Max Weber's Ancient Judaism

Wikipedia:

Maximilian Carl Emil Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist, historian, jurist, and political economist who was one of the central figures in the development of sociology and the social sciences more generally. His ideas continue to influence social theory and research.

Wikipedia: 

It was his fourth and last major work on the sociology of religion, after The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism and The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism. In this work he attempts to explain the factors that were responsible for the early differences between Oriental and Occidental religiosity. It is especially visible when the mysticism developed by Western Christianity is compared with the asceticism that flourished within the religious traditions of India. Weber’s premature death in 1920 prevented him from following Ancient Judaism with his planned analysis of the Psalms, the Book of Job, Rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity and Islam.

Weber notes that Judaism not only fathered Christianity and Islam, but was crucial to the rise of the modern Western world, as its influence was as important as those of Hellenistic and Greco-Roman civilizations.

An excerpt from, “The Vocation Lectures” by Max Weber, Edited and with an Introduction by David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, 2004, Hackett Publishing Company:

Max Weber has claim not only to being one of the founders of modern social science but also to being one of the most acute diagnosticians of the conditions of modernity in the West. The fifty-six years of his life saw the writing of an astonishing array of works, not only in the general field of political economy (ranging from ancient Rome through the Middle Ages to contemporary Europe and America), but also in philosophy, the methodology of social scientific investigation, musicology, the sociology of most of the world’s major religions, social theory, and political science. Nor were his efforts purely “academic”: as what we would now call a “public intellectual,” his attentions included contemporary events. For instance, after the 1905 abortive revolution in Russia, he took six months to learn Russian so that he could read the sources in the original language and then produced several important analyses of those events. A man of impeccably bourgeois origins and upbringing, he was also at the intersection of several of the most progressive dimensions of German and European intellectual, cultural, and artistic life.

Weber is also one of the few scholars of a century ago with whom most contemporary social scientists still feel the need to come to terms. In preparing the (necessarily dramatically incomplete) Further Reading section of this volume, we were struck by how many modern scholars, as well as those of previous and later generations, have written on Weber, even, and perhaps notably, when he did not remain the primary focus of the work for which they are best known. Weber was and remains a giant—an unavoidable figure for serious scholars.

Max Weber was born Karl Emil Maximilian Weber on April 21, 1864, the oldest of the eight children of Max and Helene Weber. His university studies at Heidelberg were interrupted in 1883 for a year of military service. He passed examinations for the civil service in 1886 and by 1891 took his Habilitation with a work on Roman agrarian history, thus qualifying himself as a university lecturer. In 1893 he was appointed to a chair as professor of law and economics at the University of Berlin, and he married his second cousin, Marianne Schnitger, the daughter of the country doctor Eduard Schnitger and Eleonore Weber. The next year he was called to a chair at the University of Freiburg in political science (Staatswissenschaft): his inaugural lecture was an analysis of the German situation entitled “The National State and Economic Policy. ” The year 1897 saw the death of his father, from whom he had been estranged for some time. Shortly thereafter he moved to a new chair at the University of Heidelberg, but during the following year he sank into a clinical depression and took leave of his university duties. He did not begin to emerge from the depression until 1902. On the occasion of a scientific congress at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, he visited the United States. Accepting a position as “honorary professor” at Heidelberg, he did not return to university duties, but writings none-theless poured from his pen. Scholarly books and articles appeared continuously, including what became his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as did newspaper articles, reviews, and polemical exchanges.

His aims were not just “academic,” although they were always pursued with a high degree of intellectual rigor. An important part of his work, as he conceived of it, was to promote the political education of the German public, an education he felt sadly lacking in the aftermath of the long rule of Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck, in Weber’s later analysis, had by his very political genius given rise to a situation in which no one could possibly take his place and for which his policies had ensured that none would have adequate training in responsibility and political experience to assume leadership. After examining what hopes there might be for political leadership from each of the German classes, he concluded his inaugural lecture with the assertion that none of them would be up to the dangers confronting Germany and that the country thus faced “a monstrous work of political education.” This concern remained with him throughout his life: by the end of World War I he had established himself as Germany’s single most respected voice on public affairs.

To this end, in addition to his writings, he was actively involved with several political groups that ranged over the entire political spectrum. He never ran for nor held office himself, despite the fact that, as his wife wrote in his biography, he had “always admired the captain of a ship, who held the destiny of so many in his hand.” During World War I he not only saw (limited) service as a hospital orderly but also published a series of articles analyzing Germany’s conduct, policies, and war aims. He accompanied the German delegation to Versailles for the peace talks and tried thereafter to persuade General Ludendorff to take public responsibility for the defeat. On June 14, 1920, he died of a lung infection consequent to influ-enza. He was the most influential intellectual in Germany at the time.

Like some of the other great thinkers of his time (Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud come most readily to mind), some aspects of his thought have passed into common parlance. When we speak of charismatic leaders or bewail bureaucracy, we do so in language that has its origin in Weber’s work. When contemporary politicians or cultural critics call for a return to the “Protestant ethic” (or nonde-nominationally, the “work ethic”), they echo Weber’s analysis, though as we shall see, generally without his sense of the tragic. Не is one of the handful of thinkers whose thought has permanently shaped the way in which we think of our modern world.

An excerpt from, “Ancient Judaism” by Max Weber, 1917, pg. 126 – 130:

But what of Yahwe?

He was and always remained a god of salvation and promise. What mattered chiefly, however, was that salvation as well as promise concerned actual political, not intimate personal affairs. The god offered salvation from Egyptian bondage, not from a senseless world out of joint. He promised not transcendent values but dominion over Canaan which one was out to conquer and a good life. This unbroken naturalism and ritualistic peculiarity going back to primitive socio-cultural conditions became important indeed. It became so in the fusion with ubiquitously diffused elements of a rational and intellectually differentiated civilization. The fusion began soon after the immigration. Acculturation is generally productive of entirely new and peculiar phenomena given the opportunity and compelling need of absorbing a series of as yet unsublimated ideas. If they are not yet stereotyped through priestly, official, or literary elaboration, they compel the old rationalized structures to adjust to entirely new and relatively simple conditions.

Israelite conceptions, on a Mosaic foundation, established such a necessity before the Oriental culture-elements diffused in Canaan. Through what native traits was the process consummated? The initial question is: What are the traits of the deity which, according to tradition, Moses newly introduced into the Israelite confederacy—regardless of how constituted?

A number of characteristics are attributed to Yahwe in the old tradition. With the old Hellenic and other deities of warlike peoples he shares those highly anthropomorphic traits which are his precisely in the earlier parts of the tradition, especially those stemming from the South, the so-called “Yahwist” tradition. One of his traits not often to be found with similar intensity is his nearness. Obviously it is an early and later quite regular attribute. Under certain conditions even the nearness of “men of god” possessed by his “spirit” ( ruach) is uncanny and dangerous. As we saw, the sight of him is deadly.

The “holiness” which is specific for Yahwe to an especially high degree, means, as is generally held since Count Baudissin’s investigations, originally this essential unapproachability and separateness of God from all men as well as objects which are not especially ritually qualified for bearing his nearness. This aloofness follows from the danger of any contact or sight of God. This important quality is apparently partially connected with the ancient absence of images in his worship. It is, however, bound up initially with his nature and its manifestations. Yahwo resembles the Indian god Indra, for, like Indra, he is, for Israel at least, first and foremost a god of war. A variant of an ancient account calls him “a man of war” (ish milchamah, Ex. 15:3). He thirsts for blood, for the blood of the enemies, the disobedient, the victims. His passion is mighty beyond all bounds. In his wrath, God devours the enemies with fire or he lets them be devoured by the earth. According to the double verse of the Miriam dance, he throws them into the sea like the chariots of the Egyptians, or he mires their vehicles, like those of the Canaanites in the Deborah batde, in the rain-swollen rivulets so that the Israelite peasants could slaughter their occupants in the same way as once happened to the Latin knighthood in Greece during the late period of the crusades.

With the prophets, still, the frightfulness of his wrath and his warlike might is the preeminent trait. His mercy is of the same grandeur as his wrath. For his passionate heart is changeable. He repents of having shown good will toward men if they compensate him meanly. Then, again, he repents his boundless wrath. The late rabbinical tradition has God himself pray (1) that his own mercy may gain the upperhand over his wrath. He personally draws near in the thunderstorm to come to the aid of the army. He assists his friends, as Athena did Ulysses. He is unscrupulous also in cunning and fraud. But one can never be certain not to provoke his wrath through some unwitting oversight. Nor can one be sure of not being suddenly pounced upon unexpectedly and unasked, or threatened with destruction by a divine noumenon from among his spirits. In pre-prophetic times, the “spirit,” the ruach of Yahwe, is neither an ethical power nor a religious’ state of habituation, but an acute demonicsuperhuman power of varying, most frequently frightful, character. The savage charismatic warrior heroes of the Israelite tribes, berserks like Samson, Nazarites and ecstatic Nebiim, know themselves to be seized by this force. They experience themselves as his following. All war prophets and prophetesses appear in Yahwe’s name. The bearers of another theophorous (Baal’s) name like Jerubbaal assume a new name as warlords (Gideon).

Yahwe, like Indra, is fit to be god of war because, like Indra, he was originally a god of the great catastrophies of nature. His appearance is accompanied by phenomena such as earthquakes (I. Sam. 14:15; Is. 2:12f.; 46:6), volcanic phenomena (Gen. 19:24; Ex. 19:11 f.; Psalm 46:6), subterraneous (Isaiah 30:27) and heavenly fire, the desert wind from the South and South East (Zechariah 9:14) and thunderstorms. As in the case of Indra, flashes of lightning are his arrows (Psalm 18:14) as late as the prophets and psalmists. For Palestine the orbit of nature catastrophies comprised also the insect, above all, the locust plague, which the South Eastern wind brought into the country. Hence the god punishes the enemies of his people with locusts and he sends swarms of hornets to confound them. He sends snakes en masse to punish his own people. Finally, there are epidemics (Hos. 13:14). God afflicts the Egyptians with pesti¬ lence, likewise the Philistines and others who lay hand on his holy Ark (I. Sam. 4:8; 6:5, 19). The serpent staff of his priests in the Temple of Jerusalem is probably indicative of his former role as the deity of pestilence. For as the master of disease he also could ward it off or prevent it as is always the case in similar instances. Thus all frightful and fateful nature phenomena were the desmesne of the god. He combined the traits of Indra with those of Rudra.

Besides this character of warlike-and-nature-mythological savage, he shows milder features even in the old tradition as the master of rainfall. He expressly points out to his people that in Israel, unlike Egypt, the harvest yield is not dependent upon irrigation. It is not a product of bureaucratic administration, of the king on earth and the work of the peasant, but it is the result of the rain given by Yahwe according to his free grace. The strong rainstorms, peculiar especially of the steppe territory bordering the desert, were his work.

From the beginning, Yahwe’s character as rain god identified him with the individual and his economic interests and facilitated the later increasingly significant permeation of his image with the traits of a benign god of nature and the heavens. The sublimation and rationalization of the image of god into that of a wise governor of the universe was consummated above all, under the influence of conceptions of supreme heavenly deities diffused in the surrounding areas as well as in Palestine. Moreover, the belief in divine providence, a belief developed among the Israelite intellectuals, exerted a partial influence. But the features of the frightful god of catastrophes, derived from the conception of Yahwe of old, never vanished. These features played the decisive part in all those mythologies and mythological-influenced images, the utilization of which bestows an incomparable grandeur on the language of the prophets. The Yahwe-directed processes of nature are primary proof of his might, not proof of wise order until deep in exilic and postexilic times. The connection of the qualities of Yahwe as a god of frightful natural catastrophies, not of the eternal order of nature, preserved down to the time after the Exile, was, beside the general relationship of those processes with war, based historically on the fact that God had made use of his power first in battle against the Egyptians, then, in the Deborah battle, against die Canaanites, and likewise, later against Israels enemies. Events of nature, especially earthquakes (I. Sam. 14:15) and heavy thunderstorms (Deborah battle) provoked panic among the enemy and were ascribed to him as “divine trembling’ (cheraath Elohim, loc. cit.). Such a volcanically determined panic (of the Egyptians) had led to the reception of the god. That remained unforgotten.