Moses the Lawgiver

[The following is Episode 5 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

                Long ago, when Agamemnon and his armies fought against the powerful city of Troy, the exploits of the Greek warriors were preserved in verses that were memorized and recited to later generations, among peoples who had no other connection to this ancient time.  To these later peoples, the tales provided a context for their lives, a history, a connection to the gods, and a common heritage.  The tales found expression in poetry, and song, and in a new medium unlike anything the world had seen before, the theater, in the plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles.  But before the walls of Troy fell, another great conflict, playing itself out in the land of Egypt, would be immortalized in the writings, songs, and verses of distant generations, centuries removed.    The outcome of this drama would also create a context for living, a heritage, and a connection to one, special god, who would assume a role in our civilization unlike any before or since.  The drama was a slave revolt, the outcome, freedom, and its hero, a man named Moses.

            In the first four episodes of this series, “Larger than Life”, we have looked at the earliest civilizations, in Sumer, Egypt, Crete, and Greece, and at some of the myths that gave their peoples a sense of meaning and common destiny in their lives.  It was easy to listen to these with amusement, fascination, and even a little condescension, but now, in Episode 5, as we turn our attention to the Hebrews, we are crossing the threshold into what might be a little less comfortable territory.  It will not be as easy to be so detached, or so impartial, or so bemused, as we listen to some of the stories that many of us still teach to our children for religious inspiration, or as we talk about that God of the Hebrews which is the same one that many if not most in our society pray to today.  Like the legendary ether that physicists once believed surrounded us, an invisible substance that serves as a medium for light waves to travel through, the religious traditions of the Bible permeate our culture, and we are immersed in them.  It is difficult – it might even be impossible – for us to step out of them and examine them with an impartial eye.  Even those who claim to be free of our religious traditions often demonstrate by their ill-disguised hostility toward anything religious that they are not really free of them at all.  As we discovered at the end of the last episode, it is true that many of our ideas about reality, about truth, and about morality have been passed down to us by the ancient Greeks.  But people tend to be much more sensitive talking about their religious views than their philosophical ones.  That’s what makes this a touchy subject, but also a fascinating one, and an important one, if we wish to learn how our beliefs shape our destiny.  Who is this God of the ancient Hebrews that holds such power over our lives, how did we find Him, or, perhaps it should be asked, how did He find us?

            The story of the Hebrew God is preserved for us in a collection of books that comprise the Jewish Tanakh, and Christian Old Testament.  This Bible, as we know it, offers us a complete history of our existence, from the time that its god created the world, through its own version of the flood legend, and on through the rise and fall of many empires.  Now as a history of the world, it presents us problems even in the opening chapters.  As Clarence Darrow, in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, pointed out, the biblical account of the beginnings of humanity runs into difficulties almost immediately, with the story of Cain, the first child of Adam and Eve, who leaves his family, settles in the land of Nod, and takes a wife.  One is compelled to ask, as Clarence Darrow did: if Adam and Eve were the first human beings, and Cain was the firstborn of this first family, then how could he find people in a distant land and among them a woman to marry?  But nevertheless, in our civilization, the Bible has long been accepted as the history of humanity, just as the ancient Greeks had accepted Homer’s epics as a record of the history of their own ancestors.  It has only been since the age of Charles Darwin, about one hundred and fifty years ago, that the historical accuracy of our Bible has been questioned by the population at large.

            But let’s look at the Bible from another perspective.  How does it differ from the accounts of creation that we have encountered in the civilizations of the Sumerians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks?  And how does its god differ from the gods of those other lands? 

            The first thing that impresses us is that the act of creation in this Bible is a purposeful event.  The God of the Hebrews creates His universe through design, and intention, not through accident or chance.  There is no account of a conflict between gods, or of the creation of the universe as an accidental consequence of this conflict, or of humanity as the result of an unintended or arbitrary act.  The Hebrew god creates the universe, and the earth, methodically, by design, and the creation of humanity is a culmination, or at least a final act, of this design.  This God is like an artisan, or architect, framing the universe according to a preconceived plan.

            It’s any wonder, then, that in such a clockwork universe anything could go wrong, but it does, and man is responsible.  And what is this terrible thing that man does, that upsets the divine order of things?  He crosses a boundary that has been set upon him by his god – he tastes of a fruit that has been forbidden to him.  And what is it about this seemingly harmless act that brings down divine anger?  According to the Bible, God says:

            “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil. . .”

and it adds that, to prevent man from gaining even more power, by eating of the tree of life and gaining immortality, God casts him and his descendants out of the Garden of Eden forever.  But this is only God’s final curse on Adam and his descendants for his transgression, for earlier we are told that from this time forward women will bring forth their children in sorrow, and men must work the ground, fighting thorns and thistles, to make their bread. 

            Three times in the book of Genesis – the book that tells the story of mankind’s earliest days – God curses the human race by bringing new hardships or difficulties to its members.  The second such curse comes upon Cain, after he murders his brother Abel.  God asks Cain, “Where is thy brother?” and Cain replies, “I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?”  Upon charging Cain with his crime, God punishes him by saying:

            “And now art thou cursed upon the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; when thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.”

            The third curse falls on mankind when it attempts to build the famous Babel tower, whose pinnacle would reach unto heaven.  God prevents its completion by confounding the languages of mankind, causing the peoples to disperse.  The reason for this interference is explained when the Bible quotes God as saying:

                “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”

            In all three instances: Adam and Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit, Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, and the building of the Babel tower, man’s transgression appears to be that he was moving too close to God, gaining or usurping powers that God reserved for himself.  By eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were gaining access to knowledge that had been God’s exclusively, and had he not stopped them, they would have gained the gift of immortality as well.  When Cain murdered his brother Abel, he usurped God’s power of life and death over mankind.  And by building the Babel tower, mankind was demonstrating its intent to transcend and overcome any limits imposed upon it, by reaching heaven itself, God’s private domain.  And in each of these three instances God’s response was to make life a little more difficult for man, by making the environment more hostile, or by saddling him with more extreme physical limitations.  Now on the surface, these divine acts seem to suggest a very petty God, even a petulant one.  Is the Hebrew God different from the gods of the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Greeks only because of his extreme jealousy and intolerance - of the rival power of men and other gods alike?  If we take a closer look, we will find some much more profound differences.  But before examining this god of the Hebrews more closely, it would be helpful to take a look at the Hebrews themselves.

            Their origins are obscure.  In the Bible, we are told that Abraham came from the city of Ur, in the land of the Sumerians, and migrated with a band of family and followers westward to Palestine, where his grandson Jacob eventually settled and established himself as the patriarch of a new people, the Israelites.  But tales of Abraham, his son Isaac, and grandson Jacob were not only passed on among the Israelites – the names appear in the mythology of the Midianites, and the Amorites: two other ancient nomadic peoples who lived in the region of Palestine.  Among these and other tribes who lived in the land, a number of gods were worshipped, in many different forms: the dragon, the sun, the moon, and the sphinx.  One tribe worshipped the image of a bull, a practice that may have been passed on from distant ancestors or relatives from the kingdom of Minos on Crete.  Another worshipped Nehushtan, the serpent god, while yet another was loyal to a very powerful and jealous god of high and remote places who was the enemy of Nehushtan.  It was this god of the desert and the mountains who would be remembered as forming a covenant with Abraham and his descendants, while the serpent, like the Egyptian god Osiris’s enemy Set, would survive as a demonic entity, the first enemy of the Hebrew God mentioned in the Bible.

            While it is difficult to untangle the earliest history of the Hebrews from other nomadic tribes that lived in the region of Palestine, there is evidence that a people calling themselves the Israelites were definitely living in the region around 1220 B.C., at about the time that the combined armies of Greece were at war with Troy.  Earlier in the century, two waves of invasions had occurred in that part of the world.  From the northwest, a horde that the Egyptians called the “sea peoples”, some of whom would later be called by other peoples the Philistines, moved through the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea, until they were stopped at Egypt.  And from the desert in the southeast, semi-nomadic tribes migrated into Palestine, Syria, northern Mesopotamia, Assyria, and Babylon, overwhelming the native inhabitants with innovative weapons that they had acquired from other peoples: iron from the Hittites, and horses and chariots from the Egyptians.  It was from among this second group of invaders that the people calling themselves the Israelites appeared.  They were a confederation of tribes, claiming a common ancestry, and a shared history, which included a remarkable tale about a man named Moses.

            Who Moses actually was, we may never know for sure, but there is no reason to doubt that he really existed.  Was he, as the Bible tells us, born to Hebrew slaves, spared from the pharaoh’s decree of death to all infant male children of the slaves when his sister hid him in a reed basket?  According to this account, Moses was discovered by the pharaoh’s daughter, raised in the Egyptian royal household, and could have continued to live a privileged existence, until a random but violent act of sympathy for his own people forced him to renounce his adopted birthright and flee from Egypt.  While in exile, he is said to have encountered that mysterious mountain and desert god of the Hebrews, who entrusted him with a very special mission and calling: nothing less than to win the complete liberation of his enslaved people from the Egyptians. 

Moses Leading the Exodus

            The name, “Moses”, is actually Egyptian, not Hebrew, and it is interesting to note that many members of the tribe that he was supposed to belong to, the Levites, also had Egyptian names.  This may have been what prompted no less a scholar than Sigmund Freud to suggest that Moses actually was an Egyptian, a nobleman raised in the household of Akhenaton: that pharaoh who unsuccessfully tried to get his people to worship one god above all others.  According to Freud’s account, Moses left Egypt after Akhenaton’s untimely death, taking with him followers from among the Semitic tribes that lived in the kingdom so that he could continue the late pharaoh’s religious practices in some other land.  After a time, Freud suggests, these tribes revolted against Moses, substituting one of their own principal gods for the Egyptian one that Moses tried to impose upon them.  But most scholars believe that a slave revolt against the Egyptians is a much more likely scenario, and that, whatever his ties to the Egyptian people and their royal household, Moses was the leader of this revolt.  We then must ask, when did it happen, and who was the pharaoh who actually played the role of arch-villain in this great drama?  Suggested dates for the exodus from Egypt have ranged from 1491 B.C. to 1290 B.C, with 1320 having a high likelihood of being the correct one.  If the exodus did happen in 1320 B.C., then Ramesses II was the oppressor of the Hebrews, and the revolt occurred under the reign of his son, Merneptah.  Ramesses II certainly fits the profile of the pharaoh described in the biblical book of Exodus.  He had a passion for building that rivaled that of the Egyptian kings who built the massive pyramids more than a thousand years before, but Ramesses II’s passion was directed toward the construction of a great palace, statues, and temples.  To supply the labor that he required, Ramesses used slaves, which by now had become a fixture in Egypt, but he used more slaves than any other pharaoh before him.  And he had no scruples about where to get them – whether they be war captives, neighboring tribes, slaves purchased in foreign auction markets, or even Egyptians driven into bondage because they couldn’t pay their debts.  Ramesses didn’t care – he had to build.  Ironically, if it was posterity that he was hoping for, he got it, but not in the way that he desired or expected, because he and his son may very well have been responsible for one of the greatest revolts in human history.

Ramesses II

            (It should be mentioned that those who subscribe to a more literal interpretation of durations and ages presented in the Bible place the exodus from Egypt much earlier, in the 15^th century BCE, during the reign of Thutmose II and/or his son, Thutmose III.)

            But Moses did more than lead his people to freedom.  He led them to, or led them back to, their God, and established a code of conduct and special relationship with the creator that would define them as a people forever more.  The ancient land of Palestine was resettled, or rather re-conquered, as the Hebrews came into conflict with the native Canaanites, and another people, the Philistines, who may very well have been distant relatives of the people of Crete, from the land of King Minos.  And while King Minos punished his enemies with the Minotaur, the Philistines held the Hebrews in check with their own brand of monster, a giant named Goliath.  We know from the Bible that Goliath’s slayer was destined to become the land of Israel’s greatest king, David, whose fame would only be rivaled by his son, Solomon.  Israel had by now become more than a people and a nation, it had become a kingdom, with all of the glories, and the pitfalls, that kingdoms face.  For with power comes the temptation to abuse it, to become haughty, and to become irreverent or even forgetful of the things that one once held sacred.  Many of Israel’s kings succumbed to this temptation, as did many of their subjects, and out of the midst of this heresy came a new figure that would loom large in the history of Israel: the prophet. 

            While Moses had established a priestly line that began with his brother Aaron, the true spiritual descendants of Moses were the prophets.  Like him, they received their calling directly from God, rather than from a hereditary birthright, or special training.  They were often simple men, poor, not from the privileged ranks of society.  Unlike the high priests in Egypt, who were part of an aristocratic caste that often exercised great control over the king, the prophets shunned lives of luxury and had to shout to be heard, and they cried out on behalf of the poor and the oppressed, often denouncing their king.  Three of the greatest of these prophets who lived during Israel’s golden but decadent age were Elijah, Amos, and Hosea.  For Elijah, the sins that offended God were the iniquity of King Ahab and his queen Jezebel, and the idolatrous worship of other gods that was being practiced in the temples during their reign.  Amos and Hosea railed against King Jeroboam II, and his abuse of the poor and downtrodden.  When the kingdom later fell to the Assyrians, Hosea declared that this was nothing less than a manifestation of divine punishment for its sinful practices.  And like Elijah, Hosea identified idolatry as one of Israel’s most grievous sins, comparing the nation and its relation to God with that of an unfaithful wife to her husband.

            By Hosea’s time Israel was actually two kingdoms, not one, because after the reign of King Solomon the northern part of the nation had broken away and, with the help of the Egyptians, declared its independence.  This northern kingdom continued to call itself Israel, while the southern kingdom, which the Bible tells us consisted mainly of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, adopted Judah as its name.  But around 720 B.C. Israel suffered a devastating downfall as Assyrian invaders conquered the land, deported many of its inhabitants, and repopulated it with immigrants from Mesopotamia.  Here began the legend of the “lost ten tribes of Israel”, those unfortunate victims of the Assyrian invasion, forced to give up their national identity and live in a strange land, never to return.  Judah also surrendered to the Assyrian conquerors, but was allowed to retain its independence.  And it was now in the land of the Judeans where the prophets would continue to raise their angry voices, beginning with the greatest of them all, Isaiah.

The Prophet Isaiah

            Isaiah was actually born into an aristocratic family, but like the prophets that came before him, he expressed God’s indignation against mistreatment of the poor.  “Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed;” he said, “To turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!”  Isaiah also echoed the warnings against idolatry made by the other prophets, convincing his king to drag the images of idols out of the temple at Jerusalem.  And if there was ever any doubt before his time, Isaiah makes it clear to his people that their god is not only supreme, he is the only god – there are no others to compete with him for worship or adoration.  Through the prophet’s voice, the creator declares: “Is there a God beside me?  yea, there is no God; I know not any.”  Isaiah’s message was reinforced by the later prophets - Habakkuk and Jeremiah principal among them.  And Habakkuk and Jeremiah also made it clear that the god of the Jews was not confined to a temple, or a place – His presence is universal.  But through Jeremiah’s prophecies it is stressed that while this God transcends borders and boundaries He is still a personal God, and while His power is supreme, so is His capacity for mercy, as in these lines:

“. . . I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.  And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

            But even the remnant of God’s followers in Judah could not escape divine judgment, as warned by the prophets.  The rural inhabitants of that land continued to worship other gods, including a mother goddess, Ashoreh, a divine consort who held an equal place in the hearts of many to the reigning god of their ancestors.  In 640 B.C. their king, Josiah, who feared that his subjects could not fend off the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian nations that threatened their independence, took a radical step.  With the aid of his priests, he set about to rally his people behind the worship of a single god.  In 622 B.C. some of these priests claimed to make a momentous discovery, a lost scroll hidden away in the temple at Jerusalem.  We know that scroll today as the book of Deuteronomy, a retelling of the story of Moses, complete with a code of laws that banned the worship of other gods in the hilltops and other remote regions of Judah.  Josiah sent troops to these pagan temples, where the temples were destroyed, and its priests killed.  It was now that monotheism would gain its strongest foothold in Judah.

            But Josiah’s hopes that a unified people under one God would prove victorious over their enemies was dashed in 609 B.C., after a bold attack led by the king against the Egyptian-Assyrian alliance was repelled, and the king himself was killed in the battle.  Like Akhenaton of Egypt, Josiah’s death seemed to portend a failure of this noble experiment, as the kings who followed him restored the worship of Ashorah and the other tribal gods.  It was now left to the prophets to warn of the consequences of their actions.  Jeremiah declared that the Judean people’s idolatry would be punished by exile, and his prophecy was soon fulfilled by the Babylonians.  Under their king, Nebuchadnezzar, they invaded Jerusalem, plundering the temple and the palace treasures.  And just as the Assyrians had done to the inhabitants of Israel, the Babylonians carried off the people of Jerusalem and resettled them in a distant land.  It seemed that the destruction of the Hebrews was complete, their culture and history doomed to extinction, a fate common to many peoples of that age who had fallen to the sword of invasion.  But here the story takes a strange and remarkable turn.

            In Babylon, the Judean exiles found solace in the writings that they had taken with them, the stories of their past, and of their relationship with their God.  The tale of their bondage in Egypt took on special significance, as did the assurances by God that repentance for their sins, and return to the old ways of worship, would bring divine mercy, protection, and liberation.  In this, their darkest hour of despair, was formed the beginnings of a faith that would forever define them as a people, and in this faith was the stirrings of a new religion, Judaism.

Persian King Cyrus

           

            When the Persians, under King Cyrus, conquered the Babylonians in 538 B.C., the Judean captives were freed and allowed to return to their homeland.  But after decades of exile, the land to which they returned was not a hospitable one.  The repatriated Jews set about rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem until conflicts between them and the new inhabitants of the surrounding countryside brought the work to a standstill.  And then, eighty years after their return, a Jewish scribe named Ezra was sent by the Persian king Ataxerxes to restore order to Jerusalem.  Ezra was accompanied by other Jewish scribes from Babylon who carried with them a document that would change the history of the world.  It was the first edition of the Bible.  Ezra read what we now know as the first five books of the Bible, or Pentateuch, to the people of Jerusalem, the book that would become their Torah.  It contained the account of creation, of Noah and the flood, of Abraham’s covenant with God, of Moses and the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, and a codification of the laws that were established by God for his people.  After reading the entire work, Ezra asked the people to sign a contract, binding them to live by the laws of the Torah.  It was a landmark event for the history of Judaism, and for religion.  The laws and precepts of God were made manifest to all who encountered the Torah, and they were binding upon all who chose to live by them.  There were no hidden mysteries, or elite priesthoods to whom only certain knowledge or divine secrets were accessible.  The wisdom of the Torah was available to any who sought it, whether they be king, priest, laborer, or slave.

             

Ezra Reading the Torah

            The people of Judah would lose their political independence to other conquerors and foreign powers in the centuries to come, beginning with the Macedonians under Alexander the Great, followed by their successors the Seleucids, and then the Roman Empire.  And while their attempts to regain political independence were marred by violent reprisals and tragedies, their identify as a people, cemented by their special relation with the Hebrew god, endured and solidified as the empires to which they were subject rose and fell.

            And so we come back to God.  What is really so special about this God of the Hebrews, this God of the Jews, this God who is now worshiped by the majority of our Western civilization?  To understand Him a little better, it might help to take a closer look at the characters of the Bible who served Him.  Because here we find heroes very different from those of the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Greeks.  These heroes were not simply brave, or strong, or bold, like a Gilgamesh or Achilles.  They were compassionate, and often challenged their God on behalf of their fellow human beings.  When God announced to Abraham his plan to destroy the city of Sodom for the iniquity of its people, Abraham pleaded for mercy, extracting a promise that if only ten righteous persons could be found inside of it, then the city would be saved.  Similarly, when God threatened to destroy the Israelites for making an idol of a golden calf, Moses interceded for them, arguing that it was in the Creator’s own best interest to forgive them, so that He would not be remembered as delivering them out of Egypt in vain.  Finally, Moses offered his own life, saying, “Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin - ; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of the book which thou hast written.”  And centuries later, King David would make a similar plea, when an angel was prepared to destroy the city of Jerusalem, as punishment for David’s sin of carrying out a census against God’s will.  “Let thy hand, I pray thee, Oh Lord my God, be on me, and on my father’s house;” cried David, “but not on thy people, that they should be plagued.”  The appeals of these men are a far cry from the utterance of Cain that so offended the Creator: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” for clearly, the heroes of the Bible were their brothers’ keepers.

            In many ways, Moses was the archetype of the biblical hero.  He was called by God to perform a great service, although, as Moses himself protested, there seemed to be others better suited to the task at hand.  But just as with Jonah, another prophet who was initially reluctant to answer the call, God insisted upon His choice.  For Moses, as for the people that he was destined to lead, the call was an invitation, or rather a command, to find a new freedom.  Many centuries after Moses lived, in faraway Greece, the philosopher Socrates told a parable about prisoners in a cave.  Having been bound inside of this cave for their entire lives, with only a fire providing light for them to see, the only images that played before their eyes were shadows that were cast by the flame upon objects outside of their field of vision.  One day, a prisoner freed himself from the cave, and stumbled out onto the bright world beyond.  After eventually adjusting his eyes to the new world in front of him, he returned to the cave and attempted to describe what he had seen to the fellow prisoners.  But they took him to be a madman, because they were incapable of understanding what he described to them, and his own disorientation as he attempted to readjust himself from the world of light back to the darkness of the cave only confirmed their suspicions.  In many ways prophets such as Moses are like this man.  Having been shown a new vision of the future, they struggle to share it with their people, and lead them out of the cave of their prior existence out into the freedom of a richer life.  But God’s calling, and the invitation to freedom that he expresses through his prophets, is wrought with real and imagined dangers and pitfalls.  There is safety, and security, in slavery and in darkness.  Many times, during their journey through the desert, the Israelites yearned for their previous life in Egypt, where, in spite of the indignities suffered, at least there was a steady food supply and a familiar existence.  They questioned if this new life of freedom was worth the struggle and the uncertainty.  One can understand their confusion, and their frustration, because this revolution was unlike any other that had ever been recorded in history.  It was not a revolution from, but a revolution for.  The bonds of an external taskmaster were cast aside, but in their place, a personal commitment was made to a new code of laws and principles that were based upon a special relationship with God.  The freedom that had been fought for and won was not the reckless freedom of a child who has broken away from his parents, but rather the demanding independence of one who has attained adulthood.  The Israelites’ fight for freedom, and the new challenges that accompanied it, is an allegory for any person who casts off the shackles of a comfortable and smothering existence to answer a calling that will lead them to their true identity.

            And so how is this God of the Jews different from the gods and goddesses of Sumer, and Egypt, and Greece?  Perhaps at first there was no difference, with the exception that this curious god of the desert and high places had little tolerance for rivals.  But this exception would become very important, as the concept took shape in the minds of the Hebrews that there was only one god, one creator.  Certainly any god that was willing to share his or her place on the altar with others could not become this supreme deity.  Only the jealous god could fit this role.  But even then, the way that this supreme being was perceived among his followers changed and evolved over time.  Like the gods of other cultures, it seemed that he could be fickle, vindictive, and prone to fits of anger.  His followers prayed to him for victory over enemies, although at times it was hard to see how the cause of one side was more or less just than the other.  But by the time of the prophets, if not much earlier, it was clear that this was a moral god, one who did not tolerate iniquity, injustice, or lack of compassion toward others.  This could not be any clearer than in the book of Job.  When Job, a righteous man, appears to have suffered from divine punishment, a bitter debate ensues among him and his comrades.   Clearly God is the only being in the universe that is above the law, and is not bound by it.  And yet, it is inconceivable to them that God would ever be anything but righteous.  Unable to resolve this paradox, Job’s friends are forced to conclude that Job must have done something to be responsible for his punishment.  Only in the Bible could such a profound debate and wrenching conflict regarding the motives of God be possible.  Had this been a Sumerian, or Greek, or even Egyptian myth, it would not have been at all unusual for a mortal man to suffer from the arbitrary wrath of a divine being.  Nevertheless, other cultures have had moral gods as well, including ones such as Osiris who reward righteous behavior and punish evildoing.  There is one final, profound development in the character of the Hebrew god that would set him apart from being a mere national divinity, one who looks out for his people and answers their prayers.  At first, of course, this is exactly the way that most of his followers perceived him.  In their times of trouble, either individually or as a nation, their hope was that their God would deliver them, at some future time.  But this view underwent a subtle change.  Eventually, it was not the mission of God to create a better world for his people, but the mission of his people to bring about God’s holy kingdom.  In the pages of Genesis, man had been cursed for trying to become too much like God by usurping His powers.  But elsewhere in the Tanakh (Christian Old Testament), man is instructed on how he can properly move closer to his God, become more like Him, and even approach the gates of Heaven.  It is by answering God’s call to a new and sometimes terrifying freedom, obeying the divine commandments, practicing compassion, and becoming your brother’s keeper.

Job

            After Alexander the Great’s armies conquered Judea, the Jews encountered the philosophies and religions of the Greeks.  The new ideas intrigued, inspired, and sometimes tempted them, as the people of Judea found themselves exposed on a daily basis to the culture of Hellenism.  Similarly, the Greeks were fascinated by the religion of the Jews and how it starkly contrasted with their own.  These worlds would continue to co-exist and occasionally intermingle until being thrown together even more forcibly as a new rising power conquered them both.  That power was Rome, and in the wake of its conquests, a new religion, born out of the clash of cultures between the Jews and the Greeks, would be born.