Fragment of Jacques Attali's book "Jews, Peace and Money" - "Before the resettlement to Egypt: from barter to silver"
Judaism begins with a journey. And, as often the meaning of the phenomenon is veiled by words, so the identity of the Jewish people is hidden in its name, which is associated precisely with the journey. The name of the ancestor of the Jews was Ever - he was the grandson of Noah and the ancestor of Abraham - the name can be translated as "nomad", "wanderer" or "money changer". Ever later became Ivri, "Jewish". So, initially, the name of the people encrypted its fate, the genetic code of its history: it has to travel, exchange, communicate, mediate. And, of course, trade.
The motive of wandering is in the myths of all nomadic peoples: their progenitor comes from distant places, the main deity patronizes travelers, nourishes exchange and communication, is in charge of peace and trust, and, as a rule, he is the god of thieves, which complicates the situation a little …
So, the biblical story begins with a journey. The first book of the Pentateuch "Genesis" opens with the words "In the beginning …" and tells about the events from the creation of the world to the departure of Joseph to Egypt, that is, from the birth of a free man to the horrors of slavery.
In real history, the origin of the people occurs in the lands of Mesopotamia for eighteen centuries BC and ends in 70 AD. e. destruction of the Second Temple and submission to the Roman Empire. As a result, the action unfolds from an earthly paradise to a semblance of Egyptian slavery.
In just fifteen centuries, a small nation created a religion on which a third of modern mankind relies in faith, and built such a relationship with money, which later formed the basis of capitalism.
Ish and Adam
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If there is no confidence in the existence of the Jewish people before arriving in Canaan (more than three thousand two hundred years ago), it is worth asking about the memories of the people themselves about their past. Even if there is no material evidence of the events described in the Holy Book, for centuries they remained for the Jews a source of moral, political, economic, social creativity, guided everyday behavior, were a lesson in life, courage, hope in the Kingdom of God.
Cosmogony, in which the first person does not belong to the people who created it, is rare.
However, in the biblical story, the first person is not Jewish.
This man named Ish or Adam lives in the Garden of Eden, a place of innocence, integrity and abundance, where there is no desire and need to work. The garden he is guarding does not belong to him. But Adam does not need to own anything in order to live happily, first alone, then with a companion: the first need is sexual, the first refusal is from loneliness. There are only two prohibitions, both relate to food: you cannot eat the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge (otherwise you will know wisdom, self-awareness, and therefore doubt) and the fruits of the Tree of Life, which grant eternal life. Both are the privileges of the Lord. The first economic commandment: so that desires do not arise, a person should not know the depth of his ignorance and the finiteness of being. As soon as a person violates one of the prohibitions by eating the forbidden fruit, he becomes aware of himself and his desires, while he finds himself in a world of povertywhere the benefits are given by hard work.
It is desire that creates scarcity, the Bible says, not the other way around, as one might suppose. The first lesson in political economy …
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the loss of the original state, turns a person into a material creature. He becomes a creature of flesh and blood. The painful need to look for food appears, as the commentary says, twice more painful than the birth of a child for his companion, and doubly more difficult than the search for salvation. Ish, a person without a name, a generic person, turns out to be a special being, concluding an agreement with God, according to which the meaning of human existence is to build the Kingdom of God on earth, to regain innocence, to overcome poverty.
For the first time, cosmogony loses its cyclical nature; it is not aimed at returning to square one. Progress becomes the goal and meaning, the Covenant with God is the arrow of time, a person has the right to choose his own destiny. This is how the functions of the economy are outlined: it is the material basis of the world of exile and a means of gaining a lost paradise. From now on, humanity has a goal - to atone for guilt. And the way to achieve the goal is to build time into value.
As the Book of Genesis tells us, generation after generation is failing. Instead of diligently rebuilding the Garden of Pleasure, people are increasingly immersed in conflicts and struggles of ambition. The more they forget the Lord, the more difficult it becomes for them to survive. "Genesis" is a story about the increasingly fatal opposition of man to economic hardships, from Abel to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to Joseph.
The sons of Adam kill each other, being unable to prefer the demands of morality to competition. Cain, whose name means "to gain" or "to envy," inherited the land. Abel, his name comes from the words "nothingness", "breath", "futility", "smoke", got his share in herds. When the farmer refuses to acknowledge the godly gift of the shepherd, one of the brothers loses his life. Second economic law: everyone wants what the other wants; and hence - society is possible only with differentiation of needs.
The murder of a shepherd is not just fratricide, the real culprit is the land itself, the cursed land that Cain inherited at the request of his brother. And if the Bible glorifies the nomadic victim, and allows the sedentary killer to survive, then only so that he, in turn, set out on the redemptive path.
As in the case of Adam, God drives out Cain, turns the killer into a beggar, a vagabond, a wanderer, so that he will experience the hardships of violence.
The first lessons are not enough. The descendants of Cain are tested again and again, compete with their own kind, fight for the good. Time after time the Lord tries to bring them back to the Covenant with Adam. With every attempt, from the time of the builders of the Tower of Babel to the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord expresses anger and reveals human weakness.
From Abraham to Jacob
After the restructuring Flood, God decides to act differently: since people do not heed his instructions, he instructs one people to be the mediator between people and the Lord. The chosen people have special responsibilities, but they are not given any privileges. This nation is required to serve as an example, to restore the world destroyed by the Fall. This is how the "Jewish" people arose. It will become Jewish only fifteen centuries later.
According to Genesis, four thousand years ago, Noah's grandson named Ever arrived in Anatolia16. On the way, he visited the first city-states (Uruk, Lagash, Girson and Kish), the people who lived there worshiped the deities of fertility, had a written language, irrigated the land, processed bronze, and used gold and silver as a means of exchange. Sargon, the former military leader of King Kish, united the Sumerian cities under his rule, creating the Akkadian Empire.
The empire was constantly attacked by nomadic peoples, conquered them, absorbing the lifestyle and cults of the vanquished. Among the wandering peoples that Everu met in Anatolia were the Hittites, they were described as "rude people living in the mountains who do not know bread", "they know neither home nor city," they spoke an ancient language from the group now known as Indo-European. Sumerians and Hittites were at enmity, watched each other, each people settled their lands.
The descendants of Noah from the clan of Ever, who became the people of Apiru or Habiru as the settled way of life developed, were priests, caravan drivers, merchants, and bred donkeys. They prayed to their closest ancestor, who accompanied and protected them in exchange for the sacrifice of animals and the setting of stones as a sign of each new undertaking.
A little later, around 1730 BC. e. King Hammurabi turned Mesopotamia into a single kingdom with the capital in Babylon, the name of the city means "the gate of God." Traces of the Hammurabi Code can be found in later Jewish laws.
According to the biblical tradition, it was then that one of the nomads of the Apiru tribe, a wealthy cattle breeder named Farrah, left the Sumerian city of Ur Chaldees (or Ur in Anatolia) and, together with his wives, children, shepherds and herds, settled in Hittite Assyria in the city of Harran. A native of a hostile empire was received unfriendly, he hardly got the right to graze livestock.
One of Terah's sons Abram - Genesis says that he was born in 1812 BC. e., that is, twenty generations after Adam and ten after Noah - he leaves his father's house and marries, one of his wives is named Sarah (which reminds Sarai - one of the names of Ningal, the goddess of the Moon in Ur and Harran).
God gives Abram the command to become the ancestor of a new people, a people-priest, responsible before the Lord for humanity.
Whatever the Lord wants to say to people, he will tell this people. What was said to the chosen people is addressed to everyone. Abram must bring people the happiness of faith in one God.
Meanwhile, in the east, in India, a new teaching suddenly appears - the Vedas, the herald of monotheism in Asia Minor. Monotheism could arise only among nomads who traveled lightly, without many idols, and quickly, they did not have time to accept the gods of the peoples through whose lands they went. Double abstraction: one god El or in the plural Elohim, god or Yahweh - one God for all peoples. It was an unheard-of coup!
Genesis describes a dispute over lands between the shepherds of Abram and his nephew Lot. Lot traveled east to the fertile, irrigated plains of Jordan and settled in Sodom. Abram, who was seventy-five years old, went south to the land of Canaan to the hills of Hebron. The South symbolizes spiritual wisdom, the light of the Law, the East symbolizes worldly well-being.
Canaan is a rich country with caravans passing through it on their way to Asia. It consists of many small city-states under the control of Egypt, texts about the Canaanite "rebels" were found in the archives of the then ruling XII dynasty.
Apparently, in Canaan, the apiru are in contact with the Hyksos, an Asian people who had the glory of sophisticated warriors, one of their gods Set merges into a single image with the Canaanite god Baal6.
In Canaan, God gives Abram, who took the name Abraham, two commands.
First, to multiply offspring and develop the land. God commanded Abraham to gather wealth to serve the Lord. In the Book of Genesis (13, 2) the growth of his fortune is proudly described: "Abraham is rich in cattle, silver and gold." In those days, these goods were the main means of exchange. To obtain them, all means are suitable, including deception: Abraham even passes off his wife Sarah as his sister, hoping to receive gifts from those who want to marry her!
Secondly, by removing the knife from the throat of the son of Abraham and Sarah Isaac, God forbids human sacrifice. According to the Book, Abraham preferred Isaac to Ismail, his eldest son by the maid of Hagar, Ismail is considered the progenitor of the Arabs of the desert. This is how God delivered the Jewish people from a thousand-year tradition of ritual murder. God does not need human sacrifice, but he does not refuse animal sacrifice. Thus, he singles out man in Creation and turns violence only to the destruction of material wealth.
Both of God's commands to his people are related to each other: wealth in the form of cattle, silver and gold is the best substitute for violence. There are a thousand and one confirmation of the relationship between money and blood, God persistently convinces the Jews, and through them and other people: money, first of all, a means to avoid violence. By replacing human sacrifices with monetary donations, the Jewish people are announcing their fate: from now on, they will use the money to repair damage and stop the flywheel of reprisals. Money will become a means of negotiating instead of fighting, a means of establishing peace. The Jewish people reject violence by using money. Until the violence of money turns against the Jews themselves …
Both commands of the Lord are linked together in the act of Abraham in Canaan: for the burial of his wife Sarah, mother of Isaac, he chose not the land conquered by force, but the cave of Machpela in the vicinity of Hebron, bought from the Hittite Efron (Genesis 15, 13-16) … So that the deal is not later challenged, it is done publicly. Abraham does not bargain over the exorbitant price announced by the seller: 400 shekels (then this word also meant a measure of weight), that is, 4.6 kg of silver (Genesis 15, 23-15). The silver was carefully weighed, checking the accuracy of the weights.
Thousands of pages have been written explaining why Abraham bought the cave and dedicated it to God, and why it was worth 400 shekels. The place reminds that people are transient, and any property, even a tomb, is just a favor of the Lord. God says: “The land should not be sold forever, for my land: you are aliens and settlers with me” (Leviticus 25, 23). Do not forget about this fragility, which requires hospitality to strangers.
The price is also not accidental, it is worth mentioning the explanations of Jewish commentators, a perfect example of how interpreters of biblical legends reasoned for millennia. In Hebrew, as in many ancient languages, numbers were designated by letters. The last letter of the alphabet meant the number 400, for further counting it was necessary to use two letters, that is, the number 400 was a kind of limit of what was measured. In addition, 400 can be thought of as 8 times 50. 8 follows seven days of the week, 50 follows 49, and 49 is the number of years after which the land must be returned to the original owner; therefore, 8 and 50 are numbers that go beyond the cycles of calculus familiar to a person. 400 symbolizes time beyond the human dimension.
Outside of human time is eternity. The number 400 also means the eternal rights acquired by Abraham to the cave, the eternal rights of the Jews to Hebron and to the whole land of Canaan. And to this day, this number sounds like a roar of geopolitical thunder …
Abraham died at the age of one hundred and seventy-five, one hundred years after arriving in Canaan. Two generations of his descendants, the Isaac branch and the Jacob branch, lived and flourished in Canaan. Their religion developed. Many Canaanite holidays have become anniversaries of major events in Jewish world history.
Isaac and Jacob affirm the need for wealth in order to please God. Isaac gathers herds of animals. “And this man became great and was exalted more and more to the point that he became very great. He had flocks of flocks and herds of cattle and many slaves "(Genesis 26, 13-14). Following him, Jacob "became this man very, very rich, and he had a lot of sheep, and slaves, and slaves, and camels, and donkeys" (Genesis 30, 43). God blesses Jacob's wealth and allows him to buy the birthright from his brother Esau - this is proof that everything has a price, even in the form of lentil stew …
After Jacob's struggle with the angel, which at dawn ended with the supernatural adversary declaring himself defeated by the patriarch's virtue, the angel blessed the wounded Jacob, giving him the name "Israel" ("Fighting with God"), later this name passed to his descendants. Then Jacob divided the lands, conquered and received more or less peacefully from his grandfather, between twelve sons, born of two wives (Leah gave birth to Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar and Zebulun, Rachel - Joseph and Benjamin) and two maids (Bilch gave birth to Dan and Naphtali, Zilpah - Gad and Asher). Polygamy has indeed long been generally accepted both among Jews and among other peoples of the region.
Then, the Book says, there was a famine in Canaan, possibly referring to the serious economic crisis that hit the Middle East at that time. The famine forced Jacob's family - at least part of the family - to travel to Egypt. There is nothing strange in this: there is little water in the Middle East, and in Egypt every year the Nile overflowed and fertilized the lands of fields and gardens with silt. During periods of prolonged drought, Asian tribes from Canaan, Cappadocia, Mesopotamia flocked to Egypt from the East. With them came the Hyksos, whom the Jews knew back in Hebron, and settled in the Nile Valley157. Through the use of horse-drawn chariots - the Egyptians did not yet have them - the Hyksos had superiority in military power, seized power in Memphis, and then in Thebes and deprived the priests of the god Amun of Asian goods, sending them to Avaris, the sanctuary of the god Set (brother of Osiris),whom the Hyksos revered as the supreme deity.
Their pharaoh Seti I called himself the godson of the god Set, the patron saint of oases, who supplanted Horus. At the same time to the north of the Hittites, during their heyday, the first written evidence of the Apiru people appeared in texts related to the mention of the names Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
