The issues of imperial conquest and colonial rule that we’ve explored in sub-Saharan Africa have deep histories farther north as well. Throughout the past four millennia, the region of Israel/Palestine has seen particularly fraught conflicts between – and among – local populations and a whole series of foreign powers. On my first trip to Jerusalem some years ago, I was taking a taxi to give a lecture up at Hebrew University, when we passed an anomalously vacant lot. When I asked the driver why such a large plot was standing empty, he replied: “Every meter of this land is covered in blood.” No further explanation was offered, or apparently needed.
The Hebrew Bible offers a transcendent vision of a single and all-powerful God, as merciful as he is just. He has embodied his covenant with his chosen people in a vital ritual order, grounded in history and reinforced with psalms, prophetic poetry, and evocative storytelling. Yet unlike the epic productions of imperial powers, the Bible’s stories and poetry are profoundly marked by the traumas of repeated invasions, internecine conflicts, and the perennial threats of assimilation and the loss of cultural memory.
These dangers reached a high point in 597 BCE, when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and deported its leaders and many of the people into exile.
Some of the greatest biblical writing is a product of the Babylonian exile, such as the haunting Psalm 137:
By the waters of Babylon,
we sat down and wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
sought from us songs,
and our tormentors mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
(verses 1-4)
In that climactic line, eik nashir et-shir-Adonai al admath nekhar?, the term nekhar, “foreign,” is aptly chosen for its Babylonian setting: it is cognate with Akkadian nakarum, which means “enemy” or “rebel.”
The biblical writers were often caught, if I can put it this way, between Iraq and a soft place, the soft place being the seductive “fleshpots of Egypt.” One of the masterpieces of biblical narrative is the story of Joseph in Genesis 37-50, and it shows the dangerous attraction that Egypt presented for the migrant laborers who periodically ventured down to find work in the fertile Nile Delta. As the story begins, Joseph’s father has been showing favoritism toward him, and his jealous older brothers are about to kill him when they observe a caravan approaching, carrying spices to sell down in Egypt. These passing traders provide a safety valve for the family conflict: the brothers sell Joseph to the traders, who in turn sell him to the Egyptian official Potiphar.
Egypt was everything Israel was not: a polytheistic land of myriad temples and magical transformations, a wealthy and secure country, with long-established cultural traditions and with rigid social hierarchies. A foreign slave would ordinarily have no prospect of success in this environment, but God causes everything Joseph does to prosper, and Potiphar puts him in charge of his household. Filled with passion for him, Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce him. When he rejects her, she claims that Joseph has tried to rape her, and in her accusation she emphasizes his foreignness: “See,” she tells her servants, “my husband has brought among us a Hebrew to mock us!” (Genesis 39:14). Her servants might really have more in common with Joseph than with their haughty mistress, but Potiphar’s wife shrewdly invokes ethnic loyalty (“to mock us,” “l’zahak banu”) to override any solidarity among workers.
In this episode, Joseph isn’t only thrust into a foreign land. He is caught up in a foreign story as well, much as a character who goes to Prague today will often have Kafkaesque experiences there. An Egyptian story, “The Tale of the Two Brothers,” had previously featured a false accusation by a spurned wife. The hero of the tale, Bata, is working for his older brother, Anubis, when Anubis’s wife asks him to become her lover. Bata refuses, whereupon she tells her husband that he’s tried to seduce her.
The two stories develop this theme in very different ways. The Egyptian tale proceeds by a fairytale logic, complete with talking animals and the hero’s transformation into a bull and then a pine tree. In the form of a splinter, he impregnates his sister-in-law, who has become the pharaoh’s mistress, and he’s reborn as the next pharaoh, whereupon he executes his sister-in-law-turned-surrogate-mother. By contrast, Joseph prospers by prudently managing the economy for Pharaoh, with no miraculous abilities beyond his God-given skill at interpreting dreams, and eventually he can magnanimously forgive his brothers for having sold him into slavery.
Joseph’s success has an ambiguous undercurrent. During the seven years of famine that follow the prosperous years when he stockpiled grain, Joseph distributes the grain to the starving Egyptians in exchange for their servitude to the Pharaoh – in effect, visiting slavery upon the entire population. The immigrant can get the job done, but his own descendants may not enjoy the benefits. No sooner has Joseph died than “a new king arose in Egypt, who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8), and he enslaves the entire population of Hebrew guest workers.
God now provides a great leader, Moses, to lead the Israelites out of Egypt – a story that African American slaves would later look to for inspiration – but Moses barely lives to begin his tale. Having been saved from slaughter when his mother sets him adrift on the Nile, he is found and brought up by the pharaoh’s daughter, but then he kills an overseer who is beating a Hebrew slave. He flees Egypt, but he isn’t restored to his ancestral homeland, as we might expect; instead, he settles in an in-between space, the land of Midian on the Arabian Peninsula, where the locals think he’s an Egyptian. There he marries a Midianite woman and has a son. He gives the child a resonant name: Gershon, derived from the term ger, “stranger, resident alien.” “For he said, ‘I have been a stranger in a strange land’” (Exodus 2:22, in the eloquent phrasing of the King James Version).
He is on the verge of permanent assimilation, until God appears to him in the form of a burning bush and enlists him to lead his people to freedom. God describes Israel as “a land flowing with milk and honey,” but he somewhat ominously adds that it is also “the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.” From the Bible’s Joseph to Kafka’s Joseph K., characters in peripheral or minority cultures have regularly found themselves to be strangers in a strange land even when they’re at home.
For many of the Israelites, it wouldn’t be home for long. The twelve Hebrew tribes became a united kingdom under Saul in c. 1047 BCE, but following the death of Solomon in 930 the kingdom split into Israel to the north and Judah in the south. In 750 the northern kingdom was overrun by the Assyrians, who deported a substantial portion of the ten tribes living there, resettling different groups around Mesopotamia:
It is this devastating loss that underlies the instructions in Exodus 28 for the elaborate garments that Aaron as High Priest is to wear when he comes before God, with onyx stones on his shoulders engraved with the names of the twelve tribes, six on each shoulder, “as a memorial before the Lord.” He will also wear a breastplate, adorned with four rows of precious stones:
The first row shall be carnelian, chrysolite and beryl; the second row shall be turquoise, lapis lazuli and emerald; the third row shall be jacinth, agate and amethyst; the fourth row shall be topaz, onyx and jasper. Mount them in gold filigree settings. There are to be twelve stones, one for each of the names of the sons of Israel, each engraved like a seal with the name of one of the twelve tribes. . . . Whenever Aaron enters the Holy Place, he will bear the names of the sons of Israel over his heart on the breastpiece of decision as a continuing memorial before the Lord.
Reflecting the intimate connection of ritual and poetry in the Hebrew Bible, this passage is echoed in the climactic lines of The Song of Songs:
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
and as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion as cruel as the grave.
So the lovers affirm; but the Priestly writer who set the twelve jeweled names as a seal upon Aaron’s heart was writing two or three centuries after the northern kingdom’s destruction, and he knew that ten of those twelve tribes had long ago vanished from the world. They live today in the Lord’s memory, and thanks to the Bible’s poetry and prose, in ours as well.