The New Republic JUNE 23, 1997
Copyright 1997, The New Republic, Inc.
THOU SHALT NOT KILL
by Peter Berkowitz
The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism
by Regina M. Schwartz
(University of Chicago Press, 211 pp., $22.95)
Modern philosophy has taken an avid and occasionally malicious interest in the evils, petty and profound, that
have been committed in the name of biblical faith. Machiavelli relished recounting Christianity's "pious cruelty.
" By a carefully drawn comparison to the tolerance of pagans, Hume was pleased to show off the intolerance
of Christians. And Nietzsche blamed Judaism for giving birth to Christianity, which he attacked for preaching,
under the guise of universal love, a virulent hatred for all that was healthy, beautiful and noble.
But these illustrious enemies of religion were not the first to put biblical religion to the test of morality.
They had sharp and distinguished precursors in ... the Bible. In the face of God's determination to destroy Sodom
and Gomorrah, Abraham confronted God with the demands of justice, urging Him to consider the innocent along with
the wicked. The prophets called their communities to account for mechanical and coldhearted observance of religious
ritual. Jesus was forced to overturn the tables of the money lenders and expel them from the Temple because those
responsible for maintaining the holiness of that holy place were unable to separate the service of God from the
service of Mammon. And in the name of the priesthood-- or the fundamental equality--of all believers, Luther mounted
an attack on what he regarded as a corrupt Church hierarchy.
Biblical faith itself has been one spectacular moral source for the critique of biblically based religious life.
Unfortunately, Regina M. Schwartz does not take much notice of the long and varied tradition of moral criticism
of biblical faith that preceded her own contribution to the enterprise. In her book she concentrates instead on
laying bare the dominant and (in her view) deeply destructive moral vision that she believes is inscribed in the
Bible. Her aim is to loosen that vision's grip on men and women in the West and to sketch the outlines of an alternative
morality.
A self-proclaimed "outsider" and "interloper" in the world of biblical scholarship, Schwartz
provides provocative readings of a range of biblical tales and teachings; and she does not hesitate to indict,
convict and render final judgment. The trouble, in Schwartz's eyes, is not with the Bible as a whole, whose conflicting
tendencies, self-subverting stories and crisscrossing narratives she applauds. As her many probing interpretations
effectively show, the Bible can be read against the grain: it exhibits self- critical moments, and in various ways
invites the reader to appropriate and to refigure its leading themes and judgments. No, the trouble, according
to Schwartz, is with monotheism, or as she sometimes prefers the "myth of monotheism" or just plain "Yahwism."
This myth--the belief in one God, creator of the heavens and the earth-- constitutes "a system in which identity
depends upon rejection of the Other and subjection of the Self." Sometimes Schwartz goes so far as to suggest
that monotheism lies at the root of evil in the Western world. In her account, monotheism's violent legacy is a
consequence of the "law of scarcity" that it implies. The law of scarcity (or "the logic of scarcity,"
"the rule of scarcity," "the myth of scarcity," "the supposition of scarcity," "the
scarcity paradigm," "the tragic principle of scarcity," "the pernicious principle of scarcity")
proclaims that there is never enough of the good things--attention, prosperity, land, love, blessings--to go around.
And the law of scarcity is a myth, because it does not reflect the ultimate truth about the world. The myth has
come to be regarded as a law, Schwartz thinks, in large measure through the enormous influence that the Bible has
exerted on the making of the Western mind.
It is an oddity of Schwartz's account that the law of scarcity does not derive its power and its influence, so
far as she can see, from facts about the world or common human experiences. Its authority flows, rather, from faulty
metaphysical principles and misguided beliefs about God. "Scarcity is encoded in the Bible as a principle
of Oneness (one land, one people, one nation) and in monotheistic thinking (one Deity), it becomes a demand of
exclusive allegiance that threatens with the violence of exclusion." Of course, by excluding from the interpretation
of the law of scarcity all but the ugliest meanings and motives, Schwartz practices the exclusion that she so fervently
opposes. Surely it is conceivable that the devotion of one people to one land and one nation can contribute to
the realization of justice by restraining that people from imposing its vision of justice on other lands and nations.
And one can certainly imagine that by establishing the essential connectedness of all humankind, the affirmation
of and allegiance to the one God, creator of all the world, works to override the fear of foreignness that comes
from the encounter with deep differences of language, culture and religion.
While she is single-minded in her opposition to the law of scarcity, Schwartz acknowledges that the Bible did not
invent scarcity and has no monopoly on it. "Ancient peoples conquered one another long before the Israelites
wrote about it, and in philosophy, Aristotle's principle of noncontradiction established that for A to be A it
could not be B while Plato wrote of polemos, endless war against the foreign, the diverse, the enemy.'" But
Schwartz introduces these qualifications without grappling with the problems that they raise for her argument.
If conquering was common before the Bible, in the pagan and polytheistic worlds of antiquity, then doubt must be
cast on the tight connection that Schwartz wishes to draw between conquest and monotheism.
In her effort to include Aristotle and Plato among the purveyors of the doctrine of scarcity, moreover, Schwartz
is rather reckless in her statement of their views. This fashionable trope that sees evil in the law of noncontradiction
is a silliness that must stop. Contrary to what is implied by Schwartz's caricature, it is precisely Aristotle's
formulation of the principle of noncontradiction that reveals the sense in which A can be both A and B. According
to Book IV of the Metaphysics, "the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same
subject in the same respect." As Plato's Socrates illustrates in The Republic, with his image of the spinning
top that is moving in one respect and stationary in another, the principle of non-contradiction enables us to understand
the complexity and the heterogeneity that are such obvious features of the world. And sometimes not so obvious.
It is also the principle of noncontradiction that allows Maimonides to observe in The Guide for the Perplexed that
Adam and Eve, having been fashioned of the same flesh and bone, "were two in a certain respect and that they
were also one." Far from homogenizing the world, the principle of noncontradiction is the basis of our capacity
to discern unity within difference, and the difference that accompanies unity.
That Schwartz misses all this suggests that her book is less an exercise in understanding than a polemic against
a principle that she is determined to reconfigure as foreign and worthless. Schwartz organizes her case against
scarcity around several themes in the formation of the collective identity of the ancient Israelites: covenant,
land, kinship and nation. In each case, she attempts to show that forging a collective identity in relation to
the one God and His law of scarcity depended on cruelty, perversity and the violent exclusion or negation of others.
According to Schwartz, to make a covenant with the one God, as the Israelites did at Mount Sinai, is to be "utterly
subjected" and to absolutely reject "the Other." The divine imperative to possess the land of Israel
contaminates the people, and it functions to legitimate conquest after conquest and to foster permanent relations
of domination. To define identity in terms of kinship relations, as the God of the Bible requires, is bad, because
"violence stems from any conception of identity forged negatively, against the other." Schwartz seeks
also to " unmask the monotheistic commitments of nationalism" by showing that the biblical God's demand
for His people to live in a settled land and to build for Him a permanent house or Temple provided models for the
xenophobic and imperialistic drives of the modern nation-state.
For the most part, Schwartz argues, the Bible sanctions the formation of a collective identity that is singular,
static and exclusionary. And yet it also provides hopeful glimpses of an identity that is multiple and mobile,
inclusive and evolving, governed by the good "principle of plentitude" and not the evil law of scarcity.
The "principle of plentitude" affirms that there are enough of the good things to go around, and proclaims
the "ethical imperative of generosity," and envisages a world of "ceaseless giving." By showcasing
the ways in which the Bible "suggests that identity is a question rather than an answer, provisional and not
reified," Schwartz hopes to rescue the "ideal of plentitude" and to provide a "more politically
congenial Bible." (That is quite an admission.)
Schwartz's exegetical aim is to repudiate scarcity and to rehabilitate plentitude. What to do, then, with the images
of scarcity that abound in the Bible? Appealing to the Bible's preoccupation with memory, but only in order to
replace it with one more to her liking, Schwartz advocates a memory governed by the "vision of plenty."
Under this new dispensation, memories must be changeable and fluid, and narratives must proliferate, and fixed
boundaries around a canon of sacred texts must be resisted. On the basis of slogans such as "truth is multiple
instead of single," and "no such thing as accurate memory is possible," Schwartz redefines memory
as "innovative interpretation" and "genuine rewriting of traditions." I am not sure that either
tradition or interpretation is well served when the meaning of memory is transformed into politically driven poetic
invention. Contrary to appearances, the resolute refusal to respect the distinction between remembering and creating,
the determination to celebrate the continuities between finding and inventing while simultaneously suppressing
the differences, betrays a selective eye for the multiplicity of meaning.
Schwartz's respect for multiplicity is also belied by her static and exclusive reading of monotheism's legacy as
essentially a legacy of violence. It is true, as she emphasizes in her introduction, that Cain kills his brother
Abel because he feels rejected by God. But this killing and its connection to the essence of monotheism must be
put in context, as she neglects to do, by considering, say, that the founding act of the Roman empire, Romulus's
slaying of his twin brother, Remus, does not occur under the auspices of the one God, but in a world governed by
a pantheon of gods. It is true, as Schwartz shows in graphic detail, that biblical monotheism is persistently entangled
with cruelty and violence; but it is equally true that plenty of cruelty and violence is on display in the pagan
or non-biblically based religions of the world that she purports to admire: the Greek, the Norse and the Hindu
gods are not exactly social democrats.
It is also true, as Schwartz notes, that biblical verses were used to justify slavery in the United States; but
it is no less true that biblical verses were invoked in this country not only to demand abolition of slavery (as
Schwartz does note) but also to secure civil rights. And it is no less significant that slavery flourished in black
Africa and South America and China long before these lands were touched by biblical faith. (And caste society in
polytheistic India is entangled with the hierarchical world of the Hindu gods.) It is true, finally, that modern
European nationalists invoked biblical passages to support their political programs; but it is also true that the
Catholic Church has played a crucial role around the world in defending the cause of human rights.
Schwartz is at turns sneeringly dismissive of select biblical texts and self-righteously critical of the tendency
that she finds in the Bible to denigrate what is different. Indeed, she is so out of sympathy with the God of the
Bible that she is pleased to depict him as a fraudulent wizard:
"Moses spoke and God answered him with peals of thunder" (Ex 19:19). "I am Oz, the great and powerful. Who are you?" "I am Dorothy, the meek and weak" begins the familiar parody of the Sinai theophany that exposes God as an inept hot-air balloonist from Kansas. Toto pulls back the curtain of the holy of holies, and we see the all too human wizard from Kansas generating his own mysterium tremendum at a microphone. But when the system of transcendent omnipotence is debunked, when God's ability to grant wishes, confer a heart, brain, and courage is exposed as not having a source in transcendence at all but in token symbols, it is only to be replaced by another system: nationalism. There is no place like home.
This is very clever. When the Bible teaches that other gods are fraudulent, however, Schwartz accuses it of
"a particularism so virulent that it reduces all other gods to idiots and so violent that it reduces all other
worshipers to abomination." So it is vicious for the Bible to reduce other gods to idiots, but it is right
and proper for Schwartz to reduce the God of the Bible to an idiot. Her vision of multiplicity is capacious enough
to contain everything but a transcendent deity.
Schwartz writes that, "in the myth of monotheism pluralism is betrayal, punishable with every kind of exile:
loss of home, loss of the land, even alienation from the earth itself." She does not say that the myth of
monotheism may regard pluralism as betrayal, but declares confidently and categorically that "pluralism is
betrayal," that monotheism in its essence seeks to root out pluralism. In fact, biblical monotheism may be
seen as providing the rich soil that nourishes respect for pluralism, especially that form of pluralism that above
all respects persons in their extraordinary diversity.
One place to see this is in the fascinating chapters with which the Bible begins. Schwartz discusses these chapters,
but her discussion is tendentious. Consider her discussion of the creation of man. In Genesis 2, man is made from
the "dust of the earth," and so Schwartz asserts that, according to the Bible, "to be human is to
be made of land." Well, yes, Adam is made of adama, or "earth," but not of "land," which
carries all the connotations of nation, power, and sovereignty that Schwartz is hoping to find. Schwartz herself
perceptively points out the universalism implied by the biblical teaching that human beings are all made of the
same element. The problem is that she conveniently forgets to mention in this context that Adam is also infused
with life from the breath of God, and, according to Genesis 1, man and woman are made by God in His image. This
magnificent idea, which encourages the thought that all human beings are of infinite worth and deserving of fundamental
respect, cannot be found in all religious traditions.
Today this monotheistic notion receives expression in the doctrine of universal benevolence, the commitment to
human rights, and the assumption of equality, all of which are moral principles that are so much taken for granted
in the West that it tends to be viewed as a mark of bad manners to ask after the reasons that underlie them. Many
liberals have become increasingly inarticulate concerning the foundations of their belief in the principle of freedom
and equality for all, and postmoderns are notoriously dismissive of the search for foundations for their celebration
of self- creation for each. But inarticulateness is not a weakness of the biblical perspective. Even when we in
the West criticize the West's legacy of colonialism and imperialism, activities that we have not been alone in
practicing but which we lead the world in condemning, we do so on the basis of a notion of human dignity, one of
whose justifications (not its only one, but a plain and powerful one) derives from the humane and humanizing Bible.
The importance of the idea that every individual is created in the image of God is perhaps nowhere more dramatically
revealed than in the Garden of Eden story. All too commonly the story of the first man and woman is viewed as a
fall from an initial state of wholeness, peace, and perfection, or, in Schwartz's terms, a descent from the law
of plentitude to the law of scarcity. There is much support in the text, however, for seeing the story as one of
ascent, from a barren state of satisfaction and completeness to a painful and fractured condition which, through
the gift of incompleteness, makes possible the love and the knowledge of what is good.
Before eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam does not laugh or shed tears, pause with surprise
or suffer anguish, raise his eyes in awe or lower them in shame. Dwelling alone, in natural splendor and abundance,
no doubts assail him, no beauty enthralls him, no task elevates him. Adam seems, when first we encounter him, singularly
devoid of humanity. Since he neither protests his solitude nor complains of unsatisfied needs, the Bible gives
the impression that in the beginning Adam is content in his garden paradise. But his judgment is called into question
by God's divergent judgment: "It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him."
It appears that one becomes truly human in the presence of another, for God casts a deep sleep upon Adam and, in
the interests of finding a companion truly suitable for him, fashions a human being out of Adam's rib. When Adam
awakes, God brings the new creature to him to receive a name. Adam proceeds to deliver a short technical discourse,
noting that his new companion is, like himself, composed of flesh and bone. Dispassionately calling attention to
the difference between their bodies, Adam says that the new creature should be called woman (isha), because she
was taken out of man (ish). Somehow Adam omits to mention, or perhaps he just fails to see, the distinctive and
highest element out of which the woman is formed. But the text notices it, and it underscores one of the rainbow
of impulses and passions that are invisible at the first encounter between Man and Woman: they do not feel shame
at being naked. The Bible thereby invites us to wonder what it is that neither sees that might have caused them
both to feel shame.
Something, apparently, that only comes to light as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Everyone knows that the woman eats the forbidden fruit because in her weakness she succumbed to the wiles of the
snake. And then she seduced Adam into the same transgression. But not all transgressions are equal, and this one
especially must be placed in context. Since we are told by the Bible that the tree of knowledge of good and evil
is a "delight to the eyes" and a tree "to be desired to make one wise," it is reasonable to
speculate that it is her passion for moral knowledge that draws the woman to the forbidden fruit and renders her
particularly vulnerable to the serpent's arguments. Indeed, one is obliged to wonder what defect or impoverishment
of the soul makes Adam obtuse to the serpent's rhetorical gifts and oblivious of the tree's sweet delights.
Subsequent events suggest that the woman's transgression brings a great deepening of the human spirit. When the
woman shares the fruit with Adam, something quite astonishing happens: "Then the eyes of both of them were
opened and they perceived that they were naked; and they sewed together fig leaves and made themselves loin cloths."
But what do they see in one another's opened eyes that compels them to cover their bodies? The sense of shame that
the Bible now highlights, and the absence of which on Adam's and the woman's first encounter it had previously
underscored, provides an important clue. What they perceive is that, standing in the presence of one another, they
are standing in the presence of a creature unique and unspeakably precious. But God's image in the other is not
all they see. With opened eyes, they see as well that they are composite creatures, each made not only in God's
image but also out of humbler materials, materials akin to the dust of the earth. And this complex sight, easily
blurred, easily suppressed, is the basis of our knowledge of good and evil, the Bible suggests, and the source
of our capacity to feel shame, and the spring of our ability to love. And so it is fitting that it is only after
the human desperation and the heavenly curse that Adam calls his wife by her name Hava or Eve, meaning "the
mother of all the living," for the first time.
Such readings of the biblical text are ruled out by Schwartz's determination to find in the biblical world two
rival and absolutely opposed ethical views, the law of scarcity and the ideal of plentitude. Yet she drastically
underestimates the case for scarcity, wildly overstates the case for plentitude, and fails to appreciate that the
Bible as a whole points the way to an ethic that weaves together respect for scarcity with a vision of plenty.
Schwartz makes the law of scarcity stand for a comprehensive and destructive worldview: "Scarcity, the assumption
that someone can only prosper when someone else does not, proliferates murderous brothers and murderous peoples."
She writes as if scarcity were an idea that the Bible arbitrarily invented and violently inscribed in the mind
of the faithful, as if scarcity were a law manufactured by monotheism out of thin air and which, if we were to
construct the correct concepts, we would be free to think away, as if the passion for preeminence were not a powerful
impulse of the human heart, as if we could reasonably imagine ourselves bringing into being a world in which there
were enough of the good things to go around, as if the desire to stand apart and excel were something to be ashamed
of, as if a love were conceivable or desirable which did not draw sharp boundaries between the beloved and the
rest of the world.
Although generally overwhelmed in the Bible by the law of scarcity, the ideal of plentitude, in Schwartz's account,
is sporadically visible. She opposes God's scattering of the tower builders at Babel "lest they become as
gods," which she deems an example of the law of scarcity, to God's making man "in his image," which
she regards as exemplifying the ideal of plentitude. But her vision of plentitude, which she admits is utopian,
is also, she fails to see, unjustified by the text and a thoroughly reckless imperative for moral and political
life. Schwartz believes that being made in God's image means that men should make themselves gods. She arrives
at this conclusion (at this late date in modern thought, a banal conclusion) by overlooking several important things.
There is a distinction between an image and an original. And whereas she pointed out, in another context, that
man was fashioned from the dust of the earth and forgot that man was also made in God's image, here she remembers
that man is made in God's image and forgets that man is also made out of what is low, gravity-bound, and perishable.
She repeatedly blots out the Bible's teaching that man is neither simply earthbound nor purely a heavenly creature,
but an unstable mix of earthly and heavenly elements.
The law of plentitude, for Schwartz, means the rejection of one God in favor of many gods; and it requires not
merely diminishing the distance between the divine and the human but entirely eliminating it. Indeed, had the principle
of plentitude that is occasionally visible in the Bible taken hold, then, Schwartz argues, "Israel would have
longed to be not only a kingdom of prophets or priests, but a kingdom of Gods." In all this, she is rather
too kind to gods. It does not occur to Schwartz to reflect on the legendary incapacity of gods to maintain peace
among themselves. Indeed, in her idolatrous humanism, Schwartz sees no reason why we should reject the imperative
to self-deification.
But reject it we should. Scarcity and plenty should not be pried apart and set up as opposing moral visions, one
standing for darkness and depravity, the other for sweetness and light. Nor should they be seen as myths or characterized
as laws. Both scarcity and plenty are real, and neither tells the whole story or ultimate truth about the world.
The experience of scarcity and the intimations of plenty should be seen instead as opposite poles between which
the moral life oscillates. And the moral vision that contains both scarcity and plenty can be seen in the story
of the Tower of Babel, though not in Schwartz's interpretation of it.
According to Schwartz, the story of the Tower of Babel is a simple tale told in black and white, a story of "God
crushing man's heavenward ambitions and punishing him with divisiveness." The consequence of the people's
pride and their rebelliousness is "bondage to a human overlord." And thus "the division of people
into peoples is not in their interests, but in the interest of maintaining the power of a tyrannical, threatened
deity jealously guarding his domain." Perhaps. But the story can be read in other ways. Indeed, the Tower
of Babel tale readily lends itself to being read as part of God's moral education of mankind.
The nine verses that chronicle the tower builders' ambition and the frustration of their project reveal a people
of few words and limited desires united by a common language and a shared longing. The general impression is one
of innocence and childlike simplicity. For the sake of preserving unity, the people resolve to build a city, construct
a tower with its top in the sky, and make for themselves a name. But God thwarts their ambitions by descending
from the heavens, confusing their language, and dispersing mankind into separate nations. Neither the tower builders'
motives nor God's are entirely clear in the text. But the tower-building may plausibly be said to have reflected
a confusion of heart, an illusion of God's proximity and accessibility, a delusive hope to abolish by means of
mortar and brick the fearful distance separating God from man. Such an interpretation suggests that it is more
than a coincidence that the name of the city where men sought to reach God was called Babel, a word which comes
from a root meaning " confusion" and which contains in a confused arrangement the Hebrew word for "
heart." The story of Babel thus prizes not the monumental artifacts produced by human hands nor the magnificent
structures created by the human mind, but the true service of the human heart. It is the latter that brings man
closer to God.
Most surprisingly, perhaps, Schwartz does not see that the outcome at Babel was precisely the diversity for which
she thirsts. The rainbow of tongues and ways of life brought about by God's dispersion of mankind at Babel is,
the Bible seems to suggest, an expression of His wisdom. Unity and plenty no less than scarcity and division seem
to carry with them dangers to the human spirit. A single nation united by a universal language promotes a false
sense of human powers, of what human beings can accomplish by taking matters into their own hands. And so, contrary
to Schwartz, who insists that monotheism hates pluralism, the Bible teaches that pluralism is a gift that God bestows
on humankind to focus our gaze, refine our hearts, and make us more human.
Like Adam and Eve, then, the builders of Babel were emancipated from a peaceful, easy plenty rooted in an uncomplicated
and uncomprehending unity. They ascended to a realm where good things are scarce, where intimations of wholeness
can be heard if one is lucky and listens carefully, where love is possible because we are incomplete beings moved
by dreams of completeness. They ascended to a realm that most people know as the world in which we live.
The Bible does have a dark side, and Schwartz has confronted it with gusto. But the Bible's dark side is not the
Bible's whole story, and it will be misunderstood if it is wrenched from context, if it is read reductively, if
the interpreters who have lived with and transmitted the text are ignored, if its self-presentation as a document
that depicts the revelation of the one God, creator of the heavens and earth, is imperiously dismissed out of hand
as so much superstitious stuff and nonsense. Had Schwartz approached the Bible with the respect for multiplicity
that she preaches throughout her book, she would have contributed more effectively to a venerable tradition of
moral criticism. For the curse of Cain is not easily or smugly dispelled. And one of the blessings that the Bible
bestows is an understanding of why not.
Peter Berkowitz teaches government at Harvard. He is the author of Nietzsche: The Ethics of
an Immoralist (Harvard University Press).