THE URSE The Violent Legacy of Monotheism OF AI N REGINA M. SCHWARTZ The University of Chicago Press • Chicago and London REGINA M. ScHWARTZ is a professor of English at Northwestern University, a principal investigator at the Park Ridge Center, and Director of the Chicago Institute of Religion, Etrucs, and Violence. The University of Crucago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1997 by Regina M. Schwartz All rights reserved. Published 1997 Printed in the United States of America 06 OS 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 5 4 3 2 ISBN (cloth): 0-226-74199-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schwartz, Regina M. The curse of Cain : the violent legacy of monotheism I Regina M. Schwartz. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-226-74199-0 (alk. paper) l. Ethnicity-Biblical teaching. 2. Ethnology in the Bible. 3. Violence-Rdigious aspects-Christianity. 4. Mono theism-Controversial literature. I. Title. BS661.S35 1997 221.8'3036-dc20 96-43269 CIP @The paper used in this publication meets the minimum require ments of the American National Standard for lnfomtation Sci ences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 239.48-1984. To my Father, IRVING LLOYD SCHWARTZ whose life defined heroism and to my Mother, RosANNE ScHELLMAN ScHwARTZ whose goodness is beyond definition Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments XIII INTRODUCTION REBUILDING BABEL Murder Identity and Violence 4 CHAPTER ONE INVENTING IDENTITY: Covenants 15 Imagining Israel 17 Cutting Covenants 21 The Blood of the Covenant 25 CHAPTER TWO OWNING IDENTITY: Land 39 Possessing Land 39 Exodus and Conquest 55 vii Contents Polluting the Land 62 Whores in Exile 69 CHAPTER THREE NATURAL IDENTITY: Kinship 77 Exogamy, Endogamy, and the Foreigner 83 Rape and the Other 91 Incest Is Best 97 Kinship, Race, and Property 102 God the Father and Homosexuality 106 CHAPTER FOUR DIVIDING IDENTITIES: "Nations" 120 Nationalism in the Discipline 124 Nations in the Bible 128 Defining Israel 133 CHAPTER FIVE INSCRIBING IDENTITY: Memory 143 Remembering the Exodus 148 The Politics of Memory 153 Forgetting 159 Joseph (He Adds) 162 Typology and Totality 167 Living Memory 173 Notes 177 Index 203 viii Preface One day while I was teaching the Bible to undergraduates, a first year student articulated a problem succinctly that I had to write an entire book to address. I was telling the class that the Exodus is the central event of the Hebrew narrative, asserting that this myth of liberation from slavery was deeply inspiring, especially in comparison to so many other foundational myths of conquest and plunder. This was, after all, not a myth that described the rich getting richer, but the enslaved getting freed. I added some remarks about class con sciousness and liberation theology to make the story more contem porary, and lingered over the fact that this story has now come to have urgent political force in Latin America and South Africa as it had during the U.S. civil rights movement. Then, in the midst of this celebration, the student raised his hand and asked simply, "What about the Canaanites?" Suddenly all the uncomfortable feelings I had been repressing about the Bible for years flooded me. Yes, what about the Canaanites? and the Amorites, Moabites, Hittites? While the biblical narratives charted the creation, cohesion, and calamities befalling a people at the behest of their God, what about all the other ix Preface peoples and their gods? Having long seen the Bible put to uses that I could not excuse-hatred ofBlacks,Jews, gays, women, "pagans," and the poor-I now began to see some complicity, for over and over the Bible tells the story of a people who inherit at someone else's expense. And so, keenly aware that our deepest cultural as sumptions are biblical and that they are not always attractive, I em barked on this book on monotheism and collective identity. I make some strong claims. One is that through the dissemination of the Bible in Western culture, its narratives have become the foun dation of a prevailing understanding of ethnic, religious, and national identity as defined negatively, over against others. We are "us" be cause we are not "them." Israel is not-Egypt. That is not to say that this way of thinking about identity is simply or originally biblical. 1 Ancient peoples conquered one another long before the Israelites wrote about it, and in philosophy, Aristotle's principle of noncontra diction established that for A to be A it could not be B, while Plato wrote of polemos, endless war against the foreign, the diverse, the "enemy." But it has been the biblical narratives, for better and for worse, that have wielded so much influence, even more than the classics, with the result that the Bible could be deployed against whatever "Canaanites" people wanted to loathe, conquer, or exile. And so, while I read the Bible in this book, I also read readings of the Bible: biblical narratives as read by biblical criticism and biblical narratives translated into secular myths of nationalism. My focus is on narratives in the Hebrew Bible, since this understanding of vio lent identity fonnation is articulated most clearly there. Collective identity is linked to monotheism, the notion of exclu sive worship, but there could be no cruder misreading of my argu ment than to attribute violence in identity formation to Judaism. Conquering the Canaanites was a fantasy of an exiled people; it could only carry force when it was adopted by groups who held the reins of power in Christendom. 2 Furthermore, what Reform Juda ism gave me was less the understanding of Judaism as a separated identity than its strong stress on ethics; shedding traditional rituals and the trappings of group identity was accompanied by a renewed emphasis on being "a good person." While I know that distinction X