Bereshith: A Political Commentary
Introduction
Daniel J. Elazar
Why Another Commentary?
It is a commonplace to say that every generation must write its
own commentaries on the Bible reflecting its own understanding of
the Book of Books. At the same time, the writing of a Biblical
commentary remains an act of daring or, to borrow a Greek term,
even hubris. Nevertheless, as a political scientist and student
of the Bible, it seems to me that there has been a missing
element in Biblical commentary to date and that is an emphasis on
the explicitly political dimension of Scripture.
This is not to say that traditional commentators do not concern
themselves with political events. Quite to the contrary,
traditional commentary is interlaced with political ideas but,
since the focus of traditional commentary was and is in other
directions, with two outstanding exceptions, the late medieval
Sephardic commentator Don Isaac Abarbanel and the nineteenth
century Ashkenazic commentator Meir Leibush Malbim, they are
presented in an almost offhand manner to the reader. Among the
traditional commentators, only Abarbanel and Malbim make the
political a focal element.
By the same token, many philosophers and scholars within Western
civilization have drawn upon the Bible as a political resource.
Indeed, it is one of the greatest political resources of all
time, especially in the perennial struggle for what we today
refer to as liberty and democracy. In the 16th and 17th
centuries in particular, some of their works almost took the form
of textual commentaries in the sense that they built their
arguments for republicanism upon Biblical proof texts.
Nevertheless, no one of them tried to develop a comprehensive
political commentary following chapter-by-chapter and
verse-by-verse. Hence I have taken the liberty to try to do just
that in the following pages.
I have begun with the foundation books of two of the three
divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures, the books of Bereshith
(Genesis) and Joshua. Each is truly a foundation describing
foundings, beginning at the beginning as it were -- Bereshith at
the very beginning and Joshua at the beginning of a new stage in
the history of Israel. God willing, I will extend my commentary
to other books of the Bible in turn.
The possibility of writing a political commentary on the Bible
always existed, but has been given added momentum, greater
potential depth, and greater urgency by the restoration of the
Jewish state in our time. The reestablishment of the State of
Israel has not only brought the Jewish people fully back into the
political arena as an initiator of action as well as a respondent
to the actions of others, it has also brought us face to face
with the Jews' strengths and weaknesses in the political arena,
giving us new insights and understanding into the very complex
Biblical descriptions of the political behavior of Jews and
others.
At the same time, this political commentary is not merely or even
particularly a commentary on Jewish political behavior. Rather
it is designed to show how the Bible offers a sound and sober
political teaching for all humans, one that brings us to focus on
the ultimate end of God and man to pursue justice without
forgetting the often harsh realities of power. The Bible,
indeed, is not only the first comprehensive political book, but
the first to show us the two faces of politics, one pointing
toward power and the other toward justice, how they relate to
each other, and how both must be taken into account in the
pursuit of the messianic vision of a repaired world.
The Bible as Political Commentary
The Bible is an eminently political book, in the classical sense.
By virtue of its unique concern for the establishment of the
kingdom of God on earth, it could not help but be concerned with
the immediate development of the holy commonwealth that was to
lead to the establishment of that ultimate kingdom. Consequently,
a great part of the Bible -- particularly parts of the Torah
proper, the bulk of the so-called "historical" books, and
sections of the latter Prophets -- is given over to discussion of
political matters, with special reference to the structure and
purposes of Adat Bnei Yisrael -- the Congregation (Assembly) of
Israelites, the formal name of the Jewish people as a body
politic.
The discussion of politics in the Bible revolves primarily around
questions of political relationships. it is (in the terminology
of the Greeks) concerned with the problem of the best
constitution for the establishment of a proper relationship
between God and man, particularly Israel, and the best regime for
the maintenance of that relationship in the Land of Israel. It
deals with these problems not only in depth but with careful
attention to proper and explicit terminology. This exceptional
care in terminology provides important internal evidence to the
effect that the political discussion was a conscious one. And,
indeed, it was a discussion, with different points of view
presented, albeit within the context of a common political
tradition.
Unfortunately, the passage of time and the progressive decline of
Jewish concern with political matters after their abortive
revolts against Rome in the first centuries of the common era led
to the loss of this political perspective as an aid to the
Biblical text among most of its interpreters, with certain
important exceptions. At the time of the Protestant Reformation
and in the early generations of the modern age -- in the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- the Protestant
founders of modern republican government, approaching the
Biblical text with fresh eyes and definite political concern,
rediscovered its political implications and made use of its great
political insights in the development of their own constitutions
and regimes. However, the secularization of politics that
followed them, and the isolation of "theology" that accompanied
this rising secularism, once again relegated the Bible to the
religionists and led to its neglect as a work concerned with the
political order of this world, except in the most messianic
sense.
The Political Purpose of the Bible
The purpose of the Bible is to teach humans the right way to live
in this world. Thus its teaching focuses on living in a polity,
a commonwealth designed to enable fallible humans to achieve the
right way. It does so on two levels: (1) it provides a basis for
the achievement of a messianic age, and (2) it discusses the more
practical problems of living in society until then.
With regard to the former, the Bible makes it clear that the
messianic age will be achieved only with God's intervention
which, in turn, will come only when humans have done their full
share to bring it about. On one hand, this has led many people
to read the Bible's teachings on matters of political import as
applying only in the messianic age, focusing on the biblical
descriptions of messianic politics which sound better than the
often harsh Biblical descriptions of political realities because
the former are abstracted from realities of the world as we know
it. Moreover, people know in their hearts that they are not
really responsible for achieving those messianic goals. hence
people often disregard these teachings which refer to the second
level for which we are held responsible. It hardly need be said
that the Bible discusses a whole range of subjects on that second
level, from the ritual laws of sacrifice to the method of
providing for the poor. Some of its most important discussions
center around matters political.
We have already noted that politics has two faces, combining as
it does the organization of power ("who gets what, when, and
how") and the pursuit of justice (who should get what, when and
how in the good commonwealth). "Good" politics always rests on
dealing properly with both elements in the combination. The
Bible recognizes the interlinking of both aspects of politics and
addresses itself to both. Every comprehensive society is, in
fact, a polity, that is to say, it is organized politically
simply by virtue of its being an organized society. That is
because human relationships inevitably involve power which must
be allocated effectively and authoritatively. Politics involves
the authoritative or just allocation or distribution of power.
The Bible recognizes this fact in the very first chapter of
Genesis where authority over day and night is assigned to the Sun
and the Moon respectively while dominion over living things is
assigned to man. Subsequently, the covenants between God and
Noah, Abraham, and the Israelites at Sinai form the basis for the
distribution of power between God and human communities. By the
Bible's own terms, any teaching about the good life must include
teachings about the good commonwealth.
The Bible utilizes historical data to present its thesis and to
demonstrate its validity, but it uses those data only insofar as
they are useful to its purpose. Thus, it does not attempt to
present a complete historical record of any period and says so
quite openly by referring those who might be interested in the
full historical record to other works which existed at the time
which were devoted to history per se. It simply selects those
incidents in the historical record which are of particular use in
the development of its central idea and relates those incidents
honestly and accurately as it were, but clearly from a particular
point of view. Thus, the historical aspects of the Bible relate
to the expression of the central idea of prophetic Judaism over
time and space (i.e., in history). The historical materials are
mainly illustrative in character. If one wished to "translate"
the Biblical approach into something roughly akin to modern
academic terminology, one might call it "moral science" since it
represents an effort to develop fundamental moral principles from
historical examples which, while specific in and of themselves,
have an applicability in other places and other times.
An understanding of this characteristic of the Bible eliminates
many difficulties. For one, it transforms the historiographic
problem of apparent discrepancies, repetitions, and chronological
gaps. Since the Bible attempts to be no more than roughly
chronological in its sequences, it is not serious to the Biblical
authors if incidents are slightly out of chronological order.
Since the Bible attempts to use cases to teach, it is not serious
to the compiler if the same case is repeated in a slightly
different version provided that each version teaches something
special. Indeed, what one must look for, when one finds the same
case repeated, is not the fact of the repetition per se but
whether there was not some larger reason for the repetition in
light of the Bible's purposes.
Prismatic Thinking
To say that the Bible is the first comprehensive political book
is not to suggest that the Bible is only concerned with politics.
This is not the effort on the part of someone to foist on
Scripture his own view of the world. The Bible is best
understood as a prismatic book, that is to say, one reflective of
a well-nigh infinite variety of perspectives, reflecting off the
same core of truth which is simultaneously solid and shifting.
One of those prisms is the political. Indeed, the Bible gives
the world prismatic, as distinct from systematic, forms of
thought. In contrast, classical philosophy is systematic in
character, primarily deductive in structure, beginning with great
principles and moving in linear fashion to identify and
illucidate subsidiary and subordinate ones.
Prismatic thought is, perforce, multidimensional at all times.
It has the distinct advantage of reflecting the complexity of
reality. In physics, for example, it is prismatic thinking to
understand light as composed of both waves and particles
simultaneously. The apparent repetition of events in the Bible,
whatever the history of the original sources, is another
reflection of prismatic thinking, each account offering us a
different perspective on the same incident and hence a different
lesson to be learned from it.
Given the extraordinary complexity of human reality, there is
much to be said for this approach. The world, indeed, is far
more prismatic than systematic. While this should not prevent us
from seeking systematic understanding of the world, such
understanding can only be achieved when we begin with its
prismatic character.
The political tradition which flows from all this is based upon
Biblical teaching, torah in Hebrew, which is Divine teaching.
With regard to the political order, Biblical teaching emphasizes
covenants, federal relationships, the frontier experience, the
importance of foundings, the special character of new societies,
the necessity for and problematics of civilization, the
generational ordering of time, the continuous relationship of
space and time, the varieties of geographic expression of human
settlement, the division of humankind into nations and peoples,
the necessity for and problematics of political organization of
all societies and communities, constitutionalism and its
republican and democratic dimensions, the importance of "way" or
what moderns call "culture," and the binding ways of tradition.
A close reading of the Biblical text reveals all of these as
recurrent themes.
Serious students of political thought must inevitably become
aware of the Bible in shaping the political ideas of the Western
world, particularly up until the first generations of the modern
epoch. Every great political philosopher from Philo to the 18th
century felt it necessary to come to grips with Biblical ideas
and to utilize case studies from Scripture. At the same time it
is both easier and harder to pass over the political meaning of
the Biblical texts than it is a piece of classical philosophy. A
Biblical text is not likely to proclaim itself as being
political. The Biblical system is one of theme and language and
sound expressed through a series of stories which embody
important cases and issues, bound together by common value
concepts. It can be discovered only by identifying and following
the threads which run through its many parts. In other words it
is a system best penetrated by what in Hebrew is termed midrash,
the induction of meaning from textual and other sources, rather
than by syllogism. The midrashic method, with its emphasis on
the explication and harmonization of text, by its very nature
makes it harder for the student untrained in the method to
uncover that teaching, but by the same token requires him to
delve deeper and make a greater effort to order his thoughts. It
also offers the student greater opportunities for flashes of
insight which restrain the impulse to rush to erect comprehensive
schemes which may be intellectually compelling but are far from
reality.
In that sense this commentary barely scratches the surface of
what can possibly be delved out of the Biblical text. It is
designed rather to be an opening, a first step toward plumbing
those depths for their political teaching.
Appreciation of Biblical prismatics as contrasted with systematic
philosophy is, in the last analysis, also a matter of aesthetics.
It is no surprise that the Greeks, for whom aesthetics were all
and symmetry the heart of aesthetic beauty, created the
aesthetics of systematic inquiry (although only after laying the
foundation through the Platonic Dialogues, which, while more
systematic in structure than the Bible, embody a similar method,
that is to say, they demand that the reader enter into the text
in order to understand the argument and the principles derived
therefrom). Thus one must be prepared to recognize the different
aesthetic beauty of the biblical system in order to enter into
it. Biblical aesthetics is much related to process; to the
necessity to read and probe, to be touched by the elegant and
moving language the Bible uses to deal with prosaic matters, and
the sudden insights that come with those efforts.
Well into modern times, our forefathers were able to do so
because religious belief led them to a need to appreciate God's
word. Most moderns are no longer able to rely on religious
belief as the basis for aesthetic appreciation of the Bible. In
fact, matters are often reversed. Discovery of the aesthetics of
biblical thought may (indeed should) lead to an appreciation of
the divinity behind it rather than vice-versa.
