Father Abraham Had Many Sons
Posted by Thomas L. Knapp on Nov 16, 2009 in Commentary • 8 commentsThat’s how the song and the story go, anyway. Two of those sons in particular, Isaac and Ishmael, are said to have founded two divergent tribal lineages known today as the Jews and the Arabs. And to the extent that those two ethnic groups today tend to identify with particular religious beliefs, those beliefs still share a deity in common.
Where the line between history and mythology is, I won’t pretend to know. But whenever I notice the latest developments in the “Palestinian statehood controversy,” I think back to a point in the putative chronology at which the deity in question argued forcefully, but to no avail, that Israel would be much better off remaining a stateless society. Here it is, in 1 Samuel, chapter 8:
And Samuel told all the words of the LORD unto the people that asked of him a king.
And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.
And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.
And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.
And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.
And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.
And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.
He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.
And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day.
Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us;
That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.
God as anarchist advocate. Whodathunkit?
The Israelites just wouldn’t listen … and consequently the conditions of their existence went to hell in a handbasket. They ended up conquered, enslaved, passed back and forth between the Babylonians and Persians and Greeks and Romans, and finally scattered across the face of the planet for close to 2000 years — a period of forced conversion, ghettoization, persecution and, finally, near extermination, all at the hands of various states — before re-establishing a toehold in their land of ancient origin.
And what did they do with that toehold? Why, they proved that they hadn’t learned a damn thing. They decided that they absolutely, positively must, at any cost, once again create a state of their own.
They wanted a state so badly — despite the failure of their previous state and despite the lessons of two millennia of persecution at the hands of states — that they whipped the armies of five existing states to get it.
And since getting it? The people who whipped five states have found themselves utterly unable, for six decades now, to effectively suppress the aspirations of a dislocated, poverty-stricken, demoralized stateless Palestinian Arab population, just as the combined might of the Arab states and the British Empire and the Third Reich and the Soviet Union had proven powerless to suppress 50 years of non-state manifestations of Zionism.
If there’s a God, and if that God is the one the Bible talks about, I rather suspect that He’s still an anarchist and waiting for His people to puzzle out the lesson He tried to teach them so many years ago.
Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).
There are Jewish people living in Israel known as the Neturei Karta, who as a group are actually opposed to the modern Israeli state.
As it says on NKUSA.org "Neturei Karta oppose the so-called "State of Israel" not because it operates secularly, but because the entire concept of a sovereign Jewish state is contrary to Jewish Law…. Jews are not allowed to dominate, kill, harm or demean another people and are not allowed to have anything to do with the Zionist enterprise, their political meddling and their wars….The true Jews remain faithful to Jewish belief and are not contaminated with Zionism…The true Jews are against dispossessing the Arabs of their land and homes. According to the Torah, the land should be returned to them."
My problem with some of them is not that they just undermine and deny the authority of the Israeli state [which is frickin awesome!] but that they actively seek to replace it with another state!
Whenever I encounter one of them, I propose to them the No-state solution; to the two-state solution leftists, I ask them to improve upon their "solution" with my 6-million state solution, which equates to one sovereign state for each inhabitant of the region.
The way I read scripture, at the time God wanted his people to live under a theocracy, not anarchy. Then again maybe you're right and my exegesis isn't very good.
@inertia — My own understanding of the word "theocracy" is that it is a nation-state that heavily depends upon religion for its legitimization. One wouldn't call a particular tribe a "theocracy" even if the tribal shaman has status roughly approximate to that of the chieftain. That doesn't mean it couldn't be an oppressive society in some ways. I'm just asking we apply accurate labels.
My understanding of labels is that the Biblical Judges period would be best described as a "kritarchy" — which isn't exactly a nation-state even if not a fully mature anarchist society either. Kritarchy is "rule" by judges that differs from "anarchy" and the anarchist notion of a polycentric legal order *only* in that the supply of judges is somewhat restricted by religion / superstition / cultural factors. The status of the body of law in a kritarchy would seem likely to have a degree of oppressiveness and/or irrationality more or less in proportion to that artificial restriction of supply. That restriction of supply is not sustainable over the long term, though. The lack of a true monopoly of law (i.e. a state), would seem to place kritarchies on the road to anarchy — with progressive social change happening roughly in tandem with secularization of the legal profession over time (most likely, driven by market pressures).
@Brad,
If you run the numbers based on the Biblical passage that describes the judicial system, it turns out that every seventh or eighth individual in the nation was ordained as a judge. The courts were so arranged that if they couldn't attain a verdict, it would keep being appealed to a higher and higher court until it would finally reach the Sanhedrin, a group of 72 judges who would have to decide the matter one way or the other.
Basically, any group of three people would constitute a court for monetary matters, and didn't need any permission to operate. For cases involving capital punishment, the requirement was 23 judges.
@iceberg — Then if there was no real restriction of supply, it was just a matter time for the law to evolve.
I love the story of Samuel's warning. Another good story along the same lines (I vaguely recall it was associated with an abortive coup by Abimelech) was the parable of the trees:
The trees decided to have a king, so they approached on tree after another and said "Come, thou, and reign over us." Every useful tree they asked (the olive tree, the grapevine, etc.) refused, on the grounds that it was busy making oil, wine, etc., "that maketh glad the heart of God and man." Finally they asked the bramble bush, who said "Sure, why the fuck not?" (I don't remember the exact words in the Bible, but I'm pretty sure that's not the exact quote). Beautiful illustration of a timeless lesson: anyone who actually wants political office bears keeping an eye on.
Er… the British Empire never tried to suppress non-state manifestations of Zionism, and was only willing and able to apply a limited proportion of "might" against the state ones (in which I include the terrorist and less violent activities aimed at setting up a Zionist state, including breaching immigration restrictions). Among other things, Zionism had heavily infiltrated both Britain's and the USA's informal ruling structures at least as far back as Chaim Weizmann's contribution to the First World War (with some even earlier indications).
For a further insight into biblical coverage of the late pre-kingdom Jewish period, see the last part of the Book of Judges. In particular, note the constant refrain that "In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes" with each episode of atrocities (implicitly endorsing royal rule as a safeguard against that, though some of that may be the Elizabethan/Jacobean translators' emphasis relating to their time, place, and social stresses after seeing the fruit of full individual interpretation of the Reformation), and the allusions – parallels and antiparallels – relating Israel's condition then to the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah, and to the failings of the Amalekites and other Canaanites that led to their losing their rights to survive; it is both a warning to the Israel of that period, and a description of the special grace they had that pulled them out of a similar condition.
Oh, and the Palestinians are not ethnically Arab "descendants of Ishmael". With even less mongrelisation than the Ashkenazim, they too are "descendants of Isaac", being descendants of converts to Christianity or Islam (either directly or via Christianity) who never left the area. Ottoman tax records show whole villages converting as late as the 17th century, for tax reasons.
Back to the original comment, based on 1 Samuel chapter 8, if you look at 8:6 . . .
6)Samuel was displeased with their request and went to the Lord for guidance.
7)"Do everything they say to you," the Lord replied, "for it is me they are rejecting, not you. They don't want me to be their king any longer.
8)Ever since I brought them from Egypt they have continually abandoned me and followed other gods. And now they are giving you the same treatment.
9)Do as they ask, but solemnly warn them about the way a king will reign over them."
So just as you might warn a child that if they touch a hot burner they will get burnt, Israel was also warned and told what would happen if they chose to have a king to judge them as other nations had. Now if that child, although having been warned, still choses to touch the burner, they will indeed get burned. So in regard to the first comment, as for God being an anarchist… well I'd say that it's more of cause and effect on a VERY large scale.
Isaiah 48 speaks to this idea as well, and regardless of all they have been through and how many times they were nearly wiped out, they have not been. A remnant has alway survived, because of the covenant God made with Abraham.
So back to "Abraham had many sons" topic, look at Genesis 17:1-8, Genesis 35:9-15 as well as Genesis 48:3-4