Shalom: Peace in the Torah and its Times
The Hebrew word for peace, Shalom, is today a customary Jewish greeting. But the uses of the word in the Torah, which recounts the early history, theology and principles of the Jewish people, are far more complex and are directly related to contemporary concerns.
By its narratives alone, the Torah is “a violent book with an obvious bias towards strife” in line with its violent, strife-filled times.1 As contexts, however, these narratives foreground the evolution of physical, spiritual, ethical and socio-political contents of Shalom. Caught between the rival powers of Mesopotamia and Egypt, Hebrew-speaking nomadic pastoralists of the Patriarchs’ generations (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, c. 2000-1500 BCE) were also at the mercy of nature. Originally from Ur, they set out on foot into the desert for distant Canaan, the Promised Land, after Abraham received a divine order to do so. In a very physical sense, then, Shalom first meant protection from human and elemental hostilities surrounding a people always on the run.The spiritual covenant with God, by which Abraham’s progeny would be plentiful and prosper in the Promised Land with divine protection, was in a way a conditional treaty on the tributary model. For these blessings, full submission and undivided devotion to the deity was required of them. The originality of this “covenant of peace” that God continually renewed with Abraham and his descendents is that it tied a single god to a single group of people exclusively and indefinitely, whereas syncretism and henotheism were then the main modes of religious peacemaking in the region at the time. Many gods are recognized in the Torah, one of which chooses Abraham’s people, giving them and their descendents a unique identity and destiny. In return, they choose this god to be the God for them, demoting the rest to idols. Highly anthropomorphized, this God (Yahweh) walks and talks with Abraham, is jealous of other gods, and gets vengefully angry when he is disobeyed.
As the search for the Promised Land’s peaceful safe-haven continues, Yahweh inflicts atrocities on those standing in the spiritual or logistical way of his people, reinforcing their belief in Yahweh’s provident omnipotence and the covenant of peace. For his part, Abraham occasionally takes on the role of diplomat, as in the non-aggression pact made with a Philistine king and his general near Canaan. “Show me,” says the king,”and the country where you are living as an alien the same kindness I have shown you,” a typical description of the guest-host relationship crucial to the survival of migrants in settled lands.2 Abraham swears to this and offers seven ewes for access to a well, in the vicinity of which he died and where his progeny prospered for a while under his son Isaac. The peoples of all three monotheisms would later trace their peace traditions back to Abraham.In individual terms, Shalom came to refer to inner peace qualified by health, serenity of mind and spiritual purity from sins such as idolatry. In search of this, Jacob (Isaac’s son and last of the Patriarchs) fled from famine to fertile Egypt with his people, where they were eventually enslaved. There, inner Shalom became a means of preserving their faith, identity and lives in the face of ongoing oppression, without which the Jewish faith might not exist today. During the subsequent Exodus from Egypt to Canaan, the ethical principles or laws of Jewish society were made explicit by its leader, the Prophet Moses. As an adopted member of the Pharaoh’s court, he had tried to make peace between the enslavers and the enslaved, as well to promote it among the enslaved themselves. When these attempts failed, he tried to negotiate with the Pharaoh for their release. The Pharaoh agreed only when Yahweh wreaked ten plagues upon the Egyptians and, with similar support, Moses and the former slaves subdued the hostile human and natural forces they met with, at great cost of lives and resources. The Ten Commandments revealed to him on the journey were meant not only to promote peace among his people, but also between them and Yahweh, who it was now believed must be punishing them for their wayward ways.
The first four renew the exclusive covenant of peace discussed above, prohibiting the worship of other gods or idols and holding Yahweh and the day of worship in the highest esteem. The last six are basic guidelines for living in a stable, unwarlike society, quite the contrary of theirs at the time: not murdering or stealing, nor coveting property or people, and treating parents with respect. The “eye for an eye” doctrine put forth a few passages later complements the Commandments as a preventative measure, but contradicts them by perpetuating instead of stopping violence in conveying a retaliatory justice confusable with the commendation of conflict. Having barely made it to Canaan, Yahweh called upon Moses to write the traditions his people had passed down orally since before Abraham’s time, after which he soon died. Being a “people of the book,” discussed below, further distinguished his religion from those tied to persons or things, and lent a portability and permanence to the instructions for individual and social Shalom that later provided the basis for both socio-political and Messianic Shalom.The conquest of Canaan (c. thirteenth-eleventh centuries BCE) led by Moses’ protege and the most military of the Prophets, Joshua, was a cruel and drawn-out affair despite and because of divine interventions. It was motivated by a belief that the sought-for Shalom was tied to a specific geographical location and a God-given right to occupy it regardless of present residents. Bloody battles between the newcomers and the locals over land, resources and religion continued long after settlement started, though Joshua had “made peace with them, and made a league with them, to let them live.”3 Following his death, the settlements were divided among twelve traditional tribes descending from Jacob’s twelve sons. These fractious new conditions and the infighting they brought about created a need to redefine Shalom in a more socially cooperative, politically united sense.
The religious messages Shalom had carried for more than a millennium thus slowly took on the added dimensions of a socio-political ideal. Mixing legislative, judicial and religious powers, potentates called Judges (shopetim) were invested with decision-making authority for and between the twelve tribes, presiding over individual cases and over their collective activities. In the Judges’ hands, Shalom came to mean an arrangement or agreement reached by mutual consent, legitimately authorized and justly implemented by established processes. Peace was now associated with power equilibriums conducive to prosperous internal order and strong defences from external threats, as when the Prophet Isaiah later proclaimed “let him take hold of my strength, that he may make peace with me.”4 As Judges consolidated their territorial gains over the course of two centuries, they began to show the same peaceable guest-host parity to strangers as their forefathers had once received in the same region. Simultaneously, attempts began to be made to consolidate previous innerpersonal into an inter-personal peace by turning wisdom, generosity, charity and patience into admirable qualities, not yet as substitutes but as additions to the warlike ones of yore.The twelve tribes, probably drawing on the monarchical models elsewhere in the region, began agitating for a king to solidify these consolidations, only three of which ruled (c. eleventh-tenth centuries BCE) before the Promised Land was once again lost. The last Judge, Samuel, appointed the first two Kings, Saul and David. Yahweh supported Saul as he led the twelve tribes to military victories over regional rivals, but then condemned him for keeping loot for himself, and he dies in battle shortly thereafter. Under David, the twelve tribes’ combined forces were able to fully pacify their foes. The internal peace David’s defensive/offensive alliances conferred to the twelve tribes was offset by the external wars by which it came into being.
With fewer and fewer enemies left to be united against, staying united in and for peace became more and more of a problem. David’s dream of building a great temple in the kingdom’s new capital, Jerusalem, was forbidden by Yahweh because David was a “man of battles” who had “shed blood.”5 Yahweh, once a staunch supporter of his people’s wars, had become the protagonist of their peace. Famed for his wisdom, David’s son and successor’s name is a variation of Shalom and his early reign an example of its socio-political meaning. King Solomon, reaping the benefits of his forefathers’ cumulative achievements, also extended them. With peace at the borders and prosperity within them, Solomon established new cities and repaired old ones throughout the kingdom while founding several colonies. He formed inter-kingdom economic alliances, as with the King of Tyre, and political ones by way of multiple marriages, as with a Pharaoh’s daughter. Yahweh, approving of Solomon’s peaceful reign up to this point, allowed him to build the great temple David was denied, where ancient ritual sacrifices intended to appease, give thanks to and glorify the deity continued. But he began levying disproportionately heavy taxes affecting the poor and demanded compulsory labor to execute his extensive building programme in Jerusalem, stirring dissent among the more distant tribes. He also encouraged his foreign wives in practicing their native religions, shocking his subjects’ spiritual sensibilities, to say nothing of Yahweh. Shortly after Solomon’s death, these policies divided the kingdom, the strength and peace of which depended on unity and justice. The ten northern tribes seceded and became Israel; the two southern, loyalist tribes became Judea. Israel, weak and war-torn, fell to the Assyrians in 722 BCE. In the same state, Judea fell to the Babylonians in 586 BCE, when the great temple symbolizing King Solomon’s Shalom was destroyed.The subsequent Exile and Diaspora or “scattering” of the Hebrew people, at first around the region then across the Hellenic and Roman Empires, stretched Shalom’s meanings in new directions.
Without a homeland, estranged or integrated in societies often historically unrelated to them, and a lack of military wherewithal dramatically changed perspectives on peace. Suddenly, tactical surrender as a means to Shalom began to be preferred to conflict, armed or otherwise. Power was no longer considered solely as an instrument of survival and domination, but also as a means of constructively reforming societies from within, instead of destructively from without. “Be at peace,” asserts Job in the book bearing his name, “and thereby thou shalt have the best fruits.”6 Renewed readings of the Torah, now taking its final form, informed prophecies and philosophies aimed at collective transformations, Kabala enhanced the mystical elements of Judaic inner peace, while exegetical works such as the Talmud aimed at conserving peace-oriented priestly, legal and lay traditions. Genesis, the first book of the Torah, tells of a Paradise called the Garden of Eden created by God for humankind where the primordial man and woman (Adam and Eve) lived in plenty and perfect peace with each other, the natural world and the deity. However, tempted by a serpent, they sacrificed this sublime Shalom by disobeying God’s only command to them: not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. As punishment, God cast them and their descendents out of Paradise into this world of toil and trouble. Cain, one of their sons, kills his brother Abel in a jealous rage over God’s preferential treatment, the act of violence back to which the three monotheisms sharing this story trace the history of warfare. Just as the peace of Paradise was lost by the sin of its inhabitants, so it was now believed was that of its closest approximation since Solomon’s kingdom. God had sent many great leaders to guide his people after their banishment from Paradise. Now that they were banished from the Promised Land, a widespread belief emerged that the peaces of the past would return in the near future through a new kind of leader.Working within this theological paradigm, Jewish Prophets predicted the coming of a Messiah (“Anointed One”) who would bring about spiritual salvation, ethical regeneration, Shalom to God’s people and, through them, to humanity. The Messianic message was one of universal peace, though along strict sectarian lines. The Messiah would be a descendent of David, but part human and part divine. His wisdom and justice would pacify the earth, which would then become his undivided kingdom. His peaceful reign would be eternal; he would purify the hearts and minds of his subjects, who would then model their morals and actions on his; and God would accept his suffering as atonement for humanity’s sins since Adam and Eve’s fall from grace. After the Messiah’s arrival, “the work of righteousness shall be peace,” as opposed to the history of righteous warfare in God’s name preceding it, and “the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance forever.”7 The Messiah would also be a conciliator, as “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,” but would concurrently deliver divine judgment, so that “there is no peace to the wicked.”8 The Messiah would be an activist arbiter, stopping all wars at their sources:
And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into ploughs, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.9
Through the Messiah, Shalom in all its meanings would come into being and Paradise would be restored. Combining Jewish with the Greco- Roman traditions, Philo of Alexandria (c. 30 BCE-40 CE) concluded that war is a corruption of the soul curable by living “with fellow citizens in peace and law-observance, that order of which justice is the guiding influence.”10 The peace he envisioned by synthesizing the Pax Romana’s ideological imperative and the Messianic message was single, indivisible, the same for one and all. But one question the Prophets left unanswered was: When exactly would the Messiah’s Shalom arrive?