic nature of the story that explains the compassion of the Samaritan, not his innate qualities.

Granted, compassion may hit any one, some would be quick to claim (perhaps a genetic predisposition, according to the sociobiology of a few decades ago or modern genetic studies), but this explanation conveniently avoids seeing the dynamics of the situation imagined by the writer. The Samaritan is able to feel compassion and act upon it because a) he didn’t belong to the “house” (or the “nation”) defined by the Jerusalem temple (he has his own temple at Mount Garizim, the center of his ethnic group) b) he was himself on dangerous enemy territory, presumably thinking about it (or the implied reader easily could supply the thought), and therefore able to imagine or see himself in the nearly dead victim before him.

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho is located within Judea, which means that the priest and Levite are likely Jews who are passing through their own territory. It may well be that both the priest and the Levite have their own reasons not to stop and care for the half-dead person. And perhaps it is the storyteller’s anti-Judaean attitude that explains what he sees as a failure of the priest and the Levite to show compassion and come to the help of one’s brother. The story may highlight the failure of some Jewish leaders to show help to someone in need, even when they’re on their own territory and close to the Jerusalem temple. Of course, that the man is naked means first of all that he is not socially rankable on the reciprocity scale. That alone can explain the failure to help of the priest and levite.

On the other hand, the Samaritan’s womb-like compassion and full help to the injured man are not simply a display of innate kindness and automatic generosity. Rather, it’s a response to his heightened perception of danger and of the risk that he shares with the bandits’ victim. He is an outsider in Judaea and an enemy alien. not simply an alien.

Note that the Samaritan’s actions (obvious depth of care, time taken, initial payment at the inn) are probably taken by the Jericho inn-keeper (as imagined by the audience of the time) to be a guarantee that the Samaritan will indeed return to the inn and pay the rest of the bill. The Samaritan himself counts on the inn-keeeper’s feeling (or greed?) that the Samaritan is taking care of a kin or a friend. So, there is an element of craftiness in the Samaritan’s compassion. That is, the Samaritan expects the innkeeper to assume the presence of a solidarity and reciprocity that only kinship and friendship could impose in the ancient world in restricted and restrictive circles such as Samaria and Judaea.

To conclude: At the end, the original question by the lawyer is not simply altered but reversed. There is an alternation of spoken and silent expectation. At the beginning, the lawyer asks “Who is my neighbor?” His silent question is: “Where does my duty of love and reciprocity begin and end?” Perhaps he expects a commentary on Deuteronomy because it makes much of brotherhood. Jesus is portrayed answering the silent question: “Where did the Samaritan’s love end?” Samaritans were understood by Judaeans to be somewhat under the Torah also, yet at the opposite end of the priest and levite. He implies: “Whom are you a neighbor to?” In this dignified, respectful exchange, the lawyer is not put down and is not commanded but asked to respond with compassion.

Finally, the expression “Good Samaritan” doesn’t necessarily describe the Samaritan’s permanent or innate character. He becomes “good” along the centuries because of our tendency to explain extraordinary and heroic behavior as stemming from permanent, inner, and natural qualities rather than from frequent situations that demand our quick decision and sudden engagement.

In the long electoral period leading to the recent win of a foolish and scary apocalyptic figure, the New York Times kept talking about Trump on its first page, no matter the inanity of the news: two articles on Thursday the 11th of January 2024 for instance. The first one explains why a new breed of evangelical Christians supports the ex-president in spite of his lack of Christian bona fide or perhaps because it allows supposed Christians to have a taste of hell.

Some Christians justify their vote by comparing him to a messianic Cyrus the Great and his support of Jewish subjects in the sixth century BC. No matter that the passage of Isaiah 45 is a pure piece of ideology and that Persian kings would in fact use compulsion and violence when necessary against their internal and external enemies. The repression of Egypt’s repeated rebellions is a case in point. Successive empires, including Persia, nonobstant the glamorous reputation made to Cyrus II, used the same combination of force and religious pressures, not to say political, to enforce tribute and avoid further rebellion. Like all large realms before and after them, the Achaemenid kings were seeking political gains and order at the lowest transactional cost possible once they were at the head of a large empire and had reached the typical limits of their power to conquer.

The messianic cloak given to Cyrus by the “second book” of Isaiah is therefore to be replaced in that old (and not so old) context. Only insiders who accepted Persian domination could interpret the Bisitun inscription of Darius I as “a peaceful state made up of many nations maintaining the protection of the cultural and religious integrity of each” (Schmid 2019, p. 241). The inscription makes clear that obedience and fidelity were considered paramount and that numerous wars and demonstrative cruelties awaited those ethnic groups that rebelled. Still, why was it politically required for the author of deutero-Isaiah to
declare Cyrus II to be YAHWEH’s messiah? I would think that the answer is in an attitude that was parallel to that of the priests of Marduk in Babylonia—and that those positions could change quickly. Finally, let it be said that the Marduk and Judaean priests were not the only subjects forced to invent the protection of a new master. Even modern Christians are apparently drawn do the same conclusion and tempted to recast Trump as their only Persian-like (Iranian?) messianic master. It is most puzzling and even contradictory to see the MAGA crowd need to take such a long detour in the feverish hopes they nurture. They consider the renewal of America’s greatness an urgent and spiriitual modern matter when what is at stake, now and then, is how to share the spoils.

I shall end here with the story world of Cyrus. He made sure that broadly known legends circulated about his birth and suggested that his destiny was out of the ordinary. Like Sargon of Akkad (23d century BCE) and even like the legendary Moses—though in reverse order—, Cyrus was expected to die by exposure but of course did not. A modest (wild?) shepherd, Mithridate, adopted him and staged an elaborate deception in which his real baby son was set to float on a river. You will need to fish the details in Pierre Briant’s book: L’histoire de l’empire perse (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 25–26.

My latest ruminations follow a conversation a few days ago about power and fascism on NPR (“Why Trump is a fascist”), and a dialogue yesterday between Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart regarding the massive following that Trump generates (“Jon Stewart looks back with sanity and/or fear”). I was impressed by the straightforwardness of the participants in the NPR discussion, and the heightened sense they gave me of their notion of service. They insisted that their service was to the nation, not to a party, not to a king, not to a would-be dictator. Are Donald Trump and his followers fascists? In the case of John Kelly and others, the word is being used by top officers who know the risk of complete obedience.

But the larger question circles back to the US election that is ominously taking place today. It is one thing to wield words like weapons and wonder what is fascistic in Donald Trump or Steven Miller. Or rather, what has become fascistic in them, or what is becoming totalitarian in their view of the world. It strikes me as a completely different question to explain why so many followers of Donald Trump—almost half of the US population—are happy with the clownery. The explanations provided so far are not satisfactory, as Jon Stewart says repeatedly in his conversation with Ezra Klein. Even though he has a sharp sense of our greedy capitalist economy and knows well the moralizing hypocrisy of much of the media, he is not content with the economic explanation.

The economic and social differentiation do play a role in growing and spreading the anger of many, most certainly, and being easily riled up by the likes of Trump. Perhaps capitalism needs this anger to function, as Jon Stewart says in passing. But it doesn’t strike me either as a complete explanation. Nor do the cultural aspects of that anger, or the claimed idiocy of the so-called “deplorables” who are opposed to many aspects of progressive rationalism. As Stewart and others perceive, a better explanation is needed, without dismissing any of the others.

Trump, Vance, Miller, etc., are still sharpening their teeth on the anger of the people and may not even know for what purpose yet. This new form of political search for power has no name yet. One path for it is the slow unfolding of a pleasurable viciousness that was reported by one of the commanders of the US immigration agency on the NPR mentioned above. Cruelty and indifference extend to this day, when there are children still separated from their parents and whose chances of being reunited with their families are slim. Or Trump followers may be both surprised and exhilarated by an ex-president of the USA who advises that spikes be set at the top of the border wall in order to injure those who climb the wall. Or drones that could shoot on both sides of the border, against all laws. And his frequent remarks on retribution and vengeance. Et cetera…

So, the glide into fascism still looks hesitant but there are people around Trump who are prepared to make something new out of the chaotic power of this ex-president. And there are plenty of followers ready to submit. Something in the nature of domination is gathering force. Will we let it fashion the world as it sees it, push away the use of laws, the rules of civility and of proper behavior? This, to me, is the big question lurking behind all of this rot. If Trump and his acolytes are elected tonight, will others have the will, the know-how, and the courage to fight the drift towards what can be called fascism, no matter the danger? Because there is no doubt about the will of a Trump government of bullies. It will use all the tools that are at its disposal, especially scapegoating, to scare and frighten people into submission. It will put laws and regulations at the service of money interests. Its megalomaniac promises to the nation are not about regaining respect but fostering a humiliating violence that could spread and unfold in a dark history that cannot be mocked anymore. This is the ultimate reality show of Donald Trump.

The situation in the Middle East is changing rapidly. Radical adjustments are occuring in the Persian Gulf and Iran as well as in Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Lebanon. My sense and fear are that Ukraine, Russia, both Koreas and Japan, not to mention China are also changing rapidly, though for their own reasons and not because the USA manage to wield their power as efficiently as ever. We are far, to note but a change, from the strange attempt to convert the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean to the economic faith of the Abraham Accords. Who could have thought that through these accords almost ten million Palestinians were going to be abandoned to their daily indignities?

Israel: for a number of reasons, the right wing government is intent on doing war on four fronts: Gaza, the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran. This multifacetet war has goals other than defense. Part of it is a powerful response to Hamas’ vicious attack of October 7, 2023, but other aims are the displacement of large sections of the Palestinian population and the eradication of the last crumbs of political control it may still have. There are about 750,000 people of Jewish background presently living in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Israel is now in a surprisingly strong position not only because of its military successes, but also because the people in the US are worrying about their presidential election—rightly so—and more importantly because the US appears to be losing interest in world leadership. This is happening even though the US economy is far outperforming Europe, China and other countries.

It is clearly in the interest of Israel, itself an undeclared nuclear power, to eradicate the nuclear weaponry that Iran has been working on, according to Iran’s enemies. But now one more factor needs to be taken into account. North Korea has accepted to fight on Russia’s side in Ukraine. What did North Korea get in exchange? Did they get money, which one assumes must be needed when buying the dictator of North Korea? Or more evidently, were they promised atomic weaponry and missiles? Confronted with a much more experienced Ukrainian army, is the use of nuclear weaponry by North Korea imaginable? How is South Korea, which has a very important arms industry, going to react? Is it going to be interested in developing its own military capacities even further? For related reasons, is the conservative leadership of Japan going to accelerate its own rearmament?

On voting day, these are some of the questions that are worrying signs of trouble.

Last week, Peter Beinart published an article in the New York Times that criticized President Biden for having no Middle East policy. He tied this failing to the moral contradiction and blindness that have become the drivers of Biden’s relationship with the Israeli government and particularly his Prime Minister, Netanyahu. In his 2021 inaugural address, Biden described the history of the United States as a “constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and a harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization have long torn us apart.“ He clearly sees Trump as an enemy that must be defeated. And he rightfully condemns the horrific actions of Hamas. But his unconditional defense of Israel and his inability to negotiate with Netanyahu lead many in Israel and here to question his ethical principles. The US President strongly believes that the core of the United States is based on the notion of equal rights, not on religion or ethnicity. Yet, that is what much of modern Israel has become based on, especially since 2018. For religious reasons, it is unable to write a constitution but it claims religion and ethnicity nevertheless as the foundations of the state. In opposition to many Israelis of the past and of the present, it proclaims that only people of Jewish ancestry can claim a national destiny. In spite and because of their long history, Palestinians are systematically rejected as undeserving of the rights and protections afforded by such a state. And unfortunately, Biden allows his fundamental principle of equal rights to have a major exception and be trampled by the present political authorities of Israel. Gaza has become his signal failure, totally in contradiction with his policy regarding Ukraine and Russia.