Yet this assertion – for Jews struggling to make sense of the ruin that had periodically overwhelmed them, and of the humiliations visited on them by a succession of conquerors – raised a problem. Why, if the world created by God was good, did he permit such things to happen? Jewish scholars, by the time that Pompey came to storm the Temple, had arrived at a sombre explanation. The entire history of humanity was one of disobedience to God. Making man and woman, he had given them a garden named Eden to tend, filled with every kind of exotic plant; and all its fruit was theirs to eat, save only that of a single tree, ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’.24 But the first woman, Eve, had been tempted by the serpent to taste the fruit of the tree; and the first man, Adam, had taken it from her, and tasted it as well. God, to punish them, had expelled the couple from Eden, and cursed them, decreeing that from that time on women were to suffer the agonies of childbirth, and men to labour for their food, and die. A grim sentence – and yet not, perhaps, the full limit of humanity’s fall. Banished from Eden, Eve had borne Adam children; and Cain, their eldest, had slain Abel, their second-born. From that moment on, it was as though the taint of violence were endemic to mankind. Blood had never ceased to splash the earth. Jewish scholars, tracking the wearying incidence of crimes down the generations, could not help but wonder from what – or who – such a capacity for evil derived. A century before Pompey’s capture of Jerusalem, a Jewish sage named Jesus Ben Sirah had arrived at the logical, the baneful, conclusion. ‘From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die.’25
For Jews, this inclination to disobedience, this natural proclivity for offending against God, represented a particular challenge. After all, it was they alone, of the many peoples of the world, who had been graced with his especial favour. They had not, as others had done, forgotten the Creator of the universe. The same God who had walked with Adam and Eve in Eden had appeared to their ancestors, and given them Canaan to be their own, and wrought a multitude of miracles on their behalf. All this was known to every Jew. Recorded in the scrolls that constituted the very essence of Jewish identity, it could be read in any synagogue. Yet these scriptures were a chronicle of mutiny as well as of submission; of whoring after idols as well as of faithfulness to God. The narratives of the conquest of Canaan portrayed a land filled with altars that demanded to be smashed, and sanctuaries that required to be despoiled – but which, even as they were destroyed, exerted an awful fascination. Not even the gift of the Promised Land had been able to keep Israel from idolatry. ‘They chose new gods.’26 In book after book the same cycle was repeated: apostasy, punishment, repentance. Jews, reading of how their forebears had been seduced by the gods of neighbouring peoples – the Canaanites, the Syrians, the Phoenicians – knew as well what the ultimate, the crowning, chastisements had been: Israel enslaved; Jerusalem sacked; the Temple destroyed. These were the traumas that haunted every Jew. Why had God permitted them to happen? Such was the question, in the wake of the Babylonian exile, that had done more than anything to inspire the compilation of the Jewish scriptures. Jews who read the scrolls that told of their people’s history could be in no doubt as to the retribution that might again be visited on them were they ever to abandon the worship of God; but there was hope in their scriptures as well as warning. Even if ruin were to be visited on Jerusalem again, and the Jews dispersed to the ends of the earth, and salt and brimstone rained down upon their fields, God’s love would endure. Repentance, as it ever did, would see them forgiven. ‘And the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you.’27
Here, in this demanding, emotional and volatile deity, was a divine patron like no other. Apollo might have favoured the Trojans, and Hera the Greeks, but no god had ever cared for a people with the jealous obsessiveness of the God of Israel. Wise, he was also wilful; all-powerful, he was also readily hurt; consistent, he was also alarmingly unpredictable. Jews who pondered the evidence of their scriptures never doubted that he was a deity with whom it was possible to have a profoundly personal relationship; but the key to his identity, vivid though it was, lay in its manifold contradictions. A warrior, who in his wrath might panic armies, annihilate cities and command the slaughter of entire peoples, he also raised the poor from the dust and the needy from dungheaps. Lord of the heavens and the earth, ‘the Rider of Clouds’,28 he served too as a comfort to those who called upon him amid dark nights of misery and dread. A creator and a destroyer; a husband and a wife; a king, a shepherd, a gardener, a potter, a judge: the God of Israel was hailed in the Jewish holy books as all these things, and more. ‘I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God.’29 A historic vaunt. Recorded in the wake of Babylon’s fall to Cyrus in 539 BC, it asserted a proposition that had never before in history been made quite so baldly. Just as Marduk had claimed the credit for the Persian victory, so too – in almost identical terms – had the God of Israel; but Marduk, despite the insistence of his priests that it was he who had chosen Cyrus to rule the world, had ranked as only one of an immense multitude of gods. Male gods and female gods; warrior gods and craftsmen gods; storm gods and fertility gods: ‘you are less than nothing.’30 Long after the death of Cyrus, with the temples of Babylon in ruins, and their idols lost to mud, Jews could read in their synagogues assurances given centuries previously to the Persian king – and know them to be true. ‘I will strengthen you,’ the One God of Israel had announced to Cyrus, ‘though you have not acknowledged me, so that from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting men may know there is none besides me. I am the Lord, and there is no other.’31
Yet if their scriptures, in the age of the spread of Roman power, were understood by Jews to demonstrate the truth of this vaunting statement, so also, scattered throughout them, were vestiges of assumptions older by far. The immense tapestry woven by priests and scribes in the wake of the Babylonian destruction of the Temple had been fashioned from numerous ancient threads. Nothing better illustrated the variety of sources from which these had been spun than the sheer range of names given throughout the Jewish biblia to God: Yahweh, Shaddai, El. That these had always referred to the same deity was, naturally enough, the guiding assumption of every Jewish scholar; and yet there lingered hints enough to suggest a rather different possibility. ‘Who among the gods is like you, O Lord?’32 Such a question was an echo from a distant, barely imaginable world – one in which Yahweh, the deity to whom it was put, had ranked as only one among various gods of Israel. How, then, had he evolved to become the universal Lord of the heavens and earth, without peer or rival? The priests and scribes who compiled the writings that told their story would have been appalled even to contemplate such a question. Nevertheless, despite all the care and attentiveness of their editing, not every trace of the deity that Yahweh had originally been was erased from Jewish scripture. It was still possible to detect, preserved like insects in amber, hints of a cult very different from that practised in the Temple: that of a storm god worshipped in the form of a bull, sprung ‘from the land of Edom’33 in the land to the south of Canaan, and who had come to rule as supreme in the council of the gods.* ‘For who in the skies above can compare with the Lord? Who is like the Lord among the sons of the gods?’34