TWO
In the Jewish Hanukkah story, there are two enemies against the pious Jews who triumph in the end: the dominant Hellenistic Empire, and the secular, or “apostate,” Jews. Who were these Jewish doubters? In the Hellenistic period, a great number of Jews grew secular in their habits, doubting the God and laws of Moses so strongly that they rededicated the Second Temple—the Temple, in Jerusalem—to Zeus, and did so in a mood of cosmopolitan universalism, in appreciation of Greek philosophy and culture. This chapter has three parts. The first, “Zeus at the Altar,” is a story of the social side of doubt: people no longer wanting to be religious and isolationist. It’s a revised Hanukkah story, from the perspective of the history of doubt. The next two parts of the chapter address two sections of the Hebrew Bible, each one a pinnacle of the human expression of doubt. The first of these is the Book of Job, probably written just before the Hellenistic period; the second is Ecclesiastes, probably written right in the thick of the Hellenistic Age. The doubt in these two books feels very different; one is a howl for justice, the other a soulful wink and a shrug. They are responding to two different versions of Judaism. Yet despite important differences, they both have the same central problem: the world is cruel and good people suffer.
Calling something an expression of doubt by no means denies that it is a religious expression, too. Wildly doubting texts can still be religious treatises, and the brilliant ones even shed light on belief. There is pious beauty in these texts. But the fact is, Job and Ecclesiastes are both rather antireligious and antidogmatic. They are remarkable events of doubt and are foundational texts in doubt’s history.
We need a little background, both to situate our story and to explain what Jews believed about providence—divine guidance or care—in the centuries at hand. Very early on in their history, the Hebrews had some extremely good fortune on the fields of war and attributed that fortune to their powerful warrior God. There were a lot of “temple peoples”: communities based on devotion to a god who was understood as living there. The people would build the god a temple, sacrifice to it, and hope for the best. The Jews were different in that the inner sanctum of the Temple held no statue—this God was invisible. Also, when a temple community started losing wars, they would generally assume that their god was weak or had abandoned them and begin devotions to another god. When the ancient Hebrews started losing wars, however, they built a theology around the idea that they had failed God and he was punishing them. By doing this they preserved the strength, justice, and presence of their God. They also cultivated a sense that the world of state is an arrangement of moral forces, rather than clever alliances. In its origins, this world justice was strictly for Israel as a whole, but in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, the prophet Isaiah extended this sense of worth and recompense to individuals as well: prosperity and community respect were proof that you were in favor with God. So now the world was moral at the individual level, too: if you are good, good things will happen to you.
It takes effort to uphold such a doctrine when things start to go very wrong. In 586 BCE Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonians. King Nebuchadnezzar razed the Temple, put the city to the torch, and sent a choice section of the population—thousands of elites, professionals, and skilled workers—into exile to enrich the cities of Babylon. This was a nasty habit of the Babylonians. In the case of the Jews, those left behind soon lost touch with their religion, but those taken to Babylon clung to their Jewish identities. That was unusual; in fact, it may have been the first time that membership in a community of worship was divorced from residence. In Babylon, the Jews were treated well, given support from the state, and allowed to worship as they chose. It was during this period that Judaism began to center on the Laws. They were not even carefully studied before but were thought of as obscure and, in some cases, clearly out of date. But the exiled Jews missed their home and longed for their Temple, and they began to follow their religion in a new way.
That longing is why Psalm 137 says, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we thought of Zion,” and that is also why the psalm wonders (and both Lord Byron and Bob Marley borrowed), “How can we sing in a strange land?” Psalm 137 swears never to forget Zion, and the strength of that sorrowful commitment created the dedication to the Laws. Only here, in exile, did ordinary Jews begin to keep the Sabbath, to decide upon and live within the dietary restrictions, to practice the rite of circumcision, and to celebrate the various feasts. The absorption of Babylonian astronomical information enabled the Jews to fix these feasts to a calendar and thus come to think of them as regular annual holidays.
When the Persians conquered the Babylonians fifty years later, they set the various captive peoples free, purposefully repatriating the myriad local gods and their worshipers. The Jews were sent home with a mandate to rebuild the Temple and with the gold and silver to do it. The Jews who had stayed behind had intermarried with the local peoples, but the returning, postexilic Jews managed to rebuild the community. Meanwhile, many Babylonian Jews, perhaps even the majority, chose to stay behind, cultivating a great Jewish culture that flourished in Babylon for the next fifteen hundred years. The Babylonian captivity—the phrase has been used throughout history to designate misappropriations of all sorts—is the beginning of the Jewish Diaspora: from the sixth century BCE onward, a majority of Jews have always lived outside Palestine, often shuttling around as the result of one exile or another. The Jews were the first to proclaim a moral, all-powerful God, responsive to the behavior of human beings, and yet they had an incredibly troubled history. That is a paradox, and the Jews came to excel in developing approaches to the problem. Ideas of a just God in a rough world would henceforth be central to the history of doubt.
Both the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel witnessed the destruction of the Temple, and the response both came to was to shore up the traditional claims that ours is a just universe. The idea of an afterlife was still absent from Jewish thinking; the doctrine held that the good and the guilty will be recompensed while they yet live. It’s a brutal theory for a people to embrace during a disaster, because it suggests that suffering implies guilt, but it also soothes by giving meaning to suffering. The Book of Job seems to have been written in this period, between 600 BCE and 400 BCE, and we shall see that this strict relationship between suffering and guilt was very much on the author’s mind. The priest and scribe Ezra was among those who returned after the exile, and he would set the tone for Judaism for the next five hundred years. Like the prophets, he believed in a just God and a morally rational world. As such, he believed the destruction of the Temple and the Babylonian captivity must have been punishment from God for Israel’s sins. If things go so badly for the state that its individuals are blanketed by grief, it is difficult to imagine them all personally guilty, to that degree. The explanation was that all the individuals had sinned because no one was following the laws of Moses, from the dietary restrictions—for instance, against eating milk and meat at the same meal—to keeping scrupulously restful on the Sabbath. The exilic Jews invented a way of life while in Babylon and came back to indict themselves, their brethren, and their forebears for not having upheld these laws all along, and for having thereby caused the disaster. Ignorance of the law was no excuse.
As a remedy, Ezra brought together a body of knowledge and created a synagogue system to teach it. It is Ezra who was primarily responsible for determining which of the ancient Hebrew writings would be considered Jewish holy scripture. He conceived the synagogues as local places to study the law and learn how to worship, whereas the Temple was to remain the one place for worship. The synagogues were an organized outpost of the Temple serving to bind together the far-flung community. Diaspora Jews, however, would come to use the synagogue as a place to congregate and eventually to worship as well. So now we have an odd temple people, who somehow survived as a group when separated from their Temple. They had a law code that was modeled to fit with how postexilic people really lived. And they had an organizational system, in the form of Temple, synagogues, and priests. Apparently it was a period of calm and certainty and it went on for over a century.
ZEUS AT THE ALTAR
Then things got very cosmopolitan. As we know, in 332 BCE Alexander the Great conquered this whole area: Greece and the once-indomitable Persian Empire—Egypt and all the way east to India. When Alexander died, Judea had the bad luck to be right in the middle of the Seleucid and the Ptolemaic empires. The Seleucid Empire was like a hand resting flat on Arabia, with its heel in the Persian Gulf and its fingers on the Mediterranean, pointing at Greece. With a slight twist of perspective, the Tigris and the Euphrates may serve as lines of the palm. The Ptolemaic Empire was more compact: a greater Egypt, clustered in a fist around the Nile. Extend the Seleucid pinkie finger down to touch the Ptolemaic fist, and you’ve got Palestine—a tiny connective stripe between two giants. When she was not a battleground, she was a stomping ground. Broadly, from 332 to 200 BCE, the Jews were ruled by the Ptolemies, from the south, thereafter by the Seleucids, up north.
Although the province of Judah retained its autonomy under its new conquerors, Jews found living in a Greek empire very different from living in the Persian Empire, which had largely stayed out of their affairs. Alexander and his successors viewed Greek culture as the apex of civilization and proselytized it in the lands they ruled. They settled veterans and other Greeks in colonies. They built cities everywhere, bringing Classical architecture to areas that had always been rugged and rural. Greek trade quickly began to generate an economic boom. In no time at all, the Jewish territories—Judah and Samaria—found themselves surrounded by a comparatively wealthy, sophisticated, artistic world. Soon Greek clothing and Greek food became common among the Jews. Especially in the Ptolemaic world, the Jews learned Greek, for business purposes at first, and then more generally, until at last Greek became the common language. Hebrew and Aramaic (the language imposed by the Persians) fell out of favor. Jews often used two sets of names, Greek for travel and business, Hebrew at home. Others simply Hellenized their names and left it at that. There were Jews in Egypt before Alexander the Great came, but now they streamed into Alexandria as soldiers, craftsmen, and professionals. The conquered Egyptians were treated as an underclass to the “Hellenes,” which meant everybody else, including the Jews. Jews were among the immigrants who had come to serve the emperor in one capacity or another and were seen as a modernizing force against the Egyptian traditionalism of the local population. Jews were involved in the Greek secular culture around them.
The Greeks seemed to like the Jews.1 They do not appear to have noticed the Jews’ existence at all before Alexander brought them into the Greek sphere, and the initial Greek description of the Jews was that they were philosophers and wise men. One historian from the period guessed that the Jews were to the Syrians what the Brahmans were to the Indians. Some thought the Jews were descendants of the philosophers of India. The Bible records the existence of Greek and Jewish business partners in Alexandria at this time. Historians argue about the extent of Greek absorption of Jewish custom and culture, but we know that there were some converts to Israel’s God, and there were many more people who were simply attracted to Judaism and wanted to offer sacrifice, take part in annual feasts, and otherwise participate. The opinion of the Jews mattered in the wider syncretic, polytheist world: in part because Jews found animal worship comic in the extreme, Isis no longer appeared cow-headed outside purely Egyptian circles.
The Ptolemaic emperor’s attitude toward the Jews of Alexandria was benevolent. The emperor’s interest in the Jews was actually at the origin of the great Library of Alexandria. The very first mention we have of the Library of Alexandria is in The Letter of Aristeas (ca. 180–145 BCE). Aresteas was a Jewish scholar housed at the library, chronicling the translation of the Septuagint, and he explained that the library and the Septuagint had the same origin. The library was a century old when Aristeas wrote. He tells us that Ptolemy I had sponsored a friend, Demetrius, to create the library. Demetrius (who had ruled Athens for ten years and had been a student of Aristotle) gathered books and scrolls, but he also supervised a massive translation project making works from various cultures of the empire available to anyone who spoke Greek. This process began with the translation of the Jewish holy scriptures into Greek, thus producing the Septuagint, named for its seventy-two translators (they rounded down the number). So the Library of Alexandria was itself a product of the desire for Greeks to get to know the various peoples of the empire, and in the first place, the Jews. And the Jews’ enthusiasm for the project was a reflection of Jewish integration into Greek culture.
To celebrate the Greek translation, the Jews of Alexandria hosted an annual feast on the island of Pharos, and each year the text was read aloud to a tremendous congregation of Jews and Jewish sympathizers. Philo, a Jewish Alexandrian philosopher writing in the early first century CE, tells us that many non-Jews participated in this event. Alexandria, with its own Bible and its own holiday commemorating that Bible’s translation, began to serve as a second religious center for Judaism. At the same time, the Jews in Alexandria, at stretches accounting for as much 40 percent of her population, were integrating into the wider culture.2 When the Greek gymnasium in Alexandria was opened up to non-Greeks—though not to Egyptians—a great many Jews accepted the invitation. Jews were the “people of the book,” even if that traditionally kept them isolated in a single literature, and they were scholars. With Hellenization, for some Jews, a wider range of literature was coming to be of interest. For the most progressive people of the book, there was an attraction to the great city of the Library.
The Jewish world was still centered in Jerusalem, the heart of these various Jewish communities, site of the Temple, and the one place where interpretation of the Torah was proper. But Alexandria in Egypt was a rival center for Jews, and later, when Antioch in Syria became a great city, it, too, nurtured a lively Jewish culture for both secular and observant Jews. Many smaller places also contained vibrant Jewish populations. We know that sometimes when an emperor wanted to populate an area with a loyal people, he invited Jews: they were offered farmland, vineyards, and cash supplements until the first harvest—along with the transfer of their laws.3 Jews thus emigrated as a distinct people, with their own law. The great cosmopolitan, syncretic tide was strong, though. Jews began to take part in the urbane pleasures of the larger culture: theater, festivals, poetry, and philosophy of both the Classical schools and the new schools—Epicureans and Skeptics, Stoics and Cynics. Our best sources for this story are some late books of ancient Jewish history, called “Maccabees,” that did not make it into the Hebrew Bible. We only have them because they were included in Roman Catholic Bibles, usually at least in part under the title “Apocrypha.” From these books it would seem there was a significant population of moderately pro-Greek Jews, and then a prominent but much smaller number of extremely pro-Greek Jews.
Jewish women in particular might have found the Hellenistic world tempting. Ancient Greece had harbored an extreme prejudice against women in public life, but this was easing in the Hellenistic period. Cosmopolitanism often means more equality for women because of the jostling of old roles and hierarchies. Whereas Classical Greek art concentrated on the beauty of the male form, in the art of the Hellenistic Age women began to appear. In frescos and mosaics, we now see images of men and women at table together, relaxing, dressed smartly, enjoying each other’s company. As for the Jews, women had some vital roles, but this was a very patriarchal society. The common culture and mores of the Hellenistic world must have been attractive to some Jewish women. In the Jewish experience and in the wider Greek world, the strict kinship ties that bound women to men and men to their fathers were breaking down, being replaced by the cosmopolitan virtues of freedom and the mutual aid of loyal friendship.
The secularist Jewish community began to see the empire and the Greek philosophical tradition as a significant part of their identity. They knew that within the reaches of the Hellenistic empire there were several odd little temple peoples; religion-states that held themselves apart. The ever-changing world seemed headed toward more integration, more trade, more shared knowledge. Some Jews, welcoming those trends, relaxed their observance of traditional law, which now seemed isolating, awkward, or irrelevant. In an ironic twist quite common in the history of doubt, it was often the children of the elite old priestly class who were the most enthusiastic defenders of the new secular culture: they were the ones suitably educated and sufficiently prosperous to take part in the new schools, arts, and other pleasures. Also, the Greeks had expanded the middle class—through egalitarian policy and the generation of government jobs—so a wider group had access to the delights of the culture. Whatever their class, the Jews who enjoyed Hellenistic culture may not have felt any less Jewish, seeing nothing ill in the Greek invitation to civic celebrations, universalist moral philosophy, exercise and education at the Gymnasium, a sense of progress, and a prosperous future for the kids.
By now the Greek mystery religions, especially that of Dionysus, seem to have become important to many Diaspora Jews. By the early first century, popular Jewish legend had it that Ptolemy IV (204 BCE), a great devotee of Dionysus, had issued a decree commanding the Jews of Egypt to become worshipers of Dionysus. The author of Maccabees III explains that many Jews in Alexandria were only too happy to comply. Philo denounced the mystery religions but reproduced their tone in his own religious works; a contemporary Jewish critic warns specifically against Dionysiac revels. But such revels were seductive. Here were secrets and, as one historian has noted, they were “Greek secrets”; they had a powerful cultural cachet and Jews were interested.4 The Mystery Religions were attractive to Jews for the same reason they were attractive to Greeks: the official worship of both Greeks and Jews had no provisions for an afterlife. The mystery rites allowed individuals to explore the notion. Again, taking part in mystery rites and other Greek diversions did not mean one wasn’t a Jew anymore. A man whose parents had neglected to circumcise him, who did not observe ancestral traditions, but instead was an ecstatic worshiper of Dionysus was still legally a Jew.5 Even if such a man attained citizenship, evidence suggests that he would yet maintain a Jewish identity. When biblical authors wanted to say just what apostate Jews believed, no particular cult came to mind; rather, they were drifting away from religion, forgetting the dietary laws, not observing the Sabbath, and, generally, “changing the practices and estranged from ancestral doctrines,” i.e., they were secular and searching Jewish men and women, living in interesting times.6
When Alexandria grew overpopulated, the governors stopped offering citizenship to newcomers or their descendants. So there were Jews who were Alexandrians, and there were newer immigrants who were just Jews and could not aspire to be citizens of Alexandria. It was a frustrating situation for the newcomers, and worse for second-generation newcomers, who began clamoring for equal rights. This meant that when the emperor offered full citizenship to members of all temple peoples in Alexandria who would join in with the general Greek sacrifice, it was not as aggressively coercive as it would have been if there had been no strata of not-very-religious people who wanted citizenship. The emperor was letting the city’s most cosmopolitan resident aliens self-select on the basis of universalist spirit and worldly Hellenism. Some Jews were more than happy to show solidarity with the greater community and thereby become officially Alexandrian—ahead of many various newcomers of various nations. And after they became Alexandrian, they were still Jews.
Being a culturally Hellenic Jew became chic. The new vision of Greeks and Jews as natural friends encouraged the production of tales linking their origins. One purported to be an exchange of letters between the twelve-year-old Solomon and his client kings of Egypt and of Tyre; another presented the sons of Abraham as companions of Hercules who, it was proposed, himself married one of their daughters.7 Since the Jews were an older people, this idea of an early connection suggested that Jews might have taught the Greeks fundamental things—even writing. About 200 BCE the biographer Hermippus supposed that the early philosopher Pythagoras had been a pupil “of Jews and Thracians.” Someone, Greek or Jew, invented the idea of a common descent of Jews and Spartans from Abraham. It is clear from Maccabees II that some Jewish circles believed it.
Abraham showed up a lot in such stories and became the preferred hero of the Hellenistic Jews. He was more cosmopolitan than Moses—he had wandered and found a new home, rather than leading people back to their origins. He seemed less exclusionary and far less legalistic.8 His image reminded people that there was a model for Jews that suggested an extended outward-bound, familial legion, rather than a secluded, inward-looking people of the Law. After all, the reformist Jews noted, Abraham had not followed the law of Moses. He predated Moses. In Genesis 18, he served milk and meat—a boiled calf with butter and milk—to the Lord himself, and both ate heartily under a tree while Sarah made cake. So how important could it be to live one’s life according to these arcane injunctions?
The value of the law during the exile was that it kept the Jews united as a separate people, distinct from their conquerors. But isolation was not the goal of Jews living as honored members of these vibrant Hellenistic cities. A conservative Jewish response generated stories that backdated the law—Eve performing postchildbirth purification rites, for example—but a lot of people weren’t buying it. Jews gravitated to the Greek world beyond Judaism because it appealed to their sensibilities: progressive Jews moved away from the law of Moses, as Ezra had championed it, because it no longer seemed relevant to their lives. Rigorously lawful Jews did not like any of this and responded with a turn toward isolationist piety. Indeed, this is the origin of a certain kind of religious extremism—some went off into the desert in bands and sharpened their knives. As suggested, the poor tended to be conservative whereas the wealthier segments of the population—those who could afford it—were avid for Greek education and savoir faire. It was a tense situation, but reasonably stable.
That changed when Judah changed empirical hands. Antiochus III had a terrific enthusiasm for Greek culture and he came down from the north and triumphed against Ptolemy at Gaza in 200 BCE. The Jews were suddenly in the empire of the Seleucids—the upper of the two hands. The war that brought this change also brought personal misery for some. But for many others in Judah, the new emperor brought a mood of inclusion and progress.
Antiochus III was enthusiastic, but not very proactive. The Greek-inclined, secularist Jewish community found its great champion in his son and successor, King Antiochus IV (175–164 BCE), who assumed the name Epiphanes (illustrious or revealer). Pious Jews changed it to “Epimanes” (cracked or mad), because they despised him, but for a great many Jews, Epiphanes seemed to have the right idea. He encouraged common, secular laws and customs in order to unify the wider community and foster economic growth. Epiphanes’ capital city, Antioch in Syria, was enlarged to accommodate Greeks seeking freedom from the growing pressures of Rome, and a very large community of Jews came to live there as well. As Antioch became a major city, it arose as a great Jewish center on the order of Alexandria and Jerusalem. We don’t know exactly what secular hellenophile Jews believed or what they practiced, in part because the more pious Jews determined which texts got handed down to us. But what we do know of them directly, combined with the invective of their conservative fellows, suggests that they did not practice many rituals of Judaism. They were un-circumcised and did not keep the Sabbath. They were comfortable with the rituals and spiritualism of the Greeks.
Of course, at this time, Greek culture was more likely to mean Epicureanism than the Olympic pantheon. Even in Judah, Epicureans were very prominent and were well represented in Hellenized cities like Galilee. Antioch and Alexandria were suffused with rationalist Greek philosophy, and we know that Antiochus himself lauded the Epicurean ideals. Antiochus retired the pro-Ptolemaic Jewish high priest—son of the high priest Simon the Just—and gave the post to Simon’s more progressive younger son, Jason. Jason was born Joshua but, tellingly, he was happier with the Greek form of his name. Maccabees says Antiochus sold the high-priest position to the highest bidder, and leaves out that he was Simon’s son and that he already had a strong following. This following included the large “family” of the Tobiads, who had long countered the religious legalism championed by Ezra.9 Jerusalem would be reenvisioned as a Greek polis.
The new high priest quickly got to work making the finer things of Greek culture available to Jews. First and foremost, Jason built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, at the foot of the Temple Mount. The gymnasia served as the central nexus of Greek life. Greek culture was exercised and passed along there, and the social connections one made there were crucial to business and prosperity. Attendants had the obvious aim of fitting in, becoming educated, and getting ahead in the Greek world. The gymnasium at the Temple Mount was very popular with Jews and non-Jews alike, and there was nothing really anti-Jewish or antireligious about it, except that, of course, there was. This was most neatly visible in the fact that most gymnasium activities were performed in the nude and there was a Jewish ban on such public nakedness. Walking in the door was already a major statement about one’s beliefs. The place was a paean to the male body, to physical beauty, and to human strength. Because the nudity at the gymnasium (the word itself means “to train naked”) was coupled with a desire to fit in and to leave old ways behind, some Jewish men actually underwent surgery to reverse their circumcision—the primary sign of the covenant. Many more stopped circumcising their sons. As the Bible tells it, the Temple priests themselves “ceased to show any interest in the services of the altar; scorning the Temple and neglecting the sacrifices, they would hurry to take part in the unlawful exercises on the training-ground.”10 That is, Jewish Temple priests were running off to play naked sports with the Greeks and everyone else. The Jews in both empires who took to Greek culture seem to have felt it was the dawn of a golden age of inspired, secular civilization. That was certainly the gist of the wider discourse.
Jews fought among themselves over all this. Even struggles over doctrine among the most pious groups of Jews came to reflect tension about Jewish interest in Greek culture. The Pharisees, for instance, were following the rationalist Greek impulse when they created an oral law to translate the archaic Mosaic law into the real world of the day. Their rivals, the Sadducees, stuck to the old written law and said that the way of the Pharisees would lead to more respect for “the book of Homer”—implying Greek literature in general—“than for the holy scriptures.”11 This is one of the few times the Talmud mentions any literature other than its own, so Jewish interest in Greek literature must have been considerable.
Whether the more traditional Jews liked it or not, “the book of Homer” was respected. We used to think Diaspora Jews were the more progressive populations in this respect, in contrast to a conservative, anti-Greek Judean population. But scholarship over the last four decades has revealed that this idea of a split is very much in error. In Judea as elsewhere, Jewish writing shows an intense interest and involvement in Greek issues and styles.12 Elias J. Bickerman’s brilliant analysis of the Jewish school system created by the Pharisees in the third and second century BCE showed that Greek teaching became so prevalent that it gave rise to the first Jewish school system. There was no precedent for it in Jewish history. Bickerman explains that because the Jewish elite of Hellenistic Judea had so completely embraced the gymnasia, pious, legalist Jews were pushed into offering a conservative Jewish alternative.13
For those Jews who embraced the changes, the old ways weren’t simply fading away. In many cases, people thought long and hard and decided that some of the old ways, at least, ought to be abolished. There were Jewish reformers and intellectuals who wanted to stop breaking the law when they went to the gymnasium—not by staying home, but by lifting the ban on nudity and generally modernizing the whole religion. Progressive Jewish thinkers at this time produced the first written biblical criticism, asserting that the Law was certainly not as old as Moses, indeed, it was not very old at all. They found the Torah full of allegory and fable and unnecessary restrictions. As Maccabees I puts it:
In those days lawless men came forth from Israel, and misled many, saying, “Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles round about us, for since we separated from them many evils have come upon us.” This proposal pleased them, and some of the people eagerly went to the king. He authorized them to observe the ordinances of the Gentiles. So they built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to Gentile custom, and removed the marks of circumcision, and abandoned the holy covenant.
Jason was acting in concert with his fellows, then, when he began to limit the tremendous number of regular Temple sacrifices, in order to save money for the new Greek-oriented cultural programs. The Temple treasury served as the state bank in a sense—it collected the money and controlled the budget—so the high priest had remarkable power. The devout found it hard to swallow Jason’s siphoning off money once designated for Temple sacrifice, but they managed.
The crisis came in 171 BCE, when Antiochus fired Jason and chose a new Jewish high priest, Menelaus, who was even more sympathetic to the cultural mood and financial needs of Antiochus. Jason fled to Sparta, “hoping that for kinship’s sake, he might find harbor there”—the “kinship” here refers to the growing legend that Spartans were also descendants of Abraham. Menelaus began channeling some of the money that had once gone to the Temple directly to the king.
Now a new sect of Jews was formed from scribes and their followers. They took the name Hasidim, which means the pious or loyal. Their idea was to concentrate on the study of the Torah, to observe the Law, and to vigorously reject Greek culture. Yet many Jews saw the new secular developments as supporting the culture that they loved and the king who defended them. Pious and apostate Jew alike had long taken pride in Jewish military heroism in service to the emperor; Maccabees II maintains that the most famous of Seleucid victories, over the Gauls in 275 BCE, was the result of the glory of the Jewish troops.14 And taking funds away from the traditional Temple expenses did not anger everyone. Indeed, some were happy to strike a blow against an old and constricting system that was literally burning up the community’s resources and tying their hands. The Sukkot chapter of the Talmud tells of a woman named Miriam, a relative of the new high priest Menelaus, and, like him, a defender of the new times. Apparently, she marched into the Temple, “struck against the corner of the altar with her sandal, and said to it ‘Wolf, wolf, you have squandered the riches of Israel.’”15 This bright vignette helps illuminate the moment: Savvy, upper-class Jews of the time preferred the advantages of secular Hellenistic society to what they perceived as a narrow, parochial Judaism. Miriam’s gesture claimed that the resources of the Jewish people were better spent on the pageant of culture and the needs of modern life than consumed in sacrifices to God.
The progressive, acculturated Jews began to lose hold of things when war broke out again between Seleucid Syria and Ptolemaic Egypt, and a rumor spread that Antiochus had been killed in battle. When the rumor got to Judea, nationalist and Hasidic groups began rioting in celebration. Jason returned from exile—speaking, we imagine, for a group of Jews ill-represented by either devout Hasidim or secularist Menelaus. The rumor was false, though, and Antiochus returned from Egypt to Jerusalem. On the way back, he quelled a revolt inspired by Jason, and when he got to Jerusalem he looted the Temple for gold in punishment. That widened the divide between the secularists and the lovers of the Law.
What happened next, apparently, is that Menelaus petitioned the emperor that the Jews might live under the common law. He proposed a decisive step away from the symbols and practices of separatism. Secular Jews must have already been living this way. What Menelaus did was assert his way of life over the zealot Jew who was being so resistant to the empire. He asked for his people to live within the ordinances of the gentiles, and to make illegal the signs and ways of the old laws—to reject isolationism and ritual purity, the immobilization of business, and the shunning of new pleasures. Circumcision, regular worship, Torah study, the keeping of the Sabbath—it was all separatist and should all be left behind. Antiochus agreed to include the Jews within the law of the gentiles, and the rites of Jewish law were at once made illegal. It seems a strange law for a Jewish man to devise, but as we have seen, these rites had been fashioned by Ezra only about half a millennium before and held different meanings for the Hellenistic Jews than they do for Jews today. Menelaus seems to have been trying to rid Judaism of what he saw as an unnecessary, backward-looking obscurantism.16
When the Hasidim went on practicing Judaism after these proscriptions, they became the world’s first martyrs. Many went passively to their deaths in defense of their ideals. This history is predominantly told in support of martyrdom, in celebration of the shining remnant of pious Jews. That is not the only way to see it. The story of Chana and her seven sons is a favorite of Jewish martyrdom. Antiochus asked each son to bow to an idol. One after another, from the eldest down to the boy of two years, each hotly refused and went out to die before his mother’s eyes. As the little one was being escorted off to be killed, Chana is supposed to have shouted: Go to Abraham and tell him he bound one son to the altar, I bound seven, and mine were for real! She went mad days later and fell off her roof to her death.
There were many Jews who would look on such a response as bizarre. Upper- and middle-class educated Jews were eager to bring the special qualities of Jewish culture into harmony with the great culture of the Hellenistic world and were happy to distance themselves from the more zealous aspects of Jewish practice. Menelaus asked all Jews for a symbolic show of solidarity with the universalist ideal: a sacrifice on a pagan altar. The Temple was now to be a universal ecumenical center, open to all. An interdenominational god was to stand as a single focus for all, and the god to represent this equality was the old Olympic god Zeus: at this point, almost a secular symbol of Greece. It was not a big deal at all, unless you were a traditionalist Jew who was not part of the Hellenistic culture, in which case, the decree violated the very core of Judaism: to worship no idols; to shun even casual images; to bow to no one but the invisible Jewish God. On December 15, 168 BCE, an altar to Zeus was built upon the Temple altar of sacrifice and sacrifice was made.
To some this was all a wonderful mixing of equally pleasant and sanitized doctrines in an attitude of secular communal devotion; to others it felt like grotesque defamation. In Maccabees I it sounds like Antiochus persecutes the Jews; all other sources, including Maccabees II, speak of the more secular, Greek-influenced Jews as apostates and not, say, victims of forced conversion. Historian Paul Johnson writes that it “was not so much a desecration of the Temple by paganism as a display of militant rationalism.”17 Bickerman tells of Jewish writers borrowing the Homeric style for biblical descriptions, along with Jewish translations of Greek texts that freely translate Zeus to God.18 We have a letter from the Samaritan Jews to the emperor from this same period, in which they ask to be thought of as separate from the zealous Jews of Jerusalem, despite their kinship, and request “that the temple without a name be known as that of Zeus Hellenios,” that is, they asked him to kindly reconsecrate their place of worship, the sanctuary on Mount Gerizim, to Zeus.19
So we know that some Jews avidly welcomed the secular Greek culture while others mildly went along with it. And although we do not hear of it, we can assume that since there was a real likelihood of physical punishment, some Jews went along with the injunction against Jewish ritual because they were afraid. We just do not know how the split went in these early days. Some were secular and sober, boldly walking into the public space of their shared world and insisting that they had a right to do so. Jews who wanted to follow the Law in Jerusalem were obviously infuriated. Beside worldly Jews who saw themselves as important members of an exciting new cultural movement, pious Jews may have felt humiliated, left behind, and frightened. Their taxes supported the reformist program, and now their way of life had been outlawed.
One of the major voices in the legalist, pious Jewish reaction was a priest named Mattathias Hasmon. When the king’s commissioners came into the town of Modein for the sacrifices, Mattathias showed up flanked by five militant sons and a number of other followers and put on a display of refusal. As he was finishing, Maccabees I tells us, “A Jew came forward in the sight of all to offer sacrifice upon the altar in Modein, according to the king’s command. When Mattathias saw it, he burned with zeal and his heart was stirred. He gave vent to righteous anger.” Running to the altar, Mattathias killed the offending Jew and also killed the emperor’s officer overseeing the sacrifices. Thus a great revolt of traditionalist Jews began. What had started it was that Mattathias killed a fellow Jew, either because that man felt forced into making sacrifice or because he, like Jason, Menelaus, and Miriam, doubted the relevance of strict Jewish law in the real world of his real life. He may have been just trying to get ahead, a bit of a toady, and not very interested in religion one way or another; or he might have been an enthusiastic man, having fun. If the first case is true, then Mattathias killed the man for failing to make a martyr of himself. If it was not just avoidance of death, though, if it was a variation on deciding to be part of the wider culture and ignoring the proscriptions of one’s parents’ (or even parents’ parents’) religion, then this unnamed Jewish man was a martyr for doubt. That he went first suggests he was an actual volunteer. He has been remembered in history, heretofore, only by the words of those who killed him, and therefore remembered as a silence rather than a voice.
Mattathias and his sons fled to the mountains. They were joined by many Hasidim, and soon enough a guerrilla war began in full force. When Mattathias died in 166 BCE, the leadership passed to his son Judah, called Maccabeus, which means “hammer.” Judah apparently was one; it is from this bloody nickname that the family name of Maccabee is derived. Judah defeated an expedition sent from Syria to squash his revolt, then occupied Jerusalem, killing sinners—Hellenized Jews—and forcibly circumcising others. Circumcision performed on grown boys and adult men, by force and in anger, is not just a strong hand leading the lost sheep back to the flock. Rather, it’s an extraordinary attack on the masculinity and the privacy of those who had chosen to live as Jewish citizens of the wider Greek world. The shift in the status of women must have been enacted in some crushingly brutal way. The Talmud tells us that after the Maccabees took power, Miriam “was punished.” The Hammer reconsecrated the Temple in 165 BCE, and Hanukkah celebrates the event. As we learn from Maccabees I, it took another year before the progressive Jews were starved out of the stronghold of Gezer, and the citadel of Jerusalem, and chased into exile.20 Note that in 162 BCE, Judah Maccabee strode a battlefield after a victory and was appalled to find pagan amulets on the corpses of his own fallen soldiers.21 Even there, a little doubting.
The emperor didn’t give up, but to everyone’s surprise the Maccabees were able to keep winning against impressive forces and were thus able to set up the Hasmonean dynasty. They couldn’t have done it without Rome’s support, so they had traded one master for another, but, for the time being, this new one was less interested in the Jews’ internal affairs. And that was the end of that particular experiment in interdenominational temple worship.
As I’ve said, Hanukkah is the celebration of the revolt that reclaimed the Temple, and it is generally remembered as marking a clash between powerful pagan oppressors and determined Jewish victims. But the revolt’s first victim was a secular Jew at the hands of a zealot Jew, the further struggle entailed murder and forcible circumcision, and it ran the cosmopolitan Jewish way of life right out of town. When secular Jews celebrate this one, they might want to do it with some care—let one candle burn for the other side. If Judah and his hammer make one kind of hero, devoted to one kind of wisdom, Miriam and her little sandal make another kind of hero, storming in defense of a wider field of wisdom and the virtue of an open mind. And let us not stop there. Chana and her sons were martyrs, but so was the Jewish man Mattathias killed, and just as the pious Jews were persecuted, so, too, were the men forcibly circumcised, and the boys torn from their gymnasium. Again, we cannot say much about the shift in education, mores, and general choices for girls and women, but we can surmise that the public life of Jewish women was suddenly and forcibly curtailed.
In the Hellenistic Diaspora, Jewish-Greek sophistication proceeded merrily onward. We learn much from their opponents: Philo denounced those “who express their displeasure with the statutes made by their forefathers, and incessantly censure the law.” He also took it for granted that sons of wealthy Jewish merchants would attend gymnasium.22 As we’ve noted, Philo also tells us that many non-Jews took part in the annual Jewish festival on the island of Pharos to celebrate the translation of the Septuagint.23 In the same period, the Seers added: “Cursed be the man who rears a pig and cursed be those who instruct their sons in Greek wisdom,” which certainly suggests that some Jews were raising pigs among their animals and were raising children among the Greeks.24
Despite the separatist rigors of the pious Jews of Jerusalem, Greek culture had a powerful impact on Jewish thought. To quote Bickerman again, “The fear of death … was the impelling force behind the Greek mystical current in the early Hellenistic world. The achievement of the Pharisees was to channel this current into the mainstream of Jewish tradition.”25 In the next centuries, the branch of Judaism most concerned with this Greek idea of life after death would create a new religion. Their two great ideas—a single, caring, ethical God, and a life after death—were joined together in Christianity, and in this form took over much of the world for a period of two millennia and counting. But both Greek and Jewish culture had traditions of secularism that also grew, and they, too, would learn more together. Theirs has been a story of sophistication, cosmopolitan delights, progressive politics, tolerant intellectualism, and comfort with different but urbane neighbors. The Jewish-Greek secular mix has been as fruitful as the religious.
JOB
The earliest evidence of doubt in the Hebrew Bible is in the psalms, all, it seems, written by the fifth century. The first psalm mentions avoiding “the counsel of the ungodly,” indeed, in this very short psalm “the ungodly” are mentioned three more times: he who delights in the Law of the Lord is prosperous, “the ungodly are not so,” “therefore the ungodly will not stand in the judgment,” and furthermore “the way of the ungodly shall perish.” Psalm 14 says that the fool, in his heart, says there is no God.
We do not know the date of the Book of Job either, but we can get closer.26 Many scholars believe it to have been written between 600 and 400 BCE; some think a little later, i.e., in the early part of the Hellenistic period. Whatever the date of the biblical book, the folk story of Job as a good man who suffered, kept his faith, and was rewarded had been around for a long time. We are by no means certain that the folk story was of Jewish origin, or that Job himself, if he existed, was a Jew. Someone, somewhere, wrote a poetic masterpiece that took that Job story, a story of faith, and reimagined it as a philosophical question—as a moment of truth. This, then, came to be included in the Hebrew Bible. The biblical Job is a story of faith, but a faith that is pushed past its limits, into fury, revolt, and doubt.
The biblical Job was a “perfect and upright man.”27 He was pious, generous, and kind, and as a result, he was extremely prosperous. He had a great household: a good wife, seven sons and three daughters, many serving hands, and so much land and cattle that he was “the greatest of all the men of the east.” He fed the hungry, looked after the fatherless, welcomed the stranger, and was honored for it. He was so righteous that every day he made extra burnt offerings to God just in case his sons ever “cursed God in their hearts.” The drama begins when, gazing upon Job, God bragged to the devil of the good man’s piety. The devil made light of it, telling God that it was Job’s prosperity that kept him pious. God insisted that Job would stay righteous even without all his blessings, and the two embarked upon an awful experiment.
In one of the most brutal and crafted scenes in the Bible, God sends a messenger to Job reporting that the Sabeans have stolen his oxen and ass and have slit the throats of his servants in the field. “While he was yet speaking,” another messenger shows up and says that Job’s sheep, and those tending them, have been burned to death by fire from the sky. Another messenger arrives, again while the last is still speaking, this time announcing that the Chaldeans have stolen the camels and killed the remainder of his working hands. Finally, and once again before the last messenger has finished speaking, another messenger appears. This one tells Job that a fierce wind has blown out of the mountains, knocking down the house in which his entire brood of children, all adults, were feasting. All are dead. Job’s response to this is to rip his clothes, shave his head, and fall on his knees, saying, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job bore his sorrow and trusted God.
When God then asks the devil if he is convinced, Satan shakes it off, saying, “Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life”; that is, Satan promises that if he hurts Job right down to his flesh, the righteous man will curse God to his face. God tells Satan to go ahead and do as he pleases, cautioning only that Job must survive the ordeal. Thus invited, Satan covers Job in “sore boils” from head to foot. The devil, by the way, does not show up much in the Hebrew Bible, and even in this story he disappears at this point. In any case, Job’s response to his sudden skin disease is to take a broken piece of pottery—to scratch himself—and go sit in the ash pile. His wife howls at him: “Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God and die.”28 But Job stays righteous, answering that having taken the good he now must not refuse the evil. As in the older folk story, the biblical Job passes the test. He has the stomach to bear calamity and not reject the feeling of submission and trust he has for his God.
The philosophical end of the matter was not so easily borne by grit and determination. As the story continues, three of Job’s prosperous, pious friends come to counsel him and help him through his grief. When they see him they can hardly recognize the man they knew. They rip their clothes at the sight of him and put dust on their own heads in sympathy and sadness. Job’s sorrow is so great, his loss so inestimable, that for seven days and seven nights they sit with him in silence.
Finally Job speaks to them and, in beautiful verse, wishes that he had never been born or that he would die now. “Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?”29 As his friends try to answer the lament, they upset Job so keenly that it produces a new kind of doubt. It is here that the biblical Job pulls away from the folktale. In the folktale, Job suffers, but waits faithfully for decades upon decades until God shows up and gives him riches, new loved ones, and long life. The biblical Job does not wait in silence for long, and it is because here there is an attempt at rational conversation and it leads quickly to a paradox. The friends attempt to help Job make sense of what has happened to him. The first friend argues that, despite the calamity, the world is still a good and just place, worth living for, and that God is great and wise. In fact, he suggests, Job must have deserved this punishment, since it was happening, so it must be all for the best. “Behold,” offers this first friend, “happy is the man whom God correcteth.”
It is not the worst take on one’s own suffering, especially if you have a sin or weakness for which you wish to repent. It is a bit unkind when offered from one friend to another, in a time of need. But worse, Job’s suffering was too extreme to fit the model. He had not been overtly sinful, and there’s no way ambient misdeeds or vague bad thoughts could possibly account for the horror his life has become. Job knows his own innocence and, given his level of pain, he cannot tolerate the suggestion that he brought this upon himself—it doesn’t make emotional or intellectual sense. Job’s other two friends, and then a “young man” (scholars think the young man’s part was added later), each deliver a speech attempting to rationalize Job’s misfortune. None questions that God has the power to create or prevent all these circumstances. All insist that God is good and just and deals honorably. It is in reaction to this defense of providence that Job’s critique of God begins to escalate.
After each of the visitors’ speeches, Job lets fly a torrent of accusations and challenges. God is described as wildly powerful but inanely capricious. He is not only unjust, he is uncaring: “Behold, I cry out of wrong but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is no judgment. He hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass, and he hath set darkness in my paths.”30 Not only is God ignoring Job and failing to deliver justice, he’s an actively nasty, aggressive power: “He hath destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and mine hope hath he removed like a tree. He hath also kindled his wrath against me, and he counteth me unto him as one of his enemies.… My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken, and become loathsome.” God is deliberately and gratuitously vicious. When the reach of Job’s indictment begins to frighten his friends, they redouble their insistence that the world, and with it Job’s suffering, is fair.
Job says, “Miserable comforters are ye all,” and we can see what he means.31 He begins to catalog the great darkness of his suffering in contrast to the certain light of his innocence. The effect is a visceral reminder of the experience of injustice and wrongful humiliation. To one friend Job explains, “He teareth me in his wrath, who hateth me: he gnasheth upon me with his teeth; mine enemy sharpeneth his eyes upon me.” Further, “God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over into the hands of the wicked.… He poureth out my gall upon the ground.… My face is foul with weeping, and on my eyelids is the shadow of death; not for any injustice in mine hands: also my prayer is pure.” To another friend Job delivers a yet sadder lament, hollering, “He hath put my brethren far from me, and mine acquaintance are verily estranged from me. My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me.… My breath is strange to my wife.… Yea, young children despised me; I arose, and they spake against me.” Job says that God has put his feet in stocks and let him waste away “like a rotten thing.”
When his guests insist upon God’s justice, Job is pushed into considering God’s dealings not only with himself but with all humankind. He draws a poignant picture of the fortunes of the corrupt.
Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power? Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them. Their bull gendereth, and faileth not; their cow calveth, and casteth not her calf. They send forth their little ones like a flock and their children dance.32
And afterward, whether or not a man or woman has had a chance to enjoy life, Job mutters, it ends the same for everyone: “One dieth in his full strength being wholly at ease and quiet. His breasts are full of milk, his bones are moistened with marrow. And another dieth in the bitterness of his soul, and never eateth with pleasure. They shall lie down alike in the dust and the worms shall cover them.”
The poetry of it is arresting. It plays us through his fall over and over, from good health to festering agony, from the top of social blessings to the worst of curses, and each time it pounds us with the question, How could it be just for a good man to suffer such agony? Prior to God’s bet: “When the Almighty was yet with me, when my children were about me.… The young men saw me, and hid themselves: and the aged arose, and stood up. The princes refrained from talking, and laid their hand on their mouth.… Unto me men gave ear, and waited and kept silence at my counsel.… And they waited for me as the rain.”33 They treated him thus because not only did he do no evil, and not only did he help those who asked him, Job actually sought out misery that he might give succor:
I delivered the poor who cried out, the fatherless and the one who had no helper. The blessing of a perishing man came upon me, and I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy. I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; my justice was like a robe and a turban. I was eyes to the blind, and I was feet to the lame. I was a father to the poor, and I searched out the case that I did not know. I broke the fangs of the wicked, and plucked the victim from his teeth.
Now consider his present days: “Now, they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.… They were children of fools, yea, children of base men: they were viler than the earth. And now I am their song, yea, I am their byword. They abhor me, they flee far from me, and spare not to spit in my face.”
How could this be fair? Job never refers to the specific texts of Judaism, but for any Jew reading the text soon after it was written, the key question would have been, Could Isaiah have been right about providence, given this level of suffering, and this level of innocence and goodness? In God’s world, Job accuses, the vicious get away with everything:
Some remove landmarks; They seize flocks violently and feed on them; they drive away the donkey of the fatherless; they take the widow’s ox as a pledge. They push the needy off the road;… some snatch the fatherless from the breast, and take a pledge from the poor. They cause the poor to go naked, without clothing; and they take away the sheaves from the hungry.… The dying groan in the city, and the souls of the wounded cry out.…34
Yet God does not charge them with wrong. It gets worse. The murderer “rises with the light” and “kills the poor and needy,” and gets away with it. “The eye of the adulterer waits for the twilight, saying, ‘No eye will see me’; and he disguises his face,” and gets away with it. “In the dark they break into houses, which they marked for themselves in the daytime”; for such premeditated evil, “their portion should be cursed in the earth.” Why should the cruel prosper? “The womb should forget him, the worm should feed sweetly on him; he should be remembered no more, and wickedness should be broken like a tree. For he preys on the barren who do not bear, and does no good for the widow.”35 Justice here is not merely absent, it is perverse. God allows a man who “does no good for the widow” to prosper, but he aggressively destroys Job’s wealth and, with it, Job’s capacity to continue serving the needy of his community. Job never formulates the idea that human beings have justice and that God has none, but he lays out the argument: Job looks after widows and orphans, God steals their support and coddles their enemies.
Job finds God responsible for great cruelty and the indictment is most effective in its details: “When I say, ‘My bed will comfort me, my couch will ease my complaint,’ then you scare me with dreams and terrify me with visions, so that my soul chooses strangling, and death rather than my body. I loathe my life.”36 The Job author here lets Job defend his brazen doubt, saying: why hold back since we all die anyway? Job moans that it is wanton cruelty that suffering people, brutalized or in mourning, should have to relive their horrors in dreams. In fact, why should any of us, in seeking rest, be met with nightmares? Job is scared by making such accusations, but encourages himself with a reminder of mortality—angry at it but keenly aware of the refuge from God it provides: “Oh, remember that my life is a breath! … As the cloud disappears and vanishes away, so he who goes down to the grave does not come up. He shall never return to his house, neither shall his place know him anymore. Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit.”37
Over and over Job asks why God is absent and why wisdom is hidden and wishes he could just have his day in court. And God, strangely enough, shows up and responds. He does not, however, offer a court; this isn’t wish fulfillment, it’s philosophy. There is no court. What God does is to show up as he is said to show up: in natural wonder and paradox. With much sound and fury, God appears and begins to list all the things he has done and the secrets that he knows. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” he roars, and what follows is one of the best tirades ever written. Some key phrases include:
Have you walked in the depths of the ocean? Have the gates of death been opened to you? Where does light come from? And where darkness?
Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? Hast thou seen the treasures of the hail? Hath the rain a father? Who hath begotten the drops of dew?
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades or loosen the bands of Orion?
Out of whose womb came the ice?
Who has put wisdom in the inward parts? Or who hath given understanding to the heart? Who can number the clouds in wisdom? Or who can stay the bottles of heaven, when the dust groweth into hardness, and the clods cleave fast together?
Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion? or fill the appetite of the young lions, when they crouch in their dens, and abide in the covert to lie in wait?
Gavest thou the goodly wings upon the peacocks?
Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? The glory of his nostrils is terrible.38
God here raises all the pertinent questions: the origin of consciousness and wisdom, the nature of death, the majesty of the stars, the wild animals, the complex wonders of nature, the magic of mechanics, the hugeness of the planet. He’s even got the sheer awesome display of the horse, not only as a gorgeous, striding power, but also as a little, mortal creature, timorous as a trapped grasshopper, yet breathtaking in its glorious terror. That glory and quivering are embodied in the same animal seen from two perspectives is a reminder of the paradox of scale; and a reminder that this God is presented as solving that problem by inhabiting all realms, from the infinitesimal to the inconceivably immense.
God also asks Job whether he gave “wings and feathers unto the ostrich.” The question is a kind of joke since ostriches cannot fly, but it’s a serious joke. Life isn’t only good, it is wonder-full. It feels so inventive that people look to an imaginative capability that transcends that of humankind. When God describes the ostrich he does not exalt her—he teases, instead, that her strangeness is beyond the understanding of human beings. She “leaveth her eggs in the earth and warmeth them in the dust, and forgetteth that the foot may crush them, or that the wild beast may break them. She is hardened against her young ones, as though they were not hers: her labor is in vain without fear; because God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath he imparted to her understanding. What time she lifteth up herself on high, she scorneth the horse and his rider.” The image of the ostrich is inexplicably foolish, yet so magisterial in her own mount that she scorns the horse and rider. And this is matched by the brave strangeness of a great variety of creatures. The eagle seeks her prey and “her young ones also suck up blood: and where the slain are, there isshe.” This is how God accounts for himself. He does not say, Here is the proof of justice or of my existence; he simply cites the weird glory of the natural world. The Job author says that life may make us reject divine justice, but nothing is going to help us explain the bloodthirsty nestling or the seven-foot, flightless bird, wandering off from her eggs with her head in the sky, oblivious.
It is interesting that God includes in this list of accomplishments the creation of some of the nasty creatures mentioned by Epicurus to argue against the idea that the gods made the world. The Hebrew God is saying, You couldn’t have a clue how I made the crocodile(here called the leviathan), let alone why. The crocodile is dangerous and not particularly beautiful; its relationship to humanity is largely antagonistic and often fatal. God’s point is that it is intolerable hubris for Job, or his well-meaning friends, to attempt to explain God’s actions.
God concludes with a stunning portrait of a crocodile, in one chilling description after another—“He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood. The arrow cannot make him flee.… Darts are counted as stubble: he laugheth at the shaking of a spear.” Again the descriptions are about imaginative excess: when the crocodile plunges into the sea he makes it bubble like a boiling cauldron.39
At this point, Job throws himself down before God and admits the fault of his presumption: “Therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not … I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth thee: wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”40
God’s response is first to punish Job’s three friends for getting everything wrong, and then to return all of Job’s estranged friends and living relations to him along with his livestock (twofold), and again Job is given seven sons and three daughters. Indeed, the new daughters are the most beautiful in the land, and it is specified that Job gives them inheritance along with their brothers. Job lives another 140 years, and is thus able to see his sons’ sons down four generations before eventually dying, old and full of days.
Many people think of the Book of Job as a story of faith and divine justice, and it is not surprising. Throughout history, Church and rabbinic readings have managed the problem of the Book of Job by reverting back to the folktale: they’d excise or play down the middle section of the poem— the rebellion—and thus make it a simple tale of faith and patience. Others have dealt much more frankly with the text but still found justice in allegory or interpretation. Most of those willingly admit that to locate an interpretation of divine justice in this poem, they had to set aside some quandary, like the bet with Satan in the beginning, or the actual death of Job’s first set of children. But in the text God made a bet with Satan, slaughtered a good number of innocent people and animals, and allowed Satan to torture Job with a skin disease. Job could handle that, but when his friends said this all fell within a rational system of divine justice, he was infuriated. The clash that follows is described by modern philosopher Martin Buber as a clash between Job’s emotional belief in God and the more legalistic “religion” of his friends: “there now came and sought him on his ash heap religion.”41 So, “[i]nstead of the ‘cruel’ (30:21) and living God, to whom he clings, religion offers him a reasonable and rational God, a deity whom he, Job, does not perceive either in his own existence or in the world, and who obviously is not to be found anywhere save only in the very domain of religion.” Unlike his friends, “Job knows of justice only as a human activity, willed by God but opposed by His acts. The truth of being just and the reality caused by the unjust acts of God are irreconcilable.”
Buber describes Job’s searching for justice in the world and only finding it within himself. Consider Job before his friends arrive. It seems his God was among the most shadowy versions of imposing humanness on the universe. Job seems to have fully accepted the idea that sometimes you’re a winner and sometimes you’re a loser and you’ve got to learn to take it on the chin. Sometimes a wind blows out of the mountains and knocks your house down, crushes the ones you love, leaves a hole in the sky where there was a beacon. The friends insist that justice is orderly, that the universe works according to decisions and justice. Job chokes on the notion because, as Buber explains, he recognizes these to be traits of his own much more than they are traits of the mind of the universe, of God. Buber called Job “one of the special events in world literature, in which we witness the first clothing of a human quest in form of speech.”42
When God does show up in the end, he does not even address Job’s questions about justice. Leaving behind divine justice, he instead touts all the remaining mysteries and paradoxes: Where did humanity come from? Where did the earth come from? The animals and plants and geography seem too beautiful and complex to have simply occurred on their own. How do the heavenly bodies move so perfectly in their orbits? What is consciousness? What is emotion? How can we understand the varieties of scale from the infinitesimal to the universal? Or the varieties of time from lives that last an instant to the never-changing stars? What is death? God’s argument is of the heap variety: its individual tenets are magnificent but not conclusive, yet the aggregate effect of the whole extraordinary list is persuasive. It is enough for Job. Modern science, of course, has seriously thinned the pile, but some tough existential questions still remain.
God’s list in the Book of Job provides an interesting parallel to the night sky; today we’ve got explanations for the heavens that do not rely on God and, in any case, we are not confronted with the night sky in the same way we used to be, because so many of us live in well-lit areas that block out the show. We have an explanation for most of the natural wonders in Job; we have also succeeded in chasing away most of these wonders. Our poets now talk about bridges, skyscrapers, and planes along with hawks and wild horses, so that we feel the opposite of how Job did (small and powerless). Also, some things God mentions are inventions, like unicorns, and these just aren’t as impressive as they once were.
The Job author had God appear and cite the mysteries of the world and barely mention justice—he does not, for instance, rehearse for Job the intricacies of communal justice versus individual justice, or challenge him with stupefying moral quandaries. Since God has overtly changed the subject and argues his outraged supremacy on other grounds entirely, it is reasonable to see the Job author as saying that God is the sum of all the world’s secrets and powers but unconcerned with justice. It may be tempting to interpret God’s speech as meaning that God’s justice is above our understanding, but he does not say that. He is outraged that Job is questioning him, but he does not offer comfort and say, Foolish child, it all works out. He just says, How dare you? We must remember that he has killed a number of people beloved by Job, on a vain bet, and never speaks to it. He lets the devil toy with Job’s body, on a vain bet, and never speaks to it. There is no afterlife for God to make good on people’s innocence or guilt. And he’s told us it is wrong to assume that those who suffer are guilty. That does not leave a lot of room for justice. God makes his peace with Job in gifts, but the implication is that Job goes off to live with his new family under a new, far less orderly, regime.
We may well ask if it is possible to envision divine mind without divine justice. Certainly it is possible to have mind without true justice—that goes for most of us. But to have as little sense of justice as the universe exhibits and still have mind? If one arrives at the conclusion that there is no divine justice, and yet still believes there is a God, then what kind of God is that? Either this God is powerless to put his care into action, or he does not care at all but still has mind, so he is a sort of sociopath. If the main reason for persisting in believing in God is that he made the world and all the creatures in it, it will be hard to argue that he does not have the power to make it a less actively dangerous and chaotic world. If he really does not care, but has mind, it cannot be the kind of mind we usually mean.
Job was never given a reason to repudiate his conclusions about justice, but faced with the remaining questions, he threw himself beneath them and was willingly trampled into submission. The pose is worth considering for a moment. With dignity, standing tall despite outrageous adversity, Job delivered his rage on injustice. Then he was reminded of the remaining questions and he essentially collapsed as an independent agent. Job tells God that having seen him with his own eyes, “I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.”
Why abhor oneself? What had changed since Job’s speeches of confident self-possession? God had not yet cured Job’s illness, restored his possessions, or given him a new family, so it is not gratitude. And yet Job began to grovel. What is this groveling about? The Job story gets going when Job starts to take as his business a question he had always been humble about.
He was not an arrogant man, but he went through a horrendous experience of seemingly random pain, violence, and loss—and to his mind the experience gave him special knowledge about justice. Yet, hearing God’s list, or just thinking about the existential questions it poses, Job guessed that despite the lack of providence, there was a God. He was drawn with more nobility when he was covered in skin disease and thinking for himself Apparently, according to the Job author, facing the great questions is empowering, while submitting to a higher power is a relief, and perhaps necessary, but not especially dignified. Perhaps not Job, but the Job author, and the rest of us, have been elevated by the rebellion and the compassion of its questions. Jack Miles’s wonderful literary reading of the Hebrew Bible as a biography of God offers the insight that after the Book of Job, God never speaks again.43 God may seem to silence Job, but Job silences God. It is lovely that Job silencing God is part of the text (though likely an accidental order of the books), because it reflects a real change in the real world after the Book of Job came into it.
There is something grand about a story that tries to reconcile human beings to loss, to letting go of the things that the universe has allowed us to amass and keep for a while—including the idea that after we lose everything, there is a good chance we’ll get it all back someday. Could the Job author have been satisfied with this as a parable of divine justice? It is not a parable of divine justice. It is a parable of resignation to a world-making force that has no justice as we understand justice. God comes off sounding like a metaphor for the universe: violent and chaotic yet bountiful and marvelous. The Job story is a story of doubt. God’s list brings Job back into the fold, but the fight has transformed that fold. With Job, that paradigm of a just God was carried to an extreme that immediately identified the problem with the idea: the world is not just. If justice exists, the Book of Job concludes, it does so in a way inconceivable to humanity. Job asked deep questions and they have lingered for millennia.
A final word: Despite Job’s tremendous contribution to our history, the figure of greatest doubt in the book is certainly Job’s wife. It is she who issued the astonishing advice “Curse God and die.” Women are often cast in the sneaky role in ancient texts, and those who wanted to sneer at women have made much of this depiction. But it is also true that part of the reason these stories have persisted, while countless other tales have disappeared, is that women liked them, and even liked their roles. Job’s wife is a tough bird. She can see a guy who is out of luck when she looks at him, and she suggests he cash in his last two chips: allegiance to God and life. What she planned for herself is singularly unclear. We do not know, at this point, if she had any faith at all. Unlike Job and his friends, she fades in and out of the story like Satan and God. The tendency is to not notice that this woman declares a complete rebellion from God and to see her instead as an aspect of Job’s own mind, the part of him that doubted. But in the actual text an actual woman—pious and good, helpmeet to a man of great righteousness and benevolence—this actual pious woman proposes that it is time to dismiss God and be done.
The Book of Job is a section of a Bible sacred to millions of people throughout history, and so it has claimed the attention of great religious minds. The glory of the poetry itself, the subtlety of the questions, and the paradox of the text make it rich with human feeling and psychological complexity. Many religious people have offered interpretations of it. To see the history of doubt we have to stop rushing in and providing someone’s moment of certainty, of belief. Just as the Maccabees and Hasidim stand in front of the cosmopolitan reform movement, blocking it from our eyes, so the way religious people have answered Job’s author throughout history has hidden the story from our eyes. But, of course, whatever else, Job doubts.
ECCLESIASTES
Ecclesiastes is so out of sync with the rest of the Bible that scholars and theologians have long marveled that it got in at all. The book was too beautiful, too smart, and too pious, in its own odd way, to leave out. It is an amazing study on doubt, both in its philosophical viewpoint and in its advice on how to best live in a world without divine justice, without an afterlife, and without any overarching meaning. The author of Ecclesiastes was Koheleth (Hebrew Qohelet); Ecclesiastes is the Greek translation of that name.44 We do not know much about him. Writing in the Hellenistic period, he seems at times to be referencing such Hellenistic notions as Tyche-Chance, and he often sounds like Epicurus. But as he never calls these Hellenistic phenomena by name, we cannot be sure of the extent of Koheleth’s real familiarity with any of it. The book was written in the third century BCE (250–225), and later scribes softened the text a bit, even giving it an epilogue that takes back some of the conclusions announced in the main text. The main text is pretty strange stuff for a holy book.
Koheleth doubted every aspect of religion, from the very ideal of righteousness, to the by now traditional idea of divine justice for individuals: “Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself? Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before thy time?”45 Koheleth saw the relationship between merit and recompense as chaotic. One of the greatest doubting lines ever written was his, and it has flashed a glint of light in myriad lives, for millennia: “Under the sun, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the learned, nor favor to the skillful: but time and chance happeneth to them all.” There is such a thing as the swift here, and the strong, and the wise. Koheleth is not rejecting the idea of value. Train, and excel, and rejoice in your labors, but don’t assume the battle goes to the strong, or riches to the learned, or favor to the skillful. It just doesn’t. Time and chance happens to them all.
Who is this person doling such keen advice across two thousand years? Apparently, he was a teacher, well schooled in traditional doctrines, but now with his own philosophy. He’d begun life as many do, out for a little mirth and pleasure, but he soon decided it was a vain pursuit. Good times did not seem sufficient or real: “I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it?”46 So Koheleth set himself to study and accomplishment, building many houses for himself; planting vineyards, gardens, and orchards, and digging ponds of water, “to water therewith the wood.” He built himself a large family of servants, herds of oxen, flocks of sheep, and his wealth in silver and gold equaled that of kings. He was wise, learned, industrious, rich, and beloved, and knew how to have a good time: “I got me men singers and women singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that of all sorts.… And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them…” And then something went wrong.
At some point, Koheleth was struck by the impression that nothing he had done really meant anything. It was a deep experience of meaninglessness, extending from a dismissal of material accomplishments to a dismissal of even wisdom and truth. “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.” Koheleth began to see even wisdom as a kind of useless strife and competition: “Then said I in my heart, as it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise?” So “this also is vanity.”
In the end, “there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool forever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool. Therefore I hated life;… for all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”47 The real crisis was that wisdom turned out to be a sham—it cannot be obtained. Here is the birth of Jewish skepticism: “When I applied mine heart to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done upon the earth.… Then I beheld that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun: because though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it; yea further; though a wise man think to know it, yet shall he not be able to find it.” And further along: “I said, I will be wise; but it was far from me. That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?”48 These mournful lines would be remembered throughout the history of doubt.
He began to hate everything, even life itself, because without an overall meaning everything he had created was as nothing. The idea of leaving it all for the next generation didn’t help at all: “Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me. And who knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool? Yet shall he have rule over all my labour wherein I have laboured, and wherein I have shewed myself wise under the sun. This is also vanity.”49 One might labor a whole life to amass a fortune only to leave it to an idler or a fool. All this pointlessness is so much worse, he argued, because struggling to accomplish anything is frustrating—“vexing” as most translations have it—and even tormenting. The one who works hard lives in a state of stress, “his days are sorrows, and his travail grief; yea, his heart taketh not rest in the night. This is also vanity.”50
Yet Ecclesiastes would not be so beloved if Koheleth had offered nothing but his nihilism. The book works in its punchy, practical way because Koheleth’s horror at the meaninglessness of life in the big picture is matched by his pleasure at the goings-on of daily life, and he gives splendid advice on how to focus on the mundane and thereby become happy. The tension is never reconciled because remembering death is his favorite technique for learning to be in the moment. Thus, his advice on taking time to laugh with loved ones is broken with grumblings about how empty it all is, and his grumblings are broken with sighs of contentment and joy.
The advice begins with some startling verses about accepting the moments of life in which one finds oneself, even the painful ones, and even the final one. His two-by-two list of these life-moments flattens them so that they all seem the same: manageable and sweet, like steps in a dance; only a fool would embrace some and protest others. It feels good to read:
To every thing there is a season.… A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. What profit hath he that worketh?51
There is nothing for a person to do but “to rejoice, and to do good in his life.”52
It is a comforting speech, but as I’ve suggested, the mood doesn’t hold. Koheleth turns directly back to the brute facts of death. He’s resigned and even bemused, but he’s also, well, vexed, and he stays vexed. His point this time is that if it is frustratingly unfair that the universe shows no difference in the fate of the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish—if the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong—it is almost comic when that lack of differentiation is seen to extend all the way down to the animals. Yet for him there is no other conclusion: men and women are animals and they die like animals, every time. The Job author gave no sign of having heard of the idea of an afterlife; Koheleth has heard of it, but does not believe it.
For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts … as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth? Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?53
Koheleth brushed aside the dream of an afterlife with a simple appeal to reason—Who knows this?—and the conclusion that human beings have nothing above the beasts in this regard; “all is vanity.” Then immediately, with a kind of poetic magic, he confronted the tragedy with a call to rejoice in one’s own works. He used to hate life because of the awful paradox of it all, but has found happiness through a degree of reconciliation. He argues that there is no meaning to life, there is no life after death, and although this state of things is absurd and empty, life is good and one’s own work is worthy of joy.
Having gained fame in wisdom and enterprise, he rejected both as vain pursuits. Now he reports that despite having abandoned meaningless struggle, he finds that life, in itself, is blighted by injustice. He now “considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun” and was struck by “the tears of such as were oppressed,” that “they had no comforter,” and that “on the side of their oppressors there was power.”54 The knowledge of this, of the vicious awfulness that some people have to live with, is unbearable. From this he concluded that the dead are better off than the living. Worse, he tells us, “Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun. Again, I considered all travail, and every right work, that for this a man is envied of his neighbour. This is also vanity and vexation of spirit.”55 The first part of this embodies the density of poetry: what level of horror could make a person who merely hears of it wish he were dead—and then take back the comment and wish instead that he’d not yet been born? The phrase is an effective shorthand for getting us to revisit the vilest horrors of which we have each, individually, heard. He brings into the discussion the emotion thereby produced in each reader’s breast. The latter notion, about envy, is a nice little psychological insight: success is as often born of envy as of love, and it will bring envy as often as it brings love. The urge to do very well is born of wrong-thinking and doesn’t make us happy.
I quote Ecclesiastes at length, rather than in bites, because it is important to see how the book creates its concentrated trance, how it multiplies its meanings with odd juxtapositions. A sentence about the misery of some lives is raised to an unbearable pitch, and then tumbles into a reminder that successful people will always be surprised at the level of envy they meet, just there where they’d hoped for affection. These are two very different ideas, but they both wake us to doubt. The collapsed distance between them is a poetic device that helps jostle us, and resettle into a more useful paradigm. The collapsed distance between them is also a hypnotic device that helps the information come in under the mind’s defenses; it gives its information in a way that is so kaleidoscopic that it is hard to even begin to argue with it. Here Koheleth begins with a rant against a single person frantically climbing for success:
There is one alone, and there is not a second; yea, he hath neither child nor brother: yet is there no end of all his labour; neither is his eye satisfied with riches; neither saith he, For whom do I labour, and bereave my soul of good? This is also vanity, yea, it is a sore travail. Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone?56
So the rant against working constantly for yourself alone concludes in another paean to daily living. There is vexation and vanity, but there is also the sweet life: get yourself someone to share your days and warm your nights, and lift you when you falleth. The crowning suggestion is:
Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.57
Again, his happy advice is mixed with talk of death and misery because the real facts of death and misery are being used to awaken us into a sensibility in which we could take his advice to be carefree. Koheleth does not see transcendence anywhere but suggests instead that we may best live in this life by finding love and doing our work with devotion.
We’ve seen some incredible doubt in providence, justice, and righteousness, and we’re closing in on the question of Koheleth’s idea of God. First, though, we need to note his take on history. Koheleth’s famous statement that there is “nothing new under the sun” is framed by similar claims of eternal sameness:
Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.… What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind… whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.58
Everything is locked into cycles of repetition, and your efforts to do anything are like waiting for the rivers to finally fill the oceans: there’s progress all the time, but you’re not getting anywhere.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be… and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time.… There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.59
It is an extreme vision of stasis. History does not quite exist in it: generations simply replace one another, forgetting everything. There was no fall from grace and there is no progress toward a better day. “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this.”60 To understand the strange piety of Ecclesiastes, one must consider this idea of sameness, along with its insistence on the finality of death and the pointlessness of accomplishment. Taken together, these three ideas do not leave a great deal for God to do.
Many have suggested that Koheleth did not believe.61 In the text he left us, Koheleth believed in God, but a pared-down God. The Lord exists, but not much. His most significant action is that he condones worldly pleasure. He doesn’t mind our good time. Thus, there is nothing better for us to do than relax. Here Koheleth is directly responding to the idea of history repeating endlessly, with no memory: “Behold that which I have seen: it is good and comely for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour that he taketh under the sun all the days of his life, which God giveth him: for it is his portion. Every man also to whom God hath given riches and wealth, and hath given him power to eat thereof, and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labour; this is the gift of God.”62
Our proper and possible relationship with God was very limited. Koheleth tells us not to break vows to God, “for an unfaithful and foolish promise displeaseth Him”; in fact, it is better “that thou shouldest not vow.” Indeed, Koheleth enjoins humankind to leave God alone in general, to the benefit of the both: “Let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few.”63 It’s a short sentence, but it’s the most Koheleth directly says about God and religion. It suggests a way of living that is radically distanced from God. After all, how else do human beings commune with God? His injunctions sound pious (do not bother God, do not risk saying something you cannot live up to, do not assume you know what to say), but they function as a command to live in a secular way—to not engage in an act that at the very least reminds one of the possibility of the divine. He seems to think that is more sensible. Interestingly, he does tag on the notion that although there is a lot of malarkey out there, there is some truth in it: “For in the multitude of dreams and many words there are also divers vanities: but fear thou God.”64 It’s funny, when one thinks of how much Koheleth’s philosophy resembles Epicureanism, that this is the active instruction he offers.
In keen contradistinction to the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes does not argue with God, and certainly doesn’t hold the injustice of the world against him. The only way to real peace was to concentrate on the fact that there is no real justice: Death comes to everyone the same way, “to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean,” to the sinner, and alike to “he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath.” It is not fair. “This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of… men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead.” He sighs that “a living dog is better than a dead lion.”65
This is billed as good news. There is no reason to struggle against the great, and the crazy, and the evil: we ought simply to be glad we are alive. Many kings and lions disintegrate now in their dusty tombs, and meanwhile, although we may be but dogs, we may drink cold, clear water under the blue sky. Being alive transcends all envy when we remember death. Good news indeed, but we also should not miss what a sharp and wide blade this is, and what it is cutting. Doubt may clear the path for carefree living, and may increase pleasure in the life one has—but while scything away much nonsense, you have to be careful not to get caught in the blade. After he rejects divine justice and purpose, it takes real work for Koheleth to avoid falling into nihilistic misery. He offers a gentle nudge toward a new response. There are “just men” whose lives go as if they had done “the work of the wicked,” while “there be wicked men” who prosper: “Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.”66
God here reads like another fact of nature, something one should not anger, but that is otherwise benign. He was a force within a world, and the world was chaotic. That’s the bulk of what Koheleth said about God, but we can read a bit more from what he said about the world. It is worth wondering how much Koheleth could believe in a historical divinity once he had given up on change. If nothing ever changes, then God has no plan. What is more, if there is nothing new, then neither are we new; if nothing is new, individuals are the same. The distance and disinterest of God is profound here, and it is best articulated in the fact that we individual human beings are going to be forgotten. Any effort to stand out is entirely futile. Koheleth makes this clear with a tidy vignette: “There was a little city… and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it: Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man.”67 This forgetfulness is built into both the form and the content of Koheleth’s speech as he repeats and repeats “All is vanity.”
Of course, he has to say all this so strenuously because there is another level at which things certainly are remembered. The man Koheleth cited as having been forgotten was remembered by Koheleth; even if the memory has grown figurative, the merit persists. Koheleth himself is engaged in a profoundly disciplined, artistic, and philosophical project—the writing of this text—but he is trying to shake off any particular ideas about recompense. He has a deep morality, too; it is Koheleth who says, “Cast thy bread upon the running waters: for after a long time thou shalt find it again.”68 For the one striving furiously to accomplish with his or her eye on rewards, for the envious who sit by and pine, Koheleth brings the news that it is all an illusion. And yet the human experience is one in which we feel different and we yearn to do something memorable, something that speaks out of our own hearts. So go ahead and speak. But remember: nothing lasts. Seen from a bit of distance, the sun, wind, and rivers—and the generations of humanity—all seem locked into laws of repetition, full of gorgeous and inconsequential variation. The most fabulous of us is like a delightfully curious little eddy in the burbling of a stream one summer morning, years ago.
That little ripple came and went unseen. Koheleth doesn’t mention God in a watching capacity; this God is not interested in what we are up to—he certainly doesn’t want regular reports. Our great need to be seen and understood will not be met by God, for according to Koheleth there is nothing to see; our separate identities are as interchangeable as asteroids floating around in space. We mislead ourselves about everything.
The last mention of God in Ecclesiastes is as follows: “As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all.”69 We are back to the unanswered questions; the mystery of the world. How bones generate may seem less of a mystery to us moderns, since we know about the double helix and the gene, but what we know is limited: we do not have much understanding of how the whole thing actually transpires. Yet even if we knew the technical bits, it is still an example of staggering complexity and beauty. And that is Koheleth’s point. He advocated resolving oneself to seeing what is true in our human situation, and that meant doubting or dismissing many hopeful beliefs. Yet this realism did not blind him to wonder: we see, with beauty in mind, a world that may not have been designed with beauty in mind. Indeed, we see with design a world that may not have been designed. That is the meat of the mystery of the world: it is not a question of how it all works; rather, it is a wonder that it all is and that it strikes us as so splendid.
Religion works through practices and so does doubt. Along with his larger philosophical message, Koheleth offers ideas on how to save your own life. Accepting the abyss at the edge of life will strip away any reason for envy or longing inside us and leave us only with the awareness that for the moment we are here. Accepting the abyss is relaxing whereas fighting it is exhausting. So the first step toward a good life is to not become entranced by extraordinary success in wisdom, business, or anything else. Control your desires to match your resources, not the other way around. Work hard, but forget worldly recompense; forget the afterlife; forget being watched or judged by God; and forget being remembered. Along with his prescriptions for love, friendship, and work, he advises contemplation of somber truths. Think dark thoughts. He says the day of one’s death should be thought of as better than the day of one’s birth; that it is “better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.”70 Let yourself know that you are small and mortal and therefore free to go about your little concerns. “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a man to hear the song of fools.”71 His suggestion is that we try to stay awake. We remember death so that we remember life, but also so that we will be prepared when disaster comes: “But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many,” and in dark times, the concerns of good times will appear as vanity.72 It helps to remember this information during normal times; disaster is normal, too, just spaced more widely.
Sounding much like Epicurus, Koheleth said not to fear death, “For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.”73 Koheleth names three things that die along with living beings: their love, their hatred, and their envy. Of these, two are better off dead—death is a release from them. Koheleth smirks here that our impulse to live longer is connected with proving things to people, and we may rest assured that our interest in these people is going to disappear from the universe.
Koheleth’s God was more than hidden; he was uninvolved and almost entirely irrelevant. Koheleth’s injunctions followed suit: Don’t pray much; we all die pretty randomly; it does not matter if you are good or bad; beasts and human beings take part in the same death; we all are dust and return to dust; no one is remembered for very long; there is no plan; and nothing ever changes. Love your spouse. Get some work to do, do it with all your might; enjoy the simple pleasures of food, drink, and love. Everything else is vanity. Koheleth was a premier figure in the history of doubt. He was rationalist, while maintaining a bright sense of paradox and mystery; he suggested behaviors and meditations to learn to bear a seemingly harsh reality; and he had fabulous distribution: his book became part of one of the most famous cultural works of humankind. It is a sublime contribution to the history of doubt, and a wildly surprising message to find nestled between Proverbs and the Song of Solomon.
There was some relationship between Hellenistic society and the rise of Jewish doubt, but it is difficult to say what that relationship was. Job and Ecclesiastes clearly speak to a crisis in Judaism, and a Golden Age of Jewish Doubt. Was this crisis a result of the interaction between the Hebrew and Hellenistic worlds? James Crenshaw, one of the foremost scholars of wisdom literature, expressed it thusly: “There may indeed be some truth in the claim that the confrontation between Hebraism and Hellenism produced a compromise position, best exemplified by [Koheleth]. However the Jewish tradition alone had its share of ambiguities, and these disparities between religious conviction and actual reality found expression in [Koheleth]’s realism.”74 Historians differ on whether Koheleth knew of Epicurus, but all agree that their doctrines bear a family resemblance worth pondering. Either from shared thought or similar circumstances, Koheleth and the Hellenistic philosophers who were his contemporaries championed similar ideas of doubt at the same cosmopolitan moment in the ancient world. Hellenistic Jews found themselves part of a new world, and some clearly embraced it. It feels like the pious and anti-Greek Hellenistic Jews kept Judaism going—because we are inheritors of their version of it. Granted, without them, Judaism might have disappeared; but it might not have— there were Jews who maintained their identity in a more secular way, outside the Hasmonean state. In any case, in studying history it is not necessary to choose sides. To understand oneself, however, and one’s culture, it is best to get a good, open-minded look at the losers in some of these historic victories, and note this greatest early drama of Jewish doubt. As for Job and Ecclesiastes, they are canonical texts in the history of doubt.