Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham

CHAPTER SIX: Pollution and Purgation

103 chapter six Pollution and Purgation The story of mankind that unfolds after the expulsion from Paradise helps diminish our wonder at the Fall by showing us how deep and intransigent is the human creature’s propensity to evil. This of course prompts in us again the question why the Creator had to create so labile a being in His image. What prompts new wonder, however, is the reluctance God shows to curtail human evil, to exercise His policing authority. We know of course what the Scripture eventually teaches to be the answer to human errancy: the rule of a specific code of positive divine law, delivered and taught through prophecy to a chosen people, who are thus constituted ‘‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’’ (Exod. 19:6). But the peculiarities of this answer are so great as to make it far from easy to comprehend. Why a chosen people? Why this positive law, for just this one people? Scripture, it would appear, intends to help us to begin to understand the necessity, and something of the purpose, of the Mosaic law and the chosen people by taking us through a series of divine historical ‘‘experiments,’’∞ in which we are made the vicarious witnesses of a succession of forms of social existence that do not yet know the people chosen to receive this law, to be formed spiritually by it, and thus to exemplify its meaning to all the world. The first divine experiment, lasting for a millennium and a half—or in other words for almost half of the total historical time that the Hebrew Bible treats—shows us what humanity for the most part decays into when left almost entirely to its own devices. Yet it is not su≈cient to characterize this first and longest biblical epoch in such depressing terms. The era from the Fall to the Flood is not merely one of divine disengagement. God’s reluctance to promulgate commandments, to make covenants, to designate prophets or judges or kings, bespeaks His original and never-tobe forgotten preference for a much simpler, more direct and intimate, less ‘‘political,’’ form of governance. The moral grandeur of the covenants, and the law, and the lawful community that the law makes possible, is not to be permitted to obscure the fact that covenant and law represent God’s necessarily punitive remedy for man’s rebellious, sinful rejection of His Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham 104 original, less ‘‘institutional’’ intention.≤ That original intention, and the human possibility of abiding by it, is still visible in the line descended from Seth, as opposed to the line descended from Cain. By devoting as much space to the uneventful genealogy of the blameless Seth and his long-lived o√spring as it does to the dramatic misdeeds and amazing accomplishments of Cain and his o√spring, Scripture does more than indicate the purity of the genealogical line descending from Adam to Noah; it also reveals something of the character of the stock from which Noah comes, and limns that stock in sharp contrast with that of Cain. A few points stand out. It was only after the establishment of Seth’s line (i.e., after the birth of Seth’s eldest son Enosh) that men began, the Bible says (or began once again), to call upon God by His name, Yahweh (hwhy). This invocation would seem to signal the recovery of some sense of intimacy with God.≥ Yet the term ‘‘intimacy,’’ unless qualified, is too strong. After the banishment of Cain, the only appearance God makes in this whole fifteenhundred -year era is when He is repeatedly said to have walked with, and finally to have taken away, Enoch, the descendant of Seth—in pointed contrast to the Enoch who is the firstborn son of Cain, the Enoch who achieved fame by having the first city named after him (Gen. 4:17, 5:21 and 24; see also Sir. 44:16 and 49:14). Centuries later God walked once again with a single and singular man: Noah, Enoch’s great-grandson. At the beginning of the narration of Seth’s line, the Scripture pauses to remind us that ‘‘man’’ (+da, ‘‘adam’’) is the name God gave when He created ‘‘man’’ in His likeness, male and female, and ‘‘blessed them’’ (Gen. 5:1–2). Scripture then says that after Adam had lived one hundred thirty years he begot a son in his likeness and image and named...