Chapter 5 — Hellenization
The name Israel applies not so much to a nation, but to a mission given to that nation.
The true servant of Jehovah seeks to rise above mere human capability, to place the mind in service to some higher faculty and develop a moral intelligence. With this faculty he will see the world from a perspective above this plane of existence. Instead of simply the solid matter and logical renderings of it, he sees that moral fabric, that living power of justice that cannot be seen by any mere human perception. This justice was a direct reflection of God’s own personal character. His greatest field of endeavor is not in the world around him, but taming his own human weakness, those raging lusts that threaten to derail holiness. While the mind can be taught to obey this higher intelligence, there is no shortcut in the process. There is no place at which to arrive, nor discernible levels of achievement and mastery, because the fleshly weakness refuses to die. It keeps finding new ways to blindside the conscious mind. His prayer is not for power over nature, but his own nature.
The Covenant of Moses was actually quite generous in ritual provisions for human frailty. You would have to openly reject the provisions of the Covenant to suffer serious consequences. It was easy to mentally disconnect those consequences from any putative prophetic warnings. There were various ways of characterizing God’s moral fabric, His living power of justice in this world. The primary focus for the bulk of human behavior was social stability. Things prohibited were generally recognized as a threat first to society, with the understanding that such actions would violate that living justice. Picking at that moral fabric would be like poking a hornet’s nest; it’s dangerous. The business of coercive law was the obligation of the society to stand guard over obvious threats to their own peace and safety. The various laws of conduct reflected God’s underlying truth, His prescription for dealing with human weakness and keeping so much equilibrium and health as was possible in this imperfect realm of human existence.
While for the majority of the people, just knowing the provisions that could be explained in human language was generally sufficient. There always had to be someone in leadership who could actually sense trouble before human perception caught onto it, and with a depth not available to mere intellect. It would be utterly impossible to do so if the leadership departed from that highly evolved intellectual background carried by Moses and his associates. Discard that worldview and the fabric of God’s justice quickly becomes invisible. Alter that underlying mythology and moral assumptions, and you’ve lost a defining element; you risk losing the divine faculty for seeing truth. Moses didn’t decide what was true; he recognized what was true because he was a true mystic. Scripture reveals his struggle to rise above the flesh, but we clearly see a level of enlightenment that outstripped human ability. Those who took up the burden of his shepherd’s calling needed at least some of that same mystical insight.
Obviously, they lost it. Various elements of it reappeared from time to time, especially among the prophets, but once we get past Samuel and his School of the Prophets, the legacy declines rather quickly among the political leadership. It starts strongly enough with men like David and Solomon, both very gifted mystics, but despite the periodic surges in the history of Israel, there is an obvious trend of losing it. Toward the end, as Jeremiah cries out the last warnings before Exile, we see where he complains that the people seem convinced they had God over a barrel. They honestly believed He could not let Jerusalem fall to the enemy or He would be homeless. Jeremiah and some of his friends were mystics, but they were a tiny minority as the bulk of the leadership sneered at the very idea.
From there, it was a one-two punch that set them up for complete failure. First, in returning to the latter Babylon, they were reintroduced to the arrogance from urban facilities and human accomplishment. The Mesopotamian mystical foundation in Babylon wasn’t gone, just badly cluttered with cheap structures. Their mystical outlook was overwhelmed by arrogance. That the rulers appeared to be genuine geniuses helped, but it wasn’t enough.
Babylon was overrun by a different kind of genius from farther east. Forgoing a detailed examination of the Persian Empire, we note first their lack of arrogance, at least initially. A central doctrine of their Zoroastrian religion was a sort of syncretism that took other national gods seriously, so that they come off quite the good guys in Hebrew history. They wanted the Jews to return home and rebuild so they could pray for the emperor, because his god wanted to be friends with all the others. But the core of Israeli leadership didn’t return to the Land of Judah. They stuck around and absorbed the Persian sense of wealth as a reflection of divine favor, the second punch. It was not so radically far from the idea that God promised to bless a faithful nation with peace, security, stability and a measure of prosperity, but it shifted the emphasis from reasonable prosperity to pining for Solomon’s level of wealth. They began to reverse the logic. Instead of wealth being one earthly sign of God’s favor, it became the primary proof they had His favor and could do almost what they might imagine would fit into the wording of the Law.
They still tended to reason along the ANE forms of logic for a time. As the traffic between Judah and the high synagogues back in Babylon increased, there was a slight revival in the old Mesopotamian intellectual depth. Some of the scholars still understood the full mysticism of Moses, and there were genuine prophets for a time. However, the folks back in Jerusalem slipped back into the old habits, such that the last prophet of record speaks for God, asking why He should tolerate them dirtying the carpet in His temple, since there was no depth at all in their religion.
It was a short time after this last prophet, Malachi, published his warnings that Alexander the Great did his thing in backlash against the Persians. They had been harassing the Greeks for quite a while. We note in passing the Western mythology makes the Spartans good guys. In the Bible, the Spartans were filthy spawn of Hell while Persians were morally superior, but just didn’t know when to quit. So Alexander the Hellenizer plowed through the land and found the Judeans welcoming. He gave them the same gifts as every other kingdom he conquered. It started slowly as just a hobby, but within a century, the leadership of Judean scholars were entirely captive to Greek philosophy.
Though the older Hebrew outlook was never quite wiped out, it was eclipsed organizationally. The political events are mind-numbingly complex during the period between the Old and New Testaments, but the intellectual shift was painfully simple. Those who taught religion were also the government, and their ability to understand Moses was essentially dead. Going back over the Covenant without that mystical outlook meant they just barely maintained the external trappings of the cultural and social structure, but they had become openly hostile the higher meaning of the Law. So much so that they virtually rewrote the whole thing in a vast fat code of Western legalism we now call the Talmud. Today’s Jewish scholars act as if the Talmud corrects the Books of Moses, sometimes claiming that the Talmud reflects the oral teaching of Moses that he didn’t write down. It does not require much scholarship, even for a Westerner, to see the shocking difference in outlook between the two. Moses would have vomited over the Talmud.
Furthermore, it doesn’t take a genius to trace back the debates they had with Jesus to realize He was calling them back to the older Hebrew mystical understanding. By and large, modern Judaism is merely the extension of the Hellenized disaster, not at all the Hebrew religion of ancient times. They had seized upon the notion of rational absolutes; the nit-picking over precise wording and legalistic analysis is entirely a Western approach. They had God fully contained in hard concrete box, and any dispute was sin by definition. Meanwhile, Jesus talked about a spiritual awareness and how those scholars completely missed the real meaning of Moses’ Law. In an age when Jewish men seldom spoke in public even to respectable Jewish women, He told a Gentile slut that what really mattered with Jehovah was a spiritual connection, not some imaginary faithfulness to the letter of Jewish law. She started down the path to that spiritual connection despite being culturally at war with the People of Jehovah.
Whatever else we see in the Gospels, Jesus was the final living clarification of everything God’s Laws meant, and the ultimate human expression of the living moral fabric within all Creation.
Recommended readings: Encyclopedic entries on various periods of Bible History including Exodus, the Fall of Jerusalem, Exile, Restoration. Articles on Hellenism will narrow the focus on just what Alexander offered Judah. Details of the intellectual shift from East to West among Jewish rabbis is best covered by Alfred Edersheim in The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, particularly Book 1, Chapters 1-4 (electronic versions are available, some free). The author’s The Mind of Christ (free) expands on the human character of Jesus as a Hebrew mystical thinker.
