The Gifts of the Jews
Stages of the evolution of religion
• 1) A ritualistic religion run by priests who
mediate between the heavens and the people,
in alliance with despotic rulers.
• 2) A revolutionary thinker, such Buddha,
attacks "external religion" and teaches people
to find divinity within themselves.
– “You are the Buddha.”
– “Here’s how you can become enlightened. It’s
simple. Look deeply at this flower.”
• 3) The recuperation of this revolution by organized religious
institutions in collaboration with the State
– recreates the external religion and the alienation of the
earlier ritualistic religions.
• 4) However, because they are keepers of the revolutionary
messages of their founders, these new religions are
contradictory and unstable, subject to evolution or reform in
the name of the true meaning of their founder.
– 28 generations later, Buddhism too had become a new
ritual religion
– -> Zen Buddhism goes back to original simplicity of
Buddha’s message: you are the Buddha, so kill any pretend
Buddha outside you
The Gifts of the Jews
• Subtitle: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the
Way Everyone Thinks and Feels
– By Thomas Cahill; Doubleday, 1998.
• Significance of being “desert nomads”?
• What gifts? What change in how people think and
feel?
• How did people think and feel before the Jews?
• We go back to the beginning of this course
– But now we take into this beginning all that has been
subsequently developed
Nomadic Patriarchalism
• Hunter-Gatherers:
– Men: animals, Women: plants
• Transformation from dependence on nature to
control over nature
• Herders focus on animals
– Men predominate
• Agriculturalists focus on plants
– Women predominate
– until invention of the animal-drawn plow
Features of Nomadic Herders
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1) They live nomadically from grazing animals
2) they live in kinship groups;
3) they are generally warrior societies;
4) there is male superiority, patriarchy;
– Recall: men deal with the animals
– Men are generally the warriors
• 5) there is a strong sense of equality and
freedom (within patriarchal hierarchy)
Kinship of Hebrews
• 12 tribes or clans of the sons of Jacob (“Israel”)
• They are herders, living in kinship groups
• Descended from Abraham who left Ur in
Mesopotamia about 1900 BCE
• Become slaves in Egypt
• Freed under the leadership of Moses about 1200
BCE
• First kings: David and Solomon about 1000 BCE
God of the Hebrews
and Unity of the Clans
• Nomadic clans fight each other, strangers
• Hebrews maintain unity among clans through
worship of one God, “Yahweh”
• Danger of absorption into surrounding agricultural
communities
– Like Aryans in India
• = Thou shalt not worship “strange gods”
• => “henotheism” (recall: panentheism):
– one God for us—
– We don’t worship the gods of the others
• Clear monotheism about 600-500 BCE
History of Slavery/Oppression and
Freedom
• Captivity in Egypt 1600-1200 BCE
– Freed by their God through Moses (God’s Chosen one, Messiah)
• Struggle with kingship 1000- BCE
– Prophets denounce inequality, slavery
– Prophets criticize the new hierarchical state in the name of earlier
kinship equality and its religion
• Babylonian captivity 600 BCE
– Freed by Cyrus 538 BCE, God’s Chosen One (Messiah)
– the temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt
• Roman “captivity” 63 BCE, 6 CE -– Who will free them?
– Another Messiah: the Anointed One of God
What gift?
• The “Gift of the Jews” is its history of freedom,
loss of freedom, and recovery of freedom:
– It is a story with a beginning, middle and end.
– = History has a direction: is “linear”
– It does not move in the circles of nature
• => break from nature religion
– The God of Hebrews is thus above, outside of nature
– Human beings are masters/guardians over the earth
Two Dangers
• Internal: division among clans
• External: absorption by surrounding
agriculturalists
– With their religion of nature
– Expressed in sexual rites
– With women priestesses
• Solution: law-bound kinship under one
transcendent God
– I.e., He transcends, goes beyond, nature
Law-bound kinship
• Earlier we stressed the contrast between kinship
society and law-based society
• 12 clans: danger of division, warfare between clans
• Re-united through “covenant” (contract) with God
(“Yahweh-Jehovah”)
• >Uniform laws cement unity between tribes:
– laws founded on the larger kinship ties replace or override
separate traditions of different clans
– = legality within kinship, not replacing kinship
– recall caste laws of India
Unity and Separation
• God (Yahweh, Jehovah, the Lord) gives laws,
– Ethical: “10 Commandments”
– Ritualistic: more detailed codes of dress,
behavior, worship
• => Unites the different tribes by a single
higher code imposed on all
• These laws separate the Hebrews from the
surrounding agricultural peoples
• So we must ask: what was the religion of
these other people like?
Sacred Marriage
• Early agricultural societies maintain Mother Earth
– Goddess religion
– Gilgamesh: Goddess Aruhu created human beings
– “Priestess/Prostitute” “civilizes” Enkidu through sexual
connection
• Concern for plant life, fertility of the soil (Earth)
• Importance of the female, the early agriculturalist
• “Sacred Marriage” (Hieros Gamos) – union of
heaven (male, sun, rain) and Earth (female)
• Recall Daoist unity of Yin-Yang
Yin-Yang
Krishna and Radha
Aristophanes on Soul-Mates
• “I believe that if our loves were perfectly
accomplished, and each one returning to his
primeval nature had his original true love,
then our race would be happy.”
• (Three kinds of unions: male-male, femalefemale, and male-female)
Who, what is Brahman?
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I am the fresh taste of the water; I
The silver of the moon, the gold o’ the sun,
The word of worship in the Veds, the thrill
That passeth in the ether, and the strength
Of man’s shed seed.
– I.e., the experience of sexual orgasm
Nature-worship of Sumerian
Agriculturalists
• “. . . [T]onight is the night of the full moon; and, as
darkness quickly falls and the moon rises in the
heavens, we hear the sounds of hundreds of
priestesses, chanting dully and playing primitive
pipes and drums. Dressed in elaborate ceremonial
garb, they gather solemnly around the terrace on
which the temple is built, looking upward to the
stepped pyramid beyond the temple, which rises
almost in defiance of geometry, almost (it seems) to
the sky itself.
• “At the highest platform of this ziggurat (for so the
stepped pyramid is called) is a small but glowing altar
of lapis lazuli, carved fantastically with snakes and
giant spiders, to which an adolescent boy has been
bound on his back. He is naked, though his flesh has
been decorated in patterns of lozenges and zigzags to
resemble the cobra. Priestesses of the highest order,
also naked except for their extraordinary rings and
spiral bracelets, are massaging the boy with gentle
foreplay.
• “As the moonlight illuminates his swelling member,
the high priestess appears, as if from nowhere,
dressed in a silver garment, which she sheds. Now
naked, except for the myriad pearls that decorate her
body and the painted spirals that adorn her breasts,
she mounts the boy with the assistance of her
sisters, who shriek their encouragement in a frenzy
that only grows higher as the high priestess rides the
boy, at first with rhythmic dignity, then with
increasing agitation till her pearls tremble in the
moonlight like so many minuscule planets . . .
• “and the lozenges and spirals glisten, and both
bodies, writhing in sweat, appear to be not so much
earthly bodies as inhuman forces of the cosmos. All
the priestesses, the lowest orders still on the terrace
at the ziggurat’s base, the higher orders arranged in
ascending importance on the lofty steps of the
ziggurat itself, are growing wild and ecstatic. Ripping
open their robes and pawing themselves, they bay
upward to the event on the ziggurat’s height and to
the moon itself.” (Cahill, 43-44.)
Minoan Snake Goddess
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Rejection of the Snake
• Recall Gilgamesh
– Snake becomes immortal
– Birth > Death > Rebirth
• Story of Adam and Eve
– The tree of immortality is banned
– Snake associated with Eve
– = She wants to be a Goddess-priestess!
• => Subordination of the female to the male
– Gives religious sanction to patriarchal nomads
– Maintains unity of Hebrew tribes
Purity before God
• From Exodus, chapter 19 and 20, the Jewish
Tanakh:
• “Moses came down from the mountain to the
people and warned the people to stay pure,
and they washed their clothes. And he said to
the people, “Be ready for the third day: do not
go near a woman.”
Fear and Trembling
• “On the third day, as morning dawned, there
was thunder, and lightening and a dense cloud
upon the mountain, and a very loud blast of
the horn; and all the people who were in the
camp trembled. Moses led the people out of
the camp toward God, and they took their
places at the foot of the mountain.
The Lord comes from above
• “Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke, for the Lord had
come down upon it in fire; the smoke rose like the
smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled
violently. The blare of the horn grew louder and
louder. As Moses spoke, God answered him in
thunder. The Lord came down upon Mount Sinai, on
the top of the mountain, and the Lord called Moses
to the top of the mountain and Moses went up.
Only the pure of heart can see God
• “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Go down, warn the
people not to break through to the Lord to
gaze, lest many of them perish. The priests
also, who come near the Lord, must stay pure,
lest the Lord break out against them. . .’”
Henotheism or Monotheism?
• “God spoke all these words, saying:
• “I the Lord am your God who brought you out
of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage:
You shall have no other gods besides Me.”
• --Not: There are no other gods besides Me.
– = “Henotheism”: there is only one God for us
– Other people have their gods too
No images or likenesses
• “You shall not make for yourself a sculptured
image, or any likeness of what is in the
heavens above, or on the earth below, or in
the waters under the earth. You shall not bow
down to them or serve them.”
• --Recall magical significance of cave drawings
Kinship guilt to the fourth generation
• “For I the Lord your God am an impassioned
[jealous] God, visiting the guilt of the parents
upon the children, upon the third and upon
the fourth generations of those who reject
Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth
generation of those who love Me and keep My
commandments.”
• Kinship and generational guilt or blessing