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The Jewish Origins of the Western Disobedience TraditionBy Yoram HazonyCivil disobedience did not, as we are taught, begin with Socrates and Antigone, but with a Hebrew Bible that rejected the supremacy of human law. The suspicion of the worldly order of states and rulers can be felt as a common thread running through the entire biblical narrative, beginning with the earliest reference to them, the description of the Mesopotamian ruler Nimrod: “He began to be mighty on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Eternal”46—that is, a man of spirit, power and violence. The narrative then presents the results of the accumulation of power in the hands of the Mesopotamian state: The construction of “a city, and a tower reaching to the sky, and we will make a name for ourselves.”47 From the perspective of the shepherd, the establishment of the tyrannical world-empires and their monuments of ego and stone is in its essence vanity, the pursuit of glory and power to no productive end, and God is subsequently depicted as dividing the Mesopotamians into disparate nations and scattering them abroad—the none-too-subtle message being that this is the fate of all states built on the craving for fame and power. The same wariness of earthly rulers appears in the stories told of the Jewish patriarchs who, with uncanny consistency, are each introduced in terms of their resistance to the worldly powers of their time and place. Other than his actual arrival in Canaan, the first event we learn of in Abraham’s life is thus his resistance to the will of the Egyptian Pharaoh, whom he has reason to fear will murder him to take his wife.48 A similar account has Isaac deceiving a Canaanite king; later, when he finds his father’s wells being destroyed by the same local ruler, we are told that he resists the ruler by redigging one well after another.49 Likewise, when Jacob travels back to Canaan, the first event reported is his purchase of a plot of land on which to encamp, a peaceable act which ends with his daughter Dina being raped by the local prince—in response to which Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi destroy his city and all its inhabitants.50 Perhaps most tellingly, it is as a result of the Hebrew shepherds’ greatest misdeed—the plot to murder their brother Joseph—that they receive the ultimate punishment: They are forced to come under the totalitarian rule of the Egyptian Pharaoh.
The subsequent story of the Jews in Egypt is a paradigm of resistance to oppressive government, to which resistors and revolutionaries throughout history have turned for inspiration. Like the other tales of the books of Moses, this one opens immediately with an act of resistance against the state. The Egyptians have come to fear the strength of the foreign Jewish population, and Pharaoh determines to submit the Jews to slavery—the making of the bricks with which he builds his edifices—in order to strip them of the capacity to rise up against him. Having done so, he then summons the Jewish midwives and orders them to kill every male child born among the Jews, the intention being to absorb the women into the Egyptian population and so eliminate the Jews as a people. But the midwives, Shifra and Pu’a, refuse the command:
Seeing that the midwives will not cooperate, Pharaoh seeks a different method of enforcement, ordering his people to slaughter any Jewish boy that is born. Jochebed, a woman from the tribe of Levi, decides she must resist the law, giving birth in secret and hiding her son for three months as the killing of the other Jewish babies takes place all around her. When she cannot hide the child any longer, she sets him adrift on the Nile, hoping for a miracle. And she receives one: Pharaoh’s daughter, finding the ark and pulling the baby from the water, immediately understands what has happened, and decides that she, too, will risk her life for the child by violating her own father’s decree—in so doing, according to the later rabbinic tradition, becoming a Jew in that she renounces her servitude to the state-
idol to do what is right.52 Jochebed’s daughter Miriam is also implicated: Standing by the river and watching the entire scene, she asks Pharaoh’s daughter if she would like a Jewish wet nurse for the child. She brings Jochebed, who cares for the boy until he is weaned and adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter as a son.53 It is by means of this conspiracy that two Jewish women and an Egyptian princess defy the Egyptian law and together manage to save a single Jewish boy from the holocaust: Moses. Neither does the narrative leave any question as to what kind of an education the Levite child received from Pharaoh’s daughter. Before we learn anything else about Moses as a grown man, we find that he, too, is unafraid to shatter the Egyptian law for the sake of what he believes to be right: “It came to pass that when Moses was grown, he went out to his brothers and saw their suffering; and he saw an Egyptian man beating a Hebrew man, one of his brothers. He looked this way and that, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian and buried him in the sand.”54 Although raised in Pharaoh’s court, there is no question that Moses retains his shepherd’s eye for resistance, and it is this, no less than his upbringing as a leader among the Egyptian nobility, that prepares him to become the first political and religious leader of the Jewish nation—and the one who will lead them to revolution.
Having fled Egypt for fear of the king’s anger, Moses becomes a shepherd like his forefathers. It is while tending his flock in the wilderness that he has his first encounter with God, an encounter which sends him back to Egypt seeking an end to the oppression of his people. The grueling rounds of Moses’ confrontation with Pharaoh—each punctuated with the demand that the Egyptian king “let my people go, that they may serve God”—are the mold from which is cast the entire subsequent tradition of the Hebrew prophets and the unprecedented belief in their authority to chastise the wielders of state power. Of course, the Jewish slaves are not necessarily built for such a bruising battle, and some of their leaders even blame Moses for the wrath which is visited upon them.55 Nevertheless, Moses does not end up with sole responsibility for the revolution when it comes: Before the Jews gain their freedom from Egypt, on the night of the final plague, Moses requires that every one of them publicly defy the state by slaughtering a sheep, the god of Egyptian might, roasting and eating it “so that nothing remains of it in the morning,” and then smearing its blood on the doorposts of the house for all to see. It is made clear, moreover, that only those who do so can expect salvation and freedom.56 In this way, disobedience, by which Moses came into the world, also becomes the act by which each Hebrew slave turns his back on the house of worldly power and accepts the higher law which makes him a Jew.
One of the most overt of the disobedience teachings in the books of Moses is the story of Balaam, to which the narrative of the wanderings in the desert devotes a full three chapters. Balaam is a non-Jewish seer who is summoned by the king of Moab to curse the Jews, in return for which the king offers to promote him to great honor and power. But Balaam responds that right and wrong take precedence over worldly inducements: “Even if Balak [the king] were to give me all of the silver and gold in his house, I would not be able to transgress the word of the Eternal, my God, in anything small or great.”57 And in fact, despite repeated orders and rantings from the king, the seer nevertheless refuses to issue anything but blessings for that which he believes should be blessed.58 Even more graphic is the accompanying tale of Balaam and his donkey, which serves as an allegory for the confrontation with the king. In this narrative, Balaam is riding on his donkey, when his way is blocked by an angel with a sword seeking to kill him. Balaam cannot see the angel, but the donkey can, and it repeatedly disobeys his commands to take him towards his doom—despite a series of blows from its master. Finally, the donkey revolts completely, lying down in the road and refusing to move. Then:
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