StudyDaddy Article Writing Following this, please find the guidelines for academic writing (MLA and Chicago). These guidelines for academic writing are essential for performing well on this assignment. Do take a close look and

Following this, please find the guidelines for academic writing (MLA and Chicago). These guidelines for academic writing are essential for performing well on this assignment. Do take a close look and

H E U R S E o F AI The Violent REGINA M. SCHWARTZ Legacy of Monotheism The University of Chicago Press' Chicago and London N Introduction REBUILDING BABEL At this point it seems impossible to think difference WJth- out thinking it aggressively or defensively. But think it we must, because if we don't. it will continuc to th1l1k us. .1S it has since Gcnesis at the very least.-Alice Jardine MURDER O riginal sin. The wisdom of the ages tells us that all the miseries of the world-the injustice, hostility, pain, poverty, illness, vio- lence, and even death-are the result of the first man and woman disobeying God. They ate a fruit when he told them not to. I have never been persuaded, and I have tried. I wrote a book about Paradise Lost to try to make sense of the idea but concluded that even Milton laid the blame elsewhere.! Now when I look at the tragic state of affairs in the world and then turn to that story of disobeying God for an explanation, it still doesn't square. But there is another Rebuildit1,~ Babel ['1 t r<> d u (t i <>" rejection of Cain's sacrifice is no mere embarrassment. Not surpris- ingly, Cain is devastated: "Then the Lord said to Cain, 'Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?'" This sounds much like the unhelpful dictum from Exodus, "I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy." Yet however circular, God's response does suggest that Cain has already done something wrong (even before he has) since he has been rejected. In what fol- lows, Cain earns that judgment retrospectively by murdering his brother. Cain has worked the soil, has offered the fruits of the soil, and when he kills his brother, the blood of Abel cries out from the soil. Then he is banished from the soil, condemned to wander be- yond the presence of God in the land of Nod (land of wandering). "Hence you are banned from the soil which forced open its mouth to take your brother's blood from your hand. When you til1 the soil, it shal1 not again give up its strength to you" (Gen 4:11-12). In tillS story, the fIrSt brother, who is the first murderer, also becomes the first outcast. Why did God condemn Cain's sacrifice?2 What would have hap- pened if he had accepted both Cain's and Abel's offerings instead of choosing one, and had thereby promoted cooperation between the sower and the shepherd instead of their competition and violence? What kind of God is this who chooses one sacrifice over the other? This God who excludes some and prefers others, who casts some out, is a monotheistic God-monotheistic not only because he de- mands allegiance to himself alone but because he confers his favor on one alone. While the biblical God certainly does not always gov- ern his universe this way, the rule presupposed and enforced here, in the story of Cain and Abel, is that there can be no multiple al1e- giances, neither directed toward the deity nor, apparently, emanating from him. Cain kills in the rage of his exclusion. And the circle is vicious: because Cain is outcast, Abel is murdered and Calll is cast out. We are the descendants of Cain because we too live in a world where some are cast out, a world in which whatever law of scarcity made that ancient story describe only one sacrifice as acceptable-a foundational myth, one that follows on the heels of the story of Adam and Eve, that strikes me as especially appropriate for the vio- lence that rends our world: the story of Cain and Abel. The first brothers committed the first murder, and unhappily I do think that the devastating legacy of Cain is very much with us. We are the heirs of Cain because we murder our brothers. This original violence makes a more modest claim than original sin: we do not kill one another because Cain did; rather, we kill one another for similar reasons. While the story of Cain and Abel does not pause to offer anything like a full account of logical explanations or deep motivations, it is safe to say that it tells a story of sibling rivalry. It depicts a world that has just been created-a world that is virtually unpopulated-and in that world the fIrSt man and first woman give birth to the first brothers who immediately dramatize the first inexplicable rivalry. No friendly competition, it soon proves fatal. What are they competing for? Not, it seems, for the favor of their earthly parents, Adam and Eve, but for the favor of their heav- enly Maker. In this cryptic narrative, each brother offers a sacrifice to God, but for some mysterious reason one sacrifice is deemed un- acceptable while the other is well-received. Abel kept flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. But Abel brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor upon Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry and his face was downcast. (Gen 4:2-5) What we know about sacrifice can be gleaned from other biblical contexts. Its uses range from rites of expiation-including purifi- cation, exorcism, and scapegoating-to rites of communion and thanksgiving. The sacrifices of Cain and Abel suggest propitiation, that is, an offering to ward off divine wrath, to encourage the deity's favor, to invoke his blessings of prosperity. With the blessings or curses of the cosmos attached to divine pleasure or displeasure, God's 3 2 Introduction scarcity of goods, land, labor, or whatever-still prevails to dictate the tenns of a ferocious and fatal competition. Some lose. When Cain's sad tale is retold in the Bible with another set of brothers, that uncomfortable rule of scarcity appears again. There is not enough divine favor, not enough blessing, for both Jacob and Esau. One can prosper only at the other's expense. When Jacob steals his brother's blessing, there are no blessings left for Esau: "Esau pleaded with his father, 'Do you have only one blessing, my father? Bless me too, my father!'" (Gen 27:38). The terrible cost of this scarcity of blessings is another Outcast: "Your home shall be far from the earth's riches." And again the Outcast becomes murderous: Esau harbored a grudge against his brother Jacob on account of the blessing that his father had given him. And Esau said to himself, "As soon as the time to mourn my father is at hand, I will kill my brother Jacob." (Gen 27:41) I n the Bible, these brothers are the eponymous ancestors of peoples: peoples whose enmity grows and is nurtured for centuries, peoples who define themselves and their prosperity in that close atmosphere of scarcity, peoples who conceive of the Other as cursed and mur- derous outcasts. IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE This book is about collective identity-the identities of groups, of peoples, of nations. It is a reminder, at a time when peoples are fighting fiercely to preserve their identities in places as far-flung as South Africa, Bosnia, the United States, and Ireland, that such iden- tities are, after all, constructed-hence provisional and arbitrary- however stubbornly those identities are shored up with concepts of religion, ethnicity, race, or nationality. Nonetheless, in recent years, much energy has been devoted to defining and defending the bor- ders of collective identities, and when the insight surfaces that their boundaries are provisional and constructed, it seems to have been more ineffectual than mobilizing. More has been achieved by dig- gmg in, claiming distinctive identities and gaining a hearing for 4 Rehuilding Babd them, particularly because the rights of those peoples who have been marginalized are often at stake..J But this ancient model of collective identity-as peoples set apart-may put such distinctive identities at another great peril, one that stems from its very oppositional charac- ter. The risk is not only further marginalization but more generally the fragmentation of humanity into clusters that must nervously de.. fend their borders, both offensively and defensively. That danger is one we should heed from the example of nationalism in our modern world, where lines on the map are drawn and redrawn in blood. territories expand and contract, but the violence does not go away because that violence is in the very lines themselves. This book is about violence. It locates the origins of violence in identity formation, arguing that imagining identity as an act of distinguishing and separating from others, of boundary making and line drawing, is the most frequent and fundamental act of violence we commit. Violence is not only what we do to the Other. It is prior to that. Violence is the very construction of the Other. This process is tricky: on the one hand, the activity of people defining themselves as a group is negative, they arc by virtue of who they are not. On the other hand, those outsiders-so needed for the very self-definition of those inside the group-are also regarded as a threat to them. Ironically, the Outsider is believed to threaten the boundaries that are drawn to exclude him, the boundaries his very existence maintains. Outside by definition but always threatening to get in, the Other is poised in a delicate balance that is always off balance because fear and aggression continually weight the scaJes. Identity forged against the Other inspires perpetual policing of its fragile borders. History has shown that in the name of our iden- tities-religious, ethnic, national, racial, gender-we commit and suffer the most horrific atrocities. This book argues that acts of iden- tity formation are themselves acts of violence.4 I trace this notion of identity born in violence to the Bible, not because it is its origin (certainly earlier ancient peoples had such formations of collective identity) nor because the Bible advocates violence (it is much too heterogeneous to promote any single mode of forming group identity) but because of the enormous cultural 5 I ~1 t ro d u [t i 0 /1 weight the Bible has had through its interpretations and dissemina- tions, chiefly in Christendom and thence into secular thought and institutions where it has forged contemporary notions of collective identity. We secularists have barely begun to acknowledge the bibli- cal influence, confidently, and I think mistakenly, believing that a sharp division has been achieved between the premodern sacred worldview and the modern secular one. But sacred categories of thought have not just disappeared. They have lingered into the mod- ern world where they are transformed into secular ones. As Carl Schmitt, a political theorist who became an important ideologue to the Nazis, well understood, "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only be- cause of their historical development-in which they were trans- ferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for ex- ample, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver-but also because of their systematic structure."5 From a different political quarter, the Marxist anthropologist Benedict Anderson reminds us early in his important study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, to seek the roots of nationalism in the cultural systems that preceded it, those of the dynastic realm and the religious community." While nationalism assumed specific and distinct forms in the modern era, with linguistic and cultural units often (but not always) overlapping political ones and with the sovereignty of the state variously imple- mented, these formations evolved from concepts of collective iden- tity that had been in place for as long as there has been any notion of "peoples." The Bible encodes Western culture's central myth of collective identity. Its narratives describe forging peoples, and it offers multiple visions of what might be meant by "a people" (each of these will be the focus of the chapters of this book): a group with a common deity and cultic practices, a population who hold a territory in common, a nation with a bureaucracy, a kinship group, an exiled community united by a common literature. That is, most of the pages of the Hebrew Bible are not filled with ethical precepts or Sunday-school lessons in piety, but with stories detailing the processes of forming collective identities. These include mythic tales about the epony- 6 R c b II i I dill g B a b cI mOlls ancestors of peoples and epiclike narratives devoted to describ- ing the liberation of a slave class from its oppressors; stories that de- scribe aspirations of self-determination and a communal pledge to a deity and his laws; tales of conquering and settling territory, of defending borders and establishing a variety of self-governing con- figurations-from tribes to judgeship to monarchy-stories of a nation divided and conquered, a people deported and their efforts to sustain an identity in exile, and finally the attempt to establish an iden- tity, upon returning, as a province of another empire. Meanwhile, throughout all of these stories, there is an effort to forge identity by means of these very stories, to create the proverbial "people of the book." Just before the advent of modern secularism, these biblical narra- tives devoted to formations of a people were disseminated in a way that was unrivaled in the history of their reception, indeed, in the history of reception of any book. Theologically, Protestantism had taken the Bible out of the hands of the clergy and put it in the hands of the masses. Materially, print technology had taken the Bible out of the hands of the scribal monks and put it in the hands of the masses. Europe acquiring literacy was Europe learning to read the Bible. Europe gaining print culture was Europe reading the Bible. "In the two decades 1520-1540 three times as many books were published in German as in the period 1500-1520, an astonishing transformation to which Luther was absolutely central. His works represented no less than one third of all German-language books sold between 1518 and 1525. Between 1522 and 1546, a total of 430 editions (whole or partial) of his Biblical translations appeared. In effect, Luther became the first best-selling author so known."7 While the Reformation centered on Scripture reading in the vernacular, it also ushered in a transfer oflegitimacy from the papacy to the state. Ultimately, the household became the temple, with Bible reading serving as the core of every family's self-government. And this Eu- rope-filled with Bible stories about peoples-was also a Europe on the road to carving itself into new peoples, into nationalisms. Despite the biblical preoccupation with collective identity and the vast cultural influence those notions of identity have inevitably 7 wielded, the Bible has received scanty attention from scholars of modern and contemporary cultural and political theory. I have al- ready alluded to one reason: the mistaken assumption that the Scrip- :ures along with all things vaguely "religious" belong to a long dark Ige that ended with enlightened secularism. Another is to be found n the history of professional disciplines. Since the eighteenth cen- ury, the Bible has become the property of biblical scholars and theo- )gians, with the less expert excluded. Biblical scholars have been usily charting the history of the composition and editing of the :xt rather than its reception, looking backward rather than forward. heologians have been mining the Bible to authorize their own ver- )115 of the sacred. Falling between the disciplinary boundaries of blical history on the one hand and theology on the other, the vast rect the Bible has had on our cultural and political lives has been t largely unexamined.H We may know, vaguely, that it was quoted tensively during the revolutions in France and the New World, ring the civil wars in Great Britain and America, that the Bible s invoked both to justifY slavery and to abolish it, invoked for ;sionary imperialism and revolutionary response, that its cadences re intoned at the birth of various nationalisms and its verses In- :d not only the rhetoric of Zionism and the liberation theologies "atin America and South Africa. but also considerably Jess overt ical polities. But what these superficial al1usions belie is the much ::>er influence the Bible has had on the way we think-about pIes, nations, religions, ethnic groups, and races-and that we ) think in those categories at all we Owe to the book whose chief 'ccupation is imagining and forging collective identity. All this is am that. if we do not think about the Bible, it win think (for) us. Iterpretations of biblical narratives have also been put to any and f political purpose. When universalism was needed, Deutero- l'S sentiment that Israel is a light to the nations was useful. When :uJarism was in order, Ezra's inveighing against the foreigner d do. Since it seems to contain all things, it has been useful for ds. (In this, I am well aware that my Own biblical interpretations 1Y explicit intention-to critique inventing grouP identity in Ice-are very much a part of that history of purposeful and Rehui/din.1! Bahrt political biblical hermeneutics.) This long history has not been as innocent, as happily egalitarian, with conflicting interpretations merrily balancing each other out, as it might sound. Rather, those who have held the reins of power made sure that their interpreta_ tions were authoritative, that while they reigned their interpretations reigned, backed by the formidable and unassailable authority of God's' word. Like the notion of the divine right of kings, biblical authority has functioned as a deeply conservative force, and if it has offered aid and comfort, it has also been used to sanction all manner of abuses." Why we should need the Bible to "authorize" at an, why Our ethics and Our codes of conduct are not felt to be sufficiently compelling without the Bible's validation, may well be a complicated question (the mechanisms of projection? mystification?), but cer- tainly the hazards of authorizing that text-any text-whether it is the Bible, the Qur'an, or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, are palpable. The U.S. Constitution with its Vast judicial afterlife offers compelling demonstration that when authority is vested in such doc- uments they take on the pOwer to threaten and to protect, to punish and to reward. To invoke the authority of the text is to claim the privilege of the highest court. However much biblical narratives themselves may caution against such authorization, offering critique after critique to unseat each of its Own authorized institutions (judgeship, priesthood, monarchy, prophecy) and revising each of its covenant codes (Noachic, Mosaic, Davidic, prophetic), neverthe_ less, its interpreters have insisted upon canonizing, codifYing, and authorizing, in short, in turning the text, despite itself, into a weapon. And in the violent tactics of identity formation, that weapon is most often wielded against the Other. It could be otherwise. In addition to Cain's legacy of violent iden- tity formation against the Other, the Bible has much to teach us about how difticult it is to designate the foreigner and how perme- able the boundaries of any people are. Anyone with even the slight- est familiarity with the Bible wil1 know that it is far too multifaceted to be reduced to any single or simple notion of a deity, of religion, and especially of a people. However limited our knowledge of its composition, it is clear that the Bible does not conform to modern 9 Introduction rlotions of authorship, composed as it was over hundreds of years in iisparate socioeconomic, cultic, and political settings. Surely such a work cannot have "one line" on collective identity, one understand- ing of who the Israelites are or who the foreigners are. There were editors, presumably even final editors, who could have ironed out all these contradictions but who chose, importantly, not to resolve them, and in the process they bequeathed a text that foregrounds the many ways that "a people" is constructed. It was laterinterpreters who, grinding their political biblical axes, violated the editors' pref- erence for multiplicity, simplifYing the complexities of identity for- mation and flattening out the variegated depictions in order to legi- timate claims for an identity locked in perpetual defense against the Other. In addition to the powerful force the Bible has generally exerted on our commonplaces of group identity, a very specific historical circumstance accounts for the direct way in which biblical narratives have shaped concepts of nationalism. A key moment in the history of biblical interpretation occurred during that transition from the predominantly sacred to the largely secular worlds that spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact, biblical interpretation itself helped to propel that shift toward secularism, with its so-called higher criticism. 10 Bible scholars of the period (many the rebellious sons of ministers) joined together in an effort to liberate minds from enthrallment to religious superstition. They asserted that the Bible was not the revealed word of God, but that it was written by individ- uals and schools in specific historical circumstances. With the aid of the burgeoning technologies of archeology and philology, the ridd]e of the Bible's composition finally cou]d be unraveled, and the mys- teries of this once sacred and inviolate text could be laid bare. But these erudite biblical scholars, for all of their commitment to objec- tive scientific inquiry, could not escape their own historical setting and their own political and philosophical presuppositions. Whether Hegelian, romantic, pietist, or none of the above, they were imbued with nascent German nationalism. Could it really be coincidence that biblical higher criticism and the ideology of radical modern nationalism were born in the same period in the same place?11 The 10 Bible's preoccupation with collective identity was read through the lenses of German nationalism-God's chosen people became the chosen nation-and read not only by scholars but also by the clergy and masses who became nationalized in the wake of reading transla- tions of the Bible. Throughout all this reading and interpreting, then, German versions of biblical narratives of collective identity assumed their place in conceiving modern nationalism. With the archeolo- gist's spade and the philologist's verb ending, miracles gave way to science, mythic origins to history, and the once sacred understanding of collective identity-as a people forged by the Deity-gave way to secular understandings of collective identity, including modern nationalism. In time, what had been a "covenant" became trans- formed into variations of a "social contract." In a disturbing inversion, soon nationalism was authorized by the once-holy writ. A text that had once posited collective identity as the fiat of God ("I will be your God if you will be my people") came to posit collective identity as the fiat of the nation authorized by God ("one nation, under God"). Nationalism has stubbornly held fast to this legitimation by transcendence. Nations are tpe will of God. National borders are the wiJl of God. National expansions and colonization are the wiJl of God. National military confrontations are the will of God. Every nation is the one nation under God. In Germany, pietism was jOl1led to the national cult: in 1784, Friedrich Carl von Moser asserted that "Pia Desideria" (true piety) was service on behalf of truth and the fatherland. 12 The German romantic na- tionalist Ernst Moritz Arndt said that Christian prayer should accom- pany national festivals, and his suggested monument to the Battle of Leipzig (where Napoleon was defeated by the Allies) was to be crowned with a cross, for such a monument "wou]d deserve the highest praise, truly German and truly Christian." Even when Ger- man nationalism self-consciously tried to separate its cult from the Christian one, it could not hide the debt: "The Introitus, the hymn sung or spoken at the beginning of the church service, became the words of the Fuhrer, the 'Credo' a confession of faith pledging loy- alty to Nazi ideology; while the sacrifice of the Mass was trans- formed into a memorial for the martyrs of the movement." 13 Where 11 Introduction nationalism is not explicitly authorized by God, it replaces God. In France, Marie-joseph-Blaise Chenier proposed in the National Con- vention on 5 November 1793 the establishment of a lay religion, that of la Patrie: Wrest the sons of the Republic from the yoke of theocracy which still weighs upon them. . . . Devoid of prejudices and worthy to represent the French nation, you will know how to found, on the debris of the dethroned superstitions, the single universal religion, which has neither sects nor mysteries, of which the only dogma is equality, of which our law-makers are the preachers, of which the magistrates are the pontiffs, and in which the human family burns its incense only at the altar ofla Patrie, common mother and divinity. 14 In the United States, symbols of nationalism are wedded to invoca- tions of the deity from the dollar bill to the pledge to the flag. We might expect that the nationalism born in the eighteenth cen- tury, a nationalism of the masses, would be eager to divest itself ex- plicitly, first, of this ecclesial relic, for it was a reminder of the univer- salism of the great Holy Roman Empire beyond the bounds of nation, and second, of this monarchical relic, for kings had ruled by divine rightY Nonetheless, nationalism clung to these old vestiges for compelling reasons. Concentrating power in a supreme sovereign is clearly an effective way to fix identity and to galvanize loyalty, as the many soldiers who willingly sacrifice their lives for their human sovereigns attest, but an even more potent way to fuel nationalistic ambitions is to call down the omnipotence of the divine sovereign, to have Him, as if by miracle, confer that omnipotence upon the temporal authority. "On his national God the modern religious na- tionalist is conscious of dependence. Of His powerful help he feels the need. In Him he recognizes the source of his own perfection and happiness. To Him, in a strictly religious sense he subjects him- self"\" Once sovereign power is legitimated by transcendence, it is elusive and (unlike human sovereignty) inviolate. There is no check upon the will of a nation-God. Carl Schmitt understood this: "The concept of sovereignty in the theory of the state. . . and the theory 12 Rebuildillg Babel of the 'sole supremacy of the state' make the state an abstract person so to speak, a unicum sui generis with a monopoly of power 'mystically produced."'17 Mystically produced and miraculously inviolate, the sovereignty of the divinely legitimated nation is, unlike its human counterpart, ultimately unimpeachable. 18 Examples could be proliferated of social theorists speaking of nationalism as a religion, marshaling the rhetoric of the sacred to describe its adherents: "National awakening in early nineteenth- century Germany, and later in other countries was experienced as rites of intoxication and solidarity shared by an entire community." "Service, even death, for the sake of the nation's cohesion, self- assertion and glory are elevated by national rhetoric to the level of sacrifice and martyrdom." "In nationalism, [the nation's] value re- sides in its capacity as the sole, binding agency of meaning and justi- fication. . . . this often has the radical consequence of transforming nationalism into a substitute religion. . . . The nation is consecrated, it is ultimately a holy entity."19 In these pages, I intend to take such rhetorical flourishes seriously, showing how and why the following sweeping assertion holds- "in nationalism, the religious is secular- ized, and the national sanctified"2fJ-by looking at the biblical legacy and the narratives that have bequeathed conceptions of collective identity. Needless to say, charting the complex inheritance of how those biblicaJ ideas came to be translated into secular formations, that is, writing a complete history of the heirs of biblicism, would be virtua]]y an inte]]ectual history of the West-and such a project is well beyond the scope of this one. Here I can only point to some key intersections of biblical identity formations and later secular be- liefs about collective identity, pausing over some of the moments in the history of the interpretation of the narratives that have been remarkably and often tragically tenacious.21 13 Chapter One INVENTING IDENTITY COVENANTS r, Yahweh your God, am a Jealous God and I punish the !:lther's fault in the sons, the grandsons, and the great- grandsons of those who hate me; but I show kindness to thou- sands of those who love me and keep my commandments. -Exodus 20::;-() Only you can make this world seem right, Only you can make the darkness bright, Only you and you alone can thrill me like you do And fill my heart with love for only you. -Buck Ran and Ande Rand M any of us imagine that the secular world has freed us from the encumbrances of religion, the rule of one deity and the au- thority of his priesthood, but the myth of monotheism contin- ues to foster our central notions of collective identity. As a cultural formation, monotheism is strikingly tenacious. Its tenet-one God 15 Chapter One establishes one people under God-has been translated from the sphere of the sacred to nationalism, and thence to other collective identities. Most historians of nationalism concede that the concen- tration of power in an omnipotent sovereign was far too useful to divest at the birth of modern nationalism, and so allegiance to a sovereign deity in order to forge a singular identity became, in secu- lar terms, allegiance to a sovereign nation to forge a national identity. That issued in such ironies as the following rhetoric from one of the architects of (secular) German nationalism: "He who does not love the fatherland which he can see, how can he love the heavenly Jeru- salem which he does not see?'" In other words, the injunction of Romans 13: 1- "let every person be subject to the governing au- thorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those au- thorities that exist have been instituted by God"- has been farther reaching than Paul could have ever imagined. In our nation's infancy, John Cotton advised John Winthrop of the Plymouth Colony that a "distinction which is put between the Laws of God and the laws of men becomes a snare. . . surely there is no human law that tend- eth to common good but the same is a law of God."2 And this has endured. In public school, 1 pledged my allegiance daily to the flag and the republic for which it stands, "one nation under God." Monotheism is a myth that grounds particular identity in universal transcendence. And monotheism is a myth that forges identity anti- thetically-against the Other. But politics are not hardwired into theology, and the relation be- tWeen monotheism and the social order is not simple. It can and has been variously conceived: as homologous, on earth as it is in heaven; as antithetical, the City of God versus the terrestrial city; as genera- tive, divine kingship as the source of human sovereignty; or one category can subsume the other-depending on your persuasion, religious myths could mirror the social order or the sacral order de- sign the state. Then too, figuring identity under a sovereign deity and figuring identity under a sovereign state could have a com- mon source: some predilection for subjection, for imagining identity "under. . . :' In what can be called America's first constitution, the 16 Inventing identity: Covena/1ts Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims promised "all due submission and obedience." Before I launch into my critique of the system of thought broadly known as monotheism, I'd like to issue a brief note of caution. First, this critique should not be confused with an assessment of the scrip- tural religious traditions, all of which have some versions of polythe- ism in their rich and complex histories (I think of Calvin's frustration when Protestant women in labor insisted on calling upon St. Mar- garet, or of the rabbinic lore that makes Proverbial Wisdom a divine consort). Furthermore, although 1 will cite the Hebrew Bible be- cause of the immense cultural influence its narratives have had through dissemination by Christianity and Islam;1 there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as monotheism in it. Monotheism would make an ontological claim that only one god exists.4 Monolatry or her/atheism would better describe the kind of exclusive allegiance to one deity (from a field of many) that we fmd in, say, Deuteronomy 28: 14, "Do not turn aside from any of the commands I give you today to the right or to the left, following other gods and serving them," but it sounds cumbersome, and since everyone uses monothe- ism to mean monolatry (thereby, with a sleight of vocabulary, turning allegiance to one god into the obliteration of other gods), I will stick to customary usage. Besides, even the monolatry variety of mono- theism is not strictly synonymous with the theology of the Hebrew Bible.' To know anything at all about the Bible is to know that it is heterogeneous and that, in the history of biblical exegesis, the same text has been understood to convey widely divergent meanings, used to justify widely divergent theologies and policies, and used to justify the oppression of peoples and the liberation of peoples, often the same peoples, usually the same verse. IMAGINING ISRAEL Identities have of late come to be thought of as provisional, con- structed, arbitrary, and one way to understand the biblical stories is to see them engaged in efforts to strengthen the precariousness of 17 Chapter O/IC collective identity formations. In the Bible, the identity of ancient Israel is shored up with the myth that it is God-given. Then Moses went up to God; the Lord called to him from the mountain, saying, "Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the Israelites: You have seen what I did to the Egyp- tians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings to myself. Now, therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all peoples." (Ex 19:3-5) Here collective identity is explicitly narrated as an invention, a radi- cal break with nature and with the past. A transcendent deity breaks into history with the demand that the people he constitutes obey the laws he institutes, and first and foremost among those laws is the requirement that they pledge allegiance to him and to him alone. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." A people are forged by their worship of one deity, Yahweh, and what makes others Other- Egyptian, Moabite, Ammonite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hittite, or Hur- rian-is their worship of foreign gods. When Israel is forged as an identity against the Other, it is figured as against other deities, and when Israel is threatened, it is not by the power of other nations, but by the power and wrath of her deity because she has wavered in her exclusive loyalty to him. Inclinations toward polytheism are repeat- edly figured as sexual infidelity: "I am a jealous God, you will have none but me"; and Israel is castigated for "whoring after" other gods, thereby imperiling her "purity": "so shameless was her whor- ing that at last she polluted the country." Jeremiah's kinky confusion of idolatry and adultery condemns Israel for "committing adultery with lumps of stone and pieces of wood" Uer 3:9). These preoccupations with divine (and sexual) fidelity are part of that ideology of identity as someone or some people who are set apart, with boundaries that could be mapped, ownership that could be titled. "You are my own people, my very own." This people is to be the exclusive possession of the deity, and none other, and they are to have exclusive desire for this deity, and none other. The Other against whom Israel's identity is forged is abhorred, abject, impure, 18 InVC/ltil1g Idc/ltity: COl/el/ants and in the "Old Testament," vast numbers of them are obliterated, while in the "New Testament," vast numbers are colonized (con- verted). This tying of identity to rejection runs counter to much of the drive that could be found elsewhere, both in the Bible and throughout religious myth and ritual, to forge identities through analogy, even identification. Instead of envisioning Israel as not- Egypt, in another biblical myth of origin, Israel is part-Egypt with a part-Egyptian Moses (born of one people, bred by another) leading the people out of Egypt, and in another story, Joseph, the son of Jacob/Israel, saves the Israelites by means of the high Egyptian status that is conferred upon him. Amid all the rich variety, I would cate- gorize two broad understandings of identity in the Bible: one grounded in Negation (or scarcity) and another in Multiplicity (or plenitude). When biblical myths carve up humanity into peoples, they make assertions of collective identity in negative terms. To be Israel is to be not-Egypt; identity is purchased at the expense of the Other. But that is not the whole story. The logic of negation should be distinguished from one of multiplicity, a logic that sustains con- traries without obliteration, that multiplies difference, and that fore- grounds the provisional character of identity. The Bible conceives of Israel's relation with the Other in diverse ways. The spectrum runs the gamut fr0111 obliterating the Other to living peaceably with her, fr0111 welcoming her into the fold of God's people to demanding that Israelites "put away" their foreign wives, from distinguishing Israel from Egypt with clearly delineated boundaries to deriving Is- rael from that part-Egyptian Moses. Furthermore, even as biblical narratives establish a logic of negation, they also critique it by exposing its enormous cost. The degradation, suffering, and blood- shed of the Other are depicted graphically, so graphically that this sympathetic depiction of the outcast threatens to overcome sympa- thy for the insider. The abhorred are not abhorred by us. Despite the Bible's efforts to shore up Israel's identity with the permanence and stability attached to notions like the "will of God," "natural" kinship relations, or territorial "inheritance," these con- structs serve only to highlight the very precariousness they are meant to strengthen. Every effort to deny, repress, contain, and otherwise 19 Chapter One minimize how tentative the construction of Israel is h~s instead the effect of underscoring the vulnerability of that model." The text seems engaged in establishing a nation ruled by a king even as it launches a powerful critique of the institution of monarchy. It nar- rates the origins of a kinship community that it completely under- cuts. It asserts that the boundaries ofland define the boundaries of a people but then insists that exile is the condition of their creation. It issues a call for a collective memory, but the memory and even the call for it are forgotten. It founds itself on the notion of a covenanted community and then takes pains to demonstrate how fragile, how easily broken, that is.7 As the constructed character of identity comes to the fore, assertions of who the people are become unmasked as provisional. The commitment to negation begins to dissolve., Israel in opposition against not-Israel ends up being elaborated mto a different understanding, of multiplicity rather than negation. The life and death struggles between Israel and Egypt give way to a another vision of Israel, not against, but among many nations: Moab, Am- mon, Assyria, Philistia, Babylonia. If the poison is fixing collective identity in opposition to the Other, then this dynamism is one anti- dote, striking a hopeful chord in what often seems an intractable intolerance. When identity is mobile and multiple, the Other is difficult to name-and to hurt. Plenitude is another antidote to the poison of forging identity in negation. The very idea that identity is constructed "against" sug- gests scarcity, as though there were a finite amount of identity itself, and so a space must be carved out for it and jealously guarded, like finite territory. If there were no identity shortage, if Israelites could be Egyptians too, for instance, there would be no need for aggressive or defensive gestures to protect their space. That is, singularity joins hands with scarcity, and both are given powerful expression in mono- theism's emphasis on allegiance to one and only one god. The bar- gain is struck in Exodus, "I will be your God if you will be my people." Henceforth, a people must attach themselves to this prin- ciple, and all the biblical preoccupations with the creation and fate of the people, their political formations and their national aspirations, are tied to that deeper concern, monotheism. Just as foreign peoples 20 In /J f /1/1 /I g I d (' /1/ i / )': C" /J C /1 a /I f s are regarded as threats to Israel, so foreign gods are deemed thre;1ts to Yahwism, and when Israel suffers, its pain is framed as punishment for wavering in her exclusive loyalty to her deity. CUTTING COVENANTS Here I will investigate the way collective identity is forged in nega- tion, and then underwritten by inviolable transcendence, by turning to biblical scenes describing the institution of Israel's identity in a covenant. The Hebrew phrase for "he made a covenant," kiirat bertt, is literally "he cut a covenant," and the violence of that ostensibly dead metaphor is dramatized in each of the biblical ceremonies of the covenant: in the covenant with Abraham in Genesis where ani- mals are cut in two and fire passes between them in a mysterious ritual, in the cutting of human flesh at circumcision-the so-called sign of the covenant-and in the covenant made at Mount Sinai where words are cut to inscribe the law in stone tablets.H According to biblical scholars, severing an animal typically at- tended covenant ceremonies in the ancient Near East, but knowing that this was customary hardly helps to familiarize that bizarre pas- sage in Genesis in which God first makes his covenant with the father of the Hebrew people. "Look at the heavens and count the stars-if indeed you can count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your offspring be." . . . "I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it." But Abram said, "0 Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?" So the Lord said to him, "Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon." Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away. As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to 21 Chapter One him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mis- treated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. . . . In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure." When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking fire pot, a blazing torch, appeared and passed be- tween the pieces. On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, "To your descendants I give this land. from the river of Egypt to the great river. the Euphrates- the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites. Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites." (Gen 15:5-21) Ancient Israel is constituted in this scene, formed as a people and as a nation. Its history is also narrated, for in the Bible. collective iden- tity is typically imagined historiographically. This history-of servi- tude and subsequent freedom from bondage, of building a great people in a mighty nation, of immense land acquisition. of establish- ing an empire-this entire foundational narrative of ancient Israel is framed by the account of severed pieces of animals. Why? In ancient Near Eastern rituals, the cut made to the animal is symbolically made to the inferior who enters into the covenant with a superior. An Aramaic treaty from the eighth century B.C.E. reads. "Just as this calf is cut up, so may Maltiel be cut up," and an earlier one describes how "Abba-an swore to Yarim-lim the oath of the gods, and cut the neck ofa lamb saying. 'If I take back what I gave you,'" presumably adding a gesture indicating that his own throat would be slit. What must Israel's forefather do to avoid the fate of the severed animals) Why does a blazing torch pass between the pieces of animal \I1stead of Abraham?') Does "cutting a covenant" create Israel's identity or destroy it? Must identity be forged in violence? One possibility, the suggestion of Rene Girard in L1 V;olCl1rc cf la sacre, is that such violence is substitutive, directing the violence of the community onto scapegoats and hence away from the persons 22 I II 11 e " t i ".e Ide II tit y: C a 11 e " a " t s whose identity is being forged. "The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence. . . . The elements of dis- sension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the per- son of the sacrificial victim and eliminated. at least temporarily. by its sacrifice. . . . The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony in the community, to reinforce the social fabric."II' Would that sacn- fice could expiate violence. This logic of sacrifice is compatible with that illogic so evident in the "binding of!sa:1c" episode, where Abra- h:1m is wdling to give up his "only" son to the sword in order to let his progeny hve. Because YOll have done this and have not withheld your son. your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descen- dants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. (Gen 22: 16-17) But I have abbreviated Girard's perception about sacrifice, for he also stresses that for identification in sacrificial rituals to work, the origi- nal object of violence must not be lost sight of in the substitution. Isaac is not fully replaced by the sacrifice of the ram; uncannily. the story has come down to us in English as "the sacrifice of Isaac." And in the covenant ceremony. Abram is not only replarcd by the flaming torch and the severed animals, he is also olle with th~m. Substitutive victims are victims nonetheless. In the scene of the covenant at Simi. where the covenant is made in stone rather than flesh and hence \.vhere we might expect substitu- tive violence to be in full play, something very different happens. The violence is not symbolized. it is literalized. And it is not de- flected away from those who are part of this covenanting commu- nity. it is suffered by them. Moses went and told the people all the commands of Yahweh and all the ordinances. In answer. all the people said with one voice. "We will observe all the commands that Yahweh has decreed." Moses put all the commands of Yahweh into writing. and early next morning he built an altar at the foot of the mountain. with twelve standing stones for the twelve tribes of 23 Chapter One Israel. Then he directed certain young Israelites to offer holo- causts and to immolate bullocks to Yahweh as communion sac- rifices. Half of the blood Moses took up and put into basins, the other half he cast on the altar. And taking the book of the Covenant he read it to the listening people, and they said, "We will observe all that Yahweh has decreed; we will obey." Then Moses took the blood and cast it toward the people. "This," he said, "is the blood of the Covenant that Yahweh has made with you, containing all these rules." (Ex 24:3-8) Moses does not refer to the inscribed commands as the "Book of the Covenant" or the "Words of the Covenant," but as dam habberrt, the Blood of the Covenant. The demand of exclusivity proves an impossible demand, one vi- olated even as it is enjoined. When Moses comes down from the mountain, with the tablets in his hand that create the people as a people with the stipulation that they must obey one deity, he dis- covers them worshipping another. And the blood that flows next is not the blood of bulls. "Whoever is for the Lord, come to me," he said, and all the Levites rallied to him. "This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: 'Gird on your sword, every man of you, and quar- ter the camp from gate to gate killing one his brother, another his friend, another his neighbor.'" The sons of Levi carried out the command of Moses and about three thousand people perished that day. (Ex 32:26-28) Far from being a dead metaphor, karat bent is a loaded phrase, car- rying all the resonances not only of making a covenant but also of severing it and being severed by it. Yes, Israel's identity is instituted by transcendent omnipotence, but that omnipotence threatens to destroy the very identity it is called upon to establish. God is both the guarantor and the threat to Israel. What was once the fragility of identity has become outright violence, a violence made explicable, perhaps even bearable, as the will of an omnipotent sovereign whose wrath could be managed through obedience. A remark in the Book 24 Inventing Identity: Covenants of Jeremiah betrays how overdetermined this system is, for the people inevitably transgress the law: "I will make the men who have not observed the terms of the covenant made in my presence like the calf they cut in two to pass between the parts of it" Oer 34: 18). 11 When were they not cut in two? How are we to account for this violence? How are we to distin- guish it from the cutting so familiar from the discourse of "differ- ence" with its celebration of discrete identities? How, that is, do we distinguish between the cutting that is an inscription of oppression and absolutism, and the cutting that is productive and proliferating? When is a cut in the name of heterogeneity, respecting differences, and when is it the violence of homogeneity, of totalizing, the vio- lence that says, in effect, you will be in my system or you will not be?'2 When does cutting subvert (totalized) Identity and when does it destroy (particular) identities? Surely, power helps to distinguish: as we have seen, in the myth of monotheism, identities are under- written by omnipotence, by the power to create and to destroy, to privilege and to disdain. A proliferating "difference" would cut into just such power, dispersing it until there is no position from which to posit a reviled Other. THE BLOOD OF THE COVENANT What, then, does it mean to say that karat bent, is not only to make a covenant but to break it and be broken by it? that the severings that create identity also destroy it? Does this mean that the price of a discrete identity must be violence, even obliteration? Exploring these questions in the context of ancient social treaties can help to defamiliarize biblical monotheism and to expose the ways that power is inscribed in a theological notion that has so long been surrounded by an aura of piety: the belief that collective identity is forged by a monotheistic "covenant." The Scottish Covenants of1638 and 1643, the Covenantal Oath of the Afrikaners, even, according to some interpreters, the U.S. Constitution, are only among the most explicit political heirs of this notion disseminated by Calvin and various Cal- VlnlSms. "Covenantal communities" are among our most enduring 25 Chapter Otle political formations.'3 Nor are they only Protestant. The Proclama- tion of the Spanish Emancipation of the New World put the cove- nant to work in the demand that Indians convert, that they "recog- nize the Church as Mistress and Superior of the world and Universe, and the Supreme Pontiff, called Papa, in his name, and his Majesty in his name, as Superior and lord" or else.

If so you do, you will do well, in what you are held and obligated to do, and his Majesty and I in his name will receive you with all love and affection. . . . If you do not do this, and maliciously set delays, I assure you that with God's aid, I shall enter with power among you, and shall make war on you on all sides and in every way I can, and subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and his Majesty; and I shall take your wives and children and make them slaves. . . and I shall take your property and shall do you all the harm I can, as to vassals who will not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him.'4 Just as the biblical covenant came to be translated into secular forms, so it began its long life in a secular context. Biblical archeolo- gists tell us that the written treaty between God and man is indebted to ancient social treaties between men. Surviving Hittite documents from the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C.E. closely parallel the structure of the biblical covenant. The preamble introduced the speaker offering the treaty and told of his might. The historical pro- logue came next, describing in narrative how the lesser party was indebted to the greater party for past favors: "When your father died, in accordance with your father's word I did not drop you. Since your father had mentioned to me your name, I sought after you. To be sure, you were sick and ailing, but although you were ailing, I, the Sun, put you in the place of your father and took your brothers (and) sisters and the Amurru land in oath for you."" The rules followed, foremost among them the demand for the vassal's complete loyalty to the overlord (including military allegiance). A section devoted to blessings and curses completed the structure, with the overlord promising blessings of prosperity and peace in return for the vassal's 26 J tl lJ C tl t i tl.i? J d C 11 t i f y: C" IJ C tl a " f s loyalty and threatening complete annihilation should the vassal fail to fulfil1 the stipulations. That is, the greater party will destroy the lesser party if he should deviate from the terms of the contract, and he will destroy him should he refuse this deal. Historica]]y, such treaties were made with a vanquished people by their conqueror. The treaty gave the conqueror the option of letting the vanquished people live, and in turn, they could choose to be subjected to the stipulations of the treaty instead of having obliteration chosen for them. In short, when we think of the prototype for the biblical cove- nant, we should not imagine a contract between two equal con- senting partners; everything about the design of these treaties under- scored their imbalance of power. 1(, The biblical debt to this Hittite treaty structure is not hard to discern. The covenantltreaty of Exodus 20, the so-ca]]ed Ten Com- mandments, begins with a preamble to introduce the speaker and continues to a historical prologue: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slaves." In this way, the contract establishes (if there were any doubt) that the Israelites owe their very existence to Yahweh, that he holds their "right of life and power over death." As the biblical scholar Gerhard von Rad succinctly put it: "The decalogue was the proclamation of the divine right over every sphere of life."'7 And this identity, granted by a greater power, continues to be radically contingent. The historical preface of the Decalogue defines the Lord as the people's protector and savior: "You yourselves have seen what [ did with the Et,,'yptians, how [ carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself" (Ex 19:4).

It also defines the vassal as the separate possession of the lord: "From this you know that now, if you obey my voice and hold fast to my covenant, you of all the nations shall be my very own" (Ex 19:5-6). The stipulations of the covenant follow, laws designed to regulate two spheres of relations: first, the community's relation to its deity (thou shalt have no gods before me), and second, relations among the members of the community (thou shalt not kill, steal, commit adultery). The connection between these two spheres has been the subject of biblical commentary from time immemorial. We are told that formulations like "love thy neighbor" are predicated on 27 Chapter One love of God, or in more sophisticated versions of the same sentiment, ancient Israel's theocracy is the enabling condition for its egalitarian sociality. 18 To put it differently, the laws that regulate the social order from On High displace the potential of violence from within the community to a violence vested fully in God. A less sanguine version of the theocracy-enables-democracy theory emerges: violence be- tween men is deferred to violence between God and men; "Ven- geance is mine, saith the Lord" (Deut 32:35, Rom 12: 19). The last formal feature of the Hittite treaties, the blessings and curses, promises of prosperity, and threats of horrific violence-to cut off, destroy, obliterate one and one's family for generations from the earth-were not appended to the treaty, but were part and parcel of its formal composition.''1 This seemingly innocuous formal detail has immense importance. Entering into the contract, agreeing to obey it in order to be protected, includes accepting the blessings and curses written into it-the covenant does not just list rules, it pre- scribes events, wonderful and dire events. Here are the blessings and curses from a Hittite treaty between Mursilis and Duppi- Tessub: "The words of the treaty and the oath that are inscribed on this tablet-should Duppi- Tessub not honor these words of the treaty and the oath, may these gods of the oath destroy Duppi- Tessub to- gether with his person, his wife, his son, his grandson, his house, his land and together with everything he owns. But if Duppi- Tessub honors these words of the treaty and the oath that is inscribed on this tablet, may these gods of the oath protect him together with his person, his wife, his son, his grandson, his house, and his country."20 In later treaties (that is, from the first millennium B.C.E.), the curses predominate, becoming more lurid and more elaborate. It is as though the liquidated damages clause overtook the terms of a legal contract. In addition to the Ten Commandments, the Bible offers a cove- nant on a grander scale, the Book of Deuteronomy, which retells the Sinai story, framing it within a narrative told by Moses on the eve of the entry to the promised land. It includes the historical intro- duction that indebts the people to God for his past saving acts, and proceeds to the stipulations to be followed. 28 llllll'nlln,~ [delllily: COIlI'II'lllIS The Lord your God commands you this day to follow these decrees and laws; carefully observe them with all your heart and with all your soul. You have declared this day that the Lord IS your God and that you will walk in his ways, that you will keep his decrees, commands, and laws, and that you will obey him. And the Lord has declared this day that you are his people, his treasured possession as he promised, and that you are to keep all his commands. (Deut 26: 1 (i-I 8) If the people obey these laws, blessings of prosperity, fecundity, and security follow, and if they should fail, curses. But in the section in Deuteronomy devoted to blessings and curses, the curses threaten to overtake the blessings, with fourteen verses devoted to blessings and fifty-four to curses, and while the blessings are of generalized pros- perity, the curses are graphic and specific. Among them: The Lord will afflict you with madness, blindness and confu- sion of the mind. At midday you will grope about like a blind man in the dark, You will be unsuccessful in everything you do; day after day you will be oppressed and robbed, with no one to rescue you. You will be pledged to be married to a woman, but another will take her and ravish her. You will build a house, but you will not live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit. Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, but you will eat none of it. . . . Your donkey will be forcibly taken from you and will not be returned, Your sheep will be given to your enemies, without anyone to help you. Your sons and daughters shall be given to another people, while you look on; you will strain your eyes looking for them all day but be powerless to do any- thing. A people whom you do not know shall eat up the fruit of your ground and of all your labors: you shall be continually abused and crushed, and driven mad by the sight that your eyes shall see, (Deut 28:28-34) To these material and psychological tortures is added a generic curse for good measure: "You shall become an object of horror, a proverb, 29 Chapler One md a byword among all the peoples where the Lord will lead you" :Deut 28:37). Only after these horrific curses does the covenant for- llally conclude. "These are the words of the covenant which Yah- ,veh commanded Moses to make with the Israelites" (Deut 29: 1). fhe narrator might well have used Moses' apt phrasing instead: "this s the blood of the Covenant." What is the magnitude of these terrible curses really about? What :ioes breaking this "contract" threaten? What is at stake in the mon- )theistic covenant-with its demand of exclusive loyalty to the sov- :reign, its insistence on his complete possession of his subjects- eems to be the very identity of the community itself, whose frag- Ie borders can be maintained only through the threat of such un- maginable (albeit luridly imagined) curses. The sermons of Puritan Jreachers vividly describing the hellfire awaiting the reprobate were ntended to strike terror, indeed, and conformity into the hearts of he congregation. That is, joining the threat of conquest by physical riolence is the threat of being colonized by spiritual violence, that s, the specter of a demanded conversion. In all cases, to cut a cove- lant with such power is to be utterly subjected to it. The covenant at Sinai is given amid a huge display of such terrible lower, with the full fanfare of fire, brimstone, thunder, and light- ling: ''At daybreak on the third day, there were peals of thunder on he mountain and lightning flashes, a dense cloud, and a loud trum- let blast, and inside the camp all the people trembled" (Ex 19:16). I.nd the wide differential between the treaty "partners" is summa- ized succinctly in the description of their conversation: "Moses poke and God answered him with peals of thunder" (Ex 19: 19). "I m Oz, the great and powerful. Who are you?" "I am Dorothy, the l1eek and weak" begins the familiar parody of the Sinai theophany nat exposes God as an inept hot-air balloonist from Kansas. Toto ,ulls back the curtain of the holy of holies, and we see the all too uman wizard from Kansas generating his own l11ysteriul11 trel11endul11 t a microphone. But when the system of transcendent omnipotence ; debunked, when God's ability to grant wishes, confer a heart, rain, and courage is exposed as not having a source in transcendence o I n v ('/1 I i n g Ide III i I y.' C" 1/(' II a n Is at all but in token symbols, it is only to be replaced by another system: nationalism. There is no place like home. Again, politics are not hardwired into theology. Worship of one deity need not necessarily produce this violent notion of identity; but monotheism has been caught up with particularism, with that production of collective identity as peoples set apart, and it so hap- pens that when the biblical text moves more explicitly toward poly- theism, it also endorses a more attractive toleration, even apprecia- tion of difference. "Let every people walk, each in the name of his god; but I will walk in the name of Yahweh my god forever" (Mic 4:5). Making Yahwism the defining feature of Israel's col1ective identity seems to have come rather late in the long process ofbiblicaJ composition, late enough to fail to completely eradicate the traces of polytheism found throughout the Bible. According to several prominent biblical scholars, a minority movement beat back, in a fierce and long competition, the prevailing polytheism of ancient Israel. "The Bible records the biased view of the victorious party."21 But its other views were not silenced, for it also records the bloodi- ness of exclusive monotheism. If. from one perspective, the myth of monotheism is a system in whIch identity depends upon rejection of the Other and subjection of the Self, from a different perspective, these same narratives offer a critique of just such a system by de- picting the enormous cost of such identity. With its graphic de- piction of violence against the Other and its sympathetic depic- tions of the outcast, the text invites us not to reject the rejected Other. In this way, the Bible may be critiquing, rather than en- dorsing, the very idea of covenant I have been elaborating. Who is to say?

When we try this idea on, when we reread all this bloodshed as a critique rather than endorsement of monotheism, other clues emerge. After all, rather than monotheism instituting some union of the people with each other and their God, the cutting covenant has cut the people off, from one another and from their God. And when we no longer tune our ears to the party line of the victorious mono- theists, we can also become attentive to the brief. little-noted scene 31 Chapter One that forms the haunting sequel to the scene of the blood of the cov- enant. Then Moses took the blood and cast it toward the people. "This," he said, "is the blood of the Covenant that Yahweh has made with you, containing all these rules." Moses went up with Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu and seventy elders of Israel. They saw the God of Israel beneath whose feet there was, it seemed, a sapphire pavement pure as the heavens themselves. He laid no hand on these notables of the sons of Israel: they gazed on God, they ate, and they drank. (Ex 24:8-11) The scene evokes another ancient ritual for covenanting besides the severing of animals and the not-so-implicit severing of the parti- cipants: the ceremonial meal. The Hebrew is so spare, just three verbs-"they gazed on God, they ate, and they drank"-three words that offer no hint of the violence of the covenant curses, but are prefaced instead by the explicit rejection of violence. Exodus tells us that just looking on God should be fatal-"no man can see the face of God and live" -but the story says "He laid no hand on these notables of the sons of Israel: they gazed on God." Similarly, despite all its symbolic violence, the covenant with Abraham may be quietly subversive. An oath is made binding with the threat that its violator would be rent like the severed animals, but a flaming torch, symbolizing God, passes through the severed pieces. Yahweh swears an oath on himself to Abraham, thereby re- versing the master/slave positions and, by extension, parodying the oath and its violence altogether. In addition to these challenges to the very idea of constructing identity in violence, any single identity formation in the Bible is also challenged by another. Grounding identity in the myth of an ori- ginary covenant gives way to forming identity by kinship, which gives way to Israel's collective identity as a nation, which gives way to Israel defined with reference to the land, which gives way to Israel understood as not having territory at all but whose identity is forged by collective memory, with each system throwing into relief the pro- visional status of the other. Perpetually imagined otherwise, Israel is 32 1/1 /J f /1 I i //.~ Ide /1 I i I }'.' C" /J l' 11 <1// , S both one thing and so very easily another, and that dynamism is itself an antidote to the hardening of Israel's heart as a people against the Other. Instead of Israel being not-Egypt, it is a nation among the nations, Egypt, yes, but also Assyria, Babylonia, Philistia, Moab, Ammon. . . . We are, then, the heirs of a long tradition in which monotheism is regarded as the great achievement of "Judeo-Christian" thought, holding out the promise of universalism and with it an endorsement of ethics and peace. But upon closer inspection, sometimes mono- theism is entangled with particularism, with the assertion that this God and not any other gods must be worshipped, a particularism so virulent that it reduces all other gods to idols and so violent that it reduces all other worshippers to abominations. This tension in monotheism between the universal and the particular should come as no surprise. The One suggests both single and All, exclusive and complete. In contrast (and in theory), a genuine universalism would be tolerant of difference, even celebrate it, rather than reject and deny it. But the monotheism that strives for universalism instead of particularism runs another risk. The danger of a universal monothe- ism is asserting that its truth is the Truth, its system of knowledge the System of knowledge, its ethics the Ethics-not because, as in particularism, any other option must be rejected, but because there is simply no other option. The danger of universalism is that totaliza- tion will incorporate all difference. What needs to be imagined is neither a circle that includes everyone-a whole that submerges and subjects all individuality to itself, a totality that closes possibility- nor a part that reviles all other parts. What is wrong with all of those constructs of the One and the Many is that they presuppose a kind of metaphysical scarcity. They imagine hoarding belief, hoarding allegiance, and even hoarding identity. Because there is a finite supply-of whatever-it mllst be either contained in the whole or protected as a part. Whether small or large, limited sllpplies suggest boundaries. But there have been other efforts to imagine monotheism. It has been seen as a principle that is not confining or totalizing, but opening and proliferating; as a principle that does not circumscribe limits, but endlessly trans- 33 :/rapter One ;resses all possible limits, a principle, as I prefer to think of it, not of carcity, but of plenitude. Infinite potential and infinite arrival. This )lenitude is frequently associated with creativity, with, indeed, the =reation, an idea (and it is an idea, after all) that seems close to nfinite potential. Even when Creation involves circumscribing po- ential (binding chaos), as it so often does, still the aura of that pleni- ude hovers, as Plotinus imagined it saturating a newborn world, and IS Wordsworth imagined it clinging to the newborn child. Most systems of ethics are predicated upon the assumption of carcity, the notion that there is not enough to go around. Such :thics are in general reactive, exploring how to behave in a world of imitations, obstacles, and dangers, and they typically endorse hero- ,m: the ability to survive dangers, overcome obstacles, and exceed imitations. If a man's elder brother is all that stands between him nd inheritance, how should he behave? Ifhe has some property but vants his neighbor's, what should he do? In other words, ethics eaches us how to respond to various modes of scarcity. It is the ombination of scarcity and its stepchild greed that gives rise to the thical dilemmas of which life is made. But what would happen if ve were to base our ethics on a utopian condition, one presupposing n ideal of plenitude instead of the world of scarcity we know too vell? The law assumes that we cannot have what we want, and so ve will covet, steal, or even kill our neighbor to get it. That is why here are prohibitions against those behaviors. But we could leave Llch prohibitions to the work of the law and let ethics do other .rork. With an assumption-albeit utopian-that there is enough )r everyone, ethics would endorse, simply enough, generosity. ,bundance dictates that goods are not lost or used up, they only irculate. A vision of plenty prompts ceaseless giving. Sometimes lis vision of plenitude prevails in monotheism, describing a god tho does not prohibit but gives. And when it does, it is accompa- ied by an alternative code, one that does not exclude, revile, vio]ate, r even obsessively define the Other. At key moments, the biblical narratives summon up moving vi- ons of plenitude before they collapse into our more familiar world f scarcity. These are glimmers of a universalism that is neither fet- 4 Inventing Idcntity: COVellallts tered with particularism nor totalizing-even if those visions are difficult to sustain. Paradise is, of course, one such imagined pleni- tude: endless life, abundant food, gentle climate, hospitable nature. And amid all this abundance, there is peace. The lion lays down with the lamb. But then, a law intrudes into this paradisal plenitude that imposes the first limit, the first obstacle, and once the fruit of one tree is off-limits, the inspiring vision of plenitude utterly dissolves. God created a man of clay and introduced the law to test him: is he a worshipper or an idol? In the terms of a totalizing monotheistic order, there are no other options. Either he is loyal to the monothe- istic order or he cannot be. With that prohibition a whole world of boundaries rushes in to the once-abundant garden: scarcity of food, pain in birth, sweat in labor, violence, and death, with that final limit completing all the others. From then on, comforts and resources are scarce and they must be competed for, like Cain and AbeI's deadly competition for divine acceptance. Again, in Exodus, before a whole host of laws are enumerated to curb the aggression induced by a world of scarcity, another moving version of paradisal plenitude is offered. It is, to be sure, a fallen paradise. This is the wilderness, not the garden, and the children of Israel are not as innocent as the children of Eden, having just escaped slavery in Egypt. When monotheism is not entangled with scarcity but with an ideal of plenitude, it offers a God who does not set Jimits but who provides. He rains bread from the heavens, manna in the wilderness. enough for everyone. And he asks the receivers to count on that sustenance, to rise to the challenge of Jiving with the assump- tion, despite evidence to the contrary, that each will have his basic needs met. Furthermore, it is such glimmers of ideal plenitude-and not the prevailing scarcity-that are intended to school the ancient IsraeJites in ethics. "That," said Moses to them. "is the bread Yahweh gives you to eat. This is Yahweh's command: Everyone must gather enough of it for his needs." . . . When they measured in an orner of what they had gathered, the man who had gathered more had not too much, the man who had gathered less had 35 Chapter One not too little. Each found he had gathered what he needed. (Ex 16: 15-18) Their failure to accept this divinely ordained distribution of wealth-each according to his needs-engenders greed. When they hoard their food, it rots and rots them. Moses said to them, "No one must keep any of it for tomor- row." But some would not listen and kept part of it for the following day, and it bred maggots and smelt foul; and Moses was angry with them. (Ex 16: 19-20) For forty years in the wilderness, the children of Israel eat manna, each according to his needs, and when they thirst, Moses strikes a rock to make water flow. But like the abundance of the garden of Eden, this vision of the perpetual satisfaction of need soon deflates into the familiar world oflimitations, and with it collapses the ethics predicated upon an infinite rain of bread from the heavens. The pericope of the Decalogue follows the episode of manna, with all the Thou-Shalt-Nots that assume a world of scarcity-a world where lying, cheating, stealing, adultery, and killing are such tempt- ing responses to scarcity that they must be legislated against. The vision of plenitude is difficult to sustain. And so, for all of the violence associated with monotheism and its demand that devotion itself be limited, the Bible also continually offers glimpses of another vision of monotheism, one of plenitude. Deutero-Isaiah depicts a God without limits, beyond thought, who confers his boundless strength and fathomless understanding to hu- manity and who gives abundantly. For I will pour out water on the thirsty soil, streams on the dry ground. I will pour my spirit on your descendants, my blessing on your children. They shall grow like grass where there is plenty of water, like poplars by running streams. (Is 44:3-4) 36 Irl[JCllfirl.~ Identify: COllerlants This is not a god of original sinners prohibiting the bounty of trees but a god who gives trees bountifully. The poor and the needy ask for water, and there is none, their tongue is parched with thirst. I, Yahweh, will answer them, I, the God of Israel, will not abandon them. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the wilderness I will put cedar trees, acacias, myrtles, olives. In the desert I will plant juniper, plane tree and cypress side by side. (Is 41: 1 7-1 9) But even his vision of endless giving is caught up in that dark univer- salism that turns other gods into idols; he speaks of the makers of idols as "nothing" who fashion "nothing" or mere material bribes in contrast to the transcendent strength of the one God. It is as though the writer feared that his assertions of divine plenitude were not compelling enough and that he had to add, just for good mea- sure, warnings to coerce singular devotion rather than simply invite assent to his ideal of boundless giving. The vision is difficult to sustain. I wonder (much as Paul does in Romans) if the laws protecting men from violence against one another are not the corollary of con- ceiving identity in violence in the first place. It seems that defining ourselves against the Other sets in motion a cycle of violence that no legislation can hold. Perhaps when we have grown weary of as- serting all of our differences, we will be willing to think more of likenesses, analogies, even identifications-not to forge totality, but to endlessly compose and recompose temporary and multiple identi- fications. I long to imagine, with the philosopher, "not only some- thing that opposes the universal, but also some element that can be extended close to another, so as to obtain a connection. Such emis- sions . . . constitute a transcendental field without subject. The mul- tiple become a substantive-multiplicity-and philosophy is a the- 37 Chapter One ory of multiplicities that refers to no subject or preliminary unity."22 Not one, but many gods. This is not to endorse some kind of Nietzschean neopaganism; the idea is not to replace ethics with the rule of the strong. But some suspicion of the ancient biblical link between ethics and the myth of monotheism seems in order, along with some doubt about the wisdom of tying ethics to an understand- ing of identity that is agonistic by nature. Finally, the Bible offers its own critique of the Wizard of Oz. For all of the appropriations of the discourse of monotheism by the rhet- oric of nationalism, the Bible itself describes the origins of the na- tions as a punishment, the punishment for challenging the sovereign power of the heavenly deity, the punishment for building an idol heavenward. The story of Babel describes all people joining together in a common project. The repetition of the Hebrew "let us" empha- sizes the collective nature of their cultural enterprise. Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, come let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly, and then they said, come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, lest we be scattered upon the face of the earth. (Gen 11:1-4) The deity smashes their tower, disperses them, and condemns them to speaking in different tongues so that they cannot communicate with each other and join together again in a project to overthrow him. The next time they make bricks, it will not be to their own glory, but in bondage to a human overlord. In this remarkable myth, 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. How did the victorious monotheistic party miss that one, we might well ask? Or better, when can we stop perceiving it as victorious, and instead heed the sentiment of the prophet, "Let every people walk, each in the name of his god." 38 Chapter Two OWNING IDENTITY LAND Do not covet your neighbor's field.-Exodus 20:17 This land is your land; this land is my land From California to the New York island From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me. -Woody Guthrie POSSESSING LAND M onotheism does not simply define a people as a covenanted community, however complex that definition turns out to be. It IS m delmeating a people another way, as those who belong to a land, that monotheism has left its deepest, most lasting, and undoubtedly its most troubling political legacy. In Bosnia, ~evera] peoples who conceive of themselves as having distinct identities lay 39

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