Jerusalem and the Lineages in the Seventh Century BCE: Kinship and the Rise of Individual Moral Liability (original) (raw)

1991, Law and Ideology in Monarchic Israel, ed. B. Halpern and Deborah Whitney Hobson

The doctrine of individual divine judgment advanced by Jeremiah and Ezekiel, rejects the proverb, "The fathers ate sour grapes...," and of punishment for ancestral sin as in Kings or even the Ten Commandments. It reflects the culmination of a process in which the role of old, landed kinship corporations (here, "lineages") were politically marginalized with the overall connivance of the royal court. Thus, by the 8th century, a full-blown Renaissance -- a vast expansion of the cultural canon -- was underway throughout the Levant, because of heavy exposure to trade, and an enormous explosion of wealth (which incidentally proceeded from Phoenician exploration and expansion, from trade itself, and from post-Bronze Age political economics). Among cultural conservatives, it seemed that the royal establishment in a relatively remote capital was aping foreigners and abandoning ancestral ways. The elite Sprachkritik that surfaces in 8th-century prophetic books was that elite's reaction, and was directed at popular religion: it denied the equivalence of a symbol with its referent -- sacrifice with social justice, icons with divinity, subordinate deities with the High God, Yhwh. Assaults on communion with the dead (especially for divination) preceded 701, to urbanize the population for invasion. But 722's and 701's mass countryside deportations, and renewed 7th-century fervor, led to attacks on ritual as a mere show rather than an internal prostration (cf. the behavioral preferences of the 8th-century prophets), to rejection even of symbols like the ark, to the attribution of all subordinate gods to the Canaanites, to the destruction of "patriarchal" sanctuaries such as that at Bethel (and probably outside Beersheba), or of Solomonic shrines left intact in 701 and after, and even to the desecration of graves under Josiah. This extreme Reformationism, identified with Axial thought, accompanied both urbanization and industrialization and specialization (especially in response to Assyrian administration) and thus the operation of comparative advantage. The political, demographic and economic situations broke the status of the old lineages (cf. 6th c. Athens). And, especially in Deuteronomy, the royal establishment attempted to banish any notion of loyalty to kin above the nation, or any unlicensed cultic articulation of kinship solidarity. The prophetic critique, thus, anticipating its many subsequent imitations and variations, ushered in an idealistic Reformation that would lead both to a philosophical monotheism and to an empirical approach to nature, a modern consciousness. To this, the birth of the individual was an indispensible component. (The article contributes evidence to the view that Axial eras are necessary to modernization.)