Not for them were there many opportunities to satisfy the "We're # 1" kind of lust for domination.
As a result of their experience ("the weak suffer what they must"), these Hebrews had reasons to crave a world better ordered, and ruled by a power of an emphatically moral character. Those reasons grew out of their traumatic experience of the lack of a moral order and of power being wielded against them in evil ways.
If this is where the explanation of the contrast lies, then the question arises: Which culture's choice comes out strengthened, and which weakened, by this picture? Or, to put it another way, which side should we be listening to, if either?
On the one hand, one could say this picture discredits the Hebrew's approach. One might say that their choice was so clearly motivated by their need -- that this idea of a moral power and order at the center of the universe was, for a victim society, a kind of opiate, alleviating some real pain -- that it seems less likely that they were coming to the truth.
"At least things make sense, in some ultimate sense," people in their painful position might be eager to conclude. "At least in some invisible world of God's justice, the wrongs will be righted."
That would be comforting for a much-victimized people to believe.
But on the other hand, one might reasonably argue that their experience could lead them to see more deeply into the way things are and into the profoundly moral challenge at the heart of the human condition.
The people who have experienced victimhood -- having been conquered, killed, hauled into slavery -- are driven by their suffering to see deeply into the big picture. And what they see is the reality of the battle between good and evil, and the moral obligation to serve the good and defend the sacred.
They know that injustice is bad, because they experience its badness in their bodies and their souls.
In this way, their experience compels that people think about the deep problems at the heart of human civilization, where the problem of uncontrolled power has subjected the human world to an ongoing force of brokenness that stretches through the millennia. (And, indeed, has erupted in all its ugliness in our times here in America.)
Anyway, those are the places my wondering lately took me, when I somehow stumbled into the question of God or gods, and the mystery of how worldviews of these two cultures came to be so different on so fundamental a question about the structure of reality.
Not just any two cultures, either. These two --Athens and Jerusalem-- together, constitute the two basic building blocks -- the two main cultural streams out of the ancient world -- that have shaped the civilization of which we are in America are part.
I say there are important truths from both of them.
Hurrah for the Greeks, for example, for providing some of the important tools for clear thinking as a way of understanding things, and for giving our civilization some foundation for pursuing truth through the use of reason and evidence.
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