The Hebrew Bible could help to heal a deeply divided America
History is full of examples of how the Bible has strengthened those who have adopted it as their national document
JOE BIDEN, calling in his Inaugural Address for national unity amid an alarming rise in American political factionalism and extremism, evoked the ancient biblical hope for change — “weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning” (Psalm 30). This message of consolation from the Hebrew Bible echoes Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, in 1865, with its allusion, again, to the Psalms in a prayer for the healing of national divisions: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds…”
From the moment of independence in 1776, the Hebrew Bible has been an essential part of the discourse of American political life.
The Bible helped inspire the fight for unity and freedom, as it has in many other countries which accepted its authority. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, calling on Americans to unite in the depth of the Depression, in 1933, quoted the Hebrew Proverbs (29: 18): “the people perish when their leaders have no vision”. John F. Kennedy, referring to his hopes to undo racial division in 1961, quoted Isaiah 58: 6, to “undo the heavy burdens . . . and to let the oppressed go free”.
Peoples who seek freedom from imperial powers, as the Americans did from Great Britain, tend to adopt the Bible (usually the King James translation of 1611 in English-speaking countries) as their own, not as the symbol of a culture that was imposed on them. In African and Latin American states, this tendency is particularly striking.
The Bible is far more influential in these countries than in Britain and other former empires, whose zealous and often self-sacrificing missionaries spread the Bible among the natives.
The Bible is a national document par excellence. Those who have adopted it as their Scripture — including Britain and the United States — have been strengthened by it. How did it come about that a collection of Hebrew texts mostly dating from before 500 BCE should continue to influence and inspire national identity?
The answer is that the Hebrew Bible itself seeks to bind up national wounds and heal national divisions.
The Bible describes the birth and growth of a nation which at its height, in the time of Solomon, dominated the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.
As the story continues, however, an idolatrous moral decline sets in, for which the Mesopotamian empires exact divine punishment, and Egyptian alliances prove worthless.
After the kingdom of Israel was destroyed in 721 BCE, Judah survived as an Assyrian vassal for 135 years, the sole guardian of a monotheist tradition attenuated by pagan influence.
The Judean defeat and exile by the Babylonians in the early 6th century BCE improbably created a window of opportunity for its cultural re-unification with the similarly-lost kingdom of Israel. The Bible unites in literature the two defunct kingdoms, which during their centuries-long existence were frequently at war and in peace hopelessly divided. The sole memorial of the history and literature of these kingdoms is the Bible. Israel vanished in exile but Judah drew on the combined literary traditions of both kingdoms to create a portable culture strong enough to enable their religious-national identity to survive in exile.
When in 539 BCE, the Persians conquered Babylonia, and the Persian king, Cyrus, issued an Edict of Return allowing exiles to return to their homelands, a minority of Judeans returned to
Jerusalem, to rebuild the city and the Temple and re-establish their state.
These Jews began a tradition of public education, drawing on works in the Bible, originally in open-air readings for the people at large, including women and children. These readings included the intertwined history of both kingdoms, details of their religious life, their sacred texts, calendar and sacrificial rites, and some of their main literary works, which together would give the audience an idea of their unique character and a desire to preserve their traditions — and perhaps, when possible, to recreate the long-lost unified state.
The editing of the Hebrew Bible was in large measure a reaction to national defeat and exile. A small library of separate books was transformed into a single book, though the final canon was not decided for many centuries.
The Bible anticipates later national literature in seeking unity in the past and also in its often-harsh national self-criticism: in the Bible, as in Shakespeare’s Richard II, for example, the nation is accused of moral corruption, of wilful internal division, more dangerous than any foreign threat, leading to “shameful conquest of itself”.
Yet the Bible is exceptionally severe in judging the nation and its leaders. The great empires in the ancient Near East — not moral corruption — destroyed the small kingdoms standing in their way. Of all national identities of the ancient
Near East, only that of the
Jews survived. Of the cultures and languages of the kingdoms and empires in the ancient Near East, only Hebrew survived as a living language. Among ancient languages which ceased to be spoken, only Hebrew has been revived as the vernacular of a modern state.
Still, the Bible reads at times almost like the report of a commission of enquiry after a major disaster, seeking the deeper roots going back into the distant past.
The title of this enquiry might be: How did we fall from being a sovereign people on our land to being a defeated, exiled people about to vanish from history? The answer reiterated throughout the Bible is that widespread idolatry and immorality, and a corrupt monarchy and priesthood, brought defeat and exile to both kingdoms.
The key to the survival of the saving remnant from the Judean exile, and to the ultimate reunion of the entire nation, is unadulterated monotheist faith, with total commitment to its divine ethical principles: above all, social justice, and care of the poor.
The biblical ideal of a unified people is stressed, over the reality of the divided kingdom. Less than 10% of the chronological narrative from Genesis to Kings is given to the period of the divided kingdom, from the time of Jeroboam’s slave-revolt in the 10th century BCE to the end of the Judean monarchy and the Babylonian exile.
The editorial implication is clear: union is the ideal and authentic character of the nation; unity is vital for national survival; disunity is fatal; the dream of reunion keeps the nation alive in exile.
Crucial to national unity was the Hebrew language. Anguish for Hebrew largely forgotten in exile is expressed by Nehemiah who castigates Judeans who returned to Jerusalem with their Babylonian wives, unable any longer to speak Hebrew.
The Bible reaches back across centuries of monarchic rule and misrule, and further back, to the tribal period, to the patriarchs, as far as possible, to the creation of the world, “in the beginning” — in Hebrew — to establish from the start the sacred character of the language of the Bible. At the same time, most biblical vocabulary is clear, concise and forceful, a basic vernacular of daily life, and many of its stories are suitable for children.
In seeking the hand of God in the fall of the kingdoms and the exile, the Bible gives a full exposé of the moral flaws and failings of the evolving nation, of its weaknesses, sins, errors, and betrayals leading to, explaining and justifying national ruin.
Yet paradoxically, the differences between the kingdoms unite them in a shared heritage, a scandal-ridden past that binds them, as well as their common faith, and religious culture, their fraternal literary tradition, their common descent.
The boldness of the Bible in facing human nature and behavior in all its complexity, for good and bad alike, in seeing remarkable but flawed characters in a sweeping, constantly changing historical canvas, makes the entire biblical narrative deeply human and powerfully alive.
The Bible speaks to humankind in its universality, and conceives of the Jews, the first who came under its spell, as “a light unto the nations”.
Throughout their long history, the Jews preserved the Bible, and the Bible preserved them. Yet, its Jewish editors could not have imagined that Hebrew Scripture collected for the broken survivors of a defeated, exiled kingdom of Jews in the land of Israel over 2500 ago could have a similarly healing effect in translation, on countless wounded and divided peoples throughout the world, generation after generation, to the present.