God and Jewish History
A Social And Religious History Of The Jews. Vols. 1 and 2: Ancient Times.
By Salo Wittmayer Baron.
Second revised edition. Columbia University Press. 415 + 493 pp. $12.50.
Here is the majestic epic of the Hebrew people from their vague beginnings far back in the 2nd millennium, onward through the selective process that brought a section of them as historic Israel into the land where they were to shape their destiny, then through the stern discipline of two deep tragedies and “the great schism,” as Professor Baron calls the rise of Christianity, and on to the stabilizing work of the sages of the Talmud, where this section of the work breaks off. It is a story inherently impressive, here told with the critical restraint of the experienced historian, but also with a deep feeling that contributes penetrating insight. It is a superb achievement, meriting the highest praise.
As a social as well as religious history, the work is concerned with economic and political circumstances and developments. But in reality the absorbing theme is religion and thought: how the Hebraic faith arose, how it adjusted itself to constantly changing conditions, and, more important, how it served the deepest needs of the people, sustaining them through vicissitudes which not uncommonly attained the poignancy of disaster. At the peril of too easy generalization, one may say that the work is primarily a history of thought: the thought of the foremost intellectual people of the ancient Orient, who became one of the greatest benefactors in the long story of man’s quest for ultimate meaning and relevance.
Yet issues of such depth, especially when complicated with the knotty problems of Hebrew history, intrinsically provoke disagreement. At many a point, of greater or less significance, the reader is moved to raise an eyebrow, direct an interrogation, or break into heated argument, which, too, is doubtless a tribute to the excellence of Baron’s presentation; and perhaps, too, it may provide a modicum of worth toward further elucidation of the matters he has so ably presented, when free rein is given to these skeptical reactions.
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One of the interpretative themes that pervades this work is that Judaism is a historical religion. The essential optimism of the Jewish religion is presented in a fine passage that may well be commended to current amateur philosophers of history, who are often as glib in their accounts of the meaning of history as they are deficient in a knowledge of its facts. Professor Baron writes: “. . . these processes of history [as understood by Judaism] are neither the processes of political victory and conquest. . . nor those of successive defeat and ultimate failure of every human achievement. . . . History. . . is a progression of conspicuous and hidden human and Jewish achievements, of conspicuous and hidden frustrations guided by the inscrutable will of God.” This process Professor Baron conceives of as set over against nature; again and again he comes back to the thought.
Excellent as the emphasis is, he greatly overdoes it. Certainly the ancient Hebrews would have been perplexed to recognize their world of thinking in the survey he sketches in his introduction. This antithesis of nature and history is foreign to the world of the Bible. By contrast, the Biblical emphasis is that the God of history is also God of nature. So the story begins in Genesis I, and so psalm after psalm reiterates in words of telling beauty and religious insight. “Second Isaiah” indeed found that the fact that God is God of nature provides ground for faith in his control of history. Even more significant, the great struggle between the Lord and Baal, which engrossed the best thought of the people from the conquest onward, even beyond the final dissolution in 586 B.C.E., centered about precisely this antithesis. But it was the Baalists who stood for the distinction which Professor Baron advocates! Orthodox thought, on the other hand, notably under the stimulus of men such as Elijah, Hosea, and Jeremiah, insisted that for Jewish religion no such dualism is tolerable; the Lord who was known for his might in history was also lord of the processes of nature.
The mistake here lies close to one of Baron’s very few unfair appraisals of early Christianity, specifically of the thought of Paul. In general his treatment of the subject is excellent, eminently scholarly in its objective presentation of the facts, so that even a mere goy can only voice admiration; in fact he finds delight in the repudiation of so-called “realized eschatology,” a notion which is misleading much New Testament thinking of the present day. But when Baron charges that “the entire ‘logos’ Christology” of the Epistle to the Colossians removed the “personality of the redeemer still further into timelessness,” and that “here, intrinsically, was a reaction of the static against the dynamic,” he merely fails to recognize Paul’s indebtedness at this point, and the debt of the entire ‘logos’ thinking, to the wisdom concept of the Book of Proverbs. In fact Paul identifies Christ with “wisdom” (I Cor. 1:24). Granted the wisdom of God in Proverbs, chapter 8, was “removed into timelessness” (it was with God before creation), was it then static? Quite the contrary! It was the dynamic of man’s highest aspirations, and of his constant striving from good to better. Christian philosophy, it is true, did in medieval times move toward a sterile staticism, but let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Maimonides, it is said, likewise rated Aristotle too high as against his Jewish heritage.
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But indeed, all this is part of one of the strange deficiencies of the work. Following a history of thought, such as this, one anticipates eagerly the point where due attention will be given to the wisdom literature; but arrived there, the result is disappointing. The essential character of Oriental “wisdom,” specifically of Hebraic, Baron fails to discern. Its long course from its earliest manifestations in 3rd-millennium Egypt, through its rise and flowering in Israel, reveals clearly that wisdom was merely the scholarship of the ancient world, secular insofar as anything in that time could be called secular. Like modern scholarship it ranged far, from philosophic speculation to practical details of political and business administration; nonetheless, it is best understood—even Solomon’s famous manifestation of it—in terms of adventures of the mind. Hebrew wisdom shared the total deepening of life which the exile entailed for Judaism; consequently it took on a definite religious orientation: the fear of the Lord came to be recognized as the chief concern of wisdom. Yet the notable feature of its expression, early and late alike, was its divorce from organized religion and the cultus. Strangely, Professor Baron wants to make it primarily an activity of the priests, and relate it to study of the Torah. This latter identification certainly came about; but it was a late development and occurred, it would appear, not through priestly influence, but by the inner logic of the movement. The wisdom of God, according to the sages, was the mode and essence of the revelation of God, hence must be identical with the Torah. It was an intellectual identification, not hierarchical.
In the contentious problem of the religion of Moses, Baron sides with conservative thought—as he has an unquestioned right to do if he so chooses. But his position raises all sorts of difficulties. He says that “some sort of universal monotheism had been thought of even before Moses,” and on the same page adds that “there is absolutely no evidence for an essential difference between the monotheism of Moses and that of the prophets”—two assertions which when thus put together, as they ought to be, go far to deny any essential significance to Jewish history at all! The consideration must also be weighed that the most outstanding of the varieties of alleged pre-Mosaic monotheism, that of Akhenaton, receives short shrift from so eminent an Egyptologist as John A. Wilson. If it is this sort of obscure “Monophysitism” that Baron wishes to ascribe to Moses, then even a supposedly rabid “critic” has a much higher concept of the meaning and historic place of the great deliverer.
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The concept of the priesthood, one feels uneasily, is considerably idealized. It is presented as the golden thread binding together all of Israel’s quest and experience of higher things. It was in the Levitic group that the impulse of Moses’ work was maintained through the period of the Judges—and this notwithstanding the fact that the only Levites of this period of whom we have any knowledge were base men; one was a dastard (Judges 19:25-29), another unprincipled (Judges 18:19-20), and an official, functioning group was thoroughly immoral (1 Sam. 2:12-22). That in some way the great concepts of Moses were preserved by “underground” means through this time, everyone must concede; equally, that in general the priests of the ancient world were of an intelligence above the average. But such evidence as we possess points not to the priesthood but to the incipient prophetic order as the vital element in the religion of this depressing period.
Baron’s interest here seems the source of two disquieting features of his presentation. We are astonished to find that a “social history” gives little prominence to the epochal character of the achievements of David and Solomon: in two generations Israel emerged from a simple pastoral economy into the rich, if unbalanced, urbanized life of Solomon’s time, the greatness of which is undoubtedly exaggerated by the ancient historian, but nonetheless may not be dismissed. A similar comment relates to Baron’s treatment of the prophets. He praises them in fine epithets, but in reality affords them meager significance in the evolution of Hebrew religious and social thought. Instead we are led to look steadily to the priests and the law as the means of all good. Doubtless he does not mean our present Torah, for though voicing some dissent, Baron seems to accept essentially the critical view of its structure, and apparently of its history; still it was an exalted Torah, a true anticipation of the developed one of later time. “The more discriminating leaders, and particularly the prophets, knew that no matter how antagonistic they were to the existing order. . . they must insist on the full validity of the remotest detail of the Mosaic law”—a very strange claim, the more so in view of the fiery denunciations of the cultus which emanated from several of the prophets. Indeed, Baron himself points out this fact. Today it is the mood to deny they really meant their extreme disparagement, but to Baron’s credit, not he; thus he writes: “The institution of sacrifice had been frowned upon by the leading prophets of the pre-exilic period.” But surely sacrifice was more than “a remotest detail of the Mosaic law”! What then does Baron really mean? In any case it must be affirmed that the Hebraic culture was not the monolithic structure Baron makes it; the priests, while certainly important, were only one of the strands of a diverse fabric.
The figure and work of Ezekiel are treated in essentially traditional terms, except that the view is first tentatively mentioned, and then favored, that he went to Babylonia in 592—which is the worst possible course that may be taken. For it departs from the tradition without, on the other hand, giving attention to the evidence that the prophet was functioning in Jerusalem only a few days before the city fell. One of the notable developments of recent Ezekiel criticism has been the recognition by most scholars who have worked with the problem-including that of this writer—that Ezekiel’s ministry began in Palestine, and there he remained and worked through the entire reign of Zedekiah.
Hosts of further questions invite discussion, but already this accumulation of dissent is in danger of throwing the central emphasis out of balance. And that emphasis is that here is history-writing of a high order, and an account of ancient Israel which attains not less than first-rate importance.
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