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Abraham: Sumerian Mythology, And Ancient Hebrew Scripture

INTRODUCTION

The patriarch Abraham is perhaps one of the best known biblical personalities. The story of his life and time is narrated in the Book of Genesis in a simple manner, depicting a man who was first to reject polytheism in preference of monotheism, a man who then became a pilgrim, and finally settled in the far away land of Canaan where he could practise his newly discovered religion. Thoughtful reading in Scripture, however, indicates that there is much more than meets the eye to this seemingly simple story. In the circle of dependence of pagan worship man could not take autonomous decisions, nor could he act on his experience; his decisions and actions were dependent upon the will of some artifact god often made in the image of man. This religious system discouraged, and perhaps even prevented man from exercising his capacity for decision-making, and hence from using his reason to distinguish between, and judge, different values, and from learning by trial and error. The rise to prominence of temples and of priests who claimed capabilities to interpret the gods’ will and to have knowledge of their wishes led to a system wherein man was robbed of his creative enterprise, of his rights, and of his responsibilities. Puzzled by the workings of nature and frustrated by his own attempts to comprehend the mysterious forces which drive it, primitive man resigned himself to accept that every force in nature has some hidden powers intended to frustrate his will and enterprise. The disappointments and suffering inflicted upon him by natural calamities impressed upon him the desire to play safe. It seems that from such cravings for safety and well- 2 BEFORE DEMOCRACY being man was driven to accept and foster the view that natural forces could be appeased and entreated to be helpful to mankind rather than contrive to hinder their enterprise. Consequently, man abandoned the very idea of self-reliance, and submitted to the unknown will of the gods; man surrendered the independence of his mind and of his action to a belief that the gods would shield him from nature and protect him from its disasters. In time, the ancient world’s long history of polytheism with its manifold gods, temples, priests, and kings gave way to scepticism; some unique man (or men) began to question its validity and viability as a system capable of serving the human interest of self-preservation and improved well-being. In Scripture the patriarch Abraham is depicted as such a unique man, perhaps even the first historical man to have dared to take a critical look into the long history of this phenomenon of hierarchical polytheistic worship and its attendant hierarchical social system of rulers, administrators, and subservient masses in his native city-state Ur of the Chaldees. His keen mind evaluated this history, and, finding it seriously wanting in its effects on human well-being, he came up with an alternative explanation of the human condition, and with a radically different world view. Critical of the lack of concern for peace, prosperity, and justice for all people within his environment, Abraham rejected the Sumero- Babylonian pantheon of anthropomorphic gods. He thought that a Deity capable of creating the universe must surely have been a unique Being considerably more powerful and more capable than any of the gods which he observed about him, and hence a Being above and beyond human understanding. Thus, the continuous wars that raged throughout the long Sumero-Akkadian-Babylonian history, wars that caused incessant destruction of property and of human life, probably led Abraham to reject their world view, and to adopt a radically different one. Observing the order in nature - the division into day and night, the seasons and their effects on the cycle of crop growing, and on other aspects in nature - and its contrast with the disorder in the social system, a disorder manifest in the incessant warfare among the people’s gods, and among their ruling representatives, but where, nonetheless, human effort could, and did, still yield some fruit, Abraham came to understand that a world freed from the shackles of failed gods, temples, priests, and kings would be far more propitious to man. I will argue that some such reflections prompted Abraham to reject his native country, its people and culture, and emigrate to settle in a far away place where authoritarian organizations were yet unknown. Historically, Canaan, the land of his choice, was then an open frontier, and its topography of hills and valleys lent itself to occupation by separate, small communities - a land where man could still be the measure of his world, and where no god interfered in his daily ABRAHAM 3 affairs. To put it somewhat differently, in Abraham’s chosen land human needs, aspirations and their fulfilment were permitted to be judged on a human level and could be seen as a consequence of human effort: production could be consumed by those who toiled for, and produced, it. In this scheme of things Abraham saw the universe as a divided system of power: the upper world - heaven - as the exclusive domain of God, a supreme intelligence, Creator of the universe, and Supervisor of its workings with all their ramifications, including regularities - a power outside and beyond human knowledge, hence beyond human control; and the planet earth as the domain of man who was assigned by the Creator to be the chief producer and overseer of the earth and all that is upon, within, and above, it. To put it into other terms, man makes decisions, he makes mistakes, but he also learns how to improve his world by learning from his mistakes. If this as yet somewhat conjectural presentation of how a man of Abraham’s calibre would have espied his world and his fellow men, and become instrumental in the transition from polytheism to monotheism may seem all too narrow, simplistic, and much too easy, the intention that grounds it is not to offer psychological explanations, but only to fill in some of the gaps in the history of social change, for it is with such change that this study is concerned. Hence, taking into consideration the paucity of appropriate documentation, the lack of clarity in some of the narrations in extant Scriptural texts, and the contentions that these texts were infiltrated by various ingredients of Sumero-Babylonian culture, I intend to show in the present chapter that the patriarch Abraham was an extraordinary human being who had original ideas and ideals, a man who, against the odds of the social system wherein he was born and bred, set out to open up new, even radical paths to social change. In a later chapter in this study I shall argue that his teachings remained with his Israelite descendants even after the debacle of the dispersion of the original Abrahamic-Mosaic Israelites among the unfriendly (and some friendly) nations in many lands to this very day. To place Abraham’s problem in its proper perspective, it is perhaps desirable to mention briefly the story of the rise to power in Babylon of Hammurabi, a leader whose successful military campaigns to destroy all of his adversaries, militarily and economically, and lay a foundation for his dynasty of rulers, gave Abraham the opportunity to persuade his father Terah to abandon the city-state of Ur where they had prospered, and find refuge in the far away and much more primitive land of Canaan. As Terah was of an advanced age, they decided to settle in Haran where they were beyond Hammurabi’s immediate reach. Thus, for as long as Terah remained alive, Abraham stayed with him in Haran where he continued to 4 BEFORE DEMOCRACY exercise his entrepreneurial gifts of finding and taking advantage of opportunities for gain. However, throughout his sojourn in Haran, Abraham prepared himself for his eventual emigration by developing a husbandry station to enable him to subsequently arrive in Canaan as an independent man of considerable wealth. Upon his father’s death, Abraham assembled his wife Sarah, his brother’s son Lot, his trusted, devoted slaves (or servants), along with his amassed riches, including cattle and sheep, and travelled to and through the land of Canaan before deciding where to settle. He appears to have been well-informed about the political and social conditions throughout the ancient world. Although we are told in the Book of Genesis that regarding this venture Abraham was guided by his God, his communications with Him were not direct; unlike Moses who is presented in Scripture as speaking personally with God, Abraham seems to have gained his insights into historical events and phenomena by inner vision, conjecture, dreams, and deliberation. Thus Abraham is presented in Scripture as a man who both acted on ratiocination, and believed his aspirations to stem from inspiration bestowed upon him by his God. This is the interpretation that undergirds our reading of the narrations in the Book of Genesis as reproduced below. Abraham’s decision to leave Haran for Canaan suggests that he acted with deliberation: he rejected the world view which he had observed and experienced in his native land, and had a fair idea of what he was after. So much we may gather from narrations in the Book of Genesis on his departure from Haran, his brief sojourn in Egypt, and his subsequent travels through the length and breadth of Canaan before deciding where to settle and build a home, not just for his immediate family, but also for his future descendants. In Abraham’s day, ancient Mesopotamia was reputed to have been the centre of a high cultural level, with a developed system of government, and a well-organized, successful commercial system that extended far and wide beyond Mesopotamia. Long before Abraham’s birth the Sumerians could boast of a written language, of a highly developed school system with an edubba (academy), of a rich literature, of high quality art work in gold and other metals, as well as of military weaponry and war tactics, and of a code of laws hundreds of years old. Why then did Abraham, a man who seems to have been well-informed about the high dimension of Mesopotamia’s cultural and commercial achievements, choose to leave it in preference for Canaan, a land with a considerably lower level of culture on all aspects of comparison with Sumer-Mesopotamia? There can be no doubt that Abraham entered Canaan with a preconceived idea that within its environs he would be free, personally and socially, from all manner of Sumero- ABRAHAM 5

Mesopotamian lifestyle, and its traditions of ancient times. Bearing in mind the differences between these cultures (the rigid social coherence of ancient Sumer-Mesopotamia, where the population saw themselves as the descendants of an ancient culture with a long and superior social history, and the late-comers in Canaan, people who did not insist that they would not tolerate novelties such as Abraham’s contemplation of one universal God), I shall attempt to find, at least, some hints about Abraham’s chief problems by searching for answers to the following questions: what impelled him to reject Sumer-Mesopotamia in its totality for a new start in Canaan? What kind of an improvement - social and cultural - did Abraham seek and find in Canaan? To search for, and find an explanation of, the ideas and ideals with which Abraham was confronted during that period in history, I intend to examine, first, the environment which he was keen to abandon, and, next, the ideals and life-style which he preferred.

THE SUMERIANS

We may learn from the various historical documentations left to posterity that the Sumerians were highly regarded, not only by themselves and in their own time, but by others throughout history, and we may note the extent to which they influenced various other cultures and peoples. The historian Samuel N. Kramer thus notes1 that in the myth, “Enki and the World Order”, the words attributed to the god Enki (creator and organizer of the “natural and cultural entities and processes essential to civilized society”) reveal that the Sumerians saw themselves as a chosen people:

a community noteworthy not only for its material wealth and possessions, not only for its powerful kings, but also for its honoured spiritual leaders, the en’s - a community which all the fate-decreeing heaven-gods, the Anunnaki, had selected as their abode.

Indeed, Sumerian influence on other cultures and peoples is evident particularly in the areas of written law, religion, education, and literature. Thus the origin of legal documents such as sales, deeds, and of law codes found in later periods throughout the ancient Near East is traced back to the Sumerian city-state throughout the greater part of the third millennium B.C. In Kramer’s words,2 “even Greece and Rome would probably never have had their written laws had it not been for the Sumerian penchant for keeping a record of their legal transactions”. In other areas, the cuneiform script emerged as a formidable tool for the wide dissemination of Sumerian culture and literature throughout the near East. For, as shown by “positive 6 BEFORE DEMOCRACY and direct evidence”, the various peoples, particularly of Western Asia, on inscribing their own records and writings, instituted a two-way mobility of teachers and scribes across both Sumerian and their own borders with the following effects:3

The ideas and ideals of the Sumerians - their cosmology, theology, ethics, and system of education - permeated to a greater or lesser extent the thoughts and writings of all the peoples of the ancient Near East. So, too, did the Sumerian literary forms and themes - their plots, motifs, stylistic devices, and aesthetic techniques. And the Hebrews of Palestine, the land where the books of the Bible were composed, redacted, and edited, were no exception.

The generally held view that the earliest parts of the Bible were not written down in their present form much earlier than 1000 B.C., at least a millennium after most of the Sumerian literary documents were composed, leads historians like Kramer to claim that there is, therefore, “no question of any contemporary borrowing from the Sumerian literary sources”. Kramer argues that Sumerian influence penetrated the Bible particularly through the literature of the Akkadians, for their language was used as the common language of practically the entire literary world of Palestine and its surroundings in the second millennium B.C. As many of these Akkadian literary works can be traced back to standard Sumerian works that were changed and transformed over the centuries, there can be no doubt of Sumerian influence on the literary works of many men of letters in Palestine, including the ancient Hebrews and their Bible. Kramer concludes that through such literary works the Sumerians came to influence, even if indirectly, the culture of modern man. Samuel Kramer’s enthusiasm for the ancient Sumerians is almost contagious. His description of their originality, of their gift for creativity manifest in inventiveness and development, and of their persistent quest for learning are extraordinary; the Sumerians’ curiosity, and, in this sense, openness of mind are an intellectual delight. Indeed, such extraordinary talents on so wide a spectrum - social, cultural, and educational - could awaken in many a reader a deep interest in the Sumerians even from a contemporary perspective, at least to admire and learn from them. However, as much as the Sumerians were original in their search for, and pursuit of, invention, and hence of progress in their endeavours to further their social and cultural institutions, at the same time, Kramer contends that those who came after them were not as talented, nor were they of similar mind and habits as the Sumerians. Whilst it can hardly be doubted that those who defeated and conquered the Sumerians absorbed their ABRAHAM 7 mythology and institutions, and perhaps even intended to imitate the Sumerian cultural and social lifestyle, evidently, in itself such imitation was insufficient to open up for them a path to survival. For in no time those conquerors were themselves conquered, and the process of conquest and subsequent defeat of that succession of conquerors became practically institutionalized, bringing about the cessation of all new creativity and cultural growth. I shall not enlarge on the differences between inventiveness or originality, and sheer imitation in human society as a means for attaining and sustaining a prosperous social system. For the purpose at hand, suffice it to note that originality has a dynamic potential for growth and development, provided it is permitted to flourish. Not so, however, the conquest and appropriation of a developed culture, whereby such a culture is made subservient to the conquerors’ own political purposes, for, as illustrated by conquered Sumer, and by the others who were conquered throughout the long history of Mesopotamia in post-Sumerian times, such actions bring forth docility and stagnation.4 Thus, for example, the Semitic conquerors of Sumer adopted the Sumerian religious system in its entirety, including its pantheon of a thousand gods, their temples, their priests, and their gods’ kings, institutions which turned around ritual devoid of any interest in change and adaptation to it, be it to enhance human speculation and its attendant growth of knowledge, or to permit human action, and, through it, improved well-being. Yet other peoples from far away lands, such as the Hittites or Assyrians, did succeed to subdue the Semitic conquerors who replaced the original Sumerians. In turn, these newcomers made the same mistakes by following the same pattern: they too adopted the Sumerian mythologies lock, stock, and barrel; Mesopotamia continued to worship the same gods and to retain the same hierarchical system until it came under the rule of Hammurabi, the ruler who visualized Mesopotamia under the rule of a long line of his descendants for a millennium thereafter, and who hence set out to make it a reality. But even the hard working Hammurabi, renowned in particular for his brilliant military and political tactics, and for codifying the law and adapting it to his own ambitious plans, also failed to attain his aims. I thus argue that, by elevating politics above the requirements of the creativity and enterprise of the Sumerians, and by simply adopting their mythology and hierarchical system of worship, along with its attendant hierarchical social system, the invaders of Sumer adopted that system’s inbuilt fatal weakness and made it the foundation for their own world view and lifestyle. I contend that a lack of understanding and vision that, not continuity in itself, but a dynamic, creative outlook both initiating and adapting to change in search for improved well-being, and a failure to 8 BEFORE DEMOCRACY nurture an environment facilitating such an adaptation plagued the long history of ancient Mesopotamia. We catch the first glimpse of such an understanding only when we come to the story of the patriarch Abraham, a man who not only comprehended that Hammurabi’s Mesopotamia was doomed to vitiation by warfare and destruction, as were its predecessors, but who went on to act upon this understanding. To put it somewhat differently, unlike Kramer’s evaluation of the strengths of the Sumerian system, I will argue below that their system contained a fatal weakness, fatal in the sense that it undermined the positive effects of its alleged strengths. Likewise, I disagree with Kramer’s above contention that the ancient Hebrew culture owed much to Sumerian influence. However, before taking up these arguments, I wish to pause briefly to examine another historian’s insights into the Mesopotamian social system.

THE CONQUERORS OF SUMER

By the year 2000 B.C. the Sumerians as a nation disappeared from the political scene, not so their mythologies, culture, and socio-religious institutions; in other words, although Mesopotamia came to be ruled by a succession of different peoples, including the Amorites, Kassites, Assyrians and Chaldeans, little was changed on the cultural, religious, and social scenes, not even during the time of Abraham’s contemporary Hammurabi. This continuity and, evidently, widespread influence of the Sumerian world view has gained the admiration of many historians and students of the ancient world. Though I learned much from a number of these historians, nevertheless, I intend to take issue with the emphasis placed on continuity as a good in itself, and, to reiterate, especially with the contention that the ancient Hebrews and their Bible owe much to Sumerian influence. For insights into Mesopotamia during the century that began sixty years before Hammurabi’s reign (2067 - 2025 B.C.), we turn to the historian Georges Roux who sets the scene for his interpretation with the following observation:5

No matter how fascinating the ever changing spectacle of political and economic situations, there are times which call for a pause; there are periods so richly documented that the historian feels compelled to leave aside monarchs and dynasties, kingdom and empires, wars and diplomacy, and to study the society in a static condition as it were. How did people live? What did they do in everyday life? These are questions which come naturally to mind and deserve an answer.

ABRAHAM 9

In order to explain the continuity of Sumerian civilization in the light of available archaeological and epigraphic sources, Roux traces6 its well- spring to the prehistory of Iraq, and argues that it “reflected the mood and fulfilled the aspirations of the stable, conservative peasant society which has always formed the backbone of that country; it was ‘Mesopotamian’ in origin and in essence”, therefore, it survived long after the disappearance of the Sumerians as a nation. Roux believes this to be particularly true of their religion, considering that not only were the gods of Sumer worshipped by Sumerians and Semites alike for more than three thousand years, but their religious ideas bore tremendous influence on the public and private life of the Mesopotamians: “modelling their institutions, colouring their works of art and literature, pervading every form of activity, from the highest functions of the kings to the day-to-day occupations of their subjects”. To put it into different terms, it was a religion that demanded a theocratic society and made man feel himself to be completely dependent upon the will of the gods: everything and everyone, from the mightiest of the Assyrian kings to the humblest of the people was co-opted into the service of his gods. Roux hastens to add that this, however, “does not mean that economics and human passions did not play a part in the history of ancient Iraq as they did in the history of other countries”, but only that in any attempt to understand this civilization, the significance of religious motives cannot be overlooked nor minimized. This historical explanation maintains that as much as the influence of Sumerian religion was supreme in the ancient world of the Near East to give its several peoples a sense of continuity, nevertheless, it not only failed to halt the incessant wars among the city-states, but it also failed to mitigate the devastating effects of such wars on human life and property. Yet no questions were raised, nor were any doubts cast concerning the viability of the Sumerian world view as encapsulated in their religion. Invariably, the new conquerors went on to adopt the Sumerians’ static religious system into their own language and culture, perhaps with some minor changes, but none deemed it necessary to consider change, or to introduce new reforms, let alone attempt to abandon that system. They all were satisfied to follow along the same well-worn path through which all those conquered peoples had already travelled beforehand, and they did so in the expectation that it would enable them to fulfil their aspirations to become god’s kings, and to command instant obedience and support from those whom they had vanquished. Thus, the system itself perpetuated warfare, and conflicts were settled by the commitment of atrocities. The ordinary toiling people did not even have the choice to resist their invaders, for war itself was seen as an act of the gods; in other words, the polytheistic system encouraged and perpetuated acts of aggression, for to be conquered 10 BEFORE DEMOCRACY was equated with being abandoned by some deity, whereas conquest (aggression) was attributed to the will of the gods. As long as the conquerors followed the old customs and religious mythology the conquered population did not feel much regret or frustration, if only because the new ruler was believed to be the beloved of the gods, gods who were believed to elevate him to the kingship. This argument becomes especially pertinent when we follow the long history of Hammurabi, the conqueror whose Amorite ancestors invaded and destroyed Ur, and who, in turn, set out to destroy his enemies - the remaining rulers of the kingdom. He thus rightly proclaimed himself to be the “king of kings” called upon by the gods to codify the law, in order to bring justice to the law, and “cause justice to prevail in the country”. Hammurabi, who used the force of arms to achieve the unity of Mesopotamia, also resorted to administrative and religious measures to give his subjects “at least the illusion of self- government”, but primarily to concentrate power in his hands, to legalize his rule, and to enable him to pass it on to his descendants. He was keen to adopt the religion and culture of the Sumerians and foster their continuity with few innovations, the most major of which was the promotion of Murduc (a “third rank deity”) to head the pantheon. Even so, Hammurabi stressed that he had been called by the great gods ‘to promote the welfare of the people’, and both he and his subjects continued to worship “Anu, Enlil, . . . and the thousand odd deities who, from time immemorial, had turned a smiling ‘face’ on the people of Iraq”.7 The political change thus enhanced rather than diminished the fervour of worship, as if to imply that the long chains of warfare had no impact on society; that there was need to look within the system itself for solutions to the uncertainties which continued to plague the diverse populations of that ancient world. I find no difficulty with Kramer’s and Roux’s emphasis on the continuity of the Sumerian socio-religious institutions, not so, however, with their presentation of such continuity in a positive light - namely, as a marvel to behold. That the Sumerians did in fact exert such an enormous, widespread, and long-lasting influence may well be true; but is there any reason for extolling the continuity of their system? I would say not, especially since their hierarchical religious institutions and their attendant hierarchical social system sponsored and fostered man’s fear of uncertainty. Their anthropomorphic gods enabled their rulers to keep mankind in a state of perpetual fear: god’s king, the priests and their temples existed both to punish man and to mitigate his punishment through forgiveness, provided that he dared not shake off the restraints imposed upon him by the hierarchical system which kept him helpless in his place. To understand the role and purpose of the priests and temples in Hammurabi’s time, and gain insight into their effects on the population at ABRAHAM 11 large we may stress, yet again, that religious institutions were of vital importance for the cultural and social order desired by rulers like Hammurabi, just as they were for his predecessors, who, like him, were concerned to perpetuate a long dynastic rule, and, who, with diligence and great patience, attempted to turn their political ambitions into a reality. The religious ardour sponsored and cultivated by those rulers may be gleaned from Roux’s description8 of the religious ceremonies performed daily in the temples to the sound of music, hymns and prayers, the variety of choice food laid on the god’s table, the pouring out of water, wine or beer into vases, and the sacrifices of choice animals on the altar, all in the service of the gods, the dullu. The gods, in turn, were portrayed as living a physical life analogous to that of humankind. Their regular supply of food was “ensured by ‘fixed offerings’ established once and for all by the king” who held all the power and also acted as “supreme chief of the clergy”. In turn, the priests also served as intermediaries between the people and their gods, for the priests were assumed to know the ‘right’ approach to the gods, and they alone could not only foresee the future, but dispense an omen for those who asked for one, be they rulers or commoners. Such daily ceremonies and complex rituals thus required a centralized administration. Many priests were attached to the main temples, where they were brought up and educated in the temple school referred to as the “House of Knowledge” (bît nummi). The royal palace, known as the “great house” (Sum. é-gal, Akkad. ekallum), emerged into “a vast compound of apartments, reception rooms, offices, workshops and stores surrounded, for safety reasons, by strong defensive walls. Mansion, castle and serai, the palace had become a city within a city”. On the political scene, however, Hammurabi’s long-term plans were frustrated; his actions, intended to ensure the consolidation of his rule and the creation of a powerful dynasty to rule over Mesopotamia for a long time after him, were altogether futile. For the peace and stability which he brought to a unified Mesopotamia lasted only some ten or twenty years at most: “The next generation would have to face new wars and witness the beginning of formidable changes affecting, not only Mesopotamia, but the entire Near East.”9 I shall return to my earlier reasoning to explain Hammurabi’s failure to bring lasting peace and stability to Mesopotamia, for I can find none other more plausible. I thus argue that, fundamentally, Hammurabi’s rule was also but a link in the chain of the process of continuity in the long history of ancient Mesopotamia, a land subjected at all time to warfare and invasion by different peoples eager to conquer the land and subdue its inhabitants. The chief reason for the lack of radical change within this social landscape may be sought in its religious system, the institutions of 12 BEFORE DEMOCRACY which induced and encouraged its adherents to succumb to the fatalistic belief that in this world any human influence entailed in human (goal- directed) action had only a marginal role to play; the final say on man’s fate rested entirely with his gods. It was thus a self-defeating system, for it encouraged man to give up the very act of taking decisions in accordance with his practical knowledge of his circumstances of time and place, in order to satisfy his aims, and, instead, to become totally dependent upon exogenous (super-human) powers. In the end, this fatalism sponsored indolence and apathy, thus forming the chief reason for the continuous warfare in the ancient Near East. To put it into different terms, on the one hand, the conquerors of Sumer, as well as the successions of their own subsequent conquerors found it comfortable to acquiesce by taking over the Sumerian polytheistic system of worship, in order to win over the defeated population by convincing them that, fundamentally, nothing had changed. On the other hand, these very same tactics served to convince the various successions of invading aggressors to give up resistance when their turn came to face such invasions. This double-edged sword of docility and indolence characterizing the civilian population formed the chief reason for the continuous warfare and its attendant chain of destruction in ancient Mesopotamia. The perpetuation of the ancient Sumerian culture and socio-religious system may have been a blessing, in the sense that, in the absence of an alternative exemplar, it helped the population survive, even if in suffering, but it also carried within it the seeds of stagnation and apathy, along with the fatal oppressive and obtrusive powers of self-defeat. Hence, on balance, human inaction pertaining to reform or change within this Sumerian social- cultural-religious framework became catastrophic to its survival. The question of justice, as will be argued in the next section below, is interwoven with that of freedom. Hence to gain a better understanding of the problems faced by the conquerors of Sumer we turn briefly to examine Hammurabi’s Code of Law, its originality or lack thereof, its purpose, and its attainment. In Roux’s words:10

The famous Code of Law issued by Hammurabi ‘To cause justice to prevail in the country To destroy the wicked and the evil, That the strong may not oppress the weak’, can no longer be considered as ‘the most ancient in the world’ - we possess now similar documents from the reigns of Ur-Nammu, Lipit-Ishtar and Bilalama - but it is still the most complete and, as such, deserves more than a few words. It should be stressed, however, that the word ‘Code’ is somewhat misleading, since we are not confronted here with a thorough legislative reform, nor with an exhaustive corpus of logically arranged legal ABRAHAM 13

dispositions, such as Justinian Institutes or Napoleon’s Code Civil. Indeed, the Mesopotamians were never ruled by any other system than a ‘common law’, handed down from reign and occasionally modified to fit the social and economic conditions prevalent at a given period. One of the first acts of every ruler, at least since Urukagina, was to ‘ordain mêsharum’, a word which can be translated by ‘justice’, but which, in this context, covered a number of other things, such as remitting certain debts and obligations and fixing the prices of certain commodities - an efficient way of regulating the economy of the country.

Continuity thus seems to have featured in the law as it did elsewhere in Mesopotamian civilization: the new king applied the laws of his predecessors, adjusting these laws whenever change in the economy and social circumstances required it, and he made his own pronouncements only where no precedent could be found.

These royal decisions (dînat sharrim), duly recorded and eventually collected together to be used for reference by the judges of future generations, formed the so-called ‘Codes of Law’, and we possess several such copies of the Code of Hammurabi on clay tablets, ranging from the Old Babylonian period to the time of the Chaldean dynasty (sixth century BC).11

Towards the end of his reign, Hammurabi ordered his royal decisions to be carved on steles. They were placed in temples “bearing witness that the king had performed his important functions of ‘king of justice’ satisfactorily and had acted according to the gods’ hearts . . .”.12 Roux’s conclusion that Hammurabi’s Code of Laws was less original than it was thought to be corresponds to that of the historians of law who, as noted by Samuel Kramer,13 are agreed that the famous “law givers”, from Ur- Nammu and Hammurabi in the ancient world, to Solon and Lykurgus in Greece, and even the authors of the Roman Twelve Tablets, did not create new law but merely aimed to perpetuate the idea of what law had always been, and hence only stated it. As a point of interest, Roux contends14 that, though seemingly cruel in today’s context, Hammurabi’s Code of Laws is “surprisingly close to our modern ideas of justice”, particularly the laws intended to “protect women and children from arbitrary treatment, poverty and neglect”; for the severity of the penalties applied in such cases was “mitigated by the admission of forgiveness and of extenuating circumstances . . .”. Roux also singles out the frequent reference in the Code to the institution called ilkum, according to which persons of certain professions - the gendarme, the fisherman, and so on - received from the king land, corn, sheep and 14 BEFORE DEMOCRACY cattle in return for military service or some other undefined services. He believes15 that the granting of an ilkum was “a measure probably introduced by Hammurabi himself, to attach firmly to the land a number of his subjects and to create between them and the king a bond comparable to the feudal bond which, in medieval Europe, attached lord and liegeman”. On the question of justice I suggest that we may discern in Hammurabi’s approach to the law an additional dimension, or a change in emphasis, namely, that justice was not to be sought in the actions performed, but was to relate directly to the laws decreed by Hammurabi. To put it into different terms, as god’s king, Hammurabi was assumed to practise justice simply by imposing his laws; justice was not to be sought in righteous acts, but in laws which came to signify justice simply because they were issued by god’s king. This shift in emphasis in the meaning of justice served to free the rulers of Mesopotamia from thinking about the association between justice and freedom, and hence from any concern with the practice of justice. The legislation of laws in accordance with the ruler’s aims thus became the supreme criterion of justice for god’s kings. It was, as I will argue below, this Hammurabian approach to justice that formed the chief reason for Abraham’s decision to persuade his father Terah to leave their ancestral home in Ur and settle in Haran where they were to be outside of Hammurabi’s dominion.

THE REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS AND ACTIVITIES OF ABRAHAM

Introduction

The documentation of Sumerian history is considered to have preceded the recorded history of the patriarch Abraham by eleven centuries, yet no one other than Abraham is known to have contemplated and actively sought radical change. Historical records inform us that, whereas the successions of conquerors in the ancient Near East continued to absorb the Sumerian religious system, its culture, and its social institutions into their own language, mythologies, and way of life, Abraham shied away from the Sumerian world view and lifestyle, and took an altogether different view on man’s relationship with his Creator, and on the status and role of man in the order of creation. In the present section, drawing in particular on some of the episodes narrated in the Book of Genesis, I intend to explicate the revolutionary change introduced by Abraham, a unique individual who was first to challenge the intricate organizational structure of Sumero-Akkadian- Babylonian grandeur. As is well known, the originality, and hence ABRAHAM 15 authenticity of such narrations has been challenged by various Bible Critics, writers who have recommended that they be rejected as fables of no historical value, especially where the particular narration can be traced back to earlier archaeological evidence (for instance, the story of the deluge). Though I do not deny the possible existence in Scripture of narrations taken from earlier sources,16 nevertheless, I intend to search for the compiler-narrator’s reasons and/or for alternative narrations in Scripture, narrations that are original, authentic and pertinent to the questions here under consideration. In the Book of Genesis (XII:1-10),17 the narration on Abraham’s migration to Canaan leaves the reader reassured about Abraham’s decision to leave Haran and settle in Canaan; he had his Lord’s advice as well as His blessing:

Now the LORD said unto Abram: ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land that I will show thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and be thou a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee, and him that curseth thee I will curse; and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ So Abram went, as the LORD has spoken unto him; and Lot went with him; and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the souls that they have gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan they came. And Abram passed through the land unto the place of Shechem, unto the terebinth of Moreh. And the Canaanite was then in the land. And the LORD appeared unto Abram, and said: ‘Unto thy seed will I give this Land’; and he builded an altar unto the LORD, who appeared unto him. And he removed from thence unto the mountain on the east of Beth-el, and pitched his tent, having Beth- el on the west, and Ai on the east; and he builded there an altar unto the LORD, and called upon the name of the LORD. And Abram journeyed, going on still toward the south. And there was famine in the land; and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there; for the famine was sore in the land.

As I am not concerned here with Abraham’s adjustment and process of settlement in Canaan I shall focus directly on the double-question of his problem situation: why did Abraham leave his father’s homeland where he had prospered to settle in the unknown land of Canaan, and what did he expect of this land that he could not possibly find in his former homeland? I suggest that we seek for answers to this question in the Book of Genesis, particularly in the narrations on the impending destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. For, as I will argue, these narrations depict 16 BEFORE DEMOCRACY

Abraham as a revolutionary of great importance, a man who not only argued but who also acted to bring about radical change in human understanding and lifestyle. Thus, at an advanced age, he took the risk of travelling far and wide in the ancient world in order to put his ideas and ideals into practice at a time when the mere contemplation of change was a dangerous exercise, and when travelling itself entailed some great hazards and unforeseen difficulties.

A Criterion of Justice

The narration in the Book of Genesis on the impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by Divine command focuses on the problems of freedom and justice in human society. It expresses Abraham’s deep concern for the moral aspect of justice and its interrelationship with the individual’s freedom of conscience, that is, freedom to dissent on issues pertaining to acts of injustice. In his discussion with the Lord, as below, Abraham points out that, as a moral issue, justice demands freedom of conscience, that is, freedom that encourages both dissent by minorities and tolerance of such dissent by consenting majorities. I see the problem of the dominance of a majority view manifest in the coercive extension of collective decision-making over that of the individual as the core of Abraham’s challenge to his Lord’s role of Judge of this earth, a role carried out within the framework of justice in both intention and practice. To see how Abraham’s ideals of freedom, tolerance, morality, and justice are closely interwoven in both theory and practice, and to understand how no coercion regarding the question of moral autonomy may be tolerated, we turn to the following narration in the Book of Genesis (XVIII:16-33):

And the men [the Lord’s messengers] rose up from thence, and looked out toward Sodom; and Abraham went with them to bring them on the way. And the LORD said: ‘Shall I hide from Abraham that which I am doing; seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I have known him, to the end that he may command his children and his household after him, that they may keep the way of the LORD to do righteousness and justice; to the end that the LORD may bring upon Abraham that which He hath spoken of him.’ And the LORD said: ‘Verily, the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and verily, their sin is exceeding grievous. I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto Me; and if not, I will know.’ And the men turned from thence, and went toward Sodom; but Abraham stood yet before the LORD. And Abraham drew near, and said: ‘Wilt Thou indeed sweep away the righteous ABRAHAM 17

with the wicked? Peradventure there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt Thou indeed sweep away and not forgive the place for the fifty righteous that are therein? That be far from Thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked, that so the righteous should be as the wicked; that be far from thee; shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?’ And the LORD said: ‘If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will forgive all the place for their sake.’ And Abraham answered and said: . . . Peradventure, there shall be twenty found there.’ And He said: ‘I will not destroy it for the twenty’s sake.’ And he said: ‘Oh, let not the LORD be angry, and I will speak yet but this once. Peradventure ten shall be found there.’ And He said: ‘I will not destroy it for the ten’s sake.’ And the LORD went His way, as soon as He had left off speaking to Abraham; and Abraham returned unto his place.

I suggest that the Lord’s description of Abraham’s character - “. . . that he may command his children and his household after him . . . to do righteousness and justice . . .” - gives us the chief reason for Abraham’s departure for Canaan. For these succinct words tell us that Abraham wanted much more than to amass wealth and consort with like-minded persons. After all, he did succeed to accumulate riches in Haran, where he also found trusted persons not only to work with but “souls attached to his retinue” - kindred spirits adhering to the same principles and ideals. Hence what he wished for most was to live in an environment conducive to the practice of “righteousness and justice”. Thus, whereas the destruction of his ancestral city-state of Chaldaean Ur might have been the initial cause of his family’s migration to Haran, not so his emigration from thence to Canaan the purpose of which was to find a habitat in a peaceful and tranquil environment wherein he may put into practice his ideals of freedom and of justice. In the remaining part of the above narration, Abraham’s discussion with his Lord clarifies the meaning of justice; it stresses repeatedly the point that slaying the innocent together with the guilty is unjust, and hence unacceptable. Abraham’s challenge that, as Judge of this earth, were the Lord to destroy the innocent together with the guilty people of Sodom and Gomorrah He would not be seen to practise justice thus becomes an issue of paramount importance to the very question of justice, and serves to clarify its practice. To put it into different terms, as the Lord concurred with Abraham, for justice to be seen to be done moral practice must be upheld; individuals must be permitted to opt out on issues of conscience, and to refuse participation in immoral activities even when such activities are upheld by the great majority within society. I thus argue that from the above encounter between Abraham and his Lord emerges a criterion of justice the practice of which is possible only through freedom of a special 18 BEFORE DEMOCRACY kind: the individual’s freedom to dissent, to opt out, to go against a majoritarian decision whenever such a decision entails an act of injustice. The emphasis here is on individual autonomy, on the value of freedom for the individual, freedom from collective control (hence freedom from democracy in its modern sense of the tyranny of majorities). The very absence of such freedom throughout the lands of the ancient Near East with their absolute, omniscient, and omnipotent rulers made it impossible for Abraham to “do righteousness and justice” as he wished, and compelled him to emigrate to Canaan, a land in the process of invasion and settlement by many different peoples. It is in this sense that the land of Canaan offered him a haven, for he could practise there his newly discovered monotheism, live a social life within his family nucleus, and act on his own decisions without outside interference, but, at the same time, refrain from interference in the domain of others. He alone was to bear the responsibilities of his own actions. To highlight the significance and originality of Abraham’s criterion of justice through individual liberty (and hence of Sodomite injustice), we return to parts of the narration in the Book of Genesis (XIX:1-29) on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah:

And the two angels came to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom; and Lot saw them, and rose up to meet them; and he fell down on his face to the earth; and he said: ‘Behold now, my lords, turn aside, I pray you, into your servant’s house, and tarry all night, and wash your feet, and ye shall rise up early, and go on your way.’ And they said: ‘Nay; but we will abide in the broad place all night.’ And he urged them greatly; and they turned in unto him, and entered into his house; and he made them a feast, and did bake unleavened bread, and they did eat. But before they lay down, the men of the city, even them men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both young and old, all the people from every quarter. And they called unto Lot, and said unto him: ‘Where are the men that came into thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them.’ And Lot went out unto them to the door and shut the door after him. And he said: ‘I pray you, my brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters that have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes; only unto these men do nothing; for as much as they are come under the shadow of my roof.’ And they said: ‘Stand back.’ And they said: ‘This one fellow came in to sojourn, and he will needs play the judge; now will we deal worse with thee, than with them.’ And they pressed sore upon the man, even Lot, and drew near to break the door. But the men put forth their hand, and brought Lot into the house to them, and the door they shut. And they smote the men that were at the door of the house with blindness, both small and great; so that they wearied themselves to find the door. And the men said unto Lot: ‘Hast thou here any besides? ABRAHAM 19

son-in-law, and thy sons, and thy daughters, and whomsoever thou hast in the city; bring them out of the place; for we will destroy this place, because the cry of them is waxed great before the LORD; and the LORD hath sent us to destroy it.’ . . .

The wording of the Sodomites’ demand that Lot hand over his guests to them suggests that they were angry with Lot because he violated a local taboo or custom prohibiting all the inhabitants to offer any form of hospitality to strangers who happened to be passing through the place. This practice of compulsory conformity to the wishes of the majority, or intolerance of any form of dissent, may be seen as the “procrustean-bed” system.18 I thus argue that, in his above discussion with his Lord, Abraham was concerned with freedom of the individual, particularly freedom to think and act towards justice in any social environment. He was concerned to emphasize that justice was not an issue to be decided by authorities, not even majorities, but a problem that confronts every human being in any social context, and hence requires man to have autonomy to act so that he may be free to decide when to participate, or perhaps rather when to refuse to participate, in particular practices. In Abraham’s sense, the crux of the idea of justice turns on the need for man to be able to opt out of being a party to iniquitous action. Hence, by its very nature, a centralized society cannot possibly tolerate such freedom, hence nor can it practise justice. The righteous person (the ‘zaddik’ in Hebrew) is he who acts within the frame of righteousness (general rules of just conduct) decided upon, not by a benevolent ruler, nor by a dictator, nor by a majority of vested interests, but by the individual concerned, and in accordance with his or her right to autonomy; the ‘zaddik’ is thus free to decide when to act or when to refrain from acting. This is the approach which, I think, formed the basis for the succession of questions directed by Abraham to his Lord, and for the Lord’s responses. It was also in this sense that the Lord referred to Abraham’s approach to life when, in the above first narration, He declared that Abraham will teach his offspring and his associates the way to just conduct; in other words, justice must be conjoined with freedom, for without freedom (of conscience and action) justice is a sham, for it may then permit the innocent to be punished, and even to be exterminated, together with the wicked. In the new order emerging out of Abraham’s above discussion with his Lord, wickedness has nothing in common with justice. This is the understanding reached by Abraham and his Lord, an understanding that came to form a central point in the uniqueness of Israel. I thus argue that according to the Book of Genesis, where we have the first available written evidence of human concern with the problems of freedom and justice in 20 BEFORE DEMOCRACY the ancient world, Abraham, who originated from Chaldaean Ur, was the first man known not only to have been concerned with the ideals of freedom and justice but to have persisted in his search for a changed social environment, one that would take him as far away as possible from god’s king, temples and priests, that is, from all those who neither were nor could have been concerned with such ideals, let alone practise them. I thus see the above discussion between Abraham and his Lord to be directed at every thinking human being, instructing him or her on how to find a way to secure his or her freedom by opting out of any society in which the ‘procrustean-bed’ type of consensus forms the measure of his or her social inheritance. That the above narration in Scripture was overlooked and altogether ignored by historians of the ancient world, and consequently by philosophers of society and culture is, to say the least, puzzling. Perhaps the historians were so taken up with the beguiling notion of continuity that they concentrated their efforts on searching for similarities between the various peoples, thus missing the differences in world views, and consequently in lifestyles of two of the most important cultures in the ancient world - the Sumero-Chaldaean, and the Hebrew. It is to the examination of yet another such critically significant difference that we turn next.

The Creation

Samuel Kramer includes in his discussion on the influence of Sumerian culture on the ancient Hebrews both the creation of the universe, and of man and the role assigned to him upon this earth. He thus notes that both Sumerians and Hebrews thought that a primeval sea preceded the Creation, and that the universe consisted of a united heaven and earth engendered in some way in this primeval sea. Concerning the powers assumed to have separated heaven from earth, the air god Enlil assumes such power in Sumerian mythology, and the Spirit of God - “ruach elohim” - in the Book of Genesis. Likewise, in both cultures man was fashioned out of clay, and was imbued with the “breath of life”. However, in his extension of this parallel to the purpose for which man was created, Kramer stresses that whereas the Sumerians saw man’s role in terms of service - physical and spiritual - to an anthropomorphic pantheon of gods, the Hebrews were meant to serve but one God, Yahweh, and to do so with prayer, supplication, and sacrifice. Although the idea of Creation remains an open question to this very day, both Sumerian mythology and Hebrew Scripture still offer some ABRAHAM 21 elaborate descriptions of the purpose for which man was created, descriptions which may enable us to discern the purpose for, and status of, man in both these cultures. For instance, on the role of man on earth according to Sumerian mythology, Kramer writes:19

Turning from god to man, we find that the Sumerian thinkers, in line with their world view, had no exaggerated confidence in man and his destiny. They were firmly convinced that man was fashioned of clay and created for one purpose only: to serve the gods by supplying them with food, drink, and shelter so that they might have full leisure for their divine activities. Man’s life was beset with uncertainty and haunted by insecurity, since he did not know beforehand the destiny decreed him by the unpredictable gods. When he died, his emasculated spirit descended to the dark, dreary nether world where life was but a dismal and wretched reflection of its earthly counterpart. One fundamental moral problem, a high favourite with western philosophies, never troubled the Sumerian thinkers at all, namely, the delicate and rather slippery problem of free will. Convinced beyond all need for argument that man was created by the gods solely for their benefit and leisure, the Sumerians accepted their dependent status just as they accepted the divine decision that death was man’s lot and that only the gods were immortal. All credit for the high moral qualities and ethical virtues that the Sumerians had evolved gradually and painfully over the centuries from their social and cultural experiences was attributed to the gods; it was the gods who planned it that way, and man was only following divine orders.

Thus, according to Sumerian mythology, man was created solely in order to toil and produce for, and serve, the pantheon of a thousand gods conceived of in the image of man, and hence in need of dwelling in man- made temples, and requiring to be fed, washed, anointed, and attired by man daily under the stewardship of a priest-caste. A role was thus called for god’s king to oversee the production and supply of all kinds of materials and products assumed to be required by the gods, their temples and priests to ensure their constant availability in abundance. To put it into different terms, god’s king was in charge to keep man working and producing, not for mankind’s well-being, but, first and foremost, for the king’s palace, for the temples, for the priests, and for their large administrations. Only when these requirements were met could the ordinary, toiling human multitudes receive their allotment for their personal consumption. To sustain such a social, or perhaps rather unsocial, order, the hierarchical human system was matched by a similar hierarchical system among the gods who, according to the mythology, took possession of the lands, the waters, and all else in nature. 22 BEFORE DEMOCRACY

For man’s role in his Creator’s scheme of things according to ancient Hebrew Scripture, we turn to the Book of Genesis, a book considered to have first come to light not earlier than 1000 B.C., a millennium or so behind Sumerian mythology. According to the Book of Genesis (I:26-31), the entire act of Creation was accomplished by a single God in six days, leaving the creation of man to the last day:

And God said: ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’ And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. And God blessed them; and God said unto them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth.’ And God said: ‘Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed - to you it shall be for food; and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is a living soul, [I have given] every green herb for food.’ And it was so. And God saw everything that He had made, and Behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning the sixth day.

This unique approach to the status and role of man in the Creator’s scheme of things opens up the first chapter of the Pentateuch: however humble the material of which man was created, he was still fashioned in his Creator’s image, and from the very beginning he was destined to rule the earth and have dominion over it and over everything which exists upon, within, and above, it; all growing and living things were created for mankind’s use and benefit. Thus this approach contrasts sharply with that in Sumerian mythology where the best of this earth’s produce, and that of man’s toil regarding all aspects of consumption was to be offered to the gods through the stomachs of their designated rulers and priest-caste. Unlike the ancient Hebrew approach, wherein the status of mankind is elevated above all other living things to facilitate and encourage improvement in human well-being, the ancient Sumerian hierarchical system facilitated and encouraged the exploitation of man by man, and, consequently, had iniquitous effects upon the toiling population, effects that continue to bedevil mankind to this day. This Sumerian approach to religion, as an exploiting institution requiring and demanding human toil for its maintenance and perpetuation, and to man, as a plaything of the gods, a being appearing in the mythology as devoid of any measure of free ABRAHAM 23 will, of self-responsibility, and of the dignity accompanying them, is altogether shunned and forbidden in the ancient Hebrew culture. Thus in the Scriptures man is given both rights and obligations so that, as the highest of God’s creations, he may assume responsibility, enjoy his rights and privileges, and discharge his obligations as befits such a being. To put it somewhat differently, in the ancient Hebrew Scriptures man is given choice; he does not have to be subservient to a pantheon of gods, nor must he server kings, priests and temples, and there is no evidence in the Book of Genesis of the rituals of religion - prayer, supplication, and sacrifices with which biblical man was expected to serve his God. It was only later on in the history of the Hebrews (1 Samuel, XVIII), that is, only after the Israelites abandoned the Abrahamic-Mosaic system, that such rituals emerged - an argument which I will develop in the following chapters on Moses, Joshua, Judges and Samuel in the present study. There can thus be little doubt, if any, that the change from Sumero- Akkadian-Mesopotamian polytheism to Hebrew monotheism was a most radical change on both levels, religious and human. On the religious level, the all-powerful God of the ancient Hebrews has neither need nor wish for human produce; He is magnanimous and beneficent to the extent of creating the entire earth for human consumption, use, and benefit. Even so, the most radical aspects of this change are perhaps to be found on the human level, namely, in the acknowledgement, or perhaps even emphasis, in ancient Hebrew Scripture that man has a mind, and hence is expected to use his reason to distinguish between beneficial and harmful actions, to recognize error, and to learn from it; man is expected to be accountable for his actions. Of the two world views, that of the ancient Hebrews fits in better with life in the real world of change, uncertainty, and ignorance where adaptation and the striving for improvement form two of the most important human characteristics. On the other hand, the approach encapsulated in the Sumerian world view - an approach that ends up in robbing man of his autonomy and decision-making powers - suppresses, or perhaps even negates these very characteristics of human life.

Abraham and the Historians

In this study the patriarch Abraham is presented as the first man known to have left to posterity a clear and concise argument on the interrelationship of freedom and justice, and a criterion of justice20 (as documented in the above quotation from the Book of Genesis): the possibility for, or perhaps even the duty of, an individual to disagree on moral grounds with majority 24 BEFORE DEMOCRACY views on particular ends, and to refuse to partake in certain activities without fear of retaliation or of compulsion to do so. Thus promoting the individual’s right to autonomy, so that he may be free to think for himself, and to act and live in a social context as an individual, Abraham’s criterion of justice is an outstanding, even if a generally unacknowledged, contribution to Western civilization. Abraham’s above approach to the problem of justice through the freedom of conscience followed from his dissatisfaction with the Sodomite ‘procrustean-bed’ system as practised in his homeland, a system according to which collective decision-making dominated over that of the individual. Abraham understood freedom in the context of individual human beings, and saw such freedom to be under constant threat from the absolute power of authorities in the hierarchical system of the ancient Near East. His condition for freedom was to be met only when the individual was to have the right to opt out of such collective decision-making. I argue that this turn of events leads to yet another criterion for which Western civilization is indebted to Abraham, namely, the criterion by which we may distinguish an open society from a closed one. It stems essentially from the criterion agreed upon by the Lord in his responses to the questions raised by Abraham in the above quoted narration on the imminent destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gommorah, questions which turned around the problem of when it might be deemed just to obliterate a social system from the face of the earth. Accordingly, a society may be deemed to be open when it is grounded on tolerance to accommodate individuals or groups of persons who, whilst abiding by general rules of conduct, cannot and will not act against their conscience, and to absolve them from participating in activities which are not morally acceptable to their way of life. This criterion for openness is thus grounded on tolerance of dissent based on moral considerations. In contrast, a social system practising a Sodom and Gommorah ‘procrustean-bed’ type of consensus, that is to say, a system intolerant of dissent, and, using coercion to compel compliance with any kind of immoral majority will, is rendered unfree, and hence qualifies as a closed society. One of the merits of this criterion turns on the clarity of its content, in the sense that it specifies the kind of social system in a way which cannot be circumvented by the use of so-called appropriate terminology to describe it; in other words, participants in a social context need not just claim, but must be seen, to be practising tolerance of the kind specified in this criterion before it may qualify as an open society.21 Though it may well be true that the original emergence of the idea of freedom “remains an overwhelming and mysterious event in the history of ideas”,22 it does not explain the historians’ and philosophers’ neglect of Abraham’s above contribution, nor does it explain their neglect of the ABRAHAM 25

Book of Genesis as source material on radical change in the ancient world of the Near East. Instead of searching for differences in the ancient cultures, such historians rather look for similarities, an approach which makes it easier for them to see continuity in the history of the ancient Near East. It is in this vein that, when presenting Abraham as a carrier of Sumerian culture, and hence as the man largely responsible for the subsequent infiltration of this culture into the Bible that, for example, Samuel Kramer, regards Abraham’s migration to Canaan. Thus Kramer writes:23

However, there is another possible source of Sumerian influence on the Bible which is far more direct and immediate than that just described. In fact, it may well go back to Father Abraham himself. Most scholars agree that while the Abraham saga as told in the Bible contains much that is legendary and fanciful, it does have an important kernel of truth, including Abraham’s birth in Ur of the Chaldees, perhaps about 1700 B.C., and his early life there with his family. Now Ur was one of the most important cities of ancient Sumer; in fact it was the capital of Sumer at three different periods in its history . . . in the joint British-American excavations conducted there between the years 1922 and 1934, quite a number of Sumerian literary documents have been found. Abraham and his forefathers may well have had some acquaintance with Sumerian literary products that had been copied or created in their home town academy. And it is by no means impossible that he and the members of his family brought some of this Sumerian lore and learning with them to Palestine, where they gradually became part of the traditions and sources utilized by the Hebrew men of letters in composing and redacting the books of the Bible.

Kramer’s presentation of Abraham as a carrier of Sumerian culture fits in well with his admiration for the Sumerians, and with his thesis on the continuity of their culture.24 But to follow Kramer’s above interpretation and accept his thesis of continuity, a thesis which according to the history of the ancient Near East had actually failed mankind, would render such a world irrelevant, and the thesis in question misleading. At the same time, however, I do not contest Kramer’s contention concerning the infiltration of the “legendary and fanciful” into the Abraham saga; only I do not accept such tales as decisive, for, as Kramer too is aware, there is still much in the narrations on Abraham in the Book of Genesis that is of historical value and interest.25 Likewise, I do not contest Kramer’s contention that some aspects of ancient Sumero-Babylonian culture found their way into Israel, only I will argue (in the chapter on Samuel below), that it was a gradual process commencing at a later date, namely, after the death of Moses, and 26 BEFORE DEMOCRACY that it gained momentum after Samuel’s acquiescence to the Israelites’ demands for the inauguration of a centralized monarchy. The description of Abraham in Scripture is that of a man with an open, alert mind, an original thinker capable of taking important decisions to resolve some serious problems. Thus we may learn from Scripture, not only, as Kramer claims, that Abraham was familiar with “Sumerian lore and learning”, but that he most definitely did not carry that tradition with him to Canaan in the intention of living by it, nor did he intend teaching others to do so. On the contrary, the Scriptural portrait of Abraham is that of a man intent upon incorporating his new ideas and ideals of monotheism into his daily life: to walk in the ways of the Lord, and to live by “righteousness and justice”. As monotheism and its attendant culture were diametrical opposites of the Sumero-Akkadian-Babylonian polytheistic religion and culture, and as Abraham had amassed considerable assets to become a man of substance we may logically conclude that he left his homeland for religious and cultural-social reasons: to find an environment wherein he and the other members of his household could put into practice their newly discovered, and perhaps never before discussed, monotheistic world view and all that goes with it. Returning to Kramer we may continue to note the parallels which he sees in the Sumerian and Hebrew approaches to ethics and morals, parallels which, he claims26 below, “unquestionably point to traces of Sumerian influence” on the ancient Hebrews:

The ethical concepts and moral ideals developed by Sumerians (see pages 123-25) were essentially identical with those of the Hebrews, although they lacked their almost palpable ethical sensitivity and moral fervour, especially as these qualities are exemplified in the Biblical prophetic literature. Psychologically, the Sumerian was more distant and aloof than the Hebrew - more emotionally restrained, more formal and methodical. He tended to eye his fellow man with some suspicion, misgiving, and even apprehension, which inhibited to no small extent the human warmth, sympathy, and affection so vital to spiritual growth and well-being. And in spite of his high ethical attainments, the Sumerian never reached the lofty conviction that a “pure heart” and “clean hands” were more worthy in the eyes of his god than lengthy prayers, profuse sacrifices, and elaborate ritual.

Though Kramer expresses his intention to stress the similarities between Sumerian and Hebrew ethics and morals, he ends up noticing in the above quotation some psychological differences between the personalities of their people, and, perhaps even more importantly, fundamental differences in their respective world views: the Sumerians ABRAHAM 27 were concerned more with form and ritual, whereas the Hebrews placed greater emphasis on content - “a pure heart” and “clean hands”, that is to say, the purity of thought and action which Abraham associated with walking in the Lord’s ways. These differences would seem to rest upon more fundamental differences pertaining to their respective approaches to man’s status and to his role upon the earth in the order of the Creation. We already examined man’s position in Hebrew Scripture, and, to some extent, compared it with that of the Sumerian approach. However, I shall return below to Kramer to gain additional insights into the status and purpose of Sumerian man on earth, insights which, as I will argue, manifest the deep gulf separating the approaches of these two cultures, not only regarding ethical and moral issues, but regarding their attitudes towards man’s search for enlightenment and for freedom to seek social change in order to improve human life upon this earth. To put it somewhat differently, I will argue that the Sumerians and Hebrews differed in their attitudes, not only towards freedom from imposition by super-human powers such as gods, their representative kings and priests, but towards freedom to act without fear of mysterious cosmic powers, freedom to take decisions, to experiment, and to bear the consequences of their actions. On the Sumerian approach to questions of morality, freedom, and the like, Kramer writes:27

The Sumerians according to their own records, cherished goodness and truth, law and order, justice and freedom, righteousness and straightforwardness, mercy and compassion, and naturally abhorred their opposites, evil and falsehood, lawlessness and disorder, injustice and oppression, sinfulness and perversity, cruelty and pitilessness. Kings and rulers in particular, boast constantly of the fact that they have established law and order in the land, protected the weak from the strong and the poor from the rich, and wiped out evil and violence. Urukagina, for example, proudly records that he restored justice and freedom to the long-suffering citizens of Lagash . . . Another deity, the Lagashite goddess named Nanshe, . . . is pictured as judging mankind on New Year’s Day; by her side are Nidaba, the goddess of writing and accounts and her husband, Haia, as well as numerous witnesses. The evil human types who suffer her displeasure are (people) who walking in transgression reached out with high hand, . . . Nanshe’s social conscience is further revealed in lines which read: To comfort the orphan, to make disappear the widow, To set up a place of destruction for the mighty, To turn over the mighty to the weak . . ., Nanshe searches the heart of the people. 28 BEFORE DEMOCRACY

Unfortunately, although the leading deities were assumed to be ethical and moral in their conduct, the fact remained that, in accordance with the world view of Sumerians, they were also the ones who in the process of establishing civilisation had planned evil and falsehood, violence and oppression - in short, all the immoral and unethical modes of human conduct. Thus, for example, among the list of me’s, the rules and regulations devised by the gods to make the cosmos run smoothly and effectively, there are not only those which regulate “truth,” “peace,” “goodness,” and “justice,” but also those which govern “falsehood,” “strife,” “lamentation,” and “fear”. Why, then, one might ask, did the gods find it necessary to plan and create sin and evil, suffering and misfortune, which were so pervasive that one Sumerian pessimist could say, “Never has a sinless child been born to his mother”?

At all times, Sumerian man was thus completely dependent upon the unpredictable will of his gods, deities who brought all that is good into this world, but, at the same time, did very little to halt the spreading of “sin, evil, suffering, and misfortune”, and hence gods who were also responsible for all that was evil in this world. Moreover, man had no direct access to his gods, but had to resort to an intermediary, one who would be favoured by the gods so that they may listen to him. From available records Kramer goes on to conclude28 that in Sumerian mythology there is no question of Sumerian man even aspiring to attain a measure of free will, let alone exercising it. Not even the Sumerian sages dared to offer explanations or propose any solutions to problems that arose. In times of misfortune, responsibility lay entirely with suffering man; it was he who had to “confess his inevitable sins and failings”, and the only way open to him was to humble himself and plead for forgiveness and help from his “personal god, a kind of good angel to each particular individual and family head, his divine father who had begot him, as it were”. Kramer’s insight that the ideals of justice and freedom not only failed to surface but were not even contemplated in ancient Sumer is upheld, among others, by the historians Georges Roux and Herbert Muller, and is extended to encompass the whole of the ancient Near East as well as ancient Egypt where, under the rule of a god-king - the Pharaoh - the very idea of freedom was unmentionable. In Muller’s words:29 “The Sumerians formulated a moral code, based on the ideals of truth, righteousness, justice, compassion, and mercy.” Yet the gods of nature were seen “plainly as amoral as the weather, having no concern whatsoever for justice”. Their kings repeatedly boasted how they protected the poor from the rich, restored justice and abolished iniquities. The truth, however, was that “justice was never restored for long, iniquity never abolished at all”. Muller goes so far as to claim that not even the uniqueness of Israel knew the ideals ABRAHAM 29 of freedom and justice, and that humanity had to wait for the ancient Greeks to be introduced to these ideals. He thus concludes30 that, regarding the growth of freedom, “the Western world owes much more to the Greek than the Hebraic spirit”. The view that the Greeks were first to have shown genuine concern for the ideals of freedom and justice is fairly widespread among historians, and hence also among philosophers of society. Thus, the distinguished philosopher of both science and society Sir Karl Popper writes31 that our Western civilization derives from the Greeks, in the sense that they started for us that great revolution - the “transition from the closed to the open society”, one of the “deepest revolutions through which mankind has passed . . .”. Similarly, the distinguished economist and philosopher of society Friedrich A. von Hayek goes so far as to claim32 that “the ancient Greeks . . . had not only discovered individual liberty and private property, but also the inseparability of the two and, thereby, created the first civilisation of men”. At the same time, Hayek emphasizes33 that, while the course of life may run more smoothly in many respects when people in society agree on the ends (goals) to follow, it is rather “the possibility of disagreement, or at least the lack of compulsion to agree on particular ends,” which forms “the basis of the kind of civilisation which has grown up since the Greeks developed independent thought of the individual as the most effective method of the advancement of the human mind”. In terms of origin and content, Hayek’s above criterion of freedom (if I may call it so) - “the possibility of disagreement, or at least the lack of compulsion to agree . . .” - is closer to the Hebraic spirit, a spirit focusing on individual freedom manifest in Abraham’s rejection of the Sodomite ‘procrustean-bed’ type of consensus, than it is to the ancient Greek spirit, a spirit focusing on collective freedom, as is also his argument34 that “the aim of just conduct is to prevent unjust action”. For, notwithstanding some major concessions made by the Greeks to the tolerance of differences (for example, permitting Plato - an outspoken critic of democracy - to live and work freely in Athens), in the end the collective view almost invariably triumphed over that of the individual; for the ancient Greeks, “collective liberty was infinitely stronger than individual liberty”.35 The meaning of freedom in general and its place in classical Greece have both been variously interpreted. Thus, whereas classicist Germans like Schiller and Humboldt saw Athens as did the classical Greeks of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. - namely, as the home of individual liberty - not so Benjamin Constant, the father of modern liberalism who described the same city-state as an organ of coercion. For, while accepting that Athens was more tolerant than her sister city-states, Constant saw Greek 30 BEFORE DEMOCRACY democracy as the collective participation of the citizens in the state - the citizens’ freedom to participate in the exercise of community sovereignty - but no individual was free from interference by the community. To put it somewhat more strongly, for Constant36 democracy implies the suppression of individual freedom, a suppression exemplified in the power of members of assembly in classical Greece to ostracize their leading citizens and expel them for up to ten years when wishing to get rid of them. The polis was the community, and freedom was always freedom of the community expressed in the idea of democracy: the polis thus formed the people’s highest interest, whereas the ‘individual’ or the ‘self’ was not even included in the Greeks’ lexicon. Thus it was in the name of the collective - Athens - that the lofty ideals of justice were proclaimed by Aeschylus, for example, and that man’s highest duty was to serve the collective. As is claimed,37 only with Socrates did the “explicit ideal of freedom and conscience begin to emerge, for the first time in history”, for, distinguishing between politics and ethics, Socrates shifted the emphasis to individual freedom. At the same time, however, the trial of Socrates is seen as the most famous example of the community’s ability to override the individual, and punish him even by death on the basis of “vague and general” charges; it is described38 as the first “unforgivable crime” of the restored Athenian democracy, a crime which made Plato despair of his city-state and set him on the path of his own utopia. Yet no one, not even Socrates, doubted the legitimacy of the people’s tribunal to do so, and, though aware of the injustice he was suffering, Socrates chose to remain in Athens, even when it meant having to lay down his life.39 The classical Greeks, though renowned for their tolerance of a large measure of free speech (but drawing the line when it concerned the collective), did not go far enough to regard such freedom as a citizen’s fundamental right. They mostly understood freedom to mean freedom from tyranny exemplified in rule by one individual, and ended up with absolute freedom for the state, but without realizing the freedom of the individual from the state: “Freedom within the state was a general fact, freedom from the state was the exception”.40 They thus saw personal freedom as fundamentally political, that is, freedom under the law within the state; it was freedom conjoined, not with justice as it was for the patriarch Abraham, but with democracy, in the sense of equal voting rights. Reflection, however, suggests that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and, as such, they form an unattainable combination, in the sense that democracy (be it by direct or indirect individual participation in government) is taken to express the will of majorities, whereas freedom must be concerned with individuals or minorities, that is, with how well ABRAHAM 31 minorities may stand up to the state or to majorities. No wonder, then, that freedom of individual conscience, in Abraham’s sense of dissent and its tolerance, as above, was excluded from classical Athenian freedom,41 where justice was not linked to righteous action, as it was for Abraham. As Plato and Aristotle saw it,42 justice was rather seen,

not in giving equal rights to men naturally unequal, but in giving every man his due. The due of the common man included no inviolable right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. What freedom he enjoyed was a negotiable asset: he could be sold into slavery to repay his debts . . .

Thus, when the above narrations on Abraham’s concern with justice and freedom are ignored, the idea that personal freedom belongs to the “isolated individual” would indeed appear to be a late development. Not even the freedom-loving Greeks saw incongruity between employing slaves, whose freedom they were depriving whilst diligently trying to ensure that they continued to retain theirs. In similar vein, Athens too existed in a contradiction, claiming to be a democracy, and, at the same time, attempting to impose her system on other city-states, even though they had similar constitutions, and to rule over them as if they were her vassals. No doubt, Western civilization owes much to the ancient Greeks for their contribution to our understanding of the relationship between freedom and democracy. As for the problems of freedom, of justice, and of their interrelationship, the ancient Greeks’ contribution grows pale in comparison with the clarity and rigour of Abraham’s above criterion of justice (and hence of the open society). Therefore, when historians and philosophers of society ignore, as they invariably do, the Hebraic contributions to the ideas and practice of justice through the individual’s freedom to dissent, they do so at their intellectual peril, for it depreciates whatever understanding they might have gained of these problems and of their effects on human society.43

CONCLUSION

In the ancient Near East, where absolute authority prevailed, man was totally dependent upon the good will of his rulers for privileges as well as his rights; and, where the measure of man’s relationship with his gods was taken in terms of unquestionable total obedience and service on man’s side, neither righteousness, nor freedom, nor justice had any role to play. Abraham - an autonomously thinking and acting individual, a man who 32 BEFORE DEMOCRACY wished to share his way of life with other members of his household, and to pass it on to his descendants - had no alternative but to emigrate to Canaan where, as we learn from the Book of Genesis, he lived autonomously as a private individual minding his own affairs; he neither sought nor held any public office, nor was he known to have preached to his neighbours about his religion or way of life. We may also learn from the narrations in the Book of Genesis that Abraham treated his employees and other members of his household with kindness and understanding. When Eliezer, the manager of his household, arrived at the home of Abraham’s nephew Bethuel to request the hand of his daughter Rebekah in marriage to Abraham’s son Isaac, he spoke of his master with respect and affection. He also spoke with loyalty and admiration of his master’s ideals and lifestyle, and recounted with pride the great wealth and success bestowed upon him by his God. Eliezer thus provides us, albeit indirectly, with some important insights into Abraham’s character and relationship with members of his household. The fact that Abraham refused to let Isaac marry a Canaanite girl, and went to the trouble of sending Eliezer all the way back to his native land to fetch a wife for his son from among his own extended family demonstrates that he was not a Sumerian cult carrier, nor had he any affinity with Sumerian, or Canaanite, culture. On the contrary, Abraham rather started a new way of life in Canaan, and was determined to see it through without compromise, choosing to remain particular and not intermingle with peoples of other cultures and religions. All of this is not to deny that ancient Sumer and Ur of the Chaldees were centres of learning, but only to recall that, at the same time, they were also centralized states wherein man’s autonomy to think and act as an individual was impeded. For within them the individual was denied his freedom of conscience (especially his freedom to dissent), and hence he was also denied justice; therefore, both Sumerian and Canaanite cultures were totally rejected by Abraham. The remaining chapters of this study are devoted to two major events in the history of the ancient Hebrews: the Mosaic revolution, seen in the present volume as an attempt by Moses to build upon Abraham’s legacy of individual moral autonomy manifest in the right (and possibly even obligation) of the individual to dissent from all manner of unprincipled activities, even authorized ones; and the events which ultimately led Abraham’s descendants to give up his legacy, in preference for life in a centralized monarchical system, events which, in a sense, signified a return to the ‘procrustean-bed’ system, the very kind of social system that was altogether rejected by both Abraham and his disciple Moses. The story, as told in Scripture, of how Abraham’s grandson Jacob (who eventually came to be known as Israel), and his twelve sons and their ABRAHAM 33 families came to reside in Egypt is well known. Following in the footsteps of their illustrious ancestor Abraham, they remained an industrious but particular community keeping very much to themselves. In later years, the upsurge in Egyptian nationalism, and the incessant feuds between the monarchy and the priesthood cast suspicion upon the segregated Israelite foreigners who were consequently taken into slavery.44 The story of the redemption of the Israelite slaves, and of their exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, as narrated in Scripture, is also well known. The present volume, however, will concentrate on the programme which Moses had intended to put into practice, a programme based upon the division, on a family basis, of Canaanite land to be conquered by the redeemed Israelite slaves; and on a constitution of a jubilee year to occur every fifty years, when all land, whether sold, leased, or taken over in repayment of debts, was to be returned to the descendants of its original Israelite holders, so that no family might be alienated from its land. The Mosaic programme combined Abraham’s adherence to monotheism and his understanding of man’s role upon this earth, as well as his vision of individual moral autonomy as a means to a free society based on justice grounded on moral behaviour, with the family as the foundation, and the tribal system as the nucleus, of a loosely bound decentralized society. I will further argue below that the failure of the Israelites to implement the Mosaic programme was primarily due to the failure of the tribes under Joshua’s leadership to conquer the whole of the land of Canaan; there was not enough land to divide on a family basis among all the tribes. Disarray ensued within, and among, the tribes. The only period of relative stability during the era of Judges occurred under the leadership of Samuel who, as I will argue, was the Israelite leader who did his utmost to follow in the footsteps of both Abraham and Moses. Samuel succeeded to unify the tribes, and he helped them regain their confidence and self-esteem. It was only when he grew old that the tribes became perturbed, and, fearing a return to the earlier days of disarray, they enticed Samuel to accede to their request to appoint a king to rule over them, so that they may be like all the other peoples around them. Before Democracy - the title of this study - encompasses the period from Abraham to Samuel, terminating with the inauguration of a centralized monarchy in Israel when the Israelites chose to return to a social system harbouring some of the characteristics which their ancestor Abraham, and his disciples Moses and Samuel had rejected, shunned, and actively sought to counteract.

34 BEFORE DEMOCRACY

NOTES

1 Kramer, The Sumerians, Their History, Culture, and Character, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, [1963] 1972), p. 286. 2 Ibid, p. 289. 3 Ibid, pp. 290-92. 4 On imitation in the context of cultural evolution and group selection, see Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty. The Political Order of a Free People (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), volume 3, especially pp. 155-69. On the inhibiting effects of political intervention on future cultural development, cf. Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, trans. Ray E. Chase (Minnesota: Michael E. Coughlin, 1978), p. 82. 5 Roux, Ancient Iraq (Great Britain: George Allen and Unwin, 1964), p. 173. 6 For the quotations in this paragraph, ibid, pp. 79, 80. 7 For the quotations in this paragraph, ibid, pp. 167-68, 174. 8 For the quotations in this paragraph, ibid, pp. 174-75, 176-77, 178. 9 Ibid, p. 184. 10 Ibid, pp. 168-69. 11 Loc. cit. 12 Loc. cit. 13 Kramer, History Begins At Sumer (New York: 1952), p. 52. 14 Roux, op. cit., pp. 171-72. 15 Loc. cit. 16 For sources, see footnote 2 in Chapter Two of the present volume. 17 This quotation, and, unless otherwise stated, all other quotations from Scripture are from the Rev. Dr A. Cohen (ed.) (London: The Soncino Press, 1956 for the Pentateuch, 1950 for the Books of Joshua and Judges, and 1951 for the Books of Samuel). 18 The reason given by the Sodomites for their demand of Lot to hand over the strangers to them - namely, “that we may know them” - is open to different interpretations, and can be traced to the narration on Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis (IV:1): “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived and bore Cain . . .” . The Hebrew expression for “knew” is “vayedah”, and may be taken in this context to mean knowing someone both carnally and mentally. The Sodomites’ given reason for wanting the strangers - namely, “that we may know them” (“venedah otam”) - has thus, inter alia, been understood to imply carnal knowledge, an interpretation which does not fit in with the rest of the narration, considering that “both young and old, all the people from every quarter” came to compass Lot’s house round, and that Lot offered them his two virgin daughters in exchange for the freedom of the two strangers. We thus have here two different interpretations - one pertaining to an evil social system of the ‘procrustean-bed’ type, and another pertaining to individual acts of Sodomy - interpretations that belong in different periods of Israelite history. As the practice of insertion (and deletion) in Scripture has been discussed and debated by many scholars, and hence is not a novel practice, I argue that the expression “that we may know them” was inserted by the scribes of the Book ABRAHAM 35

of Genesis at a later date, in order to divert attention away from the social system itself. Thus, albeit in a different context, Rabbi, Solomon Itzhaki, a scholar known for his piety, learning, erudition, and as the most authoritative commentator on both Scripture and Talmud, queried the following narration in the Book of Genesis (XVIII:22): “And the men turned from thence, and went toward Sodom: but Abraham stood yet before the Lord,” and he then concluded “that not Abraham stood before the Lord. But the Lord came to Abraham to tell him that the cry of Sodom and Gommorah’s iniquities came up to Him, therefore, it should have been written that the Lord was yet standing before Abraham. But this was an insertion by the scribes”. (Rashi’s Commentary, Vilna: The Widow and Brothers Ram Publishers, where he also notes that this insertion came from a quotation in Midrash Rabba. Free translation from the Hebrew by this writer.) In my above contention I extend the same approach to the statement “that we may know them”, and conclude that it was an insertion pertaining to a later period in Israelite history, an insertion intended to help smooth the transition from a decentralized tribal society to a centralized monarchy, and that this task was perceived to be more easily accomplished without the need to dwell on Abraham’s above criterion of justice through freedom. 19 Kramer, 1972, op. cit., p. 123. 20 According to a document in which appears the first recorded use of the word ‘freedom’ in the 24th century B.C., King Urukagina was the first reformer. He attempted to restore the ancient rights of his citizen-subjects through decrees intended to protect them from “ubiquitous tax collectors” and greedy priests, as well as to protect widows, orphans, and other weak members of society. (See Herbert J. Muller, Freedom in the Ancient World (England: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1962), p. 37; Kramer, op. cit., p. 124.) However, Muller also notes (ibid, p. 58), that ancient man scarcely believed that “freedom and justice are one and inseparable”, and that the real connection between the two began only with the necessity of law. I would argue that before Abraham, reforming attempts were mostly short-term and of a cosmetic nature rather than the issues of principle that they were with Abraham. For only in the Book of Genesis, as above, are freedom and justice presented clearly as inseparable, and a criterion of justice is clearly developed, as above. 21 Though the open society has been interpreted in a broader context in modern time, tolerance continues to occupy pride of place among its characteristics. See Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, [1945] 1957). 22 As noted by Richard Mulgan, “Liberty in Greece,” in P. Pelcynski and J. Gray, Conception of Liberty in Political Philosophy (London: The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 8. 23 Kramer, op. cit., p. 292. 24 The historian Georges Roux (op. cit., p. 100) agrees with Samuel Kramer, claiming that it seems probable that the Hebrews had borrowed from the long and well-established Mesopotamian tradition. Similarly, the historian Herbert Muller (op. cit., p. 121) stresses the indebtedness of the Hebrews to the 36 BEFORE DEMOCRACY

Canaanites, arguing that Canaan was a great crossroads where the Israelites could draw on cultural wealth to which the people before, and around, them had contributed: “. . . the Old Testament is full of allusions to Canaanite verse and echoes Canaanite legend”. At the same time, however, he also notes that research made clear the striking differences between prophetic Judaism and all other contemporary religions, especially those of their neighbours. “The genius of Israel,” he claims, “was displayed chiefly in all that it deliberately rejected from these civilizations.” 25 For example, Herbert Muller notes (ibid., p. 123) that, in making its unique history, Israel was also the first people “to write something like real history”. Similarly, Georges Roux (op. cit., p. 96) argues that in the Bible, a long line of posterity links the first man with Abraham to whom he refers as “the Hebrew true ancestor”. He also reports that Sir Leonard Woolley, the archaeologist who excavated at Ur, noted, among other things, that Abraham “went forth from Ur of the Chaldees and could well have brought with him the saga of the flood no doubt as popular in Mesopotamian history as in his day . . .”; Roux adds (ibid., pp. 196-97) that there is no reason to doubt the reality of Abraham’s migration from Ur to Hebron via Haran, as described in the Book of Genesis (XI:31). A comparison between a biblical account and the above available archaeological and textual material suggests that the flood must have taken place about 1850 B.C., or a little later. 26 Kramer, op. cit., p. 295. 27 Ibid, pp. 123-26. 28 Loc. cit. 29 Muller, op. cit., p. 33. 30 Ibid., p. 137. 31 Popper, op. cit., volume 1, p. 175; see also p. 125. 32 Hayek, op. cit., p. 166. 33 Idem, Law, Legislation and Liberty. The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), volume 2, p. 127. 34 Idem, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (London: Routledge, 1976), p. 166. Adam Ferguson, one of the Scottish moral philosophers who are much admired by von Hayek, also takes the ancient Hebraic scriptural approach when he observes that “the fundamental law of morality, in its first application to the action of man, is prohibitory and forbids the commission of wrong”. (Institute Moral Philosophy, Edinburgh: J. Miller, 1985), p. 189. 35 Victor Ehrenberg, Man, State and Democracy, Essays in Ancient History (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 29. 36 Constant, in his lecture “De la Liberte des Anciens Comparee a celle des Modernes,” Collection Complet des Ouvrages publics (1820) volume 2, pp. 238-73, noted in Mulgan, op cit., p. 11, and in Ehrenberg, ibid., pp. 25, 29, 31. 37 Muller, op. cit., pp. 167-68, 189. 38 Victor Ehrenberg, From Solon to Socrates.Greek History and Civilization During the 6th and 5th Centuries B.C. (London: Methuen [1964] 1970), p. 273. 39 Ibid., p. 2. 40 Mulgan, op. cit., p. 15; Ehrenberg, 1974, op. cit., p. 29. ABRAHAM 37

41 Ehrenberg, ibid., p. 34; Naomi Moldofsky, Political Economy On Democracy and Freedom, unpublished manuscript. 42 Cf. Ehrenberg, ibid., p. 30. 43 This view seems to be upheld by Lord Acton who notes that the Hebrews “laid down the parallel lines on which all freedom has been won - the doctrine of national tradition and the doctrine of the higher law; the principle that a constitution grows from a root, by a process of development . . . and the principle that all political authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code which was not made by man”. Acton concurs that “the greatest philosophers of Greece have no claim to be reckoned” among the influences “which brought arbitrary government under control, either by diffusion of power, or by the appeal to an authority which transcends all government”. Essays on Freedom and Power (London: Thames and Hudson. A Meridian Book, 1956), pp. 56-7, 75. 44 Notwithstanding the all too common view, among scholars, on Bible personalities as “semi-legendary, fanciful character[s]” (Sir Alan Gardiner on Moses, in his The Geography Of The Exodus. In Recueil d'etudes égyptologiques dédiées à la mémoire de J. - F. Champollion. Paris, 1922, p. 215), a view that goes against taking seriously the narratives in Scripture, interest in this particular heritage of the past continues to grow among scholars and the lay public alike. Whatever its scientific standing, the enduring resilience of the Israelite tradition, particularly that of the redemption from bondage of the Hebrew slaves and their subsequent Exodus from Egypt cannot be denied. Viewed in the light of modern literary and archeological research, discussed at a recent symposium, Donald B. Redford seems to have captured the state of play (in his “An Egyptological Perspective on the Exodus Narrative,” in Anson F. Rainey (ed.), Egypt, Israel, Sinai: Archaeological and Historical Relationships in the Biblical Period (Tel Aviv University, 1987, pp. 137-61). Following a list of strong criticisms of the shortcomings of the evidence in the extant Scripture on the Bondage and Exodus episode, he hastens to add (p. 151) that the critique is not “tantamount to branding the Biblical tradition a wholly late [post Exilic] fabrication”; and goes on to list a number of points in Scripture that remain “unassailable”, including among them the biblical story of Jacob and his family. At the same symposium, Manfred Bietak (“Comment on the Exodus,” Ibid, pp. 163-71), notes that “the objective of the historical truth behind the story” in Scripture, “can probably never be achieved”, but may be indirectly approached; and registers his attraction to Raphael Giveon’s thesis (Les bedouins de Shosu de documents Egyptians. Leiden, 1971) on evidence of proto-Israelites in the context of the Shosu Beduins as Yahweh worshippers during the reign of Amenhotep III in Egypt and on their relationship with aspects pertaining to the Bondage and Exodus episodes in Scripture. The approach taken in the present study will be explained and discussed in the next two chapters of this volume.