>> This program is brought to you by Emory University. [BLANK_AUDIO] >> So, we've now arrived in the final week of the course, and it's time to pull all the pieces together and answer the basic questions that are posed for us. Why was the Bible written? Why was it written by the populations of ancient Israel and Judah, rather than by Egypt or Babylon and the other great imperial centers of the neighbors of Israel and Judah? And then, why did the Bible survive, being transmitted from generation to generation for millenia, rather than being dug up from the ground in modern times by archeologists, as is the case for most of the other texts we know about from Israel and Judah and from their neighbors? And then closely related to that question, is the transmission history. Why has the Bible had such a major world impact? We began the course in the first week by looking at Israel's and Judah's place on the land bridge connecting the world's oldest civilizational centers. The reason why Israel and Judah emerged as kingdoms and endured, endured for a number of centuries, is because one of those civilizational centers, Egypt, relinquished its control of the southern Levant, Canaan, the land of the Bible. And when it did, it created a space for polities to take shape and to extend their influence over larger regions, what we call territorial states. And these states were ruled by kings. But what eventually happened was that the great centers of civilization reasserted themselves. And as imperial powers emerged in the East this time, in the form of Assyria and Babylon, they inevitably set their sights on Egypt. And this meant military campaigns that swept through the land, the land bridge on which Israel and Judah were located. And in the end, it meant the defeat of these states, these geopolitical moves. And that defeat of the territorial states eliminated their kings, the kings of Israel and Judah, but it also created a new kind of space, one in which the subjects of these kings could come together, and assert themselves, and take charge of their destiny as a collective people. So, but before returning to defeat, we look in week two at the rise of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah when we spent a good deal of time examining how the populations in the highlands, the Judah and Samaria, coalesced into the kingdom of Israel that extended its influence into various directions, creating thereby a very multi-regional territorial state. This diversity, along with the close relationship between the kingdom of Israel and Judah, is an important piece of the puzzle that we're trying to solve. That brought us in week three to the question of defeat, and deportation, and the responses to it by the Biblical authors. On one hand, we saw that many remained in the land of Israel after the Assyrian deportations, and these communities may have had a hand in the composition of some of the early Biblical writings. I also noted that the Biblical authors faced many obstacles, both within the land and with beyond. And, for example, in the Egyptian colony of Elephantine that, all the way down on the Nile Judeans knew very little about Israel's traditions and laws, and they do not seem to even have possessed what we know as Biblical writings. And this is in the Persian period, [INAUDIBLE] an advanced stage of the Persian period, not early in Israel's history. And even when they, these communities leaders in Elephantine write to leaders in Judah and Samaria and asking about ritual affairs, the responses they receive do not cite Biblical text as we would expect. Then for Babylonia, I discussed the wide range of evidence for Judahite communities from the Persian period, and saw that they are going about their daily business, rather than preparing to return to their homeland in Judah. In the land of Judah itself, I noted the internal Biblical evidence from the prophet Haggai and the Nehemiah's memoir from the Book of Ezra-Nehemiah reveals that the population in Judah was not really committed to the rebuilding of the ruins of the temple and of the city of Jerusalem. It really required a lot of push to get them going. So one of the first things we looked at was how the Biblical authors respond to this by bringing together all kinds of disparate traditions and forming with them a single narrative. We started by looking at the story of Isaac in Genesis 26, and we saw how Biblical scholars can isolate older sources that were later linked together into a larger narrative. And the reason for doing this was to create a story of one people. This grand narrative stretches from the creation of the world in Genesis to the defeat of Judah in the book of Kings, and it presents Israel as a family that evolves naturally into a large people that exists for many generations before it establishes a state. So there's a long period of peoplehood existing before ever a king rises up and centralizes all of the, all of the population of Israel and Judah. So this narrative shows that Israel was a lot more than just a kingdom. What it means to be a people is thus not determined by sovereignty, or territorial hegemony, or any kind of government or statehood. Israel could survive after it, it had been defeated and exist just as it had existed as a people for many generations before it had established statehood. This combined history from Genesis to Kings, it's, we saw how it consists of many different kinds of histories, laid the foundation for a distinction that we today take for granted. Namely, between the people, on the one hand, and its government on the other. The government being the state, or the kingdom. And there's a fundamental distinction that we, and many of our countries throughout the world, take for granted, and it owes itself directly to the Bible in many ways. From there, we examined in week four a clue that substantiates my claim about the Bible as a project of peoplehood in response to the defeat of the state. That clue was noble death and martyrdom. Central features of statehood are rituals, and public spaces, and monuments, and all kinds of tributes to the war dead, those who sacrificed, laid down their life on the behalf of their country. But we find nothing of the sort in Hebrew Bible, and when the members of Israel die in battle in these Biblical stories, they do so because of their misconduct, vis-a-vis, divine laws. So, why is that? The reason, I suggested, is that the Biblical authors are wanting to make sure that the members in their society do not aspire to glorious death as they resist the encroachment of imperial powers. Instead, the Biblical authors need for their readers to learn a new means of survival under conditions of foreign rule. And this re-orientation of the hero is closely related to the place the assigned family life, on the one hand, and contributions to the collective good on the other. So we have a shift from the battlefield and to the building that we notice in the books of Ezra-Nehemiah and other places. In week five, that was last week, we then looked at the role of open access to knowledge. Priests were societal elites, especially in the time after the construction when the temple replaced the palace as the center of society. In order to curb the power of the priesthood, the Biblical authors make priests knowledge public. It's available for others to use as a means of evaluating the priest decision-making process. The same goes with regard to divine prophetic knowledge. It's not supposed to be a state secret, confined to the king. Instead of solely to the palace, it's addressed to the entire people. And then closely linked to priestly and prophetic knowledge are some of the education ideals of the Bible. The nation's histories, and laws, and poetry, and wisdom traditions are not confined to the elites of society. Instead, every member of the nation should internalize them, and through them, Israel will be able to collectively compete with other nations through not internal competition, but Israel as a nation competing with others and throughout the world. Through their learning and wisdom, not through their military might, or their vast numbers, or their great architectural feats, Israel as a small, vulnerable, and otherwise insignificant people, will distinguish itself among the nations of the world. The rebirth of Israel after defeat, I suggested, is really a pedagogical project, and the Bible is the curriculum for the nation. The Biblical authors set forth an array of other means of enabling Israel to sur, to survive in the vast ocean of political changes. They include a common language, and a common land, and a capital, and the holy place, the temple, in addition to space, also time plays a role in the form of a separate calendar, and holidays, and festivals. Other things include dietary restrictions, endogamous marriage, male circumcision, rituals of commemoration, and on and on. And most of them are laid out in the laws of the Pentateuch, of the first five books of Moses. In this sense, the law comes to play the role that was once played by the king. The law, in a very concrete sense, dem, demarcates and protects the borders of the nation, and for this reason, it becomes an object of affection. Remember that line from Psalm [INAUDIBLE] 19, oh how I [INAUDIBLE] love thy law, I meditate upon it all day long. Why? Because the law is the protector and a life-sustaining force in society. If we had more time, we would examine these and other strategies in more detail, and they are all very important. But the aim of my course is not to present an exhaustive discussion of all of the strategies that the Biblical authors adopted for Israel's identity. The object is rather to answer the more basic question of why. And I will address that question now explicitly in the coming segments. And thereafter, I will turn to the most fascinating means by which the Biblical authors reshape Israel's identity. This includes theology, and matters that relate to God and the covenant, and covenantal ethics.
