Norman Podhoretz approaches the prophets of the Hebrew Bible with all the care that scholarship
can bring to the project. But his purpose in the end is to
administer a jolt—to bring out the challenge that classical
prophecy would pose against the
orthodoxies of our own day.
Those
new
orthodoxies have commanded their deepest allegiance among the
political class that rules now in the academy and the media, in
the schools of law and the courts. That the outlook of this
class has come to be seen as so intertwined with “modernity”
is not to
establish the futility of classical prophecy or the irrelevance
of what the prophets had to teach. It may only confirm
that the ancient vices of idolatry have taken a shape more suited
to our own times. When they are recognized in their various modern
guises
they may seem tame in their
familiarity, but Podhoretz urges us to take seriously the notion
that they hold for us, today as in the past, the same evil that
the
prophets had
the wit to see and decry in their own age.

And yet, the classic Hebrew prophecies came to us at times in
parables, with some layers of meaning discreetly hidden from the
vulgar. Uncovering those layers of meaning has given rise to a
whole industry, or vocation, of biblical scholarship. Podhoretz
has disclaimed the authority of the most accomplished
biblical scholars, some of whom were his own teachers. That
disclaimer might have been too modestly made, for his learning
here is considerable. When he majored in English at Columbia
in the early 1950s, he also worked toward a degree of Bachelor
of Hebrew Literature at the College of Jewish Studies, then a
division of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Abraham Joshua
Heschel was on the faculty then, and Podhoretz came to know
other scholars in this field
when he published them
in Commentary
magazine. He took on the editorship of Commentary in his late
twenties, after a stint of study in Cambridge, and his editorship
ran for nearly forty years.

Some reviewers have been so struck by the biblical scholarship
that they have fastened on that character of the book; but in
that reading, I think, they miss the point.
What is at work in
the book are the
same perspective and concerns that were described
in his editorship. His understanding was furnished by a serious
study of literature and theology; and in growing up in Brooklyn
in the 1930s and 1940s he had cultivated at least that urbanity of
one anchored in the world, able to see it as it was. From this
background of study and experience, he brought his
intelligence
to bear on the issues that vexed our politics.
His concern is to read the prophets seriously, but to read them
with a sense of what they may genuinely have to say about those
issue of moral consequence that trouble our politics right now.
In this sense, as Podhoretz notes, he brings to the task the
character of an “amateur” in the most literal sense, as one who
loves the subject and
approaches the prophets with love and
reverence.

To take in the full sweep of the prophets, from Joshua to the
Second Zechariah, from the death of Moses to the end of the sixth
century B.C.E., is to take in a history of the Jews that is worthy of Hollywood, in its scenes of miracles and mayhem, of
picturesque slaughter along with romance and martyrdom. There
are warriors collecting foreskins of their enemies and
aggressive wives, like Jezebel, egging on their pusillanimous
husbands.

After Joshua’s breathtaking performance at the battle
of Jericho, he does an encore no less striking. He confronts a
coalition of Amorite chieftains, and God comes to his aid again,
raining hailstones down on the Amorites, and granting yet another
miracle: He will have the sun stand still until Joshua finishes
off the Amorites. After the death of Joshua, an angel
appears, delivering yet another in what would be, over the years,
a string of familiar complaints and charges: The children of
Israel are denounced for failing to fulfill their part of the
covenant with God, the God who brought them out of Egypt, and
even now promises not to abandon them.
But the Israelites have
mingled with the inhabitants of the surrounding lands, and picked
up their habits. They set up altars in groves, and some fall
into the worship of Baal.
The saga of the prophets becomes an
ongoing series of recriminations and warnings, of dooms foretold,
to a people that have fallen away from the “laws and statutes” of
the one God. For it is precisely those laws and statutes that
have defined the people of Israel and their mission as a people
“chosen.”

Samuel warned the Hebrews that if they chose to be governed
by a king, they would experience all of the corruptions that come
with monarchy. Kings would deploy their sons and their property
as though they were their own. Still, the people shunned that
advice, and what followed were the kingships of Saul (c.
1020–1004 B.C.E) and David (c. 1004–965 B.C.E). Podhoretz
characterizes them as “relatively benign,” but they were attended
with rough times and high costs. After the death of David’s son,
Solomon, the united kingdom broke into two, with a kingdom in
Judah in the north and in Israel in the South. From that point
follows a string of disasters, which might have borne out the
presentiments of Samuel.

Jewish scholars have been moved, of
course, to puzzle
about a God who would dispense a rough
justice on the people He had chosen, punishing them, say, for the sins
of David. But as the story unfolds we see other incidents, as
harsh or astounding. The celebrated Elijah offers a challenge to
the rival prophets of Baal, collecting about four hundred and
fifty of them in a contest to see whose sacrifice could be
consumed with fire from above. Elijah’s sacrifice is consumed,
along with everything in the immediate vicinity, and his
adherents then proceed to kill all of the prophets on the other
side for the sake of rooting out the idolatry in their midst.

Just from these ingredients, in a story richly unfolding, the
record describes a God not at all reluctant to intervene in
history and take sides.
Elishah exhibited the power of
bringing a child back from the dead, and his power did not
desert him at his own death, for he managed his own resurrection.
And Elijah, after a life filled with incident, had the distinct
honor of being borne directly to heaven with a fiery chariot.
With these
ingredients in place, the story of Christ’s
advent and resurrection is striking, but not novel. The
awareness of that record may only confirm Paul’s observation that
the account of God-become-man was, for the Jews, a difficulty,
but for the Greeks an absurdity.

For the Greeks, and the cultivated pagans of Rome, there were
the things that were permanent
and the things that were ephemeral
and contingent. The God of this scheme was part of the permanent
things, but in that event, as Aristotle suggested, God would not
have moving parts, for God could not be material. Material
things decomposed, and they could not be part of the permanent
things. From that understanding one could derive the God who was
the First Cause in the universe, the unmoved mover, though not
the God who negotiated with Abraham over Sodom and Gomorrah, or
the God who died on the cross.
The kind of God who
could direct Elijah to cross the lines of different polities,
cashier the rulers in one place and install rulers in
another—that had to be a God with a universal jurisdiction. And
it figured: the God who authored a universal law of physics would
not have authored a moral law confined to Damascus or Jersey
City.

Podhoretz catches the logical core of the matter when he
observes that “If only one God exists, then it is axiomatic that
He is the God of all people.” The classical philosophers could
reason back to a First Cause that is not merely contingent, and
Augustine, using his wit to expose the incoherence of the Roman
polytheists, suggested that reason itself could work its way back
to that one God. Nevertheless, Jews and Christians take, as a
distinct teaching of revelation, the God who disclosed himself as
the Creator. From that point, Podhoretz engages, as he says, the
axioms of reasoning, to extract the God who covers all—and whose
laws then are universal. Spinoza had taunted the Hebrews: they
would be “no less blessed,” he wrote, “if God had called all men
equally to salvation, nor would God have been less present to
them for being equally present to others; their laws would have
been no less just if they had been ordained for all.”

As
Podhoretz argues, however, there was no hypocrisy, because the
universal sweep of the teaching had been present from the
beginning in the awareness of the God who was One. And for that
reason Podhoretz sets himself decorously, but emphatically,
against the biblical scholars who seek to argue that there was a
shift, somewhere around the time of Amos, from the God tied to a
“particular” people, exacting rituals of obedience, to a more
universal God, available to all, with “moral” principles that
swept now, more broadly, beyond the written statutes and the
prosaic, daily rituals.
“There is,” Podhoretz writes,

no
problem here [of God covering all people with his laws and
concern]. A question arises only because God has entered into a
special relation with one people alone, the people of Israel.

[H]e affirms that, for inscrutable reasons of His own, God
has chosen the children of Israel as the human instrument through
which to reveal Himself and to promulgate His laws and His
commandments. But in order to spread those laws and those
commandments throughout the world, the people of Israel first
have to fight against their own attraction to idolatry, which is
always standing in the way of their divinely ordained mission.

Podhoretz explains here the puzzle among some commentators as to
how
early the Jews had been committed to
monotheism. Had they not been committed to monotheism
from the beginning, from God’s covenant with Abraham? Well, yes
and no. For as Podhoretz points out there was a lingering
“monaltry,” an inclination to worship one God, but to acknowledge
other, lesser gods. The continuing war against this paganism
defined the mission of the prophets. The record confronting
them, in the daily lives of the people, was grim by any
reckoning: there were Jews practicing cannibalism at the time of
Micah and apparently persisting with the sacrifice of children
even at the time of Jeremiah.

Perhaps with a sense of the
baseness still unmeasured, still not experienced in its
bottomless depths, Amos was moved to declare, with a certain
anguish, that even murder may be better than idolatry. What
could not be ruled out, in the murders and villainies yet to be
licensed when people had detached themselves radically from any
sense of the laws that cast up restraints? Later, Zephaniah would
insist that God had to concentrate now on Judah and Jerusalem
because, as Podhoretz writes, they had been “so thoroughly
infected by idolatry of every kind—Baalism, astral worship and
child sacrifice dedicated to the god Molech.”

Podhoretz candidly notes that, as political seers, the
prophets had a dismal record. Neither Zephaniah nor Nahum
foresaw the rise of Persia. Neither Habakkuk nor Jeremiah
anticipated that the Persians would take the ascendance over the
Babylonians.
But Podhoretz argues that acuteness in prediction is
not the standard against which the prophets should be measured.
By the end of the period of classical prophecy,
idolatry had been discredited and virtually purged from the
understanding of what defined a Jewish people. By any measure of
things, that was a massive achievement, and without it, it is hard
to imagine the new sect of Jewish-Christians taking on the task
of bringing that rigorous monotheism to the rest of the world.

But at the same time, that achievement could not have been
managed by prophets who were willing, in the modern style, to
recede from “judgmentalism” at every sign of moral slippage. Nor
by men who fancied that they could bring peace to the world by
refusing to confront the evil before them. It would be a grave
mistake, as Podhoretz says, to identify the prophets with the
fuzzy liberalism of our own day, ever ready to turn swords into
plowshares (citing Isaiah) and hope that, if the wicked went
unopposed by arms, the lion would lie down with the lamb.
Podhoretz
reads the
prophets as men never taken in by that kind of utopianism. They
leave to God, and only God, the office of performing
miracles. In the meantime, they would call the Jews to look
seriously at the evils before them, including the evils of their
own making.

As Podhoretz
understands the
lessons of the prophets,
the evils they sought to
resist were not confined to Jews. It was just that the Jews had
to confront them among themselves before they could rightly take
up their mission of bringing the laws to the rest of the world.
By the same measure, the things the prophets had to teach would
instruct the people who were not of the Jews, and even the
atheists. But as he makes this move, he appeals to “the terms
which, in his own heart, each man knows.” That is a classical
formulation of the “natural law,” the law that is accessible to
people even when they do not know, or follow, the laws or the
rituals among Jews and Christians.
With that move, Podhoretz can
encompass figures as diverse as Saul Bellow, a Jew quite detached from the
religious tradition, and George Orwell, a professed atheist. In
Orwell’s courageous opposition to murderous totalitarian regimes,
Podhoretz finds a man “doing God’s work.”
In this vein,
appealing to the natural law, Podhoretz appreciates the American
Founders with their appeal to “Nature and Nature’s God.”

In one form or another, the central vice, as Podhoretz sees
it, is antinomianism, the rejection of lawfulness and the moral
restraints that the law prescribes. In the ancient world, it
came along with paganism and polytheism; in our own world, the
detachment from moral restraints comes from moral relativism in
all its familiar forms—cultural relativism, nihilism,
postmodernism, and even radical feminism, with its denial of
“nature” and of moral truths springing from that nature. In our
own time, the malady expresses itself most vividly in the release
of sexuality from the framework of marriage and commitments
sustained by law.
The vast wave of divorce has brought wreckage in the lives of children,
including rising rates of suicide among the young. With the
ethic of easier divorce came a new rationale to justify
sacrificing the needs of children to the interests of their
parents. As Podhoretz suggests, this may be the form that “child
sacrifice” has taken in our own time, and the results have hardly
been less deadly.

Podhoretz cites here the Palestinian intifada,
where the Palestinians were willing to incite their own children
to challenge Israeli tanks, and in that way make martyrs of their
children. Yet when it comes to the willingness of parents to
sacrifice children to their own interests, and even to see the lives
of their children snuffed out, America over the last generation
has surely given the world a far more dramatic example.
I take
it as an example of Podhoretz’s delicacy that he says nothing
here of abortion, though there could hardly be an example of his
point more evident or lethal (with about 1.3 million deaths each
year, carried out for nearly thirty years).
As the philosopher Robert George
remarked, “an infallible sign of [idolatry, or the worship of]
false gods is the demand for innocent blood.”

In other instances, the record of universalism and
particularism was also politically rather mixed. Was the “wrong”
of genocide a universal wrong, to be resisted in all places? Or
would the Holocaust be regarded mainly as a crime committed
against Jews, with no proper analogue anywhere else? Jews have
been resolved that it was a grievous fault of political leaders
in the West that they turned away from the prospect of rescuing
the victims in Hitler’s death camps. But there was no notable
movement among American Jews in the 1970s to mobilize American
arms to resist the genocide carried out in Cambodia, as the Khmer
Rouge slaughtered about two million out of a population of eleven
million.
Jews showed a reluctance to
seem parochial, in defending their own interests, when it came to
self-described American Nazis seeking to march through Skokie,
Illinois and taunt survivors from Hitler’s camps. In this case,
organizations like the American Jewish Committee identified the
interests of Jews with the interest in preserving a regime of the
First Amendment. To my mind, there was a grave mistake in
assuming that the First Amendment would be oblivious to an
assault in the form of speech, or that it made no distinction
between the victims and the assailants. But was this reaction,
on the part of the Jewish community, a move to forego the narrow
interests of Jews for the sake of becoming the bearer of a
broader ethic to a wider community?

Podhoretz argues that the particular is not lost in the
universal, that the insistence on ritual does not mark a deafness
to a moral world extending beyond the Jews. But as he candidly
acknowledges, he has not exactly been Orthodox himself in his
adherence to the rituals, with their insistent, daily demands. As
he moves to the natural law, written on our hearts—as he moves,
that is, to an understanding that encompasses the Jews who have
drifted into atheism, along, one might say, with righteous
gentiles, he would seem to be moving quite decisively to the side
of the moral ethic rather than the particular ritual, to the
universal law rather than the rules of the tribe.
And he is anchored there even though one enduring question
remains unanswered. That is the question of theodicy or God’s
justice: Why does God permit the wicked to prosper, while the
righteous and the innocent suffer? Podhoretz takes it as a
cardinal point in favor of the honesty of the Bible that this
question is recorded persistently, as a charge against God, even
though the answers
are never finally satisfying. Habakkuk (c.
586–610 B.C.E.) confronts God on the question, and laments at one
point, “Oh Lord, how long shall I cry and thou wilt not hear!
even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save? Why
dost thou show me iniquity and cause me to behold grievance?”

It is surely no answer to the question to retort, as God does to
Job, Where were you when I “laid the foundations of the earth”?
The problem may not be so acute if one doubts that God intervenes
in history, and that a Himmler is receiving his punishment even
now, and everlastingly, in the life that comes after death. But
the problem remains nagging for the Jews, for as Podhoretz notes,
nowhere “does the Hebrew Bible unmistakably and unambiguously
hold out the prospect of an afterlife in which rights are wronged
and wrongs are righted.” For the Orthodox, these things will be
taken care of in “the world to come.” But in
the meantime,
Podhoretz settles in with the mysteries of God. The doubting,
but reverent man, will finally “bow his head, accept in all
humility that there are questions he cannot and never will be
able to answer, and he will rely on faith to carry him through.”
And yet, Podhoretz’s faith here seems to be undergirded with the
conviction that there are moral laws anchoring our world, laws
that instruct us in the ways of duties manfully accepted, and of
liberties forborne. With all of the sober doubts there is a
conviction that God will keep his promises, that He will say, as
He did through Isaiah, “Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I
have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.”