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A very good morning to you. Let's begin by recapping briefly what we were attempting to do last week. Our topic is Exodus as epic. So we began by comparing the Exodus story with a number of ancient epics and came to the conclusion that they had so much in common that it was quite right to regard the Exodus story as epic. Then we proceeded to notice that the Exodus story might likely be classified as a quest story.
Some tremendous experience to start with, or some secret divulged, or some promise made. And so people start out to achieve that promise. It involves a long journey with many, uh, uh, progress, but constantly repeated obstacles in the way. And generally with those quest stories, it is at the end that most fighting comes. Judged by that Exodus then, the Exodus story was quite plainly a quest story.
But then we notice that, unlike many of the epics in the ancient world, in the Exodus story there is no fantastic geography. That is to say, while in Homer's O- O- Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid and the Gilgamesh epic, the hero goes down into the underworld or such other questionable subterranean places. Uh, in the Exodus story, there is no fantastic geography of that sort. Indeed, the, uh, overwhelming and constantly increasing evidence is that this epic, or shall I rephrase it, the world in which this epic is placed, is the known world of the second millennium BC.
We shall be observing this morning that this epic of Exodus has its roots in the earlier book of Genesis with, uh, the promises made to Abraham. And Abraham was a nomad and a pastoralist, one of many such pastoralists and transhumans that, uh, uh, inhabited the world in the early second millennium BC. Then the major story in Exodus is placed in Egypt. That is a literal country, and now looking at the background of that country, uh, the things that are spoken of in Exodus have their obvious equivalents in the real world of that country.
The Israelites made bricks, uh, under Pharaohs for the building of their great storehouses. And we could records show us that, uh, at a certain time in Egyptian history, they did use other ethnic groups that came to Egypt or were conquered. They did eventually, at one period, submit them to hard slavish work for the making of bricks. The system in Exodus that these Hebrews, uh, had Egyptian officers over them, but between those officers and the Israelites, there were Israelite foremen.
That too, we know from the records, is true to the actual state of affairs in Egypt. The question of the tallying of bricks at one stage in Exodus story is increased because the Pharaoh feels that they are, they are liable to try and escape, so he makes their work very heavy. Well, we have similarly the records of tallies of bricks, uh, over different groups and the Egyptian officers and the ethnic foremen and so forth. In this story, Moses asks permission for the, uh, from the Pharaoh that Israel should be given permission to leave to celebrate a religious festival.
We have in the records, uh, records of other groups that from time to time ask permission to go off for a day or two or four days or what have you to celebrate religious festivals. What I'm simply arguing this at this moment is that the background of this epic is the real world of, um, uh, uh, of Egypt. Whether you personally believe all the records of the stories of the Exodus is another thing. I'm simply arguing that this is the literal background. When we come to that dramatic episode of the plagues in Egypt, as we shall do this morning, we should notice, first of all, that there were nine plagues, not ten.
The tenth was not a plague, it was, uh, said to be a direct interposition of judgment by God, but the nine plagues were concerned with disturbances in the normal ecological systems of Egypt, on which Egypt prosperity depended. Since the interesting article by Greta Hort some years ago, we can see that the plagues had to do with these ecosystems, and you can trace the mechanisms by which those plagues came about.
There are records of other times when similar disturbances were experienced in the ecosystems of Egypt. That is not to deny the miraculous element in that. It simply raises the question of who eventually controls the ecosystems, and more of that than not. We should not get time this morning to consider the record that after the Jews, the Israelites, the Hebrews came out of Egypt, they built a tabernacle. That has often been regarded in last, uh, in previous centuries as a fanciful, um, uh, imaginative construction, you'll see, part of the fairy story side.
But, of course, recent archaeological discoveries, and not least of all Tutankhamun's tomb, have shown that that tabernacle and the details of its construction correspond to what we know of Egyptian building of such portable shrines in the, uh, second millennium BC. And finally, at this will, we shall this morning be considering one, uh, very important episode in the journey, namely the covenant that Israel made with their God at Sinai.
The interesting thing about that covenant is on the theological side, but we're not here to discuss that, on the theological side, the concept of a covenant made with God is a very interesting thing compared with the surrounding, uh, Mediterranean nations. But historically, it is the form of this covenant that interests us. Because the discoveries at places like, uh, Heba, Ma- uh, Mari and so on have yielded thousands of clay tablets, many of which are not yet published, and in them we perceive hosts of documents of covenants ranging over several, uh, one or two millennia.
Uh, therefore we can judge the time at which these covenants, uh, were formed, but roughly speaking, because the form of these covenants changed as the centuries went by. The form of covenant represented in the story of Sinai has its parallels in the Hittite covenant forms. They were, of course, not religious covenants, they were, uh, political measures by which an overlord king would put upon the vassal kings in his empire the terms upon which they were to be governed, and these terms had from time to time to be read in front of the assembled nation.
So suppose the emperor, uh, was Subito de Ummo, and he formed a covenant with his vassal kings and their subjects. The covenant would run in such form as follows. First, the great emperor would pronounce who he was. I am Subito de Ummo, for instance, you see. Then he would rehearse all the benefits that he had conferred upon his vassal subjects by conquering them and slitting their throats and generally, uh, uh, subduing them, you'll see.
Then he would, uh, issue a whole lot of do's, thou shalt do this, and then a whole lot of don'ts, and thou shalt not do that. For those who didn't do what they were supposed to do, he would pronounce curses written into the cover. And then he would call the gods to witness that the people had made this covenant with him, and he with them. And finally, he would ask for provision to be made for the storing of the covenant and for their being taken out from time to time and to be read, eh, by the, uh, vassal king in the presence of the people.
It doesn't take much Old Testament knowledge to see that the form of the covenant, uh, given the narrative at Sinai follows that. It begins by saying, I am the Lord thy God, that's who I am, and what he's done is brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. And then the do's, thou shalt, and the do nots, thou, uh, uh, uh, thou shalt not, you'll see. And then if you put the, uh, covenant in its ongoing history throughout, uh, the next books, and particularly Deuteronomy, will come across the blessings pronounced on those who keep it and the curses pronounced on their breaking it.
And then provision for the storing of the covenant documents. That in part was what the ark was about in the tabernacle, and the responsibility of the leader to get it out and rehearse it in the ears of the people. And that is, of course, what the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy is about. It is the leader of the people taking the covenant documents, not only reading them, but expounding them and reminding you of the blessings and the curses. And then the witnesses are called, and with the Israeli covenant, of course, not the witness of the gods, but the, uh, appeal to the one God, uh, to, uh, ma- to, uh, patrol and control the people's behavior and to judge whether it kept the covenant term.
Now, all that by way of, um, uh, introduction this morning, just to emphasize that this epic, and we've agreed it's an epic, and this quest story, the position in which it is placed, the historical background, is a background that we know nowadays very well, and know increasingly through the archaeological and inscriptional evidence. It is an epic played out in the real world. And that leads us this morning to face Dr. Devlin's very persist- perceptive question at the end of last week's session.
And that was, can we have an epic? Is there such a thing as a modern epic? Can we have an epic in our modern world? I shall try to give an answer to that at the end of this session, but just to alert you, I should be suggesting that our interest in the Exodus epic is in part because it is an example, you might say almost a prototype.
But it certainly shares themes with what is the greatest of all ethics. That is the history of human beings on this planet. That humanity is on some kind of a journey, and not just standing still, is obvious to most people. We mustn't suppose we are more intelligent than the ancients, but we know a lot more. And our last century has witnessed an enormous progress in the realm of science and technology, at least, and in medicine, for which joy we are grateful.
But ever again, there rises the question about the future of the human race. We think, when we think of epics and the prom- uh, and the Exodus epic and the promise of the Promised Land, of political systems that have taken hold of this model and used it in political circumstances. Marxism, as we pointed out last week, is a eminent example of it. Denying all the supernatural realm, of course, by talking in terms of the laws of history, so they said they were laws, that would inevitably bring in a glorious paradise, an economic paradise.
Various forms of historicism have thought they have discerned in history principles that inevitably work out. Or you have the lesser efforts inspired by the Exodus and using it as a political theme, such as the emancipation of slavery and the struggles leading thereto. But there, of course, is a bigger question, isn't it? As we consider human life on this planet, what its future may be. And the scientists are not quite agreed, are they?
As to, they tell us in their charming way that the, that the, our universe is going to come to an end anyway, at least our fanatics. They comfort us with the thought it might not, it might be a million years, ten million years, billions of years before it happens. But it one day is going to start, it raises a fundamental problem. That is, what is our goal? What is our hope for the future? Has the human race, our human race, a rosy future ahead? Or will the forces of nature eventually conspire against it and the whole thing be blotted out and come to a meaningless end.
The epic of the appearance, progress, and hopes and future of the race as a whole. So no more of that for the moment. I must come down to my proper business. I'm here not to discuss philosophy nor religion, but, uh, the book of Exodus, so to speak, and this is a quest story. It is common to regard this epic as having its roots in the story of the burning bush, where God appeared to Moses and encouraged him now to lead his people out of Egypt and to go, uh, to freedom.
And certainly that makes a very good starting point for that particular phase. But if we would be true to Exodus epic as a quest story, we must start earlier on. It goes back to the figure that the Hebrews claimed as the patriarch of their race, namely Abraham. His background was a pastoralist nomad, and as told in the record in Genesis, it's told against the background of the great cities of their early Mesopotamia, that part of the world, Babylonia, Erech, and such like places, and Ur, and then again, of course, greatest of all, Babel that eventually became Babylon.
The stories tell us at that time it was quite common to have the latest in sophisticated city life, and yet around it you would have pasturers, and so much so that these pasturers could be named after the city near which they worked. But unlike the city dwellers, the pasturers would move on and move out hundreds of miles, if need be, to get their pasture. This is the background, therefore. And at the time when people were free thus to move in the ancient East is not such a wide band of time as you might keep.
Anyway, that beside the point. The story of the beginning, what prompted this quest, and eventually the long journey, is the promise that Abram and his wife, being individuals and nomads, would have a great number of descendants that would form a great nation. Secondly, that they would have a land for their own permanent possession, so that they would cease to be nomads. That kings would come of them. And fourthly, and of great importance, that this development should be for the benefit of many nations at large.
There begins the promise. And, uh, we shall take it from there this morning and look at some of the obstacles that confronted the achievement of that promise. So let's take the first one, that is to say, the promise that Abram's deci- descendants would develop into a large and powerful nation. The first obstacle in the way is told us by the famous Joseph story at the end of the book of Genesis.
You will see, when God came down to Moses at the burning bush, he didn't just tell Moses, set your people free. He said, I've come down to deliver them according to the promise I made with your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So let's take the first element that they were to become a big nation. And the Joseph story comes in, and many chapters spent on it, with a dramatic turn of events. Now the patriarch was Jacob, otherwise known as Israel, because he was to give his name to the nation. He had four wives, whatever comments you'd like to make on that.
He had four wives and twelve sons, just say. And the object was to meld those sons into an extended family that then should become a tribe, that then should become a nation. It was at this time already an extended family, but when only an extended family, something happened that threatened to disrupt them completely and prevent their ever becoming a nation. It's a family dispute.
And if you say that surely that kind of thing is not a subject for epic, then let me remind you of Homer's famous Iliad. The Iliad is full from end to end with epic battles fought out by heroes around Troy. But the thing that gives the Iliad its cohesion as a piece of literature, as that that Aristotle long since o- uh, uh, uh observed, is what it where it starts and where it ends. It starts with a row between Achilles, the brightest of the Greek heroes, and Agamemnon, the commander in chief of the Allied forces.
That seems good to honor. And the, the point of the, of the quarrel was this, that Achilles had set his eyes on a very charming, uh, woman taken captive by the Greeks and proposed to take her for himself. When Agamemnon stepped in as commander and took the woman himself. With the result that Achilles was so incensed that he sulked and retreated to his tent and wouldn't take part in the fighting anymore. Even when he said, saw the Greeks being mauled by the Trojans.
And then there's a dramatic point in when the Greeks sent an embassy to Achilles to try to get him to overcome his quarrel and his resentment, but he would not. And the drama of the whole book comes to its climax when at last Achilles is persuaded to come back and get over his resentment and start fighting for his fellow Greeks once more. Homer decided, obviously, that from a literary point of view, this was an important element in the epic. Now, I mustn't try to retell the story of Joseph, take too long, and my clumsy attempts to do so would, uh, spoil the psychology of the story.
I recommend, if you want to read something on it, the book by Mayer Steinberg, Mayer, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, who towards the end of that volume has a very acute analysis of the twists and turns of the, uh, Joseph story. But it points out, with that ambiguity, uh, that gets our interest going, how that among Israel's 12 sons there was this son of a favorite wife named Joseph, that his father doted on him and gave him a coat of many colors, and his brothers were incensed at this favoritism.
And then, uh, this, uh, horrible teenager, he brought his father the bad report about the behavior of the brothers, and that was telling parents out of school, and they hated him all the more. And then worse, then he had his dreams, this stupid teenager, and he told his brothers his dreams unashamedly that they were all in the field and they were cutting the corn and putting it in sheaves, or stoops, as the Irish say, and uh, all the other stoops, they trod down and bowed down to the center stoop. And his brothers weren't slow at catching the implication, and they were exceedingly annoyed with this teenager pulling on his hairs and graces that up.
And then he had another dream to make things worse. He dreamed of the sun and the moon and the stars, and if you please, not only did the other stars bow down to his star, but the sun and the moon bowed down, and old Israel himself wasn't slow to see what that implied and rebuked his favorite and possibly spoiled son. Shall he rule over us? Preposterous. And of course, the story writer knows what he's doing, doesn't he? He's weighed at the scales, and yet perhaps you sense it in your bones. This impossible teenager is going to be the very savior of his brothers.
His dreams are going to come true in a spectacular fashion. And his brothers, uh, eventual, uh, suggestion to murder him and then to sell him, though they were determined to stop his dreams ever coming true, were the means, this is good Sophoclean tragedy, this is, were the very means of preserving those brothers in time of famine, accommodating them in Egypt, so that they could grow from an extended family into a tribe and then eventually into a nation.
This is, I suggest, part of the epic thing. One of those twists in the narrative that keeps you in suspense. Again, I mustn't try to d- to to relay the psychology of what then followed when the brothers came to Egypt seeking food, and of course met Joseph, and he knew who they were, and they didn't recognize him. And the devices he went to... at first he said they were spies. And to prove their story, they must leave their, uh, one of their members, their brother as, uh, uh, Simeon in prison.
And the next time they came to Egypt, they must bring also their youngest brother, son of the same wife as Joseph came from, of course. So they went off, and unbeknownst to them, Joseph had had their money, which they paid for the corn, put in their sacks. And they came home toward Father Israel and showed him with glee these sacks of corn, marvelous there, do you see? And uh, they opened the sacks and there was the money. And old Israel, that's the point of the story you're meant to concentrate on here.
Old Israel, seeing the money, he simply said, uh, that you have brought this disaster upon me. Israel said, me you have bereaved of my children. Joseph is not, and Simeon is not. Raises the question. When originally they had come home without Joseph, they'd taken his, uh, garment, his robe of beautiful colors, killed a goat and stained the coat with the blood of the goat, and they brought it to Israel, and they said, this, this, have seen this.
Um, that looks to us a bit like, it could be perhaps Joseph's coat. Looks to us as a wild beast has devoured here. We're not told what old Israel thought. Did he ever believe that lie or not? Now they come home second time. Now they've lost another brother down in Egypt. He really is risen. All his money, they sold him too. Anyway, the demand was, when they wanted corn again, they had to take little Benjamin.
And at first, Israel stuck out and wasn't having that. A famine forced him. So Benjamin was taken. And there they are in front of Joseph, and he sets them down to dine, and he gives Benjamin a double portion. That would incite their, their jealousy, if ever they had any jealousy. Some priests say, why didn't Joseph immediately reveal himself to them, that cruel old cab taking advantage of them and putting them through this harrowing experience. But that is to miss the point. He let them go, and in Joseph's sack he surreptitiously, and in Benjamin's sack he surreptitiously put his, um, golden cup.
When they were eventually arrested, they said, of course, none of us has taken the cup, but if anyone of us has, he shall be your bond servant. Uh, sorry, you may put him to death, and we shall be your bond servants forever. So they all went back to Egypt. And now comes the critical point. Joseph insists, no, you needn't stay. You agreed, but the one that had the cup, he should be executed. You can all go home. Well, at the climax, Judah steps forward. Judah, the one that had sold Joseph. And he pleaded with this man.
He says, look here, my father had one son and he's not, and now this is the other favorite son. I guarantee to my father to bring him back, or my life will go for his life. I can't go back without, without this lad, Benjamin. If I go back without him, it will kill my father. I can't do this. Let me die in the place of this lad. Now you get what Joseph was at, at. How shall this inter-family resentment and jealousy be scotched, and the, uh, the tribe come into the nation that is homogeneous and not so destructive.
The two principles involved are Joseph's own willingness, though he suffered innocently, not to take the tabulation, but the other principle which Judith is in, the willingness to suffer substitutionally in the place of his fathers, the great principles of national coherence. And since these disputes, not only at the level of family, but at the level of nations, are still with us.
They are part, in my book, of the ongoing epic experience of the human race. Then we come to Egypt. It is noticeable, should be observed, that in the history there are two parts of Egypt, and in the one, Egypt is exceedingly good. Under Joseph, it proved a refuge for Israel. Uh, they were saved from famine. They were given place to exercise their trade and to develop into a nation. Egypt educated Moses anyway, evidence of it in all his subsequent behavior, in the arts and crafts, uh, o- of Egypt.
Israel owed Egypt a tremendous lot. This is not the purpose of the record to denigrate Egypt. It's what Egypt that came later, where the Pharaohs enslaved the Israelites, and they didn't do that just to Israel, so the record shows to other ethnic groups as well. In such grievous slavery that Egypt, uh, that the, uh, Hebrews, of course, forgot their promised destiny. So that when Moses came to deliver them, they scarcely believed Moses.
And when at first it looked impossible to free them, they cursed Moses and Aaron for even going to Pharaoh to suggest that they should be let go, because our Pharaoh made their conditions five times harder with the extra tare of bricks. See, we've come across another obstacle in the way of the fulfillment of the promise, and getting Israel to believe in the reality of the promise and that there was a destiny outside Egypt for themselves where they could be free of slavery, it was one of the very difficult things, and proceeded to be a difficulty even on the journey.
So we come to the, uh, third big thing, Pharaoh's defiance of Moses and of Moses' God, of course. He won't let the people go. And they follow the ten plagues on Egypt. Notice I said, uh, uh, sorry, the nine plagues on Egypt. There were nine plagues. There was a final judgment of the first form. These were plagues. And I repeat, as Greta Hort showed some years ago, at the one level you can explain all these things as disturbances in the ecosystems of the Nile and the surrounding country.
Similar, if lesser, things can be recorded in the course of the history of the Nile. I cannot now stop to paint all those details in. That, of course, is not to deny, at least I'm not trying to deny, the miraculous element in that story. Moses claiming that these things came about, uh, uh, by God, his God. It was the timing of them, that you could prophesy them and say they're going to happen next Tuesday or so on, that was the miraculous element. I'm concentrating for the moment on the sheer physical side. Just like the subsequent crossing of the Red Sea.
The text tells us the mechanics. There came a powerful wind and separated the waters, and then they came together again. There is a record in more modern times of a good man who drove his car, or attempted to, when the winds had done a similar thing across that part of the world, and then trying to get back, the waters came quicker than he expected, and his machine was knocked down. That by the way, this question of the ecosystems of Egypt, on which all their glory, their commerce, their food supplies, and eventually their heart was raised.
We're told that the magicians in Egypt were able to do similarly and control the things. Moses turned the water to blood, so to speak? Well, they could do the same, and they did so. They're very interesting. We shouldn't be too hard on these magicians, as they're called. Perhaps that isn't a good name for them. They were a mixture of magic and science. But then in the history of mankind, science has often been intertwined with magic, has it not? Is not all those centuries ago when leading scientists were still hoping to turn base metal into gold.
Now dismissed as a kind of a magic anyway, it can't be done. Ancient Babylonian astronomy, to which the Greeks inher- uh, uh, owed much, and we through the Greeks to them in their observations, was all mixed up as well with astrology. The text is calling our attention to the fact that these so, uh, so, so proto-sciences, as we call them, they too could disturb the ecosystems. Don't we know it? That, uh, ladies and gentlemen, is still one of the problems that faces mankind on this planet.
We of all generations have become alarmingly aware of the effects of polluting the atmosphere, or the rivers, or the oceans, and are taking great steps to stop it and clean it up. We need to, don't we? The point is not can we as humans affect the ecosystems. Of course we can. Can we, with our science, try to improve? Of course we can, and have a duty to. But at the heart of all that problem is a needed question.
What or who ultimately controls the ecosystem? Ecosystems. And what future have we? Are we in a universe that ultimately the ecosystems are blind forces, and we have no ultimate control on them? They exist therefore as a threat. That might one day obliterate us, our planet, our civilization, and all our hopes. Who or what ultimately controls the ecosystem?
That, uh, too, I suggest, is a part of the great ongoing epic that reading these ancient stories begins to remind us of it. And then let's hurry on and come to the, uh, obstacle, that's one of the next big ob- obstacles, and that is Israel's decision at Mount Sinai. This is famous, of course. Ah, an Orthodox Jewry still looks back to this time.
On that I say nothing here. But the issue was eventually, as Moses pointed out to them when he recited the event, uh, and his recitations are given in the subsequent book of Deuteronomy, that at Mount Sinai they saw no form of God. Here is Israel striking its note among the nations who saw no form of God, nor should you try to represent God by any form.
What you heard was his voice with the ten words. It is a very interesting, uh, cons- uh, con- situation, therefore, with Israel making a covenant with the unseen, relying solely on hearing. The story is that having made this covenant, and Moses having gone up the mountain to get details and plans for the subsequent tabernacles, Israel, the nation down below, lost faith in the unseen, the invisible, and determined to have a visible God to go before.
Hence the golden calf. There's a state of gods to go before. We must have something visible to aim at, so to speak. And the story is that having rejected this faith in the unseen and the faith in the word, and got this visible affair, they became disorientated in the desert, lost their sense of direction. It wasn't that they lost their sense of which way lay Canyon, their promised land. That was a mere matter of geography. But the promise, the future, had depended thus far in faith in the unseen and in the word of promise.
Rejecting that, they lost their sense of direction and suggested perhaps they went back to Egypt after all. That question about whether you trust sight and the visual or ultimately trust the word is an interesting thing. It reminded me, and I got out my copy, and now I haven't got it with me here, of what Jackie Lou said, what, twenty or thirty years ago, when he talked about the humiliation of the word and what he regarded as the danger if society comes to put more faith in the visual rather than in the auditory, in the word.
And of course, that faith has always been with mankind. It's still with us, isn't it? Ask the teachers of English. And logical analysis of English. Has to think in the visual. The split second change of visuals in our televisions as distinct from sustained reading of a text or listening to words. I, I, I, I, I pass by out of this. Time is good, and I'm not here to preach to it, but sometimes temptations overcome us, if you see it my way.
And you must pardon me. And if you don't, you have the cure in your own hands. Speak to Eden, and I shall never be asked again. Obstacle, another obstacle. And this is true, if you read Christopher Booker, he will point out that in these quest stories, the major fighting, uh, comes towards the end, not at the beginning. That is true of the Exodus story. There wasn't any fighting to get them out of Egypt. There were one or two skir- skirmishings with the Amalekites and things, uh, uh, along the desert.
The big fighting when they came to, uh, the land of promise. They came to a place called Kadesh Barnea. They sent in spies to reconnoiter the land. The spies came back, and everybody was agreed that it was a marvelous land flowing with milk and honey and such grace as you never saw. But the majority voted in favor that the whole scheme of entering and taking this promised land was utterly impracticable. There were not only cities fenced up to heaven, and the Israelites were now and had been pastoralists, but there were giants in the land.
The Anarkim, as the Hebrew says it. Now this little item of there being Anarkim, giants, reoccurs in this ancient time. Of course, it's the stuff of ethics too. It will appear that, uh, in, uh, was it Moab or the Ammonites, they had a sarcophagus, which they showed to visitors in the sign of Moses, of an enormous great sarcophagus that held the remains of a certain king of Og. Giants emerged, and they said their existence meant the idea of going in and attacking the giants and subduing them was impracticable.
And they refused to go in. And this giant not only did not lost their sense of direction, but rebelled against Moses and determined to go back to Egypt and abandoned the whole quest as being an impracticable nonsense. Now, if I were to argue that this is one little, uh, little feature, but is a big feature when you come to consider the epic of mankind, then I would say that, uh, some of our problems in recent history as well as in the past have come from this feature, abnormal, powerful human beings.
I've asked myself in these recent years through my travels, how it was that such freaks of humanity got to such colossal power, psychopaths like Hitler and Stalin and Ceausescu and Chairman Mao and Bob Pot and Enver Hoxha. All of them, to some extent, disturb human beings, an ugly psychopathic element to them.
What may then they cause? And if they have appeared so recently in history, is there any hope of eliminating that strand? Will they always be there? To thwart any hope of a paradise ahead. However, there's more pressing question, is there not, which we are surrounded with, that Moses never dreamed of. And that is the possibilities now of manufacturing various types of humans.
Of cloning. However much the governments forbid it, somebody's going to do it, I'm afraid, if they can. I was shown photographs recently of certain scientists in Korea that were taken human genes and put them in the embryos of mice, and then had traced the mice and their development to see how much the human element had come into the mice embryos. So Shall we be get able to control it?
Well, if we're going to talk about a future hope and paradise that we wish to build, what decisions shall we make about these kind of things that now give reason to think that people will be able to control what kinds of human beings shall be allowed to be born. That is not a, a, a, a, a, a simple problem either, is it? As C. S. Lewis used to point out in his The Abolition of Man, man's conquest of nature is not really, really what it sounds.
It means a conquest of nature, not by all mankind, but by comparatively few men and women that will then give the power over the human race and the rest of us, to a very few, controlling view of what kinds of people might be born, and experimenting with different kinds of people. Anyway, I said enough about, about enough maybe, to say that, at least for me, reading this ancient epic, and this nation going towards its hopeful paradise, raises questions that are still with us and on a bigger step.
When it comes to the entry into the Promised Land, it is commonly talked of as though Joshua gave the people rest, and that he certainly did. They entered their promised land. But that is not the end of the story. That is not the end of the epic. People like Christopher Booker want to put the end there. After the fi- final three tests that Joshua had to go through, and indeed there were three big tests, then they reached the promised land, and they lived happily ever after. But this is history, and that's not quite true.
Moses had told them that though they entered the promised land, their hold on it would be conditional. And if they didn't behave as they should, they would get turned out to people. The danger was that having been nomads and living amongst themselves for this last forty years or so, they were now going in. What they did was to to, uh, eliminate the kings, take some cities, but they didn't destroy all the cities, and they weren't able to turn out their inhabitants. They had to leave, live cheek by jowl with a very, very different society.
And Moses pointed out to them before they went in that here would be bigger temptations now than there had been before when they were in the desert. They would be surrounded by cultures that practice, uh, the worship of fertility gods, uh, cultic prostitution, the sacrifice of infants to sundry gods, and their temptation would be, in the end, to compromise with that kind of ethics and morality. They have a long fight, and if you want to get really stories of epic heroes, like the Greeks of the Iliad and then the Odyssey, where you would turn to is not so much the Exodus as to the Book of Judges, when the people were in the land, and that has seven great heroes, and one is a superhero, and details all their military tactics and how they went about it and the triumph of these great heroes.
It is at that period of Israelite history that you get a counterpart of the Iliad, uh, and as we saw, of the Talmud even. The thing came to its first fulfillment, so to speak, in the rise of the kings, David, his capture of Jerusalem's city and his building of the temple there. And to come, in one sense, a full circle, Abraham had left the cities, the ancient cities, Babylon, Eretz, and so forth, on his life of, of pastoring as a pastor, but promised one day a permanent land.
It comes to its fulfillment with David, who bought about the biggest possession of a land and the many before him, and was able to build Jerusalem as the capital city that united the whole of the tribes into one nation. I must not stop and be tempted to contrast Jerusalem with Babylon. You will yourselves know what leading themes they have been throughout history, at least in biblical time. But eventually, of course, the records tell us that Israel was turned out. They will tell you, this is not anti-Semitism, they will tell you that the God who took them in eventually allowed their, their enemies to take them out.
It was followed by the Babylonian. Is that the end of the story? In a few seconds, let me tell you the rest of the epic so far. The, uh, the continuation of the epic, you will find, for instance, in the poetry of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, as he prophesies that Israel will one day be restored from Babylon and come back to Jerusalem. You'll find, if you read his poetry closely, a lot of his poetry is based on the imagery of the journey story of Israel's journey as they was getting out of Egypt and seeking their promised land.
I don't have the time, uh, to quote the passages that they read in in twenty, within the second half of Isaiah the prophet. In one place, they appealed to God, you who smote Rahab, that's Egypt, and brought your people out through the Red Sea, will you not bring them in again? And on the way across their desert, the kind of desert now, of course, you will provide the water from the rock and the food to sustain them. This is Isaiah in his poetry using the background story of Israel's coming out of Egypt, their journey to their promised land, in the hope of future restoration.
And in that in, uh, context, it is interesting to see what Isaiah's take is on, uh, Israel's being a benefit to other nations. Just you listen to this. There will come a time, said Isaiah, says Isaiah, when people shall say, blessed be Egypt, my people, that is God's people, and Assyria, the work of my hands, that is God's hands, and Israel, mine inheritance. Israel, Egypt, and Assyria, or modern Iraq and Bouillon, all recognized as equal partners before God.
That was Isaiah's expressed hope, his vision of the future. But even Isaiah goes beyond the literal and the historical, doesn't he, into realms that I must not now follow him. We cannot, of course, omit completely Christ's own interpretation of Passover and its end. For the last supper, he indicated, as he instituted the memorial feast, that he himself was the fulfillment of the Passover.
That his death would be the means of humanity's liberation. And so the early Christians spoke in those terms, being redeemed by the blood of a lamb, by Christ as a, as of a lamb, that is part of a lamb. And they talked freely of their hope, of an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fades not of wealth. That leads me once more to say that in my reading, and we'll see what a peculiar reading that is, the epic is an ancient epic, and yet full of life still.
Because if Jesus Christ be right, what he is saying is the biggest epic in all the long history of humanity and humanity's future. But there is an alternative epic. Uh, if you think of this as the epic of humanity, to quote C. S. Lewis again in his article, The Funeral of a Great Myth. In that, uh, myth that he talks of, man appears multi-million years ago as the accidental formation of life of some sort in this otherwise sterile environment.
Against all odds, it proceeds into various forms of life via accidental, unplanned development. Then man appears, naked, hopelessly weak against all the great forces of nature. But man grows up. Marvelous, he begins to, uh, control nature. Heart was trying. And struggles to do so with tremendous excess out there, success, understandably. But in the end, the forces of nature and this vast universe, being non-personal and mindless, overwhelm this creature and his intelligence and his planet.
And mankind dies like a good Greek hero in a tragedy by Socrates, shouting to the powers, but in the end cannot save itself. That is a very bleak, those of us who like magic endings, an acceptable alternative myth. You have been exceedingly patient, and all it remains for me to do is to wish you a very happy Christmas. Go easy, I will pass. Any questions?
No questions? So I have class to pay. Thank you, David, for a very dramatic ending and a very sober warning. Um, what I would be thinking about this would be, um, well, life as a journey is certainly imbued in our consciousness, isn't it? All our hymns tell us advisedly, bath all things aside, et cetera, et cetera. So we, it's very hard for us not to think of our own personal life as a journey, and as David said, the journey of the human race. There was another way of thinking about humanity, which I believe many of the Greek philosophers have, that life is not going forward like David's, backwards, two forward, one back, you know, but it's going in cycles, in cycles.
What do you think about Oh. Europe and Western Greek? Yes, that is a very interesting thing, isn't it? Uh, and uh, you can cite a lot of evidence to show that. Uh, civilizations hitherto have all have faded, have they not? And it's one of the lessons of history. Mm-hmm. Greek civilization failed. Romans lasted a long time, but that faded. But then there come other civilizations, and some of the successes of the earlier civilizations live on. Uh, so if you take that circular view of history, all I would add to that is that it is not just going around in circles.
Eh, the circles are getting higher every time. It's a little bit of a spike, because we here sitting today, though the great flowering of Greek civilization in the four BC, a lot of the benefits are still with us, yes? Mm-hmm. We've incorporated a lot of what the Romans taught us by way of law and administration. We owe a lot to Arab civilization, and of course to Egyptian and so forth. Yes. All I would want to say is it is not just a going round in circles, it is a spiral. Going up. Yeah. Well, now, now, readers, you have hit upon the whole crux of the matter.
You went up and down. You went up and down, but had it any limit? And there, of course, the scientists come in, don't they? And they are divided, dear souls, eh, as to whether our universe is going to expand forever. When I was a youth, that is not so long ago as some of you think, uh, the steady state of the universe, the steady state theory had been propounded, and we were assured, uh, by the s- the scientists of Manchester that this now will be proved. The steady state is that the Earth, of course, every now and again gets an input of energy from somewhere or other that keeps it going and keeps it from, uh, running down.
Unfortunately for that theory, as I understand it, modern scientists no longer accept the steady state. They are divided as to whether the universe will go on expanding forever, but if our particular part of it goes on expanding, that will lead to a heat death, that is, we shall all freeze to death. Or whether it will rebound upon itself, and that will be for us a very big crunch, and it partly depends on whether there is very much or is not what is called dark matter in the, in, in the universe. So these are complicated things, aren't they? I do see.
Whether we have, as a human race, we're not talking about tomorrow or next week, uh, as a phenomenon, the person, the sun, the solar system, and the present universe, whether they are going on forever. They are, the trouble is, on the move. And so whether they're going to expand forever or recycle, who knows? Because that is my point about it, and why the questions of, uh, literature and the things it raises can't be divorced from the realities of the world we live in, which makes it the great epic it is. Good. Could I say just something that perhaps we haven't said?
It's the way that epic is written. The literary power of the exodus, the density of its metaphor, the authority of its language carries its own truth. Would you agree with me? All in. And that apart from anything else, that is what great literature can do. The authority of it can carry truth. We know when we're reading Shakespeare, that the authority is there. It is living in so much, ninety percent of everything, maybe more, it is written. And that's what it has, certainly in our English, early English version. So all this business about the Greek and the epic, I mean, everywhere around us we see the parallels, don't we?
We see Prometheus, side to steal, fire from heaven, and being punished. Everywhere you can see they are, uh, prototyped and are always suggested. And I have to add, on a lighter note, there's one that struck me very forcibly yesterday. The myth of Sisyphus. Do you remember him? He got, was punished by the gods, and he had to get this huge stone, and he had to push and sweat until he got to the top of the hill, and when he got to the top of the hill, and he had to start again. Who does that remind you of? There they are, the Northern Ireland people.
And all the Prime Ministers are there urging on, and he's pushing, and it's sweating, and it's just as he's got to the very top. Ah, Eden, you have struck a very real signal. It's absolutely true. I know it is, but I, I hope In the end. I hope even your analogy with Irish politics isn't to be applied to the whole universe. Thank you very much for a most inspiring talk.
Um, the epic, the epic, the journey is still going on in the plain American mind, isn't it? The nineteenth century, that was the taking of the West, must have been inspired by that epic, and there's still of the epic that's still in people's mind in America, the great fight against evil. So we may have our own thoughts about that. So whether there could be a modern epic, what do you say, Dave? Oh, yes. Uh... I, I, uh, Janis, I agree with you. That's not the first thing. I mean, I agree with you that, uh, when you talk about the power of the word, uh, I think that too, like Jackaloo, the power of the word has to speak from the vision.
I hold that to be an exceedingly important principle still, and hence the importance of literature. The question, uh, of, um, uh, the all the different uses of, uh, the epic imagery by people is, uh, true enough as to the fact. So many, uh, places and directions, the imagery is used. That does seem to me to, to raise the question, however, of how much of the imagery is true. What is the ethnic motive being used to validate? I'm not quite sure myself that necessarily the American use of the imagery.
No, but maybe, I don't know whether they even believe it. Well, whether they do believe it, do they? That's right, do they? But it's there that it's there anyway. Yes, I think it's there. as a spin, like a spin. Well, I would be, I would want to say it's in the, partly in the human heart, but perhaps I'm too much of a psychotherapist. We do hope that life is not in vain. We do? We do hope that, that in spite of all these, the, uh, going around in circles, that we are getting somewhere. We do hope that we're not, in fact, Sisyphus. What happened to him in the end, did he? No, I, I, I, he, he went on forever.
Did he? I wouldn't want eternity. Surely. There is a bit of book in the, in the Old Testament, isn't there, called Ecclesiastes, Yes. where it pronounced all eternity in vexation of spirit and observes that the sun gets up in the morning, you think we're getting somewhere now, it crosses the, the, the top and it goes down again. Ah, well, perhaps tomorrow it will be better. It just goes on and around and gets nowhere.
Well, David, you've brought us to, to the limit between the epic and spiritual answers. Oh, that is very true. Many people in this class will have a very lot of interesting things to say. Oh, surely. And many will take, uh, positive and others will take negative from that. Would maybe David would call you together somewhere else to pursue that? Well, if I, if I get another chance, yes. Let me say it once, uh, what else can my man do in fifty minutes? Well, We'll see. You've suggested on a novel up to it Yeah. and have shown the extraordinary importance of that great Hebrewette.
Oh, surely. And it must be imbued in the Israelis at the moment, if you know. Oh, surely. Certainly have nation to say he was, you'll see the other major theories, as far as I know. There's the linear one. There is, uh, what is thought of in the Hindu philosophy like Shankara and the Buddhist that follows it, that, uh, it's not a, a, a linear, it's a cycle just going round and round and round and round. Uh, in those philosophies, and I'm talking about philosophy now, not religion, people like Shankara, your ultimate goal is to escape the circle anyway and get back to union with the one.
So where, yes, that is a predominant thing, and we'll find Plato and the Greeks much indebted to Hindu, uh, notions through Pythag- Pythagoras and Plato and Aristotle, who didn't believe in a beginning of creation nor an end, it just goes round in circles. But in those philosophies, the point that is sometimes forgotten is that what they advocate is a certain discipline of humanity to enable us to escape the circle and to get back to the one. So yes, it's a different world. Yes. An interesting worldview to work out the comparison between the linear thing and the thing that goes on in cycles.
But thank you very much, and together with your, uh, favorite novel, you can put that which you prefer, the linear.
