Biblical Genealogy and Nationalism

Abstract

The chronological/genealogical narrative structure of the Hebrew Bible points to an editorial aim: to give a history of Israel as a nation from Creation to the 6th century BCE Babylonian exile and the return to the land of Israel, and in so doing to bring to life and unite two dead Near Eastern kingdoms. This article considers the scribes and editors who created the structure of the Hebrew Bible as forerunners of modern cultural nationalists, especially of defeated or endangered peoples, who sought the survival and growth of the nation in literature. However, the monotheisms that derived from Judaism, and adopted Hebrew scripture as sacred, rarely accepted the Bible as the translation or adaptation of a Jewish work in the Jewish national language mostly on Jewish soil and under Jewish government in the 1st millennium BCE. Rather, anti-Semites taught a genealogy of Jewish guilt to the world, with extra charges based on supersessionist theology and anti-Jewish fantasies.

‘Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from,

how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going,

whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.’

Isaiah Berlin

Many years ago, I travelled by bus with Isaiah Berlin from London Victoria to Oxford, and we spent the entire journey discussing the genealogy in Genesis. The detail had always bored me, but Isaiah, to my surprise, was fascinated by it, a remnant of his pre-Revolution Russian childhood. I could almost see the child prodigy he had been rattling off the lists to his rabbi. He regarded them as having utmost importance and, as a Zionist, clearly felt himself linked to the Jewish national past, as countless, more God-fearing, Jews than he had done over the ages.

Among markers of national identity in the Hebrew Bible, genealogy is prominent, particularly in its first and last books, Genesis and Chronicles: the nation’s origin is traced to King David, then back to Judah son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham, and back to Adam and the creation of the world. The idea is consistent that Israel derives from one man, Adam (‘your first father’), or Abraham (‘your father’), or Jacob (‘a wandering Aramean was your father’).1 As faith in one God is seen in the Hebrew Bible as the key to national survival, and the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are remembered as models of true faith, their merit (zekhut avot) is frequently called upon throughout Jewish literature, particularly in the Hebrew prayerbook (the siddur), in expressions of longing and penitential prayers for divine aid.

The chronological/genealogical narrative structure points to an editorial aim: to give a history of Israel as a nation from Adam to the time of Cyrus (late-6th century BCE); there is a largely unswerving narrative line from Creation in the book of Genesis to the 6th century BCE Babylonian exile as described in the last lines of the book of Kings, and Cyrus’ Edict of Return (538 BCE) allowing the Judean exiles to return from Babylonia to their homeland, quoted at the very end of the book of Chronicles, the final book of the Hebrew Bible.2

The Mishna, the post-biblical code of Jewish law (c. 200 CE), creates a different genealogical principle. It presents an intellectual genealogy that links Moses with Judah Hanasi, the editor of the Mishna: ‘Moses received the Torah at Sinai and passed it to Joshua, and Joshua to the Elders, and the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets to the men of the Great Assembly…’3 This intellectual line extends to Rabban Gamaliel, son of Judah Hanasi, who lived in the early 3rd century CE, when the Mishna (which includes Pirke Avot) was completed.4

Similar aims in the use of genealogy to establish authority may be detected in Virgil’s Aeneid, to legitimize the rule of Augustus, through association with Aeneas, and in Shakespeare’s history plays, to validate Tudor rule, through association with the great kings of the past. In the genealogy of evolving national identity from Genesis to Chronicles in the Hebrew Bible, the individuality of the person presages the nation’s individuality: though the Bible covers a period of many centuries, with many people, only one man in the Bible is called Adam; only one man is called Abraham.5 The Bible, in this way, creates a model of national unity in which extraordinary individuals represent the destiny of the nation.

Genealogy is, of course, only one aspect of national identity in the Hebrew Bible. As the main root of Judaism, and later of Christianity and Islam, and a driving force in civilization, the Bible, consisting of 24 books mostly depicting events before 500 BCE, has authored and nourished national identity: in the belief in the chosenness of the nation and its necessarily moral foundations; its unity across divisions of class, geographic dislocation, and cultural assimilation; fierce criticism of and grievance against its enemies, internal as well as external, including at times institutional religion and government; the vital importance of its language and literature; reproach for a foolish, dissolute, traitorous past, acceptance of guilt for national failings and defeats, and grief-ridden penitence leading to moral reform; hopes for freedom, regeneration, and the ingathering of exiles; vengeful hatred of oppressors, and readiness to fight and die for the nation; and in all this, the inextricable bond of personal and national life.6

The Jews, consequently, according to the historian, Adrian Hastings, ‘gave the world the model of nationhood and even nation-statehood’: the Bible they created and preserved is an antecedent of modern national literature.7 Little is known of the scribes who for centuries in the land of Israel and the diaspora lovingly and painstakingly edited, copied, preserved, assembled, and sanctified the texts that became the Hebrew Bible, but the debt owed to them is immense.

Biblical scribes and editors must have treasured the ancient genealogical lists they incorporated into scripture, making them an integral part of the story they constructed of the birth of the nation.8

Individually, biblical characters in the genealogical chain are not necessarily praiseworthy: in fact, some of them—freewheeling spirits such as Samson or David, following impulse and desire—behave as though they have little, if any, faith or concern with law; yet the Bible overall sees in history the hand of God, and particularly in defeat a form of instruction, a higher enlightenment through faith and law, a way forward to a better, more just, and moral society: bataille perdue, progrès conquis.9

Bible editors might be seen as forerunners of modern cultural nationalists, especially of defeated or endangered peoples, who sought the survival and growth of the nation in the literature: men who collected, translated, and edited works from the past in order to construct an idea of a nation, an ‘imagined community’, as Benedict Anderson put it. The imagined nation is stronger and more viable than the actual nation, fragmented politically and theologically. Like modern cultural nationalists such as Johann von Herder of Germany, N.F.S. Grundtvig in Denmark, Ziya Gökalp in Turkey, and Douglas Hyde in Ireland, the Bible editors looked to the past in search of literature that lived and defined the inalienable character of the nation, stirring the imagination profoundly, stretching the range of creativity, with the power to move its readers and listeners and change their lives.10 Texts that grew in a living world were edited in a remembered world; self-contained stories became episodes in an ongoing national saga; tales of sacrilegious kingdoms were precious amid slavery in exile. Memory stands above possession, the past above the present; a profane, violent history becomes a sacred world.

The biblical narrative moves forward in time, from the Creation to the Judean exile, but the editorial eye—which sees not separate books with different, often secular purposes, but one united book with one sacred purpose—mostly looks backward in time from the Persian period,11 across centuries of monarchic rule and misrule, and further back, to the tribal period, to the patriarchs, as far as possible, to the creation of the world, ‘in the beginning’—in Hebrew—to establish from the start the sacred character of the language of the Bible and its universal message.12 Anthony D. Smith sums up the importance of the Bible in the growth of nationalism: ‘The profound consequences of the concept of a chosen people, and the passionate attachment to sacred languages and scriptures proved to be an enduring legacy to many peoples from late antiquity to modern times, sustaining their sense of uniqueness and nurturing their hopes of regeneration’.13

The biblical narrative depicts the fate of the descendants of Abraham: the people of the kingdom of Israel in the north deported by Assyria after their defeat in 721 BCE, and the inhabitants of the kingdom of Judah in the south deported after successive defeats by Babylonia in 597 and 586 BCE. Genealogy is the key to their hope of return, as the covenant with the patriarchs in Genesis guarantees theologically the nation’s survival—if faithful to scriptural law. A striking example is the Tokheha (reproof) in Leviticus, where a brutal curse of the nation shifts to blessing—in memory of the patriarchal covenant:

The Tokheha in Leviticus

 

And I will make the land a desolation, your cities ruins,

and your enemies living there will be amazed.

I will scatter you among the nations with drawn sword following you

while your land lies waste,

because when you were there you did not keep its Sabbaths.

 

In enemy lands, your survivors will be pursued

by fear, by the sound of a falling leaf.

They will flee as from a sword

and fall though none pursues them,

swallowed by their enemies,

pining in sin and in their fathers’ sins.

 

But if they confess the wrong they have done to me,

for which they have been brought to the land of their enemies,

if their uncircumcised hearts are humbled

and they accept their punishment,

I will remember my covenant with Jacob, Isaac and Abraham.14

The Bible editors link the Persian Achaemenid empire in which they lived and the story of the birth of the Israelite nation: they do this, as stated earlier, through a genealogical and chronological narrative backbone extending from the Creation in Genesis to the Babylonian exile in the books of Kings and Chronicles, and ending with a quote from Cyrus, Persian conqueror of the Babylonian empire, in his Edict of Return (538 BCE), stating that exiled Jews who wished to return to their homeland had the king’s blessing to go home.15 The exiles, though enslaved, were still ‘the seed of Abraham my beloved’.16 Cyrus gave political authority to the divine covenant with Abraham in Mesopotamia: ‘Go you, from your country, your birthplace, house of your father, to the land which I will show you…’17 As Abraham had made the journey from Mesopotamia to the land of Israel, so would the Judean exiles—in a prophetic hope expressed in soaring poetry in the book of Isaiah.

Song of comfort (late 6th century)

 

Take comfort, comfort… my people…

your God will say.

Talk gently to Jerusalem.

Tell her the exile is over, her sin forgiven.

 

For at the Lord’s hand she served double time

for all her sins…

 

Listen! A voice!

 

Clear a road in the desert!

Straight through the plain -

Lift every valley, level each hill,

make the winding ways straight

and the rugged land -

The Lord’s glory will be revealed.

\All flesh will know he has spoken.

 

Cry out! The voice declares.

What shall I cry? I ask.

 

All flesh is grass,

all its beauty like a blossom in a field…

As grass dies, as the flower withers,

touched by the breath of God,

so the people are grass…Grass dies, the blossom fades,

but the word of our God will be forever.18

• The genealogy of biblical ethics

At the same time, the universalist sympathies of the Hebrew Bible, particularly in works created under pressure of exile, notably chapters 40–66 in the book of Isaiah, owe much to the sense of a fate shared by diverse peoples uprooted and thrust together in exile by cruel Mesopotamian empires. For the Hebrew Bible and its vision of a ‘light for the nations’, a faith ‘for all nations’, emerged from defeat, mass displacement, and vulnerability to the loss of national identity, endured not just by the ancient Israelites and Judeans but also by most other peoples in the Near East in the biblical age.19 Its language of universal archetypes is shared by countless peoples, each one a ‘new Israel’. Hebrew, national language of the Jews, rooted in the land of Israel, particularly Jerusalem, is aimed also at all humankind. As biblical genealogy applies to all humanity, the Bible is in effect a national document for all nations. The family of all nations is established from the start of the Bible as everyone shares the same origin; and an elaborate genealogical list of nations filling the earth and descended from Adam and Eve is in Genesis chapter 10.

Judaism in practice did not depend primarily on bonds of race and kinship; rather, the covenant with Abraham was open to those who live lives of justice and loving kindness. Survival of national identity in the Hebrew Bible is seen as impossible in the long term if not based upon truth and justice.20 Though idolatry could also inspire goodness, the many gods of idolatry, in the overall biblical view, tend to reflect moral weakness rather than fight it. Monotheism, with its impossible divine standard, could drive human beings to imagine and try to create a better world.

The dissenting strain in the Hebrew Bible is evident in sympathy for non-Israelite individuals in an idolatrous world. Idolators show moral conduct and eloquence often missing among Israelites. At times, they are called to do the will of God: for example, Malchizedek the Canaanite priest who helps inspire Abraham’s faith; Potiphar the Egyptian who recognizes Joseph’s abilities and gives him authority; Jethro the Midianite priest in support of Moses, his son-in-law; Balaam of Moab in unexpected praise of Israel; Rahab the Canaanite, instrumental in the Israelite conquest of Jericho; Naaman of Aram asserting his faith to the prophet Elijah and regret at its limits; and the declaration of Ruth the Moabite of loyalty to her mother-in-law, Naomi: King David is descended from her.21 There are also Mesopotamian kings such as Sennacherib and Nebuchadrezzar, who wield ‘the rod of God’s wrath’;22 and among the most admired biblical kings is the Persian Cyrus, described by Second Isaiah as ‘messiah’ (mashiach = anointed) of God—despite being a pagan idolator. Cyrus galvanizes a vision of national rebirth.

• In quest of a portable national culture

As time passed, it became clear that the Israelites deported to Mesopotamia in the late 8th century BCE were lost in exile, becoming the legendary ‘Ten Lost Tribes’. By the time the Judeans suffered the same fate of defeat and exile just over a century later, they understood the need for a portable culture, to guard their religious–national identity, particularly the Hebrew language, the language of scripture, and enable them to survive exile and rebuild their state—and perhaps even restore the united kingdom of David. The biblical text preserves the world of the kingdoms not so much as they actually were, and saw themselves, but selectively, as they were seen later, long after their destruction. The biblical image of the nation is in some respects an editorial invention, less the truth of history than the truth of poetry, of the inner life of the nation, whose chief teacher and guide is not priest or king, but prophet. The nation’s past is frozen as it is imagined to be, in eternal presence. Future generations of listeners and readers are addressed as witnesses, at the exodus, at Sinai, or as exiles returning to the land of Israel. By the time the Bible was edited into what became one sacred book, the world it describes was mostly long past and, outside the literary memory it preserved, dead: it no more existed than the medieval kingdoms of German or English knights when the stories of the Nibelungen and of King Arthur were retold in the 19th century. The Judean exiles felt strongly the contrast between the power and glory of the past and their present abject condition. The rebuilt Temple was a disappointment to those old men and women who remembered as children the first Temple in all its glory. The link with the past, through a sense of genealogical and linguistic linkage, was vital for survival.

Through the edited Bible, the sacred word of the living God, the past could be reborn, faith restored, a language revived, a people could live again. The chronological form of biblical narrative points to an editorial desire to establish continuity from past to present.23 The nation is portrayed constantly changing with time, vulnerable to external and internal attacks and subject to grudges and rages against its enemies, but reaching in the end, amid defeat and exile, a greater equanimity and empathy for humanity as a whole. The nation is not fixed in character but work in progress, evolving from a ‘boorish’, ‘stubborn’ nation, ‘heavy with sin’ to being ‘a light to the nations’, ‘entirely righteous’;24 from a low state higher, provincial to universal, dark to light, evil to good, impure to purer, from tears to joy, grief to celebration. Exile and slavery are a ‘furnace’ of moral purification, of expiation from sins of sovereign power. The fierce, consistent denunciations of the monotheist kingdoms are an implicit rejection of the past and an assertion of the need to make a new start. The past unlocks ugly secrets behind the death of the split kingdom and its rebirth out of exile, poverty and suffering, into a universal religion—from kingdom to faith, Judah to Judaism.25

• The struggle for national union

The Bible editors sought to unite two dead Near Eastern kingdoms, to stitch together fragments of separate, even contrary traditions into one whole, one Torah for one imagined nation—for one imagined united humanity—under one God. The biblical text reunites the phantom kingdoms, corrupt, politically inept, choosing wrong leaders, making wrong decisions, prostituting themselves to foreign powers, constantly at one another’s throats, hopelessly outclassed, defeated and exiled by the great Mesopotamian empires, and left to die among their heathen foes, uprooted, on foreign soil, a cursed destroyed people possessed with an ancient vision of being a blessing to all nations—the divine promise to Abraham.26

The Bible tells how one group of exiles survived, ‘a brand plucked from the fire’,27 to return to the native land, how in the struggle to recover, they found strength in their ancient mythical history, inextricably joined to that of their dead rival kingdom, two dybbuks joined as much by hate as by love, rousing a faint hope of revival, a hope stoked by the astonishing destruction of the hated Babylonian empire—destroyer of the state of Judah (586 BCE)—by the Persians under Cyrus (539 BCE).

The edited Bible is thus shadowed, as its individual works are not, by historic failure culminating in disaster. The edited whole judges, as its individual works do not, the nation and its leaders: it can be read as the report of a commission of enquiry after a major government failure, seeking not just immediate causes but deeper roots going back into the distant past. The title of this enquiry might be: How did we fall from being a sovereign people on our land to being a defeated, exiled people about to vanish from history?

• Genesis and the united nation

The Genesis stories, pre-dating and transcending national divisions, are the cultural bedrock of the united nation;28 this shared literary heritage is the strongest reminder of the genealogical link between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah: in many other ways, particularly their forms of worship, they were bitterly divided, and often at war with each other: The book of Genesis portrays Judah as the ancestor of the southern kingdom, Joseph of the northern kingdom; and Jacob, of both. The story of Joseph and his brothers warns (as does the story of David and Absolom) of dangerous family disunity, yet in the end affirms family loyalty and reconciliation, an end consistent with the post-exilic hope for national reunion. However, in the perspective of the kingdom of Judah after the exile of Israel in 721 BCE, this grim tale of the brother sold into slavery could be read as a warning of future national strife.29 Slavery in the time of King Solomon and his son Jeroboam triggers civil strife and a slave revolt led by Jeroboam, splitting the kingdom.

With exile, of Israel after 721 BCE, and of Judah after 586 BCE, the Genesis stories, more than any other part of the Bible, spoke immediately to the exiles, in linking past to present and future: for the travel and uprootings of the patriarchs were normal in the Fertile Crescent: a man might be looking for a wife, or seeking relief from famine, or escaping a dangerously angry brother. The patriarchs all marry Mesopotamian women, a detail not without charm to the exiles from the two kingdoms—but all return to the land of Israel, as the exiles hope to do. Genesis, the least ‘national’ of the books in the Bible, pre-dating the emergence of the nation in the book of Exodus, also holds out in some respects the greatest hope for ultimate renewal.

Prophetic literature frequently invokes the Genesis stories, in God’s creative power, granting free will to humanity; in human responsibility for wrong and right; hellish exile or heavenly Eden. In Isaiah, Adam is archetype of national disobedience and punishment; but the Judean exiles are given hope of making the wilderness of Zion a new Eden; the return of the exiles is heralded as a renewal of God’s covenant with Noah, never to bring such a disaster again;30 and prophetic challenging of authority can be traced to Abraham, who questions God’s decision to destroy the inhabitants of Sodom.31 The prophets see the Genesis stories in the perspective of two rival states, divided in king and faith, though united in memory of the united origin of Israel and hope for Israel’s future.

Jacob and the angel (Hosea, mid-8th century BCE)

 

God has a quarrel with Judah -

he will punish Jacob for his evil,

and reward him for doing good.

 

In the womb, he gripped his brother’s heel,

he wrestled with the angel and won,

the angel wept, begged him: let me go!

 

The Lord found him at Bethel

and there he spoke to us…

 

And I speak with the mouth of a prophet.

I too have visions…

 

And Jacob fled to the land of Aram,

for a wife he labored,

for a wife he kept sheep…

 

By a prophet

the Lord brought Israel from Egypt.

By a prophet he was saved…

 

Yet Ephraim enraged the Lord -

his end will be bloody

in return… 32

• The bones of Joseph

Joseph’s burial signifies national unity. Joseph on his deathbed in Egypt makes his people swear to return his bones to the land of Israel, a promise fulfilled at the end of the book of Joshua.33 The bones, carried across the desert, are interred in Shechem (present-day Nablus) between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal. Joseph is laid to rest on a plot of land bought by Jacob, father of the tribes, at the scene of the great public recital of the blessings following the worship of God and the curses following the betrayal of the covenant.34 The burial site is a reminder of common origin of the tribes and their choice as a nation: a life in unity or a separate death.

The possibility that the monotheist states might have reached their end was felt with the destruction of the northern Kingdom of Israel in 721 BCE and especially with the destruction of the southern Kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE. If both had vanished, the genealogical link with the past might have vanished too; and memory of the faith, the literature, and the great characters of the Hebrew Bible would have been forgotten as were the cultures of most of the small kingdoms of the ancient Near East.

The survival of the biblical text enabled the link with the past to continue, a cultural equivalent of the promise to inter Joseph’s bones in the land of his father, Israel. What would have become of the memory of Joseph if not for the exiled southern Kingdom of Judah? For the Bible carries the ‘bones of Joseph’ in exile: it preserves the story of Joseph and his brothers, and resurrects them as part of a unified religion, not necessarily dependent on a territory, but on the memory of territory.35 In prophetic literature, the resurrection of the bones is described by Ezekiel, the only prophet known to have prophesied in the Babylonian exile, where this prophecy is set.

Ezekiel: the dry bones (early 6th century BCE)

 

The hand of the Lord upon me,

I was blown to the bone-filled valley…

 

Round and round he took me…

so many bones, all so dry.

 

Son of man:

Can these bones live? he asked.

My Lord, God you know!

 

He said: prophesy to these bones.

Say: ‘I’ll give you flesh, veins, skin.

I’ll breathe in you the breath of life,

and you will know I am the Lord.’

 

So I prophesied.

I heard a sound, a rattling.

The bones joined together,

veins, flesh and skin appeared -

but there was no breath in them.

 

Then he said: prophesy to the wind!

Prophesy, Son of Man!

Say: ‘Come from the four winds.

Fill these slaughtered men with the breath of life!’

So I prophesied.

 

Breath filled them.

They stood, a huge crowd.

 

He said: Son of Man!

These bones are the people of Israel.

Some say our bones are dry,

our hope is lost

we’re clean cut off.

 

Prophesy! Tell them:

I will open your graves and bring you to life.

I will bring you back to the land of Israel!36

• The prophets and national unity

Prophetic hope for the return from exile and re-establishment of the northern kingdom was futile.37 After the southern kingdom was destroyed, a new hope arose: union of the phantom kingdoms. Ezekiel expressed this hope in a symbolic acting-out, described immediately after the ‘dry bones’ prophecy:

Israel and Judah reunited

 

The Lord said to me: Son of Man!

 

Take a stick, write on it: ‘For Judah’ -

for the children of Israel -

and take another stick, and write: ‘For Joseph’,

the stick of Ephraim -

for all the house of Israel.

 

Join them into one stick.

Your people will ask: what does this mean?

Say this:

 

The Lord God says:

I will take the stick of Joseph,

a sign of Ephraim and the tribes of Israel,

together with the stick of Judah,

and make them one.

 

Hold up your writing sticks before them.

Say this:

 

The Lord God says:

I will take the children of Israel

from among the nations

and gather them back

to their own land:

and make them one nation

with one king

on Israel’s mountains:

 

no more two nations,

no more two kingdoms,

no more detestable defilement

with idols,

 

no more sin…

 

I will cleanse and save them

wherever they are

and they will be my people,

and I will be their God.

David my servant will be their king -

one shepherd -

and they will walk in my judgments,

and keep my statutes,

and live in the land I gave to Jacob my servant,

where your fathers lived,

and your children and children’s children, forever:

David their prince, forever.

 

I will make a covenant of peace,

an everlasting covenant with them,

and multiply them

and set my sanctuary among them

forever.38

 

Jeremiah, a contemporary of Ezekiel (and also a priest) at the time of the Babylonian conquest in 586 BCE, unites both kingdoms in mourning them, when he recalls Rachel, their common mother (of Joseph and Benjamin):

 

Listen!

Bitter sobs and laments in Ramah…

Rachel weeps for her sons.

She won’t be consoled

for they are gone…

Do not cry: reward will come for your labor.

They will return from enemy land.

There’s hope for you yet.

Your sons will come back to their land.39

• The sense of future genealogy

The Bible addresses not just its contemporary audience but also ‘those who are not here today’40—future generations who will be told the stories related in scripture. In seeking a link with the future, the Bible editors are drawn to texts that bring to life long-dead men and women, common people as well as kings and kingdoms, from whom the current generations are descended. They seek verisimilitude, a living quality, memorable characters, events, conflicts, feelings, and turns of phrase, both in prose and poetry, and the divine in literature, a sense of awe in all things. They shun the depiction of inner reality as pure art for its own sake, detached from social purpose. They turn from the mundane and mediocre and sanctify the aesthetically extraordinary: from the start, the power of creation and of the Word of God is divine; and the Word dominates prophetic works, the books of Psalms and Job, as well as some of the narratives, born in the fire and thunder of revelation.

Consequently, the living Bible has continued to live, in the minds and lives of others, in vastly different times, places and ways of life, as a record of their own genealogical origin. In the 1st century CE land of Israel, Jesus was seen as the long-awaited messianic descendant of King David; in the deserts of Arabia in the 6th century CE, centuries after the Jewish biblical canon was fixed, Mohammed was inspired to see himself in the image of a Hebrew prophet living a millennium and more before him; and European kings such as Charlemagne and Henry VIII traced their genealogy in the line of long-dead biblical kings, often as a ‘new David’, asserting not just political but also cultural national identity.41

Art, too, conveyed to the masses the sense of a living link with the world of the Hebrew Bible. Renaissance humanistic realism owes much to popular identification with the Bible—Massaccio’s Cappella Brancacci, Ghiberti’s bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel stand out—particularly in paintings and sculptures of figures such as Adam and Eve, Moses and David, Isaiah and Jeremiah, by artists who used living models—including themselves. People have continually looked at the Hebrew Bible and seen themselves, and vice versa, rediscovering the Bible in themselves and their own lives.

In England, though Jews were banned and had been since 1290, Tyndale’s translation from the Hebrew inspired countless English men and women to see themselves as a ‘new Israel’; and even in Germany during the Nazi era, while Jews were murdered in the millions and the Church was silent, German congregations sang psalms translated by Luther from the Hebrew, originally sung by Jewish priests in the Temple in Jerusalem; this irony continues today among those whose monotheist faith incorporates or is based upon Jewish scripture, who pray daily to the God of Abraham, yet who perpetuate vile antisemitic hatred and violence, and dream of destroying Jewish national existence.

• Toward a moral/aesthetic genealogy

The sense of connection with humanity, not just in the past but also with the future, is based on a moral genealogy, an inheritance of shared imperfection. The ripe vulgar realism of the biblical world, evident despite (or because of) its monotheist idealism and the most ardent bowdlerization, aiming to tame its flagrant vulgarity, often seems brightest when human weakness is exposed: Jacob’s deception of his near-blind father, Isaac, to steal his blessing; Joseph’s brothers, eaten with jealousy, plotting to murder him; Pharaoh’s persecution of the Israelite slaves, forcing them to make bricks without straw while accusing them of laziness; Saul afflicted by inner demons hurling his spear at David, who has tried to soothe his bitter soul with sweet music on the harp; dogs licking the blood of the murdered queen, Jezebel; King Josiah’s pulverization of idolatrous objects, hurling the dust into the Kidron river; exiles weeping under the willows by the waters of Babylon, dreaming of revenge. The Hebrew Bible is a rich mine of striking images and original turns of phrase—perhaps as the higher the literary quality, the closer to God; yet, the best in language often betrays, as intended, the worst in human nature. In the quest for artistic and human perfection, moral idealism and artistic truth and excellence clash with the ugly heritage of human nature. The tongue of God in scripture seeks the ear of corrupt humanity.

The editing of the Hebrew Bible brought together as one a body of work the history and purpose of the Jews and Judaism, ensuring, as it turned out, the survival of the Hebrew language and literature—and its renewal in modern times. As the Jews preserved the Bible, the Bible, no less, preserved the Jews, strengthening them for an embattled existence as a minority amid often hostile dominant powers—and a natural readiness to fight prejudices of the ‘compact majority’, as Sigmund Freud put it.42

Though faith and worship waned in the West, the artistic challenge of the Bible remained, yet another link with the past. In the world of Purcell, Bach, and Mozart, for example, composers writing for Church services had a daily struggle for divine inspiration to create music that men and women felt sacred in their bones. A similar struggle underlies the Hebrew Bible, whose editors sought a sacred voice—for the individual, congregation, nation, and humanity—drawing on Temple literary culture, the Psalms and prophetic visions, particularly of priests such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Countless peoples in countless languages have felt these Jewish texts to be their cultural genealogy. The original editors of the Hebrew Bible sought truth less in dogma than in human nature on a wide spectrum of experience and emotion, from tenderest love as for a newborn to genocidal rage, from mountaintops to ocean depths: from Eden to the Flood, from fraternal conflict to self-sacrifice, from the Ten Commandments to the golden calf, Lamentations to Song of Songs, conquest to servitude, loving wedlock to adulterous prostitution, sovereign power to exile, curse to consolation, ruin to rebirth.43 The effect is a sense of an inexorable connection with the past based on universal human experience.

• Guilt and national identity

The sense of an unbroken Jewish genealogical and covenantal link with a sacred past, zekhut avot, is denied in Christian and Muslim tradition; instead, the Jews are identified as sinful and accursed, abandoned by God, and replaced by ‘true’ believers, followers of Jesus and, later, Mohammed. True, biblical and rabbinic literature acknowledges Jewish guilt and responsibility for the exile and for all national failings and shortcomings, defeats and setbacks; and, as I have shown in my book, The Hebrew Bible, Nationalism and the Origins of Anti-Judaism, national cultures often follow the Bible in embracing historic self-blame virtually as a survival instinct for overcoming defeats and failings; indeed, nations that accept the moral genealogy demanded by Scripture—the kinship with ancient Israel and its monotheist ethical teachings—tend to survive. Biblical language of national self-blame—particularly in the books of Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and Ezekiel—foreshadows modern national literature in which writers attack their own people for similar failings, including neglect of the poor and of national culture.44

Give bread to the hungry.

Take the poor into your home.

Clothe the naked.

Don’t ignore them, your own flesh.

Then your light will break as the dawn.45

Modern literature is, in some cases, influenced by biblical precedent and perhaps also by the longevity of the Jewish people, despite loss of territorial homeland and dispersal among often hostile nations.

The language of national self-blame, exploding most powerfully in the poetry of Isaiah and Ezekiel, is particularly common in modern literatures engaged in independence struggles. Writers as diverse as Robert Burns of Scotland, Taras Shevchenko of Ukraine, Henrik Wergeland of Norway, Hristo Botev of Bulgaria, Khalil Gibran of Lebanon, Padriac Pearse of Ireland, and Muhammed Iqbal of India, among many others, castigate their own people for similar failings—for rotten leadership, national defeat and humiliation, excessive materialism, internecine conflict, moral hypocrisy, appeasement and accommodation with the enemy, parasitism and exploitation of the poor, and assimilationism, neglect of national culture, adoption of foreign customs, speaking foreign languages, immersion in foreign cultures, and especially by converting to a foreign religion. They attack the upper classes for their indifference to the poor; and they reprimand the aristocracy and priesthood for moral corruption and for neglecting the interests of the nation. From Burns to Yeats, traitors are denounced.

Yet, national guilt and desire for social justice, though universal principles, are internal matters, for internal reform. The Hebrew Bible was different from other national literatures in the way it was used. Expropriated as the ‘Old Testament’ from mainstream Judaism as two-thirds of the Bible in Greek translation, and adapted to Christian anti-Jewish doctrine, it then passed into every major language. It was rarely seen as the translation of a Jewish work in the Jewish national language mostly on Jewish soil, within Jewish kingdoms that existed from the 10th century to 586 BCE.46

Theological severance of Jewish genealogy is part of the history of anti-Semitism, from ancient to modern times. Peoples who accepted the Bible in translation tended to see it as their literature, no longer for Jews, but a Christian sacred work of gravity and grace, for good Christians whose messianic faith, in contrast with Jewish perfidy, was their salvation. The Jews were heirs of the biblical curses, not the blessings.47 There could be no acknowledgment of Jewish national longings, no acceptance of a viable Jewish national linkage from the distant past to a messianic future.48 Judaism could be defined only as the basis for Christianity, not as a religion in its own right, with an eternal message of the individual created in the divine image, and of universal justice and righteousness. Instead, in Christian dogma, the Bible broadcast the genealogy of Jewish guilt to the world, with extra charges based on supersessionist theology and anti-Jewish fantasies.49

Post-1945 repudiation of anti-Judaism in the Christian world came too late to prevent the dissemination of Christian theological hatred of Jews and Judaism in the Muslim world, where Jews are often seen in popular culture, supported by sacred scripture, as descended from Satan—an accursed people with no genuine national roots, and no basis for existence.