The Jews started it all--and by "it" I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values
that make all of us, Jew and gentile, believer and atheist, tick. Without the Jews, we would see the world through
different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings. And not only would our sensorium,
the screen through which we receive the world, be different: we would think with a different mind, interpret all
our experience differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall us. And we would set a different
course for our lives.
By "we" I mean the usual "we" of late-twentieth century writing: the people of the Western
world, whose peculiar but vital mentality has come to infect every culture on earth, so that, in a startlingly
precise sense, all humanity is now willy-nilly caught up in this "we." For better or worse, the role
of the West in humanity's history is singular. Because of this, the role of the Jews, the inventors of Western
culture, is also singular: there is simply no one else remotely like them; theirs is a unique vocation. Indeed,
as we shall see, the very idea of vocation, of a personal destiny, is a Jewish idea.
Our history is replete with examples of those who have refused to see what the Jews are really about, who--through
intellectual blindness, racial chauvinism, xenophobia, or just plain evil--have been unable to give this oddball
tribe, this raggle-taggle band, this race of wanderers who are the progenitors of the Western world, their due.
Indeed, at the end of this bloodiest of centuries, we can all too easily look back on scenes of unthinkable horror
perpetrated by those who would do anything rather than give the Jews their due.
But I must ask my readers to erase from their minds not only the horrors of history--modern, medieval, and ancient--but
(so far as one can) the very notion of history itself. More especially, we must erase from our minds all the suppositions
on which our world is built--the whole intricate edifice of actions and ideas that are our intellectual and emotional
patrimony. We must reimagine ourselves in the form of humanity that lived and moved on this planet before the first
word of the Bible was written down, before it was spoken, before it was even dreamed.
What a bizarre phenomenon the first human mutants must have appeared upon the earth. Like their primate progenitors,
they were long-limbed and rangy, but, with unimpressive muscles and without significant fur or claws, confined
to the protection of trees, save when they would tentatively essay the floor of the savannah--hoping to obtain
food without becoming food. With their small mouths and underdeveloped teeth, their unnaturally large heads (like
the heads of primate infants), they were forced back on their wits. Their young remained helpless for years, well
past the infancy of other mammals, requiring from their parents long years of vigilance and extensive tutelage
in many things. Without planning and forethought, without in fact the development of complex strategies, these
mutants could not hope to survive at all.
But if we make use of what hints remain in the prehistorical and protohistorical "record," we must come
to the unexpected conclusion that their inventions and discoveries, made in aid of their survival and prosperity--tools
and fire, then agriculture and beasts of burden, then irrigation and the wheel--did not seem to them innovations.
These were gifts from beyond the world, somehow part of the Eternal. All evidence points to there having been,
in the earliest religious thought, a vision of the cosmos that was profoundly cyclical. The assumptions that early
man made about the world were, in all their essentials, little different from the assumptions that later and more
sophisticated societies, like Greece and India, would make in a more elaborate manner. As Henri-Charles Puech says
of Greek thought in his seminal Man and Time: "No event is unique, nothing is enacted but once . . .; every
event has been enacted, is enacted, and will be enacted perpetually; the same individuals have appeared, appear,
and will appear at every turn of the circle."
The Jews were the first people to break out of this circle, to find a new way of thinking and experiencing, a new
way of understanding and feeling the world, so much so that it may be said with some justice that theirs is the
only new idea that human beings have ever had. But their worldview has become so much a part of us that at this
point it might as well have been written into our cells as a genetic code. We find it so impossible to shed--even
for a brief experiment-- that it is now the cosmic vision of all other peoples that appears to us exotic and strange.
The Bible is the record par excellence of the Jewish religious experience, an experience that remains fresh and
even shocking when it is read against the myths of other ancient literatures. The word bible comes from the Greek
plural form biblia, meaning "books." And though the Bible is rightly considered the book of the Western
world--its foundation document--it is actually a collection of books, a various library written almost entirely
in Hebrew over the course of a thousand years.
We have scant evidence concerning the early development of Hebrew, one of a score of Semitic tongues that arose
in the Middle East during a period that began sometime before the start of the second millennium B.C.*--how long
before we do not know. Some of these tongues, such as Akkadian, found literary expression fairly early, but there
is no reliable record of written Hebrew before the tenth century B.C.--that is, till well after the resettlement
of the Israelites in Canaan following their escape from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, the greatest of all
proto-Jewish figures. This means that the supposedly historical stories of at least the first books of the Bible
were preserved originally not as written texts but as oral tradition. So, from the wanderings of Abraham in Canaan
through the liberation from Egypt wrought by Moses to the Israelite resettlement of Canaan under Joshua, what we
are reading are oral tales, collected and edited for the first (but not the last) time in the tenth century during
and after the kingship of David. But the full collection of texts that make up the Bible (short of the Greek New
Testament, which would not be appended till the first century of our era) did not exist in its current form till
well after the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews--that is, till sometime after 538 B.C. The last books to be taken
into the canon of the Hebrew Bible probably belong to the third and second centuries B.C., these being Esther and
Ecclesiastes (third century) and Daniel (second century). Some apocryphal books, such as Judith and the Wisdom
of Solomon, are as late as the first century.
To most readers today, the Bible is a confusing hodgepodge; and those who take up the daunting task of reading
it from cover to cover seldom maintain their resolve beyond a book or two. Though the Bible is full of literature's
two great themes, love and death (as well as its exciting caricatures, sex and violence), it is also full of tedious
ritual prescriptions and interminable battles. More than anything, because the Bible is the product of so many
hands over so many ages, it is full of confusion for the modern reader who attempts to decode what it might be
about.
But to understand ourselves--and the identity we carry so effortlessly that most "moderns" no longer
give any thought to the origins of attitudes we have come to take as natural and self-evident--we must return to
this great document, the cornerstone of Western civilization. My purpose is not to write an introduction to the
Bible, still less to Judaism, but to discover in this unique culture of the Word some essential thread that runs
through it, to uncover in outline the sensibility that undergirds the whole structure, and to identify the still-living
sources of our Western heritage for contemporary readers, whatever color of the belief-unbelief spectrum they may
inhabit.
To appreciate the Bible properly, we cannot begin with it. All definitions must limit or set boundaries, must show
what the thing-to-be-defined is not. So we begin before the Bible, before the Jews, before Abraham--in the time
when reality seemed to be a great circle, closed and predictable in its revolutions. We return to the world of
the Wheel.
*Recently, the designations B.C.E. (before the common era) and C.E. (common era), used originally in Jewish circles
to avoid the Christim references contained in the designations B.C. (before Christ) and A.D. (anno dom~n~, in the
year of the Lord), have g.uned somewhat wider currency. I use B.C. and A.D. not to cause offense to anyone but
because the new designations, still largely unrecognized outside scholarly circles, can unnecessarily disorient
the common reader.
"Persuasive as well as entertaining...Mr. Cahill's book [is] a gift."
--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
"An outstanding and very readable book...highly recommended."
--Library Journal
"A very good read, a dramatically effective, often compelling retelling of the Hebrew Bible."
--Charles Gold, Chicago Sun Times
"This is a valuable book, of interest to everyone, religious or not."
--Washington Times
"A highly readable, entrancing journey."
--San Francisco Chronicle
Random House, Inc. Web Site
February, 2000
Summary
The author of the runaway bestseller How the Irish Saved Civilization has done it again. In The Gifts
of the Jews Thomas Cahill takes us on another enchanting journey into history, once again recreating a time
when the actions of a small band of people had repercussions that are still felt today.
The Gifts of the Jews reveals the critical change that made western civilization possible. Within the matrix
of ancient religions and philosophies, life was seen as part of an endless cycle of birth and death; time was like
a wheel, spinning ceaselessly. Yet somehow, the ancient Jews began to see time differently. For them, time had
a beginning and an end; it was a narrative, whose triumphant conclusion would come in the future. From this insight
came a new conception of men and women as individuals with unique destinies--a conception that would inform the
Declaration of Independence--and our hopeful belief in progress and the sense that tomorrow can be better than
today. As Thomas Cahill narrates this momentous shift, he also explains the real significance of such Biblical
figures as Abraham and Sarah, Moses and the Pharaoh, Joshua, Isaiah, and Jeremiah.
Full of compelling stories, insights and humor, The Gifts of the Jews is an irresistible exploration of
history as fascinating and fun as How the Irish Saved Civilization.