The ancient Hebrew nation of kings David and Solomon became divided into Israel, the northern kingdom, and Judah the southern kingdom. Israel was conquered by Assyria, thousands of Israelites were deported to other lands and were replaced by settlers from Syria and Babylon. Those are the ten lost tribes of Israel.

Judah submitted to Assyrian rule but strengthened national defense and repaired the wall of Jerusalem. Then Assyria was conquered by Nebuchadneezer’s Chaldean army. The prophet, and patriot, Jeremiah implored Judah to make peace with Babylon and was declared a traitor by false prophets who preached that Jerusalem could never be taken because of its wall and temple. Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern to die but was rescued by a slave. After a three month siege Judah surrendered. The leading citizens, craftsmen, artists were exiled to Babylon, leaving commoners who had never been leaders or carried responsibility.

At first the exiles were bitter. They had lost their homes, their orchards and vineyards, their native land (Psalms 137). However, they weren’t slaves, they were exiles. They were given land more fertile than that they had left. They discovered an advanced culture, lived at the center of economic and political power, learned to trade, became wealthy and less provincial. They encountered the teaching of Zarathustra (Zoroaster), including a cataclysmic war between the forces of good (angels), and the forces of evil (demons), a judgment day when a gatekeeper would weigh good and bad deeds on a balance, and a future life of punishment or reward. They discovered that their God was not restricted to the temple, or Jerusalem, or Judah, but was God of the whole world. 

The only restriction was that they were not allowed to return to Jerusalem. Jeremiah told them they were better off and to settle down and prosper. Then Persian King Cyrus conquered Babylon and permitted the Jews to return to the ruins of Judah. For this the Bible calls him a “messiah.” Not all the exiles wanted to return. 

Wars weren’t only between tribes, but between tribal gods with each army calling on its gods for victory, like high school football teams on Friday night. When a tribe’s gods were defeated some members of that tribe believed in the demonstrated superiority of the gods of the conquerer. Some Jews, humiliated by exile and seeing the power of Persia turned to Bel, the god of empire. Confession: I often prayed for victory on the football field because I believed my high school, my team, was God’s favorite. How could God allow the degenerates from Crowell or Archer City to humiliate us? That provincial, childish notion still persists in some. Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin said, “I knew that my God was bigger than his (Allah). I knewthat my God was a real God, and his was an idol." 

Yahweh may have been bigger than Bel and Bel was an idol but Persia’s army swept the field. Some Hebrews had married Babylonians, some had become prosperous, some saw the benefit of living at the center of the empire and had become part of the government. The Hebrews who did return were the core of what would become Judaism and Christianity. They carried with them the root ideas that became Armageddon, day of judgment and eternal life. They had a larger view of their role in the world, as shown in Jonah, the funniest book in the Bible and the world’s first satire. Led by Ezra and Nehemiah, the exiles returned, restored the temple, rebuilt the wall and purified the nation. 

National security, religious exclusivity and ethnic purity. And devoutly to be desired. At least that’s what I was taught in Sunday School.

Those left behind in Judah had been tormented by thieves and guerillas because they had no effective leadership and little power. However, they had benefited from homes, vineyards, orchards that had been left behind by the exiles, and they were the chosen who had been spared captivity. The exiles saw themselves as the chosen few who had suffered to preserve their religion and identity, they had profited from an advanced culture, they returned by an edict of the king, and they would rebuild the nation. Those left behind wanted to help restore the temple but the exiles rejected them as unworthy. They were to have no place in the new Jerusalem or in the restored temple that again made Jerusalem the center of religious worship. They were excluded. That hostility remained until the Romans dispersed the Jews. 

Nehemiah rebuilt the wall causing fear in neighboring nations of a growing power on their borders. While building the wall the Jews had to protect the wall and the builders from those who wanted to tear it down. That’s pretty much the history of walls. Walls, guns, cruise missiles, nuclear weapons are believed defensive by only one side. The most powerful nation in the world with the deadliest military the world has ever known was defeated by 19 hijackers armed with box-cutters. Despite all the walls we have built.  

According to the prophets God used evil Assyria to punish Israel for injustice and oppression of the poor by the rich. The prophets railed that the rich and powerful were devouring the poor and powerless and that God did not require more religious ceremonies but justice, mercy and humility. 

However, while restoring the temple they discovered a part of the law that required ethnic and religious purity. The new Jerusalem was to be exclusive. Those who had foreign wives and children ordered them to leave. That would be cruel today but it was harsher then and produced “protest” books such as Jonah, who had rather die than go to Ninevah and preach repentance for fear the Assyrians would repent and God would not destroy them. They were Jonah’s enemy, and Judah’s enemy, and Jonah wanted them dead. Esther, a Hebrew woman, married a foreign king saved her people. Ruth, a Moabite widow, chose the nation and God of her mother-in-law, and through marriage to Boaz had a son who was grandfather of King David. Matthew includes her in the lineage of Jesus. 

A Moabite? That tribe was the result of a drunken Lot impregnating his daughter. The relationship of Moabites to Israelites was a mixed one. On the way to Canaan, God told Moses that the Hebrews were not to bother the Moabites because God gave them their land. But Moabite women tempted Israelite men to their tents and their idols and God told Moses they were the enemy and to kill them. Fleeing the anger of King Saul, David took his family to Moab and asked the king to give them refuge but later he makes war and defeats them. Jeremiah said Moab would wallow in her vomit. In the Psalms God declared that Moab would be his washpot and on Edom he would throw his shoe. Because of the recent shoe throwing at George Bush we know that it is a sign of contempt but it is also a sign of ownership. And a washpot was where one wiped one’s feetbefore entering a house. Yet a Moabite woman would be important to Judaism and Christianity.

According to some, only Noah and his family escaped a universal flood and his three sons peopled the world, giving us three “races” that must remain “pure.” There is an age-old dream of purity and it accounts for the deaths of millions in tribal and national wars, in ethnic cleansings, pograms and exterminations. Six million Jews, 14 million Ukranians, a million or two Cambodians, 30 million Chinese, one million Iraqis, human trash corrupted by unclean blood, errant ideas, inappropriate colors, gods of a different name.

  Unity and exclusion has preserved Jewish culture through centuries of persecution and intolerance but it no longer works so well. Last year Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai threatened a “holocaust” in Gaza if resistance to occupation continued. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said recently, “As a Jew, I was ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire at innocent Arabs in Hebron. There is no other definition than the term ‘pogrom’ to describe what I have seen.” Israel’s leading civil rights organization, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, described Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank as being “reminiscent of the Apartheid regime in South Africa.” 

The dream of purity is not unique to Israel or the United States, or the Balkans, or Hutus or Tutsis. In India there are Departments of Astrology at universities and Hindu symbols in public places. Ethnic cleansing in Gujarat killed thousands of Muslims and removed thousands more from their homes.

In Judah, the newly discovered or rediscovered law became an obsession of exactly following the details. The forms of worship became more important than worship. Jesus spoke more harshly to those who kept the law than to those who broke the law. With what today would be called situational ethics, Jesus justified working on the Sabbath for himself and his disciples. He charged that the devout tithed mint, anise and cumin and ignored weightier matters of justice and mercy. 

In the “Federalist Papers” James Madison wrote that the threat of abuse in a democracy would first come from elected autocrats and second from the oppression of the majority. We have recently experienced the autocracy and arrogance of “elected” officials, and if the dogmatic Moral Majority (MM) had been a majority we would have had “religious” exclusivity. Doctrine requires evidence and reason. Dogma is true because some authority said it’s true. MM dogma holds that this is a “Christian” nation; therefore, only those from approved religions are acceptable in positions of power and only those from the right kind of that religion are acceptable in the highest positions. In the 2008 presidential election, two of the candidates belonged to unacceptable churches. 

MM dogma holds that women were created to serve men; therefore women were denied the right to vote, the right to office, and still are denied the right to equal pay or right to their own bodies. Dogma requires birth on demand because of concern for a “beating heart.” That concern disappears once the heart beats outside a woman’s body. A baby born in the US would have a better chance of surviving infancy in Cuba, China, El Salvador and thirty other countries where newborn life is more sacred than in America.

Because of dogma blacks could be bought and sold as property and still, even after the election of a black president, don’t have equal opportunity. I never attended a school where a black person would have been able to enroll. Thankfully that has changed but for forty years I taught at the university level and there was never a minority professor in my department.

 Because of dogma homosexuals are denied equal rights. Jesus didn’t condemn homosexuality but he did condemn divorce and called remarriage “adultery.” However, dogma regarding divorce was disavowed when Reagan pledged help and handouts to the “religious” right because Reagan had divorced his wife to marry a pregnant mistress. Divorce became acceptable, even for ministers, and homosexuality became “the threat” to marriage.

There is no equivalency between America and ancient Judah but there are lessons to be learned from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The wall they built was torn down, the temple destroyed, the nation scattered by a whirlwind. 

Building walls, whether stone, electronic, political or military does not provide security. Religious unity is not desirable and not likely. Even in those religions with hierarchical power some believers quietly disregard some dogma. Ethnic purity is the dream of fanatics. Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia were governments of strict laws strictly enforced. Prisons became an industry.

Perhaps the Hebrew prophets were right. Laws that produce injustice and permit the rich and powerful to devour the poor and powerless are evil and the people who make or permit such laws will receive God’s condemnation. Perhaps what God requires is still justice, mercy and humility. 

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