When Apollo slew the children of Niobe, no one thought to complain that his vengeance had been excessive. Lord of the silver bow, he dealt with those who offended him as he pleased. It was not by answering the complaints of mortals that Apollo made manifest his divinity, but by performing deeds infinitely beyond their scope. Like Marduk, he had even felled a dragon. In Canaan, too, stories were told of how gods had fought with dragons and sea serpents – and thereby demonstrated their worthiness to rule the heavens. Such a conceit was, to the writers of Genesis, a nonsense and a blasphemy; and so it was, in their account of the Creation, that they made sure to specify that Elohim had fashioned, not fought with, the creatures of the deep. ‘And God created the sea monsters.’44 Yet the surface calm of the Jewish holy books was deceptive. Every so often, stirring from the depths of memories and traditions that not even the most careful editing could entirely erase, the sinuous bulk of a monster that had indeed fought with God would hove into view. Named variously Rahab, Tanin and Leviathan, it was the same seven-headed serpent that had twisted and coiled in poetry composed almost a millennium before the Book of Job. ‘Could you draw Leviathan with a hook, and with a cord press down his tongue?’45 The question, demanded of Job from the whirlwind, was, of course, rhetorical. Only God could tame Leviathan. If he was portrayed in the Book of Job as ruling in the manner of a Persian king, the Lord of agents who post o’er land and ocean, then so also, when he spoke to a man who had arraigned him of injustice, did he draw on vastly more ancient wellsprings to articulate his power. No wonder that Job ended up brow-beaten. ‘I know You can do anything.’46
Yet Job had never doubted God’s power – only his justice. On that score, God had nothing to say. The Book of Job – written when, for the first time, the existence of a deity both omnipotent and all-just was coming to be contemplated – dared to explore the implications with an unflinching profundity. That Jewish scholars should have included it in their great compilation of scripture spoke loudly of their struggle to confront a novel and pressing problem: the origin of evil. For other peoples, with their multitudes of deities, the issue had barely raised its head. After all, the more gods there were in the cosmos, the more explanations there were for human suffering. How, though, to explain it in a cosmos with just a single god? Only the devotees of Ahura Mazda – who, like the Jews, believed in a universe created by an all-wise, all-good deity – had ever had to wrestle with a question of this order. Perhaps, then, in the presence before God’s throne of the Satan, who inflicts such sufferings on Job and then vanishes mysteriously from the story, there was a hint of the solution proposed by the Persians to explain the potency of eviclass="underline" that it existed as a rival and equal principle to good. Yet if so, it was not one that Jewish scholars were willing to countenance. Deeply though they might revere the memory of Cyrus, they had no place in their scriptures for anything resembling the cosmic battle between Arta and Drauga. There could be only the one God. Less blasphemous to attribute to him the creation of evil than to imply that it might ever be a threat to his power. Yahweh, speaking to Cyrus, was portrayed as scorning the notion of a universe contested by the Truth and the Lie. ‘I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster. I, the Lord, do all these things.’47
Nowhere else in Jewish scripture was there anything resembling this bald assertion. If God was omnipotent, then so too was he all-just. These were twin convictions that the Jews, no matter the patent tension between them, had come to enshrine as the very essence of their understanding of the divine. That God might have sponsored the Roman storming of the Temple, not as a punishment for the faults of his chosen people but because he was as much the author of chaos as of order, was a possibility so grotesque as to be inconceivable. All his works served the cause of order. That his purposes might sometimes be veiled in mystery did not prevent him from fathoming human despair, from caring for the wretched, and from providing comfort where there was grief.
The poor and needy search for water,
but there is none;
their tongues are parched with thirst,
But I the Lord will answer them,
I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.48
Never before had such incongruities been so momentously combined within a single deity: power and intimacy, menace and compassion, omniscience and solicitude.
And this god – all-powerful, all-good, who ruled the entire world, and upheld the harmony of the cosmos – was the god who had chosen for his especial favour the Jews. Helpless before the might of Rome’s legions though they might be, unable to prevent a conqueror from intruding upon even their holiest shrine, a people with no prospect of ever winning global rule, they had this consolation: the certitude that their God was indeed the one, the only Lord.
Covenant
Hard proof was not long in coming. Divine punishment caught up with Pompey. In 49 BC, the Roman world collapsed into civil war, and the following year, in Greece, the man who had dominated Rome for two decades was routed in battle by a rival warlord: Julius Caesar. Barely seven weeks later, Pompey the Great was dead. The speed and scale of his downfall stunned the world – and was greeted in Judaea with exultant delight. Just as God had triumphed over Leviathan, so now had he crushed ‘the pride of the Dragon’.49 A poet, writing in emulation of the Psalms, chronicled the details: how Pompey had sought refuge in Egypt; how he had been run through with a spear; how his corpse, bobbing on the waves, had been left without a grave. ‘He had failed to recognise that God alone is great.’50
The scene of Pompey’s death was a particularly potent one in Jewish imaginings. Nowhere had more spectacularly, or more momentously, borne witness to the power of their God than Egypt. Once, before they came into their inheritance and took possession of Canaan, the Children of Israel had been slaves there. Pharaoh, fearful of their growing numbers, had ‘worked them ruthlessly’.51 He and all his gods, though, had been humbled into the dust. Ten plagues had devastated his kingdom. The Nile had turned to blood; vermin had variously slithered or swarmed across every corner of the land; the entire country had been cast into darkness. For a long while, though, Pharaoh had remained obdurate. Only after a climactic horror, when the firstborn of every Egyptian was struck down in a single night, ‘and the firstborn of all the livestock as well’,52 had he finally let the Israelites go. Even then, he had soon recanted. Pursuing the fugitive slaves, he and his squadron of chariots had cornered them on the shores of the Red Sea. Still the miracles had not ceased. A mighty east wind had blown up, and the waters split apart; and the children of Israel, crossing the seabed, made it to the far shore. Onwards in pursuit of them Pharaoh and his warriors had sped. ‘The water flowed back and covered the chariots and horsemen – the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed the Israelites into the sea. Not one of them survived.’53
Here, then, in a world where the gods tended to bestow their favours upon kings and conquerors, was yet another mark of the distinctive character of the God of Israeclass="underline" that he had chosen as his favourite slaves. The memory of how he had set their ancestors free would always be tended and treasured by the Jews. As cloud by day, and fire by night, he had been more visibly present than at any time before or since: first as a column guiding them through the desert, and then imminent within a tent fashioned to serve as his throne-room. Upon one man in particular he had bestowed an exceptional grace: ‘for,’ as the Lord God told him, ‘you have found favour in My eyes and I have known you by name’.54 No other prophet in Israel’s history would have a bond with God such as Moses had enjoyed. He it was who had spoken for the Lord before Pharaoh, who had summoned the plagues that harrowed Egypt, who had raised his staff to split the waters of the Red Sea. Most awesome of all, and most intimate, was the meeting of God with Moses upon a mountain named Sinai.* As the Israelites gathered on the plain below, heavy cloud concealed its heights, and there had been thunder and lightning, and the great blaring of a ram’s horn. ‘Watch yourselves not to go up on the mountain or to touch its edge. Whosoever touches the mountain is doomed to die.’ But as the ram’s horn sounded ever louder, and the mountain began to shake, and the Lord God himself descended upon it amid smoke and fire, Moses was summoned to climb its slopes. Heaven met with Earth; the celestial with the human. What followed was to prove the axle on which the course of history itself would turn.