Governing principles

Michael Walzer illuminates the forms politics and political thought took in ancient Israel’s religious culture and during exile.

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
City of David (photo credit: www.goisrael.com)
City of David
(photo credit: www.goisrael.com)
Again and again, the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, “The Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel” tells his people that if they mend their ways, “oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood... [and] neither walk after other gods to your hurt, then I will cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever.”
Enjoined as well to fight oppression and “let justice well up like water, righteousness like an unfailing stream,” the biblical Israelites established moral standards, legal codes and rules for warfare. Primarily a religious book, political theorist Michael Walzer (a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and the author of The Revolution of the Saints, Spheres of Justice and Just and Unjust Wars, among many other books) observes, the Bible is also a political book. But, he argues, although biblical writers are engaged with politics, they tend to be indifferent, or even hostile, to it.
In In God’s Shadow, Walzer illuminates the forms politics and political thought took in Israel’s religious culture and locates kings, priests and prophets, mercenaries, magistrates and “the people” in regimes that have (or assume) divine connections and during the experience of exile.
A belief in God’s sovereignty and his active engagement in the world, Walzer concludes, did not leave much room for the everyday politics of negotiation, compromise and half loaves or inspire confidence in the capacity for self-government of a covenanted community. Focused on obedience to God’s law, he writes, the prophets subjected Israel far more often “to absolute judgment than conditional assessment and counsel.”
In God’s Shadow is full of arresting (albeit controversial) claims. Walzer indicates that the Bible portrays Israel before the reign of kings as a land of danger and chaos.
“Under the strain of emergency,” the elders (whose identity and source of power is murky) ignored Samuel’s admonition that a king would tax them, seize their lands and vineyards, make them (and their children) his servants (“as ye were the servants of Pharaoh”). They chose a king and an eternal dynastic succession.
Unlike the monarchs of some of Israel’s neighbors, however, he was regarded as a “human artifact,” existing “in the space of secular time, which is the space of normal politics.”
Emphasizing that the conviction that God’s rule is better than the rule of kings survived, Walzer suggests that prophecy was “born together with monarchy lest divine law have no voice in the world” and royal immorality go unnoticed and unpunished.
The Bible, Walzer points out, does not present a coherent view of God’s relationships with other nations. Omnipotent, and also angry and frustrated, God uses them to punish Israel. The connection sometimes seems more than instrumental, with biblical writers deeming the king of Babylon God’s “servant” and the king of Persia his “shepherd” and even his “anointed.” And yet, these nations will themselves be punished. They are not “suffering servants” and “serve God only in their triumphs.”
In exile, of course, Israel was no longer in control of its collective destiny. The actions Israelites took to remain a community (with regard to marriage, diet, worship, Sabbath observance etc.), also made them vulnerable to accusations of those like Haman (who Walzer nominates as “the first anti-Semite”) that a people who are “scattered abroad” and separate themselves from others are vicious.
According to Walzer, exile increased communal support for political passivity and accommodation – and for a redefinition of the covenant as an individual moral commitment. Although Diaspora Jews never ceased dreaming of a return to Israel, for a time the strategy seemed to serve them well.
Although the social ethic of the prophets can be (and has been) understood as a political program, Walzer insists that nowhere in the Bible is it presented as such (making it all the more puzzling that he characterizes Israel as an “almost democracy”).
Its “enduring radicalism,” he acknowledges, may well be attributable to these absences, which for centuries have invited men and women to freely imagine what a good society would look like and how to get there. More often, he claims, it resulted in “attacks on the existing order without any concrete or practical alternative in mind,” with vehemence masking a passivity toward existing social hierarchies and “the fantasyridden character of their politics.”
Walzer knows that “there are no authoritative understandings of the Bible.” And that serious textual analysis is “a complex and speculative business.” He believes that “great scholars can make educated guesses,” but presents himself as an “ordinary reader” who “must get by with less educated guesses.”
He need not be so modest. In God’s Shadow is elegant and erudite. Anyone interested in assessing the ideas about politics, government and law in the Bible should read it.
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
In God’s Shadow
By Michael Walzer
Yale University Press
232 pages; $28