Miracles in the Bible

           Exodus (Chapter 38) says: “And Judah said to Onan: ‘Go in unto my brother’s wife and perform the duty of a husband’s brother unto her, and raise up seed to thy brother… And Onan knew that the seed would not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground… And the thing which he did was evil in the sight of the LORD.” What is the origin of this strange prohibition? In an overwhelmingly agrarian society, the main property was land and cattle. Judah by demanding that Onan “raises his seed to his brother” requested that, in case Tamar bears a son, he must transfer the inheritance from his family to the family of his brother. This was a heavy request, indeed! Non-compliance with it had to be published with utmost severity.

            This Biblical narrative, despite its unconventional nature contains all the elements of the modern criminal codes: declaration of the norm, description of the offense against the norm and the requisite punishment (death). Note that when the agriculture, sedentary life and progress in monetary accumulation created financial stratification in Jewish society, the opposite behavior, namely taking the widow of one’s brother as a wife began to be punishable by death: “None of you shall approach to any that is near kin to him, to uncover their nakedness, I am the LORD. Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife: it is your brother’s nakedness… For whosoever shall do any of these abominations, even the souls that do them shall be cut off from among their people.”

            Now, when I got your attention, before I proceed to the miracles of the Bible, i.e. the supposed violations of the natural laws in the Biblical narrative let me discuss the perception of probability by the human mind. It has been known for a long time that people are very poor calculators of probabilities. For instance, many a people who would not live near a nuclear power plant fail to use a security belt in a car. Somehow, our species are “intuitive Bayesians” tending to ascribe lower probabilities to the events they seem to understand and/or control and higher probabilities to the unknown.

            The repeating random events (processes) tend to come in a few flavors. Some, for instance, tossing a coin, do not provide any glean of the future behavior by their past. Mathematicians call these processes martingales. Then, there are processes, which can be assumed to “even out.” For instance, an unseasonably cold week will be followed by a thaw and vice versa so that annual seasonal temperatures are fairly stable. This feature is called mean-reversion. Finally, there are processes which tend to increase their intensity with time. Russian proverb says: “Grief does not come once.” If there is a speeding mechanical clock, one expects it to increase speeding with time, until they become completely unusable despite frequent rewinding. These processes correspond to semi-martingales in statistics.

            For the processes of the third kind because humans and human populations have finite memory, they tend to register only the events, which happened during some period in the past. Hence, in a society, based on an oral tradition, there was likely an event exceeding in magnitude everything they could remember. Floods, earthquakes and other geophysical phenomena tend to be understood precisely in the same manner and one flood in the past will always be the Great. In two hundred years, the same population would again refer to the Great Flood, exceeding everything imprinted on human memory, though these could be completely different natural disasters.

            Rationalization of Biblical events in modern times went through several distinct phases. The philosophes of the XVIII century refuted them as superstitions borne out of the imagination of a primitive people. Biblical criticism of the XIX century regarded them as coded messages, which had to be re-interpreted in a rational vein. For instance, the prohibition to eat pork could be viewed as a precaution against storing fatty foods in a hot climate for the fear of poisoning. The anthropological school of XX century could propose that, instead pig was a totem of a certain ancient tribe and could not be consumed. My treatise proposes another—not altogether incompatible point of view—that the ancient peoples were somewhat closer to us in their feelings and emotions.

           Some of the stories are easier to rationalize than others if one absconds a tendency to over-interpret everything, even the stories for which there is no surviving factual material. We cannot say for certain, what has been meant by the “plague of frogs”, including whether our current understanding of “frogs” is correct and did not appear from later interpolation. But the connection of hunger and epidemics with the invasion of vermin of different kind has been well established since antiquity, though many casual chains or coincidences were unknown before the modern biology took hold. For instance, unusually heavy rains and flooding of the land can increase contact of the agrarian population with reptiles and amphibians and, independently, be a cause of starvation. Corpses of the fallen animals and dead people foul the water but are also consumed by rats, which are the natural vectors for a number of infections, etc. etc. Human propensity to ascribe astronomical signs to earthly events was known not only in the Middle Eastern but also in Chinese or Hellenistic cultures.  

            There is no need to invent causation where there is none. Draughts, migration of agricultural pests, hunger and epidemics of waterborn infections were sufficiently frequent before the twentieth century that it was all too easy to attribute them to the positions of the stars or rare atmospheric phenomena. Usual consequences of the hunger-epidemic cycle were the migrations of human populations to supposedly greener pastures.

            Now, we approach the Sea of Reeds. Modern hydrological analyses of excavation data suggest that the Isthmus of Suez in ancient times contained a system of salt lakes and marshes. These lowlands were, probably, periodically flooded during high tides in the Mediterranean or rare, but powerful rain storms. Marshlands provided a cover for fugitives from the ancient times, to the late Romans hiding from mounted Huns in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon, to the Nazi-occupied Belarus where swamps impeded superior German armor.

            A flood in the desert is such a nasty occurrence, especially if this desert is a tiny slice between two seas, that a particularly large loss of troops during a security sweep could have induced powers-that-were to abandon hunting for fugitives beyond certain checkpoints. In quite similar dynamics, the groups of fugitives from Russia or Turkey congregating at (much more accessible and hospitable) Ukrainian steppes formed a new race of Cossacks in Early Modern times. What was described in the Bible as forty year-long wandering in the desert—PM Begin once said that Moses led Israelites to find the only place in the Middle East which does not have oil—was probably a gradual process of resettlement typical for the ancient world.

Some groups used armed violence to displace original populations, but this was not the only way. New arrivals could have taken over the settlements abandoned by occupants because of famine or pestilence, or even welcomed by a much-thinned population of a devastated district. What is erroneously assumed to be a momentary event was, in fact, a chain of peregrinations punctuated by armed conflicts, resettlement of the depopulated districts or gradual fusion of different tribal groups with mutual exchange of agricultural and artisanal techniques. From time to time, the reports of a better life in new places reached the original settlements causing another wave of settlers to risk a dangerous and uncertain journey. The latest and final exodus of the Jews from the Eastern Europe and former USSR to Israel and North America took the same forty years to complete.

            In general, among amateur historians there is a frequent tendency to conflate two realities: the reality of the text and the reality of geographical and historic events. For instance, they look for precise location of Plato’s Atlantis as if it were certain place to be discovered. Aegean is a seismic zone and Plato must have known about horrific disasters befalling some ancient city-states. However, for Plato it could have been only a convenient storyline to elicit his thoughts about an ideal society. Whether he himself believed in Atlantis will never be known and is immaterial. So, a single location might have never existed. But sometimes it did as in the case of the Schliemann’s Troy.

            Geography of Tolkien’s Middle Earth in entirely imagined but it incorporated Norse, Old English and Germanic myths. Does the fact that “The Lord of the Rings” is a work of pure fiction means that Burgundian Kingdom in the Nibelungenlieder never existed, or that Theodoric was not a historic personality? In our Internet age we tend to forget how fragmentary our knowledge about the past is.

            Imagine if, after a few millennia, the only remaining traces of late XIX century Europe would be archeological artifacts and Jules Verne novels. The amateur archeologists inspired by “500,000,000 of Begumah” will search in vain for the remains of the giant cannon in the jungles of Guatemala or Salvador. However, the facts of contemporary life: industrialization of warfare, the rise of Prussian militarism, Franco-Prussian War and rebirth of France after the military defeat were quite accurately described in the novel.

The impression of Jules Verne contemporaries of the artillery barrages of cities, where you do not see the enemy or his guns and the only sign of impending danger is a subtle whistle of the already passed projectile must have been indelible, despite very few actual casualties.  In fact, novels of Jules Verne would produce very clever picture of the late Victorian times: how people talked, what they ate, how and why they traveled, what was the prevailing state structure and what were their main concerns, though Hatteras and Ned Land were completely fictional and his novels described events that never happened other than in the mind of their author.

Modern archeologists are more charitable to this outlook than the XIX century historians with their penchant for single-minded “rational” explanations. Neither Minoan nor Trojan civilizations disappeared in a single instant in the wake of the natural disaster and/or military invasion but continued their existence albeit on a much reduced scale.

We approach the most controversial piece of my reasoning. I view Biblical narrative as a composition of two stories. One is the Abrahamic rejection of the human sacrifice and replacement it with the animal sacrifice but also with sacrificial symbolism without actual spilling of blood. This was a first resolute step on separating of the Jews from the nearby Middle Eastern people, to whom human sacrifice remained the way of life. The second story is Mosaic.

I argue that what has been described in the Bible as Moses being given the Law on the Mount Sinai is the first experiment of the nation building. History knows many firsts: Akhenaten’s experiment with monotheism, or the Hittites experimenting with two ideas—democracy and monogamy—one of which is obviously rotten while the judgment on the other is still open. In my view, supported by some modern studies, the Jews were the first self-conscious nation in history and this was the source of their exceptionalism. The others had to wait till XVI-XVII century Europe.[1] What this meant was that for the first time the idea of the nation was abstracted from tribal affiliations, a ruling dynasty, particular territory or a capital city. Instead the commonality of culture, religion, language, tradition and the myth of national origin became a more sustainable basis for the common government than ever-changing borders, rulers and dynasties.

Henceforth, Moses became the first national leader. His political power was founded not in the birthright—for most Jews he was a Egyptian—and did not belong to any dynasty, or in the right of military command and conquest. His power was based on acceptance of “his” people and the ability to express their “national” idea.

The fact that Moses appealed to the Powers-on-High to proclaim this endeavor should not surprise us more than references to it in the preamble to 1949 German Constitution or in the speeches of American presidents. His task was purely political and truly revolutionary because following more than twenty five centuries hiatus, the nation-state became the main form of human organization and remains with us now. So, we can with justice call the giving of the Law on the Mount Sinai as the most important event in human history. Whether one wants to attribute it to the divine intervention is another matter.

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[1] Ironically, after the thousands years of diaspora, the national identity of the modern Jews is unclear. But history knows many ironies of this kind. For instance, Jewish alphabet which was one of the first to use diacritical marks, now omits them altogether, except for the poems and the Bible.