The Story of the Jews Page 12

  He looks down to the ancient war-zone borderland below. His battles will go on elsewhere, in the pages of learned journals, in conference sessions and museum conservation labs. There will be shouting, much exchange of mutually dismissive retorts, barely this side of outright abuse. Garfinkel has already been accused of being an accomplice of the resurrected ‘maximalists’ merely by describing Khirbet Qeiyafa as belonging to ‘the time of David’, as if to invoke him is to make an imaginary figure illegitimately real.

  But with every season, the evidence pointing to a First Temple Israelite military outpost accumulates with persuasive power. Thousands of weapons, sword and spear blades, shafts and arrows have been discovered. There are, however, no agricultural implements at Khirbet Qeiyafa, which for Garfinkel confirms that the fort took tax and tribute from the cultivators and pastoralists working the fields below – another sign of the assertion of lordship power. The notion that a First Temple dating means buying into the biblically imagined ‘palaces’ of David and Solomon, he dismisses as missing the point. ‘Look, I am not arguing that the Israelite state that built this place was an empire or even a big kingdom. No, the Jerusalem that built this was a little state – like Moab and other neighbours – but a real state nonetheless, reliant on some literacy, capable of mobilising labour, raising taxes, engineering walls and gateways, organising defences.’

  This does not, itself, make Iron Age Khirbet Qeiyafa Israelite. But the most recent excavation has turned up objects which may turn out to give the site its undeniable, clinching identification: two small portable, model shrines, one in pottery, the other limestone. They were found in one of the three cult rooms of the site: chambers where massebot standing stones were also discovered. Some of those rooms are a little larger than the regular living spaces as if dedicated to devotion, and one of them – where the shrines were found – has an unmistakable flight of steps that passes through a small fountain, evidently used for ritual purification, a drain leading off and outward beside and through the walls.

  Is this starting to sound familiar, just a little bit kosher, even? Fight as any dug-in sceptic against biblical association must, it is the little portable shrines, the clay no more than twenty centimetres tall, the stone thirty-five, which, when put together with all the other evidence, do seem to point in one inescapable direction. To begin with, the cult rooms themselves are part of the domestic dwellings, even if it is easy to imagine they might have been used in common by immediate neighbours. But in keeping with the emphasis in Israelite religion on the ubiquitousness of the sacred – sanctifying the local – the mini-shrines would have brought a material version of the Tabernacle or even Temple into those houses as a focus of veneration. To be sure, private, domesticated cult objects are found all over the Semitic Near East, but they are mostly images of the deities themselves or of celestial kings or their animal embodiments, as one would expect from pagan polytheism. And there are open-ended Canaanite model shrines, but those almost always enclose cult figurines. At Khirbet Qeiyafa there is no sign of having had anything inside the shrines except miniature unfeatured stone. It is equally possible that they were representations of the sacred emptiness that would become the hallmark of Judaism; a vacuum filled only by the scroll of revealed words. The stylised portico of the pottery mini-shrine is startlingly elaborate: two pillars each side, guardian lions at their feet, doves atop the roof. It is the furled textile curtain, fashioned by the potter’s fingers to suggest a swag, that is most extraordinary, evoking exactly the curtain-veil parochet said by Kings to have covered the entrance to the Holy of Holies and which would be a famous feature of descriptions of both Jerusalem Temples. The tearing of the parochet would be defined as the ultimate act of desecration by the destroyers of the Temple so that a tradition has it that when Titus tore at the curtain with his spear, blood welled from the fabric.

  The slightly larger limestone mini-shrine, its original red paint still visible in places, is no less eloquent. For while it lacks curtain and guardian animals, it has the multiply recessed doorway described as the entrance of the Temple and, still more strikingly, the ‘triglyph’ roof with seven three-planked beams, seen end-on, characteristic of temple architecture elsewhere in the region. In addition, black basalt mini-altars, in the same scooped and horned forms that would become the norm, have shown up in the cult rooms. It is this unmistakable sense of a religion – without the usual bodies and faces of pagan deities, a religion of physical emptiness and conceptual fullness – made portable, domestic, local, that seems to breathe so deeply of what would become Judaism. And suddenly, at Khirbet Qeiyafa, denying its possibility seems obtusely dogmatic.

  Yossi Garfinkel is not saying the shrines prove that Khirbet Qeiyafa was built and inhabited when Solomon’s Temple was standing in Jerusalem, only that it seems impossible not to see the shrines as expressions of a religious culture not dissimilar from the one described in the Hebrew Bible. Not to be open to that possibility, he says, is perverse. One of Garfinkel’s critics has complained in some desperation that he wants ‘book-free archaeology’, by which he means Bible-free; an archaeology that clears its head of scripture altogether and, unlike the Victorians and William Foxwell Albright and Yigal Yadin and Benjamin Mazar whose descendants still quarrel about it, just sees and studies what is before it, as if that Book had never been written at all. It seems to me, though, that an archaeology in this country that has nothing to do with the Bible is just as self-deceiving as that ‘sacred geography’ that had nothing but the Bible in mind when it mapped and dug.

  In this story you don’t escape the words, the writing. One afternoon I find the minute silver scrolls from the burial cave at Ketef Hinnom, sitting under helpful illuminated magnification in a vitrine at the Israel Museum. They are exceptionally beautiful things, the incised letters with their strong vertical strokes nothing that any Jew today would remotely recognise as Hebrew, but the real thing nonetheless. The micro writing (which will become in another age a Jewish speciality) is not directly from the Bible, but surely of its devotional poetry. ‘Graciousness to those who love him and keep his commandments . . . He is our restorer and rock,’ says one, but it is the other one, KH2 as it is labelled, that stirs something deep in me: ‘May be . . . blessed . . . the rebuker of evil . . . bless and make shine his face upon you and give you peace.’ That something is the gravitational pull of memory, the hurtling together of an ancient Then with the fleeting Now, that is the occupational hazard of anyone venturing into the Jewish story.

  I am nine years old again and standing in my synagogue. Earlier in the service the Torah had been lifted high, and then, before the reading, taken round the congregation in procession. Before Judaism it was images of gods that were processed and received veneration, but here it is the Book that is the object of our adoration, our tallitim, prayer shawls, extended to the passing scrolls for a touch. The Torah and its words are so pure in their holiness that no direct manual contact is permitted. The scribe who writes them must wash his hands on each occasion of his writing; the reader who chants them must touch the scroll only with a silver simulacrum of a finger, the yad. And we must not touch the handwritten Sefer Torah directly, but only with the edge of our tallit which we hold to our lips in kissing devotion.

  Twice this procession of the Book takes place, before and after the reading. But now the priests, the Cohanim, are standing, raised above the congregation on the carpeted steps in front of the Ark, their prayer shawls pulled over their heads, joined together to make a canopy. We Jewish hoi polloi are forbidden from looking at them as they deliver their blessing, but of course I can’t help peeping. The faded cream canopy, striped with black, nods and bobs while the men beneath it chant, some bending from the waist. ‘May the Lord bless you and keep you,’ they are saying, as if reciting from a scroll just rediscovered in the reign of Josiah, ‘may he make his face shine upon you and give you peace. Omayn.’ The Omayn – amen – rings through the panelled synagogue and not ten years on from the end
of the annihilating war I somehow feel safe.

  4

  Classical Jews?

  I. No Moses, no Plato?

  What was it to be: the nude or the word? God as beauty or God as writing? Divinity invisible or an eyeful of perfect body? As far as Matthew Arnold was concerned, Hellenes and Hebrews were oil and water.1 Both were ‘august’ and, in their respective ways, ‘admirable’, but they didn’t mix. Greeks pursued self-realisation; Jews struggled at self-conquest. ‘Be obedient’ was the sovereign command of Judaism; ‘be true to your nature’ was what mattered to the Hellene. But Arnold’s pretence of neutrality was unconvincing. Who would want to live waiting for the next round of fire and brimstone when you could be a seeker after sweetness and light?

  Grow up in the classical tradition and you believe Europe begins with the defeat of the invading Persians, recounted by Herodotus. Grow up Jewish and a piece of you wants the Persians to win. They were, after all, the restorers of Jerusalem; Esther became their queen – how bad could they be? The villain, Haman, who wanted to wipe the Jews out, was surely just a freakish monster who got his comeuppance at the hands of the Persian king. On the other hand, the Greek Seleucid king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes – who threw circumcised infants from the walls of Jerusalem, along with their mothers – seemed, according to the First Book of the Maccabees, wholly of a piece with his culture. It was Hellenism that was the enemy as much as the demented monarch. The Second Book of the Maccabees is even more sensational in its catalogue of Greek atrocity. Clandestine Sabbath observers are burned alive in their caves. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus lays on the sadism even more horrifyingly. Those who persisted with observance, he writes, ‘were whipped with rods and their bodies torn to pieces and were crucified while still alive and breathing’.2

  What Greeks hated (in this view) was the obstinacy of Jewish difference, marked by the cut they made on their male member, the break they made in their week, the restrictions they placed on their diet, the uniqueness they claimed for their faceless, perpetually cross deity, their exasperating refusal to be like everyone else. Greek philosophy presupposed discoverable, universal, truths; Jewish wisdom seemed the private treasure of a locked-off culture. Greek temples, built according to the principles of cosmic harmony, were designed to draw people to them; the Jerusalem Temple was off limits to ‘foreigners’. Greek statuary and monuments were meant to outlast the states that built them. The Torah was meant to outlast architecture. For Greeks the cult of nature, especially wild nature, was where ecstasy was to be found. But for Jews sacred groves were places where you would be lost amid pagan abomination. The ecstatic maddening of the senses was at the heart of the Dionysian cult. In the Judaic tradition, strong drink was when bad things happened: Noah lying stupefied and naked before his leering son Ham; the disobedient Israelites capering around the Golden Calf. Being drunk amid vegetation was worst of all, so when Antiochus forced Jews to celebrate Bacchus in processions ‘wreathed with ivy’, as the author of 2 Maccabees writes, the Greek cult of wild nature had displaced the Jewish obligation to master it.

  A Hellenised Jew, then, was an oxymoron. Except it wasn’t – not for countless Jews from Cyrenaica in Libya through the great metropolis of Alexandria, into Judaea, the Galilee and out into the isles of the eastern Mediterranean. During the two hundred or so years between Alexander the Great’s conquests in the fourth century BCE and the domination of the Romans, the notion that Greek and Judaic culture were mutually exclusive would have seemed baffling if not outlandish. For those multitudes, Hellenism and Judaism were not mutually incompatible at all. Their manner of living exemplified something like the opposite: unforced convergence; a spontaneous (if not untroubled) coexistence. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and the Ketef Hinnom silver amulet in 1979, the oldest continuous Hebrew text (found in 1898) came from the Hellenised Fayyum region of the mid-Nile, now securely dated to the mid-second century BCE. Written on the papyrus are the Ten Commandments (in a slightly different order from the way Jews and Christians now have them), together with the daily affirmation prayer, the shema. The Talmud suggests that it was once conventional to read the Decalogue before the recitation of the shema, so the papyrus has miraculously preserved the daily routine of an observant Egyptian Jew living in the midst of an intensely Hellenised world and yet sustaining without difficulty the defining habits of his religious identity.

  In the towns of the Fayyum region, a life lived under both Graeco-Egyptian and Torah-prescribed law (often read in its Greek translation, the Septuagint) was routinely unproblematic, both for the Ioudaioi and their Gentile neighbours. A rich archive of papyri surviving from Herakleopolis, south of Cairo – where, as elsewhere, the Jews constituted an autonomous, self-governing politeuma – reveals that while they had the right to use Torah law in matters of marriages, divorce or contracted loans, they did so only when it was likely to help their case. Mostly they ran their daily affairs according to local Graeco-Roman-Egyptian law. Under that law women could own property and reclaim dowries on the dissolution of a marriage (as they had in Elephantine), and lenders could charge the steep interest rates (as high as 20 per cent) prevailing along the Nile.

  But when it suited Egyptian Jews to invoke Torah law to reinforce their case they did so. Peton, the son of a Jew called Philoxenes, for instance, appealed to the local police chief Ktesias against what he claimed was an extortionate attempt to charge double rent on land leased from the crown. When arguing before his local religious authorities he knew exactly which Torah passage to invoke against the seizure of certain goods (like the shirt off his back) as collateral against payment.3

  These were Jews who spoke common (‘koine’) Greek as their everyday language, and whose names were Demetrius, Arsinoe (like the Ptolemaic queen), Herakleides and Aristobulus. Yakovs became Yakoubis, Yehoshua became Jason and there were many Jewish Apolloniuses. Some of them had Greek names that invoked the one almighty God, like Dorotheus. The Hasmonean king who ruled over the most territorially extensive Jewish state there had ever been was himself called Alexander. They dressed indistinguishably from other citizens of the Greek empires, and inhabited cities like Antioch and Alexandria where (in the latter case) they were said to constitute a third of the population.

  It was the Hellenistic-Jewish world that invented the synagogue, even though it was almost always called proseuche. Originally signifying an assembly or gathering (for the reading of the Torah, not for prayers), it eventually came to mean the buildings themselves created to serve the needs of Jews who lived far from Jerusalem. There were proseuchai in Cyrenaica, in Krokodopolis, Schedia and Alexandria in Egypt, in Sparta, in the great Lydian mercantile city of Sardis, and on the islands of Cyprus, Kos and Rhodes. One of the very oldest synagogues on Delos was so like a villa that for a long time it was supposed to be just that – and may actually have been converted from private use.

  Nearly always they were built in what we would immediately recognise as classical Greek temple style: pedimented porticos, entablatures, colonnaded aisles and richly decorative mosaic floors. In some Jewish accounts, including the Talmud, they are sometimes called basilicas, and inscriptions on some of their facades proclaimed them devoted to theos hypsistos – a direct translation of the Hebrew El Elyon: the God Most High.4 They had synagogue notables (an archisynagogos) who dressed in grand style, beadles (the chazzan – not yet a cantor), caretakers, and on occasion their own tough guards on the lookout for evil-doers. In Alexandria they welcomed and lodged Jews from elsewhere in the already widely dispersed Jewish world, and many of the proseuchai were granted the unusual and precious right of affording asylum. Some added exedra as additional assembly rooms. All of them needed running water for ritual purification as well as for the convenience of their lodgers. And it seems likely, from Jewish Egypt’s cemeteries, they may have helped with burials. In many of these respects – with the exceptions that none of them segregated the sexes, and their strong taste for mosaic floors – the original
Judeo-Greek synagogue is recognisable as the protoype of our own. (One historian assumed from a description of the Great Synagogue in Alexandria grouping congregants by trade and business that it must have been more of a marketplace than a house of holiness, a distinction revealing an innocent unfamiliarity with the modern shul.)

  This was a culture in which Jews could and did write poetry, philosophy, drama (like ‘Ezechiel’s’ Exagoge version of the departure from Egypt, including a dream in which, surprisingly, God’s heavenly throne is vacated for Moses to occupy). Jews wrote history, of a sort, and the fiction-narratives that some scholars call the first Greek ‘novels’. All this literary activity was accomplished without any loss of faithfulness to the distinctive rites and laws that made them Jews; in fact these Greek forms became the vehicle of expressing that Jewishness. The last books to be included in the biblical canon themselves reflect something of that hybrid character. Ecclesiastes is a ‘Wisdom Book’ that owes something to Persian-Babylonian proverbial literature but at times can sound just like an epicurean philosopher (‘Be not over-righteous and be not over-wise for why should you bring desolation upon yourself?’), as do the apocryphal books like the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach. Both books have the tone of Greek writing even when what they are teaching is transcendence from the base matters of the earthly realm.