Until it was no more. Sometime around the turn of the first millennium BCE, Zoroaster made history—literally, as well as figuratively—by prophesying the absolute end of the world. There was going to be one final battle between the forces of light and darkness and one last judgment of all human beings who had ever lived—and then there would be nothing but an all-encompassing, everlasting perfection: no hunger, no thirst, no disagreement, no childbirth, and no death. The hero would defeat the serpent one last time; chaos would be vanquished for good; only the good would remain—forever. This meant, among many other things, that time had become linear and irreversible (and thus, in a sense, properly historical). It also meant that the cost of individual moral choices had become almost impossibly high: not everyone was going to make it into timelessness, and no one was going to get a second chance.9
■ ■ ■
Perhaps influenced by Zoroaster, the ancient Israelites also came to think of time as a straight plot line. In some sense, Exodus is a conventional migration narrative explaining the legitimacy of a group’s territorial claim. Such stories (themselves versions of a questing hero’s return from the netherworld) tend to describe a hazardous march from a wrong temporary home to the right permanent one, indicated by the gods and discovered by the anointed leader-founder. But Exodus does much more than that. The story it tells is one of a final liberation from politics and a permanent solution to the “standing back and looking beyond” problem. Having escaped the Pharaoh, the Israelites did not establish a new state: they created a virtual one. Instead of a this-worldly king, they got themselves an other-worldly one, as powerful as their imagination would allow. The Israelites bridged the “Axial” chasm between the real and the ideal by submitting to a single ruler of unlimited power. They did not simply inherit him from their ancestors: they handed themselves over to him as part of a voluntary contract. They did not worship him through a polity that embodied his wilclass="underline" they worshipped him directly, as individuals (the Ten Commandments are in the second person singular) and as a community of the elect. After Moses, political and spiritual representation—indeed, any mediation between the Hebrews and their true ruler—became problematic or dispensable. They became “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Observance of the law became a matter of personal devotion and inner discipline. The Heavenly Father was to be loved, not simply served, and he was always watching and always listening: “Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, ‘Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?’ Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?’ No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.”10
The key to the one-on-one relationship with the absolute was that it be the only one (that is, truly absolute). “Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” The Israelites escaped a rule that was transitory, contingent, and mostly tolerant of golden calves and local cults by subjecting themselves to a rule that was eternal, self-sufficient, and utterly inescapable. They fled a tyranny that was gratuitously arbitrary for a tyranny that was arbitrary out of principle—and thus, one hoped, just. When Job insisted on his innocence, he was questioning God’s goodness. When Job’s three friends defended God’s goodness, they were questioning Job’s innocence (because punishment, they reasoned, must be proof of sinfulness). But they were all wrong, as God himself explained. The Almighty was simply too mighty, too powerful, and too busy with matters of life and death to justify himself to anyone. He did as he pleased for reasons only he understood. Job had to “repent in dust and ashes” and do as he was told. He had no moral agency at all. The price of political freedom was absolute moral slavery.11
Absolute moral slavery to the source of all morality may equal freedom (although Job’s possession of an independent moral sense seems to suggest otherwise), but even if it does not, the Hebrew god was remote and inconsistent enough to allow for some uncertainty. Unlike earthly kings and specialized gods, an all-powerful transcendental despot cannot be cheated (“there is no dark place, no deep shadow, where evildoers can hide”), but he just might be in a forgiving mood or otherwise engaged (he has so much more to do, after all). And of course the God of Israel gave Job and his friends plenty of reason to believe that the Covenant was well within human understanding and that all that was required of them was that they follow a few simple rules. “For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”12
Whatever the predicament of the individual subject, the fate of the chosen people as a whole was clear. The logic of the Book of Job did not apply to the Israelites as a group—or rather, the logic of the Book of Job seemed to suggest that individual moral slavery was a fair price for the guarantee of collective redemption. Some members of the tribe would be put to the sword, devoured by wild animals, or die of a plague (for breaking the law or for no reason at all), but the tribe as such would triumph no matter what. Its “great rebellions” and “many backslidings” might postpone the final deliverance, but they could do nothing to prevent it. The original election and final outcome were beyond morality or understanding: “The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people,” and that was the end of it. Or rather, that was the beginning. The end was the restoration of the chosen people to the promised land, where “they will neither hunger nor thirst, nor will the desert heat or the sun beat upon them.” Everything in between was history.13
The most obviously remarkable thing about the Hebrew God is that he was the first transcendental ruler to successfully eliminate all customary allegiances and proclaim himself an absolute monarch. But he did not stop there. After banning all rival cults and exterminating their adherents within the house of Israel, he denied the existence of all foreign gods, too. From being the only god of the Israelites, he became the only God, period. A few vestiges of traditional tribal relativism persisted for a while (you take “what your god Chemosh gives you,” and we’ll take “whatever the LORD our God has given us”), but the tendency was clear enough. “I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God. I will strengthen you, 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.”14
Some tribal gods are universal creators; the Hebrew God was the first universal autocrat. A small tribe repeatedly conquered by its much larger neighbors retaliated by conquering the world conceptually. Rather than recognizing the demonstrable superiority of their masters’ spiritual sponsors, switching loyalties, and dissolving in the multitudes of fellow opportunists, the Israelites extended ad infinitum the powers and jurisdiction of their own patron. Everything that ever happened anywhere was part of a universal design centered on the drama of their wanderings and eventual deliverance. All human beings, including the rulers of the great empires, were pawns in the hands of Israel’s heavenly pharaoh. History as the meaningful unfolding of time was the result of the Israelites’ collective moral choices. Human life past and present was one continuous reason for the postponement of the Day of the Lord.15