In the seven centuries of life between the Conquest and the Exile, the core of Hebrew culture suffered too much from accommodation. It began nobly with the somewhat determined rejection of soul-stealing human comfort. They were tent-dwelling nomads, fully capable of defeating every enemy under God's divine protection, and living comfortably enough they could ensure no one starved in their nation. They had health, reasonable prosperity, security and an identity unique in all the world. Slowly, step-by-step, they gave away this powerful legacy for the comforts of civilization gone to seed. They used the phrases and expressions of tented nomads, even as they crawled in their narrow city alleys. They developed the invasive bureaucratic government structure which denies the humanity of the governed, all to feed a vast class of parasites who did nothing useful, even as their policies drove a stake through the heart of the Covenant. At every turn, they accommodated the sinful pagan world, because they just could not be left out of all the "blessings" of sin.
As a nation, they could have survived in that state, but it meant inevitably absorbing idolatrous compromise to get there. It was less the vast number of localized deities and more the relentless pursuit of what drove Lot's wife to turn back to destruction -- the creature comforts of a brand of civilization which destroys the soul, pulling it away from utter dependency on God, and replacing Him with the god of Self. It's one thing to want so much to know what makes the world tick mechanically; it's another to presume you can know enough to ditch your trust in God. Science is not the enemy of faith, nor vice versa; sin is in assuming human knowledge can cover everything important. It's all tied to the roots of human temptation: Lust of the Flesh, Lust of the Eyes, and Hubris, the trinity of Hell. Chasing any of the human wants and wishes outside the channels of God's provision is the whole of the problem. Make no mistake: This applies whether in the Spirit Realm or in the flesh. Israel as a whole, then Judah alone, could have remained sufficiently close to the Covenant if they had pulled back and revived the other-worldly elements of their culture, but they continued running from it.
That flight demanded they explore all the other options, rather than rely on the revelation of God to keep them away from things which defile. Ritual cleansing cannot change a wounded loyalty. There is nothing particularly helpful in sowing wild oats so one knows what sin is like. The most powerful spiritual people are those who never fought much with God, but accepted His revelation from the start. That is Holiness. Israel plumbed the depths of depravity, seeking to find the depths, just as Satan tempted Eve, suggesting God had somehow denied them their rightful taste of all things.
The Exile was God's answer to their complacency. Having God's House in their capital city did not make Him their hostage. Babylon came and took it all away, then took them away. While it is true their culture did finally turn away from blatant idolatry, particularly symbolized by the extremes of King Manasseh, it was at the cost of driving farther away from the sensitivity of spirit. Most of what we know about the Exile comes from Esther, Ezekiel and Daniel. While things are seldom bluntly stated, we can detect a drift in the national character based on larger spiritual issues. Idolatry without graven images is still possible, and the Jews drifted farther and farther into idolatry. They may have done a better job of implementing the letter of the Law, but completely lost their grasp on the spirit of the Law, by way of losing their entire cultural foundation.
That loss came in steps. First, the previously noted slide into empty modernity and urbanity. Second, Solomon introduced the economics of growth by credit, an idea learned from Tyre and Sidon. This, from the man who wrote, "Debt makes you a slave of the lender." In Babylon, the Jews came up against the root of all human failure in the guise the all-encompassing merchant culture: Everything has a price, and that's all that matters. In their century of Exile, Israel became very wealthy, in large part due to their engaging primitive banking. The Law allowed charging interest on loans to Gentiles, which becomes eventually the excuse for making no loans at all to their fellow Jews, unless they received back a stake in future profits. Loans for charitable purposes became a mere formality, a tiny portion of their wealth to purchase ritual purity. A significant element of Haman's proposal to the emperor for slaughtering the Jews was the prospect of breaking all the liens and confiscating the vast wealth of the Jews.
In ancient Hebrew culture, all wealth was a gift from God, and was never directly tied to hard work. You worked hard because that was your duty to God; your recompense was at His discretion. Thus, working to gain wealth and comfort seeks to take God out of the equation, a fundamental violation of Spirit. Those with wealth were managers of a divine asset, property of God's domain. Your placement in the community was God's assignment to manage His assets for the benefit of His prosperity. Loans to your fellow community members were, in essence if not in fact, a means of protecting your own kin, your nearest relatives in the Family of God. You give of your surplus, and God is the guarantor; taking collateral was just a formality to encourage responsibility to God, not to you. You loaned knowing it may well turn out to be a gift, because you knew it was God's property, and it was He who would absorb the losses, even as He held to His promise to keep you from harm. That promise was based not on direct accounting, but on the broader, life-long and mysterious tracking of God in Heaven.
Daniel reveals a deep sense of shock at learning his people had utterly lost this understanding. The Jews became so enamored with accounting by the books, they dismissed the mystical logic entirely. They left behind the very anchor of what made them special in the world, to become merely one more nation devoted to grabbing a bigger share of the pie, as if there were no real God. Jehovah was reduced to a big CEO in the sky, and the concept of covenant was exchanged for contract. The nation which returned to Palestine was spiritually dead. They still reaped a modicum of Covenant blessing for their partial adherence to the letter of the Law, but no longer knew it as a path to something far higher. The Law was for them the sum total of God's revelation, and all the spiritual matter behind it was completely forgotten.
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By Ed Hurst
07 May 2009
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