Part 6 (1/2)
And when the Lord your G.o.d brings you into the land which he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you, with great and goodly cities, which you did not build, and houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, and cisterns hewn out, which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive trees, which you did not plant, and when you eat and are full, then take heed lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage [Deuteronomy 6:10-12].
And when, in reading, we move on from Deuteronomy to the greatest war book of all, of Joshua, there is -- most famous of all -- the legend of the fall of Jericho. The trumpets blew, the walls fell down. ”And then,” as we read, ”they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and a.s.ses, with the edge of the sword. . . And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord” (Joshua 6:21, 24). The next city was Ai. ”And Israel smote them, until there was left none that survived or escaped. . . And all who fell that day, both men and women, were twelve thousand, all of the people of Ai” (Joshua 8:22, 25). ”And so Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb, and the lowland and the slopes, and their kings. He left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord G.o.d of Israel commanded” (Joshua 10:40).
And that, the very same Lord G.o.d so frequently cited by our doves of peace today as having taught, ”Thou shall not kill!”
Moreover, we have next the Book of Judges, with that story at the end of it of how the tribe of Benjamin got their wives (Judges 21). The earliest hymn of the Bible, Deborah's song, is a war song, (Judges 5). In the Book of Kings we have those utterly monstrous bloodbaths accomplished in the name, of course, of Yahweh by Elijah and Elisha. Next come the reforms of Josiah (II Kings 22-23); shortly following which, however, Jerusalem itself is besieged and taken by the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, in the year 586 B.C. (II Kings 25).
But above and beyond all this there soars that beautiful ideal of an ultimate and universal peace, which, from the time of Isaiah onward, has played so alluringly through all the leading war mythologies of the West. There is, for example, that beguiling image so frequently cited, at the close of Isaiah 65, where ”the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; and dust shall be the serpent's food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, says the Lord.” However, just a little earlier in the same Isaiah we have already been given to know what the ideal of the peace to come is actually to be: ”The foreigners,” we have there to read,
shall build up your walls and their kings shall minister to you; for in my wrath I smote you, but in my favor I have had mercy on you. Your gates shall be open continually; day and night they shall not be shut; that men may bring to you the wealth of nations, with their kings led in procession. For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you shall perish; those nations shall be utterly laid waste. The glory of Lebanon shall come to you, the cypress, the plane tree, and the pine, to beautify the place of my sanctuary; and I will make the place of my feet glorious. The sons of those who oppressed you shall come bending low to you; and all who despised you shall bow down at your feet; they shall call you the City of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel [Isaiah 60:10-14].
Now it was strange, and not a little threatening and awesome, to hear echoes of these same themes emanating from the jubilation of victory in Israel, just following the six-day Blitzkrieg and Sabbath on the seventh, of recent date. This mythology, that is to say, unlike the ancient Greek, is still very much alive. And of course, to complete the picture, the Arabs have their their divinely authorized war mythology too. For they too are a people who, according to their legend, are of the seed of Abraham: the progeny of Ishmael, his first and elder son. Moreover, according to this history, confirmed in the Koran, it was Abraham and Ishmael, before the birth of Isaac, who built in Mecca the sanctuary of the Ka'aba, which is the uniting central symbol and shrine of the entire Arab world and of all Islam. The Arabs revere and derive their beliefs from the same prophets as the Hebrews. They honor Abraham, honor Moses. They greatly honor Solomon. They honor Jesus too, as a prophet, Mohammed, however, is their ultimate prophet, and from him -- who was a considerable warrior himself -- they have derived their fanatic mythology of unrelenting war in G.o.d's name. divinely authorized war mythology too. For they too are a people who, according to their legend, are of the seed of Abraham: the progeny of Ishmael, his first and elder son. Moreover, according to this history, confirmed in the Koran, it was Abraham and Ishmael, before the birth of Isaac, who built in Mecca the sanctuary of the Ka'aba, which is the uniting central symbol and shrine of the entire Arab world and of all Islam. The Arabs revere and derive their beliefs from the same prophets as the Hebrews. They honor Abraham, honor Moses. They greatly honor Solomon. They honor Jesus too, as a prophet, Mohammed, however, is their ultimate prophet, and from him -- who was a considerable warrior himself -- they have derived their fanatic mythology of unrelenting war in G.o.d's name.
The jihad, jihad, the duty of the Holy War, is a concept developed from certain pa.s.sages of the Koran which, during the period of the Great Conquests (from the seventh to tenth centuries), were interpreted as defining the bounden duty of every Moslem male who is free, of full age, in full possession of his intellectual powers, and physically fit for service. ”Fighting is prescribed for you,” we read in the Koran, Sura 2, verse 216. ”True, you have an antipathy to it: however, it is possible that your antipathy is to something that is nevertheless good for you. G.o.d knows, and you know not,” To fight in the cause of Truth is one of the highest forms of charity,” I read in a commentary to this pa.s.sage. ”What can you offer that is more precious than your own life?” All lands not belonging to ”the territory of Islam” the duty of the Holy War, is a concept developed from certain pa.s.sages of the Koran which, during the period of the Great Conquests (from the seventh to tenth centuries), were interpreted as defining the bounden duty of every Moslem male who is free, of full age, in full possession of his intellectual powers, and physically fit for service. ”Fighting is prescribed for you,” we read in the Koran, Sura 2, verse 216. ”True, you have an antipathy to it: however, it is possible that your antipathy is to something that is nevertheless good for you. G.o.d knows, and you know not,” To fight in the cause of Truth is one of the highest forms of charity,” I read in a commentary to this pa.s.sage. ”What can you offer that is more precious than your own life?” All lands not belonging to ”the territory of Islam” (dar al-Islam) (dar al-Islam) are to be conquered and are known, therefore, as ”the territory of war” are to be conquered and are known, therefore, as ”the territory of war” (dar al-harb). (dar al-harb). ”I am commanded,” the Prophet is reported to have said, ”to fight until men bear witness, there is no G.o.d but G.o.d and his Messenger is Mohammed.” According to the ideal, one campaign a year, at least, must be undertaken by every Moslem prince against unbelievers. However, where this proves to be no longer possible, it suffices if an army, efficiently maintained, is kept trained and ready for the ”I am commanded,” the Prophet is reported to have said, ”to fight until men bear witness, there is no G.o.d but G.o.d and his Messenger is Mohammed.” According to the ideal, one campaign a year, at least, must be undertaken by every Moslem prince against unbelievers. However, where this proves to be no longer possible, it suffices if an army, efficiently maintained, is kept trained and ready for the jihad. jihad.
And the Jews, ”the People of the Book,” as they are here called, hold a special place in this thinking, since it was they who first received G.o.d's Word but then (according to Mohammed's view) repeatedly forsook it, backsliding, rejecting, and even slaying G.o.d's later prophets. In the Koran they are repeatedly addressed and threatened: of which pa.s.sages I shall cite but one, from Sura 17, verses 4-8 (and wherever the word ”We” appears in this text, the reference is to G.o.d; where ”you,” to the Jews; while the ”Book” is the Bible):
And We gave clear warning to the Children of Israel in the Book that twice would they do mischief on the earth and be elated with mighty arrogance, and twice would they be punished. When the first warnings came to pa.s.s, We sent against you Our servants given to terrible warfare [the Babylonians, 685 B.C.]: they entered the very inmost parts of your homes; and it was a warning completely fulfilled. Then did we grant you the Return as against them; We gave you increase in resources and sons, and made you the more numerous in manpower. If ye did well, ye did well for yourselves; if ye did evil, ye did it against yourselves. So when the second of the warnings came to pa.s.s, we permitted your enemies to disfigure your faces and to enter your Temple [the Romans, 70 A.D.] as it had been entered before, and to visit with destruction all that fell into their power. It may be that your Lord may yet show Mercy unto you; but if ye revert to your sins, we shall revert to Our punishments: and We have made h.e.l.l a prison for those who reject the Faith.
These, then, are the two war mythologies that are even today confronting each other in the highly contentious Near East and may yet explode our planet.
However, to return in thought to the past, of which our present is the continuation: the old Biblical ideal of offering a holocaust to Yahweh by ma.s.sacring every living thing in a captured town or city was but the Hebrew version of a custom general to the early Semites: the Moabites, the Amorites, the a.s.syrians, and all. However, about the middle of the eighth century B.C. the a.s.syrian Tiglath Pilesar III (r. 745-727) seems to have noticed that when everybody in a conquered province is slain there is no one left to enslave. Yet if any remain alive, they presently pull themselves together, and one has a revolt to put down. Tiglath Pilesar invented the procedure, therefore, of transferring populations from one region to another: when a city had been taken, its entire population was to be condemned to forced labor elsewhere, and the inhabitants of that other place transferred to the vacated site. The idea was effective and caught on; so that by the time two centuries more had elapsed, the entire Near East had been unsettled. There was hardly a land-rooted people left. When Israel fell its people were not ma.s.sacred, as they would have been half a century earlier. They were taken somewhere else, and another people (known later as Samaritans) was brought to inhabit their former kingdom. And so also when Jerusalem fell in the year 586, its people were not ma.s.sacred but transferred to Babylon, where, as we read in the famous Psalm 137:
By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, ”Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!
Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said, ”Raze it, raze it!
Down to its foundations!”
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us!
Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!
But then there came to pa.s.s, very suddenly, an altogether radical transformation of the whole mythology of the Near East, with the sudden appearance and brilliant victories of the Aryan Persians over every nation of the ancient world save Greece, from the Bosporus and Upper Nile to the Indus. Babylon fell in the year 539 B.C. to Cyrus the Great, whose idea for the government of an empire, however, was neither to ma.s.sacre nor to uproot, but to return peoples to their places, restoring them to their G.o.ds and governing them through subordinate kings of their own races and traditions. Thus he became the first King of Kings. And that t.i.tle of the powerful Persian monarchs became the t.i.tle presently of the Lord G.o.d of Israel himself, whose people Cyrus restored to their city and encouraged to the rebuilding of their Temple. In Isaiah 45 this gentile is even celebrated as a virtual Messiah, the anointed servant of Yahweh, the work of whose hand had been the work, actually, of Yahweh's hand, for the restoration of his people to their sacred seat. And if I read that chapter rightly, what it promises through its prophet is that ultimately it would be not the Persians, but the people themselves of Yahweh who would be reigning over the world in the name of G.o.d (Isaiah 45:14-25).
The actual mythology of the Persians, on the other hand, was not of Isaiah, but of Zarathustra (Greek, Zoroaster); and since it was to exert considerable influence not only on Judaism, but also on the whole development of Christianity, we shall do well to pause with it a moment before proceeding in our survey to the mythologies of peace.
The World Creator, according to this view, was Ahura Mazda, a G.o.d of truth and light, whose original creation was perfect. However, an opposing evil power of darkness and deception, Angra Mainyu, infused into it evils of all kinds, so that there occurred a general Fall into ignorance and there is in progress now a continuing conflict between the powers of light and of darkness, truth and deception. These, in the Persian view, are not particular to any race or tribe but are cosmic, general powers, and every individual, of whatever race or tribe, must, through his own free will, choose sides and align himself with the powers either of goodness or of evil in this world. If with the former, he will contribute through his thoughts, words, and deeds to the restoration of the universe to perfection; if however, with the latter, to his own great grief in a h.e.l.l appropriate to his life.
As the day of the ultimate world-victory approaches and the powers of darkness make their final desperate stand, there will come a season of general wars and universal catastrophe, after which there will arrive the ultimate savior, Saoshyant. Angra Mainyu and his demons will be utterly undone; the dead will be resurrected in bodies of immaculate light; h.e.l.l vanis.h.i.+ng, its souls, purified, will be released; and there will follow an eviternity of sheer peace, purity, joy, and perfection -- forever.
According to the view of the ancient Persian kings, it was they who, in a special way, were the representatives on earth of the cause and will of the Lord of Light. And so we find that in the great multiracial and multicultural empire of the Persians -- which, in fact, was the first such empire in the history of the world -- there was a religiously authorized imperialistic impulse, to the end that, in the name of truth, goodness, and the light, the Persian King of Kings should become the leader of mankind to the rest.i.tution of truth. The idea is one that has had a particular appeal to kings and has been taken over, accordingly, by conquering monarchs everywhere. In India the mythic image of the Chakravartin, for example, the universal king, the illumination of whose presence would bring peace and well-being to mankind, is a figure inspired largely by this thought. It is to be recognized in the royal emblems of the first Buddhist monarch, Ashoka, ca. 262-248 B.C. And in China, immediately following the turbulent period known as Chun Kuo, ”of the Warring States,” the first ruler of a united empire, s.h.i.+h Huang Ti (221-207 B.C.), governed, according to his claim, by the mandate of Heaven, under Heaven's law.
It is then hardly to be wondered if the enthusiastic Hebrew author of Isaiah 40-55, who was a contemporary of Cyrus the Great and living witness of the Persian restoration to Jerusalem of its people, gives evidence in his prophecies of the influence of Zoroastrian ideas; for example, in the famous pa.s.sages of Chapter 45: ”Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus. . . 'I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe, I am the Lord, who do all these things.' ” It is in these chapters of the so-called Second or Deutero Isaiah that we find the earliest celebrations of Yahweh not simply as the greatest and most powerful G.o.d among G.o.ds, but as the one G.o.d of the universe, in whom not only Jews but also the gentiles are to find salvation: ”Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth!” we read, for instance. ”For I am G.o.d, and there is no other” (Isaiah 45:22). Moreover, whereas the earlier idea of the Messiah of the pre-exilic prophets had been simply of an ideal king on David's throne, ”to uphold it,” as in Isaiah 9:6-7, ”with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and for evermore”; in the post-exilic period, and particularly in the very late, apocalyptic writings of the Alexandrian age -- as, for instance, in the Book of Daniel 7:13-27 -- there is the notion of one who, at the end of historic time, should be given, over ”all peoples, nations, and languages,” ”an everlasting dominion, which shall not pa.s.s away.” And at that time, furthermore, ”Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2).
There can be no doubt of the influence of Zoroastrian eschatology on such ideas as these of the end of the world and resurrection of the dead. Moreover, in the Essene Dead Sea Scrolls of the last century B.C., the influence of Persian thought is apparent at every turn. Their period itself, in fact, was one of such terrible tumult that the end of the world and coming of the savior Saoshyant might well have been expected by anyone familiar with the old Zoroastrian theme. Even in Jerusalem there was schism, with two contending parties in rivalry for the mastery: one supported by the Hasidim, the orthodox ”pious one,” who were loyal to the law; the other favoring Greek ideas. And when (as we are told in the Books of the Maccabees) those of the latter party went to the Greek Emperor Antiochus and gained from him permission to build themselves in Jerusalem a gymnasium, ”according to the customs of the heathen, and made themselves uncirc.u.mcised, and forsook the holy covenant, and joined themselves to the heathen,” new contentions arose within the holy city, which culminated when the Greeks, supporting the claims of an opportunistic h.e.l.lenizer to the office of the high priesthood, sacked the Temple and ordered heathen altars to be set up all over the land. For it was then, 168 B.C., in a village named Modein, that Mattathias and his five sons (the Maccabees) attacked and slew not only the first Jew who approached the heathen altar to sacrifice ”according to the king's commandment,” but also the Greek officer who had arrived to set it up. However, the Maccabees themselves then impudently a.s.sumed the t.i.tles of both the kings.h.i.+p and high priesthood, to which they were not by descent ent.i.tled, and there were perpetrated within that family a numbor of ugly betrayals and murders in subsequent struggles for the inheritance. The Pharisees, Hasidim, and others resenting these impieties rose presently in a revolt that was put down with the greatest cruelty by the reigning Alexander Jannaeus (r. 104-78), who crucified eight hundred of his enemies in a single night, slaughtered their wives and children before their eyes, and himself watched the executions, drinking and publicly disporting with his concubines. ”Upon which so deep a terror seized on the people,” wrote the Jewish historian Josephus in concluding his account of this atrocity, ”that eight thousand of his opposers fled away the very next night, out of all Judea.”1 It has been suggested that this event specifically may have been the occasion for the founding in the wilderness on the Dead Sea sh.o.r.e of the apocalyptic community of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Its founders, in any case, foresaw the end of the world and were in all seriousness preparing themselves to be worthy to survive it and to continue into eternity the destiny of the remnant of G.o.d's people. Their expectation seems to have been that they would themselves const.i.tute an army of such virtue that with G.o.d's help they would conquer and purify the world. There would be a war to be fought, of forty years, of ”the Sons of Light” against ”the Sons of Darkness.” (Compare the old Zoroastrian theme!) This would commence with a battle of six years against such immediate neighbors as the Moabites and Egyptians and, after a year of Sabbath rest, recommence with a series of campaigns against the peoples of remoter lands. On their trumpets and their standards the Covenanters would have written inspiring, flattering slogans: ”The Elect of G.o.d,” ”The Princes of G.o.d,” ”The Chiefs of the Fathers of the Congregation,” ”The Hundred of G.o.d, a Hand of War against All Erring Flesh,” ”The Truth of G.o.d,” ”The Righteousness of G.o.d,” 'The Glory of G.o.d,” etc. But meanwhile, in Jerusalem, alas! two sons of Alexander Jannaeus were contending for the kings.h.i.+p. One of them invited the Romans in to a.s.sist him in his cause -- and that was that, 63 B.C.