A radical humanist vision of the Bible

We publish below large excerpts from the Introduction to Erich Fromm’s book Vous serez comme des dieux (You Shall Be as Gods), published in 1973 by Éditions Complexe. In this book, E. Fromm undertakes a study of the Bible from a humanist and secular perspective, dwelling in particular on the permanence of the questionings and of the ethical and humanist values of the prophetic tradition.

It seems to us that this text is an excellent introduction to our issue Reading the Bible, from a Jewish, humanist, and secular point of view.

Is the Hebrew Bible — the Old Testament — anything more than a historical relic, revered solely because it lies at the source of the three great religions of the West? Has it the slightest teaching to offer the man of today, this man embedded in a world of revolutions, of automation, of nuclear weapons, and steeped in a materialist philosophy that implicitly or explicitly rejects all religious values?

At first glance, it scarcely seems that the Old Testament still has any relevance today: if one includes the apocrypha, it is a collection of texts owed to a great many different authors, whose composition spread over more than a millennium (roughly between 1200 and 100 B.C.); it is an assemblage of legal codes, historical narratives, poems, and prophetic discourses, which moreover represents only one part of the literature produced by the Hebrews over those eleven hundred years. And these books were written in a small country situated at the crossroads of the routes of Africa and Asia, for men who lived in a society bearing no cultural or social resemblance whatsoever to our own.

To be sure, we know well that the Hebrew Bible has constituted one of the principal sources of inspiration not only of Judaism but also of Christianity and of Islam, and that it has therefore profoundly influenced the cultural development of Europe, of America, and of the Near East; but at the present time, even among Jews and Christians, it is apparently regarded as little more than the respectable echo of the voice of a very distant past. Most Christians read the Old Testament far less than the New, and, what is more, a great part of what they do read of it is distorted by certain prejudices. It is often imagined that the Old Testament is the exclusive expression of the principles of justice and vengeance, as opposed to the New, which would represent the notions of love and mercy; many Christians even believe that the famous sentence “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” comes from the New Testament and not the Old! Or else the Old Testament is held to have been written in a spirit of narrow nationalism and to contain nothing of the supranational universalism that is so characteristic of the New. In this regard one observes, to tell the truth, a most encouraging modification in the attitude of Protestants as well as Catholics. But to abolish all the prejudices that exist against the Old Testament, much still remains to be done. The Jews who attend religious services are, for their part, more familiar with the Old Testament, since a portion of the Pentateuch is read at every Sabbath, as well as on Mondays and Thursdays, so that the whole of the first five books of the Bible is completed over the course of a year¹. Knowledge of it is further increased by the study of the Talmud, which contains innumerable quotations from the Scriptures. To be sure, only a minority of Jews follow that tradition at the present time, but it was a widespread custom among all Jews only a century and a half ago. In their traditional existence, the study of the Bible was encouraged by the need to ground all new ideas as well as all religious teachings upon the authority of the biblical verses; but this use of the Bible had an ambiguous result. For because the verses of the Bible were employed to buttress a new idea or a new religious law, they were often cited out of their context and given an interpretation that did not correspond to their real meaning. Even when no such distortion occurred, more interest was often taken in the “usefulness” of a verse for grounding a new idea than in its meaning within the overall context in which it was situated. In fact, the text of the Bible was better known through the medium of the Talmud and the weekly recitations than through a direct and systematic study. The study of the oral tradition (the Mishnah, the Gemara, etc.) was much more important and constituted a far more exciting intellectual emulation. Over the centuries, the Jews not only interpreted the Bible in the spirit of their own tradition but also, to a very large extent, under the influence of ideas emanating from other cultures with which their scholars were in contact. Thus Philo envisaged the Old Testament in the spirit of Plato, Maimonides in that of Aristotle, and Hermann Cohen in that of Kant. As for the classical commentaries, they were composed in the Middle Ages, the most eminent of the commentators, Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (1040–1105), surnamed Rashi, having interpreted the Bible with the conservative mentality of medieval feudalism……

For many generations of Jews who lived after the end of the Middle Ages, and particularly for those who dwelt in Germany, Poland, Russia, and Austria, the medieval inspiration of these commentaries thus only reinforced the tendencies rooted in the situation of the ghetto, where they had little contact with the social and cultural life of the modern era. As for the Jews who, from the end of the eighteenth century onward, had integrated themselves into modern European culture, they generally took very little interest in the study of the Old Testament. A many-colored book, written, revised, and re-composed by numerous authors over the course of a millennium, the Old Testament is the testimony of a remarkable evolution that runs from primitive authoritarianism and clan spirit to the idea of man’s radical freedom and the brotherhood of all men. The Old Testament is a revolutionary book whose theme is the liberation of man: liberation from the incestuous ties to blood and to the soil; rejection of submission to idols, to slavery, to the power of masters; accession to the freedom of the individual, of the nation, and of all humanity². Perhaps we are today in a position to understand the Bible better than any preceding age, precisely because we live in an era of revolutions, in the course of which man, despite numerous errors that subject him to new kinds of dependency, is in the process of freeing himself from all the forms of social servitude that were formerly sanctioned by “God” and “the social laws.” Paradoxically enough, it is not impossible that one of the oldest books of Western culture may be best understood by those very people who are the least carried along by tradition and the most conscious of the radical nature of the process of liberation now under way. …….

I do not regard the Bible as the “word of God,” and that not only because a historical examination shows plainly that it is a book written by men — of diverse kinds — living at different epochs — but also because I am not a theist. It nonetheless remains that, for me, it is an extraordinary book, expressing a great many norms and principles that have preserved their validity across millennia upon millennia. The Bible has lavished upon men a teaching that is still valid today and awaits being put into act. It was not written by a single individual nor dictated by God; rather it expresses the genius of a people in struggle for existence and for freedom over the course of many generations.

The Bible as a single book.

In my view, the Hebrew Bible can be treated as a single book, although it is in fact the compilation of diverse sources. It became one book not only through the work of its various redactors but also because it has been read and understood as a single book over the last two millennia. Moreover, individual passages change in meaning when they are transferred from their original source into the new context of the Old Testament considered as a whole. Here are two examples that may serve to illustrate this phenomenon: in Genesis (1:26) God says “Let us make man in our image.” According to numerous exegetes of the Old Testament, this is an archaic sentence introduced without great change by the redactor of the Priestly Code. According to certain authors, this sentence represents God as a human being. That may be perfectly true if one considers the original archaic meaning of the text. But one then asks oneself why the redactor of this passage of the Bible, who without any doubt did not hold so archaic a conception of God, did not modify the sentence in question. For my own part, I think the reason is that, for him, the sentence meant that man, having been created in the image of God, has a “divine” (Godlike) quality. Another example of this shift in meaning is the prohibition against making an image of God or using His name. It may be perfectly true that this prohibition drew its meaning from an archaic custom, found in certain Semitic rites in which God and His name are considered taboo and which therefore forbid making His image and using His name. But in the context of the Bible as a whole, the sense of this archaic taboo has been transformed into a new idea: namely, that God is not an object and, for that reason, cannot be presented in the form of a word or in the form of an image. The Old Testament is the document that depicts the evolution of a small, primitive nation whose spiritual leaders insisted upon the existence of a single God and upon the non-existence of idols, an evolution that led this nation to a religion involving faith in a nameless God, in the final unification of all men, in the complete freedom of each individual.

Jewish history did not come to a halt at the moment when the twenty-four books of the Old Testament were codified. It continued and, with it, there continued and grew the evolution of the ideas that had taken their source in the Bible. This continuation had two branches: one in the New Testament, the Christian Bible; the other in the development of Judaism usually called the “oral tradition.” The Jewish sages have always laid stress on the continuity and unity of the written tradition (the Old Testament) and the oral. The latter was also codified: its oldest part, the Mishnah, around A.D. 200, its most recent part, the Gemara, around 500. Paradoxically, it is precisely when one adopts the point of view according to which the Bible is what it is historically — namely, a selection of writings dating from several centuries — that it is easiest to find oneself in agreement with the traditional views concerning the profound unity between the written tradition and the oral tradition. The latter, just like the written Bible, records ideas that were expressed over a period of more than twelve hundred years. If we imagine that a second Jewish Bible could be edited, it would include the Talmud, the writings of Maimonides, the Kabbalah, as well as the sayings of the Hasidic masters. Such a collection of texts would extend only a few centuries longer than the Old Testament, but would likewise be the work of numerous authors who had lived in entirely different circumstances from one another, and would present as many contradictory ideas and teachings as the Bible itself. To be sure, this second Bible does not exist and, for various reasons, could not be compiled. But what I wish to show, in alluding to such a possibility, is that the Old Testament represents the development of ideas over a long period of time and that these ideas continued to develop over an even longer period after the Old Testament had been codified. This continuity appears visually, in most spectacular fashion, on every page of the Talmud as it is printed today: there one finds not only the Mishnah and the Gemara but also later commentaries and treatises written down to the present hour, from the epoch that preceded Maimonides to the Gaon of Vilna.

The two tendencies of Judaism.

Both the Old Testament and the oral tradition contain contradictions within them, but these have a somewhat different character in the one case and in the other. Those of the Old Testament are due in good part to the evolution of the Hebrews: from a small nomadic tribe, they became a people living in Babylon and, later, were influenced by Hellenistic culture. By contrast, in the period that followed the completion of the Old Testament, the contradictions have more as their cause the passage from an archaic existence to a civilized life; they express rather the constant division between various opposing tendencies, which manifested itself throughout the history of Judaism, from the destruction of the Temple by the Romans to that of the centers of traditional Jewish culture by Hitler. This division is the one that opposes nationalism to universalism, conservatism to radicalism, fanaticism to tolerance. The persistence of these two “wings” of Judaism, their strength — and that of several other intermediate tendencies — have of course their reasons, which may be found in the conditions inherent in the regions in which Judaism developed (Palestine, Babylon, Islamic North Africa and Spain, medieval Christian Europe, tsarist Russia) and in the specific social classes from which the Jewish scholars came³. The foregoing remarks show how difficult it is to interpret both the Bible and the later Jewish tradition. To interpret an evolutionary process, one must show the development of certain tendencies that manifested themselves over the course of that evolution. Such an interpretation makes it necessary to choose the elements that constitute the main current, or at least a main current, in the process of the evolution; this amounts to assessing the weight of certain facts, to selecting some that are judged more representative and others that are deemed to be less so. A history that attributes the same importance to all facts is nothing other than a mere enumeration of events; it is incapable of giving a meaning to the events. To write history always means to interpret history. The whole question is whether the interpreter is endowed with a sufficient knowledge of the facts and has a sufficient respect for them to avoid the danger of choosing certain data to buttress a preconceived thesis. So the interpretation that follows is bound to fulfill a single condition: the passages of the Bible, of the Talmud, and of later Jewish literature to which it has recourse must not be rare and exceptional assertions, but declarations emanating from representative figures and constituting elements of a coherent and growing pattern of thought. Furthermore, the contradictory assertions must not be ignored but taken for what they are: the parts of a whole within which contradictory systems of thought existed alongside the one on which the emphasis is laid in the present work. A book of greater scope could demonstrate that the humanist and radical current of thought marks the principal stages of the evolution of the Jewish tradition, whereas the conservative and nationalist system is the relatively unchanged vestige of an older period and has never taken part in the progressive evolution of Jewish thought in its contribution to universal human values. Although I am not a specialist in matters of biblical studies, this book is the fruit of many years of reflection, for I have studied the Old Testament and the Talmud ever since I was a child. Nevertheless, I should never have ventured to publish these commentaries on the Scriptures had I not received my fundamental orientation, regarding the Hebrew Bible and the later Jewish tradition, from masters who were remarkable scholars in the rabbinic domain. All were representatives of the humanist wing of the Jewish tradition, and Jews of strict observance; yet they differed greatly from one another. One of them, Ludwig Krause, was a traditionalist little touched by modern thought. The second, Nehemia Nobel, was a mystic, whose thought was as deeply steeped in Jewish mysticism as in Western humanism. As for the third, Salman B. Rabinkow, though rooted in the Hasidic tradition, he was a socialist and a modern intellectual. Although none of them left a major work, all three were regarded as belonging among the most eminent connoisseurs of the Talmud who lived in Germany before the Nazi holocaust. As I am neither a practicing Jew nor a “believing” Jew, my position is naturally quite different from theirs, and I would not for anything in the world hold them responsible for the views expressed in the present work. But it nonetheless remains that my opinions took shape on the basis of their teaching, and I am convinced that at no moment was there a rupture of continuity between that teaching and my point of view.

The Bible as radical humanism.

The interpretation of the Bible that will be found in the present work is founded on a “radical humanism”; by this term I mean a global philosophy that lays the emphasis on the oneness of the human race, on the capacity man has to develop his powers and to attain inner harmony and the establishment of a world at peace. Radical humanism considers that the goal of man is to attain a complete independence, which implies taking, through the fictions and illusions, a full consciousness of reality. Radical humanism implies furthermore a skeptical attitude toward the use of force, for it is precisely force — the creator of fear — that throughout all history has induced and still induces man to take fiction for reality and illusions for truth. It is force that has rendered man incapable of independence and, in consequence, has warped his reason and his emotions. If it is possible to discover the germs of radical humanism in the most ancient sources of the Bible, it is solely because we know the radical humanism of Amos, of Socrates, of the humanists of the Renaissance, of the Age of Enlightenment, of Kant, of Herder, of Lessing, of Goethe, of Marx, of A. Schweitzer. The germ is clearly recognizable only when one knows the flower; the primitive phase must often be interpreted in the light of the later phase, even if, genetically, the first precedes the second. Another aspect of the radical humanist interpretation must be mentioned here. Ideas, especially when it is a matter of those that do not belong to a single individual but have integrated themselves into a historical process, sink their roots into the real life of society. If one grants that radical humanism is a major tendency of the biblical and post-biblical tradition, one must also grant that throughout all their history the Jews had at their disposal fundamental conditions apt to engender and to make grow this tendency. Is this really the case? Did these conditions really exist?

I believe so, and that it is not difficult to detect them. The Jews held effective and significant temporal power only during a very brief period, in fact only during a few generations. After the reigns of David and Solomon, the pressure of the great powers situated to the North and to the South took on such proportions that Judah and Israel lived under the growing threat of being conquered, were so in fact, and never recovered their power. Even when the Jews, later, recovered a formal political independence, they remained a small powerless satellite, subject to formidable powers. When the Romans finally suppressed the Jewish State, after Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai had gone over to their side asking only for the permission to open at Yavneh an academy intended to train future generations of rabbinic scholars, a Judaism without kings and without priests appeared: but it had in fact existed already for centuries, behind a façade to which the Romans had merely given the death-blow. Thus the prophets who had denounced the idolatrous admiration of the Jews for temporal power were avenged by the march of history. It was therefore the teachings of the prophets and not the splendor of Solomon that exerted a dominant and durable influence on Jewish thought. From that moment on, the Jews as a nation never recovered their power; quite the contrary, throughout the greater part of their history, they became the victims of those who were in a position to have recourse to force. There can be no doubt that this situation could feed a national resentment, create a clan spirit, give birth to arrogance, and such was indeed the case: it is there that one must seek the foundation of the other tendency that manifested itself over the course of Jewish history and that I mentioned above. But is it not natural that the history of the liberation from slavery in Egypt and the discourses of the great humanist prophets should have found an echo in the hearts of men who had experienced force only as victims, never as executioners? Is it surprising that the prophetic vision of a humanity united and at peace, of a justice for the poor and the dispossessed, should have found fertile soil among the Jews and never been forgotten there? Is it surprising that, when the walls of the ghettos crumbled, the Jews found themselves in disproportionate numbers among those who proclaimed the ideals of internationalism, of peace, and of justice? What, from a profane point of view, was the tragedy of the Jews — the loss of their country and of their State — may be regarded from the humanist point of view as their greatest blessing: having found themselves among those who suffered and were despised, they were able to develop and to maintain a tradition of humanism.

(With the kind permission of Éditions Complexe)

Michelangelo: The Creation of Man