God Against the Gods (10 page)

The reformer-king orders the destruction of all sanctuaries outside Jerusalem where sacrifices have been offered to the God of Israel in unwitting defiance of the newly discovered laws. Idols and other paraphernalia for the worship of pagan gods and goddesses are dragged out of the Temple and burned down to ash—“all the objects for Baal and Asherah and the host of heaven.”
¹⁷
The red-light district that has grown up around the Temple, where “sodomites” ply their trade as prostitutes, sacred or otherwise, and women fashion the ornaments and hangings that adorn the pagan shrines, is razed to the ground.

All over the land of Israel, pagan statuary and the altars where they have been put to use, including the ones installed by the anointed kings of Judah, are burned and beaten into dust. Even the shrines erected by King Solomon for the pleasure of his pagan wives and concubines—“for Ashtoreth, the abomination of Sidonians, and for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and for Milcom, the detestable thing of the Ammonites”
¹⁸
—are pulled down. At the height of the holy war that Josiah conducts within his own realm, all priests who offer sacrifice to any god other than Yahweh are put to death on their own altars.

Judaism as a faith of strict monotheism can be said to begin with King Josiah. His purge “dramatically changed what it meant to be an Israelite,” according to archaeologist Israel Finkelstein and his collaborator, Neil Asher Silberman, in
The Bible Unearthed
, “and laid the foundations for future Judaism.”
¹⁹
Thanks to his discovery of the lost scroll of the Torah that turned out to be the Book of Deuteronomy, Josiah can be said to have added to the Bible a strong measure of zeal that is quite at odds with those biblical authors who are perfectly willing to show Yahweh siring a brood of randy godlings, Moses making a magical bronze snake and David keeping a few household idols on hand.

But King Josiah was more than a religious reformer. The young king saw clearly how the idea of a single all-powerful god in heaven implied the appropriateness of a single all-powerful king on earth—an idea that would continue to exert a powerful appeal for kings and men who would be kings down through history, including Constantine and his fellow Christian emperors. “One God, worshiped in one Temple, located in the one and only capital, under one king of the Davidic dynasty,” explain Finkelstein and Silberman, “were the keys to the salvation of Israel.”
²⁰

The Son of Amon and the Son of Zeus

Josiah’s reign was brought to an abrupt end before he reached the age of forty. The tiny kingdom of Judah was caught between two rival superpowers, Egypt and Assyria, and Josiah sided with the Assyrians. When the pharaoh and his army crossed through the land of the Jews on the way to do battle with the Assyrians on the far banks of the Euphrates, Josiah loyally came to the assistance of his ally. At a place called Megiddo—the site where, according to biblical prophecy, the apocalyptic battle of Armageddon will take place—Josiah mounted a war chariot and led an attack on the Egyptians in 609 B.C.E. An arrow fired by an enemy archer struck him, and he fell from his chariot.

“Have me away,” cries the king in the battle report that we find in the Bible, “for I am sore wounded.”
²¹

His comrades in arms rescued Josiah and carried him back to Jerusalem, but he succumbed to his wound. His purge, as it turned out, was incomplete and ultimately ineffective—Jewish kings and commoners alike hastened to take up the very practices of paganism that Josiah had tried to eradicate. Archaeologists at work in modern Israel, for example, have recovered numerous examples of statuary that depict a woman cupping her breasts in her hands—she is believed to be the goddess Asherah, a figure the women of ancient Israel continued to revere, despite the best efforts of their reformer-king.

Within a quarter century after Josiah’s death, the dynasty that began with David finally died out and Jewish national sovereignty was extinguished. Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E.; the Temple was destroyed and the rest of the ruling class were marched off to Babylon. When the exiles were allowed to return to Jerusalem some fifty years later by the Persian conquerors of Babylon, they regarded themselves as the “Holy Seed” and they insisted on separating themselves from the rest of the Jews who had been allowed to remain behind. The returned exiles, for example, refused to allow the so-called
Am Ha’aretz
—“the people of the land”—to join them in the task of rebuilding the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem, where the strict and pure monotheism of Josiah was put back into practice.

Invasion, conquest and exile failed to exterminate the hardy monotheists of the Holy Land. Indeed, as we shall shortly see, the argument can be made that oppression and persecution are the ideal conditions for the flourishing of true belief. Far more dangerous to fundamentalism, as it turns out, are the seductions of peace, freedom and prosperity. And so the faith that survived the destruction of the Temple, the conquest of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile was put to its greatest trial when confronted with the changing tide of classical paganism that began with a young Macedonian general called Alexander.

Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.E.) was so successful in his own wars of conquest that he was famously said to have wept when he ran out of worlds to conquer. But his greatest conquest was achieved without force of arms: wherever Alexander and his armies marched, he introduced his new subjects to the language, philosophy, literature, religion and other institutions of Greek civilization, leaving behind cities and towns in the Greek style that endured long after he was gone. Indeed, Alexander was dead at the age of thirty-three, but he was still revered six centuries later by the Roman emperors, who followed his example in matters of both religion and statecraft.

The Greek culture that Alexander carried around the world is known as Hellenism, and it played the same role in the ancient world that American culture plays in our own. Just as the world covets the weapons, medicines, machines and amusements that America produces, the ancient world aspired to copy the Greek style of dress and manners, arts and letters, athletics and education, weaponry and military tactics. The Greek language, like English today, was the
lingua franca
of international commerce and diplomacy. Above all, the world embraced the Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses and the Greek way of worshipping them. The people whom we call “pagans” called themselves “Hellenes.”

The religion of Hellenism was the highest expression of the openness that had always characterized paganism. Alexander may have waged war with cruelty and brutality, and he may have made slaves of those he conquered, but he did not punish anyone for holding a belief in one god rather than another. Indeed, he displayed a lively interest in the gods and goddesses who were worshipped in the lands that he conquered, and he followed the old pagan practice of adding the deities of his new subjects to his own traditional pantheon. Thus, for example, Alexander advertised himself as the begotten son of a god whom he identified with both the Greek deity Zeus and the Egyptian deity Amon. The conflation of gods from two different cultures, the mixing and matching of beliefs and practices, is an example of what historians of religion call syncretism, and it is the essential feature of classical paganism as it was embodied in Hellenism.

Alexander brought Hellenism to the land of the Jews when he replaced the defeated Persian emperor as its overlord. Much to the horror of the Jewish rigorists, the Chosen People promptly showed themselves to be no less vulnerable to the charms and attractions of Hellenism than they had been to the “abominations” of their pagan seducers in distant biblical antiquity. By the second century B.C.E., the city of Jerusalem boasted its own gymnasium, where Jews studied the Greek language and practiced the athletic skills that were put on display in Olympic-style games. Not only did they insist on competing in the nude, aping the traditions of ancient Greece, but some of them resorted to a primitive form of plastic surgery to conceal the fact that they were circumcised—an act that was regarded by the rigorists as the ultimate betrayal of the God of Israel.

We cannot know how Judaism would have fared if the Jews of antiquity had been free to choose between their own traditions of monotheism and the attractions of Hellenism. Then, as now, the lure of assimilation was so powerful that no amount of scolding or sermonizing was effective in preventing defections from the oldest and strictest traditions of Judaism. But, as it turned out, the Jews did not enjoy the freedom to choose between the worship of one god or many gods. Rather, after the death of Alexander and the disintegration of his empire, they found themselves under the rule of a pagan ruler so harsh and so punishing on matters of faith that he more closely resembled a monotheist like Akhenaton or Josiah than any of his fellow pagan kings.

The Mad King

Alexander the Great believed that Hellenism would win the hearts and minds of the people he conquered by its own undeniable superiority and its own powerful allure. But one of the men who inherited a portion of his empire, Antiochus IV (c. 215-164 B.C.E.), lacked the open mind that was the hallmark of Hellenism. He was disgusted and enraged by the stubborn refusal of the most observant Jews—known as the Hasidim (“Pious Ones”)—to pay respect to the pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses, and he resolved to impose Hellenism on all of his unruly Jewish subjects by force of arms.

Antiochus looted the gold and silver treasures of the Temple at Jerusalem. He defiled the Holy of Holies—the inner chamber that only the high priest of Yahweh was permitted to enter—by installing a statue of Zeus. He banned the fundamental rites of traditional Judaism, including circumcision, the observance of the Sabbath and the dietary laws of
kashrut
. He forbade the offering of sacrifices to the God of Israel, and he compelled the offering of sacrifices to the gods and goddesses of the Greek pantheon. To make the offerings especially offensive, he commanded that only the animals that Jewish law regarded as ritually impure could be offered to the pagan deities—a pig was to be slaughtered on the holy altar of Yahweh, its flesh was to be eaten in public by the high priest and its offal was to be poured over the scrolls of the Torah.

But Antiochus was not content with merely suppressing the practice of Judaism and compelling the practice of polytheism in its place. Antiochus sent his soldiers into the land of the Jews to carry out a massacre. His death squads sought out the Pious Ones and put them to death—men, women and children alike. Special tortures were reserved for those who were caught with Torah scrolls: “They were whipped with rods,” reports the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, “and their bodies torn to pieces.” Mothers who dared to defy the royal decree against circumcision were strangled together with their circumcised sons, and the dead child was hung from the neck of his mother, “as they were upon the crosses.”
²²

The pagans of the ancient world were capable of inflicting terrible cruelties on their fellow human beings, especially criminals, prisoners of war and conquered peoples. But they did not engage in the kind of religious persecution that Antiochus inflicted on his Jewish subjects. Only rarely did the ancient pagans attempt to suppress the practice of a religion, and even when they did, they displayed a degree of restraint that seems almost quaint from our vantage point. Thus, if the atrocities carried out by Antiochus were an assault on the values of monotheism, they were also a betrayal of the values of polytheism.

The grotesqueries of Antiochus’s war against the Jews inspired a subtle act of resistance by his victims. Antiochus had adopted the pious title Epiphanes, which means “the Manifestation of God,” but the atrocities that he committed against his Jewish subjects were so senseless that they called him Antiochus Epimanes—“Antiochus the Madman.” The moniker reminds us that Antiochus violated the canons of the very civilization that he claimed to champion and thus crossed from mere cruelty into mental aberration.

Zealous for the Law

Even if the account of the conquest of Canaan by the Chosen People as depicted in the Torah is mostly or only a myth, it served its purpose during the reign of Antiochus the Madman. Inspired by the stirring examples of zealotry that they found in the Torah, the Jewish rigorists banded together in a guerrilla army, rose up in open rebellion against Antiochus and eventually inflicted a defeat on both their foreign overlords and those of their fellow Jews who had embraced the pleasures of Hellenism. Significantly, the very first casualties in their campaign were a Syrian and a Jew.

An old man of priestly descent called Mattathias and his five sons, according to a tale that is cherished in both Jewish and Christian tradition, are the first to take up arms. Mattathias has been ordered by a Syrian officer to offer a sacrifice to the pagan god, and when he refuses, a more willing Jew steps forward to comply. “Fired with zeal,” Mattathias steps forward and strikes down both the Syrian officer who gave the order and the Jew who was willing to obey it, leaving their dead bodies on the altar of sacrifice. “Follow me, every one of you who is zealous for the Law and the Covenant,” cries Mattathias, whose tale is told in the Book of Maccabees. “Thus Mattathias showed his fervent zeal for the law, just as Phinehas had done by killing Zimri.”
²³

The author of the Book of Maccabees is reminding his readers of an incident in the Book of Numbers—the slaying of the the Israelite prince who took a pagan woman as a lover. Significantly, Phinehas is the same man who commands 12,000 soldiers of God on a punitive expedition that ends with the mass murder of the men, women and male children of Midian. Thus did the Maccabees take up the tradition of holy war as they found it in the pages of the Torah.