Justice and Eschatology

There is no religious tradition that I am familiar with - certainly among the so-called "literate" religious traditions - that have not been forced to confront, in one sense or another, the problem of justice. There is, to begin with, the intimate relationship that always pertained between gods and the provision of "laws" in the ancient world. Whatever power was vested in the king was invariably justified on the basis of his unique connection to the gods, and whatever laws he enacted were said to have been delivered, with his mediation, by the gods. The link between God and the authority of Law (or, more generally, morality itself) has persisted in the Abrahamic traditions down to this very day.

More than simply acting as a legitimising conduit for legal authority, however, religions have also been forced to confront the problem of justice as it presents itself beyond the mere provision of laws. It has long been recognised, for example, that many evil people have prospered where good have suffered, thus originating the long-standing quandaries that exist at the heart of theodicy. The problem has been tackled in many different ways throughout history, though it must be said that modern resolutions to the problem of theodicy - which I will address shortly - took a long time to emerge. The earlier solutions were rather more "crude", if that is a fair judgement to impose, and reflect a vastly different view of humanity's relationship with the divine.

In the ancient world, gods were heavily anthropomorphic and believed to have motivations and failings almost indistinguishable from those of human beings. Initially in all religious traditions, Ernst Cassirer argues, the "gods" represented nothing more than the instantiation of ephemeral - yet deeply affecting - moments of "spontaneous feeling", that can be encountered in "every impression that man receives, every wish that stirs in him, every hope that lures him [and] every danger that threatens him"¹. In this there was no sensation - nor no physical object which may give rise to such a sensation - that could not have been treated as some manifestation of the divine. In such a way, as we find in the ancient Greek culture and many others, every feeling and every physical facet present within the human world could find itself deified. The next stage (Cassirer here is using Hermann Usener's tripartite scheme) involves the reification of these "momentary gods" into discrete, permanent entities, that are capable of persisting even in the absence of the phenomena which gave rise to them. It is in this stage that the gods were vested with (generally) human personalities, their essential characters furnished by rich sets of mythological histories and motivations. It is at this stage (that all literate religions traditions that I am familiar with have graduated to) that the gods could be worshipped and entreated as one might a king. 
 
If the gods at this level of religious development were heavily anthropomorphic, it should come as no surprise that their basic motivations and behaviours were - by modern standards at least - relatively base and capricious. The favour of the gods could generally be one with the provision of ritual sacrifices, which were not merely symbolic but rather genuine gifts to be consumed by the deity in question (even the OT God consumed the burnt sacrifices in the form of their "pleasing odour" - see Numbers 28 etc.). The gods, in their turn, could react to this human supplication by visiting various favours or abominations upon the worshippers depending on how well the rituals were performed. Note, though, that for all the caprice that could be shown by the ancient gods in their disposition towards human beings, it was invariably assumed that the visitation of divine intervention - for good or for bad - was somehow conditional on the behaviour of human beings. Proper conduct before the gods would deliver blessings, improper conduct would deliver curses. This rather prosaic formula was never questioned, certainly not in terms of the reasonableness or otherwise of the divine requests. If calamity struck, it must have - in some sense - been the fault of those in the community who had failed in their duty towards the relevant gods. 

This is brought into particularly sharp focus in the treatment of theodicy in the the early Old Testament texts. The theodicy of the Book of Kings for example - and other such Deuteronomic texts - was predicated entirely on the basis of Israel's faithfulness to Yahweh. Where they had approached him with due deference, and not provoked his jealousy through the worship of other gods, they prospered. Where they had abandoned this single, overriding duty, Yahweh in his wrath saw fit to use his power - via the intermediary of foreign powers - to visit wanton destruction on all the land. Even where the course of history failed to fit this rather simple pattern, the author(s) of Kings simply explained it in terms of deferred punishment for earlier crimes (e.g. 2 Kings 24:26). For the Judahites in the 7th century, then, the logic of divine justice was rather simple: obedience and unwavering deference to the will of Yahweh was the path to prosperity, all other paths led to ruin.

This simple logic was, however, severely undermined by the Babylonian invasion of the early 6th century, less than three decades after Josiah first launched his religious reforms. If the Judahites had done everything within their power to abolish the shrines and places of worship devoted to other gods, then why had Yahweh seen fit to launch the armies of Babylon against them? What more could they have done? The questioning of divine justice appears prominently in the Biblical texts here for the first time, especially in the books of Ezekiel and Lamentations. There was the very real sense of anguish in these texts that Yahweh had acted in a distinctly unjust way, in plain contradistinction to the pliant and dutiful acceptance of divine whim in the earlier texts. For some authors (for example, the second Deuteronomist) the theology needn't be amended: as mentioned above, the horrors visited upon the Judahites were merely a sign of deferred punishment for the sins of earlier generations. For other authors, however, this explanation would not suffice and they were drawn increasingly to explanations outside of the Hebrew tradition to explain the otherwise gratuitous nature of the injustices they had suffered.

It is the period after the Babylonian exile that gave us much of the so-called "Wisdom" literature in the Bible. Although much of this literature plainly sees itself as forming a continuum with earlier Yahwistic traditions (e.g. those of the Torah), it is also clear that the wider Wisdom tradition from which it emerged had a rather more international origin, and that Wisdom philosophies could be readily found in most near-Eastern cultures at the time. Rejecting - at least in part - the preceding cosmology of conflicting, parochial, anthropomorphic gods who were entirely constrained to very specific regions and / or duties, Wisdom philosophies took a rather more secular attitude towards the world. They searched for universal truths and rationales, largely detached from any specific theological premises. The rational order of the of the world - including the order of justice - could now be explored in ways obviating the need for officially sanctioned religious practice.

It was this search for such truths - in the context of divine justice - that gave us, for example, the Book of Job, a fairly sophisticated and honest look at the problem of evil. In contrast to earlier texts - and the theologies that were previously typical to the near-East - Yahweh is no longer an anthropic figure who can be assuaged by mere ritual or sacrifice, but rather a transcendent and eternal figure, for whom the struggles of human existence are comparatively trivial. That is not to say that Yahweh existed entirely beyond or outside of the everyday struggles of humanity, but rather that the human relationship to the divine needed to be completely rethought. Yahweh, suddenly, existed on a plane of time and space which absented him from the possibility of direct and immediate entreaty (in the form of sacrifice etc.) and who must now be approached with rather a longer view in mind. Whatever misfortunes may befall you from day to day, the Book of Job seems to say, keep it in perspective: in terms of the eternally transcendent nature of the deity with whom you wish to maintain a relationship, your daily troubles do not count for much. It is at this point that we start to get a clear indication of a belief in the afterlife in Hebrew literature and the conterminous belief that one's relationship was Yahweh could extend beyond the limits of the here and now. That is, whatever injustices that might be meted out over human time scales could surely be rectified over divine time scales. Psalm 49:15 and Job 19:25-26 are good indications of this kind of belief first emerging.

With time, these rather vague and half-formed intuitions of the afterlife became reified into something far more specific. In the context of Judaism, we can evince the emergence of two related kinds of belief in the Hellenistic period between around 332 and 63 BC: namely, the belief in an imminent eschatology and the belief in bodily resurrection. Both were intimately related to conceptions of justice. The former was, from the outset, linked with prophecy and revelation, generally penned in the name of ancient prophets. The Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch are good examples of this kind of genre. The eschatology in question was generally that of the imposition of a coming divine intervention that would effectively end (or cause a sharp break with) history. Sometimes this was imagined in purely heavenly terms, sometimes it was imagined as the definitive imposition of divine will on Earth. In either case, the eschaton would mark the cessation of the tyranny of the powerful on Earth: for the oppressed, the belief in a coming eschaton was essentially conceived as a future antidote to their powerlessness in the present. The evil of the powers that be would be finally and forever banished from the Earth, and those who remained would be granted the justice denied to them for so long.

A conterminous belief was that of bodily resurrection, which seems to have been occasioned largely by the Maccabean revolt in 166 BC, and presented in the Books of Maccabees. Those who participated in the revolt noted acutely the injustice of the fact that the slain - though offering everything to the cause - had not lived to see their revolution to its final fruition. Passages such as 2 Mc. 7:11 and 14:46 give clear indication of the belief that the bodies of those who had perished might be resurrected in the future by Yahweh. Note that such passages constitute the belief in a literal bodily resurrection: to the extent that one's bones persisted, it was not beyond the power of Yahweh to cover them once more with flesh. More importantly, though, this belief - as with the belief in a coming eschaton - was predicated by a belief in the injustice of the present world that would be rectified by Yahweh in the world to come. The Jews ceased believing in the possibility of Yahweh administering justice by intervening in history, and rather started to believe in the possibility of Yahweh administering justice by ending history.

While it's difficult to completely recapitulate the philosophy of Jesus with any confidence, it seems relatively clear that such eschatological beliefs - like John the Baptist before him - were central to his world view. The earliest Christian texts - the authentic letters of Paul, gMark and the putative Q Gospel - all have clearly identifiable eschatological emphases and it's difficult to make sense of the fervour of the early Christian community without the presence of the belief in a coming eschaton. For Jesus, it seems, the iniquities of his age (and there were a great many of those, to be sure) constituted the mere presaging of the coming "Kingdom of God". The current age was one dominated by evil, yet the future age would be one dominated by good. Hence, those who resisted the temptations of the current age (i.e. those who declined the trappings of wealth and power) would be those to profit most in the coming age. As Jesus himself was said to have put it, "who are first will be last, and the last will be first" (Mk. 10:31). In other words, the problems of injustice in the Kingdom of Man would soon be rectified in the coming Kingdom of God.

Resurrection held a similarly important place in the beliefs of the earliest Christians. For them the resurrection of Jesus was not a sign of his divinity and his uniquely divine constitution, but rather the "first fruits" (as Paul put it) of a more general resurrection to come: that is, even those who had died in the age of injustice would still be present to enjoy the "fruits" of the age of justice to come. The horrors of the present age - including the ongoing travails of Roman imperialism - would come to an end at the moment of the parousia, and the dead and living alike would be resurrected to heaven (1 Thess 4:17). As a consequence, calls towards forceful rebellion against the forces of Rome seem to have been completely absent from early Christianity, in contradistinction to other Jewish movement of the 1st century which often took on a more militant edge. Jesus, for example, is depicted as advocating the dutiful payment of tax to the Roman empire (Mk 12:13-17) despite the fact that the onerous Roman system of taxation frequently rendered Palestinian agriculturalists of the first century destitute. Paul, for his part, advocates "subject[ion] to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established" (Rom 13:1), ignoring the disenfranchisement that God's chosen people were experiencing under the imperial yoke. Whatever prospects existed at the time for the provision of justice were now entirely out of the hands of ordinary people, and had become entirely vested in the eschatological return of Jesus. 

As the parousia continued to be interminably delayed against all expectations, however, and the prophecies of the first generations of Christians predicting a return of the Lord before "some who are standing here... taste death" (Mt. 23:36) failed to be realised, a different theological tact was required. Already by the time we reach the Gospel of John, we witness an almost total de-emphasis of eschatological expectations among the early Christian communities and a corresponding rise in the belief of "eternal life". Borrowing heavily from Hellenistic conceptions of the immortality of the soul and the persistence of one's spirit after death, Christians came to abandon the more Jewish conception of bodily resurrection at some definite period in the future, and came rather to embrace the idea of a spiritual resurrection at the moment of death. Justice remained the sole domain of God, but now the judgement of the good and the wicked had been entirely removed from the earthly realm. Whatever prospects existed for justice would no longer be realised here at some historical moment Earth, but rather in the timeless realm of heaven. Such beliefs were to remain normative in Christianity, and would also emerge in Islam, where eschatological expections (such that they are) are now entirely confined to speculations concerning the nature of heaven and hell: the concept justice in these faiths must now be considered to exist completely outside the earthly realm.

Note, then, the progressive abstraction of justice in the history of the Abrahamic faiths. The theology which originated as a means of explaining earthly injustice has been entirely translated to idle speculations concerning the nature of alternative worlds. God's justice is no longer to be expected in this world, but rather at the moment of some timeless, dimensionless eschaton that we may only enter upon death. While this view in some ways delays the problems of theodicy (in the sense that apparent injustices will eventually be righted on a long enough time scale) it invokes a sense of justice that is far too attenuated to be of any value to us in this life, in this universe. Where injustice exists, the idea that such injustices will be addressed by God on some different metaphysical plain at some point in the indefinite, atemporal future can surely offer us little consolation. In any case, such eschatological beliefs overlook the very real fact that we can already construct the future direction of the universe and what will happen to us when we die, and that such constructions leave very little room for Gods or heavens.

Upon death, of course, our body will decay. The elements in our body will be broken down and reused in other living organisms. We can expect such a process, such a recycling of the elements of life, to continue for at least a billion years after we leave this planet. By this time, the growing, slowly dying sun will be 10% hotter than at present, potentially triggering a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth and transforming it into a hellish sister planet of Venus. Whether or not life is capable of existing on Earth by then, within 5-7 billion years the sun will have ballooned into a red giant, engulfing Venus and Mercury and extending its diameter all the way to the orbit of the Earth. By the time it explodes, the sun will have already transformed the Earth into a barren, unimaginably hot world, drowning in molten metal. During this time, our galaxy will have collided with the nearby Andromeda galaxy, potentially banishing what is left of our solar system to the obscure fringes of our galaxy's mighty arms.

Within one trillion years, the galaxies in our local super cluster will likely converge, forming in the process a super-galaxy. Within two trillion years, as the universe expands ever faster, all galaxies outside our local cluster will move away from us at ever faster speeds until the point they start to recede at such speeds that they become red-shifted beyond any possibility of detection. Ours will then be an island universe: any future observers will have no way of knowing that other galaxies exist beyond their own. For the next 100 trillion years, star formation will proceed as normal, until the point at which all the available stellar fuel is used up. The bigger, brighter, more spectacular stars will be the first to become absent from the universe, their cooling cores - the white dwarfs - the only remaining evidence of their existence. Eventually even the small, stable red dwarfs will dwindle out of existence, and nothing material will be left in our galaxy beyond the cold, black ashes of once brilliantly burning stars. Eventually even the ashes will decay, with atomic nuclei breaking apart and eventually even the protons themselves decaying into a weakly interacting soup of photons and leptons. About 10¹⁰⁰ years from now, no matter will exist in the universe at all, whatever energy is left will be entirely bound up in photons, neutrinos and leptons, all rushing past each other at the speed of light, completely oblivious to each other. Here the universe will reach heat death, with all signs that there was ever a universe of such beauty and complexity as the one we see around us today will be completely lost forever. We are bound to return to the formless void from which we sprang.

It may sound grim, but this is the only future - the only eschaton - on which we can reliably pin our. For all the religious speculation on the topic, we now know through scientific investigation the fate to which we are all careering. In this bleak scenario, even concerns of justice reach their ultimate apotheosis. For here, in this cold, undifferentiated, inexorable soup - a fate which nothing and no-one can hope to escape - there exists no possibility of greatness or mediocrity, no possibility of good or evil. All shall forever be a single, undifferentiated unity and therein lies our prospects for eschatological justice: here, in the final equation, all shall be equal.

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1) Language and Myth, p. 18.

Is the Universe "Rational"?

It is a curious, surely not insignificant observation that the universe appears (or appears to appear) to us in a comprehensible way. Children, for example, prior to any specific instruction, are capable of discerning emotions on faces, finding patterns in numbers and predicting with admirable precision the path that a ball makes through the air. As an adult living in the 21st century, we can be similarly amazed by the extent to which our universe seems to make itself understandable enough to us for its behaviour to be expressed in the language of mathematics. It is difficult not to be taken in by the elegant efficiency of Newtonian laws, for example, which compress the behaviour of physical phenomena into a few simple formulae, each containing just a handful of variables. With such examples in mind, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the universe is ordered according to a rational plan, designed to obey laws amenable to human understanding. 

It is this conclusion, certainly, that many theologians would like us to reach. With all other avenues of "natural theology" blocked off by the march of scientific progress, the role of God in nature has since been resigned to the above observation: that the universe is, and could only ever be, the way it is due to the premeditated design of some rational creator. Superficially, the argument doesn't appear to be without merit: even some non-theistic scientists have marvelled at the fact that the universe is comprehensible to us to the extent that it is. There is no inherent reason for the universe to have made itself comprehensible to us, so we are right to find something remarkable in the fact that we can explain certain facets of the universe with such extreme precision and, what is more, that these explanations appear to be true for all places at all times. Is this necessarily a sign that the universe is inherently rational, though?

One trouble with using the word "laws" to explain the behaviour of the universe is that we've inadvertently introduced an anthropic concept to explain otherwise inert, purposeless objects and events. A "law", of course, is something that is designed with forethought to control or modify the behaviour of people in a society. When we use "law" to describe physical phenomena, then, we inadvertently smuggle in a package of unintended theological implications. If there are "laws", afterall, and physical phenomena obey these "laws", then that immediately implies the existence of a law-maker who intended to control or modify the physical phenomena to facilitate the development of some teleological end. This a consequence of the poverty of the current terminology, and in lieu of replacing such terms with more teleologically neutral language, we must instead endeavour to explore why the "laws" of the universe are not the kind of "laws" that necessitate a law-maker.

The first observation to make is that all physical laws have necessarily been designed by human beings. The universe did not appear to us with any kind of comprehensible blueprint, so whatever regularities we observe in the universe have had to be mined from nature through years of dedicated observation and number-crunching. That is, if the "laws" of nature are presently clear, comprehensible and rational to us, they certainly weren't to the ancients, who were no less intelligent or perceptive than we are. So let us be clear on this: it is we who superimpose our "laws" onto the phenomena we observe in the universe, not the universe which imposes its inherently rational nature onto our consciousness. An example used by Stephen Hawking is to imagine the kind of laws a goldfish might create to explain his world from the confines of its bowl. It could (were it sufficiently clever) certainly invent some rules that were true from its vantage point (which would include the refraction of light as it hit the fishbowl, hence why the universe would appear to be inherently curved to the fish) but that these rules plainly wouldn't be universal for the simple reason that they probably would not be applicable to those who live beyond the confines of a fishbowl. Hawking uses this example to posit the idea that "there is no theory-independent concept of reality".¹ This is not to say that all attempts at an objective explanation of universal phenomena are futile, or that we should all collapse into solipsistic despair as prisoners of our own mind with no possibility of ever accessing "true" reality, but simply that all the physical "laws" we create are necessarily mere "approximations" of reality that constitute our attempts at imposing rationality upon nature, rather than the discernment of rationality in nature itself. This is why scientific theories can be supplanted despite never really being shown to be wrong (or definitively right): the latter theory simply constitutes a better approximation of reality than the one which preceded it.

Allow me to illustrate with an example, shamelessly cribbed from Isaac Asimov's Essay, The Relativity of Wrong. For most people in the ancient world, it was accepted wisdom that the world was flat. For the first several thousand years of human existence, people had no way of knowing that they actually lived upon the surface of a three dimensional sphere. We may smirk now at their naivete, but in truth they weren't far wrong. At the human scale, the curvature of the earth is extremely slight, almost exactly zero. When building a house or undertaking a car journey we can safely disregard the curvature of the Earth entirely: that is to say, to treat it as though it were flat and two-dimensional. We know now that the Earth is not flat, of course, but for most human endeavours, if we proceed under the assumption that it is, then we will not be penalised for it. In a purely pragmatic sense, the flat Earth theory is correct enough to correctly guide us upon the undertaking of most everyday activities.

Next it was realised that the Earth was actually three-dimensional in shape, and that if one started walking in one direction that one would eventually return to the point at which one started, rather than falling of the edge of the Earth. It was therefore presumed that the Earth was spherical in shape, a misapprehension shared by most people down to this very day. For although it is true that the Earth closely resembles a sphere, due to the influence of centrifugal forces it is actually wider around the equator than it is from pole to pole. Thus, although the spherical Earth theory is more correct than the flat Earth which preceded it (more correct in the sense that it is able to make accurate predictions for a wider variety of phenomena) it still fails to accurately depict the state of nature so as to conform to our best, most precise observations. Though the story doesn't even end here: according to Asimov at least, there is actually slightly more mass in the Earth's southern hemisphere than in its northern hemisphere, thus making it ever so slightly pear-shaped. So note the progress here: each theory along the way has been correct on its own terms, in the sense that it can be used accurately as the basis for some action or prediction, though there is also a definite progression towards being more "correct. It is clear, for example, that spherical Earth theory is more correct than the flat Earth theory, the distended sphere theory is more correct than the sphere theory and so on. As our body of evidence grows and changes, earlier theories come to be displaced by theories that better fit the evidence.

Another example - perhaps more pertinent to the topic at hand - is the progression in our understanding of the movement of the planets. It is the elegant, almost metronomic order of planetary orbits that epitomise the theologians insistence that this rationally comprehensible universe could only be the product of some divine watchmaker. Indeed, the regularity of the planetary movements through the sky have long been used by religious authorities as evidence of divinity in the universe. For the ancients - including the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Mayans and so on - the planets themselves were gods, their daily wandering across the sky associated with the personalities of the divine. Venus, for example, was commonly linked to gods of love and fertility in the ancient world. Again, it may be tempting to snigger at such naivete, but when we consider that the appearance cycle of Venus (the period during which it is visible in the night sky) occurs in periods of around 260 days - almost exactly the same period a human pregnancy takes - we can begin to see that the connection makes sense. In fact, doubtless the ancient Mayan theologians would have tried to tell us that the universe must be rationally ordered to some divine plan, because the simultaneity of the human reproduction cycle and the cycle of the fertility God in the sky is simply too perfect to be the result of mere chance or coincidence. Furthermore, the astrological tables drawn up by these ancient cultures could still be used today to predict the future positions of planets in the sky. Within the social context that they lived, the astrological "theories" the ancients proffered concerning the movement of the planets in the sky were perfectly rational and perfectly consistent with the data that they had so assiduously collated.

Next came the Greeks, who believed - for theological reasons as much as for scientific ones - that the universe must be ordered to according to perfect geometric principles, expressible in simple mathematical formulae. Ptolemy, rejecting the crass arbitrariness of astrological tables, took it upon himself to find some universal order in the movement of the planets during the sky, some pattern expressible in the perfect language of geometry. His solution was a geocentric model comprised of nested spheres and epicycles, based, he claimed, on over 800 years of observations. The model he proposed was in some sense an improvement on what came before it, and like the astrological tables of the ancients, we could still use Ptolemy's model today to predict the movement of planets relatively accurately for a period of at least some months or years (the accuracy of the more distant, slower moving planets would hold for longer than those of the inner planets, particularly Mercury, whose orbit wasn't well understood until the 20th century).

The next major development came with Nicolaus Copernicus who was the first to develop a heliocentric model of the solar system, and while again we can view it is an improvement over what came before it due to its correct placement of the sun at the centre of the solar system, it still contained a fatal inaccuracy that limited the long-term scope of its predictive powers. Like the Greeks before him, Copernicus believed that the universe must be order according to some perfect schema, namely one based on perfect circles. As the planets actually revolve along elliptic orbits, it wasn't until Isaac Newton elucidated his laws for the movement of the planets in his masterful Principia Mathematica that we had a relatively accurate depiction of our solar system that could be used to predict and explain the movement of the planets over a long period of time. In fact, Newton's theories proved to be so accurate that they are still used today to navigate spacecraft over a distance of millions of kilometres to within an astronomical hair's width of their intended target. In time, however, it was recognised that even Newton's theories fail under particularly extreme circumstances - e.g. in situations involving very high speeds or masses. Newtonian physics therefore came to be replaced by Einsteinian Relativity at the beginning of the 20th century, and even that may not mark the end of our story: the fundamental incompatibility of quantum mechanics and relativity (despite each proving to be powerfully accurate in their own fields of application) hints strongly at the need for the development of some newer theory, of which string theory is just one of the potential candidates.

So again note the development here: at each stage in the understanding of the shape of our planet or the behaviour of bodies in our solar system, human beings have been able to devise seemingly "rational" theories to explain the available observations, and all of the aforementioned were capable of making accurate predictions concerning future events. We must, however, be careful not to presume that our ability to express the patterns of physical behaviour in "rational" terms says anything about the inherent rationality of the universe. The ancient Babylonians could say, with some justification, that the universe must be inherently rational because the fertility god represented by the planet Venus was born and killed with such regularity (one which parallels the human reproductive cycle) that it could only be the work of a divine presence in the world. However, we moderns would be similarly justified in baulking at the suggestion that the explanation proffered by the Mayans could give us any genuine insight into the rational order (or lack thereof) of our universe, as we now know that any correlation between the heavenly cycles of Venus and the human reproductive cycle are entirely coincidental and share no causal relationship. Perhaps, then, our descendants will look back on our curious proclivity to try to explain such complex phenomena in the form of simple, rarefied mathematical language in the same disdainful way that we look back on the proclivity of the ancients to explain such complex phenomena in the form of dying and rising gods. That we are capable of making the universe rationally comprehensible to ourselves is indeed a remarkable achievement, without which our modern world would have proved unrealisable, but we must make sure that our wonder is directed at just that fact - that is, that we can make the universe rationally comprehensible, not that the universe is rational in and of itself.

On this latter point, again we might do well to return to Newton. The simple, elegant laws he devised were - after an initial period of resistance - eventually employed by theologians as evidence for the fact that the universe must be run like clockwork; so ordered and intricate in its construction that it would be literally impossible for it to have come into being without pre-ordained instruction from some all-powerful watchmaker. The argument continues to be used with great regularity among modern theologians, though the sense of awe has been expanded beyond the periodic movement of the planets to deeper cosmological facts (such as the value of the cosmological constant and other physical values) that, frankly, they are not qualified to ruminate upon quite so casually. In any case, the wonderment they express is entirely backwards: these "values" and their relationship to one another were not rationally programmed into the universe, just waiting for some perceptive scientist to reverse engineer them, but rather had to be created and elucidated by these same preceptive minds. Newton didn't simply discern some obvious mathematical relationship governing the movement of bodies in the solar system, he actually had to invent some new method by which he could create some laws. When the existing body of mathematical logic failed to help him in his quest to "uncover" the rational basis of the movement of heavenly bodies, he was actually forced to create an entirely new form of mathematics (calculus) in order to make this movement rationally expressible. In other words, there is nothing about the universe (at least in this case) that makes it inherently amenable to human logic. Where the universe doesn't make itself amenable to human reason in an immediately obvious way, we just happen to have been clever enough on occasion (or, rather, certain pre-eminent members of our species have been clever enough) to devise a new form of logic in which the observed relationships and regularities can be expressed.

And this is something that we are coming to appreciate ever more deeply: the universe does seem to be, in a very fundamental sense, operating on principles that are at best counter-intuitive to human beings, or - perhaps more accurately - deeply and inexorably irrational in nature. In one way, we should expect that world around us - that is, the everyday world, divorced from the loftier concerns of theology - be, in some sense, rationally comprehensible. Our "folk-physics" - our innate ability to predict the flight of a ball in the air, for example - and our ability to express these predictions logically, do seem to be in such a state of consonance with nature which must surely must transcend mere coincidence. Our ability to track a ball through the air, predict its path and then to catch it in our outstretched hands is a feat beyond even the most advanced robots we have been able to develop, and it would be tempting to discern a divine teleology at work in this regard: Earthly physics are so rational - and our minds so rationally attuned to them - that it could again only be the result of divine forethought. While it would be correct to note that there is nothing "coincidental" about the consonance of  human rationality and the rationally discernible laws of Earthly physics, the explanation has nothing to do with the divine. We are the product of 4 billion years of evolution that has ruthlessly culled those whose understanding of their immediate environment was subpar: only those with a functional understanding of the physical world (e.g. that falling from a tall cliff would kill you) stood any chance of surviving to produce offspring. Our folk-physics have been slowly refined by this evolutionary process to help us navigate the world in which we live, each minor improvement in our innate understanding of the world being preserved down future generations. So yes there does seem to be a compatibility between our "logic" and the "logic" of physical events on Earth, but we needn't look for divine explanations: given our existence as physical beings and the relentless drive of evolutionary pressures, it simply could not have been any other way.

When we leave our immediate human world and begin to explore the nature of the universe on the smallest and largest scales, however, we find that our intuitive preconceptions about the nature of physical events very quickly cease to conform to reality. We expect the universe to adhere to certain "rules" concerning cause and effect (as Hume noted some three centuries ago) and for objects to adhere universally to rationally discernible principles. We now know, however, that the universe often fails to conform to our expectations in this regard. The most blatant examples can be drawn from the science of quantum physics, where the universe at the most fundamental level has shown itself to be irrational, indeterministic and completely irreconcilable with the expectations of our folk-physics. The completely random (and seemingly uncaused) appearance and disappearance of sub-atomic particles is not possible to square with the idea of a rationally apprehensible universe, as even a suitably well-informed observer (i.e. a god) would have no way of predicting exactly where or when a particle and it's anti-particle might come into existence. As a consequence, even the most mundane predictions concerning the behaviour of objects in the universe turn out to be mere probabilistic statements rather than inviolable natural laws. For example, we can take it for granted that I will not be able to walk through my wall were I to try, yet it turns out that this is merely a statement of probability: it actually isn't impossible for me to walk through my wall (i.e. it's not an inviolable "law" of the universe) it's just overwhelmingly unlikely.²

Such randomness and indeterminacy on the quantum scales may still credibly be dismissed as irrelevant by the believer in the rational universe, however. They may, for example, argue that even if the universe is predicated upon random and indeterminate factors, that on bigger scales determinate laws can still be discerned. That is to say, even if the location of an electron is entirely indeterminate, the location of large groups of electrons (for example, those in my body) appear to behave collectively in ways that are roughly deterministic. In other words, I could try to walk through my wall every day until the end of the universe and could reasonably expect to get the same result every time, which if not strictly an "inviolable law" of the universe surely constitutes the next best thing. Such an argument is problematic, though, because it fails to address the reality that the universe was formed at least in part by completely random factors that even a hypothetical being blessed with omniscience could not have predicted. While it may be true that it is not necessary to take quantum factors into account when presently addressing the orbital path of a planet, say, the argument breaks down when we examine the early history of the universe: at the very beginning, a fraction of a second after the big bang, the universe was still small enough for quantum effects to have a massive influence on the path that the evolution of the universe would take. We now know from our mapping of the early universe that these very early quantum jitters came to have a lasting influence on the shape of the universe, including (most likely) the distribution of matter that may have permitted the formation of galaxies. This prohibits the possibility of the current universe being created with genuine teleological foresight: there is no way that any being - omniscient or otherwise - could have predicted that the universe would emerge with the exact structure it presently has. If we rewound the clock to zero and started the universe again, we would end up with a universe very different from our present one, and this is due entirely to the influence of quantum randomness in the earliest fraction of a second of the universe's being. God may have rationally chosen to create a universe with quantum jitters, but he couldn't have rationally chosen to create a universe with human beings.

Even on bigger scales we find that probability plays a much higher role in the behaviour of matter than could have ever been envisaged by the classical, deterministic physics that the theologians seem to remain beholden to. The distribution of gas in a room, for example, can only really be probabilistically determined. We can take it is as something akin to a "law" that gas in an enclosed space (the air in a room, for example) will tend to distribute itself fairly evenly given enough time. That is, we should expect the air pressure and the distribution of molecules within such a space to be distributed relatively evenly from one cubic centimetre to the next. In actuality, though, there is no physical reason why the molecules of air couldn't find themselves confined only to one side of the room, for example, leaving the other half a complete vacuum. Such a bizarre eventuality wouldn't violate any physical principles, it would just be exceedingly unlikely (in the sense that there are far more ways for the air in a room to be evenly distributed than for the air in a room to be confined entirely to one half). So, even when we're talking about the behaviour of physical processes on scales far greater than that of the quantum level, we find that these process are often not governed by rationally discernible "laws" so much as they are governed by probabilities. Even on distinctly human scales, it seems that God enjoys playing dice.

But we can take such indeterminacy to even greater scales. When it comes to the belief of rationally discernible laws governing physical objects in the universe, there is surely no more elegant example than the aforementioned metronomic movement of planets around the sun. If nothing else in the universe could be said to obey rationally apprehensible laws, expressible in the elegant, efficient language of mathematics, then surely it could still at least be said about the "music of the spheres". In practice, however, when physicists attempt to quantify the gravitational relationship (and therefore the movement and periodicity of planetary orbits) between anything more than three bodies, the mathematics because ungainly and completely unworkable. This is known as the n-Body problem, which remains unsolved. So even here, with something as simple as the orbit of a spacecraft around the Earth, we lack the ability to rationally express or predict with any sort of exactitude the path the spacecraft will take. We could of course get a good approximation by taking into account only the effect of the gravity of the Earth on the spacecraft (and if such approximations weren't pretty close to reality then satellite technology would be entirely impossible) but such a method would only be an approximation of reality, because we have failed to take into account the gravitational influence of the sun and the moon into the equation. And the gist of the n-Body problem is that calculating the orbital path of a spacecraft around the Earth is fundamentally impossible with such precision, because we don't have the mathematical tools to calculate fully the gravitational relationship between all 4 bodies simultaneously.
 
And so we return to the point I wished to make at the beginning of this post: even where the universe appears to be obeying rational laws, we find that these "laws" are little more than approximations of reality (albeit very good ones) that cannot be treated as reflections of some deeper logic governing the behaviour of physical events in our universe. We will continue to find patterns and regularity in the universe - to do so is part of our nature as a species - and we will continue to create physical "laws" that approximate reality with ever greater precision, but we shouldn't suffer under the conceit that we are therefore "discovering" the laws the were programmed into the universe into the universe from its very beginning. On almost any scale we probe, the universe frequently shows us that it is under no obligation to conform to the expectations of human rationality. Perhaps we should just accept that - certainly at the most fundamental levels - the universe is an impenetrably irrational place.

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 1) The Grand Design, Chapter 3.

 2) This is a consequence of a phenomenon known as Quantum Tunnelling. Essentially, the precise location of an electron around an atomic nucleus can never be determined with exact precision - this is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work. As such the location of an electron can only be specified fuzzily - as a kind of "cloud" - governed by laws of probability. In principle, there is nothing preventing all of the electrons in your body to "jump", simultaneously, to a location on the other side of the wall, it would just take an unfathomable amount of time for such an event to occur.

"The Reason of Unreason" - José Ortega y Gasset and the Revolt of the Masses

In 1930, as Spain teetered on the cusp of fascism, José Ortega y Gasset penned one of his most famous works, The Revolt of the Masses. In approaching this work, we must be mindful of the historical context in which it was born. Spain, at this stage, was mired in an internal struggle for power that would culminate in civil war and the eventual triumph of fascist General Franco, who - with Nazi support - assumed power in 1939. When Ortega wrote this book, the horrors of Franco's regime still lay in the future, but the seeds of this regime - like all such fascisms, predicated on fear, ignorance and a rank form of nationalism - were already being sowed. The nation was crippled by divisions, with the population split into a wide plurality of irreconcilable factions. There were, on one side, the monarchists and Catholics. On the other, the socialists and communists. Many more were caught somewhere in the middle. I do not know for sure, but I imagine that the work in question was to a large extent a reaction to - and warning against - precisely these divisive, popularly led movements.

Reading the book now, we may be taken aback by the disdain Ortega heaps upon "masses", itself a term that even the most shamelessly haughty of us today would baulk at using. For Ortega, the "mass-man" emerges for the first time in the 20th century as a fulcrum of political power, and - as a consequence of his ignorance and his critical lack of preparedness to govern - threatens the very basis of civilization. This "mass-man" fails to understand the lessons of history - forever facing forwards, as he inevitably must, because he believes himself to be the apex of history - and he rejects the possibility of there existing an authority any higher than himself. The culmination of the mass-man's ascent to power lies in the emergence of what Ortega terms "hyperdemocracy", "in which the mass acts directly, outside the law, imposing its aspirations and its desires by means of material pressure". Mass-man, however, lacks the competence to run a state - such a job is presumably best left with the "artisans", as Ortega puts it - and this was the source of Ortega's angst: how could civilization persist in such unworthy hands?

In the largely egalitarian democracies in which we live today ("one man, one vote") such thoughts must strike us as repugnantly conceited, if not outright dangerous. Such open disdain for quotidian folk (I struggle to find a better euphemism for "masses") runs against our modern democratic principles, and one might find it quite easy to draw a direct line from such disdainful views to the eugenic mania of various mid 20th century ideologies. If we start isolating swathes of the population as being somehow below our contempt, then what logical reason do we retain to defend them from persecution or extermination? However, I must defend this work against such charges, since in referring to the "masses" Ortega makes it clear that he has in mind no specific race, class or creed: the overwhelming majority of us comprise this gormless, faceless "mass", so I take Ortega's work predominantly as a warning against "falling in with the herd" (to invoke an unsuitably trite idiom) rather than as the disparaging identification of an inherently defective class of people. To the extent that Ortega has a specific group in mind, it appears to the burgeoning bourgeoisie class, a group - then as now - that scarcely requires our dolorous coddling. 

Nonetheless, we exist in a political environment that - quite rightly, for the most part - discourages the gradation of human being into superior or inferior classes. That way, as the crimes of the 20th century still show us, leads to the greatest realisations of misery. The political zeitgeist of the current age is increasingly one of toleration, mutual respect and individual sovereignty - once again, we can count our blessings that it should be so. However, for all the unquestionable benefits of such politics, it also runs the risk of mistaking equality for crass undifferentiation: that, in a system where all should be granted equal political rights, that all political or social claims - and those who espouse them - deserve to be treated with completely undifferentiated and uncritical respect. Even in America - a supposed meritocracy of almost Darwinian degrees - the idea that every political opinion is as valid as the next one, has led to a kind of intellectual morass where the possibility of an honest, intellectual inquiry into the fitness of a given idea - particularly in the domain of mass media - has completely vanished.

Ortega puts it like this:

"The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: "to be different is to be indecent." The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated."

Now many Americans may baulk at the suggestion that "to be different is to be indecent" in the avowedly individualistic context of American politics, but I believe it rings true. The peculiarities of the US electoral system renders the possibility of a sizeable third-party presence completely moot, with the entire political dialogue in the country consequently entirely confined to that which is most electorally convenient to the two major parties. Issues that do not carry a clear electoral advantage to either of these parties are simply ignored or glossed over. I'm certainly not one to suggest that the two parties lack clear ideological differences as others might, but however unique they may be in constitution, the presence of only two major political voices clearly dilutes the potential for open and honest political dialogue.

In the first place, each party knows that it need only discredit the other party in order to win power - it needn't trouble itself selecting the best policies from a wide plurality of options, for example, which would be necessary if their primary objective were to govern effectively on behalf of the American people. Rather, it need only seek to scandalise the positions of the opposing party: if the other party finds itself discredited, the populace is left, after all, with only one alternative. The result is a ongoing process of acrimonious gainsaying, in which neither side is truly prepared to commit itself to any policies that might benefit the other electorally, completely irrespective of their merits. This process leads not to a confluence of positions between the two parties as many have suggested, but rather an increasing dichotomisation. For the first time, the most conservative Democratic congressman is more liberal than the most liberal Republican congressman, and this makes the possibility of compromise on any number of important issues increasingly low. There are several flow-on effects to this.

The first is that electoral politics is increasingly portrayed as a two-horse race, and that all media narratives must inevitably cohere to such a portrayal. This leads to an endless and evermore tedious cycle of promiscuous politicisation, where literally every event - no matter how insignificant - is pitched as yet another battle waged in the ongoing war between the blue and red teams. This leads us to further polarisation, where the supporters of each side believe quite sincerely that all the nation's woes can be attributed to the glaring sins of the opposite side. For their part, the media - fearful of losing 50% of their market - are increasingly apprehensive about reporting unambiguous facts that may be detrimental to one side, and therefore muddy every issue by unthinkingly - yet somehow meticulously - presenting the deliberately obfuscatory "spin" of both sides on every issue. The public are therefore starved of quality information, and - with the lack of any third party to keep the two major parties honest - the Republicans and Democrats find themselves receding further and further from reality into the safe, hermetically sealed discourse of partisan politics.

The increasing polarisation of American politics presents a second problem. With each party virtually guaranteed around 40% of the vote¹, that leaves both with the need to target their message with increasing specificity to the remaining 20%. Now despite what they might like to think about themselves, these unaffiliated 20% are generally not independent-minded people, heroically guarding their vote until a full, rational analysis of the respective party platforms has been completed, but rather low-information dolts who are capable of being swung to one side or the other for the most trivial of reasons. Since these are the people who decide elections one way or another, the level of political discourse is severely downgraded and the micro-targeting strategies of each of the major parties lead us to policies which yield nothing beyond the most asinine, populist pap. Now populism in itself is not necessarily something that should concern us (sometimes the best ideas also happen to be the most popular), but when the entire political process tends inexorably towards rank populism (because neither party can win power without this middling 20%) then we start to have the kind of problems that Ortega has warned us about.

Until now I have spoken as though both of the major parties deserve their share of blame for the current malaise in US political discourse, but I think such a portrayal would be disingenuous and just another example of the insidious need to render US politics as a two-horse race. Rather, when it comes to leading political discourse down into the sewers of rank, unthinking populism, the Republicans must clearly accept the lion's share of the blame. It has long been recognised that conservatives in the US have hitched their wagon to the forces of anti-intellectualism, forgoing open and honest policy debates in favour of the much more poisonous methods of the deliberately eristic and paranoid. Once you have completely abandoned the pretence of "facts" and "reason", your only justification now lies in the realm of the instinctive and the popular. To protect these justifications from the harsh light of reality, it becomes necessary to sacralise instinctive, populist politics by placing them beyond any possibility of rational reproach. This is achieved via the advancement of the notion that to reproach the political opinions of the "common man" on rational or empirical grounds is to engage in "elitism": the views of each man must be considered inherently valid and to dispute this claim is to violate the very basis of democracy. I think such a view - in and of itself - is rather cynical, but not necessarily pernicious. The trouble arises when "the masses" adopt it as a pseudo-religious mantra.

What we have now in the American populace is the idea that to simply have a political opinion carries with it its own justification, and that it needn't be justified any further to anyone. To believe in something, in a principled way, is inherently meritorious and that no-one has the right to disabuse one of that notion. This process culminates with Ortega's notion that "the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will": namely, everyone has the obligation to respect the intrusion of my "commonplace" opinion, no matter how ignorant or inapt it may be. All views are inherently valid, every man a qualified authority on that which he happens to be passionate.

Yet, to the extent he believes himself to lie beyond any possibility of reproach (what politician, after all, has ever won votes by telling him otherwise?), the "mass-man" can accept the authority of no-one beyond himself. The rejection of scientific and political authorities - under the banner of "freedom" - is a particular feature of modern Republicanism, though it happens to be one presaged by Ortega in the "mass-man" some 80 years ago:

"...the modern mass finds complete freedom as its natural, established condition, without any special cause for it. Nothing from outside incites it to recognise limits to itself and, consequently, to refer at all times to other authorities higher than itself... He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. Ingenuously, without any need of being vain, as the most natural thing in the world, he will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes. Why not, if, as we have seen, nothing and nobody force him to realise that he is... subject to many limitations..."

This arrogance, obdurate certainty and complete disdain for authority beyond himself leads the "mass-man" to a sickening degree of self-congratulatory selfishness. To the extent that he has found himself born into a comfortable position, he sees no need to protect and maintain the kind of structures - including strong government - that allowed him to be born into such privilege in the first place. The plight of future generations - or present generations born into quite different circumstances - should be left entirely to chance. The government - or any other organisation which challenges the quite gratuitous autonomy of the "mass-man" - must be challenged and rejected at every step. Consequently, the "mass-man" is "incapable of creating or conserving that very organisation [namely, the civilised state] which gives his life the fullness and contentedness on which he bases this assertion of his personality". Ortega continues:

"...the new masses find themselves in the presence of a prospect full of possibilities, and furthermore, quite secure, with everything ready to their hands, independent of any previous efforts on their part, just as we find the sun in the heavens without our hoisting it up on our shoulders. No human being thanks another for the air he breathes, for no one has produced the air for him; it belongs to the sum-total of what "is there," of which we say "it is natural," because it never fails. And these spoiled masses are unintelligent enough to believe that the material and social organisation, placed at their disposition like the air, is of the same origin., since apparently it never fails them, and is almost as perfect as the natural scheme of things."

It is for this reason - the complete lack of respect for or appreciation of social structures that took centuries to erect - that Ortega feels the "mass-man" threatens civilisation. The Republicans would be his modern-day equivalent. The demure capitulation of at least one of the major US political parties to this new "mass-man" and his abhorrent politics has left the entire political system impoverished, with all discourse now conducted in thrall of the lowest common denominator. The possibility of sensible, rational debate has been completely exhausted by a climate in which the populace have been pandered to and indulged to such a degree that they no longer have the capacity to recognise the limits of their wisdom. A child who is not used to being told "no" will not grow-up into a mature, thoughtful and considerate adult and that is the dilemma facing us today. The genie of simply untethered freedom (i.e. that which has been granted without any corresponding responsibilities) and entitlement has been taken from the bottle, and we may find it difficult to replace him. How can a child who has grown up to respect no authority beyond itself ever be told otherwise?

 So, what to do? What lessons can we draw from Ortega? I think that the most sage advice we can take from  Revolt of the Masses is the idea that there are such things as legitimate authority, and that we shouldn't be so hasty in sacrificing the need for such authority on the altar of democratic liberalism and tolerance. The events of the mid-20th century rightly made us wary of the dangers of unchecked political authority, but that doesn't mean we should race as far as possible in the other direction. There are people who understand the world far better than we, and we should have no qualms about ceding them at least some power to do what is right for us. If they are unsuccessful to this end, we retain the hard-won right to vote them out.

 Ultimately, mass populist movements, who respect no perspective beyond their own, need to be challenged, no matter how electorally inconvenient this might be. We need to abandon the idea that all opinions are equally valid and that all deserve to be listened to. We already do this when we marginalise those at the fringes of political discourse (the 9/11 Truthers, the Birthers etc.), we just need to be a little more discriminating. As far as the Republican Party is concerned, we can take some solace from the fact that the unthinking and unfeeling crassness of its electoral strategy is teetering, and has been rejected at the last two presidential elections. The reports of its impending death are surely exaggerated, though it is clear that they must start listening to the voices of a much more diverse electorate if they are to enjoy any future success. Perhaps they might start by reading this book, and recognising the inherent dangers of their current strategy of populist pandering and reactionary anti-statism.

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1) This partly has to do with brand recognition, and partly has to do with tribal politics. The "brand recognition" of the parties means, for instance, that the GOP is forever seen as the party of small government, despite all evidence to the contrary. So people will vote for the GOP as the small government party despite the massive debts run up by recent GOP administrations, their appalling records on civil liberties and so on. Petty tribalism is also a factor now. There are many people who will never vote for one of the parties - regardless of what policies they espouse - simply because they have been conditioned to hate that party in the current electoral climate. It is here that US politics, as much as anywhere else, begins to resemble a sport.

Socio-Historical Background of the Bible: Part 5 (609 BC - 538 BC)

The Babylonian Invasion

After the death of King Josiah, Judah was thrown into a period of political chaos which culminated in its invasion at the hands of the Babylonians. At least as far as the Biblical record can be trusted, Josiah was able to oversee the complete centralisation of power in Judah, to institute the formation of a monolithic religion and to apparently unite the nation and its surrounding territories - violently, if necessary - under a single nationalist ideology. Upon his death, his immediate political project seems to have been undone in a hurry and the nation began to be torn apart, both from within and without.

The spark for all these difficulties can be identified with the decline of Assyrian Empire and the resulting power vacuum it created. Initially, this spurred an assertion of independence in Judah: free from the Assyrian yoke, Josiah was able to implement his political program in Judah without interference and Judah stood - for perhaps the first time in its history - as a strong, dominant power in the region. In the shadows of the Assyrian empire, however, emerged two more empires: those of Babylonia (who delivered the final blow to the Assyrian empire in 605 BC) and Egypt (who had allied themselves with Assyria). Judah found itself trapped between these two powers - both geographically and politically - and the competing forces would eventually tear the nation apart. Like a planet passing between two suns, Judah found itself pulled towards two powerful spheres of influence simultaneously, and the internal strain generated would prove too much.

Josiah, as we saw in the last post, allied himself with the Babylonians against the Assyrians and their Egyptian allies. After he was killed in battle by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II, his son, Jehoahaz, was installed on the throne by "the people of the land" (i.e. the same coalition that had installed Josiah). The Egyptian military presence, which by this time had stretched its influence far into the Levant, ensured that a king without sympathies to the Egyptian empire would not last long. Indeed, Jehoahaz was deposed just three months into his reign by the Egyptian Pharaoh and sent into exile in Egypt. He was replaced by king Jehoiakim, who agreed to make Judah a vassal state and to pay an onerous tribute to the Egyptians. In order to do this, he "exacted the silver and the gold from the people of the land" (2 Kings 24:35), another indication of the hardship placed on rural communities by imperial conquest. Signs of reprieve would fleetingly arrive in short time, though.

In 605 BC, the Babylonians defeated the Egyptians decisively in a battle at Carchemish, and Jehoiakim used the opportunity to transfer allegiance to the Babylonians in return for their protection. Babylon agreed, and for the next three years Judah was a Babylonian vassal state. Here, though, his allegiance began flip-flopping periodically between the Egyptians and the Assyrians, which should give some indication of the confused political state in the region during his reign. With the war between the Egyptians and Babylonians continuing apace, he transferred his allegiance back to the Egyptians and ceased paying tribute to Babylon sometime shortly before 600 BC. The reasons behind his equivocation are not easy to elucidate with any certainty, but his switching of allegiances may reflect his judgement on the state of the war (i.e. which side appeared more likely to claim victory in the region) or - perhaps more likely - the divided loyalties that existed within Judah itself. As I shall explain in more detail below, there was apparently a genuine rift that existed in Judah at the time about where it's loyalties should be placed: with Egypt, with Babylon or with neither. Jehoiakim's dithering on the issue may simply be a reflection of the irreconcilable rifts that existed within his court.

In any case, the Babylonian reaction to this transference of loyalty was predictably swift and harsh, and by 598 BC the Babylonians had come to occupy the majority of the land of Judah and were knocking on the gates of Jerusalem. It was in this year that Jehoiakim died without explanation. Some have averred that the Biblical text implies that he was killed by marauding bands of foreign warriors (cf. 2 Kings 24:2) but the Bible doesn't say so specifically, noting simply that Jehoiakim "slept with his ancestors" (v. 6). In any case, it's difficult to see how he might have been exposed directly to the presence of such foreign warriors when Jerusalem apparently stood strong for several more months after his death. The possibility of a domestic plot to end his life cannot be discounted, as there is Biblical precedent for the assassination of kings in siege situations: for instance, the murder of King Pekah in the Kingdom of Israel in the face of the Assyrian advance in 734 BC (see part 3). Jehoiakim had also apparently angered religious figures in the nation during his reign through his persecution of prophets (Uriah was killed, and Jeremiah put on trial for his life at the hands of the king), and the religious figures in Jerusalem must have held considerable political clout in the city since the reforms of Josiah. Whatever the case, the final defence of Jerusalem was left to Jehoiakim's son Jehoiachin, but he was capable of resisting the Babylonians for only 3 months. The fortified walls of Jerusalem were finally breached, and the Babylonian forces spilled into the city in 598 BC.

Jehoiachin submitted voluntarily to the Babylonians, and was taken immediately into forced exile to live within the city of Babylon. He was joined by many other members of the Jerusalem elite, including Ezekiel (who we will discuss below) and other members of the Jerusalem priesthood. Jehoiachin's story shall be resumed shortly. For now, though, we will focus on the events within Judah following the first Babylonian invasion and the deposition of their king.

Rebellion and Exile

 After sending King Jehoiachin into exile, the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar II installed a man by the name of Zedekiah onto the throne in his place. Predictably, Zedekiah was to act as a puppet-king to Nebuchadrezzar II and would be required to pay onerous tributes to the Babylonian empire. As was an all too common in the history of Israel and Judah, however, Zedekiah decided after just three years to turn away from the obligations he had towards his conquerors and to sow the seeds of rebellion.

In 594 BC he hosted an international conference in Jerusalem, where leaders were summoned from the nearby regions to discuss (presumably) their relationship with the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian king naturally viewed this activity as subversive, and requested that Zedekiah visit him in Babylon to explain his actions and to reaffirm his loyalty to the king. This apparently patched things up for a while, but the decisive break came when Zedekiah rebelled against the Babylonians and allied himself with the Egyptians in the year 589 BC. The Babylonians invaded Judah and laid siege to Jerusalem for a second time, though this siege proved to be more gruesome and prolonged. In 587/586 BC, the Babylonians forces camped outside the walls of Jerusalem for months, preventing anyone (or anything) from entering or leaving. The horrors of such a city siege in the ancient world are difficult to overstate. Cities were so dependant on rural areas to supply it with provisions, that when such avenues of supply were cut-off the city was usually only able to sustain itself for a matter of weeks before starvation and disease began to run rampant. It is worth quoting the Biblical account of this siege (Lamentations 4) at length to convey the abject misery it entailed:

How the gold has grown dim,
   how the pure gold is changed!
The sacred stones lie scattered
   at the head of every street.

The precious children of Zion,
   worth their weight in fine gold—
how they are reckoned as earthen pots,
   the work of a potter’s hands!

Even the jackals offer the breast
   and nurse their young,
but my people has become cruel,
   like the ostriches in the wilderness.

The tongue of the infant sticks
   to the roof of its mouth for thirst;
the children beg for food,
   but no one gives them anything.

Those who feasted on delicacies
   perish in the streets;
those who were brought up in purple
   cling to ash heaps.

[...]

 Happier were those pierced by the sword
   than those pierced by hunger,
whose life drains away, deprived
   of the produce of the field.

The hands of compassionate women
   have boiled their own children;
they became their food
   in the destruction of my people.

The Lord gave full vent to his wrath;
   he poured out his hot anger,
and kindled a fire in Zion
   that consumed its foundations.

The will of the king and his immediate entourage were soon broken by the conditions that had left such an indelible imprint on the mind of the author of Lamentations, and they attempted to flee the city through a hole that they had made in the wall. The Babylonians had the city completely surrounded, however, and Zedekiah was soon apprehended. For his role in the rebellion, he watched as his sons were" slaughtered... before his eyes", had these same eyes "put out" by the soldiers and was then carried away - blind, childless and "in fetters" - to Babylon (2 Kings 25:7). His subsequent fate is not recorded, but he would prove to be the last ever king of Judah.

The fate of those left behind in the city, however, was no less grim. The Babylonians immediately sacked the Temple - the last holy place remaining in Judah, and quite literally the earthly house of YHWH - breaking its "bronze pillars", taking away "the pots, the shovels, the snuffers, the dishes for incense, and all the bronze vessels used in the temple service" as well as all "the gold, and what was made of silver" (v. 13-15). The Temple - along with the kings house and much of the rest of the city - were "burnt down" (v. 9) and the great walls around the city were also destroyed (v. 10). Much of the population - certainly all of the remaining elite - were carried away into exile in Babylon. According to the Biblical account, the only people who were left in Judah were "the poorest people of the land, to be vine-dressers and tillers of the soil" (v. 12). While some of these accounts might be viewed as somewhat embellished, the archaeological record does paint a picture of widespread destruction and a precipitous decline in population within Judah during the period of Babylonian exile. The economic aftermath of the exile will be explored more fully in part 6, but for now we need only note that Judah had been lain to waste and the last embers of its independence had been extinguished. Judah was now just another Babylonian province.

The Resistance

With the Temple and the king's residence destroyed, and with all the elite members of Jerusalem now deported, the royal Davidic lineage was at an end. In its place, the Babylonians elected a governor named Gedeliah, who was a member of a prominent Jerusalem family at the time. At this point, the society of Judah (or what remained of it) was divided between professing loyalty to Egypt, professing loyalty to Babylon and those who rejected loyalty to both. Those who believed that the loyalties of the Judahites should lie with Babylon could mostly be found among the exiled populations, and I'll address them in the next section. Here, though, it's important to demonstrate the political ambivalence that divided those who remained behind.

We learn from the Book of Jeremiah (a prophet active at the time of the Babylonian exile, though we cannot be sure how much of the material in this book can be traced directly back to him) that immediately after assuming power, Gedeliah was viewed as a target for assassination by certain revolutionary Judahite groups (Jer 40:13-16). This is one crucial difference between the Babylonian occupation and the earlier Assyrian occupation: in this instance, the occupation does seem to have been met by an organised resistance, as compared with some hundred years of relative stability in the Assyrian case. According the the account in Jeremiah 41, one "Ishmael son of Nethaniah son of Elishama" went to eat bread with Gedeliah along with ten of his men in the year 582 BC - under what pretext, we cannot be sure. In any case, Ishmael and his men used the opportunity to "[strike] down Gedaliah son of Ahikam son of Shaphan with the sword and [kill] him" (41:2), before laying waste to all the guards and the Judahite consort present as well. We must be clear what this act represents: a political assassination in protest against imperial designs. This kind of reactionary militarism was to become a regular occurrence in the history of Judah and Israel, and we shall explore similar instances in future posts.

In the Biblical account, though, the actions of the assassin are rather unequivocally denounced. In order to emphasise the mindlessly violent disposition of the perpetrator, we get gory details about his future movements. In addition to murdering all the Judahites present in Gedeliah's court, Ishmael during his escape enconounters some eighty pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem to leave offerings at the Temple. For seemingly no reason, he simply slaughters seventy of them, before crudely disposing of their bodies in a well (itself an unthinkably hostile gesture, given the rules which govern burial of the dead in Judaism). The remaining ten men are then kept as hostages, and remain with Ishmael as he attempts to flee. The polemical subtext of this account is rather clear: Ishmael (and presumably other would-be resisters) weren't really acting in the best interests of Judah, and were in fact little better than common thugs who did not hesitate to slaughter their own people. This appears to be the Biblical view, but it stands to reason that from an alternative perspective, these groups who violently opposed the Babylonian occupation probably saw themselves as freedom fighters, who would have deeply resented the pro-imperial overtures emanating from the exiled community in Babylon (and preserved in Biblical books like Ezekiel and Jeremiah). What we really have here, then, is yet another manifestation of the moral ambiguities inherent to political violence: one man's terrorist is always another man's freedom fighter.

At this point Ishmael decides to flee for "the Ammonites" with his hostages, but is stopped on the way by a Judean militia headed by one "Johanan son of Kareah". Given that the king of Judah was in exile at this time - along with virtually all the other people of power in the region - it seems likely that this militia must have been a private, self-assembled one which operated with relative autonomy - though towards what aims we cannot be certain. The historicity of this specific scene needn't concern us especially, but what it does appear to show is a state of lawlessness and violence, where the normal structures of society had completely broken down, and competing militia groups had risen up to fill the power vacuum. This is partly speculation on my part, but it does seem to be borne out by the Biblical account.

In any case, Johanan is unable to contain Ishmael at this encounter, and the latter flees. This leaves Johanan with a quandary: he knew that there would soon be a Babylonian reprisal for the assassination of their puppet leader and he knew that the Judahite people (including himself) would be left to bear the consequences. As a result, he attempts to organise for his group to flee to Egypt at the first opportunity. At this point, Jeremiah is depicted as delivering them (and other would-be runaways) a prophecy from God, an order to remain in the land of Judah. The prophet is rebuffed, though, and taken with the aspiring refugees into the land of Egypt. In the meantime, the Babylonians invade the land of Judah for a third and final time, quashing definitively whatever little resistance there remained to meet them.

This account of the travails of Johanan and Jeremiah in the Bible may not have much basis in historical fact, but they almost certainly reflect the kind of situation the Judahites were faced with in their first decade and a half under Babylonian occupation. Firstly, the fact that the governor of Judah was assassinated and the fact that the Babylonians still had at least some militia forces to mop up in their final invasion in 582 BC indicates that there was violent resistance to their imperial designs within Judah that - in the absence of any government - must have been spontaneously organised. The reasons why the Babylonians may have been met with a degree of opposition that the Assyrians never seem to have faced are worth exploring briefly.

Now it is certainly plausible enough that there was popular resistance to the Assyrian occupation as well - the available historical sources documenting this earlier period are far more sparse than those detailing the Babylonian occupation - but the reaction in the Babylonian case does seem to have been markedly more vehement and more sustained (the Assyrians, for example, were never required to seize the territory in three separate waves of military campaigning). In part, this may have been a reaction to two different modes of empire. In the Assyrian case, much time and effort was expended in its vassal states investing in "nation-building" (to use the modern terminology), particularly so far as governance and economic growth were concerned. It may have been borne of a rather paternalistic chauvanism, but the Assyrians took pride in exporting their systems of writing, account-keeping and governance, and the consequence was a rapid growth in urbanisation in many of the regions under the Assyrian yoke (including Judah). Where their vassal states experienced genuine economic growth, the benefit to Assyria came in the form of increased tribute. In other words, the Assyrian model of empire building had the capacity to benefit both the empire and the vassal state economically (much in the same vein as the later Roman empire), which - at least in the case of Judah - may have dampened popular resistance towards the empire.


The Babylonians, on the other hand, appear to have had a rather different modus operandi, at least in the Judahite case. Here, the ruling city of Jerusalem was looted for everything it was worth in the first invasion, and presumably little was left that might have been used for restimulating economic growth and international trade. In the second invasion, the power structure at the centre of the state was completely dismantled, and most of those capable of wielding political power over the territory (including most of the scribes, priests and statesmen) were sent into exile. The loss of such experience and skill from the centre of the Judahite society rendered any possibility of an ordered, productive society ever re-emerging from the glowing embers of the conquered state far less likely. Finally, after the third invasion, the Babylonians seem to have abandoned any pretence of governing the land of Judah at all. What happened in the 44 years between the final Babylonian invasion of 582 BC and the eventual liberation of Judah in 538 BC is almost completely unknown, but there is there is little evidence for the implementation of any kind of strong, centralised political structure. The "capital" of the state had been officially moved from Jerusalem to the northern city of Mizpah, but it is unclear what kind of government presided there. The fact that virtually no writings survive from Judah during this period - in addition to an archaeological record which evidences a precipitous population decline in the region - tells the story of a land laid almost completely to waste, one which the Babylonians never had any interest in ever developing economically. The exploitative nature of the Babylonian occupation may go some way to explaining the degree of resistance it faced - at least initially - within Judah during the early stages of the 6th century BC.

The Exile

As we noted in the previous section, it seems that many Judahites fled the region in the aftermath of Gedeliah's assassination and in the lead-up to the final Babylonian invasion. The subsequent depressed economic state of the region probably led to further waves of emigration, as people left the stagnant region in search of better opportunities. Based on archaeological evidence (and the Biblical account itself) it seems that many of these refugees ended up in Egypt, which experienced a flourishing of Semitic communities at this time. The expulsion of the Hebrew people from their land (whether forced or voluntary) marks the first stages of the Jewish diaspora, which (as we shall see in future posts) would continue for many centuries to come. Some of the Jewish communities established in Egypt would remain there, as future Jewish communities continued to be established all around the Mediterranean in reaction to a seemingly endless succession of imperial occupations.

The other half of the Babylonian enforced diaspora, however, found themselves living as captives in Babylon. It is this community that we know the most about, because their experiences are the virtually the only ones to have achieved a written expression that has survived to the modern day. As has already been noted, many - probably most - of these exiled Judahites were drawn from the "elite" segments of their society. Among them we find scribes, priests and even King Jehoiachin. The preservation of their culture - particularly its religious aspects - was taken seriously, and we can reasonably postulate that many of the Old Testament texts must have taken on a somewhat recognisable form during this time, or at least the period shortly succeeding it. This implies that the exiled Judahite community retained a degree of autonomy in their land of exile, and the Biblical material that can be most reliably dated to this period exhibits a conspicuous lack of anti-Babylonian sentiment. The question immediately presents itself: why should this be?

Before answering this question, we must first concede that the experience of the exile was scarcely a pleasant one for those who found themselves in Babylon. Perhaps the most famous expression of this is Psalm 137, which expresses a genuine longing for the now distant land of Zion. The final verse - where the author fantasises about dashing the children of the Babylonians against rocks - is an indication of genuine anger and resentment, one often overlooked when scholars try to downplay the degree of suffering experienced by those in Babylonian exile. Similarly, the prophetic texts from this time (most notably Ezekiel and Jeremiah) do not attempt to downplay the misery of the Babylonian invasion, they merely couch it in theological terms which absolve the Babylonians from moral culpability (see next section). But perhaps that only makes the question more perplexing: if there was an undeniable degree of suffering involved in the exile, why do the Babylonians get off so lightly in the Biblical texts?

Part of the answer surely lies with the on-going influence of King Jehoiachin. We know from the Bible and independent archaeological evidence that Jehoiachin was treated comparatively well by his Babylonian captors. In addition to being afforded (along with the other exiles) the relative luxury of continuing to practice his religion and to speak in his native tongue, he was also given relatively generous rations as compared to other captives. The production and preservation of sacred literature during this time also points to a degree of freedom which belies the language of "bonds" and "fetters" sometimes used in the Bible in connection with the exile. Given that he had surrendered to the Babylonians willingly (2 Kings 24:12), that he was treated favourably by them and that he was (presumably) involved in the literature penned at this time, can there be any surprise that the literature penned in and around this time was comparatively gentle in its depiction of the Babylonians?

Ezekiel in this respect is particularly noteworthy: in forty-eight chapters, scarcely a single bad word is spoken against the Babylonians. In fact, the Babylonians are depicted as acting with YHWH's explicit help and support (e.g. 26:7-14). Perhaps even more noteworthy is Ezekiel's attitude towards Zedekiah, the man named king by the Babylonians in Jehoiachin's absence. Ezekiel denounces him as the "evil prince of Israel" (21:25) and condemns him for his rebellion against Babylon (2:3). Similar sentiments can be found in Jeremiah, who likens those who remained in Judah (including Zedekiah) to "bad figs" (24:16-17), councils those in exile to "seek the welfare of" (i.e. assist) Babylon (29:7) and to serve its king (27:17). What this all points to is the fact that the exiled community had gathered round Jehoiachin as the only legitimate king of Judah, and - at his instigation, or at least under his watchful eye - penned a whole host of texts that justified the legitimacy of his rule and denounced the illegitimacy of those who had stayed behind in Judah after the first wave of exile. The surprisingly pro-Babylonian tone of these texts can be seen as a way of strengthening the continuing political legitimacy of those in exile, over and against those who had fled to Egypt (which remained an enemy of Babylon at the time) and those unlucky few who remained in Judah. The full force of this argument, however, requires an understanding of the theology of the period, particularly in how it was influenced by the circumstances of the Babylonian invasion.

The Theology of the Exile




If it is true - as the exiled authors claimed - that Jehoiachin was a good and legitimate king, then why was it that YHWH had decided to move against Israel? More to the point, why should he have moved against Israel so soon after the reforms of Josiah, which finally saw all the aberrant religious practices removed from the land of Israel? Disasters can provoke theological soul-searching at the best of times, but the issue facing the exiled Judahites seems to have been particularly pronounced. Given all that they had done to placate YHWH, why had he still seen fit to visit his wrath so vehemently against them? If the previous inequities which faced them were the consequence of wicked kings and an unfaithful population, why had the rectification of these facts done nothing to curb God's anger?

The texts from this period exhibit a great deal of doubt and uncertainty, and clearly demonstrate to us that the theology crystalised during Josiah's time was not necessarily of any help or comfort. The author of Lamentations (2:20-22) almost appears to directly rebuke YHWH for what he had done to Judah:

Look, O Lord, and consider!
   To whom have you done this?
Should women eat their offspring,
   the children they have borne?
Should priest and prophet be killed
   in the sanctuary of the Lord?

 The young and the old are lying
   on the ground in the streets;
my young women and my young men
   have fallen by the sword;
on the day of your anger you have killed them,
   slaughtering without mercy.

 You invited my enemies from all around
   as if for a day of festival;
and on the day of the anger of the Lord
   no one escaped or survived;
those whom I bore and reared
   my enemy has destroyed.

From this, the author goes on to conclude his work by asking YHWH "Why have you forgotten us completely? Why have you forsaken us these many days?" (5:20) and then speculating that "you have utterly rejected us, and are angry with us beyond measure" (5:22). These are not the confident ruminations of an individual who felt he understood his god with any confidence, but the mournful cries of a man whose theology that had been cast into a morass of utter confusion and despair.

Nonetheless, the authors of this time clearly set themselves the task of providing an explanation for the events that wouldn't require the entire theological edifice they had created to be torn down. The first theological solution to the problem was to identify that the Babylonian invasion was indeed a sign of YHWH's strength rather than a sign of his weakness. In the ancient world, it was often assumed that a nation's strength was directly proportional to the strength of its god(s), which goes some way to explaining why the gods of powerful nations were worshipped with such alacrity in the region (including in Israel and Judah prior to Josiah's religious reforms). These gods could be absorbed into the polytheistic pantheon of a given nation without the need for much theological teeth-gnashing: many gods inhabited the world, so there was little sense in forgoing the opportunity to worship just one more who had already proven the efficacy of his powers. For the Judahites who lived in the shadow of Josiah, however, such hedging of ones theistic bets had ceased to be an option. The religion of Judah had become entirely centralised under a single god, whose power and pre-eminence (in the land of Judah at least) had been enforced by fiat with the destruction of the places of worship devoted to all the other gods. If Judah had been destroyed by foreign forces who worshipped foreign gods, this could have only been possible with the direct complicity of YHWH. And if YHWH had seen fit to inflict such violence on the people of Judah, then it stands to reason that they must have done something to anger him.

But, again, why would YHWH have been so angry if the Judahites had finally turned away from centuries of polytheistic worship towards the monolatrous worship of YHWH? The theology of the Book of Kings made it quite clear that God's punishment (for instance the destruction of Israel and the Assyrian annexation of Judah) was a response to the "evil" of the people and the kings who oversaw them. So, if Josiah had truly "turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might" (2 Kings 23:25) then what could have possibly driven YHWH to such anger? The solution to this problem first consisted of absolving Josiah and (to a lesser extent) subsequent kings for direct responsibility for what had happened. The text added to the Book of 2 Kings after the death of Josiah attempts to make it plain that YHWH still held a grudge for the gross "provocations" of king Manasseh (23:26-27; cf. Jer 15:4):

Still the Lord did not turn from the fierceness of his great wrath, by which his anger was kindled against Judah, because of all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked him. The Lord said, ‘I will remove Judah also out of my sight, as I have removed Israel; and I will reject this city that I have chosen, Jerusalem, and the house of which I said, My name shall be there.’

In other words, the theology of the Book of Kings (and therefore of the centralised Judahite religion) was not challenged by the Babylonian invasion: it was merely a sign that a generation could be punished for the iniquities of their forebears (not so coincidentally a major theme in the Torah, which was likely completed in more or less its present form shortly after the period of exile). But a second problem arises: if YHWH, in a very literal sense, occupied the Jerusalem Temple, and if this temple was to be the central focus of all worship, what was to be done pursuant to its destruction? It's not entirely clear how the exiled Judahites responded to this problem, or what form their religious worship took (only that it persisted and that it remained entirely separate from the Babylonian religion), but we can perhaps piece together some speculations based on the fragmentary evidence we have in the Bible.

Firstly we should note that many of the the hymns that were used in the Temple (in a liturgical context) prior to its destruction were collated and - if they weren't already - expressed in a written form. These would contribute to the Book of Psalms we have today, and we can presume that they continued to be sung (albeit mournfully) by the exiles in Babylon (Ps 137) outside of the Temple context. Secondly, the importance of God's law (i.e. the Torah, or the elements of it which had been penned by this time) was strongly emphasised in the writings from this nime. Notions here of sacrifices and other ritual forms of worship that would have been performed at the Temple are largely ignored, and the adherence to God's laws are now taken to be the central duty of the Judahites. This deviation from the law is also cited as a central reason for the wrath that has just been visited upon them (e.g. Jer 9:13; 32:23 etc.). Additionally, this notion of adherence to God's law is tied in with the Egyptian Exodus (and God's covenant with the Hebrews via the mediation of Moses), and explicit parallels are drawn between this event and the plight of the Judahites exiled in Babylon (e.g. Isaiah 40:3-5; 55:12–13). Although we can be relatively confident that the Exodus was an important event in the mythology of the Northern Kingdom, the Babylonian exile appears to have been the event that secured its place as one of the most defining events in the history of the Hebrew people as a whole.

But perhaps the most important theological development here - particularly as it impacts on our modern world - is that by the end of the exile we find the very first unambiguous declaration of monotheism in the history of Israel and Judah. In the book of Deutero-Isaiah (i.e. Isa 40-55), penned at the very end of the exile period, are the words: "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god" (44:6). In response to the trauma of being conquered, being thrown into exile and watching as the house of their God was destroyed by marauding foreigners, the exiled community developed a theory of their God which placed his reign of influence not merely beyond the Temple of the land of Israel and Judah, but as a universal and (perhaps?) all-powerful being who had literally no equal. The religion of Josiah, far from being destroyed by the conquering Babylonians, was taken and built into something far grander, and far more universal as a seemingly inevitable reaction to suffering they had undergone. I've been saying throughout these posts that the content of theology can often be explained as a reaction to the forces of history, and the development of monotheism in the religion of the Judahites serves as a perfect example.