A biblical heritage.

Down to the Plymouth Rock, that had been to their feet as a doorstep Into a world unknown – the corner-stone of a nation! The American story begins around Chesapeake Bay and at Cape Cod. But the Virginian foundation, with its tobacco plantations, its English riff-raff and its African slaves, was wiped off the slate by the Civil War. So that the good ship Mayflower and turkey at Thanksgiving became the primary myths. A depiction of the aboriginal Americans arriving from England with very definitive ideas on right and wrong.

The Pilgrim Fathers were Puritans whose world view was based on the Bible. (Cranmer’s Bible rather than the King James Authorised Version, as they were fleeing persecution by that monarch.) And the biblical influence pervaded the New England colony. They had wandered in the wilderness and reached the Promised Land. They had escaped from bondage to build a New Jerusalem. And, with the Almighty on their side, they would fight the heathens and so reduce them that they would disappear from history.

The Native Americans were treated as Canaanites and Philistines. They could be killed indiscriminately as they counted for nothing in God’s project for his chosen people. And because illness took the greatest toll (small pox, measles, tuberculosis, etc.), as with the plagues of Egypt the Lord of Hosts bore the brunt of the extermination. The two and a half centuries separating the Rock at Plymouth from Wounded Knee were a continual land grab. The native populations were pushed ever westward to fight among themselves. And, when they had nowhere left to go, the survivors were camped like refugees in desolate places that nobody wanted. Just the way the Good Book sad it should be. Though captain Smith fared better than Samson, and general Custer lacked David’s military genius.

America has constructed itself on the premise that worshiping the Bible God gave special rights and obligations. Superiority over other beliefs, other gods and traditions, and the duty to proselytise by force and destroy recalcitrants. This was partly due to the brutal religious wars in Europe where massacring one’s opponents was habitual, and partly to Puritan hubris. To paraphrase Max Weber, success is a sign of God’s benevolence. If His eye is on the sparrow, the end justifies the means.
The Christian Bible contains the Old and the New Testaments. And the Gospels are clearly influenced by Greek humanism. The tribal/national God, Yahweh/Eloim, becomes a universal and transcendental concept, and the Galilean Jesus is a peripatetic. The God who speaks and writes, who inhabits prophets, judges and kings, is silenced and removed to some heavenly outer sphere. This break with the past was consumed when Paul preached to the Gentiles. When circumcision, Abraham’s original covenant, was superseded by baptism.

Faced with the contradiction between old and new interpretations of faith, the Byzantine and Roman Churches proscribed the old and replaced it by saintly “biographies”. But the fall of Byzantium, the Renaissance, Gutenberg’s revolution and the Reformation brought the Old Testament back into the spot-light. And the Reformed Churches have had to deal with that duality ever since. Retribution or love, an eye for an eye or turn the other cheek, it is a schizophrenic situation of Jekyll and Hyde proportions. A form of double-think and double-talk that characterises most western societies.

For historical reasons, Zionism is not encumbered by the Gospel testimony. The Zionist God is exclusively pre-Christian. He commands angel armies, rains down brimstone and stops the Sun, and enjoys nothing more than the perfume of fresh blood and burning flesh. He is a violent God from violent times. But here again a duality appeared. The Babylonian exile had developed writing, scholarship and commentary. This led to the adaptation of the Torah to a wider perception of the world. Confronted with the might of empires, the desert God of war became an urban God of law. For every conceivable situation, a ruling decided what was right. Rules that were deduced from the Pentateuch to give the Mishna, the Gemara and finally the Talmud.

Joshua, Samson and David are the central figures of the biblical saga, on a par with the heroes of the Iliad. But Joshua is preceded by Moses the law-maker, and Jesus is vaguely related to David through his stepfather Joseph (Matthew 1). Conquest is always a lawless and destructive process. And all accounts are of bloodshed and mayhem. So Moses, who killed a man in his youth but would never shed blood again having God to do the work, could not enter the land of Canaan where men would be doing the killing. Once he had led the tribes out of Egypt, Moses became wholly preoccupied by the Covenant. The perpetual agreement between man and his creator founded on a set of written rules. The idea that life in general and community life in particular are governed by certain laws that cannot be broken without dire consequences. Something comparable to the Gaia concept and Human Rights.

There are no stories of Jesus writing. The stepson of a carpenter having sojourned in the desert (with the Essenes?), he may not have mastered the difficult art of calligraphy. But then he had no need to set down laws that existed already. His task was to revive them and replace them in a new context. The personage described in the Gospels opens the way for a Hellenisation of the Torah. He integrates the Dionysian and Osirian elements of a loving bountiful God who lays down his life to save humanity. Gods who die and come back to life are agrarian. They are quite the contrary of Abraham’s pastoral God, and would have been anathema for the tribes fleeing Egypt. But, in a world dominated by Greek culture, and where Roman emperors were made living gods, the New Testament was a perfect adaptation to the times.

The Bible is a mix of covenant, conquest and redemption. And the two nations whose ideologies have been the most influenced by the Scriptures are Israel and the United States of America. The first is stuck in the dilemma between the rule of law and the rules of war. The second is unable to pass from the rules of war to the promise of universal peace. Both nations are congealed in between, and their destinies seem inextricably linked.