KANSAS AND JUDEA
How did it happen that political agitators, living in the Mississippi
Valley at the end of the nineteenth century, were identical in spirit
with religious prophets in Asia Minor five hundred years before Christ?
The answer is that civilizations rise and fall, and history repeats
itself. Let me describe one historic process, and you watch my statement
phrase by phrase, and see if you can tell whether I am referring to
ancient Judea or to modern Kansas.
A people traveled for a long distance, fleeing from despotism and
seeking religious liberty. They were a primitive, hardy people, having a
stern faith in one God who personally directed their lives. They came to
a rich land, and conquered it by hard fighting, under this personal
direction of their God. They built homes, they gathered flocks and
herds, they accumulated wealth; and they saw this wealth pouring into
cities, to be absorbed by governing and trading classes. Their
agricultural democracy evolved into a plutocratic imperialism. The
landlords and the tax collectors left them nothing but a bare living;
the fruits of their labor paid for palaces and temples with golden
roofs, and for golden calves and monkey dinners, and rulers with a
thousand chorus girls.
So there was revolt in the country districts, and one after another came
prophets of discontent. Always these prophets were radical in the
economic sense, voicing the wrongs of the poor and helpless, the widows
and the orphans. Always they were conservative in the social and
religious sense, calling the people back to simplicity and honesty of
life, to faith in the one true God. Always they used the symbols of the
old tribal creed; repudiating new-fangled divinities such as Baal and
Darwin, and gathering at Armageddon to battle for the Lord. Throughout
their lives they were stoned and persecuted and covered with ridicule;
when they died they became their country’s glory, and their words were
cherished and embodied in sacred records which school children were made
to study.
Now, how much of that is Judea, and how much is Kansas?
Let us make clear the point, essential to our present argument, that
from cover to cover the “Old Testament” is propaganda. Those who created
it created it as propaganda, having no remotest idea of anything else.
Nowadays our docile population reads it and accepts it as the literal
inspired Word--not realizing that the book is divided between two kinds
of propaganda, which exactly cancel each other: the propaganda of a
ruling class, teaching reverence for kings and priests, and the
propaganda of rebels, clamoring for the overthrow of these same kings
and priests!
This Old Testament is also offered to us in the literature classes, so
it will be worth our while to consider it from that point of view.
Manifestly there is much of it which never pretended to be literature.
There are weary chronicles of the doings of kings, and lists of their
sons and grandsons. You may find acres of this in our big libraries, but
it is classified as genealogy, not literature. Likewise there are the
laws of the Hebrews, which belong in the legal department. There are
architectural specifications for the temple, and rules of hygiene--all
important to a historian, but rubbish to anybody else. There are a great
number of legends which are eternally delightful to children, stories of
the creation and the fall of man, and of gods and devils and miracles,
precisely as important as similar stories among the ancient
Anglo-Saxons, or the ancient Greeks, or the ancient Egyptians, or the
ancient Hopis.
Among these stories are a few which display fine feeling and narrative
skill, and so for the first time we have literature. There is one
attempt at a drama; it is crude and confused--any sophomore, having
taken a course in dramatic construction at a state university, could
show the author of the Book of Job how to clarify his theme and cut out
the repetitions. But in the midst of such crudities is magnificent
poetry, which our university courses have not yet taught us to equal.
Likewise there is some shrewd philosophy--and it is amusing to note that
our verbal inspirationalists accept the worldly-wise common sense of the
Proverbs and the bleak cynicism of Ecclesiastes as equally divine with
the fervor of Isaiah and the fanatical rage of Jeremiah.
Finally, there is some lyric poetry of a spiritual nature, this also
full of repetition. If you are judging it as ritual, that is all right,
because ritual is intended to affect the subconscious, and repetition is
the essence of the process. The difference between ritual and literature
is that the latter makes its appeal to the conscious mind, where a
little repetition goes a long way.
Dr. Johnson was asked his opinion of the feminist movement in religion,
and he said that “a woman preaching is like a dog walking on two legs;
it is not well done, but we are surprised that it is done at all.” I
think that if we examine our judgments carefully, we shall find that our
high opinion of ancient writings is on this basis. We do not really
judge them by modern standards, any more than we judge a child by adult
standards when he tries to wield a pen, or a hoe, or an oar. Our
pleasure in reading ancient writings is to note the beginnings of real
thinking, of mature attitudes toward life. We say: “By George, those old
fellows had a lot of sense after all!” But judging the Old Testament
strictly, as literature, not as antiquity, I say that everything which
is of serious value to a modern adult person could be gathered into an
extremely small volume, certainly not over thirty thousand words, or
four per cent of the total.