Moral Purity and Persecution in History

Barrington Moore Jr.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400823468
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The intellectual scope and courage to contend with the largest puzzles of human existence and organization distinguish great social thinkers. Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy was a foundational work of historical sociology that influenced a generation of social scientists and, decades later, continues to be widely read and taught. Here, Moore takes up the same tools of historical comparison to investigate why groups of people kill and torture each other. His answer is arrestingly simple: people persecute those whom they perceive as polluting due to their "impure" religious, political, or economic ideas.Moore's search begins with the Old Testament's restrictions on sexual behavior, idolatry, diet, and handling unclean objects. He argues that religious authorities seeking to distinguish the ancient Hebrews from competing groups invented, along with monotheism, the association of impure things with moral failure and the violation of God's will. This allowed people to view those holding competing ideas as contaminated and, more important, contaminating. Moore moves next to the French Wars of Religion, in which Protestants and Catholics massacred each other over the control of purity, and the French Revolution, which perfected terror and secularized purity. He then combs the major Asian religions and finds--to his surprise--that violent efforts to eradicate the "impure" were largely absent before substantial Western influence.Moore's provocative conclusion is that monotheism--with its monopoly on virtue and failure to provide supernatural scapegoats--is responsible for some of the most virulent forms of intolerance and is a major cause of human nastiness and suffering. Moore does not say that the monotheist tradition was the primary source of Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, violent Hindu fundamentalism, or ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, but he does identify it as an indispensable cause because it justified, encouraged, and spread vindictive persecution throughout the world.Once again, Moore has drawn on his comprehensive understanding of history and talent for speaking directly to readers to address one of the most crucial questions about human past and future. This book is for anyone who has ever heard the word genocide and asked why.

✸ CHAPTER 1 ✸

Moral Purity and Impurity in the Old Testament

THE ANALYSIS will begin with an interpretive survey of moral purity and impurity among the ancient Hebrews as revealed by the admonitions and prohibitions in the Old Testament. The reasons for choosing the Old Testament are obvious. It is no exaggeration to call it the moral template of Western civilization, even if departures from its moral code were numerous during the time it received written form and subsequently.

Wherever the notion of moral purity occurs—in Robespierre, the Hindu caste system, or the Old Testament—it is defined in the Hegelian manner by what purity is not, namely, impurity or pollution. Thus a morally pure person is free from moral pollution. The nature and sources of pollution vary a great deal in time and place.¹ Because pollution is the variable that defines purity, it becomes unavoidably the central subject of this study as a whole, not just the Old Testament.

The abundant sources of pollution reported in the Old Testament fall naturally into four distinguishable, if at some points overlapping, categories: (1) sexual prohibitions, (2) idolatry, (3) dietary restrictions, and (4) unclean objects, such as blood and corpses. Insofar as the violation of any prohibition in this series appears as a violation of the will of God (God’s will being the only justification for the prohibition), it appears that for the ancient Hebrew religious authorities such acts were very serious moral failures. When one gets down to cases, this conclusion seems rather odd. Hence this aspect will require fuller discussion after examining the details. We shall take up each of the four forms of pollution, which frequently intertwine, in turn.

SEXUAL PROHIBITIONS AND IDOLATRY

Beginning with sex, the first point worth noticing is its connection with apparently attractive foreign practices and with idolatry, which is, if anything, even more seductive. The religious authorities made strenuous, though hardly successful, efforts to prohibit these presumably attractive sexual practices as foreign, polluting, and idolatrous. These prohibitions in turn sought to prevent the ancient Hebrews from being culturally absorbed by the peoples they had conquered and thereby in danger of losing their religious identity. Although if the religious authorities lost many moral skirmishes over sexual behavior, they did win the big battle for a separate identity.

At the beginning of a long list of sexual prohibitions in Leviticus 18, God in verse 3 enjoins the children of Israel to avoid the “doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt” and “the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you.” This prohibition brings to mind the widespread human (or merely male?) tendency to attribute forbidden yet tempting sexual practices to neighboring foreigners. Following the list of sexual practices, God makes it clear that these acts are forms of pollution engaged in by foreigners. Lev. 18:24 tells the children of Israel not to “defile” themselves in these ways, “for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you.”

The connection between sexual attraction and idolatry appears in a brief and obscure passage, Lev. 20:1–5, recounting the death penalty for either Israelite or stranger who gives “any of his seed unto Molech.” Molech was a Canaanite god of fire to whom children were sacrificed. Mention of his worship by the children of Israel recurs in other parts of the Bible. In the Pentateuch I have found only one other explicit reference to the attractiveness of idolatry. It is a powerful and dramatic passage (Deut. 13:6–12), though with no more than the faintest hint of sexuality. If, among other relatives, “the wife of thy bosom or thy friend . . . of thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods,” the child of Israel was of course expected to refuse. That was the least of his obligations. “Thou shalt surely kill him [the tempter]; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death. . . . thou shalt stone him with stones that he die”: the horrible severity of the punishment testifies to the presumed strength of the temptation. Throughout the discussion of the penalty the tempter is assumed to be a male friend, even though the introduction raises the possibility of a wife and other female relatives. In the writings of the prophets, to which we now turn briefly, the temptation of idolatry comes from a sexually attractive woman whose morals could stand improvement.

Immediately after his famous objection to grinding the faces of the poor (Is. 3:15), the prophet Isaiah lets off a blast against Jerusalem’s attractive women of loose morals (Is. 3:16–24). This extended fulmination must be close to the acme of antisexual oratory in world literature. After describing the women’s attractions in loving detail, Isaiah threatens that their “sweet smell” would turn to “stink,” and their beauty to burning, as desolation overcame the city. However, this text contains no specific mention of pollution. Pollution is there only to the extent of a general belief among religious authorities that forbidden sexual behavior is polluting. Isaiah does emphasize that such acts are a mortal threat to Jerusalem, but no more.

In Jeremiah, pollution is explicitly linked with sexual misbehavior. As in the passage just cited from Isaiah, Jeremiah uses the device of treating Jerusalem as an attractive woman. Early on in the text ( Jer. 2:23), God addresses her thus: “How canst thou say I am not polluted, I have not gone after Baalim [deities of Canaan].” Again, at Jer. 3:1–2, she is accused of playing the harlot with many lovers and polluting the land with her whoredoms and wickedness. A list of sins occurs at Jer. 7:9 that presumably summarizes contemporary religious beliefs about the worst forms of evil behavior. The list is brief: theft, murder, adultery, false swearing, and idolatry. In light of the many forms of sexual behavior prohibited elsewhere in the Old Testament, to be discussed shortly, the limitation here to adultery is striking.

Toward the close of Jeremiah there is a revealing passage ( Jer. 44:15–19) on the practice of idolatry that suggests what God’s advocates were up against. Too long for quotation or even as a satisfactory précis, here are the main points. Jeremiah addressed a huge crowd of idolators, both men and women. But only the women burned incense to other gods, though the men knew about it. The crowd supposedly told Jeremiah that they would continue to burn incense to the queen of heaven and pour drink offerings to her as their fathers, kings, and princes had done: “For then we had plenty of victuals, and were well and saw no evil.” But after the idolaters had ceased burning incense and pouring drink offerings for the queen, they suffered want of all things and were consumed by the sword and by famine. Jeremiah’s reply was (1) to blame the idolatry for their current misfortune and (2) to threaten more thorough destruction ( Jer. 44:20–29). That was consistent with Jeremiah’s general remedy for or reaction to idolatry: nearly total slaughter and destruction ( Jer. 46:10, 48:10).

The connections among sexual attractiveness, idolatry, and general wickedness receive even more emphasis in Ezekiel. Chapter 23 is an extended allegory of the doings of two women representing Samaria and Jerusalem. Their “whoredoms” receive detailed attention that includes the pressing of their breasts and bruising the teats of their virginity (Ezek. 23:3, 21). One of them took as lovers Assyrians “clothed with blue, . . . all of them desirable young men, horsemen riding upon horses” (Ezek. 23:5–6). God threatens to destroy them because they are “polluted with [heathen] idols” (Ezek. 23:30). The allegory closes, not surprisingly, with God’s order to have them stoned to death. “Thus I will cause lewdness to cease out of the land,” God declares, “that all women may be taught not to do after your lewdness” (Ezek. 23:47–48). Ezekiel 16 is a very similar sexual metaphor for religious and political issues. Once again the severity of the threatened penalties strongly suggests an anticipation that lewdness would not be easy to eradicate.

Fantasies about the sexual attractiveness of idolatry occupied much of the imagination of religiously active ancient Hebrews. For them it was a major form of moral impurity. However, idolatry was not the only aspect of sexual immorality that concerned them. Before turning to a consideration of the other aspects, it will be well to consider two major sexual prohibitions that do not have any apparent connection with conceptions of impurity or pollution.

Both of these occur in the Ten Commandments (Ezek. 20: 2–17; Deut. 5:6–21). One is the prohibition on adultery. The other is the prohibition on coveting one’s neighbor’s wife. For none of the Ten Commandments is any special sanction or penalty for disobedience mentioned.² That is true of other prohibitions to be discussed shortly. That God decreed them is presumably enough. In the case of the Ten Commandments the awe surrounding their transmission to Moses (Ezek. 31:18; 32:15–19; 34:1–28) could be taken to preclude any discussion on this occasion of penalties including pollution. Yet the absence of any notion of pollution connected with these prohibitions I find quite puzzling. Perhaps the explanation lies in the shock of the occasion together with the probability that penalties were taken for granted. Think of the example of murder, also of course prohibited here. When it occurs it usually produces a shock as the crime becomes known. In ancient societies generally, the person who sheds blood is polluted. But it would be somewhat ridiculous to have a special decree announcing that murder leads to moral impurity. People know that anyway. From that point of view violation of any of the Ten Commandments is a serious moral evil, because it is a direct flouting of God’s will about a major issue. That simple statement, I suspect, accounts for the absence of explicit mention of pollution in connection with the Ten Commandments.

The ancient Hebrews had a long, complex series of ordinances against “uncovering the nakedness” of specific categories of women. Each category specifies one or more women who were in a potentially incestuous relationship with the male onlooker. To be more precise, the existence of a rule against seeing a certain woman naked indicates that the ancient Hebrews believed there was a potentially incestuous hazard. Characteristically the ancient Hebrews tried to build moral ramparts or outworks against serious temptation by prohibiting not only the tempting act but even awareness of the temptation.

There are two similar but not identical lists of these prohibitions, Lev. 18:6–20 and 20:17–21, which require no summary here. The first list contains no penalties that would throw light on ancient Hebrew moral feelings, except for the crucial one that these acts were “abominations” (Lev. 18:29), the standard epithet for any act felt to be both disgusting and morally repulsive. The second list has a graded list of penalties, starting with execution, which applied to most examples, passing through “cutting off from among the people,” to rather light penalties. If a man lies with his uncle’s wife, both will have sinned and die childless. If a man takes his brother’s wife, it is an unclean act and both of them will be childless (Lev. 20:20–21). Is it out of the question that in both cases the partners in a morally impure act of passion would prefer to be childless?

Mixed in with the rules about nakedness are two prohibitions on perversions. One prohibits homosexuality in the strict sense of the word: sexual relations between males. This is an abomination (Lev. 18:22). There is no mention of lesbianism. Two possible explanations for this odd omission come to mind. Conceivably the male religious authorities who created this legislation didn’t even know about its existence. Or else they were so terrified at the prospect of female joys without the male contribution that they did not even call attention to lesbianism by passing an ordinance against it. Some variant of the first explanation seems more likely. If the authorities had spoken about it, we can be sure they would have called it an abomination.

The second prohibition is against intercourse with a beast (Lev. 18:23).³ It applies to both men and women and is characterized as “confusion,” a form of ignoring proper boundaries and mixing things that ought not to be mixed, which received astonishing emphasis in ancient Hebrew dietary restrictions. To a modern it may seem odd that sexual intercourse with an animal is equated with a dietary rule. But for the ancient Hebrews, as well as some of their successors, both prohibitions carried and still carry a high moral charge.

We may close this limited survey of sex and moral impurity with a brief review of the varying penalties and conceptions of impurity connected with fornication. Marital sex for the sake of procreation, be it noted at the start, received from God frequent and strong endorsement in the repeated injunction to be fruitful and multiply. I have not noticed in the Old Testament, with the curious exception of the Song of Solomon, any endorsement of what we now call recreational sex. Explicit doubts and reservations about such pleasures evidently had to await the coming of Christianity. The same is true for masturbation. The one example mentioned in the Old Testament, that of Omar, who refused intercourse with his brother’s wife (Gen. 38:8–10), is too special to permit any general inferences. The most one can guess is that the silence of the Old Testament about masturbation does not imply consent.

According to Lev. 19:20–22 fornication with a bondmaid betrothed to a husband was a sin. However, as might be expected in an ancient patriarchal society, the penalty was vastly lighter than the death penalty for ordinary adultery. The bondmaid was not to be given her freedom. Instead of being put to death she was to be scourged: “because she was not free.” As for the man, he was required to bring a ram to the door of the tabernacle as a trespass offering for God. The priest would then make atonement for him before God for his sin, and the sin would be forgiven. In other words, if the man had enough property to spare a ram, for him there was nothing to the whole business. The poor girl at least got off with her life, though she was severely punished and probably lost her husband-to-be.

The famous episode of Joseph refusing an invitation to a sexual encounter issued by the wife of his Egyptian master, Potiphar, is not very enlightening for the purpose at hand. Nevertheless, it requires mention because it is so famous. Joseph bases his refusal on loyalty to a master who has trusted him and gives him much responsibility and authority. “How then,” said Joseph to the seducing wife, “can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” (Gen. 39:9). Joseph’s objection states a straightforward moral position. Its stress on disloyalty resonates beyond his own age and culture to make the tale so famous. For the effect, God is hardly necessary.

The last episode to be discussed here is the “defilement” of Dinah (Gen. 34). The story indicates that if a presentable young man had intercourse with a presentable young Hebrew woman and, falling in love, asked the woman’s father for her hand in marriage, the request might be happily granted. All that would be quite ordinary if the young man were another Hebrew. If he were a foreigner, even of high status, as is the case in this episode here, matters could turn out very differently. As strangers with a strange religion and conquerors in a new land, the Hebrews were fiercely endogamous, or at least tried to be.

Dinah was the daughter of Jacob, the famous Hebrew patriarch. When Shechem, son of a prince of the country, “saw her, he took her, and lay with her and defiled her.” Then Shechem asked his father to “get the damsel to wife.” The father took counsel with Jacob, who kept quiet until his sons came in from the fields. When they arrived, they were very angry at Shechem. To abbreviate the rest of the story, Jacob’s son deceived Shechem and his father by pretending to agree to their generous offer of a dowry and future intermarriage on condition that all males in Shechem’s city be circumcised. Shechem and his father agreed to the condition, whereat two of Dinah’s brothers took their swords and killed all the males in Shechem’s city. At this point the tale becomes quite hard to believe, though the attitudes it reveals remain very credible. After the slaughter the two brothers despoiled the city, taking all the sheep, oxen, asses, and other property, even the wives, whom they took captive. Then the story becomes very believable once more. Jacob angrily told the two murderous brothers of Dinah that they had made him “stink among the inhabitants of the land” (pollution again), who greatly outnumbered him and would slay him and destroy his house. To this outburst the two brothers responded with a reference to their sister’s honor: “And they said, should he deal with our sister as with a harlot?” This obligation to avenge defilement here overrides ordinary prudence. Furthermore, vengeance as legitimate aggression can yield tremendous pleasure, especially if it takes the form of a defense of moral purity.

We turn now to idolatry as impurity. Since we have already had occasion to discuss idolatry at some length in connection with its erotic attractiveness, its other features need not detain us long. The classic statement about the dangers of idolatry for religious and hence moral purity occurs in Deut. 13:13–18. According to God’s ordinances as reported here, if there is a rumor about idolatry in a city given by God to the Hebrews, and upon diligent inquiry the rumor turns out to be true, then “Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly. . . . And thou shalt gather all the spoils of it unto the midst of the street thereof, and shall burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit.” An earlier passage, Deut. 12:31, refers to idolatry as an abomination, the epithet commonly applied to polluted or polluting objects. Thus this text is a sinister justification of slaughter for the sake of moral purity.

The best-known episode of idolatry is that of the golden calf (Exod. 32). Actually there are two more episodes (I Kings 12: 26–32; Hos. 8:5–6). Since the latter two add nothing from the point of view of this inquiry, a brief comment on the first one will suffice. When Moses disappeared for a time to consult with God, the people of Israel “gathered themselves together” to request Aaron, Moses’ brother and right-hand man, “to make us gods, which shall go before us,” because they did not know what had become of Moses (Exod. 32:1). In other words, the demand for idols similar to those used by neighboring peoples surfaced as soon as Moses disappeared. Evidently Moses—or the Hebrew religious authorities generally—did not enjoy the confidence of the people, who were drawn to the indigenous deities and tried to imitate them. Naturally God became furious. We can pass over Moses’ limited success in placating his anger (Exod. 32:7–14) to note God’s punishment: the sons of Levi put to the sword some three thousand men, after w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Moral Purity and Impurity in the Old Testament
• Chapter 2: Purity in the Religious Conflicts of Sixteenth-Century France
• Chapter 3: Purity as a Revolutionary Concept in the French Revolution
• Chapter 4: Notes on Purity and Pollution in Asiatic Civilizations
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index