. . . how do these crimes compare with those of other peoples, their contemporaries or ours? When Hume wrote, the English gibbets More describes were still as full as ever

The section of Marilynne Robinson's essay that I am going over here ends with a section in which she shows a number of writers, both old and, especially new, who have distorted, misrepresented and lied about the "God of the Jews" for several but not unrelated reasons. The first one she brings up is the atheist icon, David Hume.

Scholarly books on the Scriptures typically claim objectivity and may sometimes aspire to it, though their definitions of objectivity inevitably vary with the intentions of their writers.  But to assume a posture of seeming objectivity relative to any controverted subject is a very old polemical maneuver.  David Hume, in an endnote to his Natural History of Religion (written in 1751, published in 1779), quotes Chevalier Ramsay,  who quotes an imagined Chinese or Indian philosopher's reaction to Christianity: “The God of the Jews is a most cruel, unjust, partial, and fantastical being . . . This chosen nation was . . . the most stupid ungrateful, rebellious and perfidious of all nations . . . [God's son dies to appease his vindictive wrath, but the vast majority of the world are excluded from any benefit.  This makes God]  . . . a cruel vindictive tyrant, an impotent or a wrathful daemon.”  And so on.*

Even pious critics seem never to remember that, in the Old Testament, the Jews were talking among themselves, interpreting their own experience to themselves.  Every negative thing we know about them, every phrase that is used to condemn them, they supplied, in their incredible self-scrutiny and self-judgment.  Who but the ancient Jews would have thought to blame themselves for, in effect, lying along the invasion route of the Babylonians?  They preserved and magnified their vision of the high holiness of God by absorbing into themselves responsibility for their sufferings,  and this made them passionately self-accusatory, in ways no other people would have thought of being.   

That is one of the most fascinating things about the slamming of the Torah, or really the entire Jewish Scriptures is that every particular accurately cited against them is the product of their own confession.  I mentioned the extraordinary idea contained in the Talmud that their conception of God's holiness and goodness even, as mentioned below,  extended to putting a damper on the angelic celebration of the deaths of Pharaoh and his charioteers when God made the waters close on them.  It would be like loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you.  Oh, that's right, it is exactly like that. And is it ever hard to do so.

This incomparable literature would surely have been lost if they had imagined the use it would be put to, and had written to justify themselves and to defend their descendants in the eyes of the nations rather than to ponder their life in openness toward God.  By what standard but their own could Israel have been considered ungrateful or rebellious or corrupt?  Granting crimes and errors,  which they recorded, and preserved and pondered the records of for centuries, and which were otherwise so historically minor that no one would ever have heard of them – how do these crimes compare with those of other peoples, their contemporaries or ours?  When Hume wrote, the English gibbets More describes were still as full as ever.  The grandeur of the Old Testament, and the fact that such great significance was attached to it, distracts readers from a sense of its unique communal inwardness.  It is an endless reconciliation achieved at great cost by a people whose relation to God is astonishingly brave and generous.  To misappropriate it as a damning witness against the Jews and “the Jewish God” is vulgar beyond belief.  And not at all uncommon, therefore.  It is useful to consider how the New Testament would read, if it had gone on to chronicle the Crusades and the Inquisition.

Vulgar Beyond Belief  Beyond Belief

"Every negative thing we know about them, every phrase that is used to condemn them, they supplied, in their incredible self-scrutiny and self-judgment." that is an incredible fact in the attacks made against the Mosaic tradition which those who make them never take into account.   All through the Old Testament, especially, but to an extent the New Testament, what a superficial, "enlightenment" reading of the narratives and texts as modern history or science or philosophy misses is that there is enormous ambiguity in even the victories of the Children of Israel.  It doesn't say so in Exodus but the Talmud says that even as the text of Exodus has the Children of Israel rejoicing at the deaths of Pharaoh and his charioteers, God chastises the angels who were about to join them asking them how they dared to rejoice with them, “How dare you sing for joy when My creatures are dying,”   And there are many instances in the text which how an astonishing sensitivity to the moral ambiguity of their good fortunes and, especially, military victories and which punish their desire to own God (1 Samuel 4:3-11).  That story has always struck me as rather extraordinary.

You can find similar content in some other Scriptures but I don't know of any tradition that takes it as far and second guesses their own action, assumptions and claims as the Hebrew Scriptures.  They show a vigilance against self-interest, against self-aggrandizement that is entirely lacking in modern secular-atheism and even more so in the modern-industrial-scientific framing that finds its highest value in vulgar materialism.

Modernism and, especially the United States could learn a lot from reading the Scriptures in ways that Marilynne Robinson and Walter Brueggemann and many others advocate.  One thing I'm certain of, if an effective margin of supposed liberals and moderates had that understanding of life, we would never have come to what we have.  If the "founders" had not so disdained the Old Testament they might have not embedded the terrible features that benefitted slave owners and exploitative commercial men which are the same ones that gave us George W. Bush and Donald Trump.  If they took the Commandment against bearing false witness, contained in that bit Ten they're always wanting to put in public buildings, our media and so our politics would not be the sewer they are.  I think the egalitarian moral and economic content of the Scriptures are the reason for the long campaign of attacks on them in the modern era as great fortunes have been made under capitalism and the reason they have come to be so widely associated with the poor and members of oppressed minorities who have ears to hear what they're saying.   Contrary to the pseudo-liberal line against them, the economic content of them, especially to a gentile audience through Christianity, is the only reliable foundation of any liberalism that deserves to be called that.  In other of her essays, Ms. Robinson makes a very good case for the traditional American form of liberalism, founded on the rock of equality and economic justice, was a development from the Calvinist study of the Mosaic Law.  The decline of Christianity among educated liberals is the reason that their liberalism declined into an ineffectual, counter-productive snobbery.   Liberalism won't recover until this is rediscovered and really believed.

*  Without having read the text Hume took that from, I wonder if Ramsay's argument wasn't against the doctrine of eternal damnation instead of the use Hume put it to.  About the only thing I know about Chevalier Ramsay is that he was a Christian universalist and influenced by the French quietist and mystic Bishop François Fénelon.   If I get the chance to look it up, I'll try to find out if that's right.