The Invention of the Land of Israel - Shlomo Sand

Скачать книгу

ancient homeland once owned by their mythological ancestors. To fulfill this purpose, the Bible now began to take on the character of a nationalist book. From a collection of theological texts incorporating historical plots and divine miracles aimed at inculcating faith in its readers, it became a compilation of historiographic texts that bore only a smattering of optional religious meaning. In this context, it was necessary to obscure the metaphysical entity of God to the greatest extent possible and to distill from it a completely patriotic personality. The Zionist intellectuals all tended to be at least somewhat secular and were therefore uninterested in deep theological discussion. From their perspective, God, whose existence had been undermined, promised a land to his “chosen people” as a reward for devotedly maintaining their faith in him. In this way, he was converted into a sort of voice-over in a historical movie guiding a nation to strive for a homeland and to immigrate there.

      It was no simple endeavor to persist in using the term “Promised Land” when the force that had done the promising was dying or, according to many, was already deceased.1 It could not have been easy to plant an imagined sense of patriotism in theological works that were completely foreign to the nationalist spirit. Despite being complicated and problematic, the undertaking was ultimately successful. But its goal was not achieved by the talent of Zionist thinkers and writers alone. The true secret of its success was the historical circumstances in which it was carried out, which I will discuss later in this book.

      The books of the Bible make no mention of the political dimension of a national homeland.2 Unlike later Christianity, they do not teach that the true homeland lies in the eternal heavens. Territory, however, does play a leading role in the stories. The word “land” appears in the Bible more than a thousand times and, in the vast majority of the texts, carries great significance.

      In contrast to Jerusalem, which is not mentioned in the Pentateuch,3 the land of Canaan is introduced in the beginning, in Genesis, and subsequently serves as a destination, an arena of action and of compensation, an inheritance, a place that is chosen, and plays other roles as well. It is described as “an exceedingly good land” (Num. 14:7), “a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates” (Deut. 8:8), and of course “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Lev. 20:24; Exod. 3:8; Deut. 27:3). The fundamental assumption of the Jewish and non-Jewish general public alike is that the land was granted to the “seed of Israel” until the end of days, and numerous Biblical verses appear to confirm this assumption.

      Like other masterpieces in the history of human literature, Biblical verses can be interpreted in different ways, and this versatility is one source of the power they hold. But this does not mean that every verse can be interpreted in completely contradictory ways. Paradoxically, despite the Christian scripts that trace the belief in Jesus to the land of Judea, the texts of the Bible repeatedly indicate that the Yahwistic religion neither appeared nor developed in the territory that God designated for his chosen ones. Surprisingly, the two first instances of theophany that played a decisive role in establishing God’s following and lay the foundation for monotheism in the Western Hemisphere (Judeo-Christian-Islamic civilization) both in theory and in practice did not take place in the land of Canaan.

      In the first instance, God appeared in Harran, in what is today Turkey, and issued the following instructions to Abram the Aramaean: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). Indeed, the first follower of Yahweh abandoned his homeland and embarked on a journey to the unknown Promised Land. Because of the famine, he did not stay there long, and quickly relocated to Egypt.

      According to the founding mythos, the second major dramatic encounter took place in the desert, during the Exodus from Egypt.4 Yahweh engaged Moses directly during the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. After the Ten Commandments, in addition to his instructions, commandments, and advice, God also spoke of the Promised Land: “Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared . . . When my angel goes before you and brings you to the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, and I blot them out” (Exod. 23:20, 23). Although the listeners should have already known that the land was not empty, the divine commitment now, for the first time, contains an explicit promise to remove its original inhabitants, who may disrupt the colonization.

      That is to say, neither Abraham, the father of the nation, nor Moses, its first great prophet—both of whom enjoyed a close and exclusive relationship with the Creator—were born in the land; instead, they migrated there from elsewhere. Rather than an autochthonous mythos praising the antiquity of the local inhabitants as an expression of their ownership of the land, the Yahwistic faith repeatedly highlighted the foreign origin of its founders and those who established the subsequent political entity in the land.

      When Abraham, the “convert,” who migrated to Canaan from Mesopotamia with his Aramaean wife, sought to marry off his favored son, he told his servant, “You will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell, but will go to my country and to my kindred, and take a wife for my son Isaac” (Gen. 24:3–4). Not at all surprised, the servant returned to his master’s homeland and imported the attractive Rebecca from abroad. This antipatriotic custom was practiced by the following generation as well, as reflected in the words spoken by Rebecca—who, like her father-in-law, came from abroad—to her aging husband: “I loathe my life because of the Hittite women. If Jacob marries one of the Hittite women like these, one of the women of the land, what good will my life be to me?” (Gen. 27:46). Isaac gave in to his domineering wife and instructed his eldest son accordingly: “You must not take a wife from the Canaanite women” (Gen. 28:1).

      As an obedient son, Jacob had no choice but to leave Canaan and journey to Mesopotamia, the homeland of his grandfather, his grandmother, and his mother. There, amid the not-so-distant Diaspora, he married Leah and Rachel, two local sisters who were also Jacob’s first cousins, ultimately fathering with them twelve sons and one daughter. The sons, eleven of whom (together with the two sons of Joseph) constituted the eponymous fathers of the tribes of Israel, were all born in a different land, except for one who was born later in Canaan. In addition, as we have seen, the four “mothers of the nation” also came from a distant homeland. Abraham, his wife, his son’s bride, the wives and concubines of his grandchild, and almost all of his great-grandchildren were, according to legend, natives of the northern Fertile Crescent who migrated to Canaan as commanded by the Creator.

      The antipatriotic saga continues as the story progresses. As we know, all of Jacob’s sons “went down” to Egypt, where all his descendants, the entire “seed of Israel,” would be born for the next four hundred years, which was longer than the period between the Puritan Revolution in England and the invention of the atomic bomb. Like their forefathers, they, too, would not hesitate to marry local women (a permissible arrangement as long as the women were not Canaanites). A notable instance is Joseph, who married Osnat, whom he was given by Pharaoh. (Abraham’s concubine Hagar was also not Canaanite but rather Egyptian.) Moses, first great leader of the “seed of Israel,” took Zipporah the Midianite as a wife. As a result of such marriages, which fully contradicted the later custom, it is no surprise that “the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them” (Exod. 1:7).5 The land in question here, we must remember, was Egypt, not Canaan. Thus, according to the biblical story itself, the “people” was emerging demographically in a place that was not promised to it, but that, according to the ancient cultural map, was considered a prestigious and praiseworthy cultural center. Moses, Aaron, and Joshua—who led the people to Canaan—were also born, educated, and transformed into devoted followers of Yahweh in the great pharaonic kingdom.

      As we have seen, this mythological, anti-autochthonous formation of the “holy nation” outside the land must be understood in conjunction with another integral dynamic. Not only did the authors of the Bible oppose the inhabitants of the land but also repeatedly expressed a deep hostility toward them. Most authors of the biblical texts loathed the local

Скачать книгу