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Heroes
From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle
Chapter One
God's Heroes: Deborah, Judith, Samson and David
No people in history were more in need of heroes than the Hebrews. Cast in their role, by events, as "strangers and sojourners," they came originally in the time of Abraham, deep in the second millennium BC, from what is now southern Iraq, and entered recorded history between 1450 and 1250 BC. They were a slave people, without country and possessions, with little art or technology and no skill or record in warfare. They were subjects of the Egyptians, the greatest power of the Bronze Age, and woefully oppressed. They were not numerous either. It is one of the miracles of the human story that this tiny people, instead of disappearing into oblivion through the yawning cracks of history, as did thousands of other tribal groups—and even scores of famous nations—should still be in self-conscious existence today, an important piece on the great world chessboard, recognizably the same entity as nearly four thousand years ago.
Yet history has no miracles: only causes and consequences. And the reasons the Hebrews survived are that they had a god, a sole god, whom they worshipped with unique intensity and exclusiveness; and they had their own language, first oral then written, in which they recorded his favor and protection. They were weak in the physics of survival, strong in the metaphysics. They were first henotheists, with their sole god, Yahweh, as the divine ruler of their tribal confederation (what the Greeks called an amphictyony); then, during theirEgyptian sojourn, they elevated their religious system into monotheism, Yahweh becoming sole god of the universe and all its peoples. This belief, which made them unique in antiquity, emerged under the first of their heroes, Moses, who took them out of Egyptian slavery and into independent nationhood. He gave them, in writing, their first code of divine laws, and led them, through forty years of tribulations and testing, to the edge of the land, "flowing with milk and honey," which Yahweh had promised them. Moses made full use too of their second great gift, their language. Hebrew was not only sinewy, expressive and resourceful, but peculiarly adapted to the recording of history. It was Moses, according to rabbinical tradition, who set down the first five books of the Hebrew national epic, the Pentateuch, the opening section of what became known as the Bible, to Christians the Old Testament. On this foundation the Bible accumulated over the generations, as the canonical record of Hebrew history, in time, "the most famous book in the history of the world," "the book," as its name implies. Moses and his doings continued to dominate it. He is mentioned 767 times in the Old Testament and 79 times even in the New Testament, the Christian title deeds. No other hero of antiquity, at any other period or from any other region, has this degree of heroic celebrity.
Moses having created, as it were, the matrix of heroism, Hebrew records arranged the continuing story of the people and heroic figures. The Book of Joshua, conservatively dated from between 1375 BC and 1045 BC, tells how the Promised Land was conquered and settled. According to the Talmud, the Jewish record of oral teaching compiled from 400 BC to AD 500, Joshua, the Hebrew general, as well as being the hero of the book, was also its author, except for a coda recording his burial. The next biblical book, Judges, is the key work in Hebrew heroism, however. It was written late in the first millennium BC, after Joshua, and supposedly, according to the Talmud, by the Prophet Samuel. By rights it should be called the Book of Heroes, for most of its celebrities were not judges but fighters, who enabled the Hebrews, or Israelites as they began to be called, to survive as a recognizable, independent people during extremely difficult times.
The last centuries of the second millennium BC, the chronological junction between the Bronze Age and the new Iron Age, witnessed one of the greatest convulsions of antiquity, involving the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and its shores and much of western Asia—huge conquests and tribal movements, invasions and dispossessions, massacres and genocides and great minglings and fusions of peoples. The destruction of Mycenaean Greece and Crete, the events reflected in Homer's later (eighth century BC) recounting of the Trojan War, the near-disintegration of the New Kingdom of Egypt and the movement of the Hebrews themselves into Palestine are all part of this reshuffling of the cards of history, the biggest upheaval until Alexander the Great broke up the Persian Empire and replaced it with the Hellenistic world.
The literary and archeological evidence of these massive but obscure events is fragmentary, and the picture historians have been able to build up is confused, and likely to remain so. No wonder, then, that the Book of Judges, recording part of the turmoil in a small area of the scene of convulsion, from a Hebrew viewpoint, is a confused and confusing document also. It claims to record the deeds of a dozen "judges," or tribal heroes, called Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar, Deborah (and her general Barak), Gideon, Tola, Jain, Jephthah, Ibzan, Elon, Abdon and Samson. But, though they are presented in chronological order, it may be that some were contemporaries. Their importance varied greatly. Several were obscure leaders of a single tribe. Others were national figures. The enemy too varied. At the beginning of the book, the enemy seems to be the original inhabitants of the Promised Land, the Canaanites. But no scholar has been able to settle the origins of this term, and it may be that it signified no more than the collective expression for a mass of small kingdoms and amphictyonies, living in Syria and Palestine: the Jebusites and Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, Arkites, Sinites, Arradites, Zemarites, Hamathites and others. The term may mean "lowly" or "low born," and be abusive. One of the earliest references to Canaanites occurs in a clay . . .
Heroes
From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle. Copyright © by Paul Johnson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
