Stranger than fiction : a short history of the Jews from earliest times to the present day

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Table Of Contents

. The Story of Certain Half-Savage Shepherd Tribes who Struggled out of the Arabian Desert into the Hovtue KTescenitr. tychec ctemeer ose eke arte

How the Hebrews Lost and Regained their Freedom, Took unto Themselves a God, and Tried again to Settle in the Fertile Crescent..................

. The Brawling, Ill-Organized Struggle of the Hebrews to Make Canaan Completely their Own.........

Contents

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The Trials and Disappointments after the Return from’ Babylonia.e:... ts...) 40 ac 104 The Priests Come into Power................ 111

The Greek Invasion Brings on the First War for Hreedom:ohebhoug hte rine aa eaeens 119

Prologue

42 Washington Sq., New York City, Nov. 1, xxiii,

The proper way to write a book—at least, so I’ve been told—is to buy a ream of clean white paper, a stock of pens, a large bottle of ink—and begin.

And I did all that to-day. I bought the paper, the pens, the ink; I even bought the wire clips with which to fasten the loose pages, and the pressboard folder in which to bind the whole manuscript. And seven hours ago I came up to my workroom, arranged the materials on the table, took the best pen in hand, and made ready to write.

I am still making ready to write. It is already long after midnight, and the noises of the street have died down to a creepy silence. Even whirling, frenzied, fevered New York has tired at last, and fallen asleep. But still in vain do I make ready to write.

By this time I should have been nearing at least the end of the first chapter—and I have not so much as begun! In a brave flourishing hand I have written across the top of a blank sheet:

—and no more.

18 PROLOGUE

For now that I am ready to begin, my mind is overawed. Hundreds of volumes crowd the sagging shelves that range the walls. Scores of other volumes litter the tables, the chairs, the floor. Encyclopedias and text-books and learned monographs are scattered around, and among them all sorts of pamphlets and clippings. They are in many languages, and they are cluttered with references to other writings in still other languages. And most of them tell at endless, at exhausting length, only a paragraph, perhaps even but a sentence, of the long story I would recount.

And the sight of all those enormous volumes is appalling. Their story is so long! ... So bewilderingly involved! ... And already it has so often been told.

Yet it cries out to be told still again. From beginning to end it pleads to be retold, and not as a list of names and dates, but as a wild adventure, as a romance. For the whole history of the Jewish people 7s a romance; the strangest, the most colorful in the saga of all mankind.

And it deserves to be retold because so few in the land have ever heard it. Both Jews and Gentiles— save they be historians—know exceedingly little of that romance. Perhaps the first chapters of it, those contained in the Bible, are familiar to most people—but even they are far from rightly known.

The Bible is a whole vast world of wisdom, beauty, and moral truth—but it is not a literal history. Its episodes and chronicles were in the mouths of desert tribesmen for long centuries before ever they were written down. For long centuries they were

PROLOGUE 19 passed on from father to son, growing grander and more wonderful with each generation. So that by the time they were set down in writing, the literal truth in them, like the vein of gold in a mountain, was crushed and tortured and broken in a thousand places.

We know all that because for over a hundred and fifty years great Bible scholars have been exploring for that truth. They have toiled endlessly, examining manuscripts, comparing texts, digging around for buried clews, spinning out theories and then destroying them again—all to discover just where in the Bible the literal truth breaks off, and where legend begins.

Five generations of scholars have been toiling at this ‘‘Biblical Criticism,’ and through their labor we have come to a new and nobler understanding of all the early history of the Hebrew people.

But too few among us are possessed of that new understanding. ‘To most of us the Bible is still a book every word of which is literal fact. We try to swallow it whole, to believe it without understanding it. As a result, its history often seems but a monotonous and meaningless round of unbelievable miracles and incredible facts: a long, rambling chronicle of imaginative but suspicious wonders. There is no grand swing in it, no dramatic surge up, up, up toward the heights.

So the first chapters of the story of the Jews

must be retold in the light of the new understanding. They must be shown to be what they truly are: the immortal epic of a people’s confused, faltering,

20 PROLOGUE insatiable hunger for a nobler life in a happier world.

And the rest of the chapters must naturally be retold as a continuation of that epic. For the Jews did not cease hungering for the Kingdom of God on Earth when they closed the Bible era. They went on and on—as perhaps they still go on to-day.

That is the true wonder of their story. There has been no end to the march of the Jews. They have gone on and on, ever refusing to halt where the world halted, ever pressing on in their own stubborn, headstrong, singular way. Of course, they have faltered at times; for decades, for generations, they have stood still. At times they have even retreated. But never for long. The slightest lifting of the yoke laid on them by a slow-moving world and on they have plunged—on, on, in the strangest, the wildest, the most fantastic career ever essayed by a people.

It is the story of that career that I want to tell— that I have been trying to begin to tell all this night.

Perhaps I’m too tired now to begin, too worn out from long wondering how. . . . Dawn is stealing up behind the blackened chimneys in the east. The city is awaking. There is a feeble stir in the streets, a rattling of milk wagons and a rumbling of trucks. Workmen with lunch boxes under their arms, their hair frowsy, their faces still swollen with sleep, clump along over echoing pavements.

But in the east, over where the roof tops dully gleam in the morning light, there is a greater stir, I know. Old men with matted beards, and young men and boys, crawl out from under feather beds and shiveringly don their clothes. They touch their

PROLOGUE 21 hands and faces with water from kitchen faucets, whisper a prayer, and then hurry out into the streets.

Where are they going? ... But where should pious Jews go so early in the morning? ... To the synagogues, of course!

So they go, hundreds of them, old and middle-aged and young. They go to their little synagogues hidden away in basements, there to pray as their fathers have prayed these two thousand years or more.

For there in the east, where now the roof tops are turning from black to pearl in the growing light of the dawn, lies the great ghetto of New York. More Jews are huddled there than ever were seen in old Jerusalem—more probably than were known in all the world when Solomon was King in Zion.

What are they doing there? How did they come? And why? .....

It is almost four thousand years since they were born, and fully five thousand miles from their birthplace. What have they seen‘and thought, what have they lived through and learnt, in all that long trek through time and space?

But that is just the story I have been wanting to tell all along, the story I will tell—so soon as I can begin.

Only I am too tired now.

Perhaps a little later, after I have slept, I shall be able to begin... .

Chapter I

THE STORY OF CERTAIN HALF-SAVAGE SHEPHERD TRIBES WHO STRUGGLED OUT OF THE ARABIAN DESERT INTO THE FERTILE CRESCENT

Far to the east of us, pinched between Africa and Asia, lies a vast and barren region called the Arabian Desert. It is a cruel, forbidding place: an endless sheet of dry rock that by day is scorchingly hot, like a lead roof under the rays of the sun, and by night is piercingly cold. Here and there across the plain are reaches of hard-packed gravel, or of drifting sand that can be swept up blindingly by the winds. And only at long intervals are hidden thin springs of water that soak the soil and relieve the grayness with a touch of green.

Four thousand years ago—even as in our day— countless tribes of wild shepherds roved hungrily across that dry waste. They were constantly moving about, swarming with their bedraggled flocks of sheep and goats from one oasis to another as the springs dried up or the grass was nibbled away. They had no homes save their goatskin tents; they had no possessions save the stone weapons in their hands, the rags on their backs, and the tribal flocks and herds. The only law they knew was the word of the Patriarch, the Old Man of the Tribe. They had no knowledge of reading or writing, and probably they could not count above ten.

THE STORY OPENS 23

Such were the early Semites, from whose loins sprang the Jews.

Because they did not yet know the use of metals, but made their tools and weapons of stone, we speak of them as living in the Stone Age.

They were probably far unhappier than we are to-day, for their life was crowded with all sorts of fears. The whole world seemed to them to be peopled with terrible demons and spirits. In every tree and stone and tiny spring, in the thunder and lightning, in the wind and the night, those demons were thought to dwell; and the shepherds were greatly afraid of them. They used to utter magic incantations and go through all sorts of weird ceremonies in their efforts to win the favor of those spirits. They used to offer sacrifices to them, burning the firstborn of their fiocks, and often even of their own children, so that those spirits might be pleased and give to the worshipers many more sheep and children.

These Semite shepherds were divided into many groups, and each of these groups consisted of several tribes or clans. Each tribe had its favorite spirit which—so the people believed—went with it and helped it fight the other tribes. But often these clans found it necessary to change favorites, for each demon was believed to have power only over a certain bit of desert. Therefore when a clan moved a long distance it usually threw over the old spirit, and took up a new one.

Idols of wood and stone were set up to represent those spirits. And in time these idols came to be thought of as real gods.

There was constant warfare between the tribes, for there were exceedingly few springs of water in the desert, and many flocks to drink them dry. The tribes fought for the possession of those springs of water just as nowadays the nations fight for the possession of wells of oil or mines of coal. There was no law regulating the conduct of the clans, and always they were stealing sheep and wives and children from each other. They murdered or enslaved their defeated foes, they stole and cheated, they sweltered and froze to death, they hungered and went mad from thirst.

Their life was hard and unhappy because of the barrenness of the soil on which they lived.

Only far to the north of the great desert is there a moist and less ungenerous region. For want of a better name, modern historians have called it the Fertile Crescent, for it is shaped somewhat like a quarter-moon. Of course, that Crescent acted like a magnet upon the thirsting Semites in the wilderness. They were forever struggling to reach it, plunging out one after the other, scrambling desperately to get a foothold in the rich soft soil, falling back, trying again, falling back, trying still again—and finally beating their way in and remaining there. Like hot oil spluttering out of a frying pan, so were those famished and desperate tribes as they came charging out of the desert.

They began coming out many thousands of years ago, and by the time of the dawn of history certain of them had already grown very old in the rich Crescent lands. Indeed, when one little group of those tribes, the group which we have since come to call the Hebrews, belatedly attempted to invade that Crescent, they found it already overcrowded with inhabitants.

There were first of all the non-Semitic peoples who had drifted there from many directions, and had very early begun to cultivate the soil and develop some sort of civilization. Along the Nile there were the Egyptians with an amazingly high culture. Far to the north, in what we now call Syria, there were the Hittites. Along the garden lands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers there were remnants of the Sumerians, a strange and at present little known people, who were among the first to invent a method of writing. And in and among these non-Semitic people were the hordes of early invaders from the desert: the Amorites, or Canaanites, or Phoenicians, or Babylonians, as they were called in different places.

It was not easy for the still half-barbaric Hebrews, with their clumsy stone weapons and feeble strength, to fight their way into those well-settled lands. Many times they tried, hurling themselves with all their might against the fortifications in their path. Their particular goal seems to have been that narrow strip of land we now call Palestine, and desperately they fought for its possession against the Canaanites who lived there. Several times the invaders, led

THE STORY OPENS 27 by patriarchs like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, managed to break their way in; but they were not allowed to remain in peace. The wells which they dug were filled with stones and rubbish by their enemies; their sheep were stolen; and occasionally they themselves were massacred.

Then, to add to all these hardships, there seems to have come a great famine in the land. The wells became utterly dry and the flocks began to dwindle for lack of food and drink. Death stared those harassed Hebrews in the face. All about them were their foes, the Canaanites, swooping down on them in surprise attacks and carrying off what famished sheep and goats were left to them. There was no sense in remaining longer in the land, especially since the rumor had reached them that far off in Egypt there was drink aplenty, and also much grain stored away. It was a tremendous distance to the lands of the Nile, a journey for them of many weeks —though a train now can cover it in little more than half a day—but nevertheless many of the Hebrews turned to go there. They folded their tents, gathered together the remnants of their lean and sunken-eyed flocks, and began the long journey toward Egypt.

And with that journey the ancient Hebrew shepherds enter into the realm of history.

Chapter II

HOW THE HEBREWS LOST AND REGAINED THEIR FREEDOM, TOOK UNTO THEMSELVES A GOD, AND TRIED AGAIN TO SETTLE IN THE FERTILE CRES- CENT

Just what happened when those Hebrew wanderers straggled into Egypt we can only vaguely guess. All the hundreds of Egyptian records thus far unearthed tell us nothing of the episode; and the account in the Bible is not altogether clear on the subject. No doubt the scholars now busily digging away in the pyramids and mounds of Egypt will soon have all sorts of new secrets to tell us, so that in a little while it may be possible to make this chapter in the story of the Jews far less brief and sketchy than it must be left to-day.

All we can say now with any certainty is that the Hebrew shepherds who wandered to Egypt in search of food did not have to penetrate far into the land. They stopped in a large tract of meadows called the Land of Goshen, in the eastern part of the Nile delta, and there they settled down. But then, after a lapse of years, a powerful king arose in Egypt, and marching down on the little settlement of aliens, he took them all into slavery. That king, or pharaoh as he was called, was probably Ramses II, who lived some thirty-two hundred years ago and was a little crazy with the desire to

ON TO CANAAN 29 build huge temples and palaces and monuments to himself and his many gods.

To satisfy this frenzied desire he needed myriads of slaves, for there were huge tracts to clear and vast foundations to dig, and all sorts of quarrying and hoisting and dragging to be done. Even to-day, when we have steam-shovels and pile-drivers and innumerable other labor-saving devices, we are constantly in need of unskilled laborers in very large numbers. One can easily see how much greater the need must have been in days when hardly the simplest of machinery had yet been invented.

So the wild Hebrews, men who all along had lived the free and foot-loose life of desert nomads, suddenly discovered themselves the most abject of slaves. All their days they had to cringe beneath the lash of the taskmasters while they sweated at making bricks or quarrying stone. For those Hebrews it was the first taste of a misery which their descendants were to experience many times over, and the bitter memory it left in their minds was never allowed to fade away.

The oppression lasted many years, for Ramses II reigned a long time. But soon after his death the power of Egypt began to crumble. That foolish pharoah had exhausted his empire with his extravagance, and from all sides the enemies began to sweep down on the prostrate land. Hordes of barbaric invaders came charging in from Libya, and bands of ravenous pirates sailed down from the islands of the Mediterranean Sea. Desolation and distress covered the face of all Egypt. To the simple-minded Hebrews it seemed as though an angry and avenging god were visiting fell plagues on the land for its sins.

And in the confusion, while the Egyptians were straining with all their might to fight off the savage invaders, the Hebrew slaves got away.

Their leader in the rebellion and escape was a young Hebrew named Moses. According to the Bible story, Moses had been adopted as a’ child by an Egyptian princess, and brought up in the royal court. He had never been a slave, and therefore was able to appreciate the more clearly how bitter was the plight of his brethren. But instead of cutting himself off completely from them and enjoying his own good fortune, he seems as a young man to have taken their part against their taskmasters, with the result that finally he had to flee from the land. He wandered about in the wilderness with a tribe of Kenites—a people related to the Hebrews—and tasting among them the joys of free nomad life, he felt the call to go back and deliver his brethren.

Without a leader like Moses it is doubtful whether the Hebrews, grown timid and cowardly under the lash of the Egyptians, would ever have been able to free themselves. The worst evil of continued oppression is not so much that it cripples the bodies of the victims, as that it crushes their souls. It robs them of courage and self-reliance. Even after Moses succeeded in getting his brethren to flee from Egypt, it was all he could do to keep them from

ON TO CANAAN 31 running back again. In the desert they were faced with hardships they had not known in Goshen— lack of food and water, for instance—and many of them were ready to barter every bit of their new freedom for the greasy ‘“‘fleshpots of Egypt.”

Compared with enormous revolutions like that in France in the eighteenth century, or the one in Russia in recent years, the uprising of those few Hebrew slaves three thousand years ago in Egypt appears a quite trivial incident. Yet, because of the hold the story of that uprising took on the minds of succeeding generations, the event itself looms up as one of the most important in all history. Again and again in these three thousand years, rebels against oppression and tyranny have turned for courage to that old story of the Exodus from

Egypt. 4.

Moses undertook no easy task when he attempted to lead those slaves to freedom. First of all he had ° to get them safely out of Egypt, and that meant avoiding the caravan routes—for they were infested with pirates, or were guarded by Egyptian garrisons. Then he had to give them a religion, so that they might have the courage to withstand the hardships of the desert. In Egypt the Hebrews had forgotten the god they had worshiped when they were shepherds. They had no doubt accepted the gods of the Egyptians in his place. But now, out in the wild places once more, they believed those Egyptian gods were not present, and they were therefore left without any faith.

Moses quickly felt his people’s need, and as soon as he could he led them to a certain mountain called Sinai or Horeb, which was believed by his Kenite friends to be the dwelling-place of their god Yahveh.* At that holy mountain the Hebrews solemnly swore to accept Yahveh as their one and only god, and it was believed that in return Yahveh would be their special protector. The people’s duties in this covenant were expressed in certain commands which were easily remembered because they were ten in number, and could be ticked off on one’s ten fingers. A wooden shrine called the Ark was made to symbolize the shielding protection of Yahveh, and wherever the Hebrews wandered, there went also that Ark. For, being still a primitive folk, they could firmly believe that the presence of the Ark brought them safety!

But even after this acceptance of the protection of Yahveh, the runaway slaves still remained cowed and frightened. It had been Moses’ plan to go directly from the Holy Mountain up to Canaan in the Fertile Crescent. But when his followers heard of the prowess and might of the inhabitants of that region, they refused to attempt to invade it. Instead they wandered about in the desert lands just

* Through the mistake of an ignorant translator of the Bible, we have come to speak of this god as Jehovah, but his real name was Yahveh, which may have meant ‘The Creator,’’ or perhaps ‘The Thunderer.”

BAHU aaagsiag La below Canaan, tending their flocks and herds, fighting hostile tribes, starving at times, dying of disease and snake bites and all manner of other afflictions, but not daring to strike out toward the rich soil on the north.

The Bible tells us the Hebrews wandered forty years in the waste lands before they plucked up courage enough to invade the Crescent. Evidently it was first necessary for the slave generation to die off, and for a tougher and more desperate generation to arise. We are told that Moses was still alive when that second generation had grown up, and though already an old and broken man, he was quick to lead them in the invasion. The little band of hungry wanderers packed up their belongings, gathered their few flocks and herds, and letting the Holy Ark lead their columns, marched off toward Canaan.

They thought to enter the coveted little domain from the east of the River Jordan, and so they moved around to the steppe-land on that side. They were not allowed to march in peace, however, for at every turn they were attacked by unfriendly tribes. But there was no stopping that swarm of desperate, home-hungry nomads. They proved utterly irresistible as they came sweeping over the plain.

And at last, fighting almost every inch of the way, Yahveh’s followers struggled through to the Jordan.

But there, within sight of the little land to which Moses had tried all those years to lead his horde of runaways, the aged leader died. He died and was buried no one knows where; but his memory has gone down throughout all the ages as the first of the great warriors for freedom.

Chapter III

THE BRAWLING, ILL-ORGANIZED STRUGGLE OF THE HEBREWS TO MAKE CANAAN COMPLETELY THEIR OWN

The invasion and conquest of Canaan was a long, difficult, and bloody affair. The Hebrews were poorly armed, for they still used flint knives and stone hatchets; and they were utterly untrained in organized warfare. The odds were heavily against them, for the Canaanites used chariots and fought with metal weapons and were always able to take refuge in one or other of their many fortresses. Only the ferocity and desperation of the invaders made it possible for them to conquer at all. They had come to hate with all their being the arid desert and the wanderer’s life. They craved a bit of this land that—to use their own metaphor—“‘ flowed with milk and honey’’; and they were ready to go to any extremes to satisfy that craving.

People nowadays are greatly shocked when they read the Biblical account of the conquest of Canaan. When those ancient Hebrews conquered a city they followed the custom of the time and ‘‘devoted”’ it to their god: that is, they stole all the gold and silver, butchered all the cattle and human beings, and then burnt the whole place to the ground. They plundered and pillaged right and left, razed fortresses, and decimated whole tribes. They were like ravenous beasts out of the wilderness! But we need hardly urge in their defense that they were still half-savages. We need only remember that invading armies even in our own time behave not one whit less bestially. ...

The invasion was not accomplished by all the tribes united in one definite campaign. They fought their way into the land separately, and then settled down in different localities. For instance, the tribe called Judah and that called Simeon went to the southern part of Canaan. With them went also the Kenites, among whom Moses had lived as a young man. The tribe of Ephraim and half the tribe of Manasseh settled down in the center of the land; and the other tribes wandered off to the north and almost lost themselves among the Canaanites there.

It was a wildly daring and dangerous undertaking—that invasion of Canaan by the Hebrews. Once they got into the land they found themselves surrounded by enemies on every side. And worse still, they were cut off from each other by lines of Canaanite fortresses. Clearly they had to kill or be killed. They had to crowd out and murder their foes, or else be crowded out and murdered themselves.

Then there was another difficulty: the Hebrews, who were wanderers and shepherds by long training, suddenly had to settle down and become farmers.

THE STRUGGLE FOR A HOME 37

They had to give up their life in open tents and take instead to huddled, ill-smelling stone villages inclosed by thick high walls. They had to take up the life of the very people against whom they were fighting.

Of course, there was grave danger that in taking up the life of the enemy, the Hebrews might also take up‘his gods and morals. And many of the Hebrews succumbed to that danger. Yahveh belonged to the desert, and therefore many of the Hebrews feared his power did not extend to this fertile land they had entered. They imagined they had to worship the gods of this new country, the Canaanite gods, the Baalim as they were called. Every hill and field and spring had its little Baal to be fed with human or animal sacrifices, and honored at festivals which often were little more than drunken debauches. If this was not done it was imagined that the field would not yield a crop, or the spring would dry up. The sun, moon, and stars had to be worshiped because they were believed to contrc! the weather, and the household idols—which were a little like the totem-poles of the American Indians—had to. be respected because they were supposed to localize the spirits of dead ancestors.

The natives believed that every accident or misfortune was a sign that some little local god or other had been slighted; and the Hebrews were not long in accepting that belief. They made very poor farmers and their crops often failed; but instead of laying the blame for the failure on their ignorance of husbandry, they laid it on their neglect of the native idols. So in many sections we find the conquerors, although still worshiping Yahveh, ‘‘played safe”? by sacrificing also to a dozen other gods.

In districts where that practice of ‘“‘playing safe”’ was most common, it was almost impossible to tell who were the conquerors and who the conquered. The mingling of gods was often followed by the mingling of families, and in certain regions the Hebrews and their enemies became practically one people. Thus the half of the tribe of Manasseh that had been left on the east side of the Jordan was almost completely absorbed by the Arameans there, and the tribe of Reuben almost lost itself among the Moabites. Asher took to the sea and became very largely Phoenician.