Book One: CHAPTER V--Elements of Jewish Identity

CHAPTER V

 

Elements of Jewish Identity

 

                        Judaism is a complex religion with a long history. The person of Abraham can considered to be the first Jew in that he participated in a covenant with God, which required a certain ethical response on his part, namely circumcision. If the date of Abraham’s life is accepted as two millennia before the Common Era, then it is an understatement to say that Judaism evolved and changed over the course of those two-thousand years. For that matter, it would be a gross understatement to say that it underwent many adaptations from the time of David, or even the time of the Babylonian Captivity. Judaism as a living religion had to adapt or die. In many ways, the Jesus movement of the first century C.E. may be understood as an attempt to redefine Palestinian Judaism in light of the new Hellenizing forces of Herod the Great and his successors. It is beyond the scope of this short history to provide a complete treatise regarding key Jewish theological themes. Nevertheless, a few noteworthy points that were crucial for the development of Jewish identity.

 

 

I.  LORD

 

                        Somewhere around the eighth century B.C.E., Judaism had evolved into an ethical monotheism. It was monotheistic in that the Jews came to accept that there was one, and only one, God. All other divine manifestations were mere fabrications. It was ethical in that the One, God of Israel, demanded a behavioral response from those who claimed a devotion to that God. Nevertheless, this ethical monotheism was the product of over 1300 years of evolution, developing from a polytheistic origin.

 

                        Abraham, as a product of the Mesopotamian culture from which he came would have known and accepted the reality of the general Mesopotamian pantheon. In fact, the Hebrew word for “God” acknowledges the original polytheistic character of their religion. The Hebrew word Elohim, “God” is actually a plural noun, meaning “gods.” the singular is El, which was a particular god in the Mesopotamian pantheon. originally, El was the sky god, who often functioned as a creator god and who was sometimes represented as the husband of the mother of the gods. El was eventually replaced in the region by the storm god, Baal. This competition represented between El and Baal finds representation in the Old Testament as competition between Elohim and Baal.

 

                        It is uncertain whether Abraham developed an unwavering devotion to the shy god, El, or if the word El became a generic term for any unspecified god. Biblical literature makes a case for the latter in that Abraham and others are constantly represented as defining the character of god by attaching various epithets to the word El (examples of this are El Roy, El Shaddai). 

 

                        It is impossible to definitively decide whether there was a link between the God of Israel and the Mesopotamian sky god. The term that the Hebrews preferred was the plural Elohim. As the people who became Israel moved from a polytheistic religion toward a monotheistic one, the retained the plural designation of “gods” to refer to the singular “God” of Israel. By retaining the plural they were able to express that their singular God was bigger and more powerful than any other people’s god. It also makes the case that the singular God of Israel is the sole governor of creation, as opposed to other cultures’ conceptions of creation in which various functions are delegated to various gods. 

 

                        Even as the Hebrews moved from polytheism to the exclusive worship of a single god, they were not yet practicing a monotheistic religion. The type of religion that they practiced is best defined as henotheistic. In the Greek, mono means “one” as in only, while henos means “one” as in one from many. It is clear from biblical literature that the Hebrews originally accepted the existence of other gods even as they professed exclusive loyalty to one God in particular. It was the prophets of the eighth century B.C.E. who made the leap from henotheism to monotheism. That is, it was the prophets who began to express the idea that the God of Israel was the only God that existed. For these prophets, any god who was not their God was fictitious, and they seem to have derived a great sense of satisfaction from taunting other peoples’ conceptions of the divine. 

 

                        Before the time of Moses, the Hebrew God was defined by its relation to the Patriarchs (the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac). After Moses, the God of the Patriarchs became identified as the God YHVH. The origin of the name YHVH is uncertain. There are many possible translations of the meaning of the name. Most have to do with some verbal construction of the Hebrew verb “to be,” thus rendering the name as “I am who or what I am” or “I will be who or what I will be.” Another possible understanding of the name is “The One who causes what is to happen.” This last understanding of the meaning of YHVH may be the best, since the Greek translations of the Old Testament do not focus on the verb “to be” but on the participle ho on, “The Being One” or “The One who is.”

 

                        In the Old Testament when one comes across the word “LORD,” expressed in capital letters, with the “L” written larger than the “ORD,” one has just come across the name of the Hebrew God. Many people are astounded to learn that, according to the Jews, God has a name. One of the reasons that most people are unaware of this fact is that it is against Jewish custom to speak the name of God. One of the Ten Commandments is to not use the name of God in empty or hollow discourse. The strategy ensuring that one never breaks that commandment is to never say the name at all. Therefore, if one were to attend a Jewish worship service, whenever the name of God comes up, the word “adonai” is substituted, which simply means “master” or “Lord.”  This tradition has been carried over into English translations, so that whenever the name of God appears in the Hebrew text, the word LORD is substituted.

 

                        As a result, there is a great irony concerning the name of the Hebrew God. Since the best understanding of the name is “The One who causes what is to happen,” each pronouncement of the name of God is a concise confession of faith. The God of Israel is the God who has caused everything in the universe to be, as well as being the God who governs and sustains the universe. Yet, the irony is that the Jews did not allow themselves to offer that succinct confession of faith contained in the name YHVH because they did not allow themselves to pronounce the name. So out of a sense of reverence for the name, they denied themselves the significance of the name. Regardless of the this, however, it is the God YHVH who was the exclusive God of Israel. It was in YHVH that the Jews understood their identity. They were the people of YHVH, the fulfillment of a promise made long before to the Patriarch, Abraham. 

 

                        One final note concerning the topic of monotheism. The Hebrews were not the first to posit the prospect of there being one, and only one, God. The first recorded instance occurred around the mid-fourteenth century B.C.E. in Egypt. A pharaoh named Amenhotep IV came to believe that the traditional sun god, Amon, was not God, but the actual sun was. Since his name was linked to the old god of the sun, he changed it in favor of his new understanding of God as the sun, which was called Aton. His new name became Akhenaton, meaning “the one who is devoted to Aton. 

 

                        Aton, Akhenaton believed, was an omnipresent spirit that created and guided the universe. No other gods but Aton existed; therefore, only Aton was to be worshiped. He ordered that the ancient polytheistic religion of Egypt be dismantled and that all traces of polytheism be eliminated, which generated an ongoing conflict with the traditional priesthood. Frankly, history’s brief flirtation with monotheism simply proved to be too bizarre for Akhenaton’s contemporaries to handle. At his death, his son-in-law, Tutankhamen (as the last part of his name suggests), restored the traditional Egyptian pantheon, with Amon, the traditional sun god, as the major deity.

 

                        As previously stated, there is no historical evidence to support the story of Israel that tells of the Hebrew sojourn and enslavement in Egypt. Nevertheless, the fact that Egypt experimented with a monotheistic religion at the time that it is believed that the Hebrews would have been present in Egypt, if they were in fact there, may be the best piece of evidence to support the claim of the story. The fact that a pharaoh instituted monotheism and that Israel became monotheistic may be demonstrative of an historical link between Egypt and Israel. Quite simply, the Jews learned about monotheism from their Egyptian hosts. This theory is undermined, however, by the fact that monotheism does not take hold in Israel until the eighth century B.C.E. If the Hebrews did learn monotheism from the Egyptians, why did it take six-hundred years for it to express itself in Jewish thought?

 

 

II. Land

 

                Part of the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham was that of property. It was

accepted by the Jews that God owned the region of Canaan and God gave it to Abraham as part of the peace treaty made with between the two. Abraham’s promised possession of Canaan was passed down to his descendants. When the twelve tribes of Israel move into the region of Canaan in the early -thirteenth century B.C.E., the promise was finally being fulfilled. 

 

                        The importance of the land, as it related to the Hebrew world view, was that as long as the Jews lived in Canaan, they could identify themselves as the people of God. It was God’s land after all, and God chose to give that land to the people of Israel out of all the people in the world. Therefore, the fact that the Jews lived in Canaan demonstrated their special relationship with God. 

 

                        The understanding of that relationship was undermined when the Jews were no longer in possession of the land. It would not have taken the leaping through many theological hoops to redefine the promised land as relating to Judah after the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians. The Kingdom of Judah was ruled by a descendant of David, the model of the ideal king. It was David who had received a promise from God declaring that he would be the source of a perpetual dynasty. Therefore, as long a Judah existed, and as long as it was ruled by the dynasty of David, the declaration of divine favor could still be made. In 586 B.C.E., these conditions no longer existed. The Babylonians destroyed the Kingdom of Judah, the dynasty, the Temple, and Jerusalem. In short, the Babylonians destroyed the geographic and symbolic elements that gave the Jews their identity as the people of God. A new source of identity had to be adopted if the people of Judah were going to maintain their Jewish identity in the face of the Babylonian Captivity.

 

 

III. Law

 

                        During the period of the Babylonian Captivity, the Jews who were carted off to Babylon began to curtail their understanding of being the people chosen to live in the land of Canaan and replace it with the notion that they were chosen to receive the Torah. The Hebrew word Torah translates best as “instruction.” Unfortunately, the Greek translation of the Old Testament renders the Hebrew Torah as the Greek nomos, “law.” This rendering is responsible for the misperception that Judaism is a legalistic religion, allowing for the Christian interpretation that God sent Jesus to save humanity from Jewish legalism, replacing it with Christian grace. 

 

                        Every Jew knows that Judaism expresses the concept of grace. To be sure, there have always been those who practiced Judaism with a high degree of legalism, but that could be said about any religion, even expressions of Christianity such as that expressed by Roman Catholics and Baptists. If the Jews are challenged on this point, they merely have to refer to Abraham and ask why God chose him out of all the people of the world. There does not appear to be any logical reason for this, so it is evident that it was solely the grace of God that  chose Abraham.

 

                        The Torah was simply an expression of divine justice. The God of the Old Testament, in addition to choosing random individuals to make promises to, is expressed as a God of justice. Yet, justice to the ancient Israelites differed from the contemporary understanding of justice. In today’s world, justice is understood as an abstract sense of fairness. The Israelites were not content with abstractions. They preferred concrete examples. Therefore, the Torah, rather than being a cold, legalistic, abstraction of a Law, was intended to serve as a concrete ethical expression of what justice looks like.

 

                        The Hebrew purpose of justice was to restore distorted relationships. God, the creator of the universe, intended that human beings live in a state of blessing, which is a state of divine favor. Human beings, however, appeared to have a propensity toward error that stifled that intended divine blessing. The stifling of the divine blessing distorted it into a curse rather than a blessing. The result was that human beings were living in a cursed state rather than a blessed one as intended. The divine solution was to choose one people who would receive a set of divine instruction, which would restore the intended blessing. Through this chosen people and through this instruction, the blessing would pass to the rest of humanity, so that the whole of the creation would once more be in a state of blessing. The set of instructions that were intended to accomplish this was the Torah. 

 

                        The purpose of the Torah as an ethical expression of justice was to restore the relationship between humanity and God. This reflects the biblical understanding of justice as one that is relational. Old Testament justice can best be understood, then, as “right relationships.” The purpose of the Torah was to foster proper relationships between humanity and God, as well as between people. If human error resulted in stifling the intended divine blessing, then the Torah was intended to stifle human error, negating the element that impedes a blessed existence.

 

                        From the time of the Babylonian Captivity, this notion that the Jews were chosen to receive the set of instructions on behalf of all humanity became a central aspect of Jewish identity. The gift of the Torah gave them their status as the people of God. This concept remained in Judaism even after the Exile was over and the Jews were once more allowed to return to Palestine. From this time, the Jews could lose their land and retain their identity.

 

 

IV. Last Things

 

                        The final element of Jewish identity to be discussed in this chapter is the Jewish concept of history. The Jews may have been the first people to propose the notion that history has limits and a purpose. History clearly had a beginning with the creation. The story of Israel expresses God as an active agent in history. Therefore, history takes on a sacred character for the Jews. The sacred character of history comes through in Jewish statements of where history is going. The theological term concerning the Jewish envisioning of where history was heading is eschatology, meaning “last or final things.” When applied to Jewish (and later Christian) discussions pertaining to a global/historical sense, it refers to a future course of events that will change, transform, or end the state of history as it currently exists. 

 

                        Eschatology is ultimately an expression of hope, generally offered in a time when historical developments suggest hopelessness. The nature of Jewish eschatology was quite complex; nevertheless, for the purposes of this chapter, a gross oversimplification will suffice. This gross oversimplification is that Jewish eschatology basically falls into one of two differing expressions of hope: they are Prophetic Eschatology and Apocalyptic Eschatology. 

 

                        Prophetic Eschatology is rooted in history, maintaining that God is the initiator and the Lord of history. In spite of this, human error has caused history to stray off course. This condition will not go on forever. God will one day bring history back into line. The hope of Prophetic Eschatology is that God will one day enter into history in a dynamic and decisive manner, reclaim history, judge between the just and the unjust, and establish a lasting rule in a very real and tangible form upon this earth and as a part of this history. This vision of eschatology is like someone who had build a wall, but over the years the wall has fallen into disrepair. Even though a lot of work is required, most of the wall is still salvageable. The end result of the repair is that it is still essentially the same old wall, it has simply been transformed. This is the essence of Prophetic Eschatology: God will transform history, so that it will be like a new history; yet, there will be a sense of continuity between what was and what will be.

 

                        Apocalyptic Eschatology, on the other hand, maintained that history had become so distorted that it was irredeemable. The result is that god will one day break into history, bringing the current history to an end, while initiating a brand new history. There would be no continuity between the current history, often referred to by apocalyptic authors as “the present evil age,” and the new history, described as “the age to come.” employing the wall analogy once more, this scenario presents a situation in which the condition of the wall has become so bad, that the best course of action is simply to knock it down and build a brand new wall from completely new material.

 

                        Apocalyptic eschatology arose out of Jewish exposure to Hellenistic and Persian influences, as well as from conditions of severe persecution, in which the Jewish people were expected to alter, compromise, or completely abandon their religious practices. The function of apocalyptic eschatology was to offer an explanation as to why the Jews suffered so intolerably, as well as explain what god was going to do about it. It is out of this apocalyptic theological understanding that Judaism will move toward the adoption of a more dualistic understanding of their religion, in which there is a conflict between an actively evil force (Satan) and an actively good force (God). 

 

                        Christianity will emerge from this apocalyptic world view. The age to come will be expressed by the phrase “Kingdom of god,” and apocalyptic elements such as resurrection will be expressed. In fact, the resurrection of Jesus was intended by the early-Christians to express the reality that the new age had begun at that moment and that the two ages were now overlapped, in the same way that two rooms overlap in the threshold of the door. Through the person of Jesus, and through his death and claims about his resurrection, an apocalyptic Jewish sect was able to blend the differing eschatologies. Through Jesus god had entered into history was set about transforming it. The transformation is proven by Jesus’ resurrection, in which the new age had begun. One day, in the not too distant future, the present age will run out and there will be nothing left but the new age. At that time the present history will cease to be and a new history will occur.