The Jews did not hold to this conviction lightly. They could be confident of what had happened when Moses climbed Sinai, for the fruits of it were still in their charge. Inscribed in the Torah were commandments that had originally been written by the finger of God himself on tablets of stone. ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’55 Nine similarly lapidary instructions followed: orders to obey the Sabbath and to honour one’s parents; to refrain from carving likenesses and taking the name of God in vain; never to murder or commit adultery, nor to steal, bear false witness or covet. All ten commandments, though, were dependent for their potency on the first. There were other gods, after all, who did not put the same value on moral principles as did the God of Israel. Some placed a premium on beauty; some on knowledge; some on power. The Ten Commandments were not merely instructions, but an expression of the very identity of the God of Israel. His Chosen People were being called to live, not as his slaves, but as men and women brought closer to him, to share in his nature. This was why, even as he gave the Ten Commandments to Moses, he warned that he was ‘a jealous God’.56 His love was of an order that might, if betrayed or rejected, turn murderously coercive. When Moses, descending Sinai after an absence of forty days and forty nights, discovered that the Israelites had set up a golden calf, and fallen to worshipping it, so angry was he that he smashed the tablets of stone, and ordered the slaughter of three thousand men. Yet God’s anger was even more terrible. His initial intention was to wipe out the Israelites altogether. Only after Moses had climbed Mount Sinai again and implored him for mercy did he finally relent.
Yet that love was what their divine patron felt for them the Jews never doubted. ‘For you are a holy people to the Lord your God. You the Lord has chosen to become for Him a treasured people among all the peoples that are on the face of the earth.’ As token of this he had given to Moses, after the Ten Commandments, an altogether fuller body of ordinances. Among these were instructions on how altars were to be constructed, and priests to purify themselves, and sacrifices to be conducted; but priests were not alone in being subjected to his instructions. So too were all the Children of Israel. The laws given by God to Moses specified what foods they could and could not eat; with whom they could and could not have sex; how they were to keep the Sabbath; how they were to treat their slaves; that they were to leave gleanings for the poor in orchards; that they were not to sport pudding-bowl haircuts. To contravene these dictates was to call down upon Israel the most terrifying punishment; and yet, like the Ten Commandments, they served as an expression not of tyranny, but of devotion. The Lord God, the creator of the heavens and the earth, had granted to the Children of Israel a momentous and unprecedented honour: a covenant. No other people had so much as contemplated that such a thing might be possible. Gods served to witness treaties, after all – not to enter into one themselves. Who were mortals, to imagine that they might contract an alliance with a deity? Only the Jews had dared entertain such a novel, such a blasphemous conceit. That they had entered into an accord with the Lord God provided the foundation-stone of their entire understanding of the divine. It was the Covenant, written on the tablets borne by Moses, that the Ark had been built to contain; it was the Covenant, reverently placed in the Holy of Holies, that lay at the heart of the Temple raised by Solomon. Nor, even after the ruin visited on Jerusalem by the Babylonians, had the treaty between the Lord God and His Chosen People been rendered void. The terms of it endured. The Jewish scriptures, edited and re-edited in the centuries that followed the disappearance of the Ark, had been compiled in large part to enshrine them. Every Jew who studied it renewed the Covenant in his heart.
Moses, so it was recorded at the end of the Torah, had died on the eve of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan. Despite having freed the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt, and then led them for forty years in the wilderness, he never set foot in the Promised Land. ‘And no man has known his burial place to this day.’57 The mystery that veiled the location of his tomb helped to veil as well how his story came to be told in the way that it did. No mention of Moses was to be found in Egypt; no mention of the plagues; no mention of the miraculous parting of the Red Sea. It was as though, outside Jewish scripture, he had never existed. Yet the quality of myth that attached itself to Moses, the degree to which he was – in the words of one scholar – ‘a figure of memory but not of history’,58 was precisely what endowed his encounter on the summit of Sinai with its transcendent and incomparable power. The authors of the Torah, when they formulated the covenant that bound them to the Lord God, naturally drew on the conventions of the age. ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.’59 Such was the custom in the Near East: for a king to begin a proclamation with a ringing vaunt. When the Lord God threatened that disobedience would see the heavens over Israel’s head turn to bronze, and the earth beneath her feet turn to iron, he echoed the menacing terms of an Assyrian conqueror. When he promised that he would scourge ‘all the peoples whom you fear’,60 he offered protection much as a pharaoh committing himself to an alliance might have done. Yet the record of his covenant, couched though it may have been in terms familiar to the diplomats of the Near East, gave to the Jews something utterly without paralleclass="underline" legislation directly authored by a god.
It needed no mortals to supplement this. Such was the clear lesson of the Jewish holy books. Even the oil with which David and Solomon were anointed, as the mark of their election, did not endow them with what Hammurabi and his heirs in Babylon had always taken for granted: the right of a king to issue laws. Monarchy in Israel, compared to that of Mesopotamia, was a pallid and a gelded thing. Only by abandoning the Covenant altogether could it hope to assert itself – and this, so Jewish scripture recorded, was precisely what had happened. Kings had grown uppity. They had burned incense to gods other than the Lord God, and issued laws of their own. Then, a few decades before Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians, a king named Josiah reported the discovery in the Temple of something astonishing: a long-lost ‘Book of the Law’.61 Summoning the priests, ‘and all the people from the least to the greatest’,62 he read them what it decreed. The mysterious book proved to be the record of the Covenant itself. Josiah, calling his people to the proper worship of the Lord, did not do so in his own name. He, no less than the meanest of his subjects, was subject to the dictates of God’s law. Legislation was the prerogative of the divine. Repeatedly in Jewish scripture, doubts were expressed as to whether Israel, as God’s people, needed kings at all. ‘The Lord will rule over you.’63