I highly recommend any book like this one that gets your creative juices going, whether you agree or disagree with the author. Schwartz argues well for her thesis, mustering the evidence to prove it. Best of all, she admits there is another way to read the Hebrew Bible. Both views are in the evidence. As Schwartz says, the Bible is multifaceted and built on “shifting sand” (142).
Her thesis is that the Bible presents scarcity—of goods, of gods (there can be only One top dog), of land, of women, of parental blessings and love—as the culprit which creates a worldview where everything is up for competition and violence is necessary to get your share. “It seems we kill in order to own and we kill because we cannot own. And this has been given legitimacy in religion” (72).
But she also acknowledges: “The first command. ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,’ is a blessing of plenty, not a warning of scarcity … these narratives do offer glimpses of another kind of deity, a God of plenitude, of generosity, one who need not protect his turf because it is infinite” (119).
I love this book. Schwartz’s ability to spot recurring themes in the Bible is remarkable, but that does not prevent me from raising three serious criticisms. One, Schwartz never quotes the biblical passages that bid us to be kind to and to love the stranger because we were strangers in a foreign land. This is an explicit call to treat the Other well. Moreover, there is no corresponding call to hate the Other as general principle. Two, are polytheistic societies less violent? She doesn’t address this at all.
Three, the history of Israel continues with the Pharisees and rabbis. They almost never read imperialism, competition, and violence into the Bible. They emphasized peace and sharing, and stressed God’s bounty for all peoples. Why?
The Bible admittedly has a lot of violence in it. That is because their world was a violent one. But the ancient Pharisees and rabbis did not take that as their cue. They showed us another way to read the Bible, including multiple interpretations. I wish Schwartz had brought that up.
In the last chapter, she gives a nod to Torah, written and oral, for its role in forming ancient Jewish identity, but she doesn’t note what a momentous change this is from land or kinship or the nation-state as identity markers. While all this history of Israel was happening, they were creating a society of storytelling and recorded some of it in a book that would govern their lives. Without realizing it, they had created a Constitution (the Torah) to live by. Once the Constitution is given, even God may have to stay out of it, as people debate the meaning of the Constitution—to which Regina Schwartz has made a fine contribution.
Leon Zitzer
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