Pagans, prophets and Protestants

Previosuly posted on October 10, 2021. 

The Jewish prophets (in the Christian sense of that term) are often seen as radicals or revolutionaries. They criticized their own people and their own rulers in the name of a higher transcendental principle. That would be God. Since Israel and Judah didn´t have social justice, it was right to take a defeatist position towards Assyria and Babylonia. Indeed, Israel and Judah *deserved* being conquered by foreign powers and laid waste, for going against the will of God (and social justice). 

Of course, another take is also possible.

The prophets were a bunch of quislings. 

I suppose we could also call them hiwis or kapos. Or publicans, perhaps? Note that Assyria and Babylonia *didn´t* have social justice. Yet, the prophets preached voluntary surrender to these foreign powers. In the same way, todays SJWs preach surrender to Muslim fundamentalism or generalized barbarism, despite the fact that there is no hope for social justice under any of these regimes (or non-regimes). The reason? Some collective guilt of ours, some horrible stain of imperfection, which apparently make us deserve our fate at the hands of the foreigner (although it seems all foreigners aren´t equal - a surrender to Russia is for some reason a no-no). 

I´m not sure if I think those prophets really were that good, after all. At least not in the standard interpretation! 

Here is a question I pondered. Were the prophets cultist kooks? Or was there some *material basis* for their actions? Let´s be honest here. Regardless of what you think of God or the Divine, people down here usually do things for very concrete material reasons. Unless you really think they were prophets. But here, I shall assume otherwise. 

Unfortunately, I don´t know the answer to this question. Perhaps the stories of the prophets are purely legendary, made up in retrospect to make sense of the disasters that befell the Israelites and Judahites. The message would then be: build back better, let´s make a great reset, let´s do it differently the next time. Which isn´t treason. Perhaps there was some competition going on between different factions, one of them blaming some old form of Judaism, or some polytheistic "deviations", for the destruction that befell Jerusalem? 

Or perhaps the prophets (or some of them, at any rate) represented strata in Jewish society which *improved* their lot when the old aristocracy was exterminated or forced to emigrate? Perhaps the Babylonians didn´t tax the peasants or artisans left behind as much as the Jewish royal houses had done? If so, that would be "treason" to the polity represented by the king, but it wouldn´t be treason to the *class* in the name of which the prophet spoke. And if so, the SJWs aren´t really emulating the prophets. They are simply being mad and nihilistic, like no other ruling stratum in history. 

The fact that the prophets spoke in the name of a transcendent deity is often seen as a world-historic turn-around. Previosuly, society (including its rulers) had been sacred. Nature, society, royalty, the temple priesthood - everything was sacred in paganism. The idea of a god standing *above* Nature, society, royalty and even the temple made it possible to question, attack and change society, ostensibly for the first time. This is a common perspective among secular modern Jews. Many believe it (or used to). But is it really true? Perhaps we should be wary of claims to uniqueness, especially when they come from the people it chiefly concerns. *Our* people is so unique that our ideas, apart from turning and shaping History, are at bottom non-historical, non-material, transcendent, and hence a work of rare collective genius. Isn´t this really a secularized form of belief in God? (There is also the flip side: "the Holocaust was unique" is a secularized form of belief in the Devil.) White Gentiles have the same tendencies, of course - in their case, the "Greeks" (really a small stratum of philosophers and early scientists) are said to be unique in the same mysterious way. Through Christianity, White Europeans (including secular ones) have borrowed the Jewish concepts of uniqueness, both the positive and the negative ones. 

Now, I don´t deny that unique ideas emerge now and then. But do they really shape history in the way proposed? I find that unlikely. Why should I believe that any people, Jew or Gentile, is unique in *this* sense, somehow standing above the usual flow of gritty material conditions, in some kind of serene, splendid and genial isolation, formulating trans-historical ideas that reverberate throughout the millennia? Indeed, why should I believe that something said 2,600 years ago in the Middle East can *possibly* have the same meaning it was taken to have during the Protestant Reformation, the heyday of liberal theology, or at a latter-day California college? Here is an alternative scenario!

First, there have *always* been rebellions in class societies. The sacralization of kings, emperors, pharaohs or the class society at large *has never really worked*. Conversely, there have been a lot of sacralization of ruling elites in societies with a theist religion. Why, they simply claim to do the will of the transcendent god! Simple. Second, why should we believe that Jewish society 2,600 years ago was somehow de-sacralized? Isn´t that just a projection of Protestantism (often a fairly recent one) unto ancient Judaism and ancient Jewish society? If we could somehow meet Isaiah or Jeremiah, and listen to their actual ideas in proper context, we might get a wee bit shocked. (We would probably be shocked meeting brother Martin Luther, too! Not to mention John Calvin.) Isn´t it *very strange* that the ideas of the Jewish prophets didn´t secularize much of anything, until...well, until the Reformation or even later. It´s almost as if somebody is being anachronistic somewhere...

Oh, and destruction of the natural environment of course existed already during paganism, so apparently Nature wasn´t *that* sacred, after all. 

Yes, these comments are somewhat disjointed. And now, I´m bringing them to a close!