So this semester I'm taking a special class called War and Peace in the Western Tradition. A couple days ago, we were discussing the ancient Hebrew people. From the discussion and my reading, I came to something that I think is pretty interesting...
When we read the Old Testament, the Israelites seem like losers again and again and again. They have a really hard time following and being obedient to God and this gets them into a lot of trouble. Their distrust and doubt causes them to wander in the desert for 40 years, their plea for a king leads to all the depressing years of the book of Judges, they divide and get almost entirely crushed, etc etc etc. We walk away from the passages marveling at how "God's chosen people" just screwed everything up over and over.
From my history book however, I came across an idea that cuts them a little, actually a lot of slack. In one passage the text describes how as the chosen ones of God, the Israelites were not permitted to live as the rest of the world lives. It said that God wanted them to be an example to all the other nations, by living in the way He prescribed. Later in the text, it was discussed how much of our Western Culture has been influenced by the ancient Hebrews. Way back when, Mesopotamians and later Greeks and Romans were the world's powerful peoples. But somehow, the ideals of our Western Tradition mostly trace back to the Israelites and not the other groups. God gave the Hebrews a very strong sense of self and sense of value that the other cultures did not see in individuals, that sounds familiar. Come to think of it, in our society, last time I checked, it is far more common to worship one all-powerful God, than it is to believe in Zeus and Apollo and the gang.
When I really began to think about it...I decided that it's true. We live our lives a lot more like those wandering Israelites than like any of those other ancient people. Those rules laid out in Leviticus, we follow a lot of them: We don't marry our cows, or mothers. We consider it a good idea to get our overflowing sores checked out. We don't where clothes that have mildew on them. We appoint judges over us rather than follow Hammurabi's code. I could go on and on. I ramble on like this only to get to the point that maybe those Israelites back then didn't make as much of a mess of things as we think sometimes. Maybe. because so much of their lifestyle (hello, the first five books of the Old Testament) has been preserved and is still read and some of it practiced today...maybe they actually did their job.
It looks like God's chosen people really did set an example for the other nations with their lives. Maybe when we read the Bible and roll our eyes as people get swallowed up by the earth, maybe we can give these guys a little more credit.
