The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (14 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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ISRAEL: HOW GOD CHANGED THE WORLD
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early four thousand years ago in the plains outside the walls of the sophisticated Chaldean city of Ur, an old herdsman who had lived there all his life heard a voice:
early four thousand years ago in the plains outside the walls of the sophisticated Chaldean city of Ur, an old herdsman who had lived there all his life heard a voice:
Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee:And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. (Gen. 12:1–3)
Guess What?The God of Abraham was nothing like the pagan gods.
The Old Testament God made modern science possible.
Jesus made Western civilization possible.
That poor fellow probably believed in a crowd of gods, and if they were those of his neighbors the Chaldees, they were a mixed lot, many vicious, few to be trusted. He was not even given the name of the God telling him to abandon all he knew, and the land he loved. But he obeyed anyway and, according to the Old Testament, though this Abraham was old and childless, he indeed became the father of a great nation. His descendants, by blood and by adoption into his faith, have been as numberless as grains of sand on the shore, or as the stars in the sky. We are too used to the astonishing promise made in these verses, which even according to liberal theologians and skeptics were written down long before any Jews could reasonably expect a day when their nation would be a blessing to
all families of the earth.
Yet that is what has happened.
all families of the earth.
Yet that is what has happened.
A blessing? Even our professoriate, with their predictable disdain for religion and for the nation of Israel, refrain from casting contempt upon the Jews. Yes, they will laugh at the creation story in Genesis, and will revile the bloodiness of the Hebrew conquest of Canaan under Joshua and the judges, and will shade their eyes from the natural moral law so magnificently engraved in the Ten Commandments. But it is a nervous laughter. They know that there is something shattering in the confrontation of sinful and ignorant man with the Holy One of Israel. If they say that the universe is pointless, they find Job crying out the same, but with the cry of a man who has suffered deeply and who still longs for God’s justice. They cannot, like Hitler, deny the Jews their glory, but then they are hard put to tell what is glorious about them, if not their tenacity in upholding their faith. Nor can they easily claim that the Jewish faith is just like all the paganisms against which it struggled. It manifestly is not. For it is the faith that claims God alone as true King, for whom kings and princes, and academicians and bureaucrats, weigh no more than dust. That means that men need not truckle to the state, or tremble before its lackeys. The Torah is a law to set men free.
Someone Tell John Kerry and Other Pro-Choice ChristiansDo not murder; do not commit adultery; do not practice pederasty; do not fornicate; do not steal; do not deal in magic; do not practice sorcery; do not kill a fetus by abortion, or commit infanticide.The Didache
(c. 150)This early Christian text adds to the incontestable evidence, among all Christian communities and at all times, is that abortion is forbidden. Note the company that that crime keeps.
Were the Jews important for any other reason? If we consider only those material achievements that confer glory on a nation, the Jews would qualify only for a short time. So it is deeply ironic that they should have played so important a role in the development of Western civilization—indeed
the central role.
They had little to recommend them. They did not invent democracy. They were not great sculptors or painters. That was only to be expected, since God had forbidden them to make graven images (a command of crucial importance for civilization, as we’ll see, but not one bound to encourage the arts). They had been shepherds and cattlemen, with little affinity for trade and the sea. Rather, when they sought an image of horror and chaos, landlubbers that they were, they looked to the ocean, where dwelt the terrible leviathan, and where Jonah found himself once in the belly of a great fish. Aside from the Old Testament and their commentaries upon it, the Jews wrote nothing of great interest. They enjoyed an early spring of political prominence during the time of David and Solomon, after which the kingdom was split in two. Both Israel in the north and Judah in the south were constantly pressed by their more powerful neighbors: Assyrians, Egyptians, Philistines, Babylonians.
the central role.
They had little to recommend them. They did not invent democracy. They were not great sculptors or painters. That was only to be expected, since God had forbidden them to make graven images (a command of crucial importance for civilization, as we’ll see, but not one bound to encourage the arts). They had been shepherds and cattlemen, with little affinity for trade and the sea. Rather, when they sought an image of horror and chaos, landlubbers that they were, they looked to the ocean, where dwelt the terrible leviathan, and where Jonah found himself once in the belly of a great fish. Aside from the Old Testament and their commentaries upon it, the Jews wrote nothing of great interest. They enjoyed an early spring of political prominence during the time of David and Solomon, after which the kingdom was split in two. Both Israel in the north and Judah in the south were constantly pressed by their more powerful neighbors: Assyrians, Egyptians, Philistines, Babylonians.
We remember them for one thing alone, but it is the most important thing: the revelation of the one, holy, all-knowing, almighty, all-loving God.
Whether you believe it or not (and I do), it is a plain fact that this single revelation—with all the history in which it is embedded and by which it comes to light—has been the most important idea in the history of the world. Secular historians today explain the past in terms of accidents: Who had steel? Who bore which germs? What wind blew which ships where? But if you really ask how we got where we are today (and by “we” here, I mean almost everyone in the world), you inevitably return to the city walls of Ur, and Abraham’s revelation from God.
The honest atheist must admit it. Should that atheist turn sincerely to God, it will not be to some folklore Zeus on Olympus, hurling a thunderbolt, nor to some Scythian Great Mother with fat breasts and buttocks. He will turn to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It may be politically incorrect to say so, but it is true nonetheless. If there is a God (and there is), it is He.
Why is this so important? How has it changed the world? To see that, let’s return to ancient Mesopotamia and the lands around the Mediterranean Sea.
The people who lived in the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys had plenty of water and fertile soil, making it possible to grow surplus cereals and store the dry grain. That was the minimum requirement for a city. It freed men from the daily need to procure their own food, allowing many to become carpenters or masons or bureaucrats. But the Land Between the Rivers was no easy farming. Rain was scarce, and when it came, it came in torrents. You had to use deftly constructed canals to divert the river water into the fields, or to divert the sudden rainwater. These canals had to be pitched most precisely. That’s because the land was nearly dead flat from Babylon all the way to the mouths of the rivers in what is now Kuwait, five hundred miles away.
That need for extensive and organized canals helped determine the eventual political structure of the Mesopotamian kingdoms. They had to be large states, and they had to be controlled by a single center of authority, concentrated in the person of a god-king. But the canals were still not enough to make life secure. The Tigris and Euphrates were prone to sudden and terrible floods caused by snow melt in the mountains and monsoon winds coming off the Persian Gulf. The people held their life from the fertile earth, and so it was natural that they should worship fertility gods. But nature, there even more than usual, was ferocious, capricious, wild. This disorderliness is reflected in the Babylonian gods.
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The great sky god Apsu and his consort, the malevolent sea-goddess Tiamat, once conspired to destroy the younger gods, who had gotten too many and too noisy. They were thwarted by the benevolent god Ea, who organized the opposition under the leadership of one Marduk, who then became chief of all the gods, a kind of emperor and personal protector of Babylon and
its
emperor. Marduk ended the war by funneling the winds into the gaping maw of Tiamat, to blow her belly up and blast it apart. From her scattered members he fashioned the physical world. Then he slew Tiamat’s lover, the evil Kingu, and mixed his dripping blood with earth to create mankind. He did so not out of love, but to placate his subordinate gods, who hated the tedious work of offering incense in the temple. Man is made to do work that the gods dislike. He is a slave.
its
emperor. Marduk ended the war by funneling the winds into the gaping maw of Tiamat, to blow her belly up and blast it apart. From her scattered members he fashioned the physical world. Then he slew Tiamat’s lover, the evil Kingu, and mixed his dripping blood with earth to create mankind. He did so not out of love, but to placate his subordinate gods, who hated the tedious work of offering incense in the temple. Man is made to do work that the gods dislike. He is a slave.
So it was with the ancient fertility cults. They were, with the partial exception of Egypt, grim and nasty affairs, governed by the iron necessity of hunger. If your life comes from the earth and the sky, and if these are so often malignant, ruining your crops with hail and withering them with drought, then you must placate the gods by offering them your own fertility. You send girls into the temples to be prostitutes; it was not flight of fancy when the prophets regularly compared idolatry to whoredom. Hence, also, human sacrifice. In Phoenicia and Carthage, economically savvy parents would make their children “pass through the fire to Molech” (cf. 2 K. 23:10), roasting them in the furnace-mouth of the idol, to ensure fertility to come. If you thought you might miss your own children and you had some ready money, you might bribe a poor man to let you “adopt” one of his. That would make you happy, the poor man happy, and Molech happy.
When, having obeyed the voice of God and traveled to Canaan, Abraham is granted a son and then is commanded by the same voice to sacrifice him on a mountaintop, the poor man must have been disappointed, but not surprised. That is the way gods of nature are. No doubt the god has to drink blood to provide blood. Abraham might have thought not that his promised line was coming to an end, but that this sacrifice must be an unfortunate part of the mercenary arrangement.
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