There has long been significant support for the common Israeli notion of the right to a state. Thinkers like Leibowitz, however, 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 explain in some detail the historical circumstances of the notion, while examining Leibowitz’s and Beinart’s sense that a state providing more than the sustenance of life is nothing short of idolatrous.

So, how did 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. Let us 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 the Exodus story as precisely as space allows, and replace the notion of human beings as images of the divine in a larger context.

Some historical background on Exodus

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, writing was little used before the 10th century 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 or the 13th century. More on this later.

But 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 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 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 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. 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). But 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 or the consolidation of the people’s hopes through the notion of a promised land,

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 1–12. 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 the Levite Moses by the LORD suggests that priestly authority is limited—until Hasmonean times—and that it is impossible to use relics to found a regime, at least in the case of Moses. We all know how important relics are in politics, even in modern states. The monuments to the dead on the Washington Mall are at the center of politics even in the US. 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 representation for the crowds? 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 conquest 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 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, 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,” which we see in Ezekiel as well as in chapter 3 of Exodus, in answer to Moses at the burning bush.

   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.

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 temples and 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) 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 is promulgated by the divinity, not by the king. Royal authority is severely restricted. Normally, the kings of the whole Near East promulgated the law. Justice and order were the province of the king. But Deuteronomy 17 removes any role that the king may have in granting justice. So, proper order (including cosmic order) and cultic order are the prerogative of priests obeying the only true king, Yahweh.

5. Writing is done by Yahweh, not by the king.
   1. Writing in antiquity should not be understood to be a civilizing instrument but a legitimating tool that empowered kings or oligarchs and 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 kings disappeared, didn’t these small nations respond to the new circumstances and imagine a new framework for a pen that their kings had lost?

   2. Yet, against this universal use of writing to increase the power of kings and elites, one may wonder if its use was only nefarious. In the case of the kings and elites of Israel and Judah, writing may also have been 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 (cf. 1 Sam 8, contrarywise):

      and when he 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. As Alter says in the introduction to his translation of Genesis,
   

   The style 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.

   Why then a prose narrative and not epic poetry? 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 still invite singing and chanting. But not Genesis 1–11, at least at first sight. So, the question remains: was this ancient Hebrew myth always done in prose, or was this narrative style adopted either because the text of Gen 1–2 is much more recent than the surrounding text, or 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, why and when did this happen? In the early Iron Age, 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 power, horrors, and eventual failure, that Babylonian epic represented?

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 see 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 as having always been theirs.

   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 they seem to know that they have moved from somewhere else but talk of their 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.

(to be edited)