Cognitive Projectivism and Religious Morality

In making sense of the world around us, the mind is not simply a passive gatherer of sensual data. In construing a given object or event, the mind has a vast array of tools to give sense and meaning to what it experiences. In Kantian philosophy, such inherent abilities are known as synthetic a priori judgements: that is, judgements that one can make about the world (consciously or otherwise) before any direct experience. The example Kant invokes is that of a man, blind from birth, who has just been given an operation to see. For those who have a longer familiarity with the sense of sight, our minds are able to process the sensory data delivered by the eyes and to recognise important concepts like depth, extension and so on that permit us to distinguish one discrete object from another. For the blind man in Kant's example, however, the mind simply has not learnt to process the data it receives, and the world is presented as an indistinguishable mess of light and colour. For Kant's blind man - and others who have undergone similar operations - it became more comfortable for them to close their eyes and to navigate their way around the world in darkness again, rather than having to undergo the mental strain of learning how to see.

Kant suggested that we have two primary synthetic a priori tools at our cognitive disposal: the capacity to understand space and the capacity to understand time, and that these capacities exist independently from - and prior to - sensual experience. In developing this theory of cognitivism, Kant was responding to the challenge laid down by David Hume, whose position was rather more skeptical. For Hume, the mind was a rather promiscuous imposer of order onto the world - for example, its inherent tendency towards belief in causality and the properties of objects (colour, shape etc.) - that did not actually exist in the world itself.  To quote from his Treatise on Human Nature:

Tis a common observation, that the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects, and to conjoin with them any internal impressions, which they occasion, and which always make their appearance at the same time that these objects discover themselves to the senses.

 This philosophy itself was a reaction to the Cartesian epistemology which posed the question about how we know what we know. For Descartes, there was an ontological rift separating the world in itself from our perception of it: if our senses can - on occasion - be deceived, how can we be certain that they are not always deceived? How do we know that we are not living in a dream, or that we are not being perpetually mislead by some malevolent power? Hume's response to this was rather skeptical, suggesting in essence that this ontological rift could not be bridged, and that our sense of the world is entirely shaped by the mind's inexorable propensity to impose itself on the world without. We can, for this reason, never know things as they actually are, because it is simply impossible to stop the mind from projecting its own expectations onto the sensory data we gather. Kant's response to Hume was an attempt to rescue the veracity of our understanding of the world by positing that these a priori judgements we project are actually present in the world as well.

It is far beyond my capacity to comment on these philosophical ideas in much greater depth - much less to propose a compelling solution to them - but I do want to use them as a springboard to explore mental phenomena that are currently being explored by science. They concern the way we make moral judgements - rather than strictly epistemological ones - but the philosophy underpinning them is largely the same. With regards to morality, there is the question of what kind of ontological judgements are being made when we deem some action to be "immoral". Are we saying something about the event itself? Are we correct in thinking that there are some actions that are - in and of themselves - immoral? How exactly does the mind process judgements concerning morality, and what connection - if any - does this process have to the philosophies I briefly outlined above?

The first and most important question at this stage is what role reason plays in making moral judgements. If moral judgements are generally rational in construction, for instance, then it is clear that we are not making any ontological claims about a given action when we deem it "immoral". The action happens, we think it over (however briefly) and then we arrive at an appropriate reaction. The action itself isn't considered moral or immoral, rather we simply making a post hoc evaluation that needn't have been directly derived from our immediate, pre-rational experience of the event. Conversely, if moral actions are not predominantly informed by reason, then we must look for other causes for our sense of disapprobation - emotional causes, for instance - that might be traced more directly to our immediate, ad hoc experience of the event. That is, does the mind engage in moral projectivism - does it impose our moral reaction onto the events themselves, as though they were an inherent property of the events to begin with - or does it operate in a more rational, detached, post hoc manner?

Let me use a concrete example to illustrate what I mean. When I was younger - twenty or so - I witnessed two men kissing in a club for the first time. I'm not sure if I had a particularly sheltered upbringing, or whether the continuing disapproval of open homosexuality in our culture meant that there just simply aren't many opportunities to witness such an event, but yes - I was about twenty when I first saw two men kissing. My first reaction, I must admit, was an uncomfortable one, if not a feeling of outright repulsion. I don't know what the source of this reaction was - I certainly didn't have a problem with homosexuality at the time, nor was I ever taught to have such a reaction, nor do I believe that my reaction was somehow "natural" or "innate" - but it was there all the same. Immediately after this gut reaction, though, I stopped and thought: "Is it them with the problem, or me?" I recognised what they were doing was perfectly natural, and that I wouldn't have thought twice about it had it been a man and a woman in the same position. They were harming no-one - least of all me - and I realised that it was clearly incumbent upon me to be accepting of their presence, rather than incumbent upon them to pre-empt my sense of mild repulsion by taking themselves somewhere else.

So what we have here then is an initial reaction to the situation that was completely pre-rational and projective ("that is repulsive...") and then a rational reconsideration of the problem ("I felt repulsed by it, but I shouldn't have...") of the varieties I explained above. The grammar here is important. My initial reaction - had I vocalised it at the time - would have been expressed using an active tense, denoting - perhaps unconsciously - that the "repulsion" I felt was inherent to the event itself ("It is repulsive..."), rather than a mere product of my own thought process. My later reaction would be better expressed using a passive construction ("I felt repulsed by it") to properly explicate the distance between the event itself and my reaction to it. Instances of outright moral projectionism can thus be partly identified by the use of an active tense, which - deliberately or not - place the cause of our repulsion in the very act itself, whereas the passive tense conveys a less immediate causal relationship between the action and my (subsequent) reaction.

But wait: did I just conflate the feeling of repulsion with morality? Is it really correct to conflate a base emotional reaction with something so important and so complex as morality? Not always, of course, but I think there is a much stronger relationship between feelings of disgust and moral judgements than we would care to admit. To quote Richard Joyce¹:

In one study (Wheatley and Haidt 2005), highly hypnotizable participants were given a post-hypnotic suggestion to feel a pang of disgust whenever they read an arbitrary word (“often” or “take”). They were then asked to read a variety of fictional vignettes—some involving moral transgressions and others involving no transgression at all, some using the target word and others not using it. In cases where disgust was prompted, the subjects’ moral condemnation was heightened. Even in the non-transgression story, subjects who felt disgust were often inclined to follow up with a negative moral appraisal. This is striking when one considers that there was nothing in the story remotely to support such a judgment:

Dan is a student council representative at his school. This semester he is in charge of scheduling discussions about academic issues. He [tries to take] 〈often picks〉 topics that appeal to both professors and students in order to stimulate discussion.

Disgusted subjects nevertheless reported that “it just seems like he’s up to something,” or “he’s a “popularity-seeking snob,” or “it just seems so weird and disgusting,” or “I don’t know [why it’s wrong], it just is.” This is evidence that a great deal of the time it is our emotions that are driving our moral judgments, but it certainly doesn’t seem this way “from the inside.”

We can see here how the feeling of disgust, no matter how preposterous its origin, can lead individuals to make projective moral judgements about the nature of the person in question. Note that even the later comments on the "reason" for their disgust are constructed in the active tense, showing quite clearly that the subjects of this study are not simply explicating their subjective reactions to the story but rather making deeper ontological statements about Dan's moral constitution ("he is... a snob", "“I don’t know [why it’s wrong], it just is”). A second facet of this study is that moral reasoning appears to be guided by the initial emotional response to an unnerving degree. The moral reasoning exhibited by the subjects is little more than a post hoc rationalisation: no reconsideration of the appropriateness of the reaction appears to be taking place. This subservience of moral reasoning to instinctive gut-reactions has been well explored in the current psychological literature. Johnathon Haidt, for example, notes, in response to a study he conducted:

People made moral judgments quickly and emotionally. Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made...²

And Howard Margolis notes:

...human beings produce rationales they believe account for their [moral] judgments. But the rationales (on this argument) are only ex post rationalizations.³

 
So there is then a clear body of evidence to suggest that moral judgements are frequently (if not necessarily always) formed instinctively in deference to one's initial emotional reaction, and that "moral reasoning" (such that it is) is just some piece of post hoc fluff invoked to rationalise the judgement to oneself and others. This particular explanation also implies a sense of moral projectivism, because - to quote Joyce again - moral judgements "would serve this purpose ["encouraging successful social behavior"] only if they seem like they are depicting a realm of objective moral facts"⁴. All this is not to say that it is not possible to arrive at moral positions thinkingly, or that our emotional responses cannot be over-ruled by the judicious use of reason (as in my own example above) but rather that we must be conscious of the kind of processes that lead us to make moral judgements under normal conditions. That is, the initial moral judgement must be followed by the thought "Why do I feel that way?", or - better yet - "Should I feel that way"? I'll expand on this shortly. For now, though, I want to apply this reasoning to religious conceptions of morality and explore what we might be able to learn about how the religious mind processes moral judgements.

Until now, I have been talking as though all moral judgements are one and the same in nature, but in truth they can be divided into at least two groups. The first concerns what we might call deontic moral judgements. These are the kind of moral judgements that concern absolute standards of right and wrong, and the belief that certain actions are inherently right or wrong independently of social expectations. These are the kind of moral judgements I've mostly had in mind until this point. The second category concerns what we might call conventional moral judgements and these moral judgements that are entirely contingent upon social context: i.e. the adherence to - or transgression of - social conventions. There is strong evidence that the human brain processes these claims in different ways, and that it is capable of doing so prior to cultural inculcation: children as young as three are able to distinguish between these two categories, for instance, quite independently from any specific instruction⁵. They can recognise that a pronouncement like "boys shouldn't wear dresses" is culturally contingent in a way that a pronouncement like "you shouldn't hit people" is not. Both kinds of moral judgements are present in the religious morality to which we now turn, the important question is how they might be teased apart in practice.


I'll focus here specifically on Biblical morality - and the Christian theology it has inspired - simply because this happens to be the tradition I'm most familiar with. In the Old Testament books of law, moral instructions are explicitly directed to the "Israelites" and - to my knowledge - it is never stated within the text that these instructions are expected to have a universal application. When dealing with the "abhorrent practices" of foreign nations, for example, the prohibitions seem to be specifically directed to the Israelites (those "among you") rather than as representing a generalised moral disapprobation (e.g. Dt. 18). These practices are depicted as being wrong because they are "abhorrent to the Lord" rather than because they are inherently wrong in and of themselves. The Israelites who penned this text - and others - may have believed in the universality of these laws, but it doesn't carry through in the text. Paul apparently had a similar interpretation, arguing that the Law (torah) "speaks [only?] to those who are [already?] under the law" (Rom. 3:19) and that "all who have sinned apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law" (Rom. 2:12). This implies that following the Jewish law was not a universal requirement and that it should not - therefore - be imposed on the Gentiles of his day. The second passage demonstrates a clear distinction between sin (deontic morality) and the transgression of the Law (conventional morality).

Such distinctions are - as I have said - so comprehensible that even children are able to grasp them, even when they are framed in a specifically religious context. To again quote Joyce:

Larry Nucci... found that among Mennonite and Amish children and adolescents God’s authority does not determine moral wrongness. When asked whether it would be OK to work on a Sunday if God said so, 100 percent said “Yes”; when asked whether it would be OK to steal if God said so, over 80 percent said “No.” Such findings contribute to a compelling body of evidence that moral prescriptions and values are experienced as “objective” in the sense that they don’t seem to depend on us, or on any authoritative figure.

Both injunctions (against working on the Sabbath and against stealing) are present and active in the religious traditions into which the children were born and both can be found in the Bible, which at no point indicates explicitly that one should be given preference over the other⁷. In fact, there are far more Biblical passages explicating the sanctity of the Sabbath than there are explicating the wrongness of theft. Yet, despite this, the children are clearly capable of recognising that the first injunction is contingent in a way that the second is not - but contingent on what exactly?

As the above passage hints at, the concept of "authority" is a vital component of conventional morality, particularly in its religious guise. I touched on this concept briefly in this post, but it deserves a fuller treatment here. The Bible - as I explained above - does contain the recognition that there is a distinction to be made between conventional morality (limited in scope) and deontic morality (universal in scope). So far as the former is concerned, the injunctions are conditional and frequently invoked in the context of divine judgement: that is, these injunctions are not valid in a deontic sense, but rather only in the context of a particular religious system. This immediately raises the question of the nature of divine authority: we must ask "whether the holy... is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods"⁸. In other words, can God (in Christian theology) make something "moral" purely by an act of divine fiat, or is there some more absolute standard of morality that God merely is merely sanctioning when he pronounces it to be good?

In my opinion, the question is a much neglected one in Christian theology, but it touches at the heart of this topic. As I mentioned above, children (and presumably a great many adults) are able to make the distinction with relative ease: an injunction like "rest on the Sabbath" is entirely contingent on God's will, and it carries no weight beyond this point. The injunction might just as easily have been "rest every 6th day" or "rest every 8th day", and such injunctions would have been followed just as assiduously. However, we also recognise that the commandment "thou shalt not steal" is of a different moral category: would stealing be moral if God said so?

For the children in the above study, the answer is no: stealing is wrong quite independently from divine pronouncements. But how would a Christian theologian approach the problem? For Robert Adams - and most other theologians I've seen address the problem - it can be explained away by invoking the idea that God would never make such a pronouncement because he is omnibenevolent and that such a pronouncement would therefore go against his very nature. This argument, however, contains a hidden assumption about what it means to be "benevolent" which is itself a moral problem of the very kind we are supposed to be addressing. In practice, I think, the problem is insoluble: one must simply take it on faith that God is "good", that God's moral injunctions are "good" and that therefore how to be "good" can be inferred from these injunctions. This may be well and good in the disconnected world of academic theology, but what does such a perspective lead to so far as quotidian theology is concerned?  What does a fundamentalist Christian believe with regard to the origin of morality?

Formally, the fundamentalist will not even consider the question to be worth asking: our morality is derived from God, and the only way to be moral is to follow his injunctions. It makes no sense to ask in what sense one might be said to precede the other. In practice, however, the fundamentalist does not get his laws from the Bible. The majority of Biblical injunctions are ignored with impunity, and usually on the flimsiest of pretexts. But if not the Bible, then where? What else could be the origin of the contorted, recklessly simplified moral compass of modern Christian fundamentalism? The answer, it may be no surprise, is the same as it is for the rest of us: emotions, and other pre-conscious impulses.

 Consider, for example, the fundamentalist pre-occupation with homosexuality. It is true that the Bible is rather unequivocal in its denunciation of the practice, but no more unequivocal than in its denunciation of other practices. The extremely small percentage of text in the Bible devoted to homosexuality is completely dwarfed by other injunctions that are completely ignored: for instance, the laws concerning sacrifice and priestly behaviour, or the laws which counsel concern for the poor. Yet homosexuality remains intractably central to the moral concerns of many fundamentalist Christians, and I believe that the reason pertains to the reaction I had when I first saw two men kissing: it is born entirely of an otherwise unjustifiable sense of disgust. The subsequent appeals to Biblical doctrine are simply the post hoc rationalisations we addressed earlier.

Note, though, that there are three main obstacles to the fundamentalist undergoing the same kind of self-realising epiphany I experienced. The first is the belief in the authority of the Biblical text (however poorly interpreted) and of church doctrine. They are taught, in this regard, to ignore the possibility of distinguishing conventional morality from deontic morality: morality is God's morality, and God's morality permits no degrees of nuance. In this respect - remarkably - they have succeeded in making themselves ignorant of something that a three year-old child can recognise effortlessly. Such a mindlessly inflexible conception of morality cannot make one arrive at abhorrent positions in and of itself, but it can make one feel entirely justified in holding such a position. This particular theological hermeneutic simply renders moral growth impossible, because all these pesky concerns that might otherwise occur to the believer are simply drowned by this blind appeal to the authority of God. If you adhere to such a theology, literally anything - no matter how obviously immoral it may seem to the rest of us - can justified.

The second major obstacle concerns the role of moral judgements as mental "conversation stoppers", to borrow a term used by the philosopher Dan Dennett. There is some evidence to suggest that the primary role of moral judgements (vis a vis other judgements) is to act as a kind of terminus to rational consideration: the point beyond which no more deliberation is considered necessary. This may have emerged in human cognition as a way to prevent deliberations like "Should I murder my brother?" or "Should I renege on my agreement with my neighbour?" that would prove to be socially harmful. They clearly demarcate, in our own minds, the boundaries of our potential choices: even the thought of committing such actions can fill us with the kind of moral disgust I discussed earlier, and the mind simply drops the matter right then, prior to the commencement of any serious deliberation. The value of such a cognitive block in every day life is obvious: would you trust or form any kind of relationship with a man who was seriously deliberating, in a cold and calculated way, whether or not he should murder his brother?

 The trouble with morality as a "conversation stopper", however, emerges when the moral sense becomes indiscriminate or promiscuous - that is, when it starts to treat even prosaic choices within a moralistic framework. This is becoming particularly rife in US politics, where important policies such as health care or tax reform - issues that deserve genuine debate and rational analysis - are treated as inviolable moral norms. When a Republican hears the phrase "Universal Healthcare" she has been trained - in an almost Pavlovian way - to feel moral disgust at such a prospect, and the issue is immediately withdrawn from her mental conversation before any rational consideration is permitted to take place. Among religious fundamentalists, similar intransigence with regards to issues like abortion or stem-cell research are a consequence of the same process: that is, promiscuous moralising. Such positions are often euphemistically described as making one "principled" (and this is certainly how such moralisers would see it) but in fact it's little more than a rigidity of mind, borne of the propensity to treat every issue under consideration moralistically. Once one has consigned oneself to such a state of knee-jerk moralism, one has literally forfeited the capacity to think rationally: the mind simply pulls the issue in question off the table before any deliberative thought is allowed to take place.

 The third obstacle which prevents the fundamentalist from recognising the poverty of their moral outlook concerns the notion of "sin" inherent to it. Notice from the beginning what such a concept like "sin" entails: it is an object, something of the world, and something which inheres to objects, events and people. Immorality conceived as sin is not simply an ephemeral judgement, constructed in the mind of an individual; it is rather something with a real ontological presence. Note, also, how similar this is to the moral projectivism we discussed earlier: we are attributing our moral objection (or, better, our "disgust") to the object, event or person in and of themselves, as though this "sin" were a categorical property no different to colour or shape. In Christian theology, this concept of "sin" reaches its most absurd apotheosis under the guise of "original sin": we are ontologically burdened with this sin prior to - or irrespective of - any particular action we might undertake. If one believes in such a conception of morality, where is the spur to become more discerning or reasonable in one's judgements going to come from?

 And that is my final point. We cannot control our intuitions, nor can we exercise very much control over the form they take. If our body compels us to be "disgusted" at something, there is very little we can do to instruct it otherwise. What we can do, however, is control how we deal with such intuitions. When we get the sense that something is morally wrong, we must seek to understand why and to ask in what sense such intuitions might be justified. We must not assume that the "disgust" we feel is an inherent property of the object, event or person under our judgement and must rather recognise that it is merely a cognitive reaction to some given stimulus. There are, indeed, some things that we have every right to feel morally disgusted about, but such an emotion should not be nourished with every little slight or inconvenience that befall us, but should rather be preserved for only the most egregious assaults on social well-being that we encounter. It is here, with its projective, hysterical outrage on the most innocuous of pretexts (for instance, the presence of homosexuality) that religious fundamentalism exposes itself for the impoverished moral system that it is.

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1) - The Evolution of Morality,  p. 130.


2) - The Righteous Mind, Chapter 2.

3) - Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, p. 21.


4) - The Evolution of Morality,  p. 131.

5) - Ibid., p. 136.

6) - Ibid., p. 129-130

7) - The idea that the Ten Commandments exist in a special class over and above the other laws is largely a later invention that cannot be inferred from the Biblical text itself. The Bible never identifies these as being the "Ten Commandments" as such, and in fact the only place it uses this phrase is with reference to a completely separate set of commandments in Exodus 34. The commandments do not occupy a privileged place in Rabbinic Judaism either, which avers there are 613 commandments, none of which occupy an inherently pre-eminent place with respect to the rest. Rabbinic Judaism also asserts, to continue the theme of this post, that these commandments are conventional in the sense that they apply to Jews only, with "universal laws" - applicable to all of humanity - to be found in the seven Noahide Laws.

8) - Plato, quoting Socrates, Euthyphro 10a.

The Socio-Historical Background of the Bible: Part 3 (734 BC - 640 BC)

The Fall of Israel

In 745 BC, at the conclusion of a bloody civil war, a young man by the name of Tiglath-Pileser III was crowned king of Assyria. Although the Assyrian state was already the dominant power in the region by this early date, the series of reforms and military conquests soon to be undertaken by this king would transform Assyria into one of the most powerful empires the world had yet seen. The irresistible might of the Assyrian army would forever shift the balance of power in the Levant and exert a huge influence on the development of the cultures that would give rise to the Bible.

As detailed in my previous post, in 734 BC Israel was a dominant power within its region, and particularly in its relationship with Judah. As the Assyrian empire spread, the Israelite king Pekah formed an ill-fated alliance with the king of Damascus to oppose the Assyrian's western advance. As a sign of the Israelite domination over their southern neighbour, Pekah demanded that the Judahite king Ahaz join the coalition too. When he refused, the Israelite army laid siege to Jerusalem with the intention of installing a more sympathetic king on the throne. The (much later) account in 2 Chronicles 28:1-15 describes scenes of slaughter and looting, but whatever the case it seems that Ahaz was somehow able to keep his throne. He appealed to the Assyrians for help, sent them a tribute, and - for all their cultural and religious similarities - this event marks a definitive split between the two kingdoms. They were now enemies at war.

In 734 BC, Tiglath-Pileser III - having just conquered huge swathes of Persia to the east - turned his attention back to the events in the Levant. While his reasons are not entirely clear (did Ahaz's appeals for help give him the pretext for intervention he needed?) it was here that he turned the full might of the Assyrian military machine against Samaria and Damascus. It didn't take long: in the space of two years, he had brought the entire region under his control. Recognising the futility of Pekah's rebellion, the Israelites assassinated him in desperation as the Assyrians laid siege to Samaria. The new king, Hoshea, immediately surrendered and pledged to pay tribute as a vassal state to Assyria. Although this decision staved off the final destruction of Israel for a few years, by 732 BC Israel was nothing more than a rump state, its cities and population ravaged beyond all repair. They wouldn't have to wait long for the final blow.

After the death of King Tiglath-Pileser III in 727 BC, Hoshea sensed the opportunity for liberation. Ancient empires were always weakened and thrown into confusion by the death of a monarch, and the vassal states under their control often used it as an opportunity to push for independence. Hoshea was no different, and shortly after the ascension of king Shalmeneser to the Assyrian throne, he announced that he was withdrawing tribute and forming a new military alliance with Egypt. To call this move ill-advised would be euphemistic in the extreme. Egypt was no longer the powerful military state that it had once been, and even if it had had the will or capacity to help Israel, its path was completely closed by the Assyrian occupation of the southern Levant. Shalmeneser moved against Hoshea swiftly and brutally and by 724 BC most of Israel had been retaken by the Assyrians. Hoshea was captured and taken prisoner. The now monarch-less Samarians defiantly held out for another two years as the Assyrians mounted a prolonged siege against them, but it too fell in 722 BC. And it is here, with the fall of Samaria, that the northern kingdom of Israel disappears forever from the historical record. Our story is now the story of Judah alone.

The Contingency of History and the Creation of the Bible

 It might be worth taking a brief break from our narrative here just to give me an opportunity to spell out my wider purpose in making these series of posts. Up to this point, you may well have noticed that very little discussion of the Biblical texts has taken place and there is a very good reason for this: it wasn't until the collapse of Israel in 722 BC that the penning of the Biblical books in anything resembling the form we presently have them was likely to have begun. There are some scholars who aver that we should place Biblical authorship even further ahead in history - perhaps as recently as the 3rd century BC - but here I will side with the majority view that it is most likely from around this time - the late 8th and the 7th centuries BC - that many of the current books of the Old Testament were first penned. This raises an obvious question: why then? Why not earlier or later? The answer, I think, lies only in a series of accidents of history. Had these events never taken place, the Bible - and the religions it came to inform - would look very different, if we can even presume that they would have come into being at all.

As I suggested in this post, history can be viewed as a series of contingencies that myths are invoked to try and smooth-out into a single, easy to understand narrative. There I argued that mythology can shape (or distort) our understanding of history, but I think that the reverse can be true as well: large events in history can have an uncomfortable habit of imposing themselves indelibly on the consciousness of a people, and must come, in time, to influence the shape of their mythology. In the case of the Bible, it is impossible to understand its mythology (or, more properly, its mythologies) without an appreciation for the historical circumstances that gave rise to them, and continued - over many centuries - to shape them. The fall of Israel, and the events subsequent to it, altered forever the course of Hebrew theology and these shocks can still be felt in the pages of our modern Bibles.

When Israel fell, the culture of the people who would give rise to Judaism came to be concentrated entirely in the hands of the Judahites, or - more specifically - the hands of the tiny number of Judahites who wielded political power. For the first time, their ideology was ascendant and could be asserted and imposed among the local populations with little wider resistance. Had Hoshea not moved against Assyria and had Israel survived to the fall of the Assyrian empire in the 7th century BC, the peculiarities of the Judahite culture might have remained nothing more than a historical curiosity, finding its voice forever drowned-out by the ideology of its more powerful northern neighbour. With the series of political miscalculations of just a few Israelite kings, though, and the political canniness of their southern counterpart, Israel was crushed by the forces of history and Judah was given space to find its own, distinct voice. It is this voice that we find preserved in the earliest texts of the Bible and that would echo all the way down to our own times.

Recognise, though, that none of this was inevitable. The Biblical authors, in their mythologised accounts of their history, would impose on the events a theological teleology that attempted to reduce an endless succession of historical contingencies into a few simple principles (e.g. the perceived faithfulness / faithlessness of the population with regards to YHWH). Inevitably, the principles invoked were those that best served the designs of the ruling elite, as I shall shortly explain (see again this post). For now, though, I only want to emphasise that the theology of the Bible was not thought up by detached theologians, free to ponder the timeless mysteries of existence, but was rather formed by kings and priests who were reacting to the overwhelming power of the contingencies of history among which they had found themselves cast. The Bible is far more a product of worldly forces than many modern theologians would care to admit.

Anyway, it is to these historical processes that we now return.

A Merging of Two Cultures

 The thoroughness of the destruction of Israel cannot be overstated. In addition to the obliteration of cities and other physical structures, the Assyrians sent huge numbers of the Israelite population into exile. Certain regions were almost entirely depopulated. Those who escaped this forced exile had only one option: to flee south to Judah.

This massive influx of refugees had a number of extremely important effects on the Judahite state. The first and most obvious (at least archaeologically) is the rapid growth in city size that we can observe in the region. The majority of those fleeing the wrath of the Assyrian military would likely have been urban in origin, as the agriculturalists and pastoralists were probably not targeted and - in any case - probably lacked the means to upend themselves and relocate. The most remarkable consequence was the growth of Jerusalem, which expanded from a population of perhaps 1,000 people to an estimated 12,000 people during this period. The effects of this population influx will be explored more fully below, but for now we can focus on the less tangible (but still important) cultural shifts took place as a consequence of this movement.

Having been heavily involved in international trade for at least a few hundred years by the time their nation fell, the people of Israel must have had a well-developed scribal system to record all the transactions they were involved with. In the ancient world, literacy was predominantly used for such commercial purposes, and generally the emergence of complex trade and the emergence of literacy go hand-in-hand. Before the 8th century BC, there is little evidence of literary production in the largely rural, backward and forgotten kingdom of Judah. By the 7th century, however, there is clear evidence of a literary flourishing in the region. The assimilation of Israelite scribes is perhaps the best way to account for this sudden shift.

With the literary culture of the Israelite refugees came also their unique religious traditions. Their mythology, although sharing much in common with the mythology of the south, contained many differences that have since been smoothed-over by later editorial redactors, but that can still be identified in the Bible today. The E Source of the Pentateuch is strongly suspected to have been penned in the north, for instance, based on its pre-occupation with northern locations and figures, and its use of the name "El" for God (hence Israel). It had a strong emphasis on the Exodus from Egypt (which may be a reflection of the Assyrian exodus these northerners had just suffered) that hadn't featured at all prominently in the southern mythology up to this point. In contrast, the southern mythology (as preserved in the J Source) is more focussed on Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who are associated more with the Mesopotamian region to the east, and who figure less frequently in the northern accounts. The eventual conflation of the two traditions into a single, continuous narrative (the so-called "J / E Redaction") was an early - and extremely successful - attempt to reconcile the divergent traditions of the north and the south. And, apparently, this question as to how exactly the two cultures might come to be assimilated was a matter of pressing concern for the Judahites of the late 8th century BC.

For the southern prophets, the destruction of Israel was a moment of great vindication for their belief in the monolatrous worship of YHWH. Isaiah, for instance, crows:

Human pride will lower its eyes,
The arrogance of men will be humbled.
Yahweh alone shall be exalted,
On that day.
Yes, that will be the day of Yahweh of armies
Against all pride and arrogance,
Against all that is great to bring it down.

The theological developments here are clear: Israel was punished for its arrogance in worshipping other gods than YHWH. More than that, we are witnessing the growing belief in the universal power of YHWH. No longer was a simply a patron God of a small nation, whose earthly presence was confined to the inner sanctum of the Jerusalem Temple, he is rather becoming a universal force with the power to bring down foreign nations. While it's a little disingenuous to try to identify a clear, linear trend in the universalisation of God throughout history (as certain authors have attempted) the clear contrast between the God of Isaiah and the God of earlier southern traditions (i.e. the God who wrestles with Jacob and loses, or the God who cannot find Adam in his own garden) must be noted.

Although it was apparent to the southern prophets (and a couple of the surviving northern ones as well) that Israel had been punished for its religious plurality, it is not clear that the northerners saw it that way. It seems clear, rather, that they brought their synrectistic faith with them on the journey south, which raised the ire of the prophet Micah:

I am filled with power,  with the spirit of the Lord, and with justice and might, to declare  to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin.
  Hear this, you rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong!

 Its rulers give judgement for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets give oracles for money; yet they lean upon the Lord and say, ‘Surely the Lord is with us! No harm shall come upon us.’ Therefore because of you Zion shall be ploughed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house a wooded height.

There is also evidence to suggest that the Judahite king, Ahaz, did his best to accommodate the refugees to this end. The book of Kings decries his construction of "high places" around the country, which were apparently sites of popular pilgrimage. The denunciation of such "high places" was apparently a later development, reflecting a time when the king and priests were attempting to centralise worship in Jerusalem alone (see below), because the earlier Biblical mythology depicts many of these high places as having been established by the patriarchs (e.g. Abraham's shrine at Hebron), which implies they occupied a venerated position at an earlier date. Having said that, there is every possibility that Ahaz's deference to religious pluralism was widely opposed at the time as well, and the issue quickly came to a head as we will see shortly. Additionally, there was probably some hostility between the refugees and the native Judahite population, which may go some way to explaining the Biblical emphasis on treating foreigners with due respect and hospitality (see also part 6).

In time, the two cultures would come to be skilfully conflated by later Biblical authors who had distinct theological and political reasons to treat the cultures of Israel and Judah as largely conterminous. In practice, however, there are fragmented Biblical passages (such as the ones above) that point to the difficulties and conflicts that must have occurred when cultures that had been gone down largely separate paths for over 200 years were suddenly reunited. The cultural differences must have presented one problem, but perhaps the more immediate problem faced by King Ahaz was that of how to physically accommodate so many thousands of refugees into such an economically backward part of the world. 

Urbanisation and the Growth of Judah

In addition to changing the landscape of culture and religion in Judah, the influx of refugees also produced a number of important economic effects. As mentioned earlier, this can perhaps best be seen in the unprecedented scope of urban development in Judah, as emphasised by the 12-fold growth of Jerusalem over just a few decades. This came to have an important effect not just on those already settled in the cities, but on the rural populations as well, who prior to this were likely able to exist without much direct interference from the nearby cities. The problem stems from the facts that towns or cities beyond a certain size simply become incapable of sustaining themselves: there simply is not enough land in the immediate area to feed everybody. As a consequence, it becomes necessary for the city to feed itself by taking food from the surrounding rural areas. In other words, for certain cities beyond a certain size (e.g. Jerusalem in the late 8th century BC), they cease to become productive and rather become extractive.

This extraction of food from rural agriculturalists (perhaps in the form of a centrally enforced tax or tithe) can understandably draw resentment from those involved in its production. We know that rural-urban tensions had existed in Judah even prior to the fall of Israel. The Queen Athaliah, for instance, appears to have been assassinated in a politically orchestrated move that could only really be described as a popular revolution. Those responsible are identified as "people of the land" ('am ha-aretz) and the Biblical account rather dryly notes that "all the people of the land rejoiced; and the city was quiet after Athaliah had been killed with the sword at the king’s house" (2 Kings 11:20). Elsewhere in the Bible - particularly in later periods - the expression "people of the land" can be used in a pejorative sense to denote backwards and ignorant folk who failed to observe prescribed ritual. The tensions between cities and rural folk have a deep history, then, and it was this tension that would eventually bring King Josiah to the throne, a king who more than any other would come to shape the theology of the Bible. This was all to come in the future, however.

For now, the growing urbanisation of Judah - and the need to arrange the redistribution of food from rural areas to the cities - accelerated the development of literacy in the state. As mentioned earlier, the skills for writing would have been brought south from Israel with the refugees, and its use would have been primarily commercial. With the distribution of vast quantities of food and other goods, an accounting system becomes necessary to keep track of contracts, debts and a myriad of other functions related to commerce. Commercial literacy implies general literacy, and its true that it does seem to be in this period that we witness the first signs of widespread writing in Judah. It is also from around this time that many scholars suggest that Biblical mythology first began to assume its written form.

Another effect of urbanisation can be expressed in terms of a "division of labour", though here the expression might be a little euphemistic. Now that the people of the cities were not required to invest time in growing the food they ate (because they were extracting it from the rural folk), they were free to pursue other activities. This might include, again, learning literacy skills (you can hopefully see just how intertwined literacy and economic development are by now) but also the development of other crafts, such as masonry or pottery. Indeed, this appears to be a time where more elaborate forms of dwelling and pottery begin to emerge in Judah in the archaeological record. In short, despite the protestations of the later Deuteronomist(s), Judah under the rule of King Ahaz appears to have experienced a period of relatively secure growth and development in the shadow of fallen state of Israel. This burgeoning period of peace and prosperity, however, was to be short-lived.

Hezekiah and the Assyrian Invasion

When Hezekiah succeeded his father Ahaz as king in the year 715 BC, he set about almost immediately to destroy the "high places" his father had built. The laudatory account of his reign in the Book of Kings attributes this to his piety and monolatrous devotion to YHWH, but a more cynical explanation immediately presents itself. In the first place, this represents an unambiguous assertion of centralised power that simply would not have been possible without the rapid growth of Jerusalem. In other words, what we're witnessing here is the emergence of a state: a central authority, holding a monopoly on power in the region, with both the will and the ability to enforce its "law" (if that is the appropriate term) over an entire population. It is at this stage of social development that the creation of a religious orthodoxy first becomes possible. While Hezekiah would ultimately fail in this pursuit, it apparently wasn't for want of trying.

In the second place, the centralisation of religious power here derived important benefits to both the king and those closely allied to him (i.e. the Jerusalem priests). Prescribing the conditions under which worship can be properly performed increases the power of these central forces, not just in the abstract sense of being able to enforce their ideology on the people, but also in the more immediate, material sense of economic gain. In the ancient world, temples and places of worship were not merely instrumental in their functions as "holy places", but they also served as important centres of commerce. An analogous situation would be the status of Mecca in the pre-Islamic world, where the situation of a number of pagan idols in the city attracted pilgrims from all over the Arabic peninsula to worship there. Many of these pilgrims were traders and merchants, and they made the periodic Hajj a time of great economic importance for the city. Muhammed understood this, which might go some way to explaining the importance that he and the earliest Muslims placed on the city, and why it would eventually become their seat of power.

Hezekiah's decision to centralise worship at the Temple may have had a similar effect on the economy of Jerusalem. We know in later times that the Temple served an important economic function in the city (providing animals for sacrifice, food storage, money exchanges and other mercantile functions) so there is no reason to think that Hezekiah wasn't attempting something similar at this early date. In any case, the effect must have surely been an increase in both political and economic power within the city. It continued to grow during Hezekiah's rule, and many important building projects in the city (including a large tunnel - truly a great feat of engineering for the time) have been dated to the time of Hezekiah's rule.

In time, though, it all came unstuck. Since the fall of Israel, Judah had been paying the Assyrians tribute as a vassal state. We can presume that the tribute was onerous, but in return the Assyrians granted Judah a scope of political freedom and autonomy which permitted the kind of social developments I've been exploring in this post. This makes Hezekiah's eventual decision to rebel against the Assyrian empire all the more bewildering.

In a move that draws obvious parallels with the ill-fated machinations of the Israelite king Hoshea some 20 years earlier, Hezekiah announced that he would withdraw his tribute to the Assyrian empire upon learning of the death of its King Sargon - sensing the potential power vacuum as an opportunity for freedom - and then promptly signed a military agreement with the Egyptians. In part this may have been a move inspired by advice from his religious advisers, who apparently viewed their existence under the yoke of the Assyrians as an affront to YHWH: Isaiah, for example, apparently counciled Hezekiah with the assurance that YHWH would not permit Jerusalem to fall in the event of a military campaign (2 King 19:20-34). In a sense Isaiah was right, but there is little else to commend the course of action Hezekiah and his religious acolytes came to undertake.

When Sennacherib assumed power in Assyria, he moved immediately against the rebellious Judahites. The military campaign was brutally one-sided. By 701 BC - four years after Hezekiah's withdrawal of tribute - all of Judah and the surrounding lands had been taken by the Assyrians. As had happened to Hoshea twenty years earlier in Israel, when Hezekiah called on the Egyptians for military assistance they simply failed to show up. Most of the major cities in Judah were destroyed, or at best completely ravaged by looting. A surviving inscription made by Sennachrib boasts:

As for Hezekiah of Judah, who did not submit to my yoke, I laid siege to 46 of his strong cities, walled forts and to the countless small villages in their vicinity, and conquered them. . . . I drove out 200,150 people,  young and old, male and female, horses, mules, donkeys, camels, big and small cattle, beyond counting and considered them booty.

The account is obviously hyperbolic, but it does give an indication of the severity of the rout. And by this point, the Assyrians were laying siege to Jerusalem itself.

To his credit, the king was apparently well-prepared for this siege. His tunnel, for example, was built to provide the city with access to water in the event of a siege, and he constructed a number of defensive structures as well (including the still surviving Broad Wall). The city held-out admirably for a long period of time and indeed never actually fell to the Assyrians. The reasons for this are not clear: the Biblical account triumphantly attributes the Assyrian withrawal to divine intervention, but a more prosaic explanation will probably suffice here. The Bible notes that Hezekiah offered the Assyrian king a massive indemnity (2 Kings 18:14-16) which was apparently rebuffed, but this may simply reflect a later sheen placed on the event by the ideological disposition of the later Biblical authors. Likely, Hezekiah was able to preserve his city (and his throne) by offering this tribute and by reaffirming his vassalship to the Assyrian king. Isaiah's prophecy was validated, but the king's policy was not. Judah, like Israel before it, had been laid almost entirely to waste by the might of the Assyrian army.

Manasseh and the Rebuilding of Judah

There are few figures in the Bible that are the target of more sustained and unambiguous invective than that of Manasseh. Eighteen verses are devoted to his reign in the Book of Kings (2 Kings 21:1-18) and they positively drip with loathing and resentment. The account here is little more than a laundry list of his alleged "abominable practices" including doing "what was evil in the eyes of the Lord", overseeing the "spilling of much innocent blood" and provoking the Lord and his prophets "to anger". Such was the audacious scope of his evil projects that apparently the authors didn't have enough space to fit them all into this short passage: the reader is instructed to consult a separate text for "the rest of the acts of Manasseh, all that he did, and the sin that he committed" (v. 17). What happened here? What did he do to inspire such vitriol to spill from the pens of the Deuteronomist historians?

Manasseh, in short, inherited a mess. The Biblical chronology is a little confused here, but it's probable that he ascended to the throne just a few years after the Assyrian invasion, while he was still a young man. While Jerusalem had survived the onslaught, little else around it had. Archaeological evidence shows that the rural areas in Judah were thoroughly destroyed and depopulated in the aftermath of the invasion; Jerusalem stood, but it had no-one to feed it. Whatever power Jerusalem claimed to hold in the region was now exerted only over empty and unproductive lands. To make the scope of the economic devastation even more urgent, Judah was also now required to pay a more onerous tribute to the Assyrian king than ever before. Where to begin? What could Manasseh do to rebuild the local economy in the face of such overwhelming desolation?

Manasseh's first and most important act was to set about repopulating the rural areas and to resume agricultural production. In this aim it seems he was roundly successful: the archaeological record indicates a huge growth in the number of agricultural settlements from this time. He not only repopulated older agricultural regions, but forged new frontiers, overseeing agricultural production in previously barren and uncultivated regions. He achieved this by building dams and cisterns that were previously unknown in this part of the world. But could only part of the solution: who would actually man these farms? How to attract people back to these regions that had been so thoroughly depopulated?

The Bible seems to offer an important clue: "[Manasseh] rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed; he erected altars for Baal, made a sacred pole [asherah], as King Ahab of Israel had done, worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them" (2 Kings 21:3). Now in the polemic of this later Biblical author, these developments are (predictably) decried as unambiguously evil. Manasseh is depicted here as a faithless and depraved man, whose deeds were an affront to YHWH and which defiled the purity of Judah's monolatrous faith. But these, obviously, are the views of later authors who rejected the any policies that might have been directed at fostering religious pluralism. So what were Manasseh's real reasons? Why were these policies ultimately successful in rejuvenating the Judahite state?

As I mentioned earlier, in the ancient world there were frequently deep economic connections between places of worship and the surrounding economy. Places of worship (temples, "high places" etc.) could serve as beacons to attract both settled communities and itinerant merchants, and acted as central points in a landscape where business could be conducted. The cities fortunate enough to host a major place of worship (e.g. Mecca, the Parthenon, the Jerusalem Temple in later years etc.) were also significant hubs of economic activity. Although the relationship could run both ways (i.e. it is undoubtedly common that a place of worship could be made more important by the economic conditions around it) there is a simply undeniable connection between the centralisation of religious worship and economic centralisation. "If you build it they will come": Manasseh understood this well, and I think this the logic behind his erection of "high places", "altars" and "asherah" across the landscape of Judah.

Although the later Biblical authors decried these moves as a deviation from some timeless religious orthodoxy, it seems apparent that even at this late date - the mid-7th century BC - the concept of a YHWH-only religious cult remained a hard sell. Even if we can presume that the elite, literate core of Judahite society had settled definitively on a fixed and inviolable religious system, evidence abounds that those who existed beyond the inner-sanctum still engaged in far more more pluralistic practices. The building of these high-places under Manasseh's rule - and the great alacrity with which people were attracted to them - shows that demand for such religious practices existed, and indeed was capable of wielding an important influence over royal policy.

The Jerusalem priests, who had settled into positions of significant power and influence during the time of Hezekiah, were understandably annoyed by this development. The decentralisation of religious institutions would only serve to undermine their standing and legitimacy in Judahite society. These "high places" could be operated without the mediation of priests, which stands in stark contrast to the highly sanctified, exclusivist rituals of the Jerusalem Temple. It must be remembered here that the priests saw themselves as a social caste that stood both above and outside of normal Judahite society. They were not permitted to own land or engage in menial work, so the decentralisation of religious worship genuinely posed a threat to their only source of livelihood. That is not to say that they were motivated solely by self-interest in their opposition to Manasseh's reforms - perhaps we can take them at their word when they say they had deep theological concerns for the soul of Judah - but the social and economic marginalisation they suffered here must be remembered when we begin to explore the events that transpired after Manasseh's long rule. It must again be stated again: in the longue durée of history, it is generally social and economic forces that shape the trajectory of theology, not the other way around.

And it is now that we can take stock of the social and religious situation in Judah in the middle of the 7th century. By the time of Manasseh's death in 643 BC, he had overseen a period of economic growth that was probably unmatched in the rest of Judahite history. He had taken a land ravaged by war - depopulated and unproductive - and transformed it into a vibrant economy, that came to develop for the first time strong trading links with the empires around it. Although it still existed under the yoke of the Assyrian empire, the archaeological evidence seems to indicate a time of great peace and prosperity in the region. Manasseh achieved this in part, however, by taking power from the priests in Jerusalem and divesting it into rival cults overseen by rival castes. By the end of his reign, trade had permitted those in the cities to amass great material wealth, often at the expense of the comparatively impoverished rural areas which apparently viewed themselves as the victims of exploitation.

It is these two forces - the scorned priesthood and the exploited poor - who would join forces to bring to the throne the most important king in Judahite history. He will be the topic of our next post.

Perfectionism, Myth and Politics

In the evolution of mythology, there is a tendency over time towards what literary critic Kenneth Burke calls "Perfectionism"¹. This is not a qualitative judgement, implying that myths become somehow "better" over time, but rather an observation that myths tend towards a kind of absolutism; a perfection of narrative in which particular symbols, themes and structures are given pre-eminence over particular details. Even where myths begin as historical events, their continual telling and re-telling strips them of all historical details, to the point where the purpose of the story can no longer be said to relate the details of a particular event but rather to "give counsel" in some way; that is, to provide a "moral", some "practical advice" or a "proverb or maxim".² It is this gradual tendency to place the story in an indefinite setting, outside of any known time or place, that constitutes the entelechial drift of the myth towards "Perfectionism".

Partly, this process may be an accidental consequence of human memory. Humans tend to perform relatively poorly when it comes to the recall of brute facts, but are generally much better when asked to recall structured or emotionally salient information. For this reason, many myths involve repetitive elements (the rule of three is particularly pertinent here) or draw on some of the more primal, deep-seated human emotions (which explains why sex and death feature so prominently in all mythologies). One possible test for the historicity of myths concerns the extent to which historical facts - as opposed to some more symbolic "moral" message - are central to the narrative, and the "pedigree" of a literary myth (i.e. how old it is) can be ascertained by examining how faithfully it could have been transmitted orally given the fallibility of human memory. As an example, the highly structured and repetitive parables of Jesus in the synoptic gospels (which were penned at least 40 years after his death) are generally seen as having a pedigree that can be traced back to Jesus himself (as they are memorable in structure, they promote counter-intuitive ethics and so on), where as the long-winded, largely aimless ramblings of John's Jesus are generally seen as unhistorical because they could not have been reliably transmitted via oral means for sixty years without significant deviation.

But in addition to this accidental shift, changes to the fundamental details of a myth may reflect the political inclinations of later authors / editors. This may be through the deliberate addition or omission of pertinent details (for instance, the kind of details the author(s) of Chronicles added to or omitted from of the Book of Kings that he was using as a source) or the deliberate introduction of a radically new hermeneutic, in order to change the way the mythology is understood at a fundamental level (for instance, the way that OT myths were approached by the earliest Christians). It has been suggested that the final form of certain myths - particularly where it has been dependent on literature - have been shaped and controlled by the elite of ancient societies, and that they were often used as tools to legitimise certain political policies to the wider population. In the Bible, the way that the D and P sources of the Pentateuch used older myths to legitimise the particular aspirations of their authors (a unified kingdom and the centrality of the priestly class respectively) serve as a good example of this phenomenon.

What the formation of such mythological legitimation serves to do is to naturalise certain political claims. In this world of myth, the rule of priests and kings is a natural, divinely-ordained state of the universe that simply cannot be resisted. The contingent, ephemeral nature of power is simply subsumed by the intractable timelessness of the mythological claim. To quote Roland Barthes, "[M]yth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Now this process is exactly that of bourgeois ideology... A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance... myth is depoliticized speech"³. In other words, myth can be used by the ruling classes to downplay the historical contingency of their political claims and to instead express them in the timeless and teleological language of mythic history.

So, we might observe four basic claims at this stage:

1) Myths have a "perfectionist" tendency, where - over time - specific details (time, place, people etc.) are gradually lost in its retelling, leaving a skeleton narrative structure which renders it suitable for (infinitely pliable) moral messages.

2) This process can be accidental (a natural consequence of human memory and narrative construction) or it can be deliberate.

3) Where the process of change is deliberate, it is normally the social elite who are responsible.

4) Myth is wielded in this way to "naturalise" otherwise contingent political claims.

Now the creation and utilisation of mythology is not something confined to the distant past. It's an ongoing process that continues to shape and inform our understanding of the world we inhabit. As narrative-seeking beings, the pull to explain complex historical events in the form of simple narratives underscored by vivid symbolism is sometimes too strong to resist. Many examples could be marshalled to support this claim - high among them, the importance of mythology to the formation of "imagined communities" in many modern theories of nationalism - but I'll choose to focus on just one for now: the pre-occupation among the American right with the events of the American revolution.

I spoke in a previous post about the "sacralisation" of the American constitution in modern American political thought, and in doing so hoped to highlight the similarities between the constitutional fetishism of American society and the similar textual fetishism inherent to the Abrahamic faiths. Here I want to show the relationship between religious mythology and the blinkered understanding of American history espoused by the American Right.

What distinguishes "religious" mythology from mythology in general is its infallibility and its universality, at least in the minds of those who adhere to this given religious tradition. What do I mean by this?

By "infallibility" I don't simply mean that these myths are perceived as being literally true (though the believer may assert this anyway) but rather that they are placed completely beyond any possibility of reproach. If they appear to be lending support to an idea or impulse that we find repulsive, the fault must lie with our exegesis rather than the moral message of the myth itself. There are many millions of people alive today, for example, who believe that a wholesome moral message can be derived from the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, or who believe that the Koran does not impel holy violence. Placing these texts in their appropriate historical context - a context in which extreme violence was an everyday occurrence - is apparently insufficient: we must assume, rather, that we have simply read the texts wrongly, because the timelessness of sacralised religious mythology permits no other analysis. 

The universality of religious mythology, on the other hand, pertains not simply to their timelessness and "placelessness" but rather the ubiquity with which they can be utilised to explain almost anything. To a sufficiently skilled Abrahamic theologian, there is simply no moral quandary or historical eventuality that cannot be expressed in the mythical language of their chosen text. If we want to assert the (un-)righteousness of an event, the only necessary task is to identify an appropriate passage that can be used to justify the position we wished to assert from the very beginning. If the allegorical relationship between the passage and the event in question is oblique in the extreme, so much the better: a pleiotropy of meaning in religious texts is always to be encouraged. But back to the topic at hand.


Like the mythology of Judeo-Christianity or Ancient Greece, the mythology of the American Right has is both infallible and universal in its scope and application. For the average Republican, there are few events in everyday life in the United States that cannot be explained as part of the mythology of the American story. Even the most anodyne matters - shop clerks wishing "Happy Holidays" or the first lady encouraging healthy eating - are given an almost existential urgency by their placement in a far deeper narrative propelled almost entirely by politically charged symbols and meanings. The American story, according to the Right, is one long history of patriots defending "freedom" (an entirely symbolic word in this usage, denoting nothing of substance) against the creeping forces of "tyranny" (which is also only ever loosely defined). Placed in such an epic narrative, the shop clerk and the First Lady are both antagonistic characters who represent an omnipresent "threat" to the "American way of life". The first undermines Christian hegemony, the second undermines the sovereignty of the individual, both of which are presumed by the American Right to have been enshrined in culture from the very beginning.

Beyond contemporary events, there is also a necessity for the American Right to re-interpret historical events through narrow lens of their mythology. The "Boston Tea Party", for example, was the culmination of a series of disputes between the colonists and the crown over the (perceived) exploitative behaviour of the latter. Read through the lens of the 2012 GOP platform, however, all the complexity and contingency of historical reality is smoothed-out into a simple mythic narrative of rebellion against tyranny and (especially) taxation. The events of the Cold War, to use a more recent example, have similarly been stripped of all their historical complexity and have since been retold by the modern American Right as a simple, dichotomous moral message concerning the triumph of freedom over bondage, capitalism over communism, good over evil. Such an all-encompassing "dualism", by the way, is a common and persistent feature inherent to many mythologies.

Although the creeping lunacy of GOP policy represents a rather recent development - an "historical contingency" in every possible sense - its defenders imagine that it can be traced, in a continuous, uninterrupted line, to the views of the Founding Fathers. Their movement, in other words, represents the only unadulterated, orthodox politics within the nation. Their politics are not simply the contingent consequence of the historical forces into which they happened to be born (the Cold War and opposition to the civil rights movement are obvious places to situate the origin of these politics) but rather the fulfilment and final manifestation of the hopes and wishes of the increasingly deified Founding Fathers. Note how these politics are thus naturalised: laissez-faire capitalism, gun rights and Christianity represent the politics of this original "pristine" state. Any exceptions to this (such as the politics of the Democrats) are therefore wilful corruptions or deviations that must be resisted as heretical. Like any other religious mythology, the capacity for a plurality or heterodoxy of thought is simply denounced as a matter of course.

The maintenance of such a world-view isn't easy though. Recorded history - as opposed to the vague, mythological dreaminess of their remembered history - paints a different picture of the Founding Fathers. They didn't offer a unified view of politics, but were rather deeply divided on many important issues (hence the relatively limited scope of the constitution). They didn't found the US as a Christian nation, but rather as a secular one, and their surviving writings on this issue bear this out. They didn't intend for the US to be a free-market economy, but were rather interested in driving US industry with the involvement of government and the erection of trade protectionism⁴. Not that this stops right-wing ideologues from arguing otherwise, but it can only be observed that their mythology has been erected against history, not with it.

And it is this observation that should always be remembered: where myth, for all its uses, is in conflict with recorded history, it is the latter that should be given preference, not the former. When someone tries to argue that the US was founded on Christian principles or on principles of untrammelled individualism (as though the two were self-evidently compatible) it is incumbent upon the rest of us to make two observations: firstly, the claims are in error. Secondly, these erroneous claims have been fabricated by certain "elites" - perhaps deliberately in certain cases - to naturalise and legitimise a world-view that could not be adequately justified to the people without resorting to the emotionally-charged symbolism of mythology. Our resistance to having our capacity for rational, independent thought completely subsumed by an all-pervasive mythology is apparently no greater than that of the ancients; our myths are just more secular and more overtly political.

-----------------------------------------

1) Laurence Coupe - Myth, p. 7

2) Walter Benjamin - Illuminations, p. 86

3) Mythologies, p. 142

4) Words such as "capitalism" or even "economy" were not yet in use. In fact, the first true explication of free-market ideology - Wealth of Nations - wasn't published until the same year as the declaration of independence.

The Socio-Historical Background of the Bible: Part 2 (1000 BC - 734 BC)

Before the Monarchy

As already described in my last post, the land which comprises the southern half of modern Israel was, before 1000 BC, likely a largely undeveloped and sparsely populated region, crippled by fractious political claims. Local chiefs ("judges" in the Bible) competed for the limited resources available and - for a long time - none emerged with any strong claim to authority over the region. The Bible tells us that the land then was divided amongst "the Twelve Tribes" (that is, descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob), but this is an explanation derived more from theology than remembered history. The names of these tribes are given 25 times in the Old Testament, but the lists are largely contradictory and are not of much value in determining what kind of divisions may have existed among these proto-Israelites. In any case, it bears repeating that there is little to suggest that these factions differed in any culturally significant way: all were seemingly inheritors of the Canaanite tradition and represent a clear continuity with what preceded them. Whatever may have divided these earliest groups, it certainly cannot be attributed to any major ethnic, cultural or religious differences.

In any case, by around 1000 BC we can begin to discern the emergence of political stability and urban development in the northern part of the region, a period of time close to that which the Bible asserts for the beginning of the Davidic monarchy. The status of King David in the Bible and (therefore) in early Hebrew theology cannot be overstated. His emergence as king represented for the later Biblical authors a clear demonstration of the power of YHWH, a validation for his monolatrous worship and a continuing justification for the existence of the united kingdom of Israel. We shall see a particularly pronounced expression of Davidic mythology when we address the reign of King Josiah in part 4. Quite how this Biblical picture squares with history, however, is a topic of ongoing and rather acrimonious debate among scholars. On one side there are many who are still prepared to assert the full historicity of the Biblical account, suggesting that the available archaeological evidence squares with the Bible's account of the emergence of a strong and dominant political leader in the region in around 1000 BC. On the other side, there are those who would go so far as to say that King David never existed. Here, I'll be treading a rather more equivocal path: asserting the historicity of King David while also recognising the Biblical account has been shaped more by later political and theological concerns than by genuinely remembered history.

 David and the Establishment of Judean Monarchy

In 1000 BC, the land of Judah (in the southern region of modern Israel) was small and insignificant even by the modest standards of the surrounding region. Its major city, Jerusalem, had been a seat of power for one "Abdi-Heba" in the 14th century BC, but its small size up to the turn of the millennium indicates that it was not a city from which any greater power ever emanated. The majority of Judah's inhabitants (who may have numbered as little as 5000 at this time) were pastoralists and likely lived without much interference from whatever authority resided there. It was in this small and largely uninteresting region that a man named "David" came to claim kingship over.

Quite how or why David emerged as king of Judah remains an unsolved mystery. The Bible tells us that the prophet Samuel found the young David tending sheep, and invited him to the court of Saul, a self-proclaimed "king" in the northern part of modern Israel (henceforth simply "Israel"). After various intrigues and an attempted assassination, David and Saul found themselves leading armies against each other and the former prevailed. David found himself anointed as king over both Judah and Israel, uniting these regions for the first time in their history and - with his son Solomon - overseeing a period of unmatched wealth and prosperity. A famous and stirring account, no doubt, but how reliable is it?

The historicity of the Davidic saga, it has become increasingly clear, is rather dubious overall, but there may still be kernels of historical truth there. In the first place, we might note that there appear to be at least two different sources for this tale - one complimentary and one rather uncomplimentary. The possibility has been raised by some scholars that the complimentary account was penned by a sympathetic Judean scribe, who saw David as the rightful leader of the united kingdom, and the other penned by a rather more antagonistic northern scribe who felt that David had duplicitously murdered the rightful king of Israel in a naked power-grab. Such an account, if true, could therefore be said to be attested by two independent sources in two different regions, which would lend greater credence to its historicity. There are, however, compelling reasons to cast doubt on the literal Biblical account.

Firstly, given the low population and technological backwardness of the region, it is unlikely that anyone whose power was based in Judah at the turn of the first millennium BC could have raised an army of particularly formidable strength, which renders the likelihood of David mounting a successful campaign to depose a competing monarch rather small. This is heightened by archaeological evidence which suggests that the northern region of Israel at this time was far more densely settled than the south, and may have been home to a population of around 40,000 (that is, eight times bigger than David's Judah). In fairness, the Bible does suggest that David enlisted the help of the Philistines in this campaign, but there is no external evidence that the Philistines would have been any better placed to wage such a campaign so far from their coastal home.

Besides, even if we do accept the Biblical account it's difficult to explain why Israel remained a regional power that continued to dwarf that of the southern kingdom. Even if we can accept the Biblical claim that David was once the sole ruler of a united kingdom from the southern city of Jerusalem, it is clear that he could not have exercised any great control over the northern territories, rendering his claim to such territories tenuous at best. That is to say, whatever the historical realities of the Davidic monarchy, the Biblical claim that the territories of Israel and Judah were ever united in any meaningful way by a powerful king named David are mostly the mythical products of later monarchical claims. If there was a historical King David (as most scholars accept) his power was far more limited in scope.


In actuality, it seems far more plausible that David's most major success was the rather more modest (though still significant) pacification and unification of the "tribes" of Judah. In the power vacuum of competing strong-men, it seems likely that David was simply the most successful among them and the first to emerge in the region with legitimate and widespread authority. He centralised power in Jerusalem and successfully oversaw a period of relatively benign growth and development in the region (as evidenced in the archaeological record by the growth in city size in the region during the 10th century BC). His establishment of a centralised, increasingly urban Judean state under the auspices of kingship came to solidify forever the foundation of the culture that gave rise to Judaism and Christianity. His legacy will be explored further in subsequent posts, but for now it is time to turn to developments in the northern kingdom of Israel.

Israel Ascendant

As mentioned earlier, the stature of southern kingdom of Judah was comprehensively dwarfed for the entire time period covered by this post by the stature of its northern neighbour, Israel. Israel was bigger, more densely populated, more heavily involved in international trade and - most certainly - more influential in the region. Judah and Israel shared a common cultural background (both clearly emerged from the wider culture of Canaan) though there were differences (particularly concerning religion and myth) which I shall explore more fully in my next post. For now, though, it's only important to note that for all they shared in common, Israel and Judah were separate nations (even according to the Biblical account) from very early on.

Leaving aside the question of the historicity of David and Saul, it is clear that in the 10th century BC Israel was a comparatively strong and advanced nation by regional standards. It had achieved such influence in the region that by 926 BC the Egyptian Pharaoh was incited to move against it as a legitimate competitor for power and influence in the region. Despite the fairly comprehensive nature of the Pharaoh's victory (archaeological evidence suggests a fairly steep decline in the size of urban settlements in this period) Israel soon re-emerged as a relatively powerful state.

The process by which it achieved such ascendency is difficult to uncover, because the only comprehensive records we have for the region at the time were penned by unsympathetic Judean writers hundreds of years later in the Biblical Book of Kings. These describe a decadent and unfaithful culture, beholden to foreign gods (which may simply be a reflection of Israel's international standing) and ruled by capricious, murderous claimants to an ephemeral throne that was shared among several competing "houses". Whether there is any historical truth to this portrait is difficult to say, but we do know that the state of Israel was ultimately consolidated - and subsequently underwent a great period of growth in power and influence - when King Omri took the throne in around 885 BC. He undertook massive building projects that were originally attributed to the King Solomon by the Judean authors of the Bible - but which most archaeologists now believe are better dated to the time of Omri - and he established the capital city at Samaria. He also undertook the first of a wave of conquests that eventually led to Israel claiming territory in Syria and other nearby regions. The Assyrians - whose influence in the region will be explored more fully in the next post - continued to refer to Israel as "the House of Omri" for well over 100 years after his death. He is the first Biblical character for whom we have unequivocal archaeological evidence and it would be no exaggeration to call Omri the first major king of Biblical history.

The rapid growth of Israel during this period presented also marked a period of increasing marginalisation for Judah, which seems to have been little more than a vassal state in the 9th century. The Judean king Jehoshaphat (who reigned from 870-846 BC) was apparently forced into providing men and horses for the wars of conquest being waged by Israel, and later his daughter was married off to an Israelite king. This marriage provided the grounds for a united kingdom of sorts, though it must be noted that the power balance here was incredibly asymmetric. This was unequivocally an Omridic Kingdom rather than a Davidic one.

The ascendency of the Kingdom of Israel would only grow with time, arguably reaching its apex under the leadership of Jeroboam II. Eventually, though, it would be brought to heel by the simply irresistible might of the Assyrian empire in 722 BC. Yet even before then there were critics of the policy of Israel who suggested - rather presciently - that its pursuit of power and its (perceived) promiscuity concerning foreign gods would eventually lead to its downfall. It is to these critics that we turn to next.

The Rise of Prophecy and Religious Orthodoxy

Prophecy was a common feature of most ancient near-Eastern religious traditions. Contrary to popular understanding, the main function of prophets was not to divine the future so much as to offer a religious critique of state policy. The future-looking aspects of prophecy were usually conditional: if you continue to pursue this policy, then God will do this. They were, in a very real sense, the world's first political commentators.

One important fact is that by the 9th century both Israel and Judah were worshipping YHWH as their primary God. While I've been focussing on the differences of the two states up until now, I should properly emphasise the overwhelming cultural similarities that permitted many prophets to have successful careers (if that is the right word) in both kingdoms. Early prophets such as Hosea, Amos and Isaiah preached on both sides of the border and their proclamations were directed against both kingdoms. It's difficult to tell exactly what differences existed in the religious outlook of the two kingdoms, but it is apparent that the commonalities ran deep enough for "southern" prophets to have received a wide audience for their particular brand of doom-saying amongst the people of the north. And it is indeed true that the majority of their anger was directed against the northern elite and their perceived sinfulness.

Common to each of these prophets was the belief that Israel (or - more specifically - its ruling class) had shunned YHWH by erecting shrines to foreign gods, by abandoning the plight of the poor, by forming alliances with foreign powers and generally disregarding their religious and political responsibilities. This seems as much a reaction to the growing cosmopolitanism of Israel as anything else. The stature of these early prophets cannot be reliably ascertained, but tradition generally paints them as rural folk called by God (reluctantly at times) to bring the powers-that-be into line. They, in a sense, represent the growing divide separating the rural, perhaps more traditional parts of the land with their urban rulers, a theme that has recurred throughout history and that I will explore more fully in my next post. For now, though, it need only be noted that the early prophets do genuinely seem to have been reactionary forces against the creeping decadence and internationalism of the ruling elite. The punishment for such intransigence would - the prophets assure us - be swift and brutal, a judgement borne out by subsequent history.

At this time (8th century BC) we can probably safely assume that little of the Bible as we know it had been written down. Evidence for widespread literacy is extremely sparse for the region at the time, and even the books of these early prophets suggest a reliance on oral - not written - transmission. The prophets are generally commanded to speak the words of God rather than write them down, and there is evidence from within the books themselves that they were not to be collated textually (by the "disciples" of the prophets) until a later date (e.g. Isaiah 8:16. Isaiah 1:1 indicates the book was not written by Isaiah himself). The kind of social forces that both centralised and sacralised the status of the written text in ancient Israel (and which began to produce the texts of the Bible as we know it) wouldn't arrive until the 7th century BC. This, however, begs the question of what the Judean prophets were basing their substance of proclamations on, given the lack of some definitive text from which to derive a fixed theology.

In truth, the idea that there was some pristine state of religious orthodoxy from which the northern kings had fallen (and that the early prophets were looking to reinstate) is plainly anachronistic and plainly more representative of the ideology of later Biblical authors than of lived history. We know from certain archaeological finds (for example, the graffiti at Khirbet el-Qom) that the religious orthodoxy of later periods had yet to emerge by the 8th century BC. We can probably still assume widespread henotheistic practices at this time, so the early prophets - to the extent that the words attributed to them in the Bible were actually theirs and not the product of later redaction - might well have been in a minority position in their insistence on the monolatrous worship of YHWH. Whatever the case, the cosmopolitan nature of Israel - including the syncretisistic worship of foreign gods - may not have been a matter of widespread controversy among the populace at the time, and it's unfair to uncritically accept the judgements levelled by the prophets that the kings who oversaw such prosperity in the region at the time were in any way degenerate for drawing on foreign sources for religious inspiration. It would be similarly remiss to assume that the eventual fall of Israel can be traced to its faithlessness or - in the words of Hosea - its "whoredom" to foreign powers.

It is to the fall of Israel - and its influence on the formation of the Bible - that we will look at in the next post.

The Socio-Historical Background of the Bible: Part 1 (Pre-1000 BC)

A New People:

Although the origins of ancient Israel remain obscure and have yet to be definitively settled by the science of archaeology, my own account of its history begins with a cataclysmic wave of migrations that changed forever the face of the Mediterranean. This event, known as the Bronze Age collapse, saw cities and civilizations topple like dominoes under the massive influx of people displaced displaced by earlier, unknown events to the north and west of modern day Israel. Little is known about who these people were, where they came from or what caused them to move (though any number of environmental and political causes have been invoked), but what we do know is that they left in their wake a wave of destruction and political upheaval that forever changed the course of near-Eastern history.

The relevance to the history of Israel begins in around 1250 BC, when some of these refugees landed on the Gaza coast and began a slow - but thorough - military campaign of destruction. Virtually all major archaeological sites from this region at this time exhibit scars of violence, and many cities were subsequently left abandoned for centuries. Again, little is known about the origin of the people responsible, but lexicographical and archaeological evidence seems to suggest a Greek, Minoan or perhaps even Balkan origin. Whatever the case, the people who descended from these invaders and settled in the region came to be known to the Biblical authors as "Philistines", the origin of our modern name for the region, "Palestine". There were two major consequences so far as the history of Israel is concerned.

The first is that the tenuous Egyptian grip on the region was severely weakened by the incursions of these "Sea People" (as they were known to the Egyptians). The loose confederacy of city states (known as Canaan and overseen by the Egyptian state) was fractured and smaller states emerged in their wake. Among them was a people known as "Israel", which - according to the Merneptah Steele - was subsequently attacked and defeated by the Egyptian Pharaoh, along with the other rebelling states who had briefly formed an opportunistic coalition against him. This can be dated to around 1205 BC and is the first archaeological evidence we have for the existence of Israel as an independent people (and the grammar of the inscription makes it clear that we are talking about a people rather than a particular geographical region). The Egyptian influence in the region was never subsequently restored to its earlier zenith.

The second major consequence concerns how the people of Israel came to inhabit the specific region that they did. With the arrival of the Philistines on the Gaza coast, the previous inhabitants (known to historians as "Canaanites", though whether they would have self-identified as such is unclear) were displaced and made refugees themselves. They were forced east from the relatively fertile lands of the Gaza strip into the rather more desolate and sparsely inhabited highlands of modern-day Israel. Such people likely came from different (though highly-related) cultures and the pressing question of how they might peacefully co-inhabit these new lands must have raised itself with great urgency very early on. Monotheism has been posited as a potential explanation for the political unification of this loosely affiliated population, but - as we shall see in future posts - there is scant evidence for widespread monotheism in Israel until around the 6th century BC, so we must look elsewhere for a solution. It is to this question - of how these displaced refugees might have come to form a new, cohesive culture in the highlands of Israel - that I turn to next.

A New Community:

The most important thing to note about the Israelite community from the time of its emergence in the 12th Century BC is not simply that it was derived from Canaanite culture, but that it was Canaanite culture. The archaeological sites from Israel at this time are almost completely indistinguishable from those of the wider cultural sphere. The pottery is the same, the dwellings are the same, the religious artifacts are the same... from the beginning, then, we must note that the earliest Israelites were distinguished from other nearby peoples in name only. What changed, then? How did the earliest Israelites come to differentiate themselves from the surrounding peoples? How did they come to be the Hebrews of the Old Testament?

This raises the wider question of what we might mean by "culture", and how it is that a new one comes into being. An important aspect of the emergence of any culture is the ability to distinguish it from others. To associate oneself with a certain culture is often, just as importantly, to distance oneself from a competing culture, and - as religious sectarianism has shown us - it is frequently those people with whom we share the most in common that we argue with most virulently. The tribalism of pre-monarchic Israel (see next post) gives fairly clear evidence of a struggle for self-definition in a region that was otherwise culturally homogeneous. To quote from this book:

Boundaries are marked because communities interact in some way or other with entities from which they are, or wish to be, distinguished (see Barth, 1969). The manner in which they are marked depends entirely upon the specific community in question. Some, like national or administrative boundaries, may be statutory and enshrined in law. Some may be physical, expressed, perhaps, by a mountain range or a sea. Some may be racial or linguistic or religious. But not all boundaries, and not all the components of any boundary, are so objectively apparent. They may be thought of, rather, as existing in the minds of their beholders.

In contrast to many other religions of the ancient Near-East, the religion of the Israelites eventually became "exclusionary" - that is, one which asserted vehemently (as a central tenet of its practice, in fact) its independence from other religions, and which steadfastly refused to adopt the gods and customs of other peoples. This is in contrast to the religions of the Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Babylonians etc., which were syncretistic and adopted foreign gods and customs with relative ease. At these very earliest stages of Israel, however, such exclusionary monotheism had yet to evolve, and archaeological evidence suggests a much more pluralistic form of religious practice existed for much of its early history (see next section).

One advantage that the early Israelites had in terms of the potential for cultural differentiation relates to the physical geography of their land. Its southern regions especially were comparatively isolated, inaccessible and infertile, which seemed to spare them from the need to directly resist - or assimilate - the neighbouring cultures that may have otherwise swamped them. That is, because the land of Israel was a comparatively unattractive prospect for migratory settlement, it was possible for there to exist the kind of uninterrupted social development necessary for the eventual emergence of a distinct culture. Once this distinct culture emerged, it was buttressed enough from the wider world for long enough for it to become ingrained. Beyond this point, the culture of the ancient Israelites was able to be preserved even after the land itself was lost.

On the other hand, the land of Israel also existed at the nexus of several important trade routes, where roads to and from Europe, Africa and the Middle East have long existed. For this reason, it was seen for most of its history as a strategically important expanse of land for the world's largest empires, who passed it between themselves as they rose and fall. From Egypt, to Assyria, to Babylon, to Macedonia to Rome: Israel was occupied by them all. In many respects, the progress of ancient Israelite history can be viewed as a series of reactions to imperial conquest, much of which remains ossified in our Bibles. It's simply impossible to understand Biblical theology - both in the Old and the New Testaments - without due appreciation for the way conquered populations react to their occupation. The question of collective identity - and how it might be sheltered and expressed in the face of such massive powers - recurs time and time again in our Biblical texts, and will be a central theme in these posts.

It's this quirk of geography - inaccessible enough to preserve indigenous culture, central enough to attract the interest of much larger states - that defines ancient Israel. In an otherwise tiny and vulnerable part of the world, periodically beset by the imperial designs of the states around them, a culture was able to emerge and preserve itself for 3,000 years and counting. This stands as a remarkable feat. Yet quite how or why it was that the early Israelites came to develop such a distinct culture - centred around the increasingly parochial worship of a local God - remains something of a mystery and one deserving of some consideration. Although it is now impossible to identify precisely what happened in the region that may have led to the formation of a distinct culture in ancient Israel, some educated guesses can be offered.

For example, the uncertain and fractious political state of the region spurred the necessity of political centralisation - in the form of states - that hadn't really existed prior to the scaling back of Egyptian influence. The Bible, in the book of Judges, depicts this time as one of widespread lawlessness and petty warfare, overseen by men who might most adequately be described as tribal chieftains. While historical-critical scholarship has not been kind in its judgment of the historical accuracy of this book, what we can infer from the evidence of this period seems to paint a congruous picture of social and political fractiousness. Whatever states that existed in the region at the time were loose confederations centred around independent cities, and none has left us any signs of being particularly dominant in the region. In such an uncertain environment, one can assume that there came to be a growing necessity for the people of the land of Israel (as in other nearby regions) to coalesce around some central authority (priests, king etc.) so as to ensure social stability and protection from the chaos around them. With the centralisation of authority comes the establishment of prescribed sets of behaviours and conditions that the polity must follow. These, in turn, become reified as laws and rituals, which - in the process of differentiation from neighbouring cultures - begin to take on a unique and distinctive form.

The development of Biblical Law was a long process, however, and there is little evidence to suggest the existence of such a centralised legal system in the region prior to 1000 BC (the gradual emergence of Biblical Law will be explored in future posts). The creation and enforcement of law requires a strong, legitimised system of government, usually under the auspices of a king, and it seems unlikely that any of the pre-Israelite tribes possessed the sophistication of social organisation necessary to enforce anything but the most limited tribal laws. On there other hand, while there is an undeniable degree of continuity between the (much later) Biblical laws and other ancient near-Eastern legal systems, there was apparently the foreshadowing of some important boundaries between the Israelite population and the surrounding populations even at this early stage.

The complete absence of pig bones in early Israelite sites, for example, seems to indicate the presence of a universal cultural taboo that might be adequately described (presuming it was centrally enforced) as a "law". Such a taboo may have emerged as a mere accident of history (did the conditions of the new land make it prohibitively difficult to raise pigs, for example?) but, over time, such relatively minor and arbitrary differences become sacralised as a culture seeks to define itself in opposition to others. There needn't have been any rational reason for the emergence of the prohibition on eating pork meat, but it did come - in time - to serve as an important "boundary" separating the Israelites from their neighbours. The subsequent addition of other stringent laws - and related religious observances - would also serve as important identity markers, denoting ever more clearly the boundaries between the Israelites and their neighbouring cultures.

These Israelites were still ethnically and linguistically indistinguishable from the Canaanites, though, and neither the Hebrew language nor its people ever radically diverged from those of other Semitic populations. Given these similarities - and the absence of well-defined boundaries, such kings, laws or customs at this early stage -  in what ways (beyond the taboo on consuming pig flesh) could the Israelites be said to represent an identifiably separate population in the region? One potentially unique aspect of early Israelite culture may be that of their religion. That is the topic of our next section.

A New Religion:

Like all other Near-Eastern cultures, it seems that the early Israelites were (to a surprisingly recent date) polytheistic. While the exact form of this polytheism - and the kind of practices it might have entailed - are widely disputed, we know that even well into the mid-first millennium BC the Israelites retained a belief in the existence of the pantheon of gods.

In Canaanite theology, the god "El" was the head of all the gods. He had 70 children, each of which was allotted his own land, and each of which represented the gods of different people. The earliest Israelites retained this mythology, and so the first patron god of Israel was El (as evidenced by their patronymic title Israel). It seems evident that El's wife, Asherah, was also widely worshiped in Israel at this time, though the evidence in somewhat disputed (see here for a thorough discussion). The existence of early Israelite names derived from the Babylonian God "Baal", and the Bible's persistent denunciations of his shrines, would seem to indicate that the worship of this God was also common, though perhaps not at such an early date. Similarly, we know from the Book of Kings (2 Kings 23) that a plethora of other gods - such as Molech, Astarte, Chemosh and Milcom - were being worshipped in and around Judah during the 7th century, and it would be unreasonable to assume that none of these practices originated in a much earlier period. In any case, the fact that the earliest Israelites worshiped a multitude of gods is not seriously in dispute.

Out of such plurality, however, the worship of one god over all others began to emerge. It seems that Yahweh, one of El's 70 children, came to be adopted as the patron god of certain of these pre-monarchic tribes at a relatively early date, even if this remains a far cry from the more recognisable religious system of later centuries. Yahweh's origins as a "second-tier" god - one among a much wider pantheon - are still in evidence in the Bible, for example Ps 82:1 and especially Deut 32:8-9. The earliest Yahweh worshipers would probably best be described as "henotheistic" (believing in a pantheon of gods but with the preferential worship of just one), with the practice of monolatry (much less monotheism) almost certainly not coming into effect until much later. Over time, with the decline of the Northern Kingdom and the continuing assertion of Israelite independence from the wider religious culture of the region, Yahweh would come to absorb the qualities of other Gods (for instance, Baal's role as a storm God and slayer of sea monsters), until the ultimate conflation of El and Yahweh sometime in the early first millenium BC. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Not much more can be said about the earliest strains of the Israelite religion, but we will fill in the pieces as we progress forward in time. Nonetheless, we have here already the foundations of the religious beliefs that would - over the next millenia - give rise to Judaism, Jesus and the Bible: we have a relatively isolated culture, closely related to those around it, that slowly came to realise itself as a new and distinct people, overseen by an ever more narrowly defined coterie of gods. It is to the emergence of the Israelite monarchy, the split kingdoms and the mythologies they produced that I will turn to in my next post.

Constitutionalism and Eisegesis

With the news that the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the "Individual Mandate" centrepiece of Obama's Healthcare bill, political commentators on both sides of the aisle have suddenly found themselves transformed into expert constitutional scholars. Even Mitt Romney feels comfortable asserting the mandate "was unconstitutional", despite - and in contrast with the president - having never formally studied law. What is going on? What makes so many people assume that they are qualified to make pronouncements on what is or is not constitutional?

In part I think it can be traced back to the revered status that the US constitution and its authors hold in US public life. As I mentioned in a previous post, religious traditions that produce a central canon of texts (and I'm thinking here especially of the Abrahamic traditions) come to treat this canon as an object of worship and reverence in and of itself, forming "a largely insuperable doctrine that all subsequent developments in the tradition must not find themselves to be in conflict with". Given the progressive mythologisation of the Founding Fathers and the events that led to the penning of the constitution in American political discourse, a similar process of sacralisation seems to be at work here. The US constitution is not merely seen as a foundational legal text, but rather an inviolable prescription forged and passed down by demi-gods, whose scope of wisdom and moral perspicacity remains completely beyond the possibility of reproach. None of this has anything to do with the mundane process of interpreting law (constitutionalism proper), but rather the incessant American drive to idealise and sacralise every aspect of American history that led them (in a distinctly teleological sense) to become "the greatest nation in the world".

In practice, this makes the constitution the putative foundation and inescapable focus of every political ideology that exists in the US today. As the political ideologue imagines his beliefs to be unequivocally "good" and also imagines the life and works of the Founding Fathers to be unequivocally "good", then it stands to reason that his beliefs must be in perfect agreement with the text of the US constitution. Given this, those who adhere to a different ideology (let us say, the president) must hold beliefs that are inherently at odds with the text of the constitution, and therefore any legislation passed to further this ideology (let us say, healthcare reform) is viewed as an act deliberately conceived to assault the sanctity of the constitution. As such, the political ideologue feels a keen sense of offense at this act of blasphemy and feels justified in accusing his opponents of deliberately violating and undermining the central document of his Republic. Hence the current state of political rhetoric in the US, where every act of governance from Obama can be denounced as "unconstitutional" with a straight face.

Is unclear whether the political ideologue actually believes in the truth of such denouncements or whether it is mere political rhetoric, but it's clear in either case that he has not derived his outrage from a clear and objective reading of the US constitution. Such a reading would require a process of honest constitutional exegesis, and the real problem is that truly impartial exegesis - of any text - is almost completely impossible, and can lead one to many different (but equally valid) conclusions depending on one's starting conditions. When we read the Bible, for instance, and want to know the "meaning" of a passage, there are many different approaches we can take and different exegetical approaches have led to a myriad of different interpretations of the text. With "profane" texts (that is, texts not considered to be inviolably sacred) the ambiguities of language and the attendant exegetical issues are not serious: small differences in meaning don't lead to radically different understandings of the texts. When one is dealing with a text that is highly esteemed and fetishised within a given community, however, the overwhelming desire of the members of this community to find their own beliefs articulated within this foundational text precludes any possibility of an objective, disinterested exegesis of the text. Rather, the beliefs of these members are read into (rather than derived from) the foundational text, and it becomes more proper to call this process one of textual eisegesis instead.

In this way, it is firmly my belief that the progression and content of Christian theology, for example, is for the most part not shaped by the Biblical text. The sheer size of the combined texts and the irreducible plurality of views contained within (different authors from different places writing at different times...) makes any attempt to create a coherent theology that is not in conflict with any aspect of the text completely impossible. This is especially true where theology attempts to engage with more modern ethical concerns that the Biblical authors simply could not have foreseen. The conservative Christian may claim that his opposition to abortion, stem-cell research or gay marriage are based on Biblical injunctions, but it's plain for all to see that the Bible is completely silent on all these issues. The Christian here has plainly arrived at his conclusions for his own reasons (or lack thereof) and has then - ex post facto - gone in search of Biblical passages that might validate them. As an example, Jeremiah 1:4-5 is often cited as a Biblical injunction against abortion, though it is plain that the most natural reading of this passage bears no relation to abortion, as evidenced by the fact that it has never been interpreted in such a manner until recent times (i.e. when abortion became such a central political issue for American evangelicals). 

As it is true for the Bible, so it is also true for the constitution. As great as the authors of this text may have been, they were clearly not omniscient and plainly could not have foreseen every issue that the Supreme Court has been asked to rule on since the time they wrote it. There are different ways that the Supreme Court judges may interpret the constitution when forming their rulings, none of which are perfect or inherently superior to the alternatives. Some, for example, may claim to be strict constructionists or textualists, believing that they are taking into consideration nothing but the original wording of the text, though it's apparent that such a ideal is - in practice - completely unrealisable. The constitution only extremely rarely directly mentions any of the issues that are presented before the court, so when deciding on (for example) the constitutionality of Obamacare, in lieu of finding any direct injunctions for or against the provision of healthcare in the text of the constitution, at least some creativity or imagination will be required in its interpretation in order to provide a verdict. Abortion, yet again, serves as a clear example. The constitution has nothing to say about the issue of abortion, so Roe v. Wade was decided under the privacy clause of the 14th amendment, despite the fact that the right to privacy is plainly not the central moral or legal issue in question where abortion is concerned.  

Still others may claim that the constitution is a "living tree", that should be interpreted liberally in light of the development of public opinion, though such flexibility undermines the need for such a central, inviolable legal document in the first place. In practice, the brevity of the constitution vis-a-vis the complexity of the issues brought before the Supreme Court means that the judges will - consciously or otherwise - be forced to read their own prejudices and expectations into the text in order to arrive at a conclusion.

However, even when allowing for the inherent and inescapable need for such judicial eisegesis, we must note that the political leanings of the Supreme Court justices directly influence the decisions they make to an unjustifiably high degree. In one study, simply noting the affiliations of the judges allowed the researchers to correctly predict the rulings of the court in 83% of cases, far higher "than forecasts made by legal experts as well as those made by algorithms that take into consideration the content of the cases". When the affiliations of the judges are so strong as to render the "content of the cases" purely incidental, it's clear that we have a problem and cannot claim that the text of the constitution is decisive or unambiguous. In reality, the very fact that Supreme Court judges - who are appointed by congress - can be designated as either "liberal" or "conservative" makes a mockery of the concept of the separation of powers, and is a sad indictment on the American political system.

So far from representing some clear, understandable foundation for all of American law, the American constitution has been reduced - by everyone from politicians to Supreme Court justices - into a mere blank-page, carrying neither authority nor meaning, onto which all of one's hopes, fears and prejudices may be penned without hindrance. Such is the danger - and the inevitable outcome - of sacralising a text borne of fallible human beings.