Nationalism and the Hebrew Bible*

Abstract

The Hebrew Bible, though generally seen mainly as a religious docu- ment, has also provided models of secular national identity. A number of biblical motifs have been revived in modern cultural nationalism: for example, the importance of moral regeneration, attacks on internal and external enemies of the nation, and the unification of disparate groups despite geographic dislocation. The Hebrew Bible also anticipates various forms of conflict in modern national identity: between the individual and the group, chosenness and egalitarianism, the narrowly national and the universal. In the two centuries after the invention of printing, the Hebrew Bible in vernacular translation had a decisive influence on the evolution of nationalism, particularly in Britain. The Bible was essential in the culture of empires but also, paradoxically, inspired defeated, suppressed and colonised people to seek freedom. A number of modern national poets, notably Whitman and the Hebrew poets Bialik and Greenberg, adopt a free verse neo-prophetic mode of expression. The Hebrew Bible can, therefore, be read as the archetypal, and most influential, national document from ancient times to the rise of modern nationalism. As a dominant driving force in civilisation, the main root of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Hebrew Bible has authored and nourished national identity and religious-cultural nationalism: in the belief in the chosenness of the nation and its necessarily moral foundations; its unity across divisions of class, geographic dislocation and cultural assimilation; fierce criticism of and grievance against its enemies, internal as well as external; acceptance of guilt for national failings and defeats, and grief-ridden penitence leading to moral reform; hopes for freedom, regeneration and the ingathering of exiles; vengeful hatred of oppressors, and readiness to fight and die for the nation; and also the interconnection of the personal life with that of the nation. 1 The Hebrew Bible also prefigures paradoxical conflict in national identity: between the individual and the group, chosenness and egalitarianism, the narrowly national and the universal. The Hebrew Bible is the great model of the nation pickled, as it were, in literature, and preserved to survive defeat, failure and exile. Its vivid stories,