Genesis

Unsettled; An Anthropology of the Jews
by Melvin Konner, Ph.D., M.D.

(Page 4 of 8)

How The Jews Were Born In Israel

At first God crafted the skies and the land, but the land was tumble-bumble, dark hid the deep, and God's wind hissed at the face of the waters. But God said, "Light will be," and it was light. So it was dusk and it was dawn, Day One....

Whatever else we may or may not know about the Jews, it is likely that in their earliest generations as an identifiable people, they were already telling this story. By the time they had really become Jews they had written it down, and the pale, dried skin it was inked on was sacred to them. There can have been no time when there were Jews but no text, because text was of their essence. They belonged to it even more than it belonged to them. They very nearly worshiped it, and they surely believed that it reflected the mind of God, whom they called Elohim, or Yahweh.

Radically arrogant in their divine abstractions, they saw no distinction between God and their God. Yahweh was God. Anyone could worship Yahweh, perhaps, but he was theirs first. Eventually they would conclude that there could be no other. Thus did a group of paltry, poor hill-country tribes, relentlessly buffeted among huge warring states, dismiss with a small wave of its hand all the great gods of all those looming, mighty empires.

Or really, a wave of its mind. As soon as there were Jews, no doubt, they insisted upon abstractions. Where others built statues of gold, bronze, and marble, minimally fitting tributes to their feared, cherished gods, the Jews rejected all such concretions and all the deeply held beliefs that went along with them. Think of the passion and reverence of Achilles and Agamemnon, Penelope and Odysseus, Antigone and Creon, to get some sense of what the Jews rejected: ancient, comforting, tried-and-true, fiercely fought-for, deeply held beliefs about awesome gods and compassionate goddesses.

They spoke, instead, of God, and let the idea hang in the air among them. They prayed to God, and basked in the glow of the Thou thus envisioned. God was theirs, not just as a people but as individuals, and each and every one of them could become intimate with God. Some wrote of God in paroxysms or trances of inspiration, and others found the writing holy. In time, if not at once, they cast off the distinction between the abstraction of a God-inspired text and that of a text authored by God. God, the first writer. God, who existed because he wrote. God, who wrote his message down and gave it to his people and through them to the world. Still in the new millennium, Jews throughout the world raise that text aloft every Sabbath for all to see, and sing or chant the proclamation of what it is - just as Jews did in two earlier millennia, and for all the Sabbaths in between. Hear their proclamation:

And this is the Torah
Moses set
Before the children of Israel -
From the mouth of God,
In the hand of Moses.

The God of Creation, the God of the Flood, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, yes; but most of all the God of Moses. The writer-God who made Moses a vehicle for the text. The invisible God for whom abstractions were harder than stone. The whispering God whose message, delivered by Moses, felled an empire. The shapeless God who dwelled in fog or a column of flame. The God who dragged his people out of the muck of slavery to meet and exchange words with him in the wilderness. The God whose greatest prophet climbed to the top of a barren mountain to sit for forty days and nights taking dictation. The God for whom the most palpable embodiment would be, once and for all, the text.

Yahweh or Elohim? According to scientific Bible scholarship, the books we know as Genesis and Exodus were melded from two main sources, each set down by an earthly author who lived not much less than three thousand years ago. One of them called God Yahweh, the other Elohim, and they wrote parallel versions of the tales that shaped their lives. A later editor - likely a committee - folded together versions by the Elohist and the Yahwist. And that was just the beginning; at least two other authors had their contributions edited in before the Torah as we know it was canonized.

But the first two concern us here because they first tried to define this people. They contradict each other in places, but they record a common tradition. Perhaps they represented different factions in the courts of Israel's kings, or rival branches of the hereditary priesthood. Perhaps tribal loyalty was a factor, and the blended text we know helped make two related tribes a nation. It has even been suggested that the Yahweh author was a woman in the court of King David's grandson, composing an ironic text that gave women pivotal roles and made important men look like fools.

We can't know, really, but it is interesting to think that Elohim was the Hebrews' first name for their distinctive, solitary God. In the Torah's grammar, Elohim is a singular proper noun, but it seems to have a plural ending. El, god; Elohim...gods? Elohim is a singular noun with a strange property: plurality contained in singularity. If this is so, the very idea of one God - the supreme idea of an idea-ridden people - is contained in what may have been God's first name. Elohim proclaims not only God's oneness but the oneness of God's comprehensive inclusiveness. In other words, God's name proclaims the impossibility and falsity of every other competing idea of God. Say "Elohim," and you declare that the gods of Achilles are just so many chunks of stone, so many vain and helpless dreams, all absorbed in the complex unity of the only God.

Still, the Torah can say what it will; for our purposes, there must be other evidence for nonfundamentalists to believe the tales it tells. Independently corroborating historical documents. Archeological excavations. Tombstones engraved with telltale symbols. Trade records etched in stone tablets. Ships loaded with wine casks at the bottom of the sea. Altars. Stories told in Ur or Egypt of a small tribal people on the banks of the Jordan River, conquered and enslaved or still peskily fighting back. Monuments to conquest. Bows and shields interred with slain princes. Scratches on limestone slabs. Something.

The fact is, there is no corroborating evidence that Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob ever existed. Except for the Torah text, there is no decisive proof that the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt, that they rebelled and walked away from the place, or that a leader such as Moses arose and took that people into the desert. There is no proof that they wandered for forty years; that they crossed the Jordan from the east; that they made assaults on Jericho and other towns in what is now Judea; that they arrived believing that they had been promised that land; that they conquered the Canaanites west of the Jordan and stood off the Philistines coming in from the coastal plain; that they came, desert nomads, to settle in a land in which they had spied out giants, a land in which their forefathers had met Yahweh face-to-face, a land flowing with milk and honey. There is not one single fact that requires us to accept one single miracle, and the voices of science are raised in unison against most of them.

And yet, the Bible is a document. Like many ancient documents it is quirky and tendentious, inventive and mythological, dazzlingly poetic and craftily dramatized. It has designs on the mind of the reader that are often not compatible with historical or scientific truth. But it also contains historical facts that have been independently confirmed. And again, even for those that have not: just because it is written in the Bible doesn't necessarily mean that it is wrong.

© 2004 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Melvin Konner, Ph.D., M.D., the author of nine books, is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, where he teaches in the anthropology, human biology, and Jewish studies programs. He has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, Science, and the New England Journal of Medicine.